#if i ever touched him i would be mutually touching president trump | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

intoafandom · 3 years

Text

Why I like Kevan Miller, Steven Kampfer, Trent Frederic, Torey Krug, Tuukka Rask etc and why I will continue to like them.

(Sorry this is soooo long but it’s the only way I can explain)

So last night I got an anon ask and the person was asking why I like Kevan Miller when he’s a republican and I mentioned how I would make a separate post explaining my reasoning better and now that I have the time and its no longer 3 am, now seems like a good time lol.

So I’m gunna give a backstory about the players above that I mentioned and why a lot of bruinsblr doesn’t like them (so people that may not be aware know the context of why people are upset/dont like them). Most of bruinsblr doesn’t like Miller or Kampfer because they’re republicans. Everyone on bruinsblr is allowed to dislike them if they choose to. I recognize I’m in the minority on this app when I say I like and support Kevan Miller and Steven Kampfer. People on here also don’t like Torey Krug for the same reason and because he follows/followed Trump’s twitter account (since trumps account got deleted, torey now follows the “trump archives” account). People on here don’t like Tuukka anymore because over the summer, during all the blm stuff in the bubble, Tuukka went on tv in the bubble for an interview with a hat that said “Boston police” on it (the interview also aired right after the Bruins Organization posted about how they stand against racism, so people ended up calling Tuukka a racist hypocrite.) Last night, people on here found out that Trent Frederic follows Trump supporters and republicans on social media, which is why he’s losing some fans on this app. There are probably more stories about other players that I’m not aware of as well but these will be the ones I’m focusing on for now.

I am NOT going to start talking about my political opinions or my position on social issues. My account is called IntoAFandom for a REASON. So I can escape the real world and go “into a fandom” and have some peace. That’s why i never reblog or like or post about any real world events or issues. I want my blog to be solely about things, fandoms, and people that I love and care about. I don’t wanna come on my blog and see how a bombing happened or if someone got shot or this president signed this executive order etc etc. i wanna come on my blog and fangirl about Bucky Barnes being a sweetheart with kids or how amazing Matt Grzelcyk is at “tight turns” etc etc. Hence the name “IntoAFandom.”

I’m getting a lot of questions as to why I still support these players and I’ll definitely answer those questions in this post. Just so my mutuals know where I stand on this.

Now obviously it would be super easy for me to just go “well the player is super nice so i dont care about their political views.” And while that’s partially true for me, its not the only reason. For me, the reason is much deeper than that. I’ve never mentioned or talked about or even said it out loud. I touched upon what I’m about to say in that anon ask I got last night, but I’m going to go into detail now. It’s kind of hard to explain and the only way I can describe it is to tell you about my hockey journey up until this point, and specifically the 2018-19 season.

So one day in April in 2018, I was on school vacation and I was very bored. There was literally nothing on tv. However, as I was scrolling through the channels, I saw that a bruins game was on. I had never really watched hockey before in my life and the only experience I could remember having with it was when my mom was obsessed with them in like 2013 and how she set up this whole contraption to try and watch a game when a snowstorm made us lose connection. So with nothing else on the tv, crippling boredom, and being a Massachusetts native, I put the game on. It was literally just starting and the national anthem was about to start. We were playing the leafs lmao and it was game five or six of the series probably. I cant really remember because I didn’t think I would care this much about hockey at the time of watching it. But what I do remember was how CREEPY Tuukka looked😂 He was just standing there alone with a huge spotlight on him, head down, wearing these huge pads and looking straight up terrifying. I literally started laughing because of how creepy he looked. And then he put his cool ass mask on and right there I knew he was my favorite player. And to this day he is still my favorite. Tuukka was the first hockey player I EVER knew and could remember by name. I gotta admit, at first I thought his name was “Tuuk Arask” because that’s what it sounded like whenever the announcers would say it, specifically Jack Edwards lol. But then I was like “wait is it Arask or Rask” and after looking at his jersey like 3 games later I finally realized it was actually Rask lol. And I was like “Tuukka Rask. So freaking creepy lol. He’s my favorite.” I also have to mention that I’ve always been a sucker for people that play positions that no one else wants to play. Like for example, when I first started watching football in like 2014, my first ever favorite player was Stephen Gostkowski because he was the kicker. He was super good and he was instantly my fav. That’s what Tuukka was like for me. This huge, tall ass, creepy ass, goalie who was playing super well. How could i NOT like him. I didn’t really bother to learn any other players on the bruins team since they got eliminated in the second round. I remember saying to my mom “I don’t want them to be out. I wanna learn more.” I wanted to know more about the game and 6 games, or however many it was, wasn’t enough. So for some reason, I followed them throughout the offseason and in late September/early October I started watching a ton of their older games on YouTube. Not super old obviously, but games from like 2013-2017 ish. Just whatever I could find. And it was so interesting. I tried to only watch games where they actually won so I wasn’t wasting my time lol, but not having to worry about the score helped me start learning the game and some of the rules, like what an icing was for example. So then preseason games started and I got more into it. And then the beginning of the 2018-19 season started. I still didn’t really know any players besides Tuukka, even though I was watching YouTube games. The YouTube ones were more for me to learn the game and the rules rather than players (however, looking back, I did notice that Kevan Miller was a freaking beast, but I just didn’t acknowledge who he actually was. I just saw a player going absolute sicko mode and being like YEEEEAAAAH). The second player I could actually remember by name was Danton Heinen. I noticed he was playing really well and I was like omg who is that and I learned his name and he became one of my favorites with Tuukka. Next was Anders Bjork. I remember I was texting my friends and was trying to make it seem like I wasn’t a complete amateur at hockey knowledge, so I was like “hey guys, Bjork is back in the line up😃” and so I always remembered his name. Next was Ryan Donato because he was literally AWAYS smiling. Every time he was on camera he was SMILING. I loved it so much he was like a little bean. And so he was one of my favorites and i had a top three with him, heino and tuuks.

