monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

A Democratic senator called on President Donald Trump on Friday to repudiate a White House aide's comment about "dying" Republican Sen. John McCain, who has brain cancer.

"The President should be saying that, 'This was unacceptable. Under my watch, I will not tolerate such comments.' But we haven't heard a word from the President," Sen. Ben Cardin from Maryland said in an interview on CNN's "New Day."

White House aide Kelly Sadler had responded to McCain's opposition to Gina Haspel's nomination for CIA director by attempting to joke Thursday morning that "he's dying anyway," a White House official told CNN. Asked about Sadler's comment, a White House official said, "We respect Senator McCain's service to our nation, and he and his family are in our prayers during this difficult time."

When asked if top Senate Republicans should speak out against the comments, Cardin said all leaders should.

"Leaders have a responsibility to speak out when things are done that are against the traditions and values of this country. And that statement went beyond what is acceptable," Cardin said.

While he didn't say Sadler should lose her job, Cardin called her comment "outrageous" and "something that needs to have some disciplinary results."
"(McCain is) a hero," Cardin said. "To make that type of comment, there's no place for that anywhere in our society, let alone the White House."

@BetoORourke

Just joined my colleagues in introducing bipartisan legislation to limit the number of years a member of Congress can serve. We must end the perpetual re-election of Reps and Senators, and start bringing new voices, ideas, and perspectives to the Capitol.

I hope this gets traction for politicians at all levels in all jurisdictions/countries.

At a rally in Indiana Thursday, President Donald Trump floating the idea of getting an “extension for the presidency,”

President Donald Trump hinted at spending more than eight years in office during an extended story about balking at approving a $1 billion payment to place the new American Embassy in Jerusalem during Thursday’s Elkhart, Indiana campaign rally

24 Million Americans tuned in to hear about the present president and his affair with a porn star. And they continue to pay attention because the president keeps changing his story every time a new fact in the case pops up. First he doesn't know Stormy at all, then a picture emerges of the two together. Then he didn't pay her any money and a contract for $130,000 pops up where Trump's lawyer Cohen says Trump is listed under a false name. Then Michael Cohen the hardass bully says he is suing Stormy Daniels for $20 Million dollars, one million for each time she violated the contract. Then he becomes embroiled in this lawsuit where more and more stuff comes out about Trump and the way he runs the White House, Trump's story gets changed several times a week along with Trump's lawyers and Trump's lawyers' stories, many of whose stories contradict other Trump's lawyers at the same time. Meanwhile, Trump's lawyers have to hire their own lawyers to try to get them out of the trouble they got into trying to defend Trump in the first place.

And during all of this mess the conservatives are saying, "Move along folks, nothin' to see here". LOL, like hell there isn't.

While scratching around for something to bloviate about, as columnists are wont to do, imagine my surprise when President Barack Obama professed Americans embrace his vision for the country and he would have, by golly, won the past election if only he had been able to run.

They won't change the system, why would they vote themselves out of a sweet job?

This is actually something a majority of US citizens agree with, it seems the career politicians don't feel the same way. They won't change the system, why would they vote themselves out of a sweet job?

@BetoORourke

Just joined my colleagues in introducing bipartisan legislation to limit the number of years a member of Congress can serve. We must end the perpetual re-election of Reps and Senators, and start bringing new voices, ideas, and perspectives to the Capitol.

we're working on changing the voting system here - it's a slog but we're making some progress

The Insurance Policy, The “EC”, The 2016 FBI Counterintel Operation, and The Mysterious Informant Who Originated Brennan’s EC…

Remember the Peter Strzok trip to London? The source of John Brennan’s “EC” is likely FBI and CIA operative Stefan Halper a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.

So says a longtime Congressional staffer with years of experience surviving the D.C. swamp.



“Mueller’s getting desperate. He’s frustrated. Some say he’s despondent. He’s pulling people off of airport runways in gotcha interview sessions. Kicking in doors, showing up unannounced at workplaces, monitoring private conversations, travel, everything. It’s bizarre, police-state type stuff that’s going on. The public is tired of it all but they don’t even know how bad Mueller’s behavior has been and how it’s getting worse. The entire investigation is out of control. The media has been covering up just how abusive it really is.

