This week we got an example of just how far things can go once religious zealots get power in a state: The Alabama Supreme Court found that frozen embryos in an IVF clinic count as children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
If you’re a generous-minded sort, you may have seen all the headlines and suspected that the media was piling on: Probably, you think, the actual decision is not quite as bad as all that.
I have some bad news for you: I read the full 131-page decision, and it’s worse than the headlines make it sound. One highlight is the state’s Chief Justice invoking “the wrath of a holy God” — a phrase I never thought I’d see in a legal opinion. I’ll summarize what I found in this week’s featured post, “Sweet Home, Gilead”. That should appear between 9 and 10 EST.
That leaves a lot for the weekly summary to cover: The Biden impeachment case now looks like a phenomenally successful Russian disinformation operation. Where is Trump going to get the half-billion dollars he needs in order to file his appeals? There’s a weird anti-Biden bias in the mainstream media, reminiscent of the “Hillary’s emails” delusion of 2016. Speaker Johnson is still blocking Ukraine aid on the second anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion. And the week’s major good news: Wisconsin is about to become a democracy again.
I’ll try to get that out by noon, but I’m feeling slow today.
This week everybody was talking about the Trump trials
$355 million, Fani Willis testifying, a trial date for the Stormy Daniels case, presidential immunity goes to the Supremes, and more: It was hard to keep track of which case any particular news story applied to. I sort it out in the featured post.
and Putin’s Republican sympathizers
Putin critic and political rival Alexei Navalny died in an arctic prison on Friday. Navalny is an inspirational fighter for democracy who Putin has tried to kill before. Prison authorities attributed the death first to “sudden death syndrome” and then to a pulmonary embolism.
The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen (my favorite Russia-watcher) pulls a number of themes together:
Putin appears to be feeling optimistic about his own future. As he sees it, Donald Trump is poised to become the next President of the U.S. and to give Putin free rein in Ukraine and beyond. Even before the U.S. Presidential election, American aid to Ukraine is stalled, and Ukraine’s Army is starved for troops and nearing a supply crisis. Last week, Putin got to lecture millions of Americans by granting an interview to Tucker Carlson. At the end of the interview, Carlson asked Putin if he would release Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter held on espionage charges in Russia. Putin proposed that Gershkovich could be traded for “a person, who out of patriotic sentiments liquidated a bandit in one of the European capitals.” It was a reference to Vadim Krasikov, probably the only Russian assassin who has been caught and convicted in the West; he is held in Germany. A week after the interview aired, Russia has shown the world what can happen to a person in a Russian prison. It’s also significant that Navalny was killed on the first day of the Munich conference. In 2007, Putin chose the conference as his stage for declaring what would become his war against the West. Now, with this war in full swing, Putin has been excluded from the conference, but the actions of his regime—the murders committed by his regime—dominate the proceedings.
Meanwhile, Ukraine withdrew from the city of Avdiivka in Donetsk. AP attributes the withdrawal to lack of artillery.
One reason for that lack is Speaker Mike Johnson, who still refuses to bring Ukraine aid to a vote (because it would pass). Johnson says he won’t be “rushed” into voting on aid that President Biden asked for in September. Russian forces may be gaining ground and Ukrainian soldiers may be dying, but what’s the hurry?
The elephant in the room here is Trump, who won a narrow victory in 2016 with Putin’s help, and has been in Putin’s pocket ever since. (Hillary Clinton correctly observed in a 2016 debate that Trump would be Putin’s puppet, to which Trump made a typical playground response: “No. You’re the puppet.”) Trump single-handedly torpedoed the Ukraine/Israel/border bill that the Senate had negotiated a few weeks ago, and was just about the last political figure in the US to make any comment on Navalny. As usual, Trump did not criticize Putin, and instead made his comment mainly about himself.
“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted, and then the rest is about himself and his troubles.
I’m sure both the beleaguered people of Ukrainian and Navalny’s grieving widow take great comfort from that.
While we’re talking about Tucker, he followed his Putin interview by going to a Moscow supermarket to show his viewers how great conditions are in Russia.
Lots of people pointed out that things usually are cheap in poor countries, which Russia is at this point in spite of its vast natural resources and educated population. In 2021, Tass reported that sixty percent of Russian citizens spent at least half their income on food. For context, in 2022 Americans spent about 11.3% of their income on food, and the poorest quintile of American society spent 31.2% of its income.
But The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood has travelled in Russia and went deeper. Yes, there are some things that are better in Moscow than in New York.
Carlson’s videos never quite say what precisely he thinks Russia gets right. Moscow is in many ways superior to New York. But Paris has a good subway system too. Japan and Thailand have fine grocery stores, and I wonder, when I enter them, why entering my neighborhood Stop & Shop in America is such a depressing experience by comparison. Carlson’s stated preference for Putin’s leadership over Joe Biden’s suggests that the affection is not for fine food or working public transit but for firm autocratic rule—which, as French, Thais, and Japanese will attest, is not a precondition for high-quality goods and services. And in an authoritarian state, those goods and services can serve to prolong the regime.
One lesson from the election appears to be the mistake House Republicans made by giving in to Trump and scrapping a bipartisan compromise on the border. Suozzi was able to flip the script on the GOP in this race: Democrats tried to do something about the immigration problem, but Republicans blocked them.
The election followed a long string of recent Democratic victories since the Supreme Court ditched Roe v Wade. The great political mystery of recent months has been how polls show Democrats in trouble, but then Democrats win elections anyway.
You might think that another Democratic victory would be good news for other Democrats, like Joe Biden, but you wouldn’t guess it from reading the New York Times. In the Times, nothing is good news for Biden.
This is a regular theme in the humorous Twitter account New York Times PItchbot, which suggests how the Times should frame various stories. Tuesday afternoon before the polls closed the Pitchbot tweeted:
If Democrats win today’s special election in NY-3, it’s further proof that special elections don’t mean anything. But if they lose, it’s very bad news for Biden in November.
And that turned out to be more-or-less exactly what the NYT’s Nate Cohn wrote Wednesday morning.
As we’ve written recently, it’s hard to glean much from special elections. … If anything, one could advance the idea that the results were slightly underwhelming for Democrats, given all of the aforementioned advantages than Mr. Suozzi seemed to possess. Either way, a single special election result like this one is entirely consistent with polls showing Mr. Biden and Democrats in a close race heading into 2024.
While we’re talking about Biden and his prospects in November: In this 25-minute podcast, Ezra Klein makes the most convincing Biden-shouldn’t-run argument I’ve heard yet. Last week, I wrote about my strong belief that the Biden-is-too-old-to-be-president argument is misguided, and how his occasional use of the wrong word should not raise worries that he isn’t up to the job. I still believe all that.
But Klein makes a subtly different argument. He acknowledges that Biden has been an excellent president, and says that everyone he talks to who has observed Biden’s performance in decision-making meetings agrees that he is still quite sharp. But Klein points out that running for president is different from being president. Yes, the Republic would be in good hands if Biden were president for an additional four years. But is the Democratic Party in good hands with Biden at the top of the ticket in 2024?
Klein thinks not, and says that the kinds of people who run campaigns — unlike the kinds of people who run governments — are deeply worried about Biden’s reelection.
In the final section of the podcast, he paints an upbeat picture of an open convention choosing candidates the way old-time conventions did: Imagine younger Democrats like Gretchen Whitmer, Kamala Harris, and Gavin Newsom giving speeches that actually mattered, as they tried to convince delegates to pick them. Maybe there could even be a boom for a dark horse like Andy Beshear, who has managed to convince red Kentucky to elect and reelect him as governor. Contrast that with MAGA lackeys kissing up to Donald Trump in the Republican Convention.
I will need to consider that convention fantasy, which could also go wrong in any number of ways. And I’m not sure I’m ready to change my mind, but Klein’s podcast definitely gives me a lot to think about.
and two right-wing conspiracy theories collapsed
For years, Fox News talking heads like Sean Hannity have been talking about “the Biden crime family”, and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has been implying that he had evidence of a bribery scheme where money flowed through Hunter Biden to his Dad, who then did something-or-other in a quid-pro-quo sort of way. This has been the basis of House Republicans’ so-far-unsuccessful effort to impeach President Biden.
The evidence for this story was always kind of thin, and depended heavily on the testimony of one guy, Alexander Smirnov, who Hannity and Comer touted as a “trusted FBI informant”. But in fact the FBI didn’t trust this informant or his story, which is why the investigation never went anywhere, even during the Trump administration.
This week we found out just how much DoJ doesn’t trust Smirnov: The special prosecutor handling the Hunter Biden investigation just indicted Smirnov for making up his story, including inventing meetings with people who were provably somewhere else at the time. Jay Kuo has a good summary.
If the Republican effort to impeach Biden were based on anything more substantive than seeking revenge for Trump’s well-deserved impeachments, it would fold now. But I bet it won’t.
If election-deniers still show up in your social media feeds, you are bound to have heard about Dinesh D’Souza’s 2022 film 2000 Mules, which presents a conspiracy theory about
unnamed nonprofit organizations supposedly associated with the Democratic Party [who] paid “mules” to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election.
