monk111 | Recent Entries

It's been over a year since I last updated this blog. I thought I should break that streak.

I was using this blog for essays that I find on the Net, but I soon lost that copy-and-pasting feeling. I don't want to lose this blog, but I don't really know what to do with it.

After a shooting incident aimed at Republican congressman, hitting one, the discussion on American political violence has ramped up. A lot of commentators were arguing that it is getting worse. Jeet Heer points out that violence is as American as apple pie.

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The shooting in Alexandria, Virginia, which wounded House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and four others on Wednesday, has roused worrywart pundits and politicians who fret about the state of America today. “The United States is in a time of great danger,” John Podhoretz wrote in The New York Post. “I don’t want to invoke all the clichés of the past decade, but you know them all—we’re a divided nation, we’re all living in our own bubbles, we don’t even accept the same facts and we hate each other. The problem is these clichés are largely true.” There is a real danger, he argued, that America is entering an era of political violence like the one that began with JFK’s assassination in 1963, “reached an apogee in 1968, and came to an end with the nearly successful attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.”

In less alarmist terms than Podhoretz, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also claimed that our era is characterized by particularly intense vitriol. “It didn’t used to be this way,” Pelosi said on Thursday. “Somewhere in the ’90s, Republicans decided on the politics of personal destruction as they went after the Clintons.”

The notion that Americans are particularly angry today has become a rote talking point in the political press, repeated year after year. In 2011, after Representative Gabby Giffords was shot by a mentally ill man, NBC’s Mark Murray wrote, “If one word summed up the past two years in American politics, it was this: anger.” In 2007, George Will wrote in The Washington Post, “Americans are infatuated with anger.” In 1996, in her book The Angry American, George Washington University political scientist Susan Tolchin described an epidemic of “voter rage.”

But long before any of these writers, amid Barry Goldwater’s demogogic presidential campaign, the great historian Richard Hofstadter began his classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” thus: “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers... But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Hofstadter was exactly right—not only about the anger in the mid-’60s, but also that it was “far from new.” We are not, as Podhoretz and Pelosi suggest, living in a especially or uniquely dangerous moment. Incendiary political speech and political violence have been pervasive in U.S. history.

“What is impressive to one who begins to learn about American violence is its extraordinary frequency, its sheer commonplaceness in our history, its persistence into very recent and contemporary times, and its rather abrupt contrast without our pretensions to singular national virtue,” Hofstadter wrote in the introduction to American Violence: A Documentary History, the 1972 collection he co-edited with Michael Wallace. It shouldn’t surprise us that a colonial settler society that wiped out the Native American population, imported slave labor, and relied on vigilante violence to police newly incorporated territories should be prone to political violence. Reading through Hofstadter and Wallace’s book, one is reminded anew that American history has consisted of slave revolts and their violent crushing, race riots, labor clashes, and assassinations.

There have always been loud voices in the press egging on this violence. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, newspapers run by William Randolph Hearst were notorious for their incendiary content. In 1900, Hearst columnist Ambrose Bierce wrote a poem hoping that the bullet that killed Kentucky Governor William Goebel would also murder President William McKinley: “The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast / Can not be found in all the West; / Good reason, it is speeding here / To stretch McKinley on his bier.” McKinley was assassinated the following year, leading another Hearst writer, Arthur Brisbane, to write in an unsigned editorial, “If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” This appeared not in some small-town rag, but The New York Journal, one of the most popular newspapers in America at that time.

Westbrook Pegler was one of the most popular conservative pundits of mid-twentieth century America—the Rush Limbaugh of his time. In 1933, he wrote a column regretting that an assassination attempt against President Franklin Roosevelt “hit the wrong man” and killed the mayor of Chicago instead. In 1950, Pegler argued that “the only sensible and courageous way to deal with Communists in our midst is to make membership in Communist organizations or covert subsidies a capital offence and shoot or otherwise put to death all persons convicted as such.” This would have resulted in a political purge killing tends of thousands of Americans. In 1965, when Pegler was admittedly in sharp decline and had lost much of his popularity, he wrote that he hoped “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter [Robert Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”

The words of Bierce, Brisbane and Pegler should cure us of the illusion that American political discourse was ever more polite and less violent than it is now. Similarly, recalling the political violence woven throughout the fabric of American history should serve as an antidote to any misguided nostalgia for a supposedly more idyllic past. If America is polarized and violent now, it’s because it has long been that way. The divisions of the present are part of the nation’s patrimony.

-- Jeet Heer at New Republic

After President Trump distances us from our NATO allies and drops out of the Paris accord on global warming, David Brooks vents his spleen.

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This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”

That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath.

The essay explains why the Trump people are suspicious of any cooperative global arrangement, like NATO and the various trade agreements. It helps explain why Trump pulled out of the Paris global-warming accord. This essay explains why Trump gravitates toward leaders like Vladimir Putin, the Saudi princes and various global strongmen: They share his core worldview that life is nakedly a selfish struggle for money and dominance.

It explains why people in the Trump White House are so savage to one another. Far from being a band of brothers, their world is a vicious arena where staffers compete for advantage.

In the essay, McMaster and Cohn make explicit the great act of moral decoupling woven through this presidency. In this worldview, morality has nothing to do with anything. Altruism, trust, cooperation and virtue are unaffordable luxuries in the struggle of all against all. Everything is about self-interest.

We’ve seen this philosophy before, of course. Powerful, selfish people have always adopted this dirty-minded realism to justify their own selfishness. The problem is that this philosophy is based on an error about human beings and it leads to self-destructive behavior in all cases.

The error is that it misunderstands what drives human action. Of course people are driven by selfish motivations — for individual status, wealth and power. But they are also motivated by another set of drives — for solidarity, love and moral fulfillment — that are equally and sometimes more powerful.

People are wired to cooperate. Far from being a flimsy thing, the desire for cooperation is the primary human evolutionary advantage we have over the other animals.

People have a moral sense. They have a set of universal intuitions that help establish harmony between peoples. From their first moments, children are wired to feel each other’s pain. You don’t have to teach a child about what fairness is; they already know. There’s no society on earth where people are admired for running away in battle or for lying to their friends.

People have moral emotions. They feel rage at injustice, disgust toward greed, reverence for excellence, awe before the sacred and elevation in the face of goodness.

People yearn for righteousness. They want to feel meaning and purpose in their lives, that their lives are oriented toward the good.

People are attracted by goodness and repelled by selfishness. N.Y.U. social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has studied the surges of elevation we feel when we see somebody performing a selfless action. Haidt describes the time a guy spontaneously leapt out of a car to help an old lady shovel snow from her driveway.

One of his friends, who witnessed this small act, later wrote: “I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing. Just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people. Writing a beautiful poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed.”

Good leaders like Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt and Reagan understand the selfish elements that drive human behavior, but they have another foot in the realm of the moral motivations. They seek to inspire faithfulness by showing good character. They try to motivate action by pointing toward great ideals.