“Mueller has always been a rat but now he’s a rat in a corner and that means he’s at his most dangerous. Behind closed doors, Dems are screaming for his head. They pinned so much of 2018 on him and he hasn’t given them sh*t. The polling shows the gap between Republicans and Democrats has been reduced to a near tie which means Trump is overperforming the historical party-in-power trend big time. 2018 was supposed to be a Midterm bloodbath but it isn’t shaping up to be that.

“The Special Counsel appointment should never have been allowed. It was Establishment Republicans who let that happen. They’re paying a price for that too. Trump is doing everything he said he would. That includes going to war with the swamp. No president in our lifetime has ever done that. Even some Democrat voters are learning to appreciate what’s happening. Imagine if Republicans were to actually pick up more seats than they lost? It might happen. Not likely but it might. That would be sweet!”

McCain Criticized for Slur / He says he'll keep using term for ex-captors in Vietnam

"I hate the gooks," McCain said yesterday in response to a question from reporters aboard his campaign bus. "I will hate them as long as I live."

Thank you for proving my point. This [Stormy Daniels] affair happened when Trump was a private citizen, he wasn't a politician and held no elected office. That is primarily the reason why it's a non-issue. Unlike Clinton who did things like this in the Oval Office....

Patriotism is the organising passion of modern political life in the United States yet its vitality defies obvious explanation. The country has no national education system. There’s neither compulsory military nor civil service. No government agency distributes the ubiquitous US flags, nor enforces observance of the rituals to country performed at schools and sporting and political events throughout the country. Despite lacking the classic machinery for inculcating patriotism and spreading it among the people, American patriotism is a norm in the true sense: at least within the US itself, it exists in a place without question.

One of the conceits of American patriotism – that it is a salubrious version of the pernicious nationalism that other countries have – has helped to protect it from critical questioning of almost any type. The kinds of 20th-century Leftist political movements that in principle opposed nationalism fared poorly in the US, and this might be why popular justifications for the country’s patriotism tend to be shallow. They are often based on appeals to treasured details of family or community life: patriotism is Little League baseball on a warm summer day, the courtesy of the small-town merchant, a neighbourhood rebuilding together after a destructive storm. All nationalisms make sentimental appeal to intimate but generic experience, and the effects can help to raise armies and start wars. They carry, in other words, formidable political force. But they are not any kind of serious moral or intellectual case for patriotism.

American patriotism is in some ways old. It is notable for being perhaps the first nationalism in the fully modern sense of the concept, ie the loyalty to nation of a kingless people. Some of its defining qualities have changed very little, including the distinctive cult of the ‘founding fathers’, which began while they were still living. The strength of the preoccupation with the founders is that it is an open way to demonstrate national belonging. Talking about ‘the founders’, declaring loyalty to them and their texts, has been second only to military service as an effective way for immigrants and descendants of slaves to assimilate, and to become, at least in one sense, American. The great weakness of this preoccupation with the founders is that it’s a convoluted, limiting device through which to think about the world today – much like the country’s overestimation of its constitution – yet it plays an outsized role in American political debate and thought.

Most patriotisms enlist territorial rivals in the required role of the enemy: France has Germany; India has China; Britain has France. But America’s particular historical experience in the New World reshaped this need. The US colonised a very rich continent without ever facing a real geopolitical rival. Lacking a serious competitor for land and other resources, American patriotism turned to the task of conjuring ideological enemies, drawing on an Anglo, especially Puritan, propensity for recasting outsiders as fearsome maleficents. The Puritan minister Cotton Mather (1663-1728) gave this impulse a paradigmatic expression when he speculated that the devil resembled either an Indian sagamore or a French dragoon.

American patriotism has always depended on conjuring alleged conspiracies from migrants or outsiders bearing existential threats: foreign devils all. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, it was Catholicism. The Anglo establishment held Catholics to be unreasoning and beholden to priestly power, unfit for the obligations of citizenship. That’s why people who take the oath to become citizens must renounce allegiance to any foreign ‘potentate’, that is, the Pope. Then the Cold War made it communism: like Catholicism, a nebulous and formidable global power, yet also moving invisibly in the hearts and minds of immigrants, to undermine the country from within. Now rival camps differ as to whether the existential threat is sharia or Russia.

