Sound The TRUMPets! A Thread for Presidential Pondering 2016-2020(?)

[SimonNZ]

Donald Trump advocates death penalty for drug dealers in rambling speech

"Looking forward, Trump announced his 2020 campaign slogan would be "Keep America great" since he had already "made America great again"."

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Trump lawyers want to stop '60 Minutes' from airing Stormy Daniels interview: report

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White Nationalist Rally Organizer Sues Charlottesville for Denying Anniversary Rally Permit

[SimonNZ]

[nodogen]

I imagine all this kind of fake news will carry on until the day we all develop gills. 

[Karl Henning]

Why, no–he still doesn't know squat about what he's doing.

Tariffs Are Taxes

Steel and aluminum may win in the short term, but steel-and-aluminum users and consumers lose.

[Christo]

Maybe.  I have serious doubts about the validity of comparisons of the current situation to 30s era Germany, by which I mean they are nonsensical.

Historical comparisons are hardly ever nonsensical and differences are always evident (otherwise there would be no history). The German leadership shared some aims, was far more popular, but also incomparably more competent.

Hardly surprising, looking for patterns and similarities is what historians do.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme - similar, repeating mechanisms in varying circumstances.
The comparison with the 1930s is not particularly far fetched - I cannot think of a time in history that resembles the current times closer.

Q

Agree.

[Karl Henning]

Look who's afraid of the NRA now: [El Tupé] owes Toomey an apology

[...] whatever nice words [El Tupé] had for the victims' families and classmates at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., he cannot bear to disappoint an essential source of support, the NRA gun absolutists.

[Karl Henning]

You can keep your dignity or vouch for [El Tupé], but not both.

Will they ever learn? The humiliation of [El Tupé] spinners.

Evangelicals gave [El Presidente Tupé] a "mulligan" on his alleged affair with Stormy Daniels. If [El Tupé's] attempt to disassociate himself from lawyer Michael Cohen's hush-money payment proves untenable — and who believes Cohen paid for this out of the goodness of his heart? — will the religious mop-up squad give him a second mulligan for lying? Maybe they should find out how many paid-off women are out there before offering more absolution.

Evangelicals, who thundered disapproval of Bill Clinton (and even Rudy Giuliani for multiple marriages), have turned a blind eye to each and every new [El Tupé] scandal, thereby forfeiting any claim to religious or moral leadership. (Their cult of resentment, their stunted and unattainable political agenda, and their disregard for public morality and culture are a dismal tale told brilliantly by my Post colleague Michael Gerson in an Atlantic piece.)

On a more comic level, Anthony Scaramucci (the former communications director for less than a fortnight) got taunted (and laughed at) by fellow CNN panelists when he insisted [El Tupé] was "very presidential" and for saying Cohen definitively (!) claimed it was he — and not [El Tupé] — who paid off Daniels. The price one pays for defending [El Tupé] is self-humiliation, as one aide and ex-aide after another have learned.

[Karl Henning]

Burn of the Day:

According to Jerry Falwell Jr., evangelicals have "found their dream president," which says something about the current quality of evangelical dreams.

[Karl Henning]

Burn of the Day:

According to Jerry Falwell Jr., evangelicals have "found their dream president," which says something about the current quality of evangelical dreams.

A prominent company of evangelical leaders—including Dobson, Falwell, Graham, Jeffress, Metaxas, Perkins, and Ralph Reed—has embraced this self-conception. Their justification is often bluntly utilitarian: All of Trump's flaws are worth his conservative judicial appointments and more-favorable treatment of Christians by the government. But they have gone much further than grudging, prudential calculation. They have basked in access to power and provided character references in the midst of scandal. Graham castigated the critics of Trump's response to the violence during a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia ("Shame on the politicians who are trying to push blame on @POTUS"). Dobson has pronounced Trump a "baby Christian"—a political use of grace that borders on blasphemy. "Complaining about the temperament of the @POTUS or saying his behavior is not presidential is no longer relevant," Falwell tweeted. "[Donald Trump] has single-handedly changed the definition of what behavior is 'presidential' from phony, failed & rehearsed to authentic, successful & down to earth."

