We've been through this before, but it seems like a good time for your periodic reminder:
It's about to get really deep out there. So when wading through social media, remember a few things:
Just because someone says they support Bernie (Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, etc.), don't take them at their word. Especially if they're a non-verified account you don't know. They could easily be lying to make that candidate (or their supporters) look bad.
Aside from their standard dirty tricks (voter suppression, etc.), the primary weapon Trump and his team will use to try to win in 2020 is to divide the opposition. It worked just well enough in 2016 to get him across the finish line; we CANNOT let them do it again. So be skeptical of any accounts like this one claiming 'Candidate X is corrupt/dishonest/a drug dealer/whatever'. And no matter what your personal feelings are about the Democratic candidates who aren't your favorite, NEVER reinforce the Trumpian narrative that they're somehow corrupt!
On July 16 next year, the Democrats will select their nominee, and no matter who you personally support, the odds are that it won't be your candidate. So we all need to be prepared to put our differences aside and fight like hell for 4 months to get that nominee elected, no matter who it turns out to be.
It's bad enough that the Republican noise machine has their own supporters lapping up lies about Democrats. Don't let them poison the Democratic nomination contest as well.
I now declare campaign 2020 officially kicked off. And to start it off right, I'm providing my initial list of candidates to donate money to.
Without question, the two biggest targets for Democrats in 2020 need to be --- no, not Trump, believe it or not --- but the two most powerful Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham.
I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.
If a potential juror in a criminal trial anywhere in America said this, he'd be dismissed. Unfortunately, such brazen devotion to subverting justice to their Dear Leader is par for the course for Republicans these days. For example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell makes Graham sound downright ethical:
During an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, the Majority Leader said that "everything" he does "during this, I'm coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this, to the extent that we can."
And that's the bad news: the Republican party has given up any pretense that they care about the Constitution, checks and balances, or the rule of law.
So I'm starting out the 2020 cycle by making generous donations to Graham's opponent, Jaime Harrison, and McConnell's opponent, Amy McGrath. I urge your to do the same, and start setting money aside. There will be lots of opportunities to influence close races in 2020.
After taking about 2 months off from Twitter, I signed back in this morning to see this:
Red & orange areas have the same population. Imagine if orange elected our president every election & red was completely ignored. Exactly why we need to keep the Electoral College. pic.twitter.com/aiCuItbiVC
The cult of Trump never gets tired of arguing that up is down, black is white, and the Electoral College is necessary in the name of fairness. Their favorite tactic is the one employed here, where they hope that a map with a huge splotch of red on it will make you forget that relatively few voters actually live in that splotch.
In a no doubt vain attempt to debunk their idiocy once and for all, I have calculated what I'm calling the Electoral Power Index (EPI). It's fairly simple. I have calculated what the vote of an average voter in each state is worth in the Electoral College simply by dividing the number of electoral votes for that state by the number of voting-age citizens in that state. Since the result of such a calculation is a really small number, I then multiplied the result by 1 million simply for readability. Here is how the states rank in the Electoral Power Index (data on voting-age citizens is from the Census Bureau, 2015):
State
Voting-Age Citizens
EV
EPI
Wyoming
434,584
3
6.90
Vermont
494,717
3
6.06
District of Columbia
504,242
3
5.95
Alaska
528,248
3
5.68
North Dakota
571,119
3
5.25
Rhode Island
784,997
4
5.10
South Dakota
634,140
3
4.73
Delaware
697,148
3
4.30
Hawaii
1,022,704
4
3.91
New Hampshire
1,035,684
4
3.86
Maine
1,056,410
4
3.79
Montana
797,198
3
3.76
Nebraska
1,352,947
5
3.70
West Virginia
1,451,557
5
3.44
Idaho
1,168,843
4
3.42
New Mexico
1,470,045
5
3.40
Nevada
1,942,764
6
3.09
Utah
1,945,001
6
3.08
Kansas
2,074,102
6
2.89
Arkansas
2,185,724
6
2.75
Connecticut
2,584,884
7
2.71
Mississippi
2,220,616
6
2.70
Iowa
2,310,467
6
2.59
Minnesota
4,007,159
10
2.50
Oklahoma
2,807,548
7
2.49
Alabama
3,653,381
9
2.46
South Carolina
3,677,799
9
2.45
Kentucky
3,329,835
8
2.40
Oregon
2,956,232
7
2.37
Washington
5,081,800
12
2.36
Maryland
4,239,987
10
2.36
Arizona
4,710,448
11
2.34
Louisiana
3,454,978
8
2.32
Colorado
3,896,986
9
2.31
Wisconsin
