The main problem is not the cops. It’s Republicans blocking gun control.
To be sure, the behavior of cops are a terrible problem but don’t let Republicans change or confuse the subject. Republican inaction and greed is the main problem here.
It’s nearly impossible for any rational being to agree with anything the National Rifle Association says or does. But when they’re right, I think it’s very important that we acknowledge that.
Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at the National Rifle Association’s Annual Leadership Forum on Friday. But audience members at the group’s annual meeting, being held this year in Houston, won’t be able to carry guns during his address.
It’s true: No one should be carrying a gun anywhere near a former president. Ever. Then again, no one should be carrying a gun near anyone.
(Adding: Yeah, there probably are a few commonsense exceptions but as a general principle, let’s err on the side of zero guns.)
My sentiments exactly. Read the entire article:
It was a Freudian slip for the ages: during a speech in Dallas this week, former President George W Bush condemned the “decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq”. Whoops! “I mean of Ukraine,” he added a second later, as laughter rang out in the room. Isn’t it funny when a former president accidentally confesses to war crimes? Ha! Ha! Ha!
…
[I]magine it’s 2042 and Vladimir Putin has transformed himself from war criminal to cuddly grandpa who paints in his dotage. Imagine he slips up while making a speech and talks about the wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Ukraine. Imagine everyone in the room laughing. That wouldn’t be terribly funny would it? In fact, the idea that a guy like Putin could face zero accountability and spend his old age giving speeches instead of serving time for war crimes, would be horrifying.
It’s very simple: without Bush, there would never have been Trump. Sure, the GOP and our mainstream discourse was not well before Bush. But Bush’s murderous lies turbocharged America’s descent into our present psychotic politics.
No, the leak isn’t as serious as the decision to force American women to give birth against their will. It’s not even as serious as the naked vehemence and maliciousness of Alito’s language. Still, this leak had a very serious purpose.
The leak waters down the impact of the official release of the decision (a la Barr and the Mueller Report). When it’s finally official, it will be old news. Also, the “premature release” of the decision throws into disarray any planning for protests and legal/legislative opposition to the overturning of Roe. Those opposed thought they had until June to organize. Now, they’re scrambling. And for extra measure, the heads up that Roe will be killed (with extreme prejudice) is useful for all those pushing forced birth bills in Republican-led states.
Despite the ravings of the right on social media,I can’t think, as per Digby, of any good reasons why this would have been leaked by someone interested in affirming Roe. Everyone knew it was coming and many could have guessed it would be written as belligerently as possible. It serves no purpose for those in opposition to the overturn and would surely lead to a firing.
I think it was most likely leaked with the full knowledge of at least one of those in the majority. This stunt has all the hallmarks of far right political activism.
Often, the problem of bothsiderism — providing an unearned equal status to opposing views held by different political parties even if one is obviously wrong — is not as obvious as it is in the cartoon above. Case in point is Mark Penn’s op-ed in the Times today. The entire op-ed is replete with hidden bothsiderism. Take, for example, all the times he mentions Trump:
Immigration was used effectively by President Donald Trump as a wedge issue to win working class voters. According to the April Harris poll, under Mr. Biden, 59 percent of voters believe that we have “effectively” open borders and, looking back, many even support some of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies.
The Biden administration is also losing in swing areas on immigration, as evidenced by the nine Senate Democrats and the House’s bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus that have expressed reservations about its plan to lift Title 42, the Trump administration’s Covid-era policy of intercepting and returningmigrants without due process.
Mr. Biden now says he is running for re-election in 2024. But he is facing limited enthusiasm in his own party for a second run and loses even to Mr. Trump in hypothetical matchups, according to the Harris Poll.
Do you see the problem? Actually, there’s a lot wrong but especially this:
Penn has framed our political crisis as a mere contest between two opponents of equal status who just happen to differ on policy. There is not a single acknowledgment of Trump’s criminality, his cruelty, his bigotry, or his blithering ignorance. To Penn, the current situation is merely one of policy differences between worthy opponents — and which policies poll better. Trump, as unqualified to be president of the United States as Cassie Bowden of The Flight Attendant, is accorded the same deference and status as a serious politician like Biden.