It is remarkable to hear religious leaders defend profanity, ridicule, and cruelty as hallmarks of authenticity and dismiss decency as a dead language. Whatever Trump's policy legacy ends up being, his presidency has been a disaster in the realm of norms. It has coarsened our culture, given permission for bullying, complicated the moral formation of children, undermined standards of public integrity, and encouraged cynicism about the political enterprise. Falwell, Graham, and others are providing religious cover for moral squalor—winking at trashy behavior and encouraging the unraveling of social restraints. Instead of defending their convictions, they are providing preemptive absolution for their political favorites. And this, even by purely political standards, undermines the causes they embrace. Turning a blind eye to the exploitation of women certainly doesn't help in making pro-life arguments. It materially undermines the movement, which must ultimately change not only the composition of the courts but the views of the public. Having given politics pride of place, these evangelical leaders have ceased to be moral leaders in any meaningful sense.

[SimonNZ]

White House officials alarmed at education secretary's '60 Minutes' performance

"White House officials were alarmed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' struggle to answer basic questions about the nation's schools and failure to defend the administration's newly proposed school safety measures during a tour of television interviews Sunday and Monday, according to two sources familiar with their reaction.

Though DeVos was sworn in to her Cabinet position 13 months ago, she stumbled her way through a pointed "60 Minutes" interview with CBS' Lesley Stahl Sunday night and was unable to defend her belief that public schools can perform better when funding is diverted to the expansion of public charter schools and private school vouchers. At one point, she admitted she hasn't "intentionally" visited underperforming schools."

[SimonNZ]

Republicans find no evidence of collusion or Russian preference for Trump

"House Intelligence Committee Republicans have completed a draft report in their year-long Russia probe that states they found no evidence President Trump or anyone affiliated with him colluded with Russian officials to affect the outcome of the 2016 election, a conclusion expected to incite backlash from Democrats.

Republicans also determined that while the Russian government did pursue "active measures" to interfere in the election, it did not do so with the intention of helping Trump's campaign, contradicting the U.S. intelligence community's findings.

"We've found no evidence of collusion," Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), who oversees the Russia probe, said Monday. He noted that the worst they had uncovered was "perhaps some bad judgment, inappropriate meetings, inappropriate judgment at taking meetings" — such as a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York City between members of the Trump campaign and a Russian lawyer. Conaway said that meeting "shouldn't have happened, no doubt about that."

"But only Tom Clancy or Vince Flynn or someone else like that could take this series of inadvertent contacts with each other, meetings, whatever and weave that into some sort of a fiction, page turner spy thriller," Conaway said. "We're not dealing in fiction, we're dealing in facts, and we found no evidence of any collusion."

The GOP's conclusion comes as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ramps up his team's investigation, gathering evidence that an early 2017 meeting in the Seychelles was an effort to establish a backchannel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin.

It also contradicts the preliminary findings reached by Democrats on the House panel. Ranking member Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) told reporters last month that, based on what he had seen, there was "ample evidence" of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Democrats and Republicans on the committee have interviewed the same 73 witnesses and viewed the same 300,000-plus documents, according to the tally Conaway gave reporters on Monday. Democrats say there are thousands of pages of documents the committee never procured, and dozens more witnesses they need to call for interviews.

Committee Democrats have said the panel should issue several subpoenas for witnesses who have either ignored the committee's requests to appear or provided incomplete answers during their interviews.

Democrats also have warned Republicans against shutting down the panel's investigation before Mueller's is completed.

Conaway dismissed the idea of keeping the investigation open any longer, saying that if Democrats expected him to "sit around and wait with the expectation that something might happen," his answer was "no."