Now I was watching games and slowly learning important names like Chara, Bergeron, Marchand etc but it wasn’t really on my radar to actually learn all the players because I hadn’t even done that with the patriots who I had been watching and loving for yeeeears. But that was until I decided to watch a behind the b episode. And I was HOOKED. I instantly began to love and care about every single player on the roster. This was in like February of 2019. And that’s when I started trying to name everyone on the team, including their numbers. I made it a mission. I remember writing out lists in math class because I was so bored and would rather try to memorize hockey players. And that’s when I found bruinsblr. It was march by the time I started to post hockey stuff. And i made an instagram account so I could started editing them. I’ve had this blog since 2014 and its seen many phases, but march of 2019 was when I changed it into a mainly bruins blog. And I remember not knowing what “bruins lb” was and i never wanted to tag it because I thought it was like a club or something that I would be intruding on😂 So I started posting and reblogging bruins stuff and posting sucky bruins edits on here and on my insta account. And I started watching every single behind the b episode from every season and I was literally obsessed with the team. And then Donato got traded and i was heartbroken cuz I loved him and I was like Coyle is gunna have to wow me to get me to like him and he DID and i LOVE HIM. But then I decided to have a top five instead of a top three. And it was Tuukka, Krug, DeBrusk, Pasta, and Marchy. They were the players I noticed the most. And Marchy started LICKING people how could i not choose him😂 So then the playoffs come and we beat the leafs in game 7 AGAIN (and I literally missed the first two periods because I was at my confirmation) But I finally understood all the memes about the leafs and I finally understood hockey and hockey culture by this point. I knew the rules, the players, the memes, literally everything. And then we make it to the finals and get lil nas x singing old town road before game 1 and we get JD wearing that stupid hat😂 and the two people from The Office (one of them wanted the bruins to win and the other wanted the blues) and it was all just amazing for me. Then we lost and i was devastated. And we had to see pictures of CMac sobbing on the ice and JD sitting alone in his stall crying and all of them were so sad and after that journey we just went through i was fvcking crying too. We didn’t win, but that 2018-19 season is SO special for me.

The people on this roster (minus gemel smith and lee stempniak) are EXTREMELY special to me. They TAUGHT me hockey. They turned me on to an entirely new culture. I got to experience my first real bit of hockey. I got to experience EVERYTHING about hockey with them (besides the cup) in this ONE season of hockey. I saw the preseason games in china, the halloween visit to to the hospital, Chara bringing pies to the homeless, them buying toys for kids in the hospital at Christmas then visiting them, the new years game outside against the hawks, trade deadline crushing my heart, every round of the playoffs, players pushing through crazy injuries, loving players, despising other teams, all the memes, all the jokes, all the players. Everything. The 2018-19 season is SO incredibly special for me because it’s the first time I ever experienced real hockey and watched an entire season. The people on that roster mean so much to me because of that. Now take a look at the names on that roster. Rask. Krug. Miller. Kampfer. Frederic. They all helped me experience my first year of hockey. Freddy in his first freaking game, getting into a fight😂 Miller and Kampfer were BEASTS on the ice. Krug being a SPECTACULAR little defenseman, quarterbacking the pp and sticking up for himself and SLAMMING thomas. Tuukka Rask being the brick wall. There is no way that I could ever dislike the people on that roster unless the did something suuuuuper bad. I don’t know if you would call it hero worship or whatever, but those people on that roster are so fucking special to me. Even ones like JFK and Vaak and Colby that didn’t play that many games. They still made an impact for me as a hockey fan. THAT is the main reason why I will never stop liking and supporting tuuks, krugger, kampfs, millsy, or freddy. Everyone on that roster has a special place in my heart and I’m not going to let their political views change or tamper with the incredible experience they gave me during that 2018-19 season. I wont ever love another team as much as I loved that specific roster. And no one is going to change that for me. I dont care about their political views or whatever. For me, the experience and the feelings they gave me trump anything i may or may not disagree with. That roster is so special to me, I cant bring myself to dislike any of those people. I will always like those players, no matter how republican or democrat or whatever. Political views dont matter to me when it comes to those players.

Now besides all of that and the experience they gave me, I do believe that they’re still good people even tho they may be republican. I wanna start with Tuukka because it literally doesn’t make sense to me. Tuukka is not even AMERICAN. I dont think he cares that much about American politics since im pretty sure most his family lives in Finland. People got mad at him for wearing a Boston police hat. But I think those people are forgetting that Tuukka has been in boston for soooo long. There have probably been multiple occasions where the police had to help him or the team for some reason or another (they are technically famous after all). Tuukka wearing a hat that says Boston Police doesn’t make him a bad person. He was probably just showing support to the people that helped support HIM as well as his family and teammates. I follow Tuukka on insta and he literally NEVER posts anything political. Probably because NEVER actually posts ANYTHING at all lol. Tuukka had been my favorite from the start and theres almost nothing he could ever do that would make me dislike him.

As for the other 4, and any other players on the team that may be republican (honestly i bet most of them are because 1) most hockey players are and 2) a lot of the guys are christian/catholic and most christian/catholic people are republican as well) I choose to believe that political opinions dont make you a bad person. I like to believe that it depends on the circumstances for every individual. Now I’m not gay or black or anything. Im an 18 year old, straight white girl. So obviously i dont know what its really like for someone to hate or disagree with my race, sexuality, etc. I saw someone say (sorry I forget who it was) that they keep thinking “well what would that player say about me because im gay. What would they actually think about me. I cant support them.” And honestly that’s extremely valid. I never thought about it that way before. So if Kevan Miller for example was out here posting a bunch of homophobic stuff like “i hate gays” or “gays are all stupid” or anything like that, then yeah my opinions on him would probably change in some way. But I follow him on insta and i know the stuff he post about. I have NEVER seen him say anything like that. Ive never heard any bruin say anything like that. From what I’ve seen, they all seem like super nice, sweet, supportive people when they’re off the ice. (I think it’s also important to mention that I follow EVERYONE on the 2018-19 roster. I follow all of their instas. Most of them dont have twitter, but I follow all the ones that do. It’s part of the whole “that roster is incredibly special to me” thing). I choose to believe that following republicans or being one yourself doesn’t automatically make you a bad person, especially when you consider the different circumstances that every individual is under as humans. We all experience different things and that always plays a role in how you act or the opinions you have or the people you support. Someone’s political opinions have never stopped me from liking people. Ive clearly shown that I don’t mind republicans at all, but that doesn’t mean im going to dislike democrats either. Most of the actors/ singers that i like are democrats. And it just happens that most of the athletes i like are republicans. The political stuff doesn’t matter to me. I just dont want it being slapped in my face 24/7. I dont care if you’re a republican or democrat as long as you aren’t constantly talking to me about politics or social issues or trying to change my mind on stuff. Hopefully you can try to see my point of view on this and UNDERSTAND why I like them. Again, I’ve never told my hockey story to anyone so please don’t try and invalid my feelings about the season or the players.

Please, I beg, please don’t comment on this calling racist or something. Please dont try and change me mind. Please dont tell me i need to educate myself. I know WHY i like these players. I know where they stand politically and who they support. But these players are too special to ME for me to actually give a sht about if they like trump or not. Honestly tho, feel free to give your opinion (especially if you’re gay or black or anything) cuz i dont mind hearing other standpoints as long as you aren’t mean about it or try to change my mind. If i change my mind, which i probably wont, I want it to be on my own terms. Please remember that we ARE still a hockey family 💛🖤💛

(Also I’m NEVER talking about this again. If anyone ever asks or something like this comes up again im just gunna link/ reblog this post)

(Also, thank you to whoever made it this far and actually read all of that. ESPECIALLY if you’re someone that doesn’t agree with me. Its good to hear multiple standpoints on this stuff.)

