Month: March 2016

A beautiful conservative Christian sentiment for this Easter Sunday

by digby

From Conservative HQ:

Christians are called to follow an almost unfollowable example; a man who, in defiance of all authority, preached the Gospel of God’s power, love and forgiveness. And who, as the Son of God, set aside his earthly power and allowed himself to be crucified to redeem a world of sinners.

Holding such beliefs at any time, but especially in pagan Rome or secular America is bound to draw the scrutiny of those in power because central to the Christian world view is the belief that secular rulers have no power over us – Caesar’s image may be on the coin, but God’s image is upon us.

Indeed, being a Christian is almost a guarantee that Christ’s opponents will use coercion, violence and government power to persecute you if you follow him.

But for most Americans, living as we do in a still relatively free country, persecution of Christians is perceived as happening only somewhere over there on the other side of the world.

Distance serves as anesthetic said Fay Voshell writing for The American Thinker.  Certainly it’s not happening here.  Not in the United States of America!  Christians in America who look with horror on the persecution of their co-religionists in the Middle East, Africa, Communist China and North Korea assume they are safe from persecution.

But they are not safe.

Voshell, citing Msgr. Charles Pope and Johnette Benkovic, identifies five stages of persecution and posits that in America we are well into the fourth stage of persecution, that involves criminalizing Christians and their churches, businesses, and educational institutions.

As Monsignor Pope put it:

An increasing amount of litigation is being directed against the Church and other Christians for daring to live out our faith[.] … It is clear that attempts to criminalize Christian behavior is a growth sector in this culture and it signals the beginning of the steady erosion of religious liberty. Many indeed feel quite righteous, quite politically correct in their work to separate the practice of the faith from the public square.

One of those who most openly advocates excision of Christianity from the entire culture is Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who stated at the Sixth Annual Women in the World Summit that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed” for the sake of giving women access to “reproductive health care and safe childbirth. Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth, and laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced.  Rights have to exist in practice – not just on paper.”

But where is the pushback on Mrs. Clinton’s publicly announced plan that, if elected, she will lead her administration in a war on Christianity and Christian practices?

The deafening silence from religious leaders is indicative of a problem we face throughout today’s body politic, and especially in the conservative movement, and that is a lack of moral courage in the face of pressure from those who seek to destroy our culture, the rule of law, and our liberty – those things that have kept secure the God-given rights exercised by those who seek to make America weaker and less exceptional.

Reproductive health care and safe childbirth are a declaration of war on Christianity.  Good to know.

Happy Easter, everyone.

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They’re coming to mutilate your daughters!

by digby

Trump aide Stephen Miller talking about how the Donald will cherish and protect the wimminfolk from the barbarians:

“You want to talk about women’s issues? Here’s something we should be talking about. It is a fact: As a result of uncontrolled migration into this country – you can look this up, it’s a statistic from Equality Now – half a million U.S. girls in this country are at risk of female genital mutilation.”

My God! Is that some kind of creeping Sharia law thing?  Actually no:

The report he cited, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, states that half a million women and girls in the U.S. are at risk because they were born in countries were female mutilation is a tradition or have parents who were born in those countries.

He obviously cares nothing for these girls because his answer to the problem of female genital mutilation is to make them have it on their home soil. The fact is that American culture and law actually prevents this barbaric practice more often than not.  But as with most things Trump, he has it exactly backwards.

And, needless to say, in the context of the subject of the Muslim immigration ban, the clear implication was that violent Muslim terrorists want to mutilate the genitals of your all-American wives and daughters.  Because that’s just how they roll.

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Behind the Rise of Trump; Islamophobia and Islamic Terror

by Joshua Holland

This week on Politics and Reality Radio, we’re joined by Clare Malone, senior political reporter for FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s home for wayward nerds. Malone looked at some of the competing theories for what’s behind Trump’s rise, and then went and talked to some Trump supporters to see how they matched up.