He argued against using subpoenas or stronger measures — including contempt citations — to compel more testimony from witnesses who refused to answer questions about their time in the administration, arguing that Trump might eventually want to invoke executive privilege.

"You use subpoenas when you think you can actually get something from them, and we're not particularly confident that the subpoena process will get us any more information than we had," Conaway said Monday. "We've interviewed everyone we think we need to interview."

Democrats were not involved with drafting the GOP's report and were not presented with a copy of the findings before Conaway addressed the media. Conaway said he would give committee Democrats the report Tuesday for their comments, suggestions and proposed changes — taking them under advisement before presenting the document to the intelligence community for redactions. He said it's unlikely the report would be released publicly before April"

[BasilValentine]

White House officials alarmed at education secretary's '60 Minutes' performance

"White House officials were alarmed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' struggle to answer basic questions about the nation's schools and failure to defend the administration's newly proposed school safety measures during a tour of television interviews Sunday and Monday, according to two sources familiar with their reaction.

Though DeVos was sworn in to her Cabinet position 13 months ago, she stumbled her way through a pointed "60 Minutes" interview with CBS' Lesley Stahl Sunday night and was unable to defend her belief that public schools can perform better when funding is diverted to the expansion of public charter schools and private school vouchers. At one point, she admitted she hasn't "intentionally" visited underperforming schools."

Really? They're alarmed now? Where were they during the confirmation hearings? That's when the rest of us were alarmed.

[lisa needs braces]

So much moral preening for lefties to do, so little time.  Perhaps the righteous deep thinkers of GMG can catalog the positive effect their moral preening has had on the world given the vast audience of literally tens of active posters on the board.

Accusing others of "moral preening" is a Breitbart-esque conservative insult that amounts to nothing more than a splutter...

[lisa needs braces]

I really like this twitter thread that examines NYT's bizarre hiring of two "never Trump" New York-based elites to represent the "conservative" perspective, because in the current political environment the "conservative mood" is better represented by Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, Patrick Buchanan, etc. But the perspectives of these people is toxic to many NYT readers -- so the Times finds itself in a weird spot: to really broaden the paper's opinion section, they'd have to give space to hate mongers.

https://twitter.com/drvox/status/972915124032888832

There's hatred being directed against NYT op-ed page right now because Weiss and Stephens do nothing but agitate leftists while failing to illuminate anything about the Trump voter, who they don't really care for in the least anyway. Why in the world did those two get hired?

An article from Jeet Heer on this issue:

https://newrepublic.com/article/147240/myth-times-intellectual-diversity

[lisa needs braces]

5. Trump has swerved this way and that on immigration, taxes, healthcare, guns ... and the base doesn't care. They follow him this way, they follow him that way. It is the resentment, the aggrieved sense of persecution, that they respond to. That's what US conservatism IS now.

[milk]

I really like this twitter thread that examines NYT's bizarre hiring of two "never Trump" New York-based elites to represent the "conservative" perspective, because in the current political environment the "conservative mood" is better represented by Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, Patrick Buchanan, etc. But the perspectives of these people is toxic to many NYT readers -- so the Times finds itself in a weird spot: to really broaden the paper's opinion section, they'd have to give space to hate mongers.

https://twitter.com/drvox/status/972915124032888832

There's hatred being directed against NYT op-ed page right now because Weiss and Stephens do nothing but agitate leftists while failing to illuminate anything about the Trump voter, who they don't really care for in the least anyway. Why in the world did those two get hired?

An article from Jeet Heer on this issue:

https://newrepublic.com/article/147240/myth-times-intellectual-diversity

I thought Weiss's piece on the toxic twitter mob-ery and outrage-machine, regardless of her own past, served a purpose. There is a part of the left, these days, that intends to eat broader liberal viability. If the left is what Huffington Post, for example, has become, then I think we can see why we're in a bit of a pickle. I'm glad they keep Drump-ers out. Drump has twitter and I think the pixel limitations of twitter provide him all the space he needs to wank off his little daily tantrums.     