#boston bruins #bruins #torey krug #brad marchand #tuukka rask #jake debrusk #charlie mcavoy #patrice bergeron #zdeno chara #matt grzelcyk #kevan miller #steven kampfer #trent frederic

8 notes · View notes

thepropertylovers · 3 years

Text

What Foreigners Really Think of The U.S. Right Now

The other night, after the kiddos went to bed, we decided to watch the second Borat movie that just came out (have you seen it?). It was insane and hilarious all at the same time, but it got me wondering: what do folks who don’t live in the U.S. think of The United States of America right now? What is their perception of us?

So I decided to pose this question on Instagram and wow. Y’all did not hold back. I want to thank everyone who submitted for your candidness and honesty, even if some of these were hard to swallow. It’s important to note that just because these are their opinions of America, it doesn’t mean it is all necessarily true. Regardless, it was interesting to read everyone’s thoughts and get an outsider’s perspective.

We received hundreds of submissions and couldn’t post them all, but below, people from all over the world share what they really think of the United States at the moment.

Leadership is out of touch with reality and messing things up real bad, not just for the U.S. but also for the world. What’s worse is that half the country is being misled successfully. It just shows poorly on the country all over. -Annonymous

Your president is a disaster when it comes to foreign politics and corona. No class, no knowledge. A joke. Very scary to watch. But half of the voters are happy with it. And that is even more scary. Very difficult to understand the hate and ignorance in your society right now. -Mikkel

It’s just weird. Everything basically. I totally understand now why the U.S. is described as '“flawed democracy” in the democracy index. It’s just a crazy system which is not providing equality among people- regarding the vote especially. This system leads to the fact of the two big parties (similar in the UK basically). But democracy is about diversity in opinions and options. Not just two. -Max

The US is more divided than ever. The two parties cannot work together nor do they appear to want to. The government is no longer run by reason, facts, and policy aiming for the betterment of the entire country and or world in the long or medium run; rather it’s instant gratification for the few who benefit from nepotism. Lies and misinformation are used to build a dictatorship hiding in the form of “patriotism”. And those who could act as a check or balance focus on their own personal gain, putting their needs above those of the persons they should be representing. -Joel

I personally don’t think there is a very good atmosphere in the USA, especially right now, Trump’s administration does not protect the American people or the economy. He only cares about himself and his male-white supremacy. The worst of all is that lots of Americans think Trump is actually a good leader (idk why, honestly). But thank God that people are starting to wake up and fight about what they believe. We can see it through BLM protests, feminist movements, and so on, and the whole world is proud about those people fighting for their rights. America was once the land of dreams, but nowadays (with all that is happening) it is even scary to go there. Lots of things have to change and those changes have to start, voting and defending your rights and your beliefs are the first step. Greetings from Spain. -Antonio

The main reasons I can think of are vote suppression/gerrymandering, expensive health care wealth inequality, racism, lack of fun control… -Brian

Definitely find the hypocrisy of the Republicans so annoying, Trump still being in office, the fact that there has been no police reform or justice for Breonna Taylor, the gun laws, and the COVID numbers just to name a few. -Brian

Here in the UK it seems like CARNAGE over there..don’t get me wrong, it’s wild here too but Trump is insane and it’s really odd seeing so many Americans supporting him. -Dan

Really worried about the fact that you might go for 4 more years with Trump and the fact that he’ll for sure contest the results if he loses. Add to this, all the racial violence and in particular the way some policemen act without being condemned by any judge. And finally the pandemic which seems to be even more out of control than in other countries. This is coming from someone who lives in France where we’re going to be under lockdown for the second time since the beginning of the pandemic (2nd lockdown starting tomorrow evening and will last at least until December 1st 😢). -Estelle

To put a long story short, let’s just hope Cheeto doesn’t get reelected otherwise our UK trade deal will be a disaster and we don’t need any more negative influences in the UK around gender and sexual equality.-Christian

I think with this administration, the US has demonstrated how to shipwreck a whole nation economically, ideologically, socially, and politically within a really short period of time. After just 4 years, we’ve come to associate the US with widespread narrow-mindedness, a lack of respect and courtesy to other nations (and minorities in its own country for that matter), short sightedness when it comes to global phenomena like environmentalism or migration patterns, and a celebration (by some at least) of almost barbaric notions of violence, oppression, and backward thinking, all under the camouflage of its constitution and socio-historic heritage. We’ve really admired the Obama administration over here in Europe, which-despite its flaws and shortcomings- has opened up the US to international partnerships and has established an ongoing discourse shaped by mutual respect and politeness…the contrast couldn’t be more pronounced these day…-Sebastian

I look at our Prime Minister and government and then see Trump and think we really could have it so much worse! Vote!! -Ant

As an American living in London, I can tell you that the news coverage here makes the US look like an absolute joke. Mainly due to 45, his lies, his bigotry, and his insane desire to make covid seem as though it’s a falsehood “created by the left” while hundreds of thousands of Americans have ben victimized by this pandemic. What was once seen as a country of opportunity and freedom, is sadly no longer held to that level of greatness in comparison to its neighboring countries. It saddens me because I had plans to move back home within the next year or so, but if the US continues on its path, I can see myself in London for the unforeseeable future. I can’t live in a country where I am seen or believed to be lesser than another because of my sexual preference. I can only hope and pray that this election brings the change we need to be that country of greatness once again. -Rob

Very poor to be honest. And I’m not necessarily [talking about Trump]- I think the immediate reaction is to blame him. Though, he is pretty awful. There was obviously a huge level of social and other problems in the US, and the current administration has exploited them to the breaking point. Whereas more “skilled” past administrations had the ability to leverage those issues for their benefit, but not let it boil over. I actually thought Trump would be a positive for the US and world- in that his incompetence would force other world leaders to step up. Meaning more equity in how disputes etc. are assessed and the US wouldn’t bully smaller nations. I think the US has hit the point in its journey with capitalism that the USSR hit with socialism in the late 80’s that led to its collapse. Does that mean collapse for the US, I don’t know but the system isn’t providing equity and equality for all as it stands. -Paul

Worried but also hopeful for you guys because I don’t think all citizens in America reflect the current administration. It’s been really great to see people voting early and making their voice heard. No matter what happens just know you did what you could in this moment in time. Even though the current administration provides a scary outlook for the future. As long as the current and future generations lead with love, there will hopefully be a brighter future. Love from Canada. -Ajetha

I've been subscribing to all of the US News since the Black Lives Matter Movement commenced and honestly, it made me scared as a Filipino Asian to step foot in the States ever since. I have big dreams of flying over there and probably working there as an immigrant after I finished college. However, when I found out about the racial injustice that is currently ongoing in the country, I became hesistant of still wanting to live there. Although, I'm positive that there are still people like you two that will be open about working immigrants, I really hope that racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia will end for good among every human beings in the US and also around the world. I do wish and pray that the 2020 US election will make certain amends to the current situation y'all are experiencing because it's getting pretty scary out there. -Harvey I’m an American living overseas working for the US government. I’m trying my hardest to stay overseas so my family and I don’t have to come back to the mess that is the US right now. From politics to COVID, it’s not a good time. While the virus may be surging again in Europe, at least the people comply with the government rules. Sometimes I believe Americans take freedom and liberty a bit too far, especially when it comes to the greater good. -Anonymous