Then we’ll talk to Ali Gharib about the outpouring of rank Islamophobia from the GOP primaries, and how it signals a party that’s going off the rails and losing the message. Gharib wrote about that for The Guardian this week.

Finally, we’ll speak with Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani ambassador in the UK who is now a professor at American University’s School of International Service. Ahmed has been studying the differences between American Muslims and Europe’s Muslim communities, and his insights go a long way toward explaining the domestic terror problem Europe faces today.

As always, you can subscribe to the show on iTunes or Podbean.

Playlist:
Los Fabulosos Cadillacs: “El Matador”
Kacey Musgraves: “Follow Your Arrow”
Melanie Durrant: “Bang Bang”
Atlas Sound: “Walk a Thin Line”

California crazies

by digby

Republicans in my state are mostly just as nuts as they are anywhere. In fact, they may even be nuttier since the party has been stripped to its bare essence here after Pete Wilson activated the Latino base with his xenophobic campaign more than 20 years ago.  But there are still some more or less well-off coastal types who care about the environment and choice and have a relaxed attitude about immigration. Their beef with the Democrats is mostly about taxes. There aren’t a lot of them compared to the rest of the population and they are a distinct minority in the GOP here.

They will not vote for Donald Trump. I have personally heard several of them say “I have no one to vote for.”

Riding a rebellion fueled by opposition to illegal immigration and pessimism about the nation’s future, Donald Trump leads a scrambling duo of competitors less than three months before California’s Republican presidential primary, a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times statewide poll has found.

Yet the party whose nomination he is seeking has fractured because of his candidacy, with ominous prospects for Republicans if the New York businessman emerges victorious after the party’s summer convention.

A quarter of California Republican voters polled said they would refuse to vote for Trump in November if he is the party’s nominee. Almost one-third of those backing Trump’s leading competitor, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, said they would not cast a ballot for Trump. Voters who back Trump, meanwhile, are critical of Cruz, with only half holding a favorable impression of him.

That division sets up the potential of cascading losses down the ballot for Republicans already fighting the tide in one of the nation’s most Democratic states, including in a number of contested congressional districts.

Oh heck.

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Of Trumps and tweens and blastocysts
by Tom Sullivan

New Yorker tells the sad tale of the latest failed experiment in AI. Apparently (I missed it), Microsoft last week rolled out a twitter bot named Tay:

Tay is an artificial intelligent chat bot developed by Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding. Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you.

Tay is targeted at 18 to 24 year old in the US.

Uh-oh. You don’t have to be Mary Shelley to see where this is going. After barely a day of “consciousness,” Microsoft pulled Tay’s plug.

Anthony Lydgate explains:

Why didn’t Microsoft know better? Plop a consciousness with the verbal ability of a tween and the mental age of a blastocyst into a toxic, troll-rich environment like Twitter and she’s bound to go Nazi. (This is particularly the case if she presents as a young woman, the trolls’ favorite quarry.) Why not encode her, as we humans usually try to encode our offspring, with an aversion to words like “whore” and “kike”—both of which Tay used, in tweets subsequently deleted by Microsoft? The answer is that her creators seem to have tried.

Tay simply didn’t remain well-adjusted in that environment. As the Onion piece pointed out last week, well-adjusted humans seem on the brink of extinction and don’t fare well outside the preserve. Lygate writes of Tay, “She had more negative social experiences between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning than a thousand of us do throughout puberty. It was peer pressure on uppers, “yes and” gone mad. No wonder she turned out the way she did.”

Speaking of the verbal ability of a tween and the mental age of a blastocyst, consider Donald Trump, another heavy user of Twitter. It’s not even worth bothering anymore to fact-check the man. “Trump has successfully made language irrelevant,” writes Eldar Sarajlic, political philosopher and an adjunct assistant professor at CUNY LaGuardia.

