The Weekly Sift

I’ve got two featured posts planned this morning, both having something to do with trying to proceed responsibly on the Trump-Russia scandal.

The Clinton impeachment in the late 90s was what hardened me as a Democrat. Before that I’d been a mostly left-leaning independent, but I had voted for a number of moderate Republicans over the years, and I went through a real decision process on every election. But when Republicans in Congress misused the impeachment power so badly — and virtually none of them dissented from that effort — their whole party became dead to me. It seemed obvious that having an extra-marital affair and then lying about it wasn’t what the Founders had in mind as an impeachable offense.

Now, as impeachment talk starts to swirl around Donald Trump, but we don’t yet know the full extent of what he did, I think it’s important to examine myself for hypocrisy, and do what I can to guard against a similar partisanship. So this week I set myself a challenge: Can I spell out a vision of impeachment that I’m both willing to apply to Trump and prepared to live by the next time there are accusations against a Democratic president?

My answer to that question is in the article “What is impeachment for?”, which should be out between around 9 EDT.

A second post comes out of a question a commenter raised last week: How will we know if we’ve gone off the rails on Trump conspiracy theories the same way that Republicans did on Benghazi conspiracy theories? My first response was that it’s way too early to be making those comparisons. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Republicans — not the puppet-master types, but the rank and file who are still genuinely enraged about Benghazi and really believe that Clinton and/or Obama got away with murder — made their key mistakes early in the process, right about where we are now with Trump/Russia.

So I wrote “Step Around the Benghazi Trap”, which still needs some work, but should be out by 11.

The weekly summary is more focused on the immediate news: the special counsel, the Russia leak, what Trump’s Saudi-Arabia speech tells us about policy changes, Roger Ailes died and Bill O’Reilly might be coming back, and some other stuff, before closing with a caption contest for that weird-glowing-orb photo. I’ll predict it for noon.

I’m back home again in the eastern time zone, operating on my usual schedule.

Last week I linked to some other people’s responses to the Bret Stephens’ NYT column “Climate of Complete Certainty“, in which he denounced environmental activists for making claims beyond what the underlying science justifies, but oddly named no environmental activists and specified no unjustified claims. That left his critics in the odd position of feeling like they needed to argue, but not really knowing what to argue against.

This week it dawned on me how to understand that column: as an illustration of Jason Stanley’s model of propaganda. The best propaganda, Stanley argues, doesn’t lie; it just activates false ideas that are already sitting in the minds of its target audience. I reviewed Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works a couple years ago, but his ideas are worth looking at again now that we have such an excellent current example. So the featured post this week will be “Climate of Propaganda” and should be out before 8 EDT.

A second post is a short note that outgrew its space, on the odd ceremony at the White House Thursday celebrating Trump’s executive order defending “religious liberty”, i.e., the one that is supposed to end the persecution of Christians by the IRS and other federal agencies. Since that persecution doesn’t exist, and since the order stopped well short of the unconstitutional things Trump had promised (like ending enforcement of LGBT rights), the religious leaders attending Trump’s ceremony were actually celebrating the fact that the conman they support has conned them. I’ll describe that scene in “Much Ado About Religious Liberty”, which should appear around 9.

The weekly summary has some important news to cover: France decided not to go fascist, raising the possibility that the Trump election was the peak of the global fascist momentum. The House passed TrumpCare, and House Republicans celebrated at the White House as if it had become law. One House Republican told a town hall meeting “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” I think we’ll hear that line a lot in the 2018 campaign, so I’ll examine the evidence against it. New Orleans is having a divisive and potentially violent argument about removing Confederate statues. There’s some other stuff, and I’m still looking for a closing. So that probably appears between 11 and 12.

I’m still in the West — Santa Fe this week — so things might run a little later than usual again.

Trump’s 100th day is Saturday, so I was tempted to write a 100-days post. But after I read about six such articles, I realized that there will be hundreds of them, so mine may not be strictly necessary. Still, though, I wrote an article last November “The Trump Administration: what I’m watching for“, so it seems like basic accountability to go back and check whether any of the things I was worried about have been happening. That didn’t take nearly so many words, though, so I tucked it into the weekly summary.