4,340,567
10
2.30
New Jersey
6,154,126
14
2.27
Indiana
4,856,797
11
2.26
Tennessee
4,919,574
11
2.24
Massachusetts
4,924,459
11
2.23
Georgia
7,168,068
16
2.23
Illinois
9,017,653
20
2.22
California
25,002,812
55
2.20
Missouri
4,567,771
10
2.19
Texas
17,523,904
38
2.17
Michigan
7,436,478
16
2.15
Virginia
6,062,304
13
2.14
New York
13,704,991
29
2.11
North Carolina
7,296,335
15
2.06
Ohio
8,765,154
18
2.05
Pennsylvania
9,752,322
20
2.05
Florida
14,441,877
29
2.01
This table really illustrates the problem with the Electoral College. Until someone can explain why the average vote for president in Wyoming should count more than 3 times as much as the average vote for president in Florida, they can't justify supporting it. You might get a Trumpian to agree that a Wyoming voter should count more than 3 times as much as New York voter, but they'll probably change their tune as soon as you tell them that a D.C. voter counts almost 3 times as much as an Ohio voter.
And if the response is that different geographic regions of the country need increased representation, ask why it is that the vote of a D.C. resident is worth almost three times as much as the vote of her coworker living a quarter-mile away in Virginia, or why crossing the border from New York to Vermont supercharges your vote.
Then ask why we only use such a bizarre, unbalanced system for the highest office in the land, while every other election in America is decided on the principle of one person, one vote.
It's easy to use this table to construct an extreme example of minority rule. Hypothetically, Satan McAwful could win a bare majority of the vote in the states with the 40 highest EPI scores, while getting 30% of the vote in the remaining states (because party affiliation guarantees any major-party candidate a floor of 30% of the vote, no matter how awful that candidate is). In this scenario, Satan McAwful would become president while receiving just 39.23% of the popular vote.
And sure, Satan would have won 40 out of 51 states (for Electoral College purposes, D.C. is a state, you sticklers) --- but why does that mean that more than 60% of the country should have to suffer under his rule for the next 4 years?
Yesterday, I wrote a post forcefully denouncing Bernie Sanders. I put up the same post, verbatim, in a couple of lefty Facebook groups. That post was removed in one of them, presumably because it was considered divisive. However, the moderator who removed it suggested that it would be good for me to provide some explanation as to why I was denouncing Sanders, and so I shall. Yesterday, in an interview on MSNBC, Sanders was asked whether he would drop out of the race before the convention if it became clear that he would not be the nominee. When pressed, he said this:
Some people say that if maybe that system was not rigged against me I would have won the nomination and defeated Donald Trump
I feel like I shouldn't have to explain why this is 100% unacceptable, but I will. Sanders has had 4 years to come up with a better answer to this question, which is, after all, a fairly standard question to ask candidates during the primaries. I came up with a better answer in under four minutes. He could have said, for example:
I intend to fully support the Democractic nominee for president. It's crucial that anyone who cares about our democracy, the rule of law, freedom of the press and the Constitution supports the Democratic nominee in defeating Donald Trump, and I intend to be that nominee
Something like that probably would have been his best answer. My second choice would have been literally any other answer which doesn't reinforce and validate GOP attacks that the Democratic party is in some way corrupt. Even if he's referencing the 2016 race, there is NO REASON to use the word 'rigged' when discussing the nomination process, ESPECIALLY on the very day that the nominating process officially begins. So I rather forcefully expressed my opinion that I have no intention of supporting Sanders for the nomination. And in my opinion, no one who's interested in defeating Trump SHOULD support Sanders, considering that Sanders is doing Trump's work for him. There are PLENTY of other candidates to choose from, all of them younger, most of them as good (or better!) than Sanders on the issues, and none of whom would repeat GOP attacks on the Democratic party, because they're actually Democrats. I really feel like this should be obvious to an objective observer, especially someone concerned about divisiveness. NOTE: There is an important coda to all of this, and it's the main reason I took the time to post this at all. And it is that although Sanders is now my 23rd choice for Democratic nominee, I promise to enthusiastically campaign for him in the event he wins the nomination! I say this because I promise to enthusiastically campaign for the Democratic nominee no matter who it is! The importance of this promise should also be obvious to any objective observer, and is something I hope all of Trump's opponents agree on.
