The Weekly Sift

This week’s leading NFL highlights weren’t about game-winning passes or violent sacks, but about what the players did during the national anthem, and how Trump incited or responded to them. Bit by bit, the national argument for and against Trump is taking over the entire culture. There are fewer and fewer places where you can escape from it.

Even if you did manage to ignore the various fronts in the war between Trump and black athletes, there was a lot to pay attention to this week. The last-last-ditch, we-really-mean-it-this-time attempt to repeal ObamaCare looked briefly like it might pull together 50 senators, but now appears to be as doomed as the previous attempts. Trump made a disturbing speech to the UN, and increased both the rhetorical and economic pressure on North Korea, which showed no signs of cracking. A few more examples of Trump-administration corruption popped up, and the Russia investigation had its usual drip-drip-drip of revelations.

But I decided to take a step back to get a wider view. After the election I suggested that we need to start discussing issues we used to think were settled, and explaining things that we thought everybody already understood by now. My first shot at that was “Should I Have White Pride?“. This week’s featured post comes back to this theme. I use Trump’s UN speech and Steve Bannon’s 60 Minutes interview as a jumping-off point for discussing nationalism: why so many people are attracted to it again, and why I’m not one of them. That should be out maybe 10ish.

The weekly summary covers the things I listed above, plus a few others, before closing with an amusing commercial for a truly natural health remedy. I’m aiming to get that out by noon.

I’m in Halifax, having spent the week driving around Nova Scotia, hiking, and watching hurricane coverage. None of that activity has provoked a thought deep enough to write a featured article about. I’m still slogging through background reading about what actually works to fight fascism. (I want to deepen the observations I made about Antifa a few weeks ago.) And hurricanes are sucking up so much of the country’s attention that I’m not sure who would read an article about anything else right now. So this week I’ll just post an extra-long weekly summary.

That said, a number of the articles the summary will link to have the kind of depth my thoughts have been lacking: getting past Trump’s secrecy to find the favor-seekers paying big bucks to join his clubs, an American’s envy of high Swedish taxes, examining how badly charter schools work in Betsy DeVos’ Michigan, seeing Trump as “the first white president”, and a few others.

I can’t compete with CNN to give you the latest on Irma or Jose, but I’ll point to a few side issues the hurricanes are raising: Should there be a Category 6? Should FEMA help rebuild churches? Did the media cover Irma differently than Harvey? How do zoos plan for hurricanes, and what are all those flamingos doing in the men’s bathroom?

Finally, there’s Trump’s deal with Schumer and Pelosi to keep the government running for the next three months, and all the make-nice he’s been aiming at Democrats this last week. What’s that about? Will it last? Is there a change here worth taking seriously? (I’m skeptical.)

Taking advantage of waking up early in the Maritime time zone, I should have the summary out by 10 EDT, if not earlier.

Once again, a week seems like a long time.

Last Monday afternoon, after the Sift came out, the whole country watched the eclipse, and then in the evening Trump gave a televised speech that he claimed was the announcement a new Afghanistan strategy. How distant that all seems.

Since then, a category 4 hurricane hit Texas, and Houston is now drowning under rains not seen since Noah. (If only they’d built the Ark Encounter Museum in Texas instead of Kentucky, we’d have some great photos.) Under the cover of the hurricane, the Trump administration did one of the truly historic Friday night news dumps: the Arpaio pardon, details of the transgender ban, and Gorka’s exit from the White House.

Meanwhile, Trump is feuding with McConnell. Nobody knows whether Congress will manage to get the debt ceiling raised and the government funded in time for the new fiscal year to start October 1. And if it does pass something, will Trump sign it if it doesn’t include funding for the Mexico-will-pay-for-it wall?

I managed to hold myself to two featured posts this week. The first one pays attention to the national unity pitch Trump made at the beginning of the Afghanistan speech, which most pundits either took at face value or ignored as boilerplate rhetoric. But there’s something going on in there, and we should take it seriously, because the same phrasing goes back to his inaugural address. I find it disturbing, because the kind of unity he’s calling for is based on the emotional underpinnings of fascism. I’ll discuss that in “Fascism as a Unifying Principle”, which should be out before 9 EDT.

In the second post, I wasn’t able to stop myself from grabbing the week’s bright shiny object: Sheriff Arpaio. The mainstream press kept describing him as “controversial” and communicated that the Latino community didn’t like him, but glossed over just how evil he has been. A number of in-depth accounts of Arpaio’s reign of terror have been written over the years, though, and I went back and read a bunch of them. In particular, his reputation as a tough sheriff who kept the Phoenix area safe was bogus: With all his manpower devoted to the menace of Scary Brown People, he let a lot of child molesters and other serious criminals slip through the cracks. I’ll cover all that in “The Message in Joe Arpaio’s Pardon”, which I hope to get out by 11.