Realist leaders like Trump, McMaster and Cohn seek to dismiss this whole moral realm. By behaving with naked selfishness toward others, they poison the common realm and they force others to behave with naked selfishness toward them.

By treating the world simply as an arena for competitive advantage, Trump, McMaster and Cohn sever relationships, destroy reciprocity, erode trust and eviscerate the sense of sympathy, friendship and loyalty that all nations need when times get tough.

By looking at nothing but immediate material interest, Trump, McMaster and Cohn turn America into a nation that affronts everybody else’s moral emotions. They make our country seem disgusting in the eyes of the world.

George Marshall was no idealistic patsy. He understood that America extends its power when it offers a cooperative hand and volunteers for common service toward a great ideal. Realists reverse that formula. They assume strife and so arouse a volley of strife against themselves.

I wish H. R. McMaster was a better student of Thucydides. He’d know that the Athenians adopted the same amoral tone he embraces: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The Athenians ended up making endless enemies and destroying their own empire.

-- David Brooks at NYT

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Sir Roger Moore, who played James Bond for a dozen years in the 1970s and ’80s and proved that the series could thrive without Sean Connery, died Tuesday at the age of 89.

Born in London, Moore became famous thanks largely to his small-screen work. He starred as Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe in the ’50s, appeared as a cousin of the eponymous brothers on Maverick, and much later had a brief run with Tony Curtis in The Persuaders! But it was on The Saint that he really made his name. That show, which was later turned into a Val Kilmer movie, took advantage of Moore’s looks, charm, and perennially raised eyebrow. It’s unwatchably dated today, but its tales of Simon Templar, the rogue who helps people out of jams while avoiding the law, was apparently just what mid-’60s audiences craved.

Moore was still in that role when Connery declined to play Bond in the sixth film of the series, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), which thus starred George Lazenby. Although a later favorite of (some) 007 aficionados, the movie didn’t do as well as hoped, and Connery returned for Diamonds Are Forever (1971), a smash. After Connery again stepped aside, claiming he would “never” return, the producers of the franchise turned to Moore, already 45—Connery had started out in his early thirties—but who they had long envisioned would make an ideal 007.

Moore’s first Bond film, Live And Let Die (1973), is a dreary effort. But since we now view the Bond series as a permanent fixture, it’s worth recalling how shaky it might have seemed at the time. It wasn’t obvious that audiences would ever accept anyone but Connery in the role—some people still haven’t, I suppose—and there was no guarantee the 007 series would become the five-plus decade, nearly twenty-five film behemoth that it is today. For this reason, Moore is probably as responsible as anyone other than Connery and producer Albert R. Broccoli for the success of the franchise.

The common criticism of Moore’s approach to Bond is that he made the series sillier and less serious—which is thought to be what audiences were looking for in the dismal 1970s. The first part of this isn’t really fair. The series was changing, it’s true: the gadgets got bigger, the jokes got broader, and the action frequently moved to the United States, because of the size of the American market. (This last aspect proved temporary, thank God.) But all of these things are true of Diamonds Are Forever, in which Connery himself adopted a lighter take on Bond. If the series was going in that direction, it wasn’t Moore’s fault.

Still, he certainly enjoyed the more humorous approach to the character. He never viewed it with the same seriousness as Timothy Dalton or Daniel Craig, both of whom treated 007 as a real person. (That can be a problem if you don’t have a good script and competent directing.) He tended to make light of his own acting abilities— over decades of interviews, self-deprecation is the one constant—and he sometimes expressed anguish over the violence in the movies, which was mild even by the standards of the day. Moore’s approach—to interviews and to acting—is perhaps best captured in a revealing remark to The Telegraph: “My James Bond wasn’t any different to my Saint, or my Persuaders or anything else I’ve done. I’ve just made everything that I play look like me and sound like me.” This is certainly simplified, but it isn’t entirely wrong.

After The Man with the Golden Gun, in 1974, Moore and the producers took two-and-a-half years off before turning to The Spy Who Loved Me, still considered his best Bond film by most fans and the one that ensured his stamp on the character would last. Alternately witty and exciting, the film was a giant hit. (Moore called it his own favorite for its combination of “locations and humor,” which gives a hint of how he viewed a successful Bond film.) He was fifty by the time the movie came out, but looks fantastic and youthful throughout; the film displays the combination of debonair charm and insouciance that were his hallmarks. He became a much bigger star after it was released, and began commanding larger paychecks on the subsequent films. (Like almost every other Bond, his non-Bond work during this era was much less successful; even Connery didn’t have many other big hits until he quit the series.)

Moonraker (1979), Moore’s fourth 007 film, has some good moments before it falls victim to an onslaught of gags, but For Your Eyes Only, two years later, is Moore’s most serious Bond movie. An exciting espionage story with a confusing albeit compelling plot, the movie shows Moore investing the character with traits that he was seldom allowed to show, including anger and occasional ruthlessness. By the time of Octopussy in 1983, Moore’s approach was so popular that the film managed to out-gross Never Say Never Again, a “rival” Bond film (by different producers) that marked Connery’s long-awaited return to the character. Still, when he made his last 007 movie, 1985’s A View To A Kill, he was in his late fifties, and it was clearly time to move on. (He looked remarkably good for his age, but he made an implausible action hero, and his female co-stars weren’t getting any older, creating an off-putting discrepancy.)

Moore didn’t do a ton of work after retiring from the series, but he made several films, pursued charitable causes, and wrote some memoiristic accounts of his time as an actor. Moore was married four times, including to the singer Dorothy Squires. He split his time between the UK and Monaco and Switzerland, and in his later years seemed to live a rather conventional life of luxury, replete with beach-going and dining with minor European royals.

As someone who grew up obsessed with all things Bond, I made it my mission to one day interview both Moore and Connery. The latter is retired and no longer gives interviews; even before retiring, he was always prickly, especially when asked about the character with whom he will be forever identified. As for Moore, I tracked him down several years ago; we talked over the phone for twenty-five minutes or so. It might be the only time in my career that my recording of a conversation failed; I attribute it to anxiety about talking with a boyhood hero.

I did my best to think up some questions about Bond he had never been asked, and failed miserably. I could tell that he knew the answers to all my questions by heart, and yet he was nothing but patient and generous, recounting with seeming sincerity and energy stories I’d already read or heard. Several times he paused and took note of how lucky he had been: good health, nice kids, interesting women. I mentioned that Connery still seemed bitter about his Bond experience. Moore, who had a long friendship with Connery, didn’t exactly scold him but made clear that he found that attitude strange. Yes, Moore would always be identified with James Bond, and there were annoying paparazzi to deal with, and it could be tiresome always being asked to order a martini. And yet, he went on, how lucky have I been? I got to play the most famous character in film history, make lots of money doing it, and travel around the world in the prime of my life. Who has time to complain? I always thought this was an admirable answer, and all the more so from someone who showed real generosity in his charitable work.

