I know this doesn't need saying here, but when poverty is such a major driver (among others) to such a situation, the idea that cutting aid is in anyway a response, is mind-boggling.
From reading Woodward's book, Trump himself probably does believe in it - he seems to get fixated on certain things (like balance of payments) and not be able to understand, never mind listen to the explanations of why he's got it wrong. I've no idea what his advisors think but politically it works because the core Trumpites will lap it up, as always...
Trump is just whipping up the "faithful" for votes. The so-called "caravan" is a gift to him. The whole idea that the Democrats have helped finance this movement of people for political advantage is clearly stupid; it is Trump who is using it for GOP political advantage in the short term. But logic doesn't seem to get much of a look in these days.
What the Democrats do not have at the moment is an obvious leader who is able to command similar levels of publicity and articulate, clearly, that Trump is not just lying, he is talking nonsense. As things stand, he can talk any old BS he likes and get it on the air.
And there is some evidence that it may be working. Journalists like Anderson Cooper have been doing a good job (e.g in his "keeping them honest" features in AC360) in exposing this lying nonsense, but they are mostly preaching to the choir. In the post truth era, very few right wing journalists seem willing to expose the Trump lies for what they are. Their wish to see the GOP retain political control seems to make them very reticent about Trump's abuses of fact and truth.
Its so hard to see what the situation will be on the other side of the midterms. A catastrophic shellacking might shift things on the right, but Trump is still the President. If he can conjure up a win...
It is hardly news to say that both sides of American politics are motivated by fear. Trump uses socialism and Venezuela (inter alia) to stir fears of a totalitarian takeover by the Democrats. To my ear, that sounds ridiculous, but there must be Americans out there who believe it, and not just in the comments section on social media. It echoes with my own dark fears of a right-wing dictatorship forming in the US, and isn't that what we all worry about? I'm not just concerned that Trump is ignorant or incompetent or in the pay of the Russians. I worry that by stacking the courts, by attacking the Justice Department, by trying to get personal pledges of loyalty from Government officials he seeks absolute control.
Ordinary Democrats fear an unconstitutional takeover of Government by the Republicans. Ordinary Republicans fear an unconstitutional takeover of Government by the Democrats. These fears are stoked by politicians on both sides in an attempt to win power by legitimate means.
Is it because I am only experiencing the USA through the prism of the media that this seems like its true?
Its so hard to see what the situation will be on the other side of the midterms. A catastrophic shellacking might shift things on the right, but Trump is still the President. If he can conjure up a win...
It is hardly news to say that both sides of American politics are motivated by fear. Trump uses socialism and Venezuela (inter alia) to stir fears of a totalitarian takeover by the Democrats. To my ear, that sounds ridiculous, but there must be Americans out there who believe it, and not just in the comments section on social media. It echoes with my own dark fears of a right-wing dictatorship forming in the US, and isn't that what we all worry about? I'm not just concerned that Trump is ignorant or incompetent or in the pay of the Russians. I worry that by stacking the courts, by attacking the Justice Department, by trying to get personal pledges of loyalty from Government officials he seeks absolute control.
Ordinary Democrats fear an unconstitutional takeover of Government by the Republicans. Ordinary Republicans fear an unconstitutional takeover of Government by the Democrats. These fears are stoked by politicians on both sides in an attempt to win power by legitimate means.
Is it because I am only experiencing the USA through the prism of the media that this seems like its true?
I experienced the USA through the prism of cartoons this morning. Was doing my morning pretending-to-run with the dog and we encountered 7 rabbits. Which got me to wondering how it is that Americans normally choose the most Bugs Bunny-like person as their leader but this time chose Daffy Duck.
and then there's Robin Williams, who I watched on the Carson show do a routine about the Clarence Thomas hearings, Saddam Hussein, and a few other things in 1991. He was loud, his clothes were loud and I had a feeling that he'd be just as funny riffing about Kavanaugh and a bunch of people heading north, destitute and afraid, being pilloried by a bloke who claims to be a billionaire to further his schemes.
Trump is just whipping up the "faithful" for votes. The so-called "caravan" is a gift to him. The whole idea that the Democrats have helped finance this movement of people for political advantage is clearly stupid; it is Trump who is using it for GOP political advantage in the short term. But logic doesn't seem to get much of a look in these days.
What the Democrats do not have at the moment is an obvious leader who is able to command similar levels of publicity and articulate, clearly, that Trump is not just lying, he is talking nonsense. As things stand, he can talk any old BS he likes and get it on the air.