The film’s methodology and conclusions have been widely debunked ever since it came out nearly two years ago. But if you really want to believe that Democrats stole Donald Trump’s “landslide”, you can ignore all that.
The movie … uses research from the Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote, which has spent months lobbying states to use its findings to change voting laws.
The group filed claims with Georgia’s secretary of state’s office, which then launched its own investigation into ballot-harvesting. You’d think that would be the whole point of filing complaints, but True the Vote was strangely uncooperative and refused to give Georgia the evidence it said it had collected. Eventually, Georgia officials lost patience and got a court order.
A Fulton County Superior Court judge in Atlanta signed an order last year requiring True the Vote to provide evidence it had collected, including the names of people who were sources of information, to state elections officials who were frustrated by the group’s refusal to share evidence with investigators.
This week, True the Vote reported to the judge: It has nothing.
This has been the pattern for all of Trump’s Big Lie claims, going back to the court cases it filed immediately after the election: Tell the rubes who believe Trump that they have bountiful evidence of election fraud, and then, when challenged in court, produce nothing.
and the Super Bowl parade shooting
At the parade celebrating the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl win, 23 people were shot, including 11 children. One person died.
If you’re just talking about deaths or even injuries, this event doesn’t rank high on the list of recent mass shootings. But I think it will have a huge impact on the national psyche. Like the 4th of July shooting in Highland Park in 2022 and the 2017 shooting at a Las Vegas music festival, it reinforces the idea that in America, it’s not safe to be outdoors in a crowd — not unless the area has been locked down by police and you had to go through security to get in (like at an inauguration). If you do go to a big outdoor event, you’ll have a hard time not wondering whether the people around you are armed, or looking for snipers in the tall buildings.
Being armed yourself is no answer. In Kansas City, there were 800 armed police assigned to the parade area. All those “good guys with guns” couldn’t stop this from happening.
Other countries are not like this. The NRA rhetoric about guns “protecting our freedom” has it exactly backwards. We are less free than the citizens of other countries because we live under the tyranny of guns.
Remember those pro-Jesus He-Gets-Us Super Bowl ads? We now have a better understanding of what that’s about, thanks to Kristen Thomason at Baptist News. The effort is funded by shadowy conservative political groups that are trying to get churches to partner with them, helping churches with their outreach to local people looking for a church. The political goal is to gather enough information to make personal profiles of people who might be persuadable (through targeted marketing) to support conservative causes.
Former President Donald J. Trump has told advisers and allies that he likes the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban with three exceptions, in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother, according to two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s deliberations.
Other Republicans have tried to run on this “moderate” position recently, but without much success. That’s probably because it doesn’t satisfy the anti-abortion zealots, but it still has the logic flaw that the stricter abortion bans have: When you allow any exceptions, you’re admitting that the issue is not simple. Even after N weeks, there are still hard cases where difficult decisions need to be made. And then you’re assigning those decisions to the government rather than to the people who are actually involved and understand the details of the situation. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Here’s a scenario every ban-supporter ought to run through their exception protocols: A pregnant woman past the ban deadline discovers a cancerous tumor that is currently small but of a very aggressive type. Statistics indicate that if she has an abortion immediately and goes straight into chemotherapy, she has a 90% chance of survival. But if she waits a few months, delivers the baby, and then goes into chemotherapy, she has only 40% chance of survival. She and her husband decide to seek an exception because they really want her to live, and figure they can try again to have a baby later. What happens? Do they get the exception or not?
Can you imagine being in such a situation knowing that somebody else was making that decision for you?
Late to the party: I just noticed this episode of NYT’s “The Daily” podcast from December. If you have no idea what the whole phenomenon of Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift fandom is about, this would be a half-hour well spent.
Trump has a new explanation for why he repeatedly said “Nikki Haley” when he was talking about Nancy Pelosi: He meant to do that. He was being “sarcastic”. (I don’t think he actually understands what that word means.)
As I’ve said often before, we all knew people like Trump when we were six years old: They were never wrong. Anything they did was something they meant to do. Any game they didn’t win was rigged, and anybody who beat them cheated.
Maintaining such childish character traits into his late 70s is far scarier than saying the wrong name occasionally.
Vox explains the rush in several states to ban lab-grown meat, which barely exists yet, and is nowhere near being a marketable product. The associated politicians may give all kinds of reasons, but what this effort comes down to is protecting the meat industry as it currently exists.
The proposed bans are part of a longtime strategy by the politically powerful agribusiness lobby and its allies in Congress and statehouses to further entrench factory farming as America’s dominant source of protein. …
The cell-cultivated meat bans and the plant-based labeling restrictions represent one side of agribusiness’s policy coin: proactive measures to weaken upstarts that could one day threaten its bottom line. The other side of that coin is sweeping deregulation that has made meat abundant and cheap, but at terrible cost to the environment, workers, and animals.
Agriculture is exempt from the federal Animal Welfare Act, and most farms are exempt from the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, loopholes that have resulted in awful conditions for animals and widespread pollution.
Family farmers (like my Dad once was) are the poster children of this effort, but the money and political clout comes from the giant corporations that are pushing family farms into extinction.
I imagine that someday we’ll get lab-grown meat figured out, and some future generation will be able to enjoy all our favorite dishes without slaughtering sentient creatures. Probably they’ll look back on this era the way we look back on slavery, and be appalled that so many people worked so hard to hang on to their gory practices.
Speaking of animal welfare: One of the week’s stranger stories concerns plans for a 200-acre “mini-city of monkeys” in Georgia. The proposed breeding facility would house up to 30,000 long-tailed macaques for use in medical research. The plan faces protests from two sides: Residents of nearby Bainbridge (human population 14,000) are afraid the macaques will be bad neighbors, and animal rights activists oppose the cruelty of using such intelligent creatures for research.
Medical researchers argue back that they need primates precisely because they are so similar to humans. Without primate research, the first round of human tests of some possible medical advance would be far more dangerous.
About 70,000 monkeys a year are still used across the US in tests for treatments to infectious diseases, ageing and neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s, with researchers warning that the US is running low on available primates for tests.
I am reminded of some hard-won wisdom from a friend who studied psychology in graduate school: If a lemur gets loose and finds its way into a suspended ceiling, it’s almost impossible to catch.
and let’s close with a question
Usually, my closings are little amusing snippets, and if you’re looking for one, the story above about the “city of monkeys” is pretty close.
[W]atching the frenzy over President Biden’s age, I am, for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.
And the final blow won’t be the rise of political extremism — that rise certainly created the preconditions for disaster, but it has been part of the landscape for some time now. No, what may turn this menace into catastrophe is the way the hand-wringing over Biden’s age has overshadowed the real stakes in the 2024 election.
I’ve talked before about why I think Biden will beat Trump in the fall, but like Krugman (and like most of you, I suspect), I have moments when I just can’t believe where the national conversation has gotten to, and I get a vertiginous feeling in my stomach that says I don’t really know what can happen.
There’s something paralyzing about that fear, and I think we need to talk openly about it so that we can support each other these next several months. And even if we’re not paralyzed, actions taken out of fear are usually not effective. We’re going to do a better job saving the country if we have faced our fears and found our courage.
So here’s my question: If you have those moments of paralyzing or reactive fear, what do you do? Does it help? Do you have any insight in how to push through fear and come out the other side?
This was a week where you couldn’t tell the players without a program. Important things were happening in multiple Trump trials at once — a phenomenon I think we’ll see more of in the months ahead. But before going into the details, I want to talk about the general phenomenon: Why does Donald Trump keep losing in court?
Why Trump keeps losing. Friday, New York Judge Arthur Engoron issued his decision in the New York civil fraud case against Donald Trump, his adult sons, several Trump Organization companies, and two major Trump Organization executives: a $355 million “disgorgement” penalty, plus interest.
This is a huge amount of money, and it is just the latest of a series of Trump losses in court: the two E. J. Carroll lawsuits for defamation and sexual assault, which resulted in $88 million in damages; the criminal tax-fraud case against the Trump Organization ($1.6 million from the company and jail time for ex-CFO Allen Weisselberg); the Trump University civil fraud suit (settled out of court for $25 million), the Trump Foundation lawsuit ($2 million and dissolution of the foundation), and 61 of the 62 suits Trump filed in his attempt to overturn his loss in the 2020 election. (The one he won affected a tiny number of votes and had no effect on the election’s outcome.)
Trump, of course, paints this as years of harassment by a corrupt legal system, but I learn a much simpler lesson: Bullshitters don’t do well in court. A talented bullshitter can succeed in politics and/or business, but judges don’t have to put up with bullshit, and most of them won’t.
When he’s been caught doing something wrong, Trump’s usual damage-control technique is to spin out several mutually inconsistent stories until he sees which one is catching on. (January 6 is a great example: At first, the rioters were antifa rather than his supporters. Then they were his supporters, but they were conducting a mostly peaceful protest. Or maybe it was a riot, but he didn’t incite it. And now we’ve reached the point where it was a riot and they were his supporters, but they are patriots being railroaded by the same corrupt legal system that is railroading him.) His supporters latch on to whichever explanation rings true to them, ignoring the fact the Trump himself may have moved on to a different story.