As we were getting off the phone, I dropped the pretense of reportorial objectivity and told him it was an honor to speak with him, and confessed to having spent a good deal of my childhood in his presence. He thanked me, said he appreciated it, and noted how good it made him feel to know that others had derived pleasure from his work. Many people have wanted to be James Bond; if your wish comes true, you should be grateful for it.

-- Isaac Chotiner at Slate

Some background on Trump's firing of FBI director Comey

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WASHINGTON—The more James Comey showed up on television discussing the FBI’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, the more the White House bristled, according to aides to President Donald Trump.

Frustration was growing among top associates of the president that Mr. Comey, in a series of appearances before a Senate panel, wouldn’t publicly tamp down questions about possible collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race. A person with knowledge of recent conversations said they wanted Mr. Comey to “say those three little words: ‘There’s no ties.’”

In the months before his decision to dismiss Mr. Comey as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Trump grew unhappy that the media spotlight kept shining on the director. He viewed Mr. Comey as eager to step in front of TV cameras and questioned whether his expanding media profile was warping his view of the Russia investigation, the officials said.

One White House aide, speaking after Mr. Comey’s dismissal, described him as a show horse.

“Oh, and there’s James—he’s become more famous than me,” Mr. Trump said as Mr. Comey crossed the room to greet him at a Jan. 22 reception for law enforcement.

In firing Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump said he relied on recommendations by his top two Justice Department officials that the FBI needed new leadership. But he made a point of thanking the director for “informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.”

That purported detail about the FBI’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia hadn’t previously been disclosed. The FBI declined to comment.

The culmination of those frustrations came with Mr. Comey’s summary dismissal, by letter to FBI headquarters, when Mr. Comey was in Los Angeles to meet with FBI agents and attend a job fair. It marked the dramatic end of a rocky relationship between the two that saw Mr. Trump oscillate between effusive praise for and accusations of wrongdoing against Mr. Comey.

His focus on the FBI director began last July, when Mr. Comey, in an extraordinary press conference, said that while Democrat Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information while secretary of state, the FBI wouldn’t recommend criminal charges against her. Mr. Trump, at a rally later that day, said the system was “rigged” in Mrs. Clinton’s favor and suggested that she had tried to bribe the Justice Department.

When Mr. Comey in late October—weeks before the election—informed congressional leaders that the FBI had new evidence in the Clinton email probe, effectively reopening the investigation, Mr. Trump praised the move. “What he did, he brought his reputation—he brought it back,” Mr. Trump said at a rally that month. “He’s got to hang tough because a lot of people want him to do the wrong thing. He did the right thing.”

Mr. Trump reversed course again when Mr. Comey, just two days before the election, told Congress that the new information in the Clinton probe didn’t change the FBI’s determination not to prosecute.

At a rally in Michigan that evening, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Comey again of rigging the system to protect Mrs. Clinton. “You can’t review 650,000 new emails in eight days—you just can’t do it, folks,” he said. “Hillary Clinton is guilty.”

Since his election victory, Mr. Trump appeared at times to warm to Mr. Comey, whom Mrs. Clinton has credited with Mr. Trump’s victory. The two hugged at an event shortly after his inauguration, and the president in April defended Mr. Comey’s handling of the email investigation, telling Fox Business Network that the FBI director wanted to “give everybody a good, fair chance.”

Critics of Mr. Trump have pointed to his previous statements about Mr. Comey—including his praise for the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email probe—as proof that the president’s decision to fire him wasn’t motivated by the reason cited in his dismissal: mistakes made over the handling of the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email server.

Instead, they suggest that Mr. Trump was seeking to short-circuit the FBI’s investigation into his own associates, noting that as a candidate Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Comey only when he made decisions that adversely affected his campaign.

Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, in a CNN interview late Tuesday, said Mr. Trump’s praise for Mr. Comey’s handling of the email probe during the campaign was irrelevant to his decision to dismiss the FBI director. “You’re looking at the wrong set of facts. You’re going back to the campaign,” she said. “This man is the president of the United States.”

Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, a frosty relationship has persisted between him and the FBI director. Associates of Mr. Comey said the director respected the office of the presidency and understood he served at the pleasure of the president. He regularly briefed Mr. Trump on national security matters and had discussions with the president about policy issues, ranging from gang violence to the encryption of communications and devices that is bedeviling law enforcement.

He was careful not to release information to the president about the ongoing probe into Russia’s alleged meddling in the U.S. election, however, because Mr. Comey believed doing so would cross ethical and legal boundaries, according to the associates. Mr. Comey told associates before the election and in December that he knew he could be fired but wouldn’t let such fears affect his decision making. He also urged agents investigating Russia’s meddling in the election not to worry about politics or how their probe might affect those in power, an associate said.

Mr. Comey was irked when Mr. Trump alleged in early March without any evidence that the Obama administration had tapped the phones of Trump Tower, fearing that what he described to associates as reckless tweets could damage the reputation of the FBI. The agency can only obtain such wiretaps with court approval. He made a point of telling members of Congress later that month at a hearing he had “no information” to support Mr. Trump’s assertions.

Last week, ahead of Mr. Comey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—where he said he feels “mildly nauseous” over the possibility that his actions influenced the election—Mr. Trump tweeted: “FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!”

On Tuesday, an FBI official sent a letter to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee acknowledging that Mr. Comey had overstated evidence stemming from the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’’s email use. People familiar with the matter said the mistake sealed Mr. Comey’s fate. Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s longtime bodyguard who is director of Oval Office Operations, delivered the letter to FBI headquarters. One person familiar with the matter said Mr. Comey was giving a presentation to field agents when one agent in the presentation got a news alert on his mobile and told the director the report said he was fired.

Mr. Comey was in the FBI’s Los Angeles headquarters when he learned of his firing, according to a law-enforcement official. Before he left the office, he addressed hundreds of employees and offered encouragement to them, this official said, adding that the mood was “somber.” News channels later showed a white private jet, reportedly carrying Mr. Comey, taxiing at the airport en route back to Washington.

-- Rebecca Ballhaus, Michael C. Bender and Del Quentin Wilber at Wall Street Journal

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WASHINGTON — Toward the end of his comic opus on the press, politics and President Trump, the “Daily Show” comedian Hasan Minhaj looked out at the hundreds of journalists gathered in a subterranean hotel ballroom here on Saturday night and declared, “This has been one of the strangest events I have ever done in my life.”

The lengthy laughter and applause that followed made clear that he was not the only one who thought that way.

No one knew quite what to expect at this year’s edition of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the chummy Washington ritual that became a flash point over press freedom in a year when the relationship between the White House and its correspondents is anything but friendly. The president skipped the event. Celebrities stayed away. Comedians turned down the gig.