That's not a function of the Democratic leadership, it's what Matthew Yglesias calls "the Hack Gap".
The hack gap has two core pillars. One is the constellation of conservative media outlets — led by Fox News and other Rupert Murdoch properties like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but also including Sinclair Broadcasting in local television, much of AM talk radio, and new media offerings such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller — that simply abjure anything resembling journalism in favor of propaganda.
The other is that the self-consciousness journalists at legacy outlets have about accusations of liberal bias leads them to bend over backward to allow the leading conservative gripes of the day to dominate the news agenda. Television producers who would never dream of assigning segments where talking heads debate whether it’s bad that the richest country on earth also has millions of children growing up in dire poverty think nothing of chasing random conservative shiny objects, from “Fast & Furious” (remember that one?) to Benghazi to the migrant caravan.
And more than Citizens United or even gerrymandering, it’s a huge constant thumb on the scale in favor of the political right in America.
I'm not sure what the solution is here. Having the American left develop its own media empire of blatant propagandists to compete with Fox News, talk radio, Breitbart, et al. seems like a bad idea. It would be nice if the more mainstream media outlets would stop chasing whatever shiny object conservatives dangle in front of them, but since they've never really come to grips with the fact that their obsession with e-mail server management practices at the State Department had any negative real-world consequences, this seems a slim hope. For example, if I had to judge the relative newsworthiness to an American audience of a) a few thousand Hondurans in southern Mexico forming a "caravan", most of whom will probably opt to stay in Mexico if past behavior is any guide to future outcomes or b)separate but very closely synchronized assassination attempts on both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I'd probably regard the latter as more newsworthy. Most American media sources apparently disagree with me.
Ordinary Republicans fear an unconstitutional takeover of Government by the Democrats.
This isn't quite accurate. Ordinary Republicans seem to fear America becoming a lot less white than it has been. That's the fear being stoked by Republican politicians. I'm sure some of them even regard this as "unconstitutional" in some sense. Glossing over this in an attempt to create a false equivalence with Democratic concerns about Republican abuses of power is part of the "hack gap" problem.
Yes, I'm sure that a kind of mirror-image Fox TV isn't the answer and yes I think the media obsession with conservative "shiny objects" has done a lot of damage. As has the perception that all politicians spin i.e. bend the truth to serve their advantage.
What does seem to me to be clear is that the distortion of truth is not just a media issue but it is itself a political issue. The aim to "clean up Washington" has landed the US with a liar-in-chief, rather than a commander-in-chief. And the consequences now include synchronised bomb attacks on political targets and media criticised as purveyors of fake news by the faker-in-chief.
Trump is guilty of incitement to hatred. There is abundant evidence of that from his rallies. He deserves to be called on that, clearly and unequivocally, by leaders of the Democratic party.
Trump is guilty of incitement to hatred. There is abundant evidence of that from his rallies. He deserves to be called on that, clearly and unequivocally, by leaders of the Democratic party.
Hillary hinted at it when she said “It is a troubling time, isn’t it? And it’s a time of deep divisions, and we have to do everything we can do to bring our country together,”
Dubya was bad enough, though he does seem to be getting his act together, a bit, in retirement. T might have nuked the Middle East, or the world. Or put statues of himself all over the Middle East--and cities named for him.
D and company faked/lied a lot. We pretty much lost the White House press corps for years, because they and their bosses were as freaked out as everyone else.
IMHO, the one person who got it going again was the matriarch of the press corps. I forget her name. But she challenged D at a press conference, and kick-started the press corps.
IMHO, the one person who got it going again was the matriarch of the press corps. I forget her name. But she challenged D at a press conference, and kick-started the press corps.
Now the man wants to withdraw from the START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties) Reagan signed with Gorbachev.
Is that ticking I hear the Doomsday Clock getting closer to midnight?
It's not the START Treaty but the older Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which Obama also accused Putin of violating. And the treaty does not cover China, which means that the US has its hands tied in dealing with a nuclear rival in Asia that is getting very aggressive with its neighbors. But Obama chose not to withdraw from it after pressure from European leaders who warned of a new arms race. Even if there is a new de facto arms race, taking whatever legal breaks there are off of it are likely to make things worse. And European countries are very against the US leaving the treaty.