Allthough on social policy the US is no real example for us (I think there is more social ‘security’, more justice, high standards in education for all in most of the EU countries), they always have been a ‘safe haven’ in big international politics. It now feels like ‘they have our back’ doesn’t imply anymore. -Jasper

Well personally I think the country seems in total disarray, instead of focusing on the real issues in the streets both house of the capitol are focused on bashing each other during the election campaign which is a circus due to the sitting POTUS. The obsession with the right to bare arms and the gun culture bewilders most other countries, you have teenagers walking into schools with Assault weapons and yet people still want guns to be available, worst still you ban one type of assault rifle but another just as powerful is kept on sale, it’s plain weird. -Philip

Neither candidate represents their party well. As an outsider looking in, it just baffles me that either of these men could potentially be the leader of the free world...It genuinely feels like worrying times are ahead for the US. -Marc I'm from India and living in Germany at the moment. The race problem in the US is as bad as the class/caste problem in India. Even if I don't have money I can go to a government health center in India. I just had an operation and stayed at the hospital for 18 days here in Germany, I had to pay only 180 Euros, everything else ( the operation and the many tests and scans that followed) was covered by the insurance. When my friends at the US heard about it they were shocked about low the hospital bill. There are really great labs (I'm a researcher) that I would like to work but I have no intentions of working/living in the US for a longer period of time. -Maithy

I think the US has become a joke to the rest of the developed world. Neither candidates running for president are fit to run such a powerful country. I can't help but feel after the election if Trump wins the left will riot and if Biden wins the right will riot. The country might just rip itself apart. American politics has zero empathy and zero morals. Honestly its terrifying. -Andrew

The US has always been a bit confusing to me - the two party system, the focus on religion, the divide in income and possibilities- as well as being the beacon of light in the fight for human rights, the strong personal pride in creating caring societets, the blending of and openeses for ethnicities and cultures... But for a while politics have become not at all about politics, religious beliefs are taking charge in policy work, the wealthier part shows little companion towards the less wealthy, the public spending is way above budget year after year while health care seems to be crazy expensive and not for all. The intrusion of US interest in politics in other countries are blunt to say the least, creating conflict where human lives have no value if they’re not US lives... School shootings that seems to be acted upon as that is part of normal lives, and schools to expensive for even middle class kids to study at... This is a shift in trust and soft power that affects all of us. -Olof

To be honest, I couldn’t come to the US right now, it scares me. The leadership, the gun laws, the violence and the divide of the nation. It sucks, because I love America and have been there 7 times in the last two years from Australia for work... but not anymore. I’m not coming back now until peace wins. -Anonymous

The fact that such a hate filled government is presiding over what is one the greatest countries in the world is scary. And it is seriously mind blowing that out of such a powerful country filled with some of the greatest minds in the world it’s these two men are the best you can do to be your next president. Unbelievable. Seriously unbelievable. -Rachel

I think the orange dude in office is making you guys look bad. But also, good (?). Seeing the black lives matter movement and so many of you stand up to the problems your country faces has been inspiring. One thing our countries have in common is how we are divided into very distinctive opposites sides. I mean, where do all these racists, bigots, utterly, madly conservites people came from? I few like a few years ago things did not seem so much as a boiling pan about to explode. Or maybe they were all hiding and when a lunatic like them rose to power (how that happened still boggles my mind) they all showed their true colors. It’s scary. I hope Trump doesn’t get reelected. Brazilians loooove to imitate americans🙄, so if he gets reelected it makes that much probable that our lunatic will also be in office for four more years. P.S. have you guys watched the show Years and Years from HBO? A really good watch is this election times! ☺️ -Taty

Re. The US atm. Unfortunately your president has made your country a laughing stock around the world and he's destroyed relationships with allies. It's gonna take time to rebuild all of that. He's also moved an entire branch of your government to the far right, even though the majority of the country if left/centr of left. So you've a supreme court that doesn't represent you and it's looking like they're going to try and take away rights from people. You have a healthcare system that doesn't look out for its people and there's this bizarre fear of universal healthcare that seems insane to every other 1st world country. If if Biden wins (and I really hope he does for everyone's sake), there's going to be a lot of work in undoing the damage Trump has done before he can even get into what he wants to do. All the while you've an ultra conservative highest court. There's also the massive political division and the systemic racism. It's a lot. It's not impossible, but it's going to take so much time and people who want it to change. -Ciara

I’ve been sitting here for an hour thinking about your question and there are many different outlooks I could raise so I’ll keep it generic. I’ll start with the elephant in the room known as Covid. Each day, our morning news informs us of what your leaders are doing and daily case numbers in the US. We sit here completely shocked at how your government has let it reach this point. You may have heard that Melbourne has just come out of one of the strictest and longest lock downs in the world. I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone to have to do, but I will say, I feel much more comfortable to be able to go to the shops knowing the numbers are at about 2-3 a day instead of in the thousands. I do think that your government does need to address this now, could even be making it compulsory mask wearing. It’s hard for me to comment about your economy as we don’t here much about it, but I will say Trump ‘says’ make America great again, let’s get more jobs, they are pro life, yet how is someone who is prolife not doing anything to stop a virus that is killing people? Isn’t your unemployment rate worse (pre-covid) than what it was when Obama was president? I think as a generic outlook, if change isn’t made in the election, the outlook from a Australian does not look like it would be something you’d want to be apart of. I love America. Have visited a couple of times, even thought about moving there, but at the moment, I’ve never been more thankful to not be there. -Ben

7 notes · View notes

pip-n-flinx · 3 years

Text

Among Us

So this is going to get long, this is going to get personal, this is going to be about prejudice and race and self-serving bad-faith arguments and flawed rhetoric. And for all of these reasons I’m going to leave the rest of this under the cut.

As a few of my friends will know, earlier this week I was delivered an ultimatum from my landlord/roommate. He disguised it well, telling me he was ‘concerned for my mental health’ that my ‘negativity was dragging the whole house down’ and that I was simply too filthy to live with. I won’t pretend I’m a neat freak, and I can honestly say that I have taken some pains to clean more since, to his surprise and delight, though its particularly hard to take coming from him.

“You’re always so down. It’s making you lazy and thin skinned” You know its funny you should say that, now specifically, because I’ve actually been on the up and up this last week and you didn’t mention this at all in January when I was actually at my worst, or February when I was afraid I was going to have to quit my job, or back during the holiday season when retail work was breaking my back... Only now do you think to check in on me?