But even as Mr. Trump heckled the proceedings in real time — joking at a Pennsylvania rally about reporters’ “consoling each other in a Washington ballroom” — attendees said the often-frivolous dinner felt oddly profound. Part pep rally, part therapy session, the event became a moment of catharsis for a political press corps that has faced months of unrelenting strain.

Loud cheers and a palpable sense of defiance broke out when the president of the Correspondents’ Association, Jeff Mason of Reuters, declared with sermonlike ferocity: “We are not fake news. We are not failing news organizations. And we are not the enemy of the American people.” It was the longest ovation of the night.

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, seated on the dais, reminded the room of journalism’s power, and Mr. Woodward articulated the subtext of the evening when he addressed Mr. Trump directly, saying, “Mr. President, the media is not fake news.”

Even Mr. Minhaj — who opened with a blistering takedown of Mr. Trump, saying the president was “in Pennsylvania because he can’t take a joke” — finished with an earnest ode to free speech. “Only in America can a first-generation immigrant Muslim kid get on this stage and make fun of the president,” he said.

The event “was a line-in-the-sand night, to an extent I didn’t expect,” E. J. Dionne, a longtime Washington chronicler, said in the ballroom afterward. He added that “having Woodward and Bernstein sends another message” — that journalists can, under the right circumstances, topple a presidency.

Promoting the First Amendment was, in the end, the safest possible angle for the Correspondents’ Association, which liaises with the White House on behalf of its members and was wary of blasting the president in absentia. At one point, Mr. Mason recited the text of the amendment onstage, and an introductory video took pains to showcase clashes between previous presidents and the press, demonstrating that the news media’s adversarial relationship with the presidency — which Mr. Mason called “healthy” — did not start with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump raised the tension of the evening with his Pennsylvania rally, an event designed to underscore the contrast between tuxedoed Washington journalists celebrating themselves and the blue-collar supporters at his rally — “hard-working Americans,” as one senior administration official put it.

Wary of looking biased, many prominent journalists in the ballroom kept a poker face during Mr. Minhaj’s nastier punch lines. (He called Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, a “Nazi” and labeled the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a racist, moments quickly featured on Breitbart News and other right-wing news websites.)

“I was covering my mouth with my glass,” April D. Ryan, the White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks, said as she fielded selfie requests on the ballroom floor.

But as reporters fanned out to after-parties, they described the night as a needed tonic to the celebrity-soaked atmosphere of recent correspondents’ dinners and the national climate of hostility toward the news media.

Blake Hounshell, the editor of Politico Magazine, wrote on Twitter, “The WHCD may have lost some glitz tonight, but recovered its self-respect.”

The celebrity quotient was notably low. The biggest Hollywood names in attendance included the actors Matthew Modine and Alan Ruck. Star anchors like Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and George Stephanopoulos of ABC were missing.

A review of Washington hotels on Saturday afternoon showed plenty of vacancies, even at popular lodgings like the Hay-Adams and the Jefferson. At a fashionable brunch hosted by the media impresario Tammy Haddad, several guests confided that they planned to leave town before the dinner. (The New York Times stopped attending in 2008.)

Still, Mr. Mason took pleasure in announcing to the packed crowd that tickets to the dinner had sold out. And journalists who did attend were greeted outside the event site, the Washington Hilton, by an unexpected sight: a small group of supporters, some from as far away as Boston, who had come to cheer the news media.

“We’re actually here to encourage the journalists,” said Julie Locascio, who lives in the Washington area and held a handwritten sign reading, “Journalists are not enemies of the people but friends of freedom.”

As reporters in formal wear walked by, she called out, “We need you in those trenches!”

Howard Fineman, an NBC News analyst and a top editor at HuffPost, said he had been surprised to encounter the supporters on his way into the hotel.

“I’ve been coming to this dinner for many years,” he said at a pre-dinner cocktail reception hosted by CBS News. “I’ve never actually seen the public come here to tell us, ‘Keep up the good work.’”

-- MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM at NYT

In a Times essay titled "How the Left Learned to Hate like the Right", in response to the Trump presidency, it is argued that "Liberals are discovering what conservatives have known for years: Negative energy is a powerful force."

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MARIETTA, GA. — Shortly before President Trump’s swearing-in, I spoke to Steve Cohen, a liberal congressman from Tennessee, about his decision to skip the ceremony. Mr. Cohen said his horror of Mr. Trump almost made him understand how Tea Partyers might have felt under President Barack Obama. “I want my country back!” he said, echoing the right’s rallying cry.

One hundred days into his administration, President Trump has few legislative achievements to his name. But he has forced liberals to experience the near-apocalyptic revulsion that conservatives have often felt toward Democratic presidents. In doing so, he has unwittingly created a new movement in American politics, as Democrats channel the sort of all-encompassing outrage that has long fueled grass-roots conservatism.

For decades, Democrats have envied the Republicans’ passionate, locally attuned base. It turns out that what Democrats were missing was a sense of existential emergency. Mr. Trump has provided it.

Objectively, there’s no comparison between the conservative demonization of Mr. Obama and the progressive case against Mr. Trump. People on the right saw Mr. Obama as a Kenyan-born secret Muslim with a hidden agenda to hobble American power and a health care reform plan to establish “death panels.” None of that is true.

People on the left believe that Mr. Trump has incited hatred against minorities, and boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. Democrats think that the president and his family are blatantly profiting off the presidency and that he welcomed the help of a hostile foreign power during the election. All this is grounded in fact.

Facts aside, there is an emotional symmetry between the conservative reaction to past Democratic presidents and the liberal response to Mr. Trump. Suddenly, left-of-center people get what it’s like to have a president who is the living negation of all they value, a president who makes them ashamed before their children and terrified for their future. Now they’ve learned what it’s like to worry that malevolent foreign conspirators are manipulating American affairs. And these feelings, it turns out, are an extremely powerful goad to political action.

I saw this recently in Georgia’s Sixth District, a conservative area that had sent to Congress first Newt Gingrich and then Tom Price, now Mr. Trump’s secretary of health and human services. I was there to report on the special congressional election to fill Mr. Price’s seat. Ahead of the April 18 open primary, a Democrat, Jon Ossoff, was showing unexpected strength. In the event, he only narrowly failed to win the district outright, and goes forward to a June runoff against the leading Republican vote-getter.

Lots of outsiders were paying attention to the race; Mr. Ossoff raised a staggering $8 million for what was widely seen as a referendum on Mr. Trump’s presidency. On the ground, though, the people powering the campaign were locals, many of them previously apolitical suburban women shocked into action by the presidential election.

In November’s aftermath, Amy Nosek, a 42-year-old stay-at-home mother of two living in an affluent Atlanta suburb, sank into depression, though she’d never been depressed before. “I didn’t even want to go pick up my kids from the school bus because I didn’t want to talk to the other parents, or see anybody,” she told me.

