It’s becoming more and more evident that Democrats didn’t lose an election. Instead, America lost a war. Maybe we lost it to Russia, maybe we just lost it to moneyed interests who could no longer tolerate the idea of democracy, but we lost. And the results of that loss are terrible.
Jeffery Smith on how Trump is destroying national security agencies.
The world is wobbling on its axis under stresses caused by wars, ethnic tensions, instability, climate change and economic pressure in virtually every region. The liberal international order, largely established and led by the United States since the end of World War II, is fraying. Mr Trump’s America First policy pays scant heed to international cooperation and appears to believe that if we have enough military might we can make anything right. We can’t. …
The New York Times on the growing number of diplomats forced from the State Department.
Even before Mr. Tillerson was confirmed, his staff fired six of the State Department’s top career diplomats…
None were given any reason for their dismissals, although Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Kenney had been reprimanded by Trump transition officials for answering basic logistical questions from Nikki R. Haley, President Trump’s pick as United Nations ambassador.
The Washington Post on the Justice Department.
Sessions is methodically reshaping the Justice Department to reflect his nationalist ideology and hard-line views ...
Sessions has implemented a new charging and sentencing policy that calls for prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges possible, even if that might mean minority defendants face stiff, mandatory minimum penalties. He has defended the president’s travel ban and tried to strip funding from cities with policies he considers too friendly toward undocumented immigrants.
Sessions has even adjusted the department’s legal stances in cases involving voting rights and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues in a way that advocates warn might disenfranchise poor minorities and give certain religious people a license to discriminate.
That’s in addition to what’s happening at the EPA, the DOE, the FCC … and every other agency. Many articles are fond of saying that Trump is busily taking apart the “administrative state.” It’s a term that seems to imply that he’s clearing away the bureaucratic brush and regulatory brambles, and leaving behind … what? The administrative state is the state that operates by rule of law. The reason there are so many empty offices from Foggy Bottom to Langley to the White House isn’t because this group is concerned about saving money. It’s because when the administrative state is gone, there will only be something else.
Come on in. Let’s read pundits.
Ruth Marcus on the death of shame.
Our sad national trajectory has been on display recently with two oddly connected stories: Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore and the tax bill. They share a common thread in President Trump, but their significance goes beyond the president. Trump surely helped fuel the end of shame, but just as surely we were already on that degraded path.
No one who has watched Moore expected that reports of how he allegedly preyed on young girls would provoke shame from the egocentric, already discredited judge. Moore has long proved — with his flagrant disregard for constitutional values, his homophobia and racism — that he is impervious to such feelings.
Trump and Moore have replaced shame with anger and apologies with revenge. When they’re caught at something despicable, all either of them can think to do is throw accusations at others, and to pretend that a speck like shoplifting is bigger than a beam like sexual assault.
The open question involved Moore’s true-believing supporters and political allies of convenience: At long last, had they any decency? For some, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and most of his colleagues, the answer has been a welcome yes. Others, most prominently Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) and, inevitably, Trump, have failed what should have been an easy test. To conclude that electing an accused child molester to the Senate is preferable to seating a Democrat is the epitome of shamelessness.
Don’t worry, as we get closer to the election, I fully expect McConnell to get in line behind Moore.
Leonard Pitts and the concern over “manliness.”
It wasn’t that long ago we were hearing that men were in trouble. It was said that our manly maleness was under siege from a culture of runaway political correctness hellbent on snipping off our masculine accoutrements and turning us into sissified wimps who ate kale, clipped coupons, and talked about our feelings. Fox “News” sounded the alarm about what it dubbed the “feminization” of the American man.
From commentator Todd Starnes warning about colleges that were turning men into women, to anchor Brit Hume explaining that people only think Chris Christie is a bully because they’ve been “feminized,” to morning show co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck asking if all those unmanly men might pose a threat to national security, Fox was on this “story” like hyenas on a gazelle. Beyond Fox, people were writing books with titles like “The War Against Boys” and “Save The Males.”
What this nation needs is more locker room talk.
