I know it’s very early for Thanksgiving, but let me say this — I am thankful for Leonard Pitts. There have been many times on in the dim, wee hours of Sunday morning when I’ve sweated over producing some kind of opening for APR. Something that sums up the spirit of the week. Something that puts a bit of a story arc around the piecemeal work of a dozen or so pundits.
And then, I find I don’t have to. Because … Leonard Pitts has already written that piece. And he’s done it better than I ever good and … wheh. Just wheh.
Also, here’s a deep dark secret: When it comes to actual Thanksgiving week, I plan to be on vacation. Remember those? No, me, neither. But I’m told they are nice things that come to people who don’t think for one moment about taking a break before the election is over. Now. Where where we?
Leonard Pitts on sending a message to America this Tuesday.
Miami Herald
We could lose it all. We could lose our country here.
Maybe you think that’s alarmist. But anyone who is sanguine about America’s future has not been paying attention to America’s present.
Let’s take an episode from last week as an instructive example. As you will recall, our regrettable president claimed the power, at his sole discretion, to overturn the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Which is patently absurd. That’s not the way America works. A president cannot declare some part of the Constitution — the Constitution! — null and void on his authority. Only dictators can do that.
When the election rolled around in 2016, I genuinely expected to spend the next week recuperating and resting up focus my outrage in a lot of articles like “Hillary wants to take twelve months to move to $15 an hour when we should move right away!” This time, I know better. No matter what happens this week, the next day we’ll be dealing with Trump. It could be Happy Trump. It could be Angry Trump. But you know it’s going to be Jackass Trump either way.
But if this guy thinks he has that power, what else might he think he can do? Knowing him as we do, is it far-fetched to imagine a scenario where he gins up some fake crisis in 2020 and uses it to postpone the election? Or is it inconceivable that, having lost that election, he refuses to surrender power, claiming the process was “rigged?”
Let’s really hope for Angry Trump. And let’s all go read the rest of Pitts’ essay before going below the fold.
Midterm Elections
Dana Milbank on taking this damn thing seriously.
Washington Post
Exactly two years ago, many Americans held their noses and voted for Donald Trump. Some were conservatives willing to tolerate his vulgar excesses in hopes of getting tax cuts, a repeal of Obamacare and a friendlier judiciary. Others had Clinton fatigue. Sure, they were concerned about Trump’s words about Mexican “rapists” and what he liked to do to women — but maybe those were just words. Maybe Trump could build a coalition across traditional party lines to get things done.
Clinton fatigue: A symptom generated by the intense hope that if Hillary Clinton was off the stage, the New York Times might rediscover journalism. But … there’s another thing people are wiser about this time around.
On Tuesday, voters will make a decision in what is the purest midterm referendum on a sitting president in modern times:
Will we take a step, even a small one, back from the ugliness and the race-baiting that has engulfed our country?
In between those two excerpts is a long, long list of Trump’s sins over the last two years. You can read it if you like — but you already know.
David Von Drehle on the chances of Kris Kobach.
Washington Post
Years of covering politics makes one appreciate that some voters actually like the sort of phony-baloney candidate who — despite having served exactly zero days in the military — would ride in parades aboard a flag-painted Jeep with a fake machine gun mounted on the back. Maybe these voters feel a surge of patriotism at the sight of a grown man playing soldier with a toy gun, but more likely they just enjoy the way it drives the liberals crazy.
Does it? Honestly, 99 percent of the things that conservatives are convinced “drives the liberals crazy” are things I never once heard a liberal mention. What drives me crazy? Racism. Anti-Semitism. Xenophobia. Sexism. And … nope, that’s about it. Kobach can dress in red, white and blue underoos for all I care.
The problem for Kris Kobach, the ersatz G.I. Joe running for governor of Kansas, is that the number charmed by such hooey rarely approaches 50 percent.
Nor is the Jeep the only factor capping Kobach’s potential share of Tuesday’s vote. Though he is the Republican nominee in a heavily Republican state, many Republicans want nothing to do with him. Two former governors and a pair of former U.S. senators are among the long list of GOP stalwarts who have endorsed Democrat Laura Kelly, a veteran state senator.