As an antidote, she and a friend founded a local chapter of Indivisible, the network of anti-Trump groups that sprang up after the election. Soon, they were consumed by political organizing. “We’re working all the time,” Ms. Nosek said. “Sometimes, I fall asleep on the couch at 9 or 10 p.m., and then I wake up at 2 and I’m working until 4.”

Like her, most of the activists I met were new to electoral politics. Some had not even known what district they lived in or who their local representatives were. Now, thanks to Mr. Trump, they were obsessed.

I was struck by how their stories echoed tales of conservative political awakening. Until the rise of Mr. Trump, wave after wave of right-wing Republican activism was driven by comfortable but morally scandalized suburbanites, particularly suburban women. Shaken by what they saw as liberal attacks on beloved institutions — family, church, law enforcement, private property — they organized politically, and found meaning and community in it.

This phenomenon long predates the Tea Party movement that so galvanized Republican voters for the 2010 midterm elections. In her 2001 study, “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” Lisa McGirr described how Orange County, Calif., became ground zero for militant conservatism in the early 1960s: “At living room bridge clubs, at backyard barbecues, and at kitchen coffee klatches, the middle-class men and women of Orange County ‘awakened’ to what they perceived as the threats of communism and liberalism.”

Campaigning to save the nuclear family from the depredations of the Equal Rights Amendment, Phyllis Schlafly induced housewives to become local activists.

“These were local women whom most politicians feared to alienate,” wrote Mrs. Schlafly’s biographer, Donald Critchlow, “because these women talked politics, volunteered in political campaigns and wore political buttons when they came to meetings.”

Democrats have their passionate local leaders, but they’ve lacked a Schlafly-style nationwide network of kitchen-table activists. And outside big cities, the party has allowed its local infrastructure to wither.

Mr. Trump is changing all that.

For many Democrats, his election was a traumatic event that demands a response, lest their country become unrecognizable. Democratic women, especially, find it intolerable and degrading to call Mr. Trump their president.

“The story we hear again and again and again is that it’s moms and other women who came together after the election and said, ‘This is totally unacceptable,’ ” said Ezra Levin, one of Indivisible’s founders.

Alan Abramowitz, a professor at Emory University who studies political polarization, said of Democratic antipathy to Mr. Trump, “If anything, I think it’s gotten stronger since he became president because the stuff he’s been doing has just exacerbated those negative feelings.”

There are dangers for Democrats in this absolute loathing. Hatred obliterates nuance and fosters conspiracy theories, a particular temptation when the country is sorting through real evidence of the Trump campaign’s worrisome foreign entanglements. It’s probably not good for America that every election — even an off-year special election in placid suburban Georgia — feels like a struggle over the future of civilization.

Yet, as the right has repeatedly shown over the past 50 years, disgust is politically potent. Nothing, Professor Abramowitz said, works as well as what political scientists call “negative affect” — intense dislike — for “getting people energized and mobilized.”

So far, the lesson of this presidency is that when it comes to building political power, love does not, in fact, trump hate.

-- Michelle Goldberg at NYT

~ ~ ~

On April 29th, Donald Trump will have occupied the Oval Office for a hundred days. For most people, the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy is the luxury of not following politics with a nerve-racked constancy. Trump does not afford this. His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite. The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but it’s worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious, Trump has, in the same span, set fire to the integrity of his office.

Trump has never gone out of his way to conceal the essence of his relationship to the truth and how he chooses to navigate the world. In 1980, when he was about to announce plans to build Trump Tower, a fifty-eight-story edifice on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, he coached his architect before meeting with a group of reporters. “Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he said. “Tell them it’s going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.”

( Read more... )

~ ~ ~

His first date with his future wife was spent in a New Hampshire motel room drinking Wild Turkey into the wee hours with Hunter S. Thompson. He stood several feet away from Martin Luther King Jr. during the “I Have a Dream” speech. He went to China with Richard M. Nixon and walked away from Watergate unscathed. He survived Iran-Contra, too, and sat alongside Ronald Reagan at the Reykjavík Summit. He invaded America’s living rooms and pioneered the rhetorical combat that would power the cable news age. He defied the establishment by challenging a sitting president of his own party. He captured the fear and frustration of the right by proclaiming a great “culture war” was at hand. And his third-party candidacy in 2000 almost certainly handed George W. Bush the presidency, thanks to thousands of Palm Beach, Florida, residents mistakenly voting for him on the “butterfly ballot” when they meant to back Al Gore.

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France has a big election coming, and this piece gives up a look at how the French are being affected by the rise of white nationalism

~ ~ ~

Paris — For some time France has been a country that does not like itself. Somewhere on the road from its humiliation in World War II to its disappointment with European integration to its discomfort with globalization, France slid into moroseness. High-speed trains purred; France pouted. Grumbling became a way of life, the response to lost grandeur. Now France seems ready to vent this slow-ripening anger in an election that could see the extreme right return to power for the first time since the 1940s and Europe revert to a turbulence not seen since that epoch.

If Marine Le Pen of the National Front wins, she says she will take France out of the euro, the shared European currency, and restore the franc. Exit from the European Union could follow. This would constitute an economic and political rupture so violent that even Donald Trump’s victory and Britain’s vote to leave the union would pale beside it. Europe, and not just its markets, would be upended. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has been meddling, would be happy.

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~ ~ ~

Sylvia Plath alleged Ted Hughes beat her two days before she miscarried their second child and that Hughes wanted her dead, unpublished letters reveal. The two accusations are among explosive claims in unseen correspondence written in the bitter aftermath of one of literature’s most famous and destructive marriages.

Written between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963, a week before her death, the letters cover a period in Plath’s life that has remained elusive to readers and scholars alike. While the American writer, who was living in England during that time, was a prolific letter writer and had kept detailed journals since the age of 11, after her death Hughes said his wife’s journals from this time were lost, including the last volume, which he said he destroyed to protect their children, Frieda and Nicholas.

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~ ~ ~

At 3:58 on a recent Wednesday afternoon in Washington, CNN’s largest control room was mostly empty but for a handful of producers hunched over control panels and, hovering behind them, a short, barrel-shaped, restless-looking man in a dark pinstriped suit and open white dress shirt: the president of CNN Worldwide, Jeff Zucker.

Zucker had spent most of the day holed up in a conference room, prepping two anchors who would be moderating a CNN Town Hall on Obamacare that night. Right now, though, his mind was elsewhere. It was two minutes until airtime for “The Lead With Jake Tapper,” and Tapper’s featured guest was the President Trump counselor and noted CNN adversary Kellyanne Conway.

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David Brooks gives us some comical criticism.

~ ~ ~

I just read that the Trump administration has filled only 22 of the 553 key positions that require Senate confirmation. This makes me worry that the administration will not have enough manpower to produce the same volume and standard of incompetence that we’ve come to expect so far.