He tried something similar in the NY civil-fraud trial: He claimed his financial statements weren’t false. Or maybe they were false, but they had a disclaimer. Besides, accuracy was the accountants’ responsibility, not Trump’s. In real estate, everybody’s financial statements are false. And the bankers are sophisticated people who should have known not to believe Trump’s claims. Pick whichever answer appeals you.
Trump’s string of losses demonstrates that his tactic doesn’t work in court, where the legal process is designed to reach a single narrative of events. Shifting back and forth from one excuse to another will just annoy a judge, who will communicate that annoyance to a jury, if there is one.
Another thing that doesn’t work in court is restarting arguments you’ve already lost. Trump’s lawyers keep repeating defenses that Engoron had already ruled against. (Like: The loans were repaid, so there was no fraud. More about this below.) That kind of doggedness can pay off in politics, because the public easily forgets how some point was debunked. But in court it just pisses a judge off.
The judge also added interest to the penalty, bringing the total to around $450 million. He denied the state’s request to ban Trump permanently from doing business in New York, and instead banned him for only three years, with sons Eric and Don Jr. banned for two. Engoron also decided not to revoke the Trump Organization’s certification to do business in New York (part of his earlier summary judgment that an appeals court had put a stay on), which would have effectively dissolved the company, since it is incorporated in New York.
The decision is dull reading, because Engoron goes through the witnesses one-by-one, summarizing what each one said and why it was believable, unbelievable, or irrelevant. Then he goes through Trump’s fraudulently valued properties one-by-one and lays out the evidence of fraud. This is important material to record for Trump’s inevitable appeal (since the appellate court won’t hold its own trial), but it can be tiresome to plow through.
Here are a few simple things I gleaned from the decision:
First, the shape of the fraud: When The Trump Organization was looking for loans during the 2010s, Deutsche Bank’s Private Wealth Management Division was the only bank that wanted to do business with them. In a series of deals, it offered two loan possibilities: a loan secured only by the real estate collateral, or a loan secured by the collateral plus Trump’s personal guarantee. The second loan had a significantly lower interest rate, and it was based on assertions about Trump’s net worth and available cash. Trump was then obligated to give Deutsche Bank annual statements of financial condition (SFCs) verifying that his net worth and available cash were still above certain thresholds.
Those SFCs are the fraudulent business records, and they were off by a lot. One type of fraud was to value Trump’s properties “as if” rather than “as is”. So for example, Mar-a-Lago is worth a lot more if it can be sold as a private residence, but its deed restricts it to being a social club. (Trump got a lower real-estate tax rate by agreeing to that restriction.) The SFCs list the value as if that restriction could be made to go away. Similar things happen all over the Trump empire: One property is valued as if Trump had permission to build 2500 residences, when in fact he only had permission to build 500. And so on.
Second, where did the $355 million figure come from? Engoron didn’t just pull it out of a hat, and punitive damages play no role. It is a disgorgement of ill-gotten gains. Basically, it’s the interest Trump saved by making the fraudulent guarantees, plus the capital gain from the sale of the Old Post Office hotel near the White House (which Trump would not have been able to buy without the fraudulently obtained loan). Eric and Don Jr. each give up $4 million, because that was their share of the Old Post Office gain.
Third, the fact that the penalty is a disgorgement is why Trump’s there-is-no-victim rhetoric is off-base. The point here isn’t to compensate a victim, it’s to protect “the integrity of the marketplace” by punishing fraud. Engoron quotes a precedent:
Disgorgement is distinct from the remedy of restitution because it focuses on the gain to the wrongdoer as opposed to the loss to the victim . Thus, disgorgement aims to deter wrongdoing by preventing the wrongdoer from retaining ill-gotten gains from fraudulent conduct.
By asking for the personal guarantee and demanding evidence of the wealth to back it up, Deutsche Bank was trying to protect itself against a possible downturn in real estate in general and in Trump’s fortunes in particular. As it happens, those risks didn’t manifest and the loans were repaid. But Engoron observes: “The next group of lenders to receive bogus statements might not be so lucky.”
This kind of disgorgement happens all the time in insider-trading cases: The SEC makes the traders give up their gains, even if it’s impossible to figure out exactly who they cheated. And the purpose is the same: to protect the integrity of the market by preventing cheaters from prospering.
Finally, I want to turn around one standard conservative criticism, which you’ll hear whenever Biden tries to forgive college loan debt: “But what about the people who follow the rules, the ones who took their debts seriously and paid them off? What do you say to them?”
In this case, what about the people who have been denied loans (or had to pay a higher sub-prime interest rate) because they filled out their applications honestly? Or people who can’t afford to pay an accountant to lie for them, the way Trump can? What do Trump’s defenders say to them?
The hush-money criminal case will go to trial March 25. This is the red-headed stepchild of the Trump indictments, but it looks like it will be the first one to go to trial. Slate’s Robert Katzberg expresses what I think everybody is thinking:
While the conduct charged is, no doubt, criminal, it feels a bit like prosecuting John Gotti for shoplifting. The Bragg prosecution is also clearly the weakest of the four outstanding indictments from an evidentiary perspective, especially when compared to the D.C. slam-dunk. … In an ideal world the D.C. prosecution would be first, allowing the world to see just how close we came to having the 2020 election overturned and the frightening degree to which the former president is a threat to our democracy. However necessary and appropriate that would have been, it is not where we are now. The Bragg case, while hardly the most desirable opening act, at least gets the show on the road.
This case stems from Trump paying off porn star Stormy Daniels to keep their affair secret during the 2016 presidential campaign. But the sex itself isn’t a crime and the fact of the payoff isn’t what’s being prosecuted: It’s the lengths Trump went to in order to hide the payoff from voters in 2016. He had Michael Cohen pay Daniels. Then the Trump Organization created a false paper trail to reimburse Cohen, and recorded the reimbursement as a business expense when it was actually a campaign expense. So the charge is falsification of business records.
The Georgia case. The RICO case against Trump and his election-stealing co-conspirators is currently on hold while the judge decides whether DA Fani Willis should be disqualified.
The issue is her romantic entanglement with another prosecutor on the case, who she hired, and the claim that he kicked back some of the money she is paying him by spending it on her during their affair, which they both claim is now over. (They both claim she paid her own way by reimbursing him in cash, leaving no records — which is a sensible thing to do if you hope to keep the affair secret.)
The stakes in this are huge, because if Willis is disqualified, quite possibly nobody else picks the case up and Trump walks. Certainly the case won’t be tried before the election.
On the other hand, that outcome seems unlikely to a number of observers, for this reason: Willis’ affair is certainly salacious and embarrassing, and it may even be unethical enough to result in some kind of discipline against Willis outside this case. But disqualifying her from this case requires showing prejudice against these defendants. And nothing they’ve put forward so far proves that.
As a matter of both common sense and Georgia law, a prosecutor is disqualified from a case due to a “conflict of interest” only when the prosecutor’s conflicting loyalties could prejudice the defendant leading, for example, to an improper conviction. None of the factual allegations made in the Roman motion have a basis in law for the idea that such prejudice could exist here – as it might where a law enforcement agent is involved with a witness, or a defense lawyer with a judge. We might question Willis’s judgment in hiring Wade and the pair’s other alleged conduct, but under Georgia law that relationship and their alleged behavior do not impact her or his ability to continue on the case.
My social media is full of a point that may not be legally relevant, but packs a political punch:
So Clarence Thomas can accept hundreds of thousands in gifts but Fani Willis can’t go dutch on dinner?
Jack Smith and presidential immunity. The question of whether former presidents are immune from prosecution for anything they did in office is now with the Supreme Court. Both Judge Chutkan and the DC Court of Appeals have rejected Trump’s immunity claim, which appears to be far-fetched and intended as a delaying tactic.
Other than Trump and his lawyers, I haven’t heard anyone predict that the Supreme Court will reverse the lower courts’ rulings and stop Jack Smith’s January 6 case in its tracks. However, it remains to be seen to what extent Trump allies on the Court will cooperate with his strategy to delay the case past Election Day.
(As I’ve commented before, Trump’s delay strategy is essentially an admission of guilt. An innocent man who believed he was being prosecuted purely for political reasons would want the case to be tried as soon as possible, so that he could get the vindication of a jury’s not-guilty verdict. But Trump knows that a jury that sees the evidence will convict him, so his best hope is to get reelected and then instruct his attorney general to drop the case.)
The key documents have already been filed with the Court: Trump’s application for a stay that will continue delaying the trial, Jack Smith’s response, and Trump’s reply to Smith. The arguments Trump’s lawyers are making are the same ones the lower courts rejected, and amount to “No, they’re wrong.” (BTW: I love that this case is Trump v the United States.)
The Court has a number of options, which Joyce Vance outlines, ranging from refusing to hear the appeal and letting the case continue as soon as possible, to scheduling lengthy briefings and not ruling on the case soon enough for the trial to be heard before the election.