2018 vs 1968
Samuel Freedman on which year is the greater threat to America.
The Guardian
At the resonant remove of 50 years, historians and commentators and civilian graybeards like myself have gazed back at the shocks and strains of America in 1968 – Vietnam escalation, growing anti-war protests, assassinations of idealistic heroes, race riots, demagogic politicking – to help us comprehend the awfulness of the disunited states of the Trump era. My own children, in their mid-20s, have asked me more than once how 1968 compares to 2018.
As both parent and citizen, it is tempting to find a reassuring moral in that comparative story: America survived the turmoil and division and bloodshed of 1968, and it will do the same with the emergent authoritarianism of 2018. Having lived through both years, however, I find no basis for such solace.
Sorry. This is not the comforting answer.
Nothing in 1968, despite all its traumas, bears a likeness to Donald Trump, his administration and his high-profile enablers with their rampant and shameless mendacity, myriad bigotries, explicit incitement to violence against journalists, racial minorities and political foes. Technological advances and market forces have allowed these toxins to spill profitably into rightwing pseudo-journalism and the sewers of social media.
Racism and anti-Semitism
Melissa Greene brings back last week’s shooting with her personal connections.
Washington Post
Even before the names of the victims were released — the number of dead clicking upward as hours passed — we knew who they would be. The first arrivals for Shabbat services tend to be the middle-aged and the elderly; at that hour, younger households are still corralling the children, trying to find the other shoe or the matching sock. The early birds tend to be the shomrim, the guardians of the congregation, the folks who — thanks to a long-ago yeshiva education — lead the morning service. As the terrible list of the dead was released, our hunch was proved correct: The early-arriving regulars had been mowed down. “The heart of our congregation,” said a fellow member. “They are the people who conducted our services, they did Torah readings, they managed the bimah.”
You don’t have to go to that synagogue. Or be Jewish. To know those people.
Sixty years and three weeks ago, the Temple in Atlanta was bombed by anti-Semitic white supremacists who perceived the Jews as “masterminding” the civil rights movement — not unlike accused killer Robert Bowers accepting the widely broadcast theory that Jews conceived and bankrolled the migrant caravan. The day after the Temple bombing, Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, published an editorial attacking Southern elected officials who conjured up scapegoats and stirred up the mobs for their own political gains. “It is not possible to preach lawlessness and restrict it,” he wrote. “You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.”
Alexander Petri and that ad. You know the one.
Washington Post
I am frankly insulted you would insinuate that any of my support for President Trump might be in any way tied to racism. Please, I am not racist. I could not be further from being racist if Being Racist were walking down the street minding his own business and I had rapidly crossed the road to avoid him.
It is rude and wrong of people to insinuate that I am racist just because what motivates me to come to the polls are:
1) creepy ads that demonize all immigrants,
2) ominous warnings about The Caravan that Fox News has covered 24/7 in a way that makes me believe invaders are coming for my lake house, or
3) the president shouting the word “NATIONALIST” while my dog whimpers in agony.
Funny. I believe I may have had this conversation with a relative.
The mere fact that what inspires me to vote is the idea that the president wants to dramatically undercut the 14th Amendment doesn’t make me racist. At best, it would make me — Golly, what is the word? — racially tinged! Racially charged. Daubed with the faintest racial chiaroscuro.
I don’t know the right term. But I’m sure the New York Times could tell me.
Susan Estrich and that ad. Yes, the same one.
Washington Post
It has been 30 years since an ad featuring the mug shot of “Willie” Horton, the infamous murderer who raped a woman while out from prison on furlough, became the theme of the 1988 presidential election. It was paid for by a committee that you’ve never heard of. And it blamed Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, for whom I served as campaign manager, for letting him out.
Of course it tested well. People were predisposed to be afraid of a black man they see in a mug shot. And then you hit it home and blame it on your opponent.
Today, President Trump is doing the exact same thing. Except in this case, he subbed in a Mexican immigrant for a black person and tweeted it out himself. There’s a lesson from the Horton ad episode that Democrats should take to heart: Don’t let him get away with it.
The murderer in the Trump ad just happens to have been released by Trump’s good buddy, former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, despite multiple drug charges and re-entering the country after being deported. Arpaio let him go “for no known reasons.” I wonder how many zeros come with that excuse.