Granted, in its first few months the administration has produced an impressive amount of ineptitude with very few people.

On his worst days Sean Spicer can produce more errors than 10 normal men on their best days. Kellyanne Conway can flail her way through television confrontations 24/7 and still have the stamina to lose to the Teletubbies on Saturday morning.

The White House staffing system is successfully answering the question, How many scorpions can you fit in a bottle? And in general, the personnel process has been so rigorous in its selection of inexperience that those who were hired on the basis of mere nepotism look like Dean Acheson by comparison.

But still, I worry that at the current pace the Trump administration is going to run out of failure. So far, we’ve lived in a golden age of malfunction. Every major Trump initiative has been blocked or has collapsed, relationships with Congress are disastrous, the president’s approval ratings are at cataclysmic lows.

But can this last? By midsummer, during the high vacation and indictment season, we could see empty hallways in the West Wing and a disorienting incompetence shortage emanating from Washington.

The executive branch could simply go dark. CNN’s ratings will plummet. Columnists will wither and die. Liberals will have to go without the delicious current of schadenfreude and their daily ritual baths of moral superiority.

Now I’m not underestimating the president’s own capacity for carrying on in an incompetent manner almost indefinitely. I don’t think we’ve reached peak Trump.

The normal incompetent person flails and stammers and is embarrassed about it. But the true genius at incompetence like our president flails and founders and is too incompetent to recognize his own incompetence. He mistakes his catastrophes for successes and so accelerates his pace toward oblivion. Those who ignore history are condemned to retweet it.

Trump’s greatest achievements are in the field of ignorance. Up until this period I had always thought of ignorance as a void, as an absence of knowledge. But Trump’s ignorance is not just an absence; it is a rich, intricate and entirely separate universe of negative information, a sort of fertile intellectual antimatter with its own gravitational pull.

It’s not so much that he isn’t well informed; it’s that he is prodigiously learned in the sort of knowledge that doesn’t accord with the facts of our current dimension.

It is in its own way a privilege to be alive at the same time as a man who is the Albert Einstein of confirmation bias, a man whose most impressive wall is the one between himself and evidence, a man who doesn’t need to go off in search of enemies because he is already his own worst one.

But even Trump will eventually hit the limits of human endurance. I know what it is like to be profoundly incompetent, and it is exhausting.

Just to take a small example by way of illustration, in the days before GPS I was (and remain) profoundly incompetent at comprehending driving directions. I would ask for directions and all would start off normally: “Go down Fourth Street and take a right on Poplar.”

But then all would slide into a fog of incomprehensibility and I would keep nodding furiously to try to persuade the person that I could follow what was being said: “Then you toggle over that spur of the thruway that goes under the overpass before the six roundabouts of the gargle.”

By this time entire hemispheres of my brain had shut down, and as the person kept talking, my entire existence slipped into a catatonic mist: “After that it’s just six wheedles up the perplex and after a quick stop at the bolint it’s the 27th driveway on the right.”

The incompetent person in the Trump administration has to live in that stupor shroud every day.

So I hope the Trump team learns to delegate — carelessness in one office, backbiting in another. I hope the president continues to play golf (I don’t get those progressive critics who say Trump is ruining the world and then they complain because he takes time off). I hope his team continues to take advantage of the fact that it takes only one inexperienced stooge to undo the accomplishments of 100 normal workers.

And I hope it continues to negatively surpass all expectations. I remain a full-fledged member in the community of the agog.

One of the things I’ve learned about incompetence over the past few months is that it is radically nonlinear. Competent people go in one of a few directions. But incompetence is infinite.

The human imagination is not capacious enough to comprehend all the many ways the Trumpians can find to screw this thing up.

-- David Brooks at NYT

~ ~ ~

This week’s New York Times interview with Donald Trump was horrifying, yet curiously unsurprising. Yes, the world’s most powerful man is lazy, ignorant, dishonest and vindictive. But we knew that already.

In fact, the most revealing thing in the interview may be Mr. Trump’s defense of Bill O’Reilly, accused of sexual predation and abuse of power: “He’s a good person.” This, I’d argue, tells us more about both the man from Mar-a-Lago and the motivations of his base than his ramblings about infrastructure and trade.

First, however, here’s a question: How much difference has it made, really, that Donald Trump rather than a conventional Republican sits in the White House?

The Trump administration is, by all accounts, a mess. The vast majority of key presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation are unfilled; whatever people are in place are preoccupied with factional infighting. Decision-making sounds more like palace intrigues in a sultan’s seraglio than policy formulation in a republic. And then there are those tweets.

Yet Mr. Trump’s first great policy and political debacle — the ignominious collapse of the effort to kill Obamacare — owed almost nothing to executive dysfunction. Repeal-and-replace didn’t face-plant because of poor tactics; it failed because Republicans have been lying about health care for eight years. So when the time came to propose something real, all they could offer were various ways to package mass loss of coverage.

Similar considerations apply on other fronts. Tax reform looks like a bust, not because the Trump administration has no idea what it’s doing (although it doesn’t), but because nobody in the G.O.P. ever put in the hard work of figuring out what should change and how to sell those changes.

What about areas where Mr. Trump sometimes sounds very different from ordinary Republicans, like infrastructure?

A push for a genuine trillion-dollar construction plan (as opposed to tax credits and privatization), which would need Democratic support given the predictable opposition from conservatives, would be a departure. But given what we heard in the interview — basically incoherent word salad mixed with random remarks about transportation in Queens — it’s clear that the administration has no actual infrastructure plan, and probably never will.

True, there are some places where Mr. Trump does seem likely to have a big impact — most notably, in crippling environmental policy. But that’s what any Republican would have done; climate change denialism and the belief that our air and water are too clean are mainstream positions in the modern G.O.P.

So Trumpist governance in practice so far is turning out to be just Republican governance with (much) worse management. Which brings me back to the original question: Does the appalling character of the man on top matter?

I think it does. The substance of Trump policy may not be that distinctive in practice. But style matters, too, because it shapes the broader political climate. And what Trumpism has brought is a new sense of empowerment to the ugliest aspects of American politics.

By now there’s a whole genre of media portraits of working-class Trump supporters (there are even parody versions). You know what I mean: interviews with down-on-their-luck rural whites who are troubled to learn that all those liberals who warned them that they would be hurt by Trump policies were right, but still support Mr. Trump, because they believe that liberal elites look down on them and think they’re stupid. Hmm.

Anyway, one thing the interviewees often say is that Mr. Trump is honest, that he tells it like is, which may seem odd given how much he lies about almost everything, policy and personal. But what they probably mean is that Mr. Trump gives outright, unapologetic voice to racism, sexism, contempt for “losers” and so on — feelings that have always been an important source of conservative support, but have long been things you weren’t supposed to talk about openly.

In other words, Mr. Trump isn’t an honest man or a stand-up guy, but he is, arguably, less hypocritical about the darker motives underlying his worldview than conventional politicians are.