Suffice it to say, it seems obvious the problem with men isn’t that they’ve become feminine. Rather, the problem is what it has always been — that, as men, we too often define manhood by the use of our (usually) superior strength and/or position to take what we want. Which makes this an opportune moment to reconsider manhood, to ask anew what being a man means — and should mean.
I’d like to suggest a twenty year moratorium on men voting or running for office. That seems like step one in an appropriate reconciliation. But I’ll understand if there are objections to taking away someone’s voting rights. In that case, let’s just give women two votes apiece.
Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller with some very good reasons women are reluctant to come forward.
The women accusing the Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct have faced doubt and derision. Other women, who have alleged sexual assault or harassment by powerful men in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and elsewhere, have become targets for online abuse or had their careers threatened. Harvey Weinstein went so far as to hire ex-Mossad operatives to investigate the personal history of the actress Rose McGowan, to discourage her from publicly accusing him of rape.
As awful as Weinstein’s actions were — and his follow-up here takes them into real-life super villain territory — it’s equally tragic how police often process these cases in a way that punishes the victim.
In 2015 we wrote an article for ProPublica and the Marshall Project about Marie, an 18-year-old who reported being raped in Lynnwood, Wash., by a man who broke into her apartment. (Marie is her middle name.) Police detectives treated small inconsistencies in her account — common among trauma victims — as major discrepancies. Instead of interviewing her as a victim, they interrogated her as a suspect. Under pressure, Marie eventually recanted — and was charged with false reporting, punishable by up to a year in jail. The court ordered her to pay $500 in court costs, get mental health counseling for her lying and go on supervised probation for one year. More than two years later, the police in Colorado arrested a serial rapist — and discovered a photograph proving he had raped Marie.
And then there was a huge round of firings, Marie was paid back, and … nope. None of that.
Want to get seriously, justifiably angry — and to understand at least part of the bigger problem here beyond just the men who assault women in the first place? Read the rest.
Stephen Marche and posits a reason for the current discussion.
Men arrive at this moment of reckoning woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience. Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido. ...
Fear of the male libido has been the subject of myth and of fairy tale from the beginning of literature: What else were the stories of Little Red Riding Hood or Bluebeard’s Castle about? A vampire is an ancient and powerful man with an insatiable hunger for young flesh. Werewolves are men who regularly lose control of their bestial nature. Get the point? There is a line, obviously, between desire and realization, and some cross it and some don’t. But a line is there for every man. And until we collectively confront this reality, the post-Weinstein public discussion — where men and women go from here — will begin from a place of silence and dishonesty.
Actually, I think this is an extremely simplistic, if not intentionally slanted, misreading of the roots of these legends. There are a lot of examples in both history and folklore that fit this issue better than a shorthand version of Universal’s monster squad.
Unfortunately, the rest of the bit is no better. As much as I’d like to take away something of value from Marche’s essay, his gloss on Freud is equally pithy and pointless, grabbing up words out of context and ignoring how much of Freud’s work is a mythical as anything in the Brother’s Grimm. Ultimately, Marche tosses the term “masculinity” around to see where he can make it stick, but with no seeming goal other than to get back to “men are intrinsically bad.” Which is just another way of failing to address the problem.
Jill Filipovic on how “girl power” still gets short-circuited.
Girls today receive two conflicting messages: Be mighty and be good.
Now-pervasive “Girl power” messaging declares that girls can be anything they want. But in practice, the more subtle rewards for compliant behavior show girls that it pays to be sweet and passive. The sexual harassment revelations that have come to light over the past few months show just how dangerous this model can be.
Routinely, victims of harassment and assault didn’t challenge their abusers or immediately file complaints not just because they didn’t want to endanger their own careers (although there was that, too), but because women have been conditioned for acquiescence to authority and male power their whole lives.
Men, on the other hand, have been raised to embrace risk-taking and aggression. Girls are taught to protect themselves from predation, and they internalize the message that they are inherently vulnerable; boys move through the world not nearly as encumbered and certainly not seeing their own bodies as sources of weakness or objects for others’ desires.
