We’re coming down to the wire on the early primaries: Next Monday the Iowa caucuses happen, and eight days later I have to vote here in New Hampshire. As the Democratic race tightens up, I find myself wondering: So far all the Republicans have been running against Hillary, talking about Benghazi and emails and Bill’s escapades. If they started running against Bernie, what would that sound like?
Well, it turns out The New York Post jumped the gun on the anti-Bernie campaign, warning America that he’s a “diehard Communist”, and listing all sorts of “evidence” that has just about as much factual basis as … well, as the Benghazi stand-down order and all the other crap they’ve been throwing at Hillary.
But just because it’s crap doesn’t mean that it won’t work, or at least work well enough to distract the electorate from looking at the issues Bernie is trying to run on. Going back to Dukakis and the Pledge of Allegiance issue in 1988, all Democratic nominees spend a big chunk of their campaign wading through crap: swift-boating against Kerry, birtherism and “paling around with terrorists” against Obama, and so forth. Some nominees have had the political skill to cut through the noise and get the public to pay attention to their issues, and some haven’t. That has a lot to do with which ones won.
So what about Bernie and his “history” of diehard Communism? If he’s nominated, how will the Republicans use that against him and will he have the skills to deal with it? I’ll meditate on that in this week’s featured post “Smearing Bernie, a preview”. That should be out soon.
The weekly summary also has a lot of election coverage in it: Trump/Cruz is getting nasty. Hillary has been overstating the problems with Bernie’s healthcare plan, but Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman point out that there are some legitimate issues there. The Vanilla ISIS folks are still scaring the birds away in Oregon. Winter Storm Jonas clobbered the NY-Washington corridor, but left New England alone. Then there’s Flint, and verification that 2015 was the hottest year ever. And of course, a couple guns-make-us-safer stories. That should be out by 10:30.
I’m back after a week on the west coast.
I expected to do a State of the Union post. But oddly, what struck me was a stretch of Nikki Haley’s SOTU response — and not the one that got all the attention. The part of her speech that everyone covered was the anti-Trump part, where she said the GOP shouldn’t “follow the angriest voices”. More interesting to me, though, was that she went on to give a positive message about what the country could expect from a Republican president. I’m not hearing that kind of thing anywhere else, so I thought I’d call it to your attention.
Naturally, though, my reaction to that litany of future accomplishments wasn’t a simple “Gee, that’ll be great.” Instead, I went through it line-by-line and asked whether the policies Republicans are proposing could actually lead to these results. The result is “The Positive Republican Message, Annotated”. It should be out shortly.
I’ve also been paying attention to the militia that has taken over that wildlife refuge in Oregon. At first I thought I’d write an in-depth article about it, but then I decided I’d never get all the background reading done in time. So instead I started summarizing all the good articles other people have been writing. Then that got out of hand and turned into its own article after all. It still needs an introduction and a title, so that probably won’t be out until 10 or 11.
The weekly summary will cover the Iran negotiations, Obama’s SOTU and gun townhall, the Episcopal/Anglican kerfuffle, the Cruz birther thing, and a few other topics before closing with the War and Peace trailer — I’m not entirely sure what it has to do with War and Peace, but wow.
In this week’s featured post, I’ll return to the theme of one of my old favorites, “One Word Turns the Tea Party Around” from 2011, which was the first Sift post to go viral and get 10K hits. The point of that post was that while I agreed with a lot of Tea Party rhetoric about how working people need to take the country back from a tyrannical elite, TPers got turned around when they identified that elite as Big Government and sought to control it by allying with billionaires and corporations. The reality was exactly the reverse: The ruling elite we need to take the country back from are the billionaires and corporate executives, and we need to use the power of government to do so.
So the metaphor I gave for the Tea Party was Jim Marshall’s famous wrong-way touchdown run, which looked great athletically, but scored points for the wrong team. I proposed to fix Tea Party rhetoric by changing the word government to corporations, and the post gave many examples to demonstrate how well that works, like this adjusted Ronald Reagan quote:
Lord Acton said power corrupts. Surely then, if this is true, the more power we give the corporations the more corrupt they will become.
Well, four and a half years later, Tea Partiers are catching on to the fact that the Republicans they elected aren’t serving their interests, so they’re going with “anti-establishment” Republican candidates like the billionaire Trump. In other words: They’re still running towards the wrong goal line. I’ll flesh that idea out, with some background on how the working class has been suckered by the rich throughout American history, in “Trump Supporters and Liberals: Why aren’t we on the same side?” That should be out between 9 and 10 EST.