Hence the affinity for Mr. O’Reilly, and Mr. Trump’s apparent sense that news reports about the TV host’s actions are an indirect attack on him. One way to think about Fox News in general, and Mr. O’Reilly in particular, is that they provide a safe space for people who want an affirmation that their uglier impulses are, in fact, justified and perfectly O.K. And one way to think about the Trump White House is that it’s attempting to expand that safe space to include the nation as a whole.

And the big question about Trumpism — bigger, arguably, than the legislative agenda — is whether unapologetic ugliness is a winning political strategy.

-- Paul Krugman at NYT

Ross Douthat writes on the tensions between diversity and democracy.

~ ~ ~

One of the hard truths of human affairs is that diversity and democracy do not go easily together. In the Middle East today as in Europe’s not-so-distant past, the transition from authoritarianism to popular sovereignty seems to run through ethnic or religious purges. Worldwide, many of the models of successful democratic government are effectively ethno-states, built on past cleansings or partitions or splendid isolation. And in the West in recent years, both mass immigration and cultural fragmentation have brought authoritarian temptations back to life.

This pattern runs deep in our species’s history. A new paper from the economists Oded Galor and Marc Klemp finds a strong correlation between diversity and autocracy in pre-colonial societies, with a legacy that extends to today’s institutions as well. The authors suggest that authoritarianism emerges from both bottom-up and top-down pressures: A diverse society seeks strong central institutions for the sake of cohesion and productivity, and internal division, stratification and mistrust increase “the scope for domination” by powerful elites.

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After House Speaker Paul Ryan's failure to pass his healthcare plan to override Obamacare, more doubt is being cast on his capabilities, particularly as a policy wonk. Someone coughed up this essay from 2012 when Ryan was selected for the vice-president slot on the Republican ticket, which shows there was always some concern about the man's intellectual heft.

~ ~ ~

THE TALL, GOOD-LOOKING young man from Wisconsin sure was likable and energetic, but in the early 1990s, no one in Washington expected Paul Ryan to become the intellectual tribune of his party. It wasn’t clear at first that he even wanted to be in D.C. Offered a position on Senator Bob Kasten’s committee right after college, Ryan took awhile to respond because he was trying to find work as a ski instructor in Colorado instead. He only ended up going to Washington because his mom convinced him to, recalls Cesar Conda, the committee’s minority staff director.

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~ ~ ~

Last month, when President Donald Trump toured a Boeing aircraft plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, he saw a familiar face in the crowd that greeted him: Patrick Caddell, a former Democratic political operative and pollster who, for forty-five years, has been prodding insurgent Presidential candidates to attack the Washington establishment. Caddell, who lives in Charleston, is perhaps best known for helping Jimmy Carter win the 1976 Presidential race. He is also remembered for having collaborated with his friend Warren Beatty on the 1998 satire “Bulworth.” In that film, a kamikaze candidate abandons the usual talking points and excoriates both the major political parties and the media; voters love his unconventionality, and he becomes improbably popular. If the plot sounds familiar, there’s a reason: in recent years, Caddell has offered political advice to Trump. He has not worked directly for the President, but at least as far back as 2013 he has been a contractor for one of Trump’s biggest financial backers: Robert Mercer, a reclusive Long Island hedge-fund manager, who has become a major force behind the Trump Presidency.

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The better part of an article giving us an 'inside look' at the Trump administration. The failure of the plan to repeal & replace Obamacare has been a humbling experience.

~ ~ ~

On Monday, Jan. 9, less than two weeks before President Trump’s inauguration, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, hosted a dinner at his office in the Capitol with members of Trump’s inner circle. The guests included the president-elect’s chief White House strategist, Stephen K. Bannon; his son-in-law and family consigliere, Jared Kushner; his chief of staff, Reince Priebus; his economic adviser, Gary Cohn; his nominee for Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin; his incoming deputy chief of staff, Rick Dearborn; and his legislative-affairs director, Marc Short. The ostensible purpose of the dinner was to discuss the details of Trump’s legislative agenda — in particular, the prospects for a sweeping tax-reform measure that Republicans, and especially Ryan, have been coveting for the past decade.

( Read more... )

Franken, the "Saturday Night Live" guy, has been scoring some points in the Senate, and there is some buzz about him running for president.

~ ~ ~

It was only a matter of time before the presidential chatter began. Al Franken, the comedian-turned-politician from Minnesota, kept a conspicuously low profile during his first term in the Senate, sticking quietly to policy matters to convince the world that he was a serious guy, not just a celebrity with a political jones. But since Donald Trump’s election (and Franken’s re-election), the senator has been busting out all over, mainly due to his expert grilling of the Trump nominees that liberals most love to hate. Franken laid a perjury trap for attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions during his confirmation, and then, for his next act, uncovered education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos’s deep ignorance of education policy. This week, Franken’s deft questioning made vividly clear the callousness of Neil Gorsuch’s judicial philosophy—and turned a Supreme Court nomination fight into a public conversation about the conservative bias for corporations over people.

These dramatic moments, instantly distilled into YouTube moments, quickly spread online, transforming Franken in the blink of an eye from a relative political newcomer to someone who must be buzzed about, played up, shot down, and speculated about as potential presidential candidate in 2020. Queue the bandwagon!

“This is Al Franken’s moment in the spotlight,” writes Josh Kraushaar at National Journal. “If he chooses, he could parlay his good fortune into a bid for the presidency in 2020.” Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post and Michael Kinsley in Vanity Fair have echoed this argument that Franken is (or should be) a serious presidential contender for 2020. And a 23-year-old graduate student named Nick Butler has even set up a PAC to draft Franken. His rationale for a Franken candidacy: “He could be a kind of younger, cooler Bernie Sanders,” Butler told The Wrap, appealing to both young and blue-collar voters with his populism. Plus, Franken has “plenty of friends in the deep-pocketed entertainment industry.”

The “Franken for President” buzz is as understandable as it was inevitable. The Democratic Party needs all the star power it can find right now, of course. And with Trump in the White House, a colorful past in the entertainment world no longer looks like such a political liability; maybe it’s even an advantage.

Franken, of course, has every right to run for the presidency if he wants to. And he may very well be thinking about it—along with several dozen other Democrats. After all, he is the author of the 1999 satirical novel, Why Not Me? The Inside Story of the Making and Unmaking of the Franken Presidency. The plot is farcical and far-fetched—or at least, it seemed that way he wrote it. Franken unexpectedly wins the White House by promising to eliminate ATM fees, but is quickly forced to resign because of his bizarre behavior during the inauguration, which leads to the revelation of diaries revealing his unfitness for office. Why Not Me? is self-deprecating, as much of Franken’s humor is, but seems considerably less fantastic now that Trump is president. Trump’s success has enormously expanded the range of what is possible in American politics, to the point where an idea that Franken played for laughs in 1999 could be a real possibility in 2020. (Although he probably wouldn’t run on the ATM issue.)