“You left a pair of gloves, a letter, and a small wooden trinket on the table!” Indeed I have, as you have left your pair of gloves, well over 21 letters, and regularly set your packages on this same table, including today two packages to be returned to amazon. I didn’t realize I didn’t get to use the table the same way you do.

“You don’t do dishes! except that you did this week, which is cool I guess but still!” You do realize that I actually hand-wash every dish I use within 24 hours of using it, right? And that often the dishes you come to me bitching that I never cleaned are in fact your fiances, yes? Ok good, next question.

“You’re always complaining about work. I don’t mind that you vent, but its all you talk about anymore!” I have either lost or walked away from 4 jobs in this last year, and that has not been easy, or fun. I have worked essential retail jobs the entire pandemic thus far. Additionally, in the months leading up to you storming out of your 75k a year salaried sales job, I had told you to leave it because I could see that it was killing you. You got so fed up with the job that for 4-5 months before you left your grandma-paid-off-my-second-mortgage capitalism-knows-best-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-ass spent more time playing valorant and league of legends on the clock than doing actual work. Need I remind you that every time I stepped into your office, or simply stepped upstairs to get ready for work, you would complain about how awful your managers were, or how shitty someone had been to you over the phone? DID I EVER BELITTLE YOU FOR ANY OF THESE THINGS????

The real kicker was that the spark, the moment that started this (at least for him) was me trying to explain why racism and ‘cultural supremecy’ was bad. I had brought to him something I thought we could both agree on, that we could both laugh at. I brought him a series of tweets about how problematic Van Gogh was for studying and imitating traditional japanese painting techniques. He took this, and immediately turned into a piece of the culture wars. Now, I agree, this is an egregious example of trying to ‘cancel’ someone. How cancelling a long dead artist who couldn’t sell his art while he was alive is important is beyond my comprehension, its not as though the market value of these comes up very often, and almost no-one will ever have a chance to buy or reject a Van Gogh. But to him this was emblematic of ‘liberals’ cancelling Seuss and Rowling.

He even went so far as to say that Van Gogh probably ‘did it better’ than the artists he was studying/imitating. Now, this is a huge red-flag to me because this is straight out of the Nazi playbook. This is William Shenker, proposing a theory of music to proof ‘German cultural superiority.’ This, if you will pardon my language, is the real culture war: trying to supplant other cultures art and history with western figures and events.

Now, for those of you who don’t know who I’m talking about, this man is sexist. He doesn’t believe women are equal, complains about women’s sports, and rejects a woman’s right to choose. This man is a transphobe, questioning the logic of ‘safe-spaces’ and allowing people to change their pronouns. This man is a Trump supporter, and voted for him twice. And all of these things I found out years after we became friends. I have in the past contemplated what it would take to cut him out of my life wholesale. Despite our wealth of shared experience and our shared interests, we’ve been drifting apart as he drifts further and further to the right. And he has been drifting. He’s parroted more bad-faith arguments from Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson in the last 6 months then he ever did when I first moved in with him.

I have been trying to push back, especially when he says the quiet parts out loud. I try to let him know that it is not acceptable to say he would rather an unarmed black man die that risk that a police officer might be injured. When he compares the people in control of Seuss’ intellectual property and works choose to stop printing less than 6% of his published works to the book burnings in Mao’s china. When he says that its more important to protect teacher from students trolling them by changing their pronouns than it is to protect trans or NB kids. When he espouses his belief that trans and NB kids are ‘just mentally ill.’ Whenever he says any of this shit, I have pushed back. I have tried to halt, or at least slow, his descent towards eugenics and white supremacy and fascism.

It has been to no avail.

And to be honest its exhausting. I wanted to believe that he would trust me, not just to be a moral and thoughtful person, but to be educated and informed on these issues. We went to school together, spent countless hours solving homework and trying to crack games together. If I don’t know the answer to his questions immediately, he often jokes ‘C’mon, you’re supposed to know everything!” and has frequently told me that I’m selling myself short.

But apparently all that trust and all that respect goes out the window when I challenge him. Suddenly I’m ‘overly negative’ or ‘too sensitive’ or he’ll ‘need to look into that, but...’

And the thing is, he is capable of great acts of kindness. He offered to rent me a room in his completely paid-off house, no mortgage at all, simply because he could see living at home was killing my mental health. He offered me 50-75% off of market rate. He buys gifts all the time, has landed tenants job interviews, set people back on their feet, and refused to press charges for several major financial loses he’s taken on the determination that it would do more harm to the defendant than he could ever recoup from it.

But he does not extend this kindness, this generous soul, to everyone. And lately, his circle grows smaller, and his kindess has waned, and it’s been so devastating to see him slip further and further towards his own worst impulses.

I know there will be people who think I should have cut him out of my life years ago, who can’t believe we never talked enough to know that he voted for Trump in 2016. I think back then he was genuinely ashamed, or at least guilty, about that vote. Now? It’s almost a matter of pride for him. I can’t tell you the number of times in the last 4 months that he’s told me that Biden “couldn’t possibly” be as “great” a President as Trump.

And he hides behind this “praise them when they do good, cuff them when they do bad” line and I used to take comfort in it but now... Now it’s clear that it was just a front or excuse for liking these abhorrent people.

I’ve had a couple of hard conversations with some of our mutual friends about what this means for me, and how I interract with the whole group of friends as a whole, in the last 3 days. None of our mutual friends seem to take any of these things as seriously as I do, with my oldest friend even telling me that he ‘can’t imagine’ breaking a friendship off over politics.... I know I know, the caucasity of it all, yes ha ha. And it does make me genuinely worried that I’ll wind up losing the 5-6 close friends that I actually rely on these days over this horrible sonuvabitch. But all this personal venting aside, there’s something bigger here I want to address:

I sat down this evening to watch Last Week Tonight and I was struck by this piece about Tucker Carlson, because while I knew some of what was said on his show, he is remarkably confident for a man who spouts the quiet parts of racism/sexism/homophobia on TV. I have a hard time imaging a more blatantly racist thing to do then declare that a woman who suggested ‘dismantling systems of oppression wherever they are found’ wants to dismantle the American system...

And I have to say, we should go back to punching Nazis. I want these fuckers afraid. I want them to crawl back to the furthest reaches of the internet, relegated to be laughed at for their bigotry by pundits of every political ideology. I want their vile vitriol hidden away where it doesn’t embolden others. I want them to know that they are out of line, out of touch, out of time. I want them to feel ashamed, like the relics of a bygone and worse era that they are, and for them to quietly fade to an ignominious death. I’m tired of seeing them on National News. I’m tired of Pewdiepie’s channel and influence refusing to die despite all the horrible things he’s said and done. I’m tired of Ben Shapiro spouting off about a woman’s place and rights, as if he has any fucking authority on the matter. I just want these people to lose their platforms and their followers. And for me the fact that they haven’t yet is so incredibly discouraging.