In the weekly summary, I’ll link to some best-of-2015 lists, then talk about Bill Cosby, the affluenza teen, Tamir Rice, the Oregon militia stand-off, Donald vs. Bill, and a few other things, before closing with AJ+’s resolutions for 2016 “that will really make America great”.
It’s the final Monday of 2015; time for the Yearly Sift. Today I’ll assess what the Sift’s themes of the year have been, link to the most popular and most significant articles, provide a handy list of links to all the books I reviewed this year, claim my most and confess my least prescient comments, link to a list of all the year’s opening quotes, and tell you how the blog has been doing in terms of readership.
The themes of the year should start coming out soon, and I’ll try to get everything done by noon.
I’m at a Holiday Inn Express with the slowest wifi in the known world, so any time predictions on this week’s Sift are iffy.
This week’s featured post will be “Small-government Freedom vs. Big-government Rights”. It explores a key difference in liberal and conservative rhetoric: When conservatives talk about “freedom”, they usually mean the absence of government, while when liberals talk about “rights”, they typically are referring to prerogatives that wouldn’t exist if government weren’t there to defend them. The clearest illustration of this difference in American history comes from a new book After Appomattox by Gregory Downs, which shows how the rights of the newly freed slaves depended on the presence of Union soldiers, who suppressed the freedom of the Southern whites to re-assert their dominance.
The weekly summary will cover developments in the Freddie Gray and Laquan McDonald police-violence cases, the deal to keep the government open, a variety of bizarre religion stories, the Flint water scandal, and a very sad and instructive story about a rape investigation, before closing with some Bad Lip Reading of Star Wars.
Times? Geez, who knows? I’ll stay with it until I get stuff out.
A few hours after last week’s Sift got finished, Donald Trump made his don’t-let-any-Muslims-in proposal, which seemed to be about all anybody could talk about for the rest of the week. Not to write about that would feel like dodging, but at the same time I don’t want to repeat the same oh-isn’t-that-horrible reaction you’ve been hearing all week.
Not that it isn’t horrible, but you know that already. Is there anything more insightful to say about it? The articles that I found interesting this week focused on where this stuff comes from and why there is an audience for it: Republicans and their conservative media have been building that audience for years, using white Christian identity politics to manipulate working-class whites into supporting the candidates of the corporate establishment. They’ve built an echo chamber where bizarre conspiracy theories and simplistic views of economics and foreign affairs can avoid the friction of the real world. Now that Trump is playing their game better than they do, they want to call a foul.
I’ll sum up that point of view in the first featured post “How the Republicans Trumped Themselves”. That should be out shortly.
But there’s something else that I think needs to get out there. What Trump’s fans love about him is that he is a “strong leader”, and I feel like that idea needs to be taken on more directly — because what he’s doing doesn’t fit my notion of leadership at all. So the second featured post will be “The Leadership We Need”. That still needs work, so I’m not sure what time it will post.
The weekly summary will discuss the aftermath of the recent mass shootings, quote two new books that illustrate the complexity and diversity of Islam, and pull together a few of the Peanuts references that have accompanied the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas, before closing with two attempts to enlist high tech in the effort to replace meat and eggs.
I didn’t get as much done this weekend as I usually do, and I still haven’t digested the President’s speech last night, so I’m not making predictions about when today’s posts will appear. I can say that there will be two featured posts and a weekly summary.
The first post will short (by recent Sift standards), making a simple point about the gun-control debate and why the two sides talk past each other. It will be called “Guns are security blankets, not insurance policies”.
The second catches up with the presidential race in a somewhat more detailed way than I can do in a weekly summary. On the Democratic side, I’m going to discuss where I am in deciding who to vote for in the New Hampshire primary, and on the Republican side I’m going to review several of the predictions/observations I’ve been making, to see how events have been treating them. (No, I did not foresee Trump at the top of the polls this late in the process.) I think the political pundits on TV should do more of that, so I’m going to apply those standards to myself.
The weekly summary will include a bunch of points about guns that I combed out of the first post to focus it better. (Some posts get long because a big theme has broad implications, and some get long because I keep saying “and another thing …”.) Also, the Paris climate talks may have been driven off the front pages, but they’re happening; coal baron Don Blankenship finally faces (not nearly enough) consequences for his role in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster; Republicans in Congress take a further step in their never-dying effort to repeal ObamaCare (while making yet another promise that their replacement plan will appear really, really soon — they’ve only kept us waiting for six years); sadly, Dick Cheney has not been frozen in carbonite Han-Solo-style; and the closing will be a guided meditation that you will probably never hear from one of those motivational consultants at the office.
