Once again, Donald Trump is out of the country. So if we are going to build a wall, this would be an excellent time. Say … one that extends up to the cruising altitude of a 747. Or we can just tell Trump that it’s raining in America. That seems to be enough to keep him grounded.
Trump is in Argentina, meeting with Vladimir Putin and redefining the word “impromptu” to mean “without any witnesses, photographs, or post-meeting press conference.” Apparently Trump wasn’t happy with the reaction when people saw him grovel to Putin in Helsinki. So his solution isn’t to stop the groveling. It’s to stop the people from seeing.
Meanwhile, Putin and Mohammed bin Salman high-fived over how they bought America on the cheap. They’ve both demonstrated that while Donald Trump’s claim that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue might be a boast, bin Salman can chop someone up alive in a consulate, and Putin can poison people wholesale, and they can both come away laughing about it.
And also meanwhile, back in the United States, the odds that Donald Trump Jr, or Ivanka Trump, or both, will be hearing from the Grand Jury real soon now. In fact, here’s an interesting thing to ponder: Why hasn’t Mueller indicted Donald Trump Jr at this point? Trump Jr not only had communication with Russian operatives in scheduling the Trump Tower meeting, he was also communicating with Michael Cohen concerning the Moscow real estate deal. From the emails that we’ve seen between Trump Jr and Emin Agalarov, Junior also seemed very aware that Russia was out to help his pop. Junior didn’t just lie about these things in public, he also lied about them in closed door testimony to the House. So why hasn’t he been visited by the jolly 4AM raid squad?
Well here’s a funny thing — Robert Mueller doesn’t know that Donald Trump Jr lied in his congressional testimony. That is, he knows, in the same way that everyone knows based on leaks and snippets of Juniors that have made the papers. But Mueller does not officially know. He doesn’t know, because Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Trump’s nether regions) has so far refused to hand over copies of Junior’s testimony to the special counsel’s office.
But as soon as the new Congress is seated in January, Adam Schiff has already stated that he will turn over Junior’s testimony to the special counsel. If you were wondering why Trump chose to direct his excellent third grade potty talk toward the incoming head of the House Intelligence Committee … that’s a pretty good candidate for the primary reason. And once Schiff hands him the paperwork, then Mueller will officially know, what he already knows. Which should make the Trump familiy Christmas super interesting this year.
Okay. Let’s go read pundits.
George H W Bush
E J Dionne on what he considers important about the recently departed president.
Washington Post
George H.W. Bush was legendary for his thank-you notes. He wrote thousands of them, expressing appreciation for kindnesses large and small. When it came to his gratitude, no one was left behind.
That’s very nice. My mother taught me to do the same. And from my father, I learned you should always attend weddings, graduations, and funerals, because even when people don’t say it, they appreciate the effort. I’ve had my say about George H W Bush, I’m not going to contradict the idea that the guy had good manners. Or that good manners, what we used to think of as “simply common courtesy” isn’t a much missed commodity in a time when the guy in the Oval Office seems to delight in both cruelty and crudeness.
A box full of thank you notes won’t paper over thirty years of voting against Civil Rights legislation. But Dionne is right to credit Bush with singing some bills of genuine merit.
Marshall Shepard provides from praise for Bush on a topic that’s not getting a lot of play.
Forbes
President George H. W. Bush was a Republican, a conservative, and even had ties to the fossil fuel industry. However, you might be surprised at some of the positive things about the environment and climate change that happened under his watch. My perspective here is not about his broader ideology or whether we agreed with everything that he said or did. I often didn't. Herein, I provide a respectful analysis of the climate change and environmental legacy of President Bush. …
One of his most important contributions is related to the recently released 4th National Climate Assessment. President Bush was a central figure in this activity. In fact, some have asked me why the Trump administration would release a report that the current president says he doesn't believe. The short answer: It's the law. George H.W. Bush's Administration and the Congress of that time period deserve credit. By the way, science is not a "belief" system so even if you don't believe in gravity, guess what happens when you fall from a ladder. The National Climate Assessment reports are not about "belief systems" or "tooth fairies." They are about science and policy. As I wrote recently in Forbes,
It’s worth reading this if only to remember that the Republican war on the environment is a recent thing. Nixon, reluctantly, saw the EPA come into being. Reagan hated it and tried to wipe it out. But Ford and GHW Bush both looked on the environmental issues seriously and saw opportunities as well as restrictions. Republicans weren’t always required to be anti-science as part of the party platform — though many provided ignorance voluntarily. Many of the bills Bush signed on climate and pollution enjoyed genuine bipartisan support.
The Global Change Research Act of 1990, signed by President George H.W. Bush, also "requires the Council, at least every four years, through the Committee, to submit to the President and the Congress an assessment regarding the findings of the Program and associated uncertainties, the effects of global change, and current and major long-term trends in global change."
David Von Drahle remembers Bush the way a generation remembered him.
Washington Post
As a star of “Saturday Night Live” during the misunderstood presidency of George H.W. Bush, Dana Carvey had people across the country repeating, as a laugh line: “Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.” Carvey’s Bush impersonation captured the distinctive syntax of a patrician Yankee who was taught by his formidable mother that speaking in the first person was bad form.
Von Drehle also praises Bush for his foreign policy, which mostly consisted of watching from the sidelines. When it wasn’t blowing things up.
Trump / Russia
Randall Eliason plays high-low with the Mueller investigation.