If adopted by Democrats,, Penn’s disguised-bothsiderist framing is guaranteed to lose the Senate and the House this fall. Unfortunately, there is every indication that Democrats do indeed believe that they can win by ignoring not only Trump’s criminality but also the sheer madness and degeneracy of the Republican party.
There is only one way for Democrats to have a chance of holding the Congress in 2022, one that will require immense effort. That is for all major candidates to simultaneously expose the criminality and corruption of Trump and the GOP while, as per Elizabeth Warren, quickly implementing (and just as importantly, promoting) actual policies that benefit Americans.
To pretend that this is simply a political contest between two equally worthy opponents is sheer insanity. Likewise, to pretend that Democrats can win without delivering anything except “well, at least we’re not Trump” is equally crazy. Democrats must attend to it all, with equal energy.
Most artists have been there. Overwhelmed by terrible finances, or seeking to curry favor with their often shady presenters and gallery owners, or driven by personal insecurity, many good artists will inevitably make numerous compromises with scoundrels to get their work out there. Many artists I know think that that it is not up to them to take a “political” stand and will work blindly for anyone who pays them. Others rationalize their compromises by hoping that the beauty of their work will, somehow, balance the scales towards a better world. Fair enough; unless you live entirely off the grid, you are, at least to some extent, complicit in actions that may be personally disagreeable or even repellent.
But there are limits. And by any reasonable criteria, the atrocities knowingly committed by Putin — a mass murderer whose embrace was warmly returned by numerous world-class Russian performers — require universal condemnation and disavowal.
Recently, an opinion writer in the Washington Post wondered whether Russian artists should be shunned if they refuse to sign statements disavowing Putin’s war:
With the invasion of Ukraine, everyone and everything associated with Russia, the aggressor, is newly measured by their position on the war. Western institutions are canceling Russian artists, sometimes for being too close to President Vladimir Putin — sometimes regardless. Music providers like Sony are suspending their Russian operations, laying off hundreds of employees. The Royal Opera House in London scrapped a summer season featuring the Bolshoi Ballet. The Montreal Symphony Orchestra just postponed three shows by 20-year-old pianist Alexander Malofeev, despite the fact that he has stated publicly, “Every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence and predict.” Long-dead artists, too, are under scrutiny. The Cardiff Philharmonic in Wales pulled the 19th-century liberal homosexual Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky — hardly a nationalist — from its repertoire.
What is the purpose of these cancellations, beyond signaling moral solidarity against Putin’s war? Some benefit presumably accrues to companies and cultural organizations that respond to popular sentiment and fashionable trends; participating in the antiwar movement by demanding anti-Putin statements from Russian artists can help bottom lines. Yet these acts of protest, symbolic and emotionally satisfying for us, deprive vulnerable artists of livelihoods, place them at risk and don’t otherwise accomplish much. What’s more, they play into Putin’s hands by treating artists not as individuals but as cultural ambassadors for his grandiose vision of Russia. This affirms his sense that Russians have been wronged by the world — that Europe and the United States are out to get them, as he has long argued — and therefore justifies further draconian clampdowns and stronger fortifications for Holy Rus.
As for the artists, there’s no easy way to navigate this treacherous terrain, whether they work outside or inside Russia, or consider themselves ambassadors of higher causes and blanch at the conflation of art and politics. Touring artists can make a lot of money, so many of them tend to choose silence to protect their personal brands even in the most compromised circumstances. But now they face pressure to speak out, which can cause trouble for them or their families back home, and in any case doesn’t inoculate them against cancellation.
First, it is very hard for anyone to speak out in an autocracy, especially one like Putin’s. Certainly, it’s silly to cancel a performance of Tschaikovsky. And of course, a single member of the Bolshoi Ballet corps has very little clout. But the larger point is badly wrong.