This week much ink was spilled discussing the word fascist. What is fascism, anyway? Is it fair to call Donald Trump a fascist? Does the word actually mean something or is it just an insult? If it does mean something, does it apply uniquely to Trump, or is there a larger fascist or proto-fascist problem in America?
When I started researching this, I worried that it might be a little too theoretical to blog about. But everybody I mentioned fascism to this week got intense. It’s like we ate something we can’t digest. We’re thinking about it, but we don’t know what to think.
Well, I’ve been thinking about it too. The result is a long article (which has a convenient stopping point in the middle, if you don’t feel like going all the way down the rabbit hole) I call “The Political F-Word”. It’s pretty much done, but this is the kind of article where a small misstatement can lead to a long comment thread that completely misses the point, so the final edit may take longer than usual. It should post sometime between 8 and 9 EST.
The weekly summary will pull together two recent examples of what appears to be right-wing terrorism: the Planned Parenthood attack in Colorado and the attack on Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Minnesota. Also, the murder of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago policeman, and what the 13-month cover-up says about a larger corruption issue that Mayor Emmanuel shows no interest in; possibly the last sub-400 ppm measurement of CO2; and I’ll have to look around for some good news to balance all that. Let’s predict that to appear sometime between 11 and noon.
When the Paris attacks happened, I expected a push to re-invade Iraq and put boots on the ground in Syria. (That’s why I focused last week’s featured post on the fact that ISIS wants us to do that.) What I wasn’t expecting, and feel a little silly about not foreseeing, was the demonization of Syrian refugees and American Muslims. That wave of public hysteria has been building all week, sweeping up even my own Democratic governor and congresswoman, and causing Republicans to say some things that sound downright fascist. (Explaining what I mean by fascist and why I think it’s appropriate to start using that word is what I’ve got planned for next week.)
But tempting as it is to blame politicians for all this craziness, I really think the problem is us, the American people. Some of us have gotten swept away by cruel, xenophobic impulses, and many of the rest of us have either taken a well-maybe-you’re-right, maybe-just-a-touch-of-fascism attitude. Or we were intimidated into silence, or defended our position in a way that just mirrored the hysteria of the other side. (That’s not how you talk somebody down.) Sad to say, our political representatives have been doing a pretty good job of representing us.
So if you accept that this is the public’s problem, the next thing you realize is that we’re going to have to step up and fix this. The insanity is only going to slow down if ordinary people stand up for reasonability in our conversations, our social media, and elsewhere. The politicians won’t get saner until the public gets saner.
How to take up that challenge is the subject of this week’s featured post, “In times of hysteria”. It will be out a little bit later than usual, maybe around 10 EST. That’s going to run a little long, so the weekly summary will be correspondingly thin: a variety of odds and ends concluding in a great song-and dance video. (We need something like that about now.)
Friday night’s attacks in Paris made all my plans for today’s Sift obsolete. Naturally, a one-man blog can’t cover breaking news, so I’ll direct you elsewhere for that.
But there’s a larger issue of how the West should respond to terrorism launched by groups who claim to represent all of Islam. Getting the frame right is very important here. The neo-cons get this, so they always have the Munich frame handy: If we don’t stop ISIS now, they’ll just get stronger and be harder to stop later.
But a few thousand zealots in the desert between Syria and Iraq are not Germany in 1938. A handful of guys with AK-47s and grenades in Paris are not General Guderian’s panzer corps. Treating them as if they are might do more harm than good.
Realizing that the Munich frame doesn’t fit, though, doesn’t give us a better frame. I’ll take a shot at what the right frame is in this week’s featured post “A Mediation on Terrorism”. That should appear maybe 9ish EST.
In the weekly summary, I’ll recall some of my earlier (and longer) writings on terrorism. (Back in 2004, “Terrorist Strategy 101: a quiz” was one of my first blog posts to get a readership beyond my friends. On its ten-year anniversary, I updated it with “Terrorist Strategy 101: a review“.) I’ll also link to some other people whose views seem insightful.
But a weekly summary can’t be 100% grim, so I’ll also discuss the Starbucks red-cup controversy and make fun of some of the odder ideas in Tuesday’s Republican debate. By the time the Democratic debate rolled around on Saturday, I was already focused on Paris, so I’ll punt that to next week. There’s also the University of Missouri protests to talk about. And I’ll close by pointing out the one thing Starbucks could do to make the cup controversy even more contentious.
The Weekly Sift 