The split among Americans as to whether imams or Russian bots present a greater threat to the country is indicative of political polarisation. At a deeper level, it also indicates a certain turmoil within US patriotism, a result of its increasing incoherence. Quite simply, exceptionalism has always been core to American patriotism, and American exceptionalism is no longer tenable. Exceptionalism is the idea that the country bears some special lesson for the rest of the world, some vital role in world history. But if the US represents something invaluable to the rest of the world, what is that? In the 18th century, an experiment in republican government filled the bill of exceptionalist pretensions. In the long 19th century, the availability of land for settlers, combined with political democracy and capitalism, compared favourably with Europe’s aristocratic regimes. After the Second World War, the shared prosperity of postwar economic boom helped to revitalise US exceptionalism. Now? There’s no good answer.

This core component of American patriotism – the popular conviction in a world-historical role for the US – is unlikely to continue. First, it is increasingly difficult not to notice that in many basic matters of government and society, including healthcare, public education, gender equity, social mobility and prosperity, economic fairness, childcare, environment and more, the US has fallen behind most of the developed world. The US’s world-historical ambitions have simply not kept pace with world history. Secondly, the wars. Wars are nation-making events, but they can also be unmaking ones. If your patriotism is linked to pretensions of a world-historical role, what do you do when the world chooses not to emulate you, or when it (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) doesn’t want your Americanisation project? Mere military supremacy, especially when it proves ineffective at achieving its goals, is unlikely to be enough to sustain the exceptionalist heart of American patriotism.

Killing or dying for a principle might be just. But principles are universal, not confined to the good of a particular nation; and patriotism by definition is concerned only with the good of the nation. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) uses the word ‘universal’ five times, and further specifies that the rights apply to all peoples and all nations, and all children. The universality of the Declaration is just a recent instance of an ethics of reciprocity put forward, in some form, by almost all religions and moral systems – but not by patriotism. Nearly two decades into the 21st century, the premise that all people deserve the same basic recognition and protections should be a conservative principle. Patriotism, however, elevates to its highest expression killing and dying for the nation. This might be an aspiration, if you care for such ideals, but it cannot be a principle.

The sacred status of American patriotism in the US indicates only an ideological strength, not moral or intellectual soundness. The Right-wing nationalism resurgent in many places, including the US, has convinced many Americans that reasserting patriotism is necessary, or at least politically strategic. But questioning American patriotism is a greater opportunity, and might also be a more pragmatic course, since some of its historical foundations are unraveling. It is time to start treating American patriotism – the most deadly form of identity politics – as a question, not an answer.

I think I know what it feels like to be “red-pilled,” the alt-right’s preferred metaphor for losing one’s faith in received assumptions and turning toward ideas that once seemed dangerous.

For me, it happened over several visits to the West Bank. I’d inherited, without really thinking about it, a set of default liberal Zionist beliefs about Israel as the good guy in its confrontation with the Palestinians, whose hostility I understood to be atavistic and irrational. This view collapsed the first time I walked down Shuhada Street in Hebron, in a part of the city where more than 30,000 Palestinians live under Israeli military control for the benefit of 1,000 or so Israeli settlers. Palestinians whose homes are on Shuhada Street aren’t allowed to walk out their own front doors, because the street, constantly patrolled by Israeli troops, is reserved for Jews.

Going there, I felt a transformation not unlike the one my colleague Bari Weiss described in her recent article on what’s been called the “Intellectual Dark Web,” a group of iconoclastic thinkers, many on the right, joined together by their confrontations with, and rejections of, social justice ideology. “The metaphors for this experience vary: going through the phantom tollbooth; deviating from the narrative; falling into the rabbit hole,” wrote Weiss. “But almost everyone can point to a particular episode where they came in as one thing and emerged as something quite different.”

For my own part, I didn’t emerge an anti-Zionist, exactly, but anti-Zionist arguments I’d previously dismissed began to make sense. Such experiences, in which feelings of confusion and betrayal are resolved through immersion in a once-anathema body of knowledge, are extraordinarily powerful. Every passionate Jewish critic of Israel I’ve ever met has had one. They’re the reason ex-Communists made the fiercest anti-Communists, and why religious converts tend to be particularly pious. The red pill metaphor — taken from the sci-fi movie “The Matrix” — is potent because it can apply to wildly disparate situations in which one reality seems to crumble in the face of another.