Washington Post
It was a dizzying week for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. The election is over, and after more than a year of haggling, Mueller finally received written answers from President Trump — not as good as testimony or a live interview, but better than nothing. With these milestones behind him, it feels as though Mueller is rapidly moving toward a resolution of his ultimate questions : What were the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and were any of them criminal?
Eliason looks at the actions of Cohen, which at a minimum show that Trump was lying to the public, press, and everyone else during the campaign. But was it criminal?
Executing a complex criminal conspiracy with foreign accomplices would require a level of sophistication and ability that was not generally on display in the Trump campaign. It remains to be seen, but the campaign’s documented contacts with Russians may prove to have been naive, bumbling, reckless, sleazy, unpatriotic or some combination thereof — but not criminal.
“Criminal conspiracy” doesn’t necessarily mean well executed. In fact, criminal and stupid are often synonyms.
Jeffery Epstein
Leonard Pitts on the horror show that shows how horrible “justice” can be.
Miami Herald
No one even knows how many girls there were.
Federal prosecutors identified 36. In “Perversion of Justice,” a stunning piece of investigative work by Julie K. Brown that was published last week, the Miami Herald reported that it has found 80. But accounts given by the girls themselves suggest there may be hundreds.
Hundreds.
This whole story seems so sickly familiar.
We’re talking underage girls, some as young as 13, troubled children, children living in foster care, children of addicts and abusers, children of poverty and molestation, children who were homeless runaways, children who, in the early 2000s, were lured by promises of easy money to the Palm Beach estate of Jeffrey Epstein, a multimillionaire money manager whose friends included Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. There, they say they would massage him or watch him masturbate, perform oral sex or have intercourse. Epstein, they say, went through as many as three girls a day. Then those girls were sent to recruit others.
It’s not just that Epstein deserves a million years behind bars. So does everyone who enabled him.
The politics of racism
Ross Barkan calls the Mississippi election, for racism.
The Guardian
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner, the great American novelist, once wrote. “It’s not even past.”
Faulkner’s home state of Mississippi, more than a half-century after his death, proved his point again on Tuesday night. Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican senator, prevailed in a heated runoff over his African-American opponent, Democrat Mike Espy . Hyde-Smith cements the Republicans’ 53-47 hold on the Senate, an important bulwark for conservatives against what was otherwise a blue wave.
Hyde-Smith won because there are far too many Republicans who support Donald Trump in the state of Mississippi and too few who could dare to choose a Democrat. Trump carried the state by 18 points. A Democrat has not won Mississippi since 1976.
And why is that?
Mississippi, a state that proudly flies the Confederate flag, holds the heinous distinction of having lynched more African Americans than any other state through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In just about every way, it is the emblem of the deep south – where white supremacy exerted itself with all its bloody might.
Colbert King on how Trump’s racist policies have been even worse than anticipated.
Washington Post
Trump’s two years of shameless and cynical exploitation of fears and anxieties within the ranks of his white base of support, and his unprincipled governance, have left this country more fractured along racial lines than at any time since the civil rights revolution.
The Trump effect has drawn the attention of The Post, the FBI, the Anti-Defamation League and other entities concerned about the hatred he has let loose in the land.
Shootings, bombings and other acts of violence motivated by right-wing political ideologies are nothing new, according to a Post analysis of global terrorism data. But it found that “violence by white supremacists and other far-right attackers has been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency — and has surged since President Trump took office.”
The FBI’s report released this month revealed that hate crimes had jumped an astonishing 17 percent from 2016 to 2017. And the targets? Sixty percent of the victims were selected because of their race, ethnicity or ancestry. More than 20 percent were targeted because of their religion.
It’s honestly surprising that in the last couple of years, Republicans haven’t moved to weaken hate crimes legislation. I suppose they can always count on keg-stand Brett to do it for them.
Climate Change
Ken Kimmell and Brenda Ekwurzel on what Trump won’t admit about the latest climate report.
The Guardian
Just two days before 13 federal agencies released a report laying out the devastating human and economic toll that climate change already is taking in the United States, Donald Trump tweeted: “Whatever happened to global warming?” The tweet was based on a spurt of cold weather in the north-east, never mind that the rest of the world was experiencing higher than normal temperatures.
The administration was so concerned about what the report, called the National Climate Assessment (NCA), would reveal – including the fact that the president’s thinking on climate change is hopelessly flawed – that it chose to release it on Black Friday, hoping no one would pay attention. A member of Trump’s transition team, Steven Milloy, was candid about this strategy, saying: “Do it on a day when nobody cares, and hope it gets swept away by the next day’s news.” Fortunately for the Earth and its residents, news coverage about the report continued over the weekend and into the following week.
This whole article is worth reading. So is the report, but that’s a bit of a challenge.
So, what was Trump trying to hide? The fact that global warming’s effects are here and now. When western state residents say that recent wildfires are unlike anything they’ve experienced before, there’s a reason for that. Climate change doubled the area burned by wildfires across the west between 1984 and 2015, relative to what would have burned without warming, according to the report.
Hopping back in this morning to add one last piece from The Guardian.
The Guardian on how Trump has made everyone tired of all the … losing.
Trump’s domineering, chief executive style, inimical to open discussion and hostile to challenge, sits uneasily within a democratic system where any president must be answerable to voters, their elected representatives and the media. It also means he must always be right. Many Americans, not least his fabled “base” of predominantly white, working-class and rural voters, seem ready to accept Trump is not always truthful. But they will not accept failure – and Trump’s list of failures is lengthening.