The idea for this week’s featured post ended up coming from David Brooks, of all people. I usually grind my teeth through Brooks’ columns in the NYT, and, well, I did through Friday’s “The Crisis of Western Civ” as well. But it raised an issue that I thought deserved better than Brooks was giving it: whether the collapse of the story the West used to tell about itself has something to do with the difficulty the West is having defending itself against the rise of fundamentalist religious movements on the one hand and neo-fascist nationalist movements on the other.

Once I started doing my own version of that column, it linked in with another article: Peter Beinart’s “Breaking Faith” in The Atlantic, where he noted that the Christians most vulnerable to Trump’s tribalist us-against-them message are the ones who don’t go to church any more. They retain Christianity as a tribal identity, but not as an active faith whose practice pulls them into the community. Once again, the breakdown of an old message was leading not to progress, but regress.

Naturally, my post, “What’s Our Story?”, isn’t going to solve either problem. But I hope it will get you thinking about it in a different way. That should be out sometime in the next hour.

As it has for around 100 days or so, the weekly summary suffers from an excess of news: Trump’s 100 days, the Georgia congressional election, the March for Science, Bill O’Reilly’s firing, the French election, and a few other things. I’m not sure when that will be out.

I’m running an hour behind this week, because I’m in the Central Time Zone. (Amarillo, to be exact, on my way to Arizona.)

Two featured posts this week. The first is the week’s obvious news story: the attack on the Syrian air base. Usually I leave major news stories to major news outlets and only provide links, but here I think the coverage is doing a bad job of disentangling the diverse ways people are reacting. Also, I think Obama is getting a bad rap for “doing nothing” about Assad in 2013, when people really mean “not blowing anything up”. That should be out sometime before 9 EDT. (I’m giving times in Eastern because that’s what I usually do. I’m traveling, but most of you aren’t.)

The second relates a news story to a new book: Jeff Sessions’ announcement that the Justice Department is going to stop overseeing local law enforcement — ignoring a law to do so, by the way — dovetails nicely with Chris Hayes’ new book A Colony in a Nation.

Hayes argues that the right way to think about cases like Michael Brown and Freddie Gray isn’t that the American justice system was biased against them, but that their neighborhoods exist under a different justice system than the one whiter and more affluent people live under. They live in what he calls “the Colony”, not “the Nation”. In the Colony, police are an occupying force, controlling the public in accordance with rules and standards imposed from outside the community.

Obama’s Justice Department tried to bring the rights of America’s internal colonial subjects closer to those of full-fledged citizens. That is the effort that Sessions has pledged to stop. I’m guessing about when that will appear, maybe 10-11 EDT.

In the weekly summary, I’ll talk about the White House palace intrigue that has Steve Bannon retreating from Jared Kushner; the Senate changing its rules to approve Supreme Court Justice Neal Gorsuch, and why the filibuster is nothing to mourn for; Trump’s infrastructure vaporware; and a few other things before closing with a rocked-out parrot.

A chunk of this week’s Sift is already up: “Donnie in the Room“, a poetic retelling of the TrumpCare debacle modeled on “Casey at the Bat“. It seemed more likely to find readers if it came out quickly, so I posted it Saturday morning, and then added an afterword about “Casey” Sunday afternoon. (Also, whenever I get such a crazy idea in my head, I am possessed by the notion that everyone must have thought of this, so I have to be sure to get mine out first.)

By the way, if you find yourself in an inter-generational conversation, an interesting topic is to compare notes on the poems you remember from school. “Casey”, for example, was ubiquitous in my day, but seems to be taught only rarely now. Young people do seem familiar with Poe’s “The Raven“, and I forgot to ask about “The Man Who Wasn’t There“. (Mysteriously, I can’t find anyone of any age who remembers Oliver Wendell Holmes’ clever “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay“. That’s Holmes senior, the judge’s father, who in the 19th century was one of the best-known poets in America.)

Anyway, go read “Donnie” if you haven’t already; I’m pleased with it. This was another week of too-much-news, so even with a featured post out already, it will take me until 11 or so to post the weekly summary.