While girls are being told to protect themselves, too many boys are growing into the men they need to be protected from.
And what I want to believe is that while Marche is a little bit right — men are intrinsically more violent — Flilpovis is even more right in saying that society still delivers a different message, and has different expectations, for men and women.
Because that’s something that can be discussed. Something that can be worked on. Something that may never be fixed, but at least can get better.
David Von Drehle is ready to say goodbye to my generation.
George Washington was 43 when the Continental Congress placed him in command of the fledgling army that would eventually drive the British out of their American colonies. At 55, the general presided over the fractious convention that produced the most durable constitution the world has ever seen. He then served two terms as the nation’s first president, leaving office for the last time at 65.
Abraham Lincoln moved into the White House shortly after his 52nd birthday and guided the nation through a terrible civil war. Along the way, he ended slavery, started the Transcontinental Railroad, expanded higher education and delivered two of the most eloquent speeches in human history. When he was assassinated on April 14, 1865, he was 56.
Follow with the Roosevelts, TR was 40, FDR, 51.
If our four best presidents entered office at an average age of 50, why am I reading about potential candidates for 2020 who will be in their 70s? Former vice president Joe Biden says he is thinking about making a run. If he won, he would take office at 78. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been touted as a front-runner for the Democratic nomination. He would be 79. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) beams as throngs of Democrats chant her name. If she runs and wins, she would take the oath at 71.
Personally, the only generation I want to be shed of is the 2016 generation — anyone who brings the mud of that contest onto the national carpet in 2020 needs to be shown the door.
Frank Bruni on the down home folks of Team Trump.
If Donald Trump wants to keep insisting that he’s some scrappy watchdog keeping the corrupt elites at bay so that the little people have their day, then I want to keep pointing out what an utter crock his supposed populism continues to be. If you can produce for me an administration that has showcased as much unabashedly, unrepentantly regal behavior as his, then I’ll personally collect and supply the driftwood for your Thanksgiving tablescapes for the next three decades. I’ll throw in a few clamshells and pinecones, too.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs — at Trump-branded properties — while working-class parents see their children’s dreams of affordable college go up in smoke. This brings me to tax reform, which has taken shape in ways that hardly prioritize struggling Americans who are trying to climb the economic ladder a rung or two.
Bookmark this one for the next time someone tries to make any kind of case that Trump is “of the people.” It also includes some of the best tweets.
All Louise Linton needs now is an opera length cigarette holder and a full length Dalmatian coat. pic.twitter.com/1zzji3g8CL
— Hunter (@huntrgathrr) Nov. 15, 2017
The Washington Post on one kind of rising tide.
A new FBI report on hate crimes tells a sobering story. For the second year in a row, police departments across the country reported a rise in the number of crimes motivated by bias.
In 2016, the FBI counted 6,121 reported incidents nationwide — an increase of 4.6 percent from 2015, during which 5,850 cases were reported. That number, in turn, marked a 6.8 percent increase in reported hate crimes over 2014. Roughly 58 percent of such attacks last year were motivated by racial bias, of which about half targeted African Americans.
And if you need a reminder about the kind of “very fine people” behind these attacks ...
Of the 21 percent of crimes fueled by animosity toward the victim’s religion, more than half the attacks were aimed at Jews, a quarter at Muslims.
Bill McKibben on something else that’s rising — faster than we want to believe.
Some of humanity’s most primordial stories involve flooding: The tales of Noah, and before that Gilgamesh, tell what happens when the water starts to rise and doesn’t stop. But for the 10,000 years of human civilization, we’ve been blessed with a relatively stable climate, and hence flooding has been an exceptional terror. As that blessing comes to an end with our reckless heating of the planet, the exceptional is becoming all too normal, as residents of Houston and South Florida and Puerto Rico found out already this fall.
A reminder — this was Houston’s third 500-year flood in the last three years. That’s not a coincidence. For all the pussy-footing around with “well, we can’t say if any one event is connected to climate change ...” That’s not true. This would not have happened without warming.