Disqualification. We’re still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether the 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause applies to Trump (because of his role in the January 6 insurrection), and whether states (like Colorado) can enforce that disqualification from public office by refusing to list him on presidential ballots.
The judges sounded skeptical during the oral arguments, so it would be a shock if they ruled Trump ineligible. But it will be a challenge to square a Trump-is-eligible ruling with the conservative justices’ originalist philosophies. The Court works on its own clock, so a ruling could come tomorrow, at the end of the term in June, or any time in between.
I’m trying to write less about Trump and his trials, but this week that really was the news. Trump and his companies got fined hundreds of millions of dollars for fraud. Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis testified to defend herself against salacious claims that she should be disqualified from the Georgia RICO case against Trump. The New York case stemming from Trump trying to hide his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels will be the first of Trump’s criminal cases to go to trial (on March 25). Trump’s lawyers and Jack Smith traded filings to the Supreme Court on presidential immunity. And we’re still waiting for the Court to rule on whether the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from running for office again.
You can be forgiven for seeing a Trump-trial headline and thinking, “Wait. Which case is this again?”
Most weeks I try to keep all this in the weekly summaries, but this week sheer length made that infeasible. So the featured post is “A Big Week in the Trump Trials”. That should appear shortly. BTW, I think the mainstream media has done a bad job explaining how Judge Engoron came up with his $355 million figure, which he didn’t just pull out of the air, so I think most people will learn something from this post.
It’s not like nothing else happened this week. Putin critic Alexei Nevalny died in a Siberian prison, and Russian forces captured a Ukrainian city, calling extra attention to the Putin sympathizers in the House and their continuing blockade against resupplying the Ukrainian forces resisting Russian conquest. The Democrats flipped George Santos’ House seat, shrinking the Republican House majority by one, and raising questions about what this means for the November elections. The guy whose testimony was the lynchpin of James Comer’s effort to impeach President Biden was indicted for making the whole thing up. The group behind the whole 2000 Mules election-fraud conspiracy theory admitted in court that they have no evidence. There was a mass shooting at the Super Bowl victory parade in Kansas City. Ezra Klein posted the first Biden-shouldn’t-run argument that has made sense to me. And a few other things.
That will all be in the weekly summary, which I’ll try to get out by noon EST. I’m planning to do something a little different with the closing this week: I want to start a conversation about dealing with fear and finding courage as we move towards the November elections. I hope a lot of readers will comment.
This week everybody was talking about Biden’s memory
That’s the subject of the featured post. One of the things I learned during my father’s final years was the difference between aphasia (inability to find the right words) and dementia (inability to grasp situations). Biden’s occasional flubs look completely verbal to me, so they don’t seem worrisome. He knows what’s happening and is thinking clearly about it, even if he sometimes calls something or someone by the wrong name.
Trump makes similar mistakes all the time (probably as often as Biden) but the media doesn’t cover them the same way. I guess I understand why: It seems silly to worry about Trump saying the wrong words when the words he intends to say are so reprehensible. What if, when he wanted to call Democrats “vermin“, or accuse immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country“, he had accidentally said something else? Would that be worse?
What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone. He knew. He knew.
I haven’t seen a clear explanation of what Trump imagines Michael Haley knows. But where Haley has gone is no mystery: He’s a major in the South Carolina National Guard, and has been deployed to Africa since June. The Republican Party used to respect military service, but apparently it no longer does. Wherever Major Haley is, though, he has access to the internet, because he tweeted back:
The difference between humans and animals? Animals would never allow the dumbest ones to lead the pack.
Former President Donald Trump said Saturday he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if it attacked a NATO country that didn’t pay enough for defense.
When he says that kind of stuff on purpose, who has time to cover his misstatements?
and the Trump trials
The big news from early in the week was the DC Appeals Court ruling against Trump’s claim of “absolute presidential immunity”. The court rejected Trump’s arguments across the board, summing up its opinion like this:
For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.
For weeks, observers have been speculating about what was taking the court so long — nearly a month — to rule, and their opinion validated most of that speculation: The three judges were ironing out their differences so that they could write a single opinion in the name of the court. It seemed obvious from the beginning that none of the three agreed with Trump’s lawyers’ arguments, but if they had disagreed about why Trump was wrong, they would leave issues for the Supreme Court to resolve. As it is, the Court has the option to refuse Trump expected appeal and let the lower court decision stand.
Trump is expected to file his appeal to the Supreme Court today, because the appellate court’s stay on his DC trial runs out today, leaving Judge Tanya Chutken free to restart proceedings. Jay Kuo explains:
But here’s a fun fact: While it only takes four justices to agree to hear a case, it takes five justices to issue a stay. And a stay is what Trump really, really needs to keep running out the clock.
I feel like commentators are doing the public an injustice when they observe that Trump is trying to “run out the clock”, as if that were a natural thing to do. An innocent candidate for office would want to get his cases settled before the election, but Trump wants to delay past the election because he is guilty. His only hope to stay out of jail is to regain the presidency and use its powers to obstruct justice, so that no jury ever sees the evidence against him.
Thursday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in another Trump case, the one about whether the 14th Amendment bans him from office as an insurrectionist. The questions asked by almost all the justices were skeptical, and most observers have concluded that the Court really doesn’t want to be the reason Trump doesn’t become president again.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick discusses what she finds “The Most Galling Thing About the Supreme Court’s Trump Ballot Arguments“: taking seriously the idea that finding for Colorado would open a can of worms, as red states would then start throwing Democratic candidates off their ballots. The assumption behind this argument is that our justice system is incapable of distinguishing frivolous cases from well-founded cases.
Remember when Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support? Well, imagine if he did and the State of New York charged him with murder. Trump could then argue that the prosecution shouldn’t be allowed, because otherwise red states would start charging Democrats with murder.
Does that make any sense? I don’t think so, and I don’t think a similar argument in this case makes sense either.
We’re still waiting for a verdict in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial.
and the Gaza War
Since the ground attacks on Gaza started, Israel has been pushing the civilian population south, towards Rafah. CNN estimates that 1.3 million of Gaza’s two million people are now taking refuge there. The only place further south is Egypt, which is not accepting refugees.
Over the weekend, airstrikes on Rafah began. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society claims that over 100 people have been killed, but says the exact death toll is hard to know because people may still be trapped under rubble.
Last night, an Israeli raid into Rafah rescued two Israeli hostages.
There is beginning to be some daylight between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government. In the press conference where President Biden responded to the Hur report, he characterized the Israeli response to the October 7 attacks as “over the top” and said
There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop.
Secretary Blinken has been trying to negotiate a ceasefire. The most recent Hamas proposal was for
a ceasefire of 4-1/2 months, during which all hostages would go free, Israel would withdraw its troops from Gaza and an agreement would be reached on an end to the war.
Prime Minister Netanyahu described this proposal as “delusional” and instead pledged to push on for “total victory” over “all of Hamas”.
and the failed Mayorkas impeachment
Something about the conservative mindset that’s been true for a long time: They’d rather focus on good and bad people than good or bad policy. So a scapegoat or a savior is more important than a plan to make things better. (You can see this happening in the presidential campaign: The point is to glorify Trump and promise that everything will be better after he’s back in power. But what will he do differently than Biden? Don’t worry about that.)
Case in point: The border. The Senate negotiated a tough bipartisan compromise to try to improve things at the border, but then Trump and his minions rejected it without any alternative proposal beyond “Elect Trump”. Simultaneously, House Republicans tried to impeach the secretary of Homeland Security, Aleyandro Mayorkas, for not solving the problems at the border. So: We don’t need new policies or new funding, we just need to punish somebody we don’t like. That’ll fix everything.
There are really no grounds for impeaching Mayorkas: no criminal activity, no personal scandals, etc. He’s just overseeing a badly broken immigration system that Congress has been refusing to fix for decades. All the problems would still be there if he were gone.
Not to worry, though, because in the end Speaker Johnson counted his votes wrong, and the impeachment failed 214-216. This kind of thing never happened to Nancy Pelosi: If she brought something to the floor, she had the votes to pass it.
Republicans are going to try again, though, because Rep. Steve Scalise may return soon from cancer treatment, and because they have nothing else to do.
Meanwhile, the Senate is trying to repair the damage done when Trump turned against the border/Israel/Ukraine compromise that was set to pass. Originally, the parts of the bill dealing with the border were put in because Republicans demanded them as a price for Ukraine aid. (Otherwise, they seem content to let Putin take over Ukraine. One fascist hand washes the other, I suppose.) But then Trump decided that solving a problem (which his party keeps saying is an existential crisis for our country) would give Biden a victory and help him claim that he is actually governing. Can’t have that, so the bill had to die.