Its so hard to see what the situation will be on the other side of the midterms. A catastrophic shellacking might shift things on the right, but Trump is still the President. If he can conjure up a win...
It is hardly news to say that both sides of American politics are motivated by fear. Trump uses socialism and Venezuela (inter alia) to stir fears of a totalitarian takeover by the Democrats. To my ear, that sounds ridiculous, but there must be Americans out there who believe it, and not just in the comments section on social media. It echoes with my own dark fears of a right-wing dictatorship forming in the US, and isn't that what we all worry about? I'm not just concerned that Trump is ignorant or incompetent or in the pay of the Russians. I worry that by stacking the courts, by attacking the Justice Department, by trying to get personal pledges of loyalty from Government officials he seeks absolute control.
Ordinary Democrats fear an unconstitutional takeover of Government by the Republicans. Ordinary Republicans fear an unconstitutional takeover of Government by the Democrats. These fears are stoked by politicians on both sides in an attempt to win power by legitimate means.
Is it because I am only experiencing the USA through the prism of the media that this seems like its true?
Not quite so, but close. Thanks to recent history and features of the constitution, the problem isn't an unconstitutional takeover, but an entirely constitutional one. A President funded by a foreign power (or two) who has appointed Supreme Court justices that will do his bidding and a legislative branch elected through gerrymandered and disproportionate constituencies leaves plenty of room for things to go very wrong within the bounds of a constitution.
Trump did tone it down a bit at the Wisconsin rally. But managed to insult both ex-President Clinton and ex-President Obama by referring to them as "former high ranking government officials". That looked deliberate, as is the fact that he made no personal calls to either Clinton or Obama yesterday, which I would have thought would have been a normal sign of courtesy and respect.
He did manage to single out the media for its negative reporting (obviously of him). And did observe, as a joke, that he was "being good" in the speech. Otherwise the speech showed no comprehension of the impact of his own words, as this statement accurately observed.
“There is a total and complete lack of understanding at the White House about the seriousness of their continued attacks on the media,” CNN president Jeff Zucker said in a statement released Wednesday afternoon. “The President, and especially the White House Press Secretary should understand their words matter. Thus far, they have shown no comprehension of that.”
Trump did tone it down a bit at the Wisconsin rally. But managed to insult both ex-President Clinton and ex-President Obama by referring to them as "former high ranking government officials". That looked deliberate, as is the fact that he made no personal calls to either Clinton or Obama yesterday, which I would have thought would have been a normal sign of courtesy and respect.
I assume both have Caller I.D. and wouldn't answer if he had called. A call from Trump on top of a bomb scare would be a bit much to take.
Asked about New START’s future while in Moscow, John Bolton. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, said the government is “currently considering” its position on the agreement, but then added that the administration “does not have a position that we’re prepared to negotiate.”
This isn’t the first time the administration has raised fears about the future of New START. In February 2017, Trump called the agreement “a one-sided deal” and a "bad deal.”
Trump is convinced any deal not negotiated by him is a bad deal, and Bolton has yet to discover a treaty he doesn't want the U.S. to withdraw from.
And the treaty does not cover China, which means that the US has its hands tied in dealing with a nuclear rival in Asia that is getting very aggressive with its neighbors. But Obama chose not to withdraw from it after pressure from European leaders who warned of a new arms race. Even if there is a new de facto arms race, taking whatever legal breaks there are off of it are likely to make things worse.
Farley's arguments are generally persuasive to me, though I think he understates the value of a treaty even in the case of cheating. An INF which Russia violates around the edges but still has to maintain plausible adherence to is different than the situation where Russia is completely unbound by the INF.
[ Trump ] did manage to single out the media for its negative reporting (obviously of him). And did observe, as a joke, that he was "being good" in the speech.
It's kind of like his claims of being a genius. If you have to keep telling people your being good, you're probably not.
IMHO, the one person who got it going again was the matriarch of the press corps. I forget her name. But she challenged D at a press conference, and kick-started the press corps.
He did manage to single out the media for its negative reporting (obviously of him). And did observe, as a joke, that he was "being good" in the speech. Otherwise the speech showed no comprehension of the impact of his own words, as this statement accurately observed.
If you see the clips of angry people surrounding and shouting at the media, there is one inescapable conclusion: at some point, journalists will start being killed.
I assume both have Caller I.D. and wouldn't answer if he had called. A call from Trump on top of a bomb scare would be a bit much to take.