Since the redacted Mueller report was released Thursday, there has been a lot of discussion about whether House Democrats should move forward with impeaching Trump.
While the arguments fordoing so should be obvious (even if one ignores the Mueller report), I have also heard a number of arguments (from Trump opponents, ostensibly) saying that impeachment should be off the table. Arguments such as:
The Senate will never vote to remove Trump from office.
The election is 'only' 18 months away.
Impeaching Trump will backfire on Democrats the way impeaching Clinton backfired on Republicans in 1998.
I don't mind living in a country with a racist, criminal, ignorant president who permanently separates children from their families and puts them in jail, really I don't.
Other equally ridiculous things.
It's a slam dunk that Trump is unfit for office. Anyone who doesn't already accept that can see various cases for that argument here and here. If you don't want to take my word for it, there are manyotherpeople making this same point. And contrary to laughable and clearly dishonest White House claims that the Mueller report found 'no collusion - no obstruction', it seems fairly clear that Mueller intended his report to be an impeachment referral to Congress. No one outside the cult of Trump really believes he has any business remaining in office.
So it is incumbent upon Congress --- and, specifically, Democrats in Congress, since Republicans have spent the last two years demonstrating that they value their loyalty to Trump above the Constitution and rule of law --- to act to remove him. Inherent in that charge is that they act in a way most likely to result in Trump's removal.
This means that while congressional Democrats shouldn't just wait around for the 2020 election, neither should they hold an impeachment vote tomorrow. Instead, they need to build their case and present it to the American public, to put maximum pressure on the Senate to do their job. Given the overwhelming criminality of this president, I believe that a well-constructed case might actually persuade 20 Republican Senators (or more!) to remove Trump from office. And even if it doesn't, House Democrats have a responsibility to the country to try.
I'll lay out the two principal arguments in favor of action, followed by addressing the arguments some have made against it.
Trump is Destroying the Country
One takeaway from the Muller report is that, as David Graham of The Atlantic writes: "Trump’s own handpicked aides and close associates, viewing his orders as illegal, counterproductive, dishonest, or just plain stupid, simply don’t carry them out." This has been a theme throughout his presidency, and will continue as long as he's allowed to remain in the White House. What's worse, given his recent purges at DHS and the installation of willing lackey Bill Barr as Attorney General, we should expect that Trump is trying to find people who WILL carry out his "illegal, counterproductive, dishonest, or just plain stupid" orders. He may well succeed. And some of those orders will result in needless suffering of children.
Congress can't just watch that happen for 18 months. If Trump had committed only one or two transgressions --- like lying about an extramarital affair, say --- then perhaps it would make sense to let the voters decide on election day. But when your house is on fire, you don't wait for the rain to come; you call the fire department.
If You Can't Impeach Trump, You Can't Impeach Anyone
Last month, Nancy Pelosi seemed to suggest that she won't proceed with impeachment without Republican support: "Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path . . .". There's reason to believe that she's playing a long game here, but on it's face, this statement is just plain wrong.
Someday, there will be another Republican president. And if that man is sworn in knowing that Donald Trump wasn't impeached despite his long list of transgressions, then he'll feel emboldened to break whatever laws he wishes, so long as there are more than 33 Republicans in the Senate.
Don't Assume the Senate Won't Remove Trump
Some have argued that the worst case scenario is actually impeaching Trump followed by the Senate letting him off the hook. That would certainly be bad, but no worse than giving Trump a pass in the first place. Both scenarios end with Trump facing no consequences for his actions. But an important difference is that in the second scenario, Senate Republicans are the villains for explicitly approving his behavior, while in the first, House Democrats are the villains for failing to hold him accountable in the first place.
Personally, I like politicians who do the right thing, and I think the country as a whole does, too. If I'm wrong about that, then I guess none of this matters, but I'm not ready to just assume that American democracy has utterly failed. I want to see it for myself.
Moreover, while it's probably true that we won't find 20 Republicans ready to convict Trump tomorrow (we probably won't even find one), that doesn't mean that Republicans can't be persuaded to do the right thing in the face of a well-built case for impeachment with solid public support. Richard Nixon's public support was sky-high before the House commenced impeachment hearings, but it fell nearly 40 points as the facts came out. And Trump's approval has never been much above 40%. If impeachment hearings drop his approval even a few points into the mid 30s, do we really think Senate Republicans will cast a vote to keep him in office?