If mass graves in Bucha — easily predicted back in March when the essay above was published — are not enough to trigger public disavowals of Putinism (even by Russia’s artists without household names), then what will it take? When do the atrocities become so utterly egregious that it becomes incumbent upon anyone with a public presence — including individual artists and their institutions — to openly denounce the barbarity? Will Putin need to open crematoria filled with Zyklon B? Will there need to be widespread chemical attacks before the “trouble for them or their families” beomes outweighed by the prospect of world catastrophe? Or will the use of nuclear weapons finally cross that line?
When the threat is existential — as it is with Putin, with Trump, and other 21st Century monsters — the problem with not speaking out is that your moral sense is damaged and your family gets harmed anyway. No one leaves unscathed. Masha Gessen’s 5th Rule of Autocracy applies to artists and artistic institutions as well:
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises… damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when [autocratic] mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case…that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.
A long time ago, I had the enormous privilege of co-writing the musical theme to one of Walter Cronkite’s CBS News TV shows. My musical partner and I also wrote a theme for Face the Nation that ran for something like 10 years. As a result, I had an opportunity to hang out with several CBS News reporters, producers, and editors. And yes, I got to meet Mr. Cronkite once (he was incredibly gracious).
I will say flat out that CBS News had the hardest working and most dedicated team of people I’ve ever encountered (and I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of great people). To this day, I remain in awe not only of their talent but especially of their integrity.
And that is why this is so personally heartbreaking:
CBS News’s decision to hire former Trump administration official Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor is drawing backlash within the company because of his history of bashing the press and promoting the former president’s fact-free claims.
But a top network executive seemed to lay the groundwork for the decision in a staff meeting earlier this month, when he said the network needed to hire more Republicans to prepare for a “likely” Democratic midterm wipeout.
“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News’s co-president Neeraj Khemlani told the staff of the network’s morning show, according to a recording of his comments obtained by The Washington Post. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
None of my friends work at CBS anymore. But if they did, and Khemlani had spewed this garbage to them, I’m certain half would have laughed in his face. The others would have quit. Aside from the sheer madness of a highly professional news organization hiring a known liar and Trump stooge, Khemlani’s obscene excuse for paying Mulvaney — we need access! — would have been deeply insulting. The folks I knew were perfectly capable of reporting accurately and deeply on a corrupt political party without having to resort to paying one of their members.
It’s not enough for Mulvaney to quit. Khemlani should go, too. This represents a spectacular lapse of judgment on his part.
Bush cannot be allowed to paint over the atrocities committed during his presidency. He, and all those who participated at all levels, should be held fully accountable by both American and international courts of law:
A detainee at a secret CIA detention site in Afghanistan was used as a living prop to teach trainee interrogators, who lined up to take turns at knocking his head against a plywood wall, leaving him with brain damage, according to a US government report.
The details of the torture of Ammar al-Baluchi are in a 2008 report by the CIA’s inspector general, newly declassified as part of a court filing by his lawyers aimed at getting him an independent medical examination.
Baluchi, a 44-year-old Kuwaiti, is one of five defendants before a military tribunal on Guantánamo Bay charged with participation in the 9/11 plot, but the case has been in pre-trial hearings for 10 years, mired in a dispute over legal admissibility of testimony obtained after torture.
I truly don’t understand why the media are so eager to portray Bush today as a some kind of avuncular figure puttering around in his art studio, a reminder that “Republicans could be serious politicians.” When he was president, the US became victim to its worst atrocity since Pearl Harbor (a direct result of his neglect); the US invaded another country on lies that Bush well knew were lies; Bush showed stunning incompetence and a lack of empathy for the victims of Hurricane Katrina; and so very much more.
Bush was a catastrophically bad American leader, the worst president ever — until the Republicans gleefully decided they could go even lower.
To repurpose a great quote by William Goldman, regarding Putin and Ukraine, no one knows anything. We’re guessing and if we’re lucky, it’s an educated one. Here are two highly educated guesses. They seem to jibe with how I understand the situation.