To the alt-right, of course, being red-pilled means abandoning liberalism as a lie. It means treating one’s own prejudices as intuitions rather than distortions to be overcome. The act of doing this — casting off socially acceptable values in favor of those that were once unthinkable — creates the edgy energy that has, of late, attracted Kanye West. (West’s sojourn on the alt-right has been facilitated in part by Candace Owens, a conspiracy-minded African-American conservative who created the website Red Pill Black.)

Because the red pill experience is so intense, progressives should think about how to counter dynamics that can make banal right wing beliefs seem like seductive secret knowledge. Attempts at simply repressing bad ideas don’t seem to be working.

To be clear: I don’t think the members of the alt-right or the Intellectual Dark Web — which overlap in places but are quite different — are repressed. The latter regularly appear on television; write for the op-ed pages of leading newspapers, including this one; publish best-selling books; and give speeches to large crowds. They haven’t been blackballed like Colin Kaepernick, who lost his football career for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality. No state has passed laws denying government contracts to critics of political correctness; such measures are only for supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

But online life creates an illusion of left-wing excess and hegemony that barely exists in the real world, at least outside of a few collegiate enclaves. Consider, for example, how an online mob turned a Utah teenager who wore a Chinese-style dress to her prom into a national news story. The sanctimony and censoriousness of the social justice internet is like a machine for producing red pills. It makes people think it’s daring to, say, acknowledge that men and women are different, or pick on immigrants, or praise the president of the United States.

The leftist writer Angela Nagle captured this phenomenon in her 2017 book about the alt-right, “Kill All Normies.” Long before the alt-right “bubbled up to the surface of college campuses, and even Twitter and YouTube,” she wrote, it developed in opposition “to its enemy online culture of the new identity politics typified by platforms like Tumblr.”

Countering right-wing movements that thrive on transgression is a challenge. One of the terrifying things about Trump’s victory is that it appeared to put the fundamental assumptions underlying pluralistic liberal democracy up for debate, opening an aperture for poisonous bigotry to seep into the mainstream. In California, a man named Patrick Little, who said he was inspired by Trump, is running for U.S. Senate on a platform of removing Jews from power; in one recent state poll 18 percent of respondents supported him. On Thursday, Mediaite reported that Juan Pablo Andrade, an adviser to the pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies, praised the Nazis at a Turning Point USA conference. (Owens, West’s new friend, is Turning Point’s communications director.)

It’s a natural response — and, in some cases, the right response — to try to hold the line against political reaction, to shame people who espouse shameful ideas. But shame is a politically volatile emotion, and easily turns into toxic resentment. It should not be overused. I don’t know exactly where to draw the line between ideas that deserve a serious response, and those that should be only mocked and scorned. I do know that people on the right benefit immensely when they can cultivate the mystique of the forbidden.

In February, Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has garnered a cultlike following, asked, in an interview with Vice, “Can men and women work together in the workplace?” To him, the Me Too movement called into question coed offices, a fundamental fact of modern life, because “things are deteriorating very rapidly at the moment in terms of the relationships between men and women.”

Having to contend with this question fills me with despair. I would like to say: It’s 2018 and women’s place in public life is not up for debate! But to be honest, I think it is. Trump is president. Everywhere you look, the ugliest and most illiberal ideas are gaining purchase. Refusing to take them seriously won’t make them go away. (As it happens, I’m participating in a debate with Peterson next week in Toronto.)

More debate, I think, is what’s needed. Not with everyone — I wouldn’t bother talking to a huckster like Milo Yiannopoulos, for example. But a left that’s confident in its ideas and values should be able to debate someone like Ben Shapiro, a young conservative who often speaks on college campuses, or Christina Hoff Sommers, a critic of contemporary feminism.

Ezra Klein recently demonstrated how progressives can engage with ideas they abhor in his two-hour podcast dialogue with Sam Harris, a star of the New Atheist movement who defended the right-wing thinker Charles Murray’s work on race and IQ. Klein appears to have put a lot of patient work into the debate, but given where we are now, such work is necessary.

Some might argue that respectfully debating ideas seen as racist or sexist legitimates them. There’s something to this, but refusing to debate carries a price as well — it conveys a message of weakness, a lack of faith in one’s own ideas. Ultimately, the side that’s frantically trying to shore up taboos is the side that’s losing. If there’s an Intellectual Dark Web, we should let the sun shine in.