I know I didn’t offer any answers here I’m just tired of being alone with this defeated attitude and I guess I needed to get this off my chest as I try to disentangle myself from the losing battle of trying to save a friend from alt-right radicalization.

#tw/ white supremecy #tw/ sexism #tw/ racism #tw/ transphobia #wooow this got longer than I expected #meta: alt right radicalization #and how they're reaching people my age #plus a lot of personal venting

1 note · View note

sheusedtobesassier · 4 years

Text

Day 10,330

Home alone for the first time in I think three weeks?? And by home I mean Allynda’s home. Lights off almost everywhere. Moon lamp, Scentsy dark crystal, candle, streetlight, three more candles, and the lowest lighting of the touch lamp. The Ballad of Love and Hate playing. Just got out of a hot hot bath during which I decided I feel capable of writing out the love story, well at minimum the beginning of it. I would call the start the best part, but I hesitate to say so. Intimacy was the best. Before that was just the delicious anticipation of that. Yeah so I realized I want to write about it tonight which was the smallest gasp of relief. I know there was a time when I couldn’t fathom remembering the sweetness. Begged for protection from those memories actually. And truthfully, I think that prayer was heard and answered. Sure they suddenly come for me sometimes, but they’re almost always quick and painless, like a shiver. Like a muscle memory. Phantom. Hm, hm.

“You’re still all over me like a wine stained dress I can’t wear anymore.”

We knew each other back when we were kids. To be specific, he was definitely a kid and I was in high school haha. (I believe he’s four years younger than me.) We were goof around pals that saw each other occasionally when our churches got together for Christianese functions. It wasn’t a close friendship, but me and my friends were very fond of him and his best friend. I left home in 2010 and probably interacted with him online once or twice throughout the next seven years of wandering on my own. I wasn’t keeping tabs.

November 2017. His best friend ended up falling head over heels in love with an old friend of mine. They had a sweet little “café con leche” wedding ceremony. There were a whole pile of people I knew at the reception and we filled up a long table. I noticed two friends seemed to be checking somebody out and when I curiously turned to follow their eyes, there was Omar. And uh, haha, he was definitely no longer a kid. Broad shoulders and the longest curls. I noted that he was nervously glancing around the room, probably looking for someone he knew. (I found out later it was an uncomfortable wedding for him.) Without a second thought, I stood up and excited rushed over to him. It was a short conversation, an exchange of pleasantries. What he’d been up to and what I’d been doing. He told me he was a vagabond and I told him I’d just been assigned the role of Staff Director at Sky Lodge. I mentioned that if he didn’t have anything going on in the summer he should come up and work. He said it’s something he had considered before and gave me a maybe. I don’t believe I saw him again the rest of the night.

Fast forward to the spring hiring season. For a few months, week after week, day after day, I was trying to round up summer staff, particularly a strong adult leadership team. I was interacting with maybe 100 college kids throughout this process with the goal of getting around 12 of them to commit to a full summer at camp. It is a grueling process. That spring specifically I felt like I was being forced to relentlessly coerce others to apply for a ministry they seemed to have Absolutely Zero Interest in. The applicants I did have were concerning to me as far as trustworthiness. I knew I wasn’t doing a great job and that knowing made it hard to do even a good job. Once May came around I had no fight left in me. And then I got weird messages from Omar. He had said early on that he wasn’t available, but whatever he had lined up fell through so he was wondering if there were still spots. I sent him the info and he said he’d apply that evening. A couple days later nothing had come through from him so I messaged him to see what was up. He had read the application and was no longer interested. I had a gut feeling and asked, “Is it because you don’t think you want to work for us or because you think you won’t get hired?” He told me it was a little of both and felt like parts of the application process were intrusive. Which, lol, he wasn’t wrong. I was thrilled. Asked if he’d be willing to fill it out and then have a longer discussion with me about his misgivings. He said he would. I remember calling my sister after I read what he submitted and giddy announcing, “HE’S A REAL LIFE PERSON.” He hadn’t given religious robot answers. He’d been forthright and controversial. He would bring something So Different than everybody else I was hiring AND THAT POSSIBILITY WAS DEEPLY INTRIGUING TO ME. I scheduled his interview, knowing I’d be deciding if we were going to hire him BUT ALSO he would be deciding if he wanted to come. I told him he should take a few days to really really think it through, talk it over with people he trusted, and genuinely pray about it. I started asking God to work it out if it was supposed to.

Okay. A little pause because I’m about to write about a part that I want to make sure comes off as how it actually was. First, I want to be clear that I was 0% attracted to this person at this stage. We were both grown, but he was still a kid to me. A long ago friend who I’d lost touch with. I was in boss mode, desperate to have admirable leaders I could count on for the summer (which was only a week away). Second, there was a specific season of my life where I considered myself very in tune with the Holy Spirit. I communicated with Her consistently and believed I heard from Her pretty often. That may sound kooky to you, but it doesn’t change what I believed then haha. This story I’m telling occurred like, five years after that Era of Very In Tune. Which I feel the need to say because like, interacting with the Holy Spirit still happens in my life, but rarely. I’m not seeking it out as frequently and hardly ever get anything straight from Her. Lol, if this weirds you out, no worries it weirds me out too. Okay so. With those said.

The morning before his phone interview, I was driving around a riding mower praying about the conversation we were going to have. I was concerned that he wasn’t going to choose us, worried about how I might screw up a good thing. I big time wanted to know that he’d be good for camp AND that camp would be good for him. Honestly I probably wanted the second one even more. I was stressing about it to God. And like. I wouldn’t write this except that it’s true. I out of the blue just experienced 100% reassurance that Omar would be at Sky Lodge for the summer. Right there, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was was going to say yes. And like, I knew it was from the Holy Spirit. That familiar Her. Burst into tears because like I said, I wasn’t hearing from Her as much as I used to. So to suddenly experience that rush?? I wept happy tears. When I came in for lunch I told Jeremy we could start putting Omar’s name on all the official lists. He was like, “But you haven’t done the interview yet? And didn’t you say he might not even want to be here?” And I was like, “Look. I know he’s gonna say yes. I can’t explain how, but put him on the lists.” Then I went out in the sun and called him up. We talked through several complicated things. It was an articulate conversation between two people who respected each other. (It is very weird to think about how much I low key instantly trusted Omar.) And lol. The end of the conversation was me big smile saying, “So uh, everybody else is getting here on Thursday to get moved in and settled by 5 o’clock. So.” and then he was big smile basically like, “Okay. Yeah. Well. Huh. Yeah I’ll be there.”

And sure enough he was. Well kind of. He showed up late. Everybody else was going through the line for dinner when he called me to say he was here but not sure where to go. I ran out of the dining room and saw his black car pull in. Showed him to park down by Maple. Noticed the John Mayer poster rolled up in his back window so we chatted about our mutual fondness for him on the quick stroll to the Lodge. I remember as dinner was finishing up the Foremen were starting to gather. I was staying on the edge, interested to see the beginnings of all their dynamics. Noticed Omar keeping his distance, but not in an uncomfortable way? Like, he definitely wasn’t exuberant, but he wasn’t closed off either. He was wearing the DAYDREAMER hoodie. He couldn’t hold still? I decided I didn’t need to worry about him and hoped he would pick buddies soon.