Completely agree with the sentiment, but to engage seriously for the moment, unlike Trump, both clearly have too much respect for the office not to accept the call.
I experienced the USA through the prism of cartoons this morning. Was doing my morning pretending-to-run with the dog and we encountered 7 rabbits. Which got me to wondering how it is that Americans normally choose the most Bugs Bunny-like person as their leader but this time chose Daffy Duck.
The stock market has been very volatile these past few weeks. Trump boasted that the numbers (when the market was up) showed his policies were WORKING--but as of today, all the gains for the year have been wiped out. Reasons why? Housing Starts are down because of the increase in Federal rates (not necessarily Trumps fault, granted). But the doubling of the National Debt due to the tax cuts he pushed through also have an impact. Farm prices have dropped by up to 30% depending on the crop. Then, too there is the foreign policies fiasco of the Trump administration
Of course this is part of a defence lawyer's strategy and should be read in that light. But it provides some insight into the impact of inflammatory rhetoric on a disturbed mind. Not that there is a single sign that the Chief Inflamer either knows or cares about these risks, and his own part in increasing them.
I experienced the USA through the prism of cartoons this morning. Was doing my morning pretending-to-run with the dog and we encountered 7 rabbits. Which got me to wondering how it is that Americans normally choose the most Bugs Bunny-like person as their leader but this time chose Daffy Duck.
Of course this is part of a defence lawyer's strategy and should be read in that light. But it provides some insight into the impact of inflammatory rhetoric on a disturbed mind. Not that there is a single sign that the Chief Inflamer either knows or cares about these risks, and his own part in increasing them.
I think so. Demagogues like Trump who play so many hate cards must take responsibility when the impaired, emotionally, intellectually whatever, latch on to their rhetoric and use it to justify violence.
If his inflammatory rhetoric is seen by the GOP to have worked for a period but is now becoming counter-productive, they will make sure he pays for it. If Trump becomes seen as an electoral liability, you will see that the GOP loyalty is, as ever, skin deep.
Henry Farrell makes the point that the current political ecosystem is predicated against Trump altering his appeals to racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and Islamaphobes*.
Trump’s prospects for political survival don’t depend on uniting country, but on continuing to divide it in ways that are reinforced by the political geography of Senate, the rural-urban divide in House seats etc. Even if (implausibly) he wanted to build unity, he couldn’t stick to it without undermining his only viable political strategy (the people who hate him are going to go on hating him). This seems obvious.
The whole thing is worth a read. Blogger Paul Campos has put the whole thread in paragraph form for those who don't like reading tweets.
*I obviously didn't pick those five descriptors at random. They're the specifics Hillary Clinton cited in her "basket of deplorables" comment. It's not like nobody noticed this before now. Except it's not nice to say racists are "deplorable", apparently!
Yes, I think that's right. He'll live or die if there are sufficient left in the "basket of deplorables" to keep him politically viable. Which is a scary thought.
wot Barnabas said. He's accountable to the electorate. Once he's out of office he'll be accountable to twelve angry people, to update a movie title, but not for demagoguery.
The Tree of Life shooter criticized Trump for not being racist or anti-Semitic enough. But with respect to the caravan, the shooter merely followed the logic of the president and his allies: He was willing to do whatever was necessary to prevent an “invasion” of Latinos planned by perfidious Jews, a treasonous attempt to seek “the destruction of American society and culture.”
The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a midterm election. There is no political gesture, no public statement, and no alteration in rhetoric or behavior that will change this fact. The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day. But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread and that his followers chose to amplify.
As for those who aided the president in his propaganda campaign, who enabled him to prey on racist fears to fabricate a national emergency, who said to themselves, “This is the play”? Every single one of them bears some responsibility for what followed.
Italics and link from original. Bolds added by me.
How do you combat this stuff? It's hard to fact check, as it's fantasy. Streicher used to say that the German people were weighed down by the yoke of Jewry, well, they weren't, but that seems an inadequate response, as Streicher is constructing a fantasy or dreamlike world. And Bowers seems to connect all the themes of the right wing at the moment, white America is threatened, by Jews, poor brown people, liberals and so on. And we are going to be slaughtered - you get always the victim position, beloved of fascism. In Germany, after WW1, the Dolchstosslegende, the stab in the back myth.
And Bowers seems to connect all the themes of the right wing at the moment, white America is threatened, by Jews, poor brown people, liberals and so on.