So a bill with just Israel and Ukraine aid is moving through the Senate, having jumped a couple of procedural hurdles this week. (Bizarrely, Lindsey Graham wants to add amendments with border funding, creating a Groundhog Day causal loop.) It might move faster, but Rand Paul is blocking the unanimous consent necessary to vote sooner.
and you also might be interested in …
Yesterday, two pro-Christian Super Bowl ads promoted the slogan “He gets us” — “he” being Jesus. This campaign has been around for a while, but it seems that many people noticed it for the first time yesterday. The leftist magazine Jacobin traced the money. It comes from the billion-dollar Servant Foundation, which also has contributed $50 million to the Alliance Defending Freedom. The “freedoms” ADF defends are the states’ right to take over women’s healthcare decisions, and businesses’ right to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
So maybe the “us” in “He gets us” isn’t as all-encompassing as the ads make it sound.
Meanwhile, my social media feed was blowing up with the observation that If Jesus had that many millions on hand, he would probably use it to feed the poor rather than to buy Super Bowl ads. It does seem like a rather mysterious way for the Lord to work.
It was widely reported before the game that Tucker Carlson threatened to kill himself if Taylor Swift’s boyfriend’s team won the Super Bowl. (The claim appears to be false.) Yesterday, Travis Kelce’s Chiefs did win, starting a Tucker death watch.
Unfortunately for Tucker’s career, which has gone into eclipse since Fox News sacked him, Putin did what dictators often do: gave a long boring speech that few Americans will be interested in. Putin has this theory of history, going back to the Middle Ages, saying that Ukraine is not really a country and has no right to exist separate from Russia.
It’s not hard to imagine King George making a similar speech about his 13 American colonies, so Americans are unlikely to be persuaded. To Americans, nationhood is a covenant between people, and is not based on some essentialist theory about race, language, and culture. If a bunch of people get together and declare themselves a nation, who are you to tell them they’re not?
Anyway, it appears that the point was to impress Russians with how seriously Putin’s ideas are taken by Americans, and not to actually convince American viewers of anything. It was an internal propaganda victory similar to the victory Kim Jong Un got by meeting with Trump.
Prior to the interview, Tucker put out a video defending his decision to do it. I have no real argument with the points he was making, but I think he was making them in bad faith: Yes, Americans should hear from voices that the American mainstream paints as villainous, but those people should be asked hard questions, challenged when they lie, and fact-checked afterward. Tucker did none of that.
Also, I suspect he won’t apply his reasoning evenly. For example, the same logic would lead him to interview the leaders of Iran and the Taliban, something I suspect he won’t do. He interviewed Putin not for any noble journalistic reason, but because he supports Putin.
Climate scientist Michael Mann won his defamation lawsuit against two conservative critics. He was awarded only $1 from each in compensation, but one of the two was hit with $1 million in punitive damages.
and let’s close with something in bad taste
Everybody who tries to cook has had the experience: You look at a recipe, have high hopes, and then something else happens entirely. In the end, you see that the outcome was completely predictable, but somehow that wasn’t obvious beforehand.
Well, you can always laugh. The Tasty Area website has collected extreme kitchen fails that will make you feel brilliant by comparison. My favorite is the guy who cooked his pasta from both ends at once.
The Hur Report. Thursday, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page document reporting on his investigation into classified documents President Biden returned to the government after they were found among his papers at the University of Delaware and in his home. The conclusion of that report is in its first line:
We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter. We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.
In a report that followed Department of Justice traditions and guidelines, that would be the headline: We looked for evidence of prosecutable crimes and didn’t find any. For comparison, the special prosecutor tasked with investigating classified documents found in former Vice President Pence’s home also decided (last June) that no charges were warranted. The NBC News headline was “DOJ closes Pence classified documents investigation with no charges“.
The second paragraph of such an article would have quoted Hur outlining the difference between this case and former President Trump’s classified documents case:
It is not our role to assess the criminal charges pending against Mr. Trump, but several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear. Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts.
Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview. and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.
But the Hur report was covered very differently, because in addition to summarizing his investigation, Hur also gratuitously speculated on how Biden would defend himself at a trial.
In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute. When Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter he “just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” he could have been referring to something other than the Afghanistan documents, and our report discusses these possibilities in detail.
We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.
Throughout, the document casts inappropriate and unnecessary aspersions on Biden’s memory and mental processes.
Mr. Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations-both at the time he spoke to [ghostwriter Mark] Zwonitzer in 2017, as evidenced by their recorded conversations, and today, as evidenced by his recorded interview with our office. Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.
Thursday night, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes commented on how needlessly editorialized this was: Painfully? Who was supposed to be in pain? Ordinary human difficulties — struggling to interpret handwritten notes from years ago, or speaking slowly when you are trying to get something exactly right — are cast in the light of disability. The report then continues:
In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.
This, again, paints something perfectly ordinary in a negative light: There’s no indication that Biden has really forgotten “when he was vice president” or “when his son Beau died”, just that he sometimes attaches the wrong year-numbers to these memories. This happens to me (and to Paul Krugman) all the time. A frequent exchange with my wife is “When did we move here? 2018? 2019?” And then we work it out because she was turning 65 and wanted to start Medicare in Massachusetts. Same thing with my father’s death: I know his birth year and that he lived to be 90; that’s the only way I remember what year he died. But I have not at all forgotten “when my father died”; I can tell you precisely where I was and what I was doing.
In general, I remember the years personal events happened only if I’ve had to list them on a resume. (Krugman gives the example of recalling the year his mother died: He figures it out by remembering when he left Princeton for CUNY.) Otherwise, I have to think about it. That’s been true all my life and has nothing to do with aging.
If you can’t identify with those examples because your memory works differently, let me try an analogy: It’s like the difference between forgetting the dates of the Civil War (1861-1865) and forgetting the Civil War. (“Like, didn’t a bunch of states secede once or something?”)
It’s hard to argue with Krugman’s conclusion that the report was written by somebody who knows that Republicans want to make a political issue out of Biden’s mental acuity and wants to help them do it. Hur’s legitimate conclusions as an investigator are of no use in this regard, so he contributes in other ways.
Contrast Hur’s behavior with Jack Smith’s. Smith has played it by the book: He has investigated alleged crimes, and when he has found sufficient evidence, he has presented that evidence in indictments. Does he know other embarrassing details about Donald Trump’s life? Quite possibly. But if they’re irrelevant to the crimes he’s indicting, he doesn’t talk about them.
For example, back in December there were reports in the press that Trump literally stinks “of armpits, ketchup, and butt”. Has Smith’s investigation turned up anything related to that? He hasn’t seen fit to tell us, because reeking is not an indictable crime.
There’s a reason the Justice Department has standards about this kind of thing. Criminal investigation is one of the most invasive things our Constitution allows the government to do. So unless the investigation turns up something actually criminal, investigators should remain circumspect about what they think, and certainly should not use the authority of their investigation to defame or denigrate people they are not prosecuting.
The Egypt/Mexico mistake. Biden was understandably angry with Hur’s report, and held a press conference to say so. Unfortunately, as he was walking out of the room, he took one more question about an unrelated subject: his efforts to negotiate a release of the hostages Hamas is holding. Responding off-the-cuff, he said this:
I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in Gaza — in the Gaza Strip has been over the top. I think that — as you know, initially, the President of Mexico [Egypt], El-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.
I talked to Bibi to open the gate on the Israeli side. I’ve been pushing really hard — really hard to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza. There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop.
OK, I’m biased to like this statement, because Biden’s views on the Gaza War have shifted in the same direction as mine. (See what I wrote last week.) But there is that mistake: He said “Mexico” when he meant “Egypt”. (Notice: He got the name of Egypt’s president right. So he clearly knew what country he was talking about.)
People have tried to draw a lot of conclusions from this mistake, but again, I do stuff like that all the time. So does Trump. In this clip, for example, he says, “We’re going to defund our freedoms.” (Presumably he meant “defend”.) In this one, he recalls (falsely) what he did after the World Trade Center was attacked on seven-eleven. More recently, he said “Nikki Haley” when he meant “Nancy Pelosi”.
I think most people do stuff like this from time to time: You reach into your mental bag of words in a category, and you come out with the wrong one. (In Biden’s case, the category is “countries on the other side of some significant border”. In Trump’s it’s “women who get in my way.”) Speaker Mike Johnson made a comparable mistake on Meet the Press a week ago yesterday. “We passed the support for Iran many months ago.” (He meant Israel, another Middle Eastern country beginning with I.) Johnson is 52.
Aphasia vs. dementia. Obviously, this kind of mistake happens more often as people get older. I have a lot of experience with this phenomenon, because in his later years, my Dad developed a far worse case of aphasia than anything Biden or Trump have demonstrated. Eventually, it reached the point where he called every meal “lunch”.
But it’s important not to confuse aphasia (problems recalling words) with dementia (problems grasping the situation). For example, Dad saying “lunch” did not reflect any confusion about what time of day it was or when he had eaten last. “Lunch” was just the easiest meal-word to find. (On a road trip, we went to “lunch” first thing in the morning, before getting on the highway. Dad ordered breakfast.)
You might worry that dementia is a natural progression from aphasia, but that’s not how it works. There’s a relationship, but the causality runs in the other direction: Problems in your thinking will lead you to use inappropriate words. But in general, pulling the wrong word out of memory (or no word at all) doesn’t screw up your thinking. So Dad’s aphasia kept getting worse, but he knew who he was, where he was, what he was doing, and who I was all the way up to his last days. (I remember one extreme example: Dad wanted a tool for some home maintenance project he was doing. He couldn’t come up with the name of the tool, the store he wanted to go to, or the street it was on. So he told me to get in the car, and then gave instructions — turn left, turn right — taking us directly to the paint store. He got the tool, we drove home, and he continued his project.)