The weekly summary, then, only has the hurricane, Afghanistan, the eclipse, the transgender ban, and the looming government shutdown to cover. Piece of cake. Should be out by noon.

As Calvin once said to Hobbes, “The days are just packed.”

It’s been another week where, by Monday morning, everything I thought was so important on Tuesday and Wednesday (like the debate over the Google anti-diversity memo, whose author was being fired as I was posting last week’s Sift) seems like it happened a long time ago. Even North Korea, which on Friday looked like a plausible site for Armageddon to begin, is barely denting the headlines this morning. I imagine a reader thinking: “Why are you still going on about all that?”

Today — or rather this morning; Trump has advertised a big news conference for later today, so who knows what we’ll be buzzing about by this afternoon — it’s the alt-Right violence in Charlottesville, and Trump’s lack of reaction to it.

In short, reasonable commentary is tough these days. By the time you research something well enough to know what you’re talking about, it’s ancient history.

Enough complaining. What caught my attention this week was the Higgins memo, the one that got its author fired from the National Security Council, and seems to be part of the McMaster vs. Bannon power struggle happening inside the White House. Rich Higgins is part of the Bannon faction, and the memo is — I might as well be blunt about it — insane. All the resistance to the Trump administration, it turns out, arises from a multi-decade conspiracy to destroy America by “cultural Marxists”, who have infected not just the media, but both major parties, big corporations, and the Islamists as well. I’ll bet you didn’t realize you were “inter-operating seamlessly on a narrative level” with the Muslim Brotherhood and several international organizations whose names I had to look up. Now you know.

This doesn’t seem to be the work of One Crazy Guy. It’s a point of view that has a following both on right-wing web sites and inside the White House. In particular, the Donald Trumps Sr. and Jr. both seem to be open to it. (The President reportedly was upset to discover that Higgins had been fired.) So this week’s featured post, “The Battles Within the White House Are Even Crazier Than You Think”, fleshes out the cultural Marxist conspiracy theory and how much it explains about the more rabid sort of Trump supporter. It should be out around 9 EDT.

In the weekly summary I’ll discuss (but mostly link to other people’s discussions of) Charlottesville, Google, North Korea, and some other ancient history happened days and days ago, before closing with a Queen parody that spoils the first six seasons of Game of Thrones. Lots of work still to do there, but I’ll try to have it out by noon.

Well, that week happened.

Since Trump’s inauguration, most of us have gotten used to much higher level of background craziness than America has seen in our lifetimes. A lot of ridiculous statements and absurd proposals just kind of bounce off my ears now, the way a hard rain bounces off a sidewalk. Even as we warn each other not to “normalize” Trump, we do get inured to him and his circus after a while.

And then you have a week like this one. McCain’s middle-of-the-night vote to shoot down the latest version of ObamaCare repeal made great drama, but only if your suspension-of-disbelief had already processed that a major piece of legislation could be kept secret until two hours before the voting started, and that senators could beg for guarantees that the bill they were about to vote for wouldn’t become law.

Oh, and when was the last time the Boy Scouts had to apologize for exposing their boys to the President of the United States? (Hint: never.)

The White House Communications Director — the guy who’s supposed to keep everybody else on message — made anatomically impossible on-the-record suggestions about another major White House staffer, and both of them are going to work this morning. (Forget that C. J. would never have said something like that about Leo. Hamilton would never have said something like that about Burr.) Trump spent a bunch of the week humiliating his own attorney general. Police departments are putting out statements reassuring the public that they don’t do the things the President just told them to do. And when the Commander in Chief announced a new policy over Twitter, the Pentagon acted like he was just some drunk guy ranting in a bar. Orrin Effing Hatch stepped up to defend transgender soldiers against Trump.

That’s the kind of week it was. Oh, and by the way, North Korea tested a missile that could hit Chicago, or maybe Boston if it was having a good day. You may not have noticed that with all the other stuff going on. (Trump responded by criticizing China, which acted like he was just some drunk guy ranting in a bar.)

In this environment, there’s a certain amount of absurdity involved in continuing to discuss public issues as if they were serious things, even though they are serious things. But I think we have to continue doing it, or at least trying.

So this week I attempt to keep on keeping on by asking: What if Congress made a serious attempt to fix ObamaCare? It’s not “imploding” or in a “death spiral” as Republicans keep claiming, but it’s also not working as well as it was supposed to for certain people, particularly in rural areas. What can or should be done about that? I’ll try to have that posted by 9 EDT, or 10 at the latest.

This week I was uninspired by the misunderstandings I ran into, so I decided not to put out a “Three Misunderstandings” piece. The series will continue, but I don’t want my weekly deadline to force it to continue at a lower quality. Expect more misunderstandings soon, but not today.

The weekly summary … did I mention it was a crazy week? I’ll try to cover all that and post something before noon.