Fiona Hill is an expert on Putin; you may remember her from the first Trump impeachment trial, for her remarkably brave and articulate testimony. In Politico, she provides a detailed, stark, and worrisome assessment. The entire interview is essential reading. This struck me as especially helpful for providing context:
…people are saying Ukraine is the largest military operation in Europe since World War II. The first largest military action in Europe since World War II was actually in Chechnya, because Chechnya is part of Russia. This was a devastating conflict that dragged on for years, with two rounds of war after a brief truce, and tens of thousands of military and civilian casualties. The regional capital of Grozny was leveled. The casualties were predominantly ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. The Chechens fought back, and this became a military debacle on Russia’s own soil. Analysts called it “the nadir of the Russian army.” After NATO’s intervention in the Balkan wars in the same timeframe in the 1990s, Moscow even worried that NATO might intervene.
In other words, Hill’s saying that we’ve seen what fate lies ahead for Ukraine — and for Russia. The suffering for everyone was immense, the risk terrifying, but it is a risk Putin has already taken — and believes is worth it.
Then there is, even more ominously, this:
…what President Putin has said quite explicitly in recent days is that if anybody interferes in Ukraine, they will be met with a response that they’ve “never had in [their] history.” And he has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. So he’s making it very clear that nuclear is on the table.
Putin tried to warn Trump about this, but I don’t think Trump figured out what he was saying. In one of the last meetings between Putin and Trump when I was there, Putin was making the point that: “Well you know, Donald, we have these hypersonic missiles.” And Trump was saying, “Well, we will get them too.” Putin was saying, “Well, yes, you will get them eventually, but we’ve got them first.” There was a menace in this exchange. Putin was putting us on notice that if push came to shove in some confrontational environment that the nuclear option would be on the table.Reynolds: Do you really think he’ll use a nuclear weapon?
Hill: The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.
The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box where it was found by Sturgess and her partner. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants.
So if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again.
Not only does Putin want to use exceedingly cruel means, he will use them. That includes nuclear weapons of all kinds. The world needs to factor this into account when considering responses.
Jonathan Littel is a novelist. While he doesn’t have the deep knowledge and experience Hill does, his Guardian article provides excellent insight into at least some of Putin’s reasoning for the invasions (he is not saying that Putin’s reasoning is correct, of course):
Putin must have rejoiced when the west, eager to freeze the active conflict in Donbas, quietly allowed Crimea off the discussion table, effectively conceding the illegal annexation to Russia. He saw that while sanctions hurt, they didn’t bite deep, and would allow him to continue building his military and extending his power. He saw that Germany, the greatest economic power in Europe, was unwilling to wean itself off his gas and his markets. He saw that he could buy European politicians, including former German and French prime ministers, and install them on the boards of his state-controlled companies. He saw that even the countries that nominally opposed his moves still kept repeating the mantras of “diplomacy”, “reset”, “the need to normalize relations”. He saw that each time he pushed, the west would roll over and then come fawning, hoping for an ever-elusive “deal”: Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron, Donald Trump – the list is long.
Putin began murdering his opponents, at home and abroad. When it happened, we squeaked, but it never went further. When Obama, in 2013, callously ignored his own “red line” in Syria, refusing to intervene after Bashar al-Assad’s poison gassing of a civilian neighborhood in Damascus, Putin paid attention. In 2015, he sent his own forces into Syria, developing his naval base in Tartus and gaining a new air base in Khmeimin. Over the next seven years, he used Syria as a testing ground for his military, granting invaluable field experience to his officer corps and honing their tactics, coordination and equipment, all the while bombing and slaughtering thousands of Syrians, and helping Assad to regain control of large swaths of the country.
In January 2018, he began confronting western powers directly in the Central African Republic, sending his Wagner mercenaries there. The same process is now under way in Mali, where the military junta, with Russian support, has just forced the French anti-Isis mission out of the country. Russia is also actively involved in Libya, foiling western attempts to bring peace to the country, and deploying forces along the southern flank of the Mediterranean, in a position to directly threaten European interests. Every time, we protested, flailed, and did exactly nothing. And every time, he took good note.