So I cringed when I heard Biden say “Mexico”, but only because I knew how people would react. His misstatement did not at all cause me to worry that he did not grasp the world situation, or that he would start using the powers of the presidency in some delusional way.
Trump, on the other hand, has lived in a delusional world for decades. In his world, he has always been right, people oppose him because of some inexplicable hatred unrelated to his behavior, he has a mystical “strength” that causes the world to warp around him, his personal charm changes the behavior of dictators, and his wealth comes from mastering “the art of the deal” rather than via a vast inheritance and a lifetime of fraud.
Biden will undoubtedly continue to say the wrong words now and then. But I can live with that, because I trust him (and not Trump) to stay rooted in the real world.
If things were worse than that, how would we know? There would be defectors from inside the Biden administration. Unlike Trump, Biden isn’t the focus of a personality cult. People who work with him may like Joe Biden, and they may feel a certain loyalty to him, but they are primarily Americans and Democrats rather than Biden-worshippers. If something were wrong with him that endangered the country and threatened the goals of the Democratic Party, at least a few insiders would come out and say so. Cabinet secretaries, speech writers, White House aides … they’d hate doing it, but at least a few of them would: “It’s worse than it looks,” they’d say. “We have to do something.”
But look around. That’s not happening. The people disparaging Biden’s competence are precisely the people who don’t work with him, the people who wouldn’t know. Even Republicans, like Kevin McCarthy, come out of their dealings with Biden saying that he’s sharper than you think.
What should Biden and the Democrats do? Immediately: nothing.
These last few days, pundits of all sorts have been trying to stampede Biden into resigning or Democrats into abandoning him. This is crazy: Biden has been a very good president and there’s no reason to think he won’t have an equally good second term, despite the unforgivable sin of saying “Mexico” when he meant “Egypt”.
On the flip side of that panic, it’s tempting to want to make some dramatic gesture to prove how sharp Biden is. But that’s likely to be counterproductive in the same way that Richard Nixon saying “I am not a crook” was counterproductive. “I don’t have dementia” is exactly the kind of thing somebody with dementia would say.
Immediately, Biden should let the wave of hysteria pass. Get on with governing. Give a good State of the Union address. Keep working on a truce in Gaza. An oval office message about something else entirely — the importance of not letting Ukraine fall to Russia, for example — would help.
After the dust settles a little, Biden should sit for more one-on-one interviews, like this one he did with John Harwood ten days before his interview the special counsel. When you watch this kind of exchange, you quickly realize that Biden has a mental dexterity Trump lacks: He can listen to a question, process it, and produce a thoughtful answer germane to what was asked. Asking Biden a question is like playing catch: You throw him a question, he fields it, and throws an answer back. But asking Trump a question is like bouncing a rubber ball off an irregular stone wall: It will ricochet quickly, but in a direction that doesn’t seem to have much to do with your throw.
And finally, Biden needs to laugh. This is tricky, but Ronald Reagan pulled it off. When a questioner raised the age issue during a debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, Reagan made a solemn pledge:
I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.
In a week in which the DC Appeals Court ruled against former President Trump’s claim of “absolute immunity”, the biggest headline ended up being about Biden: Special Counsel Hur’s report found no crime worth indicting in his retention of classified documents, but threw the Trump campaign a bunch of red meat anyway by gratuitously opining on Biden’s age and memory. That produced a firestorm of speculation about Biden’s mental competence, which he exacerbated in a press conference by saying “Mexico” when he meant “Egypt”.
It’s been weird watching how Biden’s mistakes are covered differently from Trump’s. After all, how can you fault Trump for saying the wrong word (which he does all the time), when the words he intends to say are so evil, like calling immigrants “vermin”, or encouraging Russia to attack our NATO allies.
Anyway, it turns out I know something about people who use the wrong words as they get older. Aside from doing it occasionally myself (as most people of all ages do), I dealt with my Dad in his final years, when he had an extreme case of aphasia. Aphasia (inability to find the right words) can look like dementia (inability to think clearly), but it’s completely different, and anybody who has dealt with aphasic people can easily distinguish between the two. To sum up today’s featured post: Biden’s problems with words do not bother me. I think Democrats should let this wave of pundit hysteria pass and get on with the task of saving democracy from fascism.
That post should appear shortly.
That leaves the weekly summary a lot to cover: the appeals court ruling and what it means for Jack Smith’s DC indictment, Israel pushing its attacks into the last refuge of most Gazans and the Biden administration’s slow separation from the Netanyahu government, Trump outdoing himself with outrageous comments about NATO and Haley’s husband’s military deployment, Tucker Carlson’s Putin interview, the Jesus ads in Super Bowl, and a few other things.
That has to be out by noon, because I’ve got stuff to do today.
This week everybody was talking about the widening war
This feels like one of those recurring nightmares where you know what’s going to happen, but can only watch as it does. Biden responded to last week’s attack on a US outpost in Jordan by hitting Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as continuing to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen. It is simultaneously impossible to imagine (1) the US government doing nothing after American soldiers are killed, and (2) our counterattacks achieving anything.
On the one hand, Biden would surely be facing a political firestorm even bigger than the current one if American soldiers died and he did nothing. But I can’t imagine that the groups we’re striking are saying, “Wow, we need to stop what we’re doing.” A third alternative would be to hit the source, Iran, but that looks even worse to me.
In a different century, the great powers would get together in some grand conference with everything on the table. I’m not sure why that couldn’t happen now.
and sabotage in Congress
When Democrats run against Republican congressmen in the fall, their hardest task is going to be convincing voters that the Republicans really did what they’re doing right now. A lot of voters will listen to a true account and just say, “No. Surely not. You must be exaggerating.”
So Ukraine, which is fighting for its life against an invasion by Trump’s buddy Putin, needs weapons from us to defend itself. At first, supplying them was a bipartisan priority, with only some extremists like Matt Gaetz holding out. Then about half of the Republican conference turned against Ukraine aid, and Speakers McCarthy and then Johnson decided Ukraine aid was a hostage they could get Biden to pay some ransom for. Their rhetoric paired Ukraine with our own problems at the Mexican border (something like “Why are we paying for Ukraine to protects its borders when we’re not protecting our own?”), even though the two really have nothing to do with each other.
The result was a three-part package including Ukraine aid, aid to Israel, and money to better protect the border. Republicans decided that wasn’t enough, so they insisted on policy changes in addition to money. The Senate negotiated a bipartisan compromise, which included most of what Republicans had been asking for.
But then Trump turned against it, because passing any border legislation at all would allow Biden to say that he has done something about the border. So: It’s a terrible, terrible crisis, but let’s not do anything about it, because any problem that gets solved (or even addressed) while Biden is president will make it harder to unseat him in November.
In other words: The border is just a talking point for Republicans. They don’t actually want to do anything about it.
Even with Trump’s opposition, a majority of the House probably supports this Ukraine/Israel/border bill. So Speaker Johnson has decided not to hold a vote on it. Instead, the House will vote on a stand-alone Israel-aid bill.
Even after Trump is out of office, Putin continues to reap benefits from helping him get elected.
With all the border rhetoric, it’s hard to sort out what is really happening and how serious it is. The Big Picture blog does a good job with that.
and Biden’s South Carolina victory
Remember how “nobody really likes Biden” and “nobody wants to see a Biden-Trump rematch”? Well, Saturday in South Carolina, actual Democratic voters got a chance to cast a protest vote against renominating Joe Biden. They didn’t. Biden got 96.2% of the vote, with Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson splitting the remainder.
Now, you can say that those aren’t real candidates, not like Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or whoever your favorite Democrat might be. But if you wanted more choices in the election, the way to ask for them was to vote against Biden. Not many people did.
If Phillips and/or Williamson had gotten 30-40% of the vote, we’d be having different conversation, as the Democrats did in 1968. (LBJ won the New Hampshire primary 48%-42% over Gene McCarthy, but he looked at the level of resistance he was facing and dropped out.) The press would be approaching other prominent Democrats asking “Are you sure you don’t want to step in?” But the electorate seems to have no real appetite for that.
James Fallows reviews the long series of “Biden is doomed because …” narratives mainstream media has given us, and how they’ve fared.
We’re at a point where the polls will tell you whatever you want to hear. Want to believe Biden is in trouble? CNN has Trump ahead 49%-45%. Want to believe Biden is doing fine? Quinnipiac says Biden is ahead 50%-44%.
Personally, I remain optimistic, though I won’t fully relax until I’m listening to Biden’s second inaugural address. My general impression is that public sentiment is more-or-less even right now, but that Biden has a better story to tell going forward: The economy is doing quite well, and was in terrible shape when Trump left office. (You don’t have to blame Trump for the pandemic shutdown to realize that Biden was handed a tough situation.)