Foreman Training. Okay. He was definitely the most interesting person in the room. I mean, besides me of course. He was laid back and whenever he spoke up it was good for everybody. He kept giving out nicknames. Playful. Oh lol, when we’d take breaks, he and Elicia had a game of pool going on which was great because it gave the other girls the chance to watch him flirt. He was noticeably special. I was glad I hired him, because he consistently brought the group’s average up. And we got along well. One night after training had wrapped up the two of us got into a chat about the Kardashians, which lead to Kanye, which lead to President Trump, which lead to talking about Omar being brown. On my walk to my home, I txted him apologizing for maybe expressing too much and not asking enough questions. He told me not to worry and thanked me for the conversation. THERE WERE NO BUTTERFLIES YET. This was my first shot at being a true blue leader and I wasn’t taking that lightly. Being good for everybody working for me was my obsession.

Foreman Campout. Okay. Several things happened here that I want to note.

1. We had a mega controversial meeting about cell phones, during which I suggested we make an official policy that Foremen would leave their phones up in my office unless they needed them for something. It was a kick I was on mostly. A very firm belief that the less the Foremen were on their phones the higher quality their summer would be. There was immediate pushback. I was fending off tiny arguments. Suddenly Omar gave this rallying speech of like, “Come on guys. What the heck? Why are we being babies about this? This could be a really good thing for us!” And that settled it. He had power.

2. The morning after it rained there was a little pack of us huddled up in the gazebo talking about what the storm had been like for us. I asked if anybody had a pen I could borrow and Omar ran to get me one from his backpack. I journaled something like, “Last night I tried to imagine somebody to fall asleep with and couldn’t think of anyone. It’s nice to not be even a little in love with anybody.” AND I MEANT THAT. THERE WERE NO VIBES YET.

3. We all went tubing together and slowly but surely got split up into tinier squads. I was with Marissa and Omar, which was the ideal scenario for me. A lot of stupidity and laughter. Goofballs. There was definitely a point where I was wondering if there was chemistry between them. They drifted further ahead than me towards the end and I thought, “Interesting. We’ll see how that unfolds.” Once everybody was back on land I heard a bit of, “Ooh did you see Omar and Marissa?” It wasn’t a match in my head, but I didn’t think that hard about it.

4. The drive back to Sky Lodge, haha. Omar and I were both on the first bench. Him in the middle and me next to the sliding door. Jeremy was driving and Chris was shotgun so the four of us were chatting away. We passed some fields getting irrigated and I made some offhand comment about the Farmers’ Almanac. Omar suddenly turned to me and was like, “What do you know about that?” I tried to defend myself and he was like, “This sounds like you’re just making stuff up.” WHICH. EXCUSE ME. I WAS NOT. I couldn’t believe it. Him just challenging me right to my face. I was surprised and super secretly thrilled. Do you want me to explain that? Like, I didn’t feel dismissed by it. It was like he wasn’t allowing me to sound stupid and get away with it. Like. More was expected of me? He wasn’t gonna let me be high and mighty as his boss. And that like. Lol. It bothered me, but in a good way.

5. Okay this one was his story that he told me later. Both of us were claiming that there wasn’t any attraction happening yet at the campout, but then he was like “Oh hold up.” He said that on that drive back, most of us in the van were slowly falling asleep. I dozed off and was sort of precariously placed, like there was potential my head might land on his shoulder or my knee would drift into his. He said I woke up a little, noted the situation, and arranged myself as far from him as I could. He said he thought, “Why is she being like that?” And then he thought, “Wait actually why is it bothering me that she’s being like that???” Lol.

6. We got back and dropped everybody off at the staff dorm with announcements for the next day. Edith, my right hand woman, had evening rounds so the two of us did a super quick debrief of the trip standing outside my front door. I mostly remember making the statement that we had to look out for Omar because a lot of the girls seemed interested in him. It meant in a few weeks either they would all turn on each other OR all turn on him. Edith laughed and was like, “Well soon him and Elicia are gonna make out. Then nobody else will want him.” We giggled and I was like, “I just don’t want everybody to decide he’s a flirt when he’s actually just comfortable around women.” And like, haha. I WRITE THIS AS PROOF THAT I DIDN’T SEE IT COMING.

Alright so. Lol. Mm, mm. I’m gonna let me hit a hard pause for the night because I’m losing steam. Will come back to this though and soon. It’s a time in my life where I do have the space to get it out and I think I’d like to. Idk if it’ll be healing or useful. I’m not worrying about damage and maybe I should? But. Look. I fell in love with a good one who fell in love with me too. And. I’m not choosing to take my hands off it yet. Still pulled in. Fixated. I keep being afraid that I’m coming off embarrassingly obsessed, panicked that I’m weak and messy. But. Lol. I actually don’t feel like those things at fucking all. I do feel like someone became part of my life and with him I grew in gorgeous ways that I kept wanting to grow in and then I lost that person and now I am having a hard time figuring out some other gorgeous ways I can grow now. And like. I cannot have more of Omar or more from him. Not right now I can’t. But that doesn’t change that I already have a lot of what he did give me. And it’s really mine and I’m not required to like, demolish it to smithereens in order to qualify for moving on.

#personal

2 notes · View notes

the-75-blog · 6 years

Text

Ye - Album Review

Ye is seven tracks long. The album is not what I expected. I’d hoped it would be a return to form for Kanye, but instead it is a further exploration of the artists ego and fear. The saying goes that lightning doesn’t strike more than once, but Kanye has proven that wrong over and over. His body of work includes albums that have been game changers in the hip-hop world. Kanye doesn’t ever give you what you were expecting; he always delivers more. How many artists are there with a first album that pushes hip hop into a new direction as opposed to serving up more of the same radio fare?

How many artists have a College Dropout under their belt? Or an 808’s and Heartbreak? Or a Graduation? Or a, you get where I’m going here. Kanye has repeatedly raised the bar for the hip hop genre. So where does that leave Ye in the mix? If Kanye said to have consulted an eighteenth-century demon to make Yeezus, then Kanye may have consulted director Michael Gondry for Ye. Kanye lays emotions bare on the table here. The first track is him musing over how he wants to kill an identified person while professing his love for them. He also expresses a yearning to kill himself too.

Ye is Kanye’s darkest album, even though the production is contrarily full of high notes. The craftsmanship of the production is top notch, but is not a return to form for Kanye. The album has no versions of “Stronger, Gold-Digger, Touch the Sky, or Through the Wire”. Here Kanye broods. The slick production runs counterpoint to the narrative. It’s as if we had stepped inside the mind of a jaded, artistic genius, where the sound scape was designed to disorient any trespassers into this torrid place.