To review the basic physics: Warm air holds more water vapor than cold air does, which means you get more evaporation and hence drought in arid areas, and more rainfall and hence floods in wet ones. (Harvey, for example, was the greatest rainfall event in American history, the kind of deluge possible only in a warmer world.) Meanwhile, heat melts ice: Greenland and the Antarctic are vast stores of what would otherwise be ocean, and now they’re beginning to surrender that water back to the sea.
Much of McKibben’s article looks at a new work from Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell that focuses on just how ill-prepared we are for how climate change is going to impact coastal cities very soon. Both McKibben’s review and Goddell’s Rolling Stone article are worth a read — before you buy that house on the coast.
Charles Blow is thankful there’s a Resistance.
Donald Trump, I thought that your presidency would be a disaster. It’s worse than a disaster. I wasn’t sure that resistance to your weakening of the republic, your coarsening of the culture, your assault on truth and honesty, your erosion of our protocols, would feel as urgent today as it felt last year. But if anything, that resistance now feels more urgent.
Nothing about you has changed for the better. You are still a sexist, bigoted, bullying, self-important simpleton. But now all of the worst of you has the force of the American presidency.
That’s all I’m going to quote. Just go read the rest.
The New York Times goes back to Puerto Rico.
Two months after Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, a sense of desperation seems to be yielding to resignation at best. More than half of the island is still without power, and hundreds of thousands of residents are fleeing to the American mainland in an extraordinary exodus.
It has been weeks since President Trump visited to jovially toss rolls of paper towels to needy fellow Americans and brag about how successful the recovery effort was. But true evidence of progress has been hard to come by. Even the simplest symbols of government, like traffic lights, remain useless. Most of the Pentagon’s emergency troops have begun pulling out, except for those working on the island’s shattered power grid.
But most of the media has stopped looking. So why would they expect Trump to do anything?
R. Alexander Pyron makes the most idiotic argument of the year — and that includes Trump.
Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. Species constantly go extinct, and every species that is alive today will one day follow suit. There is no such thing as an “endangered species,” except for all species. The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings. Yes, we have altered the environment and, in doing so, hurt other species. This seems artificial because we, unlike other life forms, use sentience and agriculture and industry. But we are a part of the biosphere just like every other creature, and our actions are just as volitional, their consequences just as natural. Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.
If you listen carefully while reading this piece, you can hear the tendons stretch as Pyron, himself a biologist, reaches around to pat his own back for being oh-so-much of an iconoclast.
Not only is this an argument so foolish you’d think it would be squeezed out of anyone past the age of ten, it’s an old argument. It’s been recycled around biological circles since the pre-Darwin days when people first realized that extinction was possible. I had a personal back and forth with a zoology TA who voiced this Very Clever Argument somewhere around 1979 to justify the construction of a dam that had would do in the only known habitat of a small fish (And Ken, if you’re out there, you’re still a jackass).
I don’t have to explain what’s wrong with this argument, because Pyron makes it crystal-f#cking clear,
Climate scientists worry about how we’ve altered our planet, and they have good reasons for apprehension: Will we be able to feed ourselves? Will our water supplies dry up? Will our homes wash away? But unlike those concerns, extinction does not carry moral significance, even when we have caused it. And unless we somehow destroy every living cell on Earth, the sixth extinction will be followed by a recovery, and later a seventh extinction, and so on.
If he had written down the words “Hey, I really, really, really don’t understand the first thing about morality” the message could not be more clear.
Look, idiot. “Everything dies anyway, so it’s not wrong to kill it” isn’t just the argument of sociopathic teenager carrying a bag of cats to the river, it’s an argument that completely ignores that smashing your own environment because you like to see pieces tumble isn’t just destructive, it’s self-destructive.
Or to put it another way: Everyone dies, but murder is still a crime. Not only that, it’s immoral and wrong. Even the murder of iconoclastic biologists whose level of smug self-centeredness is so great they’re willing to burn down the world so long as it doesn’t ruin their day. For that, you should be heartily glad.
The image at the top of the article came from Andy Brunning at Compound Interest and is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can get the original, full-sized image here.