I say let's find out.
Won't Impeaching Trump Backfire on Democrats?
When a man as dangerously unfit as Trump is in the White House, there is a moral and constitutional duty to remove him, political consequences be damned. But it seems likely the political fallout of impeachment --- even if the Senate allows Trump to remain in office --- is far more likely to help Democrats than to hurt them.
Trump's impeachment will fire up his base. But it will fire up Trump's opponents as well, especially if the Senate lets him remain in office. And since there have always been more people opposing Trump than supporting him (recall that he lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes), that's a tradeoff we should be happy to make.
Conversely, a lot of Democrats --- including me --- invested a lot of time and energy into electing a Democratic House in 2018. If House Democrats refrain from impeaching Trump, it's unlikely we'll see that same level of enthusiasm to turn out the Democratic base in 2020. Meanwhile, Trump's supporters will still be fired up because they always are, and because their hero 'got away with it'.
And finally, even if impeachment doesn't ultimately result in Trump's removal, it insures that Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors feature prominently in all election coverage, which has to be a net positive for the Democrats.
But Clinton's Impeachment Backfired on Republicans
It's conventional wisdom that the impeachment proceedings the Republican Congress brought against Bill Clinton in 1998-99 hurt them politically, but I'm not so sure that's true. So far as I can tell, this is the full list of ways in which the Republican party was damaged:
Republicans saw their majority in the House drop from 227-206 to 223-211.
Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich lost his job --- and then when his replacement, Bob Livingston, was named, he was immediately forced to resign as well.
The 1998 election was otherwise a draw --- neither party gained in the Senate or gubernatorial races --- but the Republicans did lose control of the Senate in 2000.
This should be considered the absolute worst-case scenario for Democrats in 2020, and if a few House seats is the cost of impeaching Trump, then it's well worth the risk.
But I think it's extremely unlikely a Trump impeachment causes even this much blowback for Democrats. The Clinton impeachment was widely recognized as a partisan witch hunt about a single extramarital affair. On the eve of Clinton's impeachment, only 35% approved of Starr's handling of his investigation, while 58% of the public currently trust Robert Mueller. And as everyone knows, Trump's crimes are far more serious and far more pervasive than Clinton's (every day Jared Kushner continues to have a security clearance puts our country at risk).
Meanwhile, consider the context of the 'damage' done to Republicans in 1998:
Although the 5-seat loss in the House for the GOP was historic in a sense, it's important to remember that Republicans had picked up a whopping 54 seats in the 1994 election. Their loss in 1998 was likely part of a correction among voters.
Gingrich owes the loss of his job in part (and Livingston owes it completely) to their hypocrisy in impeaching a Democratic president over an extramarital affair when each of them were also having affairs. The Democrats who impeach Trump won't be subject to similar hypocrisy.
Whatever damage the Republican party sustained was short-lived. They won the presidency in 2000 and held the White House, House and Senate from 2002-2006.
Democrats should hope to suffer such 'damage'. Indeed, House impeachment manager Lindsey Graham, who lead the effort to impeach Clinton, is likely to win his fourth Senate term in 2020, despite the hypocrisy of being one of Trump's biggest supporters after saying this in 1998:
(Lightly edited from the original version, to correct an earlier math error, and to make it more readable and less crappy).
Imagine that the president wants to implement a radical policy, but his advisers shoot it down, "citing legal, budgetary and optics risks". Now imagine that, even though he's been told the policy is illegal, he chooses to pursue it anyway.
Finally, imagine that the president's plan is to take people whom he describes as "drug dealers, criminals, rapists" and release them in the cities and congressional districts of his political opponents.
Without attaching names or party identification to this president, would anyone deny that this president is unfit for office, does not respect the rule of law, and is guilty of abuse of power? In other words, can anyone deny that this president has committed an impeachable offense?
Add these two impeachable offenses to the non-partisan case against Trump I made less than a week ago. Not only is it obvious to anyone with a shred of objectivity that he is unfit for office and a danger to our country, it should also be obvious that the country's tilt toward authoritarianism will only worsen the longer he is allowed to remain in office.
Congress needs to act. Democrats need to stop being afraid of discussing impeachment, and Republicans need to stop being afraid of standing up to Trump. All 535 members of Congress have a job to do --- it's way past time that they did it.