Plus, he has achieved some noteworthy liberal goals: The percentage of Americans without health insurance is at an all-time low. The expansion of the child tax credit in Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan reduced the childhood poverty rate to an all-time low. (Biden tried to make the credit permanent, but Congress wouldn’t go along, so the rate rebounded after the credit expired. The pending bipartisan tax bill would reinstate it at a lower level.)
And that’s even before you start looking at Trump’s personal issues: It’s been established in court that he is a sexual predator. His mental lapses (and general tendency to babble) is far worse than anything Biden has shown. Who knows how long he (and the judge he appointed) can delay the trial, but the evidence in the Mar-a-Lago case — that he took classified documents he had no right to, stored them sloppily, showed them to people not authorized to see them, and lied to the government when it asked for them back — is quite strong, and Trump has offered no credible explanation for it. (If his indictments were really the politically-motivated nonsense he claims, wouldn’t he be eager to get a jury of ordinary Americans to rule on them?) His effort to stay in office after clearly losing the 2020 election (the subject of another federal case as well as the Georgia RICO case) is one of the worst things any American president has ever done.
I think that for now a lot of Americans are withholding judgment about whether Trump is actually guilty — he is — or whether the charges are all politics, as he claims. As the cases proceed and the election gets closer, I think a bunch of those voters will turn to Biden.
One additional thing makes me hopeful: There will be a Republican Convention this summer. People will watch, and the MAGA folks will be scary. They can’t help themselves, because they believe their own propaganda that says they represent the real American majority.
Trump does have one outstanding talent that we have to watch out for: He’s very good at claiming credit and avoiding blame. Why is the stock market at a record high? Because investors are anticipating his return to office, of course. He doesn’t need to have a policy for dealing with the Gaza situation, because Hamas would be behaving itself if he were president, so the whole situation wouldn’t have come up. Ditto for the Ukraine War; it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been re-elected (which he still says he was), and he could solve it in 24 hours now, through some negotiating method that he needn’t elaborate on. Any claims he makes about “the Trump economy” conveniently ignore the fourth year of his term, when millions of jobs were lost and the deficit skyrocketed. A large part of what he is selling is a magical return to 2019; Covid was a bad dream that he will wave away with his amazing powers.
and Taylor
I had a Swift picture in last week’s Sift and didn’t really want to write about her again, but it’s hard not to. Last night she won the Album of the Year grammy, her fourth, a record.
Most of this week my social media feed was full of articles about the Right going nuts over Taylor and her boyfriend Travis Kelce, who will play in the Super Bowl Sunday as a star of the Kansas City Chiefs. I had a hard time deciding whether the Right was broadly going nuts, or if a few Trump cultists were going nuts and the liberal side of the media couldn’t resist a story that makes the Right look this bad.
A related story I should have covered when it came out two weeks ago was the AI-generated porn images of Swift, which circulated across various social-media platforms before most (but probably not all) of them were taken down. (I can’t tell you how easy they are to find now, because I’ve resisted the urge to look for them. Please don’t post links in the comments.) I don’t think anyone knows exactly who distributed these images or why, but it seems hard to believe that the timing is a coincidence: Swift runs afoul of MAGA, and then fake porn images of her circulate. Attacking the sexual reputation of a troublesome woman is a tactic as old as time. Jill Filipovic observes:
Swift is also a person who many on the right seek to humiliate, degrade and punish – the same aims as the creators of deepfake porn.
Undoubtedly we’ll see more of this, as AI-assisted image-processing tools get into more and more hands. The popular ones supposedly have safeguards against being used this way, but I don’t think it takes much know-how to circumvent those protections. We need to start thinking about how ordinary junior-high girls are going to fend off these kinds of attacks.
but here are some interesting articles to think about
There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes — even skeptics will pray when facing death. But Hancock, in the time leading up to his execution, only became more insistent about his nonbelief. He and his chaplain were both confident that there was no God who might grant last-minute salvation, if only they produced a desperate prayer. They had only one another.
Personally, I am not an adamant there-is-no-God atheist, but I’m also not anticipating any particular afterlife. I’ve watched both believers and non-believers face the reality of death, and I can’t see that it makes any real difference in how well they deal with the experience. One misperception I think a lot of believers share, though, is that idea that unbelievers could believe if they just wanted to. I don’t think it’s that simple. Some things, to some people, are just unbelievable.
I will add that I would much rather go to a nonsectarian funeral than one based in a religion with a lot of dogma. Too often, church funerals are more about propping up the dogma than about the life of the deceased. If we’re just going to talk about Jesus and Heaven and God’s plan, it could be anybody in the casket.
Eric Klinenberg previews some ideas from his forthcoming book on 2020 “the year everything changed”, by claiming that we’re not fully appreciating what the pandemic did to us: It isn’t just that people died and the rest of us missed out on a lot of experiences. More fundamentally, the pandemic shook our faith in our whole society.
I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust. The result is a durable crisis in American civic life. … [L]oneliness was never the core problem. It was, rather, the sense among so many different people that they’d been left to navigate the crisis on their own. How do you balance all the competing demands of health, money, sanity? Where do you get tests, masks, medicine? How do you go to work — or even work from home — when your kids can’t go to school?
The answer was always the same: Figure it out. Stimulus checks and small-business loans helped. But while other countries built trust and solidarity, America — both during and after 2020 — left millions to fend for themselves.
Last year, Mary Wood got reprimanded for teaching Ta Nahisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me in her AP English class in Chapin, SC. This year, she has read all the relevant rules, checked all the boxes, and is trying again.
To me, Wood represents a living refutation of the “Great Man” theory of history. When big waves wash across society, like the anti-woke movement of the last few years, lots and lots of ordinary people either resist or submit. And that’s what determines how it all shakes out.
Remember when rising healthcare spending was going to swamp our whole economy? Something happened right about the time ObamaCare kicked in — claiming cause-and-effect is probably a bit much at this point — and healthcare’s percentage of the economy leveled off.
and you also might be interested in …
The Trump trials are still mostly on hold while we wait for judges to decide things. Reporters keep telling us that something could happen any minute on a variety of topics, but I’m going to wait until something actually happens before I comment again.
Idaho was trying to repeal its ban against public subsidies for religious schools, and then a spokesman for Satanic Idaho spoke in favor of the bill.
I look forward to the opportunity to be able to start a Satanic K-12 performing arts school, and being able to have access to the same funds that any other religious school would have.
Apparently the proposal is on hold now. God alone knows when we’ll get to see that Satanic performing-arts school.
Pregnancy from rape has long been a headache for the anti-abortion movement. If some man forces you to have sex, you get pregnant, and then the government forces you to spend nine months turning your rapist’s DNA into a baby — that doesn’t sound much like “freedom”, does it? And even if the man eventually gets sent to jail, his genes have already won the struggle to survive for another generation. So the government has validated rape as a viable evolutionary strategy.
Over the years, forced-pregnancy defenders have dealt with this problem in a variety of ways. Back in 2012, US Senate candidate Todd Akin just denied it altogether: Rape pregnancies don’t really happen, he claimed, because
If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
Sadly for him, that appeal to biological wishful thinking didn’t go over well, and he lost a very winnable seat in Missouri to Claire McCaskill by 15%.
Also in 2012, Senate candidate Rich Mourdock of Indiana confronted the challenge in more religious terms:
I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.
But that didn’t fly either. PIcturing rape as just another one of God’s mysterious ways, and even implicitly suggesting a woman ought to be grateful for a “gift” that bears an unfortunate resemblance to her worst nightmares — it was too much of a stretch, even in a heavily Evangelical state like Indiana. Mourdock lost to Democrat Joe Donnelly by 6%, and the Republicans missed their shot to control the Senate.
By 2021, then, Republicans had learned a few lessons. So after a six-week abortion ban with no rape exception took effect in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott came at the issue from a different angle, one more in line with the GOP’s tough-on-crime image: Forced pregnancy wasn’t going to be a problem for much longer, because Texas was going to eliminate rape. How could any feminist be against that?
Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them
According to their study, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies occurred in Texas during the 16 months after the state legislature banned abortion. That figure comprises nearly 45% of all such pregnancies estimated to occur among the nine ban states that did not make a legal exception for rape.
That’s 26K Texas women who have had their most basic freedoms taken away from them.
Here’s a suggestion for Governor Abbott: How about trying this in the opposite order? Eliminate rape first, and then the grateful women of Texas might be ready to listen to your ideas about abortion.
While we wait for the Supreme Court to rule on Trump’s eligibility for office, consider the legislator-eligibility case in Oregon: The rules of the state senate require a 2/3rds quorum to do any business, which means that a minority of senators can delay any bill they don’t like by just not showing up.
Republicans have been the minority in Oregon for some while, so walkouts are seen as a partisan tactic. Jay Kuo notes
Republicans in Oregon began walking out in 2019 and didn’t really stop. They did it again in 2020, and again in 2021. By summer of 2023, they had walked out a total of seven times in four years.