Trump highlights an important distinction between lies and bullshit. At Salon, Sarajlic cites philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit”. If bullshit is “a form of communication aimed to obscure the matter of facts being discussed by using the words that are neither necessarily true nor false,” bullshit artist makes a better descriptor for Donald trump than liar. Trump knows little about the affairs of the government he is running to lead. He’s not even trying hard to hide it with lies. Trump compensates with bullshit.

And that is revelatory. “What he hides is, therefore, not the mere irrelevance of truth, but more important, the crucial relevance of instinct for politics.” That is, for a “centuries-old tradition in American politics,” contra Jefferson, that some men are more equal than others and “fit to rule, while others should obey.”

This is where Trump’s aversion for “political correctness” backfires and has the GOP leadership apoplectic, not his past liberal dalliances. Sarajlic writes:

But, a more likely reason for the mainstream conservative opposition to Trump than this is the fact that he threatens to reveal the true face of American conservative politics. Namely, the bullshit he produces every day has only so much success in hiding what lies beneath: the deeply embedded instinct for racial and economic domination, white over black, rich over poor. This deep structure rises to the surface at every Trump rally, whenever a mass of his supporters gathers together. Hands raised to a Nazi salute, beatings of blacks, journalists and dissenters are the flip side of the bullshit rhetoric. Basically, Trump threatens to reveal something most conservative politicians are trying to hide: that American conservatism is not an ideology of limited government or public virtue, but as Corey Robin argues, a “mode of counterrevolutionary practice” to preserve hierarchy and power of white and rich elites over non-white and poor masses.

Digby yesterday cited Josh Marshall’s essay on Trump’s “dominance politics” and where it comes from. Trump’s “misogyny” is not hatred of women, per se, but for strong women violating the natural order, as he (and many followers) sees it. In that order, Trump must be “at the top at all times.” Hence his Twitter obsession with Megyn Kelly, a Fox commentator and former attorney disinclined to bow before him, and a teaser for what may come. Marshall writes:

It now seems very likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee and that he will face Hillary Clinton, the first woman ever to be the presidential nominee of a major US political party. If Trump is driven by a contempt and anger at female power at his core that is a pretty big thing in itself … This is, to put it mildly, a highly combustible situation.

Sen. Bernie Sanders pulled a hat trick last night, winning (shall we say) dominating victories over Clinton in Democratic caucuses in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii. Should those and his other primary wins not carry the day in Philadelphia, Trump will face Hillary Clinton this fall, as Marshall observes. If so, that’s a pay-per-view waiting to happen.

Saturday Night at the Movies

A fiddling festival

by digby

This is a nice piece by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker musing about the end of empires and Rome and Trump. I thought this was particularly perspicacious:

Today, though, we find ourselves in the midst of the ascent of a figure right out of Petronius: an orange-colored vulgarian of meretricious display, right down to the trophy wives from Far Elsewhere—with an ambition to dominate, a cunning out of proportion to his wisdom, a contempt for truth coupled with a readiness to manipulate, and a personal arrogance combined with, and indifferent to, a universal understanding that he is utterly unfit to govern. Now that we are in possession of an honest-to-God demagogue of the classical model, old portents of doom seem pertinent. As David Remnick remarked recently, though demagogues have long had their place in America, this is the first time one has come this close to Presidential power. The paralyzed, passive self-persuasion that overcomes ordinary politicians in extraordinary times is proof of this.

With Paul Ryan and the rest of the collapsing Republican “leadership” we see the expected response: this will pass, it’s an oddity—and anyway it’s more important to be positioned after the demagogue’s fall than to take the costly action necessary to oppose him. Turn on that same Internet to the conservative press, and one reads frantic denunciations of Trump vying with equally frantic denunciations of Hilary Clinton, the habit of hatred still intact even in extremis. Reporters who know that the demagogue lies as he breathes are too depressed or discouraged or demoralized to say so loudly and repeatedly. And then among the pro-plebeian party there is an unworthy glee at the discomfiture of the patrician “establishment.” Well, they may deserve the demagogue. The rest of us don’t.