Bowers wasn't quite an original thinker in that area. Anti-Semitism is the constant companion of other forms of racism. If you posit that brown people are both lazy and stupid they seem less of a long-term threat. The "missing link" is to add a bunch of sneaky, conniving Jews importing all those lazy, stupid brown people to replace decent, hard-working white folks to your conspiracy theory. Which is why you get a bunch of tikkki-torch wielding neo-Nazis chanting "Jews will not replace us" through the streets of Charlottesville a year ago.
This isn't a new idea or some unique and idiosyncratic twist of previously unconnected ideas. This is something very old and a large, obnoxious, and deadly group was chanting it on American streets a year ago.
Times of uncertainty bring forth dangerous right wing idiots. Right wing idiots bring forth times of uncertainty.
No, the dangerous right wing idiots you will always have with you. (h/t)
On a more serious note, economic downturns tend to produce an uptick in right wing politics, particularly violent right wing politics, but there's usually a multi-year lag. We're currently about as far away in time from the start of the Great Recession as the rise of the Nazis was from the Great Depression.
On a more serious note, economic downturns tend to produce an uptick in right wing politics, particularly violent right wing politics, but there's usually a multi-year lag. We're currently about as far away in time from the start of the Great Recession as the rise of the Nazis was from the Great Depression.
And to back fill this analogy a little, starting in the 80s right wing politicians were able to harness the votes of a generation of people who had not lived through the depression or the war that followed and dismantle the various institutional arrangements (New Deal, restrictions on Banks, etc.) put in place following the Great Depression. Gradually the Centre-Left joined in.
This set the stage for a series of financial bubbles of increasing size which eventually caused the financial meltdown of 2008.
On a more serious note, economic downturns tend to produce an uptick in right wing politics, particularly violent right wing politics, but there's usually a multi-year lag. We're currently about as far away in time from the start of the Great Recession as the rise of the Nazis was from the Great Depression.
And to back fill this analogy a little, starting in the 80s right wing politicians were able to harness the votes of a generation of people who had not lived through the depression or the war that followed and dismantle the various institutional arrangements (New Deal, restrictions on Banks, etc.) put in place following the Great Depression. Gradually the Centre-Left joined in.
This set the stage for a series of financial bubbles of increasing size which eventually caused the financial meltdown of 2008.
That happened in Australia too, almost at the same time. The only thing we really kept was strict regulatory control on the banks, medicare, and to some extent our wonderful system of industrial regulation. Mind you at the same time, OH&S regulation and enforcement ramped up, and compulsory insurance schemes for people injured at work and on the roads happened. That might be a function of the State paying for healthcare.
A sociologist I read said that 'welfare' in the USA was resented by the middle class because they perceived themselves as paying for it but being excluded from it. One of the benefits of medicare in Australia is that because everyone gets a clear benefit, they really really ark up if there is a sniff of the conservatives cutting it unduly. This is so, even though you pay a separate medicare levy and can see it in your tax each year. To cut medicare means death in Aussie politics, and so-called medi-scare campaigns will no doubt be a feature of the next Federal election. The ALP also likes using the American Right as a boogieman.
Comments
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day ...
That'll turn out well.
I know this doesn't need saying here, but when poverty is such a major driver (among others) to such a situation, the idea that cutting aid is in anyway a response, is mind-boggling.
From reading Woodward's book, Trump himself probably does believe in it - he seems to get fixated on certain things (like balance of payments) and not be able to understand, never mind listen to the explanations of why he's got it wrong. I've no idea what his advisors think but politically it works because the core Trumpites will lap it up, as always...
AFZ
What the Democrats do not have at the moment is an obvious leader who is able to command similar levels of publicity and articulate, clearly, that Trump is not just lying, he is talking nonsense. As things stand, he can talk any old BS he likes and get it on the air.
And there is some evidence that it may be working. Journalists like Anderson Cooper have been doing a good job (e.g in his "keeping them honest" features in AC360) in exposing this lying nonsense, but they are mostly preaching to the choir. In the post truth era, very few right wing journalists seem willing to expose the Trump lies for what they are. Their wish to see the GOP retain political control seems to make them very reticent about Trump's abuses of fact and truth.
