The Weekly Sift

Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself. 

– attributed to Napoleon

This week’s featured post is “Sexism and the Clinton Candidacy“. Short version: A man can misbehave and be an endearing rogue, but there’s no stereotypic loophole for a woman’s mistakes.

Last week the Sift had its two millionth page view since I moved the blog to weeklysift.com in 2011. The push over the line came from “Why Bernie Backed Hillary“, which got over 16K hits.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s downward spiral

Up until this week, Republicans were willing to rationalize Donald Trump’s rhetorical excesses: It was a strategy, an act, a way to manipulate the media, and so on. He could turn it off and on as necessary to control the news cycle.

But when he went into a full-bore multi-day attack on gold-star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan, raising stereotypes about Muslim women, describing his own wealthy lifestyle as “sacrifice“, and even connecting the Khans to terrorism, it became hard to ignore what’s really been going on: Trump has a character flaw that borders on a personality disorder.

There is no strategy here: He kept his self-destructive argument with the Khans going because he simply cannot control himself. If he feels disrespected, he must strike back and keep striking back until he can convince himself that he has won.

In other words, he proved the truth of what Clinton said about him in her acceptance speech:

A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.

Combined with Clinton’s convention bounce, that put Trump’s poll numbers into free fall. Between the conventions, the race was either tied or Trump might even have been a point or two ahead. But this morning both Nate Silver and the RCP average have Clinton up 7 points. BTW, Nate has a great graphic of how the national and state-by-state polling fits together. (If you find this a little hard to read, click it and scroll down.)

Here’s how bad things are for Trump: He’s already making plans for how he’s going to soothe his ego after he loses: He’s going to claim Clinton cheated. More and more, this campaign is reminding me of third grade.

and I thought I was on vacation when …

… I was in Portland, Maine on Friday. I was on my way to my favorite Portland tea shop to read a book I hope to tell you about soon (Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance), when I noticed a big crowd in front of city hall about a block away.

I knew Trump had been in Portland on Thursday, and I had seen on TV that protesters silently holding up pocket copies of the Constitution had been removed from his rally.

In that rally, Trump promoted a local version of the immigrant-crime-wave lie I pointed out in his convention speech.

We’ve just seen many, many crimes, getting worse all the time. And as Maine knows – a major destination for Somali refugees. They’re coming from among the most dangerous territories or countries anywhere in the world. We have no idea of who they are … this could be the great Trojan horse of all time!

To which the Portland Press Herald responded:

Mr. Trump can relax. We know who they are. They are our neighbors and our friends. Some of them work in our schools and hospitals. Some are students. Some own businesses. They pay taxes, which are used for, among other things, maintaining the stage from which he spoke.

What I had stumbled into Friday afternoon was originally supposed to be the Portland Somali community’s counter-demonstration, and it included some of the same Constitution-waving protesters. But when they had asked the mayor if they could hold their rally on the steps of City Hall, he asked if he could spread the word around, because “maybe some other people will want to join in.”

By the time I got there, there were about 400 of us, of all races. (My estimate on the spot matched the one in the newspaper the next morning.) It was not a partisan thing; I didn’t see any Clinton signs. People were there to support their neighbors and the unity of their city against outsiders peddling hate. The Press Herald quoted the police chiefs of Portland and nearby Lewiston, where many Somali refugees have settled. Both made the same points:

• Crime is down, not up.
• There is no special Somali-refugee crime problem.
• Nobody from the Trump campaign had talked to them.

That third point is the one that most enrages me. Anybody can get a fact wrong. But Trump is not trying to get his facts right. He’s going to American cities and raising fear against the immigrants who have settled there without even checking that those fears are based on anything real.

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BTW, the Constitution thing is a big deal. Khizr Khan started it at the Democratic Convention when he offered to give Donald Trump his copy of the Constitution. And Trump made a huge blunder when his people ejected the silent protesters in Portland. They weren’t disrupting anything, they were just holding up the Constitution, which Trump’s people saw as a hostile act. The crowd booed them (and their Constitutions) as they were led away.

Up until now, waving the Constitution has been a conservative thing. I imagine Ted Cruz pulling his hair out and yelling at Trump as he watched this on TV: “You let the Democrats take the Constitution away from us?”

and my church is also in the news

First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Bedford, Massachusetts — I know, I live in New Hampshire, but I go to a church 25 miles away in Massachusetts; it’s a long story — is in the middle of an expensive project to bring our carbon footprint as close to zero as we can. After new insulation and HVAC equipment, the last piece of that plan is to put solar panels on the roof of our early-19th-century building, carefully positioned so as not to be too striking from the road.

The local historical commission blocked that, and now we’re going to court. ThinkProgress picked up the story this week, noting that we’re using the kind of religious-freedom legal argument that “is more often used by conservative faith groups”. We’re arguing that publicly fighting climate change is part of living our faith. It’ll be interesting to see what a court does with that reasoning.

and you might also be interested in

No matter who wins in November, or what kind of Congress she gets, the new President will have to face the problem of slow growth. It’s not just an American problem, so it probably doesn’t have a purely American solution.

Both parties have been talking around that. There’s a certain amount of genuine mystery about global growth, so the idea that we can ramp up growth locally by cutting taxes or building infrastructure is a little iffy.

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For Obama’s 55th birthday, USA Today put together this compilation of his most endearing moments.

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There’s Liberal vs. Conservative, and then there’s Reality vs. Fantasy. Incumbent Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson made it clear which side he’s on in an interview on a local radio show:

First of all, the climate hasn’t warmed in quite a few years. I mean, that is proven scientifically.

After 2014 turned out to be the hottest year on record (until 2015 was hotter), the government’s real scientists published this graph, showing that global warming has actually accelerated in recent years.

Senator Johnson went on to explain what really motivates climate change activists:

The reason they’re doing it is it’s such a great opportunity to control, you know, pretty much, government, and control your lives.

Yep, that’s why I drive a hybrid and why my church is going to court for the right to put solar panels on its roof: It’s all part of a nefarious plan to control everybody’s lives. I can’t remember exactly how the plot is supposed to work, but I’m sure somebody explained it to me once.

and let’s close with some Trump songs

Here a busker redoes “The Boxer”:

And Dennis Leary and James Corden put a Trump twist into Leary’s “I’m an Asshole”.