No we don’t deserve it. But things are just sideways enough that it could happen. Yet, there’s a whole lot of fiddling going on.

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Trump’s “gendered armageddon”

by digby

Josh Marshall has a good piece up about the gendered nature of Trump’s run and how it informs his agenda and appeal. An excerpt:

What I’ve called ‘dominance politics’ is not only central to Trump’s political success with one portion of the electorate. It is central to his personality going back decades, seemingly deep into childhood, one of the reasons he was sent to a military school as an early adolescent in the first place.

This raises another question. Does Donald Trump hate women? And I guess this begs the question of what is misogyny? I don’t want to put myself forward as an expert on the issue, for obvious reasons. But looking just at Trump’s case, it is not hatred of women per se but hatred of powerful women or female power itself that is the defining trait. In a society where women have become more powerful in all aspects of life for decades and where gender equality is a defining political issue, the distinction may be rather semantic. But this is about power and being out of place in the proper hierarchy of power which has Trump at the top at all times.

To put this in perspective, it is worth remembering that the race hatred which long permeated the white South (and of course in a different way did in much of the rest of the United States) was never about or at least did not start as hating black people in themselves. Southern planters imported hundreds of thousands of black slaves, brought them into their homes. Indeed, the most aggressive and unbridled defenders of what was called the Southern ‘slaveocracy’ were themselves literally raised by and nursed at the breasts of black women. What we call ‘racism’, with all its hatred and violence, was the effort to defend and preserve the white supremacy that slavery and later Jim Crow and segregation were built on. Of course, this didn’t begin with Emancipation. Because slavery always rested on force and violence. But the intensity of ‘racism’ has always been precisely related to the degree to which white supremacy was contested. Trump’s misogyny is of a piece with this.

It is all of a piece. Trump’s personality and political traction is one rooted in dominance – indeed, assertions and demonstrations of dominance. We’ve seen it played out with his presidential competitors, often in fairly gendered terms, even with his mainly male opponents.

Two points are worth noting here.

The first is how this relates to the on-going issue of violence at Trump rallies. These aren’t just stern reactions to hippie-loser protesters. These have evolved into campaign rituals where Trump and his followers play out the centerpieces of his campaign: authority, domination and violence – and Trump’s ability to reassert the proper hierarchies his followers crave.

Second, this tells us why many evangelicals and other traditionalist, right-wing Christians are so supportive of Trump, notwithstanding his fairly open life as a sexual braggart and libertine: because he stands – quite convincingly – for authority, hierarchy and patriarchy.

For many of his supporters, whether they use the phrase or not, he stands for white supremacy.

All of this goes back to the earlier point we’ve discussed. Trump hasn’t been able to maintain this stranglehold over half the electorate in spite of this stuff but precisely because of it. It is the essence of his popularity, albeit it one that is locked down into perhaps 25% of the voting electorate.

There’s more and it’s all worth reading and thinking about.

I’ll just say this: anyone who thinks that someone running on a “dominance”platform is some kind of non-interventionist is deluding themselves. This is a guy who constantly says that foreign countries are “humiliating” us and “laughing at us.” And he promises to make them stop. Does anyone think a person like that is not going to respond when it inevitably happens as it always does?

This need among some commentators to turn Trump into a closet progressive because of his idiosyncratic, ill-informed lies continues to amaze me. He’s a militant, neo-fascist with all that that implies.

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Low energy Trump

by digby

Yes, that supposed to be The Donald

I was wondering about this:

Scan the headlines this week, and Donald Trump is everywhere. Scan his campaign schedule, and he is…nowhere…

His last day on the trail was Monday, when he delivered a foreign policy speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference. His next public campaign event is not until next Tuesday afternoon in Wisconsin — which votes on April 5 — meaning that he will have gone nearly seven full days without any campaign events.

Though the candidate has remained active launching Twitter attacks on rivals while vacationing in Florida, his absence on the trail is a notable departure from his hectic schedule around high stakes elections in the South and in the Midwest earlier this month. His campaign regularly hosted several events per day and hopped between states each night.