It is hardly news to say that both sides of American politics are motivated by fear. Trump uses socialism and Venezuela (inter alia) to stir fears of a totalitarian takeover by the Democrats. To my ear, that sounds ridiculous, but there must be Americans out there who believe it, and not just in the comments section on social media. It echoes with my own dark fears of a right-wing dictatorship forming in the US, and isn't that what we all worry about? I'm not just concerned that Trump is ignorant or incompetent or in the pay of the Russians. I worry that by stacking the courts, by attacking the Justice Department, by trying to get personal pledges of loyalty from Government officials he seeks absolute control.
Ordinary Democrats fear an unconstitutional takeover of Government by the Republicans. Ordinary Republicans fear an unconstitutional takeover of Government by the Democrats. These fears are stoked by politicians on both sides in an attempt to win power by legitimate means.
Is it because I am only experiencing the USA through the prism of the media that this seems like its true?
Saw a TV ad today for a *Christmas* *zombie* *comedy* film...called "Anna Apocalypse"!
ROTFL.
I experienced the USA through the prism of cartoons this morning. Was doing my morning pretending-to-run with the dog and we encountered 7 rabbits. Which got me to wondering how it is that Americans normally choose the most Bugs Bunny-like person as their leader but this time chose Daffy Duck.
Goddamn it. God, damn it.
Bed.
That's not a function of the Democratic leadership, it's what Matthew Yglesias calls "the Hack Gap".
I'm not sure what the solution is here. Having the American left develop its own media empire of blatant propagandists to compete with Fox News, talk radio, Breitbart, et al. seems like a bad idea. It would be nice if the more mainstream media outlets would stop chasing whatever shiny object conservatives dangle in front of them, but since they've never really come to grips with the fact that their obsession with e-mail server management practices at the State Department had any negative real-world consequences, this seems a slim hope. For example, if I had to judge the relative newsworthiness to an American audience of a) a few thousand Hondurans in southern Mexico forming a "caravan", most of whom will probably opt to stay in Mexico if past behavior is any guide to future outcomes or b) separate but very closely synchronized assassination attempts on both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I'd probably regard the latter as more newsworthy. Most American media sources apparently disagree with me.
This isn't quite accurate. Ordinary Republicans seem to fear America becoming a lot less white than it has been. That's the fear being stoked by Republican politicians. I'm sure some of them even regard this as "unconstitutional" in some sense. Glossing over this in an attempt to create a false equivalence with Democratic concerns about Republican abuses of power is part of the "hack gap" problem.
What does seem to me to be clear is that the distortion of truth is not just a media issue but it is itself a political issue. The aim to "clean up Washington" has landed the US with a liar-in-chief, rather than a commander-in-chief. And the consequences now include synchronised bomb attacks on political targets and media criticised as purveyors of fake news by the faker-in-chief.
Trump is guilty of incitement to hatred. There is abundant evidence of that from his rallies. He deserves to be called on that, clearly and unequivocally, by leaders of the Democratic party.
Hillary hinted at it when she said “It is a troubling time, isn’t it? And it’s a time of deep divisions, and we have to do everything we can do to bring our country together,”
Dubya was bad enough, though he does seem to be getting his act together, a bit, in retirement. T might have nuked the Middle East, or the world. Or put statues of himself all over the Middle East--and cities named for him.
D and company faked/lied a lot. We pretty much lost the White House press corps for years, because they and their bosses were as freaked out as everyone else.
IMHO, the one person who got it going again was the matriarch of the press corps. I forget her name. But she challenged D at a press conference, and kick-started the press corps.
Helen Thomas?
It's not the START Treaty but the older Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which Obama also accused Putin of violating. And the treaty does not cover China, which means that the US has its hands tied in dealing with a nuclear rival in Asia that is getting very aggressive with its neighbors. But Obama chose not to withdraw from it after pressure from European leaders who warned of a new arms race. Even if there is a new de facto arms race, taking whatever legal breaks there are off of it are likely to make things worse. And European countries are very against the US leaving the treaty.
Not quite so, but close. Thanks to recent history and features of the constitution, the problem isn't an unconstitutional takeover, but an entirely constitutional one. A President funded by a foreign power (or two) who has appointed Supreme Court justices that will do his bidding and a legislative branch elected through gerrymandered and disproportionate constituencies leaves plenty of room for things to go very wrong within the bounds of a constitution.
He did manage to single out the media for its negative reporting (obviously of him). And did observe, as a joke, that he was "being good" in the speech. Otherwise the speech showed no comprehension of the impact of his own words, as this statement accurately observed.
I assume both have Caller I.D. and wouldn't answer if he had called. A call from Trump on top of a bomb scare would be a bit much to take.