In 2022, voters overwhelmingly passed Measure 113, which says that legislators with 10 or more unexcused absences are ineligible for reelection. But in 2023, Republicans shut down the senate for six weeks to stop an abortion-rights law. As a result Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade ruled ten of the 11 Republican senators ineligible to appear on the 2024 or 2026 ballot.
The Republicans sued, and Thursday the state supreme court unanimously upheld the exclusion. So it can happen. As Kuo notes, there’s no reason some other Republican couldn’t win one of those 10 seats.
But it might give serious pause to any future senator thinking about walking out but actually planning to stay in office longer than one term.
Judd Legum’s Popular Information blog documents just how far off the deep end Moms for Liberty have gone and how crazy the response has been in Florida. The Indian River County school district has begun drawing clothes onto naked characters in children’s books, including Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. The book was published in 1970 and was named a Caldecott Honor Book, but apparently it’s been corrupting Indian River children for the last half century. The whole article reads like parody, but I don’t think it is.
While we’re talking about Florida, the state where American freedom goes to die, Gov. DeSantis is backing a law to make lab-grown meat illegal. A senator promoting the bill, Jay Collins of Tampa, gives this odd justification:
Let’s look at what you’re doing here. You’re growing cells in a cultivated petri dish and creating protein to eat. There are many ethical boundaries that this steps in and frankly, over.
I mean, if you believe cattle-raising is an important industry that state government ought to protect from competition, that’s at least a coherent thought that reflects certain political realities. But the whole point of lab-grown meat is for people to be able to eat a hamburger without participating in the death of a conscious being, and (one hopes) without the strain our meat habit currently inflicts on the environment. And that’s unethical? Plus: Of all the lab-produced things that wind up in our food, this is the one that bothers you?
The group that got the Supreme Court to outlaw affirmative action in civilian universities now has a lawsuit challenging affirmative action at West Point, the Army’s primary officer-training institution. Students for Fair Admission has been seeking a restraining order that would stop race-based admission practices at West Point until the lawsuit could be resolved. Friday, the Supreme Court denied that request in a terse order saying that “the record before this court is underdeveloped”, and giving no hint as to its views on the merits of the case. Vox’ Ian Millhiser elaborates.
the Supreme Court has historically shown a great deal of deference to the military. As the Court said in Gilligan v. Morgan (1973), “[I]t is difficult to conceive of an area of governmental activity in which the courts have less competence” than questions involving “the composition, training, equipping, and control of a military force.” … So there’s a real chance that this Court, despite its recent opinion in Harvard, could decide that the judiciary’s long tradition of deferring to the military on personnel and related matters should continue to hold in the West Point case.
The military has long been a bit ahead of the rest of the country on racial issues. For example: An executive order from President Truman in 1948 said:
It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.
Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that struck down “separate but equal” public schools, didn’t happen until 1954, and segregation in public accommodations (i.e., businesses open to the public) wasn’t banned until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I don’t have a peace plan. I just want the destruction to stop.
One of the more intriguing stories in Genesis happens in chapter 18: God visits Abraham in human form, along with two companions. As he is about to leave, God lets Abraham in on a divine secret: He is about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. He tells his companions why he thinks Abraham needs to know about this:
Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just
Like many passages in the Bible, there are at least two ways to read this: Maybe Abraham needs to know how evil nations are punished, and to teach his children, so that the nation of his descendants will know better than to be like Sodom. [1] But the conversation develops in such a way as to allow a second interpretation. Abraham knows his nephew Lot lives in Sodom, and he worries that God will kill evil and good people indiscriminately. So he pushes back against God’s judgment.
Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?
Gods agrees that he should save Sodom for the sake of fifty. And then Abraham begins to bargain. What about 45 good people? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? Each time, God agrees. And then the text says only “When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left”, not telling us whether Abraham pushed no further or God cut the discussion short.
Again, there are at least two ways to read this: Maybe God already knows that there aren’t ten righteous people in Sodom, and he indulges Abraham because the concessions he grants are moot; he’s going to destroy Sodom one way or the other. Or maybe something else is happening. Maybe this conversation establishes the idea of acceptable and unacceptable levels of collateral damage. Maybe that’s the lesson that God is drawing out of Abraham, so that he can pass it down to the great and powerful nation of his descendants. [2]
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as the world watches the city of Gaza be destroyed. [3]
Immediately after October 7, my sympathies were entirely with the Israelis. The coordinated attacks of that day, targeted at places of no military value, apparently aimed at killing and carrying off as many civilians as possible, could not be tolerated. The people who planned and carried out those attacks could not be allowed to sit in safety and plot another one. And Hamas is famous for using civilians as shields, so I accepted that an Israeli counterattack would kill some number of innocent Gazans.
But not any number of innocent Gazans.
As of January 20, this was the British Red Cross‘ assessment of the situation in Gaza:
Winter temperatures are putting the lives of 1.9 million displaced people at risk
80% of the population faces severe food insecurity
The death toll in Gaza currently stands at more than 23,210, and 330 in the West Bank
59,167 people have been injured in Gaza and 4,042 in the West Bank
Food and safe and adequate shelter are extremely scarce, with many families unable to eat a single meal a day and people setting up makeshift camps in the street.
Sanitation and public health conditions have seriously deteriorated, posing a high risk of disease outbreaks that could cause significant casualties. Heavy rain and flooding is affecting Gaza which adds to the risk of waterborne diseases.
The situation facing Gaza’s hospitals and those relying on their care is also dire. Hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza no longer have access to healthcare.
Nearly 85% of the total population of Gaza have been forced to leave their homes in precarious and unsafe conditions. Many of these people have been forced to move and seek new shelter several times.
[S]atellite data analysis obtained by the BBC shows the true extent of the destruction. The analysis suggests between 144,000 and 175,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed. That’s between 50% and 61% of Gaza’s buildings.
I don’t want to make claims beyond my knowledge and expertise, so let me admit my limitations: I don’t know what alternative responses to October 7 were considered or were even possible. I don’t know what negotiations have happened behind the scenes, or what possibilities for peace have been offered. I don’t know how much influence the Biden administration has, or how it has tried to use that influence.
I also don’t know precisely what the Israeli government intended or how well that matches what the Israeli public wants. I do know that some elements of the Netanyahu government have genocidal intent. Some others, I suspect, simply don’t care: They (understandably) want Hamas gone and want Israeli lives to be secure; the number of Gazans who must die or have their lives shattered to achieve that goal does not matter to them.
I just want to say this: What we have seen is already too much. Gazan lives do matter.
I contrast what’s going on in Gaza with smaller-scale hostage situations, thinking not just of the Israeli hostages, but of the Gazan civilians who are simply in the wrong place. Police typically do not charge into such situations as if the survival of the hostages were not their responsibility.
I still have no sympathy with Hamas, and I continue to condemn what they did in October. But are there fifty righteous people in Gaza? It seems like there must be.
[1] What exactly made Sodom so intolerable to God is widely misunderstood. When God’s two angels (presumably the two companions Abraham met) arrive in the city, the men of Sodom want to rape them. So it’s often thought that Sodom’s sin had something to do with homosexuality, i.e., sodomy. But Genesis doesn’t explicitly say that, and Ezekiel says something else entirely:
Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
So if your political plan involves cracking down on LGBTQ folks while kicking children off food stamps, you might want to reconsider.
[2] Apparently there is some history to this interpretation. I first ran across it in Adam Levin’s novel The Instructions, about a boy from Chicago who may or may not become the Messiah. The boy’s training is full of such rabbinical discussions.
Of course, you can contest this interpretation by pointing to the conquest of Canaan described in the book of Joshua, in which God orders genocide.
So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.
Conflicts like this are a major reason most modern scholars read the Bible as an amalgamation of separate sources rather than as a narrative from a single point of view.
[3] Gaza’s history also goes back to Biblical times, and perhaps further. It was the Philistine capital where Samson was taken, blinded, and held prisoner. Gaza is where he killed himself and numerous Philistines by pulling down the Temple of Dagon. The Aldous Huxley title Eyeless in Gaza is an allusion to Samson.
As far as I know, nothing happened in Gaza this week that hasn’t been happening for months. But for some reason, this week it all became too much for me. I can’t watch it any more. It has to stop.
Of course, I have no power to make it stop, but at a minimum I can say something about it. But what? The temptation was to over-extend myself and lay out some six-point this-is-what-everybody-should-do plan. As if I know. I’ve done my best to resist that temptation.
Instead, the featured post this week is “Gazan Lives Matter”. It’s a simple cry of empathic pain. Tens of thousands of Gazans are dead from this war, and two million more are in the path of two other Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Famine and Pestilence. Too much of the discussion of this war continues as if their lives do not matter. That has to stop.
That article is almost done, and should appear around 9 or so EST.
The weekly summary is full of topics that events have forced on me: I didn’t really want to write about Taylor Swift again, or speculate about why court decisions on Trump are taking so long, or catalog the ways that the US is getting drawn into a wider war in the Middle East. The South Carolina primary established pretty firmly that Democrats have no appetite for replacing Joe Biden, so maybe we can stop talking about that. I added a section of articles worth thinking about; I think I’d like to make that a regular feature. I’ll try to get that out around noon or so.
The Weekly Sift 