[lisa needs braces]

I thought Weiss's piece on the toxic twitter mob-ery and outrage-machine, regardless of her own past, served a purpose. There is a part of the left, these days, that intends to eat broader liberal viability. If the left is what Huffington Post, for example, has become, then I think we can see why we're in a bit of a pickle. I'm glad they keep Drump-ers out. Drump has twitter and I think the pixel limitations of twitter provide him all the space he needs to wank off his little daily tantrums.     

This is her past. This is who is now lecturing us about political intolerance on college campuses. 

http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/advocate-reportedly-intellectual/

[lisa needs braces]

Why Liberalism Failed -- talk at the University of Virginia by Patrick J. Deneen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLPpqCAPd7Y

I heard about this guy from a recent Andrew Sullivan column:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/sullivan-things-are-better-than-ever-why-are-we-miserable.html

Sullivan mentioned Deneen's work in the context of discussing Steven Pinker's new book ENLIGHTENMENT NOW:

At the same time, I was finally reading another new book, Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick J. Deneen. If you really want a point of view that is disturbingly persuasive about the modern predicament and yet usually absent from any discussion in the mainstream media, I cannot recommend it highly enough. A short polemic against our modern liberal world, it too is relentless. By "liberal," I don't mean left-liberal politics; I mean (and Deneen means) the post-Machiavelli project to liberate the individual from religious authority and the focus of politics on individual rights and the betterment of humankind's material conditions. Deneen doesn't deny any of the progress Pinker describes, or quibble at the triumph of the liberal order. It is, by and large, indisputable. He does something more interesting: He argues that liberalism has failed precisely because it has succeeded.

As we have slowly and surely attained more progress, we have lost something that undergirds all of it: meaning, cohesion, and a different, deeper kind of happiness than the satiation of all our earthly needs. We've forgotten the human flourishing that comes from a common idea of virtue, and a concept of virtue that is based on our nature. This is the core of Deneen's argument, and it rests on a different, classical, pre-liberal understanding of freedom. For most of the Ancients, freedom was freedom from our natural desires and material needs. It rested on a mastery of these deep, natural urges in favor of self-control, restraint, and education into virtue. It placed the community — the polis — ahead of the individual, and indeed could not conceive of the individual apart from the community into which he or she was born. They'd look at our freedom and see licentiousness, chaos, and slavery to desire. They'd predict misery not happiness to be the result.

There's a rebuttal from a left-leaning professor about 50 minutes into that video and while he's careful not to entirely endorse Deneen's argument he pretty much ends up saying "a lot of what you say is true ever since Dems and Republicans united around Reagonomics in the early 80s."

[milk]

This is her past. This is who is now lecturing us about political intolerance on college campuses. 

http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/advocate-reportedly-intellectual/

I'm not very sympathetic to the invitation of Ahmadinejad to Columbia. This piece you linked to makes the case for that invitation being some sort of opportunity. That point is a little strained.

"It was a golden opportunity for students to hear from—-and confront—someone incredibly important/powerful, someone with the potential to alter the course of world history. Now, believe it or not, Bari Weiss didn't agree."

I'm with her there.

""...the neocon/Zionist rabble...""

Yuck. One can be critical of Israel without resorting to agitprop. 
This writer tries to undermine his case by being as yucky as possible with language. However, trying to get people fired or denied positions for having legitimate differences of opinion does make her a hypocrite and wrong.

So maybe you're right that she's a bad choice. Nevertheless, they need someone to beat back the permanently outraged and hysterical anti-free speech left for it's own good, so that we can win elections again and restore competence and accountability to government.

[Karl Henning]

""...the neocon/Zionist rabble...""

Yuck. One can be critical of Israel without resorting to agitprop.

Oh, but abe can't.  No, he cannot.