We knew the Horton issue was coming long before it hit the national airwaves. I knew the story far better than Lee Atwater (the mastermind of the ad who later apologized to me) ever could. And I know what it cost, not only in percentage points but also in the way it changed for the worse the way we have dealt with race and crime. It poisoned a difficult issue, divided us just when we needed to be united. And it won votes.
Estrich gives a good history of that earlier ad, and how Republican operatives weaponized Dukakis’ own sense of honor and good intentions.
Leonard Pitts is back for a return engagement.
Miami Herald
Another bell rang last week. None of us can yet say what it signified, what opened in America. But that something fetid and evil stirred itself seems beyond dispute.
It wasn’t just the synagogue killings. It was also the explosive devices sent to Democratic critics of Donald Trump and to CNN, the news network he despises. And it was a white gunman who, after trying unsuccessfully to get into a black church in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, killed two black patrons at a supermarket.
It all added up to one hell of a bad week. Worse, it was a bad week in the context of years that have seen mass murder at a black church in Charleston and the killing of an anti-racism activist in Charlottesville. Suddenly, Marvin Gaye’s famous question from almost 50 years ago feels freshly relevant: What, indeed, is going on?
What’s going on is clear enough. The question is whether or not we can still stop it.
Troops vs Caravan
Jon Michaels and Jeffrey Smith tackle Trump’s military deployment inside the US.
Washington Post
President Trump has ordered 5,200 U.S. troops to the southern border and says he may send as many as 15,000. That’s approaching the number now serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more than Gen. John J. Pershing mustered to pursue Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa in 1916.
The troops’ mission appears to be to block two caravans of between 3,600 and 7,000 Central Americans, most of whom are fleeing violence and poverty, from entering the country.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Wednesday, responding to a reporter’s question, said that the Pentagon doesn’t “do stunts.” But given the president’s race-baiting and fearmongering on the eve of deeply consequential midterm elections, the stunt-like quality of this exercise is hard to miss.
Trump’s actions are already being used to defend murder half a world away. Every time he acts, he makes it hard for anyone, in America or out, to honor human rights.
Let’s start with the basics. First, there is no credible basis for the president’s assertion that the migrants are dangerous. They are hundreds of miles away from the U.S. border and are the very definition of Emma Lazarus’s tired, poor and huddled masses. They should not be blocked by bayonets but met by a joint U.S.-Mexico operation that provides humanitarian support and processes them for possible admission to the United States in accordance with immigration and asylum laws.
A good primer if you have to discuss this topic with someone.
Climate Change
Michael Mann is tired of both denial and the half-truths.
Washington Post
Summer 2018 saw an unprecedented spate of extreme floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires break out across North America, Europe and Asia. The scenes played out on our television screens and in our social media feeds. This is, as I stated at the time, the face of climate change.
It’s not rocket science. A warmer ocean evaporates more moisture into the atmosphere — so you get worse flooding from coastal storms (think Hurricanes Harvey and Florence). Warmer soils evaporate more moisture into the atmosphere — so you get worse droughts (think California or Syria). Global warming shifts the extreme upper tail of the “bell curve” toward higher temperatures, so you get more frequent and intense heat waves (think summer 2018 just about anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere). Combine heat and drought, and you get worse wildfires (again, think California).
Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
Colbert King on Trump’s wait-it-out approach
Washington Post
In the face of international demands for all the facts and circumstances surrounding the barbaric murder of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, as well as the outcry for accountability, President Trump is putting Saudi Arabia’s interests first. The Saudis wish to keep the kingdom clean from the dirtiness it has created. The president’s willingness to let the Saudis escape justice is an affront to the American people.
Trump is following the Jared plan — just wait until the press loses interest, then go on as if someone didn’t get hacked to pieces inside a consulate.
The top of the royal family in Riyadh knows what happened inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2. They know who ordered and oversaw Khashoggi’s grisly death. And the Saudis, up to and including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and maybe King Salman, are dead set against revealing the truth. They cannot keep their secrets without the cooperation and complicity of Trump. And they are getting it.
Please remember to repeat this after the election.