(Also worth noting --- Trump's current behavior clearly shows his contempt for the rule of law, which also clearly demonstrates that both the FBI investigation surrounding his campaign and the Mueller investigation were 100% warranted. Anyone who argues otherwise is clearly a partisan hack who cares more about tax cuts than the Constitution).
It's been nearly 15 months since I first called for Donald Trump's removal, either via impeachment or the 25th amendment. Yet he remains in office, bringing America a bit lower with each passing day.
I fear that we are on the brink of a true constitutional crisis. This is something no American should want. So I'm making an effort to present the reasons why every American should want Trump removed from office, appealing strictly to facts which are not in dispute, and which are non-partisan in nature.
Trump lies with abandon, telling multiple lies per day and repeating the same lies over and over and over, despite the media's best efforts to fact-check him. America and Americans are poorly served by a president completely lacking in credibility.
There is reason to be concerned about Trump's mental state. These concerns are not new, they have been expressed by those in his inner circle, and there's reason to believe that his mental state is deteriorating.
Trump has spent the past two years using the office of the presidency to personally enrich himself, often to the detriment of America's national security. From his hotel in downtown D.C., to his property at Maralago where shadow administrative positions are literally for sale, Trump's first instinct as president is to use the office to line his own pockets. Another neat trick he uses is renting out his properties for government business, pouring taxpayer money literally directly into his pockets. And then there are even more disturbing examples of self-dealing, like the corrupt deal to lift sanction from Chinese telecom ZTE in exchange for a $500 million loan from the Chinese government. And since there are minimal requirements for Trump to disclose such conflicts of interest, it's likely that the deals we know about are just the tip of the iceberg.
The Trump administration is a national security disaster. I've discussed this at length before, so I'll just point out that no fewer than seven members of Trump's senior staff are using personal email accounts to conduct official business. When Hillary Clinton did exactly the same thing, Trump and his supporters cried holy hell, but guess what: If it was a security risk when Hillary did it, it's seven times the security risk when the trumpians do it.
But what's even worse is Trump handing out security clearances to his daughter, his son-in-law, and at least 23 others whom the U.S. intelligence community deems an intelligence risk.
Trump's signature policy revolves around demonizing and abusing Central American and Mexican refugees, including a family separation policy which was ultimately struck down by the courts. The horrific and inhumane nature of this policy should be self-evident; indeed one may reasonably view it as a crime against humanity. But not only did the Trump administration continue family separations in violation of the court order, and not only did they take children from their parents with no plans to ever reunite them, but they are now planning to ramp up the policy once more --- again, in violation of both natural and U.S. law.
Trump's disdain for the rule of law is not confined to his family separation policy. He has ordered border agents to deny entry to asylum-seekers (which is illegal), and has even gone so far as to demand that Congress 'get rid of judges' (twice!). And Mick Mulvaney, who is more or less the acting head of every executive branch department, has insisted that Democrats will "never" get Trump's tax returns, even though the law is quite clear that Congress has every legal right to subpoena them.
Given Trump's lying, self-dealing, and disdain for the rule of law, one would hope that all Americans would at least demand transparency from their president --- both in the case of his tax returns, as well as the final report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a report which no doubt contains a great deal of information relevant to protecting our elections from foreign influence if nothing else. Trump is steadfastly stonewalling the release of both, and these are just the most notable examples.
Finally, it is chilling to consider that a president who is this compromised and unaccountable has just effectively decapitated the leadership of the country's second-largest law enforcement agency, and put its fate in the hands of probable white nationalist Stephen Miller. This not only bodes ill for American's immigration policy, but also for the country should Trump be forced from office (either via impeachment or electoral defeat) before he wants to go.
And these arguments are just the ones that a guy with a computer came up with while watching the NCAA men's basketball championship. Imagine what else an actual political analyst would add to the list. Imagine what else has gone on which the public doesn't yet know about.
And imagine how much worse this all gets if there's any truth to suspicions of Russian influence over Trump.
Enough is enough. There is no longer any reason for any American to want this man to serve in office for even one more day. So contact your legislators, and demand Trump's impeachment. This isn't about Democrats vs. Republicans; it's about Trump vs. the Constitution. America can't tolerate another 21 months of Trump's misrule until another president is (possibly) sworn in. He needs to go now.
And that will only happen if we make it clear to our elected leaders that we expect them to lead.
