How Moral Monday’s “Fusion Politics” Trumped North Carolina’s Right-Wing Extremists and How They Will Continue to Do So
Nation
Draining the Swamp
Remarks of Walter M. Shaub, Jr., Director, U.S. Office of Government Ethics, as prepared for delivery at 4:00 p.m. on January 11, 2017, at the Brookings Institution.
I wish circumstances were different and I didn’t feel the need to make public remarks today. You don’t hear about ethics when things are going well. You’ve been hearing a lot about ethics lately.
I need to talk about ethics today because the plan the President-elect has announced doesn’t meet the standards that his nominees are meeting and that every President in the past four decades has met.
Strategy Memo
OK, Meryl Streep is a wonderful actress, a very smart and eloquent lady. But I think her Golden Globes statement, while striking and eloquent, was a strategic mistake. And here’s why – because it puts style over substance, and not everybody agrees with putting down Trump’s style.
Miserabalism (& Socialism)
Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty by Jennifer M. Silva, Oxford University Press.
Continental Drift 2.0
Russell Banks responds to questions about the election put to him by a regular interlocutor from Nouvel Observateur.
1. Did anger and hatred against Obama contribute to Trump’s success?
Until now, on the eve of the winter solstice, at the start of a new astronomical year, I’ve put off trying to answer questions about the election of Donald Trump. I went to Ecuador and climbed in the Andes, cut myself off from radio and TV, the Internet and newspapers. I remained mostly silent, except to utter quiet moans and groans of despair or the low worried whimpering that follows a sudden fall from a great height after you’ve checked for broken bones and found none, but haven’t yet determined the extent of internal injuries. Since returning to the US, I’ve read most of the explanations for Trump’s victory by the pundits and commentators of the left, right, and center, and listened mainly in silence to my friends and colleagues as they try to explain how and why this mentally deranged ignoramus became the most powerful human being in the known universe.
Tease
Molly Klein is working on a piece for First that links Trump’s spectacles to “a war on rationality that began in Baltimore in 1966 with the Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism/post-structuralism, which introduced the mountebanks Lacan and Derrida to US academia.” In the meantime, here’s a taste from her recent demolition of Slavoj Žižek, “The Protocols of the Learned Lacanian of Slovitzie,” published this year in a Belgrade academic journal. Klein’s clarity about “ecstasy of the bullying” makes her a national resource for Americans in our time of the Don.
The Interpretation of Dreams
Friday, January 23rd, 2016
In the few days prior to Trump becoming the President of the United States, even through a flickering awakeness, we know that given the power of the United States however in decline, the whole world is right now being funneled together for the long march into dreamland.
Post-Election Reflections
The role of identity politics in Trump’s victory and Clinton’s defeat: Identity politics, the invention of the multicultural left, has been taken over by Trump and his hard right supporters.
Long Weekend
Excerpts from familial emails.
12/11
BEFORE THE ELECTION
Mid-September, “Obama dispatched [Lisa] Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson to make the pitch for a ‘show of solidarity and bipartisan unity’ against Russian interference in the election.” —WashPost, story then scrubbed for particularities and replaced with blander version (about voting machine worry, discounting intelligence agencies’ consensus about Russian subversion of the Clinton campaign).
The Manchurian Candidate
The final item in Greil Marcus’s last Real Life Rock column (originally posted at Pitchfork.com) has taken on a new urgency in the light of Trump’s pick for Secretary of State and the leaked CIA “assessment” confirming “Russia intervened in the 2016 election for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win the presidency.”
Sometimes It’s Hard to See the Comedy
“The Human Comedy” is something you watch, and if you’re nice and mature and secure, you watch yourself being part of it.
But how can you view Trump as a part of a comedy?
Patriotism of the Scream
Re: The Torture Report Must Be Saved. (See the New York Times, p. A23, December 10).
Historians will increasingly find much to admire in the Obama presidency, but not the fact that in the years of his first administration he failed openly to review the mendacity and nationally inflicted deludedness of the Bush years. A struggle for the truth was at that moment urgently needed. Wherever that inquiry might have led, it would have been a moment past that would now calmingly come to the support of the present. For we face the increasingly bewildering question of how to parry the dislocation of mind—a reign of disinformation—that a president-elect with an impinged sense of reality now uses to keep in turmoil and uproar a nation that has itself for decades dodged knowing its own reality. It is sickening to say, but however everyday everyday life continues to seem from a sidewalk view, we are in the midst of a struggle for the truth that is propelling us to the edge of what is felt as impulses for self-preservation where any comprehension of what is actually occurring could be lost for good.
My Path to Perdition
That craggy-faced master of the art, Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill Jr., famously pointed out that all politics are local.
I’m here to tell you about that.
It began for me in mid-summer this year when I was taking my usual morning walk on the Boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ, and a bunch of young teenage punks on bikes came busting by, and the nearest one yelled at me, “Hey, buddy — vote for Trump!”
Silence = Trump
As they say in the corridors of officialdom, mistakes were made. Enough of them to go around––and I guess it’s always like that. You see your mistakes when you fail, and overlook them when you succeed. Well, we failed. Not just some sect, race, or gender, but everyone who didn’t vote. Their silence gave us Trump.
Where the Heart Is
They [Mexicans] brought their third-world ****hole here and while it’s a little bit better than what they had in the process of doing it they dragged us into the gutter with them.
What’s one more racist projection now when Alt Rightists give Nazi salutes and the President-elect’s consiglieres are (brutish or kinder/gentler) white supremacists? Acts speak louder than spew. Still, the line above jumped out at me because of where I came across it. Not at an Alt Right conclave or website, not in a bar or…locker-room, but in an email by a distinguished D.C. cardiologist, Dr. Oskoui, to a group who read and sometimes respond to William Greider’s Nation articles.
It’s Time for the Stone to Flower
On the Anniversary of Kristallnacht, Donald Trump is Elected President
It starts with breaking glass,
a brick thrown,
Jewish storefront shattered.
Businesses destroyed.
The vile Other punished.
(All that has been worked for
in ruins.)
If I didn’t know,
the German word sounds pretty,
tinkles, conjures flutes of champagne
raised in toast.
If we didn’t know.