***

But Franken should not run for president. The Democratic Party needs him too much in the Senate. What the last few weeks have demonstrated, most of all, is that Franken has exactly the skill set the party needs in Washington—especially when hearings come around. Senate hearings are a unique public forum that remains central to American political life and debate: They’re half-courtroom, half-theater. Like a good trial lawyer, a senator has to know how to ask questions forensically, so that they support an argument. And like a good actor, a senator also has to know how to grab and hold the spotlight at the right moments.

With the possible exception of Elizabeth Warren, no Democrats excels at congressional theater like Franken. He has a true gift for interrogating nominees in a way that gets them to reveal things about themselves that they would rather not. It was Franken’s direct questioning of Sessions during his confirmation hearings that led to the former Alabama Senator lying under oath about meeting the Russian ambassador (and ultimately forced Sessions to recuse himself from the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the election).

Similarly, under the glare of Franken’s questioning, Betsy DeVos revealed her stark ignorance of education policy, creating a national outcry over her nomination. This, as we now know, was vintage Franken: He shrewdly zeroed in on the debate over whether students should be evaluated based on “growth” or “proficiency”—one that anybody who knows anything about education would instantly recognize. As DeVos sputtered out her non-answer, it became clear that she didn’t know the difference between the concepts: “I think, if I’m understanding your question correctly around proficiency, I would also correlate it to competency and mastery, so that each student is measured according to the advancement they’re making in each subject area.” Franken corrected her: “Well, that’s growth. That’s not proficiency.” When DeVos said she was “just asking to clarify,” Franken finished her off with a dry quip: “It surprises me that you don’t know this issue.”

In his grilling of Gorsuch, Franken once again managed to redefine a Trump nominee—this time, as the embodiment of conservative judges’ corporate bias, and the human toll it extracts. In a deft line of questioning, Franken drew out the dangerous smugness of the nominee’s judicial philosophy with needling questions about a decision Gorsuch had made in what’s known as the “frozen trucker” case. A truck driver was fired after he temporarily abandoned his rig for a good reason: He risked freezing to death in it, or harming others if he tried to move it. In a dissenting decision, Judge Gorsuch said the company had every right to fire the trucker. Franken picked apart Gorsuch’s dissent, getting him to essentially admit he couldn’t put himself into the shoes of the truck driver.

Franken used the case to make a larger point about how Gorsuch’s “literalism”—like that of so many other Republican judges—leads him to make decisions that are manifestly cruel. In his closing peroration, Franken noted that Gorsuch claimed to be devoted to the “plain meaning” of the law, and then dissected that devotion mercilessly. “The plain meaning rule has an exception,” Franken explained. “When using the plain meaning rule would create an absurd result, courts should depart from the plain meaning. It is absurd to say this company is in its rights to fire him because he made the choice of possibly dying from freezing to death or causing other people to die possibly by driving an unsafe vehicle. That’s absurd.”

Franken then ended on a self-deprecating joke pointing to his own comedic past: “Now, I had a career in identifying absurdity. And I know it when I see it. And it makes me — you know, it makes me question your judgment.”

This is what Democrats desperately need more of. But Franken, like every promising Democratic office-holder, is going to be flattered and urged and petititoned to run for president—partly because his party has fetishized the presidency, to its own peril. While Republicans have invested heavily in “down-ballot” races, and built up a massive advantage in both state capitols and Washington, Democrats have continued to throw everything at winning (or losing) the White House. That mentality has to change—and maybe the process can start with Franken.

Franken has emerged as a uniquely effective senator because he has the skills needed to do the work that senators are actually tasked with. Beyond grilling nominees—and redefining national debates in the process—they’re legislators who have to have a command of policy details. Franken displayed that sort of command even before entering politics. As a comedian, he specialized in surprisingly wonkish political humor that was based on challenging blowhards like Bill O’Reilly on the facts. Franken’s special gift is that he can explain the often arcane matters taken up by the Senate in crisp terms that average citizens can easily understand. His use of the truck- driver story drove home a point about the real-world consequences of Gorsuch’s jurisprudence. Democrats need more voices like that in the Senate, not less—and not a guy who’s distracted by a presidential bid.

For the sake of their future, Democrats must come around to understanding that the party needs strong office-holders at every level. They can start by refraining from whipping up, or hopping on, the “Franken for President” train. Instead, liberals should encourage Franken to ignore the temptation, stay put in the Senate, and continue to hone his essential skills as the master of hearing-room drama.

-- Jeet Heer at The New Republic

INTERVIEWER

What books are on your night stand now?

FRAN

There are no books on my night stand, because I’m a lifelong insomniac, so eight or nine years ago, I thought: “Don’t read in bed. It’s too stimulating. Watch TV instead. It’s boring.” And it’s true. TV is boring, but apparently not boring enough to make me fall asleep. So now instead of being overstimulated and awake, I’m bored and awake.

INTERVIEWER

What moves you most in a work of literature?

FRAN

I think it might be the word “move” that kind of perplexes me, because that’s a word connected with emotion. I don’t really seek out emotion when reading. The feeling that’s most important to me when reading is that I’m absorbed. I just want to be taken away. I really like being dazzled. That would be nice. The thing I care least about in reading is the story. I just don’t care that much about stories. That may have to do with being older. Tell me a story I don’t know.

But really, I read in order not to be in life. Reading is better than life. Without reading, you’re stuck with life.

INTERVIEWER

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

FRAN

None. I would never do it. My idea of a great literary dinner party is Fran, eating alone, reading a book. That’s my idea of a literary dinner party. When I eat alone, I spend a lot of time, before I sit down to my meager meal, choosing what to read. And I’m a lot better choosing a book than preparing a meal. And I never eat anything without reading. Ever. If I’m eating an apple, I have to get a book.

INTERVIEWER

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

FRAN

I wouldn’t say disappointing or not good, but I will say that I have never enjoyed reading William Faulkner. I am not saying he’s not a great writer. I will just say that I prefer not to read him. I don’t enjoy reading him. I did not acquire the ability to not finish a book until I was 50 years old, which probably has to do with scarcity as a child: You have a book — finish it!

But I’ve made a number of decisions since then. If you don’t like a book, stop reading it. If you don’t like a movie, walk out. Life is not a jail sentence. When I used to be able to go into bookstores all the time, when there were lots of bookstores, I could read a few sentences and put it down. Now I hear about a book and get someone to order it on the internet, and when the book arrives I find I don’t like it. I only read for pleasure. I don’t have to finish a book. Sometimes, I don’t realize how little I care about a book. Sometimes, I start reading a book and then realize I forgot I was reading it. And it disappears under a pile of books.

INTERVIEWER

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

FRAN

It would depend on who’s reading it to him.

-- Fran Lebowitz at NYT

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