It is conventional wisdom that social media in general, and Twitter in particular, is a cesspool where people let their basest instincts run wild, engaging in shouting matches rather than even trying to engage others in honest discussion.
There's a lot of truth to that.
But it IS possible to make a difference, and I want to record here that Twitter actually changed my mind about something. It is thanks to Twitter that I have decided to end my support of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and instead switch my support to the Southern Center for Human Rights.
For those who aren't yet familiar, the SPLC has undergone an upheaval in recent weeks. It ousted its founder, Morris Dees, for unspecified reasons which likely have to do with allegations of sexual harrassment. Then a few days later, Richard Cohen, who took over leadership of the SPLC from Dees 2003, also stepped down.
This can be viewed either as a good thing or a bad thing. It's bad because these changes appear to be driven by long-standing institutional sexism and bigotry within the organization --- which, needless to say, was news to me. But it can also be viewed as good if --- that is, IF --- the changes are a harbinger of an organization working to remain true to the values it proclaims itself to champion. So when I first heard about these changes, I was on the fence about whether to continue my support.
What finally changed my mind was this essay by Nathan J. Robinson, which I first encountered via Twitter. While Robinson also recounts the ideological contradictions within SPLC, he further makes the point that SPLC often spends the money it collects unwisely --- if it spends it at all. For the fiscal year ending October 2017, for example, SPLC took in more than twice as much money as it spent. I make donations to a civil rights and justice organization so that my dollars can be working for civil rights and justice, not gathering interest.
(It should be noted that even SPLC's critics --- if they're honest --- acknowledge that the organization has done a lot of good. While Mr. Robinson's essay is about 90% critical, he does point out that "The SPLC could run through a very long list of its admirable legal triumphs.")
So I have taken Mr. Robinson's suggestion to donate to the Southern Center for Human Rights, instead, an organization which takes in far less money than SPLC, but actually spends most of what they collect --- and so far as I can tell, they already have their house in order when it comes to their organizational structure.
Anyway, considering that I've been advocating for the SPLC for a few years now, I felt an obligation to let any readers who might accidentally be reading this know about that organization's problems.
And also, parenthetically, to point out that in rare cases, it is still possible to change someone's mind on social media.
I'm a cisgender, heterosexual male, and a non-Christian. So I should probably leave this alone. But somehow I can't:
Here is the distinction that makes no sense. An orthodox Christian and (to take an example) a married secular gay employee work side by side. They disagree with each other about matters absolutely fundamental to their lives and identities. The secular gay employee believes the Christian’s worldview is false. The Christian employee believes the secular gay employee’s worldview is false. Why is it uniquely intolerable or even injurious for the gay employee to have to share the workplace (much less the industry) with the Christian? Do they not have the same obligations to set aside their differences and treat each other with dignity and respect?
This isn't the first time that French has argued that in order to be Christian, one must be an anti-queer bigot. Sadly, it's also not the first time that he has attacked those who object to his bigotry. In fact, French's Catholicism seems to be such a significant part of his identity that he derides ALL of the people he disagrees with as anti-Christian (queers of course, but also liberals). Apparently it is inconceivable to him that a person can be queer and Christian, or accepting of LGBTQ people and Christian, or liberal and Christian.
Needless to say, in addition to insulting queer folk, this is a grave insult to Christians who DON'T feel compelled to be anti-queer bigots.
Let's rewrite the above paragraph in an effort to clarify the problem:
An orthodox Christian and (to take an example) a married secular gay employee work side by side. They disagree with each other about matters absolutely fundamental to their lives and identities. The secular gay employee believes the Christian’s worldview is false (note: not all gay people feel this way; many are themselves Christian). The Christian employee believes the secular gay employee’s worldview is falseshould not be allowed to marry, adopt children, or have his loving partnership recognized by the state in any way, and would, if he had the ability, force the secular gay employee to undergo conversion therapy. Why is it uniquely intolerable or even injurious for the gay employee to have to share the workplace (much less the industry) with the Christian? Do they not have the same obligations to set aside their differences and treat each other with dignity and respect?
The final two questions seem pretty stupid when the true nature of French's argument is spelled out.
Of course, French's conservative buddies are once again congratulating him on writing such a marvelous defense of bigotry.
Jared Kushner's application for a top-secret clearance was rejected by two career White House security specialists after an FBI background check raised concerns about potential foreign influence on him — but their supervisor overruled the recommendation and approved the clearance, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.