Ukraine represents the moment when he finally decided to put his cards on the table. He clearly believes he is strong enough to openly defy the west by launching the first land war in Europe since 1945. And he believes it because everything we have done, or rather failed to do over the last 22 years, has taught him that we are weak.
Littell is saying that Putin perceived a failure to follow through on responses. Putin’s aggression was caused as much by a long history of inept, ineffective responses as it was by the cruel, sadistic streak that Hill mentions.
Now what? Both analysts know that unless Putin attacks NATO, a concerted military response is off the table. They insist that only the strongest economic and cultural sanctions will work — a total isolation from the world economy, one that will wreak utter havoc but one that will be existential for Putin.
This proposal is problematic — and both HIll and Littell surely know it. Seizing an oligarch’s yacht or kicking their kids out of Harvard may be emotionally satisfying but hardships they are not. They also know that the kind of sacrifice required to existentially damage Russia is something that the extremely spoiled US and Europe will never tolerate. Also, given the cronyism and corrupt interdependence between Russia and the West (Littell: “He saw that he could buy European politicians, including former German and French prime ministers, and install them on the boards of his state-controlled companies”) existential sanctions aren’t possible.
These analyses point to a nearly unmistakable conclusion. Unless NATO is attacked, in which case all bets are off, Ukrainians need only look to Chechnya to get a sense of what the future holds.
One major difference, of course, is that Ukraine is immensely larger. This will provide more opportunity for an underground resistance movement to grow. This is nothing to celebrate; the people in historical resistance movements suffered horribly before (sometimes) achieving their goals. But it is realistic to assume that Ukrainians will be fighting a guerilla war once the cities fall. Unless, that is, Putin is able to find an excuse to use his nukes. And, as Hill makes clear, he really doesn’t need an excuse.
There is nothing that would make me happier than to re-read this a year from now and learn that the conclusions I’ve drawn from these articles were completely wrong and too pessimistic. It is my sincere hope that Putin will make fools of Hill, Littell, and so many others (including yours truly) by stopping this ghastly war now.
In principle, I agree with Paul Campos:
A “victory” which leaves the victor an economically and culturally crippled pariah state, in military possession of a nation of 45 million people, that is going to be violently unwilling to remain pacified, is the very definition of a pyrrhic triumph.
If this is at all an accurate description of the state of affairs, then it’s critical to find some face-saving rationale that will allow Putin to walk back his fantastic blunder, while also allowing him to save his own miserable skin in at least the short term (obviously the latter condition is a prerequisite for the former outcome, as long as Putin is around)
The problem, which Paul fully understands, is this:
…the longer the rest of the world can remain absolutely opposed to this ongoing first order war crime, the better the chances are of pressuring Putin and the rest of the thugs running the oligarchical kleptocracy that is contemporary Russia into some negotiated settlement that will save their faces just enough to save millions of lives.
I don’t share the (unstated) optimism that we can long remain opposed to Putin. My guess is that assuming the situation doesn’t devolve into direct war with NATO — a big assumption — the US will be among the first to buckle to the reality of Putin’s conquest of Ukraine. (The extreme right will start screaming its head off once gas prices jump, the media will amplify their screaming, and the government will feel compelled to appease). Germany and other European nations, facing an energy shortage of catastrophic proportions — and one more gigantic infusion of refugees — will quickly follow. In short, by this fall at the latest, the West will be well on its way towards somehow accommodating much of what Putin demands.
As for this being a Pyrrhic victory, there is no doubt that Putin’s Russia will face exceedingly dire problems. But Russia is a country with a history that demonstrates it can endure hardships at a level that is impossible for long-pampered Americans even to imagine.
So yes, we have to find a way to immediately stop the killing and avoid the potential slaughter of millions. And agreed, Maximum Belligerence is the worst of a lot of dangerous options: after all, this is not exactly 1939. Putin has nukes and speaking personally, I don’t want to find out if he’s bluffing.
But let’s not kid ourselves. To prevail in any meaningful way, the West, especially this country, will have to summon up vast reservoirs not just of oil but of patience. The former we have, at least in the short term. The latter we’ve never possessed.