But who can know for sure?
It's actually both. Trump seems interested in pulling out of the INF now and John Bolton, his National Security Advisor, is making noises about not renewing the New START treaty when it expires in 2021.
Trump is convinced any deal not negotiated by him is a bad deal, and Bolton has yet to discover a treaty he doesn't want the U.S. to withdraw from.
Over at The Diplomat Robert Farley lays out the case that withdrawing from the INF is in the U.S. long-term interest, a case he expands on at his own blog. His co-blogger Dan Nexon takes the contrary position.
Farley's arguments are generally persuasive to me, though I think he understates the value of a treaty even in the case of cheating. An INF which Russia violates around the edges but still has to maintain plausible adherence to is different than the situation where Russia is completely unbound by the INF.
It's kind of like his claims of being a genius. If you have to keep telling people your being good, you're probably not.
Yes. Thx!
If you see the clips of angry people surrounding and shouting at the media, there is one inescapable conclusion: at some point, journalists will start being killed.
Completely agree with the sentiment, but to engage seriously for the moment, unlike Trump, both clearly have too much respect for the office not to accept the call.
AFZ
Roll on the end credits.
The calls are coming from inside the (White) house!
Of course this is part of a defence lawyer's strategy and should be read in that light. But it provides some insight into the impact of inflammatory rhetoric on a disturbed mind. Not that there is a single sign that the Chief Inflamer either knows or cares about these risks, and his own part in increasing them.
Roll on the end credits.
(Thought I'd better re-post this as it should have been - blush!)
I think so. Demagogues like Trump who play so many hate cards must take responsibility when the impaired, emotionally, intellectually whatever, latch on to their rhetoric and use it to justify violence.
Hence the importance of the midterms.
The whole thing is worth a read. Blogger Paul Campos has put the whole thread in paragraph form for those who don't like reading tweets.
*I obviously didn't pick those five descriptors at random. They're the specifics Hillary Clinton cited in her "basket of deplorables" comment. It's not like nobody noticed this before now. Except it's not nice to say racists are "deplorable", apparently!
Italics and link from original. Bolds added by me.
Bowers wasn't quite an original thinker in that area. Anti-Semitism is the constant companion of other forms of racism. If you posit that brown people are both lazy and stupid they seem less of a long-term threat. The "missing link" is to add a bunch of sneaky, conniving Jews importing all those lazy, stupid brown people to replace decent, hard-working white folks to your conspiracy theory. Which is why you get a bunch of tikkki-torch wielding neo-Nazis chanting "Jews will not replace us" through the streets of Charlottesville a year ago.
This isn't a new idea or some unique and idiosyncratic twist of previously unconnected ideas. This is something very old and a large, obnoxious, and deadly group was chanting it on American streets a year ago.
Yes, I was thinking that Hitler's stab in the back mythology, and the racist paranoia, worked on people, partly because the economy was a wreck.
No, the dangerous right wing idiots you will always have with you. (h/t)
On a more serious note, economic downturns tend to produce an uptick in right wing politics, particularly violent right wing politics, but there's usually a multi-year lag. We're currently about as far away in time from the start of the Great Recession as the rise of the Nazis was from the Great Depression.
And to back fill this analogy a little, starting in the 80s right wing politicians were able to harness the votes of a generation of people who had not lived through the depression or the war that followed and dismantle the various institutional arrangements (New Deal, restrictions on Banks, etc.) put in place following the Great Depression. Gradually the Centre-Left joined in.
This set the stage for a series of financial bubbles of increasing size which eventually caused the financial meltdown of 2008.
That happened in Australia too, almost at the same time. The only thing we really kept was strict regulatory control on the banks, medicare, and to some extent our wonderful system of industrial regulation. Mind you at the same time, OH&S regulation and enforcement ramped up, and compulsory insurance schemes for people injured at work and on the roads happened. That might be a function of the State paying for healthcare.
A sociologist I read said that 'welfare' in the USA was resented by the middle class because they perceived themselves as paying for it but being excluded from it. One of the benefits of medicare in Australia is that because everyone gets a clear benefit, they really really ark up if there is a sniff of the conservatives cutting it unduly. This is so, even though you pay a separate medicare levy and can see it in your tax each year. To cut medicare means death in Aussie politics, and so-called medi-scare campaigns will no doubt be a feature of the next Federal election. The ALP also likes using the American Right as a boogieman.