The downtime comes after weeks of negative press centered on volatile, sometimes-violent clashes between protesters and his supporters at campaign rallies around the country.
[…]
The real-estate mogul has regularly contrasted his energy level with other candidates, perhaps most famously former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whom Trump branded as “low-energy” — a moniker that followed the former governor for much of the race before he dropped out. Trump also regularly contrasts himself to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, whom he says lacks the physical endurance to serve as president.

“I think she doesn’t have the stamina. You watch her, her life, you’ll watch how she’ll go away for three four days, she’ll come back, and she’ll go. I just don’t think she has the stamina,” Trump said on CNN Monday. “Look, we’ve got to beat China in trade. We’ve got to beat ISIS. We’ve got so many problems in this country. I say she does not have the stamina to be a good president.”

Cruz’s campaign has been happy to point out Trump’s quiet schedule: “MISSING #SleazyDonald: Why no events in 4 days; none planned for 8,” tweeted Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe Friday. “Ever had psychological eval? What is hiding in medical records! Release!”

Trump, meanwhile, has largely spent the last several days in Palm Beach, Fla., at his famous Versailles-like club, Mar-a-Lago. Members of his family have joined him there.

“Very cool impromptu concert by members of the band Chicago at dinner at Mar-a-Lago just now. Awesome surprise,” wrote Donald Trump Jr. in an Instagram post, alongside a video of his father standing with the band. “…Even got @realdonaldtrump up and going.”

Trump’s last full day on the trail was in Arizona on Saturday, when chaotic scenes in Tucson and the Phoenix suburbs assured another weekend of footage showing protesters clashing with Trump supporters or police officers.

Maybe he’s figuring that he can just campaign via twitter. And maybe he can.

The hits on Bush and Clinton seemed to be about the simple fact that he believes neither of them are brimming with enough testosterone to get the job done. With Clinton that’s about both age and gender.

But the fact is that Trump’s an older guy and he doesn’t look to be in great shape if you ask me. He was really knocked down by that three hour debate in the beginning and complained a lot about how long it was before his caught himself. So, I’d guess he’s tired and needed a rest. Which is fine.

But his comments about Obama taking taking vacations should be, in Marco Rubio’s favorite phrase, stuffed down his throat. This is from 2011:

TRUMP: Well, the fact is, he takes more vacations than any human being I’ve ever seen. They used to complain about George Bush, but I understand he’s already exceeded George Bush and we’re not even through the year. So he likes vacation.

VAN SUSTEREN: What does — I mean, obviously, that doesn’t sound a — send a good message if, indeed, the American people think that he likes a, quote, “vacation.”

TRUMP: Well, I mean, it sends a bad message. Here we have a country that really is going to hell in a handbasket. Let’s not kid ourselves. What’s happening to this country is horrible. All over the world, they’re talking about it. And we have a president that’s constantly — whether it’s Martha’s Vineyard or someplace else, constantly on vacation. I mean, all the time he’s on vacation! So I think it sends a very, very bad message. We have to work in this country to bring it back.

He has continued to say this during the campaign and promised that he won’t take any vacations if he’s in the White House. Because he knows what it is to work, unlike that lazy Obama. If you know what I mean.

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Chart O’ the Day

by digby

It used to be that there quite a few moderates in the GOP which gave them an advantage since there are so many more conservatives than liberals. That’s changing because the Republicans have gone so far to the right and become so radical in their approach to governance that moderates are no longer comfortable in that coalition. Moderates are often as much about temperament as policy and the right has become very intemperate. With Trump or Cruz as the standard bearer of the GOP, for different reasons, even more of those moderates are likely to move into the Democratic column making a much more solid majority.

Trump presents a real opportunity for the Democrats to make their case on the basis of steady, mature experience and disposition rather than their old emphasis on moderate/conservative policy positions to attract more of these people. One hopes they take advantage of that in down ticket races.

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