. . .
After reviewing the file, CIA officers who make clearance decisions balked, two of the people familiar with the matter said. One called over to the White House security division, wondering how Kushner got even a top-secret clearance, the sources said. Top-secret information is defined as material that would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security if disclosed to adversaries.
And if that isn't bad enough, Kushner's case is hardly an isolated one (emphasis mine):
The sources said they did not know whether Kline was in communication with senior political White House officials. They say he overruled career bureaucrats at least 30 times, granting top-secret clearances to officials in the Executive Office of the President or the White House after adjudicators working for him recommended against doing so.
Senator Ron Johnson, Republican head of the Senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, naturally spent the day focused on blaming Chuck Schumer for the fact that air traffic controllers weren't getting paid during the government shutdown.
It's really fascinating how Republicans can pretend to be outraged when a Secretary of State fails to follow email protocol (but only when the SoS is a Democrat, naturally), but literally could not care less when a Republican president is handing out top-level security clearances to his family and flunkies like candy.
I have a rather startling confession to make --- I'm a liberal (try to contain your surprise). But someone somewhere made the wise point that we should expose ourselves to opposing points of view, so as to test our assumptions and biases, and not become detached from reality in a bubble of like-minded thinkers.
So in this spirit, I follow S.E. Cupp and David French on Twitter. I have learned that Cupp occasionally takes a break from her fact-free attacks on the left and exercises in false equivalence to level the occasional well-placed attack on Trump. I haven't followed French for very long, but if most of his views are like his recent essay on masculinity, I have very low expectations.
French is unhappy because the APA (American Psychiatric Association) just released it's first-ever guidelines for working with men and boys. And French disagrees strongly with it:
The APA sees the challenges facing young men and rightly seeks to overcome those challenges, but then diagnoses the wrong cause. As Stephanie Pappas notes on the APA website, the new guidelines conclude that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.”
French presents his case citing essentially no facts other than two charts which show that women have seen greater wage gains than men over the past 40 years --- which is kind of to be expected, considering the stark gender-based wage discrimination 40 years ago (not to mention the fact that women were still largely shut out of lucrative fields like law and medicine). And he certainly makes no effort to refute any of the APA's 13 years of research. The rest of his piece is the kind of primal scream one typically hears from the right any time someone suggests that it's possible for men to improve their behavior. A typical passage:
Yet as we survey a culture that is rapidly attempting to enforce norms hostile to traditional masculinity, are men flourishing? And if men are struggling more the farther we move from those traditional norms, is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy’s essential nature? Male children are falling behind in school not because schools indulge their risk-taking and adventurousness but often because they relentlessly suppress boys and sometimes punish boys’ essential nature, from the opening bell to the close of the day.
Are men flourishing? Well, we're currently suffering under the misrule of history's most corrupt and incompetent president, in part due to the fact that his opponent was a woman. Women's earnings are still only 80% of men's. And to the extent that men aren't flourishing (suicide rates are rising generally, but it is much higher among men than women), French makes no effort to relate it to 'norms hostile to traditional masculinity'.
Is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy's essential nature? I wonder whether French is familiar with the concept of a straw man.
Male children are falling behind in school . . . Without even the pretense of a factual basis to back it up.
The whole essay is like this, and I wouldn't bother writing about it, except that his closing argument is: a) Anecdotal, and b) A tremendous self-own:
Then, one day after I returned from overseas, I was on a Cub Scout hike with my son. We were at the bottom of a ravine, when one of the boys threw a rock that hit my son square in the head. The gash was deep, blood was everywhere, and he started to lose consciousness. Our cell phones worked to call 911, but there was no way the ambulance could come down to us. We had to run up to it.
So, with the pack leader applying direct pressure to his head, I picked him up and started to run — straight up a steep incline. I ran, carrying him, until I was about to pass out. Then my wife (who is very strong but couldn’t carry him as far) would spell me for a bit. Then I’d grab him and run some more. We got to the top of the hill just as the ambulance arrived, and they were able to stop the bleeding before the blood loss got too serious.
Exciting! And in French's mind, the perfect example of why we shouldn't listen to the APA when they say that "stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful."
French doesn't explain which of these traditionally male traits --- stoicism, competitiveness, dominance or aggression --- was the key ingredient in getting his son to the top of the hill. Nor does he explain how his wife came by those same traditionally male traits when she took her turn.
But the 800-lb. gorilla that French ignores is that there would have been no need to carry his son up a ravine in the first place if another boy hadn't thrown a rock and hit his son in the head, in exactly the kind of dominance and aggression the APA wants to address.
What's more amazing than French's lack of self-awareness is that of his right-wing buddies, who jumped on Twitter to praise him for writing such a marvelous rebuttal to the APA.
In sum, we have:
The nation's most respected body in the study of psychology releases a document which is the result of 13 years of clinical study and analysis.
A right-wing commentator with no background in psychology (who probably didn't even read the full APA document) throws together a response full of right-wing grievance and unsupported whining, concluding with a self-refuting anecdote.
The rest of the right-wing applauds him on his accomplishment.
I don't think I'll be adding other conservatives to my list of Twitter follows any time soon.
AP-NORC POLL: “Immigration among the top concerns in 2019.” People want to stop drugs and criminals at the Border. Want Border Security! Tell the Dems to do the inevitable now, rather than later. The wait is costly and dangerous!
Any time you hear a trumpian use the phrase 'national security', that's a clue that they're handing you a load of BS. To them, national security is just another tool in their collection of partisan talking points.
For example, anyone with a pulse and a memory which extends longer than 2 years is aware that the trumpians want Hillary Clinton to be locked up due to her email practices, which supposedly put our national security at risk. But their hypocrisy is exposed when stories about multiple officials in the Trump White House doing the same thing disappear with barely a ripple, or when Trump himself is allowed to use an insecure iPhone for official business.
But it's not just engaging in poor security practices with official information --- which, for the record, was wrong when Hillary did it and it's wrong when the trumpians do it --- Trump is blatantly and repeatedly putting our national security at risk, and at worst a few Republicans have engaged in some quiet tut-tutting.
At some point, the reality gap between Donald Trump‘s personal psychosis that imagines all sorts of mythic threats that are generated from his ‘gut’ will constitute the true national security threat to the nation.
Of course, given Trump's narcissistic personality disorder, this reliance on his gut doesn't necessarily demonstrate a disdain for U.S. national security. But one thing that DOES indicate such disdain is the way Trump has politicized security clearances.
Of course, our national security really takes a beating when it goes up against Trump's personal business interests. Since the day he was sworn in, Trump has been trading on the presidency to personally enrich himself and his family, and nearly 200 members of Congress have filed suit in an effort to stop his violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitition.
It's self-evident that the president has a conflict between his personal financial interests and the nation's interests when he makes business deals with foreign powers, and there are at least two concrete deals which clearly run counter to the nation's security interest. First, there is Trump's decision to scrap the long-planned relocation of FBI headquarters.
. . . it was congressional investigators who sounded the alarm about possible cyberespionage by ZTE and Huawei in 2012, after an 11-month probe by the House Intelligence Committee concluded that the companies were essentially arms of the Chinese government that could be used as conduits for spying on American citizens and companies. And Rubio along with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced a bill earlier this year that would bar the U.S. government from buying or leasing telecommunications equipment from the companies over those concerns.
In February, FBI Director Chris Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Americans shouldn’t use ZTE or Huawei products or services. He was joined by the heads of the CIA and National Security Agency, and the director of national intelligence, who also cautioned against the public using ZTE's products.
This isn't a partisan issue; it's a Trump issue. Republicans, Democrats and the intelligence community ALL agree that ZTE is a national security threat, but Trump dropped sanctions on them in return for a $500 million loan from the Chinese government.
And yet, the Republican party continues to pretend that they care about national security.
Finally, let's focus on border security specifically, since that's the theoretical rationale for Trump's stupid $25 billion wall.
For starters, one might expect that a president truly focused on border security might spend a lot of money on it, and one who is willing to shut down the government over border security would spend every penny on it that Congress allocates. In Trump's case, however, only 60% of the money available has even been allocated to contracts, and only 6% has been spent.
For another thing, a wall is one of the least effective ways to spend $25 billion on border security. And Trump's focus on the southern border is misguided at any rate, as the number of unauthorized immigrants from the southern border has been steadily declining for more than a decade.
So let's mock the trumpians' supposed concern about 'border security' for what it is: A naked attempt to politicize national security for the purpose of pleasing Trump's xenophobic base. And then let's change the conversation to focus on the national security disaster which is the Trump presidency.