Kanye has recently been professing a lot of love. Love for Trump. Love for the plastic surgeon that killed his mother, the late Donda West. Love for all people. I think expressing love requires the letting go of a lot of pain. Maybe that’s what Ye is for Kanye; a pain letting exercise where we the audience mutually experience an artist’s catharsis. In recent years, Kanye has been through a lot as a person. There was his breakup with Amber Rose, the passing of his mother, the negative fashion press, the robbery of his wife, the mental exhaustion, the hospital stay, the dying his hair and posing for a photo with President Donald Trump, and the backlash for his open support of the President and blacks who had pledged their allegiance to the right.

Hopefully Kanye finds another “Good Life, Diamonds from Sierra Leone, or Jesus Walks in him. Ye is a very good album. It’s seven slick and tight produced tracks. It feels very much like the “Eternal Sunshine of Ye’s Spotless Mind” should have been the title for Kanye’s latest album. I like it, but I am already finding myself listening to the tracks less and less. Only if a little Pusha T or Bump J would have rubbed off on Kanye during their time spent in the studio.

In hindsight, the track Free on the Kanye / Cudi collaboration album, Kids See Ghosts clearly indicates Mr. West no longer feels constrained by the reviews or opinions of others. He is free. Free to make the music he wants, over what’s expected. It’s quite a thing to experience the artistic and personal growth of a musician throughout their career. I would grade the album a B+. Though good, the album is not in the top five of Mr. West’s discography.

#ye #yeezy #kanye west #album review #music #goodmusic #review #song #2018 #music review

1 note · View note

vanity-neverdies · 6 years

Text

I wasn’t able to write about this the night that it happened because it was the night before Thanksgiving, but I still wanted to be able to tell all of you about something that happened to me. It was a really raw, unexpectedly touching moment and helped put everything going on in my own life into perspective. Lately I’ve felt so overwhelmed by everyday demands of life and school and the holidays and I think it’s really easy to slip into that feeling of resentment at the moment. Waking up to a new Donald Trump scandal every 12 hours and/or the blatant disregard for basic human rights doesn’t help, but I’m not about to get into that. Anyway, the night before thanksgiving I found myself getting into an uber alone. I had left my group of friends and was headed back to my apartment before driving to the suburbs to get drunk with my family. I had just seen a musical and was standing under the lights of a neighboring theatre, trying not to shiver from the cold that seemed to have crept in off the lake out of nowhere. I opened my uber app and called a car, and within 5 minutes the driver had pulled up to the sidewalk down the street. I sped-walked down the street past well-dressed groups of people who had also just left the show, and, at the prospect of getting out of the cold, excitedly slid into the back seat of an ordinary Toyota Camry. The leather seats embraced me like an old friend, and the warmth pulsating throughout the small car crashed over me like waves on a shore. “You’re here for James, right?” I look at the driver for the first time, realizing I had forgotten to double check that the license plate matched the car I’d ordered on the app. “Yes sir!” He says, making eye contact with me in the rear-view mirror. “Cold one tonight, isn’t it?” He’s small, probably no bigger than 5 feet, with his seat pulled as far forward so he can reach the gas and brake pedals. He has combed over hair thats dark and a shiny bald patch on the back of his head that catches the street lights as we start to drive. He looks older than me, late 40’s/early 50’s. He has on a large puffy coat, an old pair of glasses that look slightly dusty, and a shiny gold ring on his pinky finger. “FREEZING,” I say, shivering a little while I did for added effect. “Must be winter.” “Yeah,” he says, rolling his eyes at me in the rear view, “and with Donald Trump as our president for the next three years, imagine how cold the winters are going to be after he’s effectively destroyed the environment.” He smiles and lets out a loud laugh and I laugh too, genuinely happy that if I’m going to connect with a stranger over anything, it’d be our mutual hatred of Donald Trump. “Sorry if you voted for him,” he says, suddenly getting quieter, the way a child does after they get scolded for swearing, “I suppose I shouldn’t assume…” “Oh no!” I interject before he can finish, “I fucking HATE Donald Trump.” He smiles and we roll into to a long red light. “Do you have any plans for thanksgiving?” I ask him, looking to fill the silence as I wait for the light to change from red to green. “No,” he says, averting my eye contact in the mirror, “I don’t have any family really.” “Oh wow,” I say, feeling guilty for having asked, realizing he feels saddened by what he’s just said, “I’m really sorry to hear that.” “Yeah,” he mumbles, looking at his hands on the wheel in front of him, “the holidays are a hard time for me in particular.” “I understand that,” I say, not knowing exactly how to proceed without coming off as cold or dismissive. The light finally turns green and we continue to drive down the road, past crowded bars and busy late night restaurants. “You’re very handsome, you know,” he says casually, glancing at me in the rear view mirror, the streetlights catching his eyes as he does. It doesn’t feel gross or inappropriate, it feels genuine, it feels kind. “Well thank you,” I say, smiling. “I went to a musical tonight, so I got a little dressed up.” “Can I ask you something?” he says, almost pleading. “Of course!” I say, trying to make sure I sound as casual as possible. “Are you a sensitive kind of guy?” I’m confused by this question. “What do you mean? Sensitive in what way?” “Like, are you easily offended? Do things bother you easily?” “Not at all,” I say, chuckling nervously, “I’ve worked with criminals and drug addicts and ex-cons. Nothing really shocks me anymore, so don’t be worried about offending me.” We turn onto the highway and begin the journey towards my neighborhood in Chicago, a 15 to 20-minute drive north of downtown in Logan Square. The roads are completely jammed, and as we descend down the turnpike we’re immediately swallowed by a sea of red tail lights. “I like your bracelet,” the driver says to me as we merge into bumper to bumper stand-still traffic. “Thanks,” I say, holding my wrist up higher so he could get a better view in the mirror. My Love bracelet had been cleaned a day or two prior and was shinier than normal. “I really like your ring!” I point out as it catches the light from the car in front of us. He looks down at this hand on the wheel and flexes his pinky for me to get a better look. “It’s really important to me.” “Why’s that?” “Honestly? I got it from my first boyfriend when I was 14.” I take this personal disclosure in stride. “I love that you have it still, he must have been really important to you.” “He WAS,” he says, beaming ear to ear. “I loved him.” We sit in silence for a minute before curiosity gets the best of me. “…What happened to him?” “He married a woman and had a family…It was a different time back then; you know?” He says this to me really matter-of-factly, like at one point uttering the words would have made him want to cry, but not he’s un phased by it. Time has a way of making what was once painful less so. “That must have been hard for you,” I say, holding eye contact with him. “It was,” he says, smiling to himself. “That’s the thing about love though, it never really goes away. It changes, but it’s always there. Even if you don’t have the person, you still have the love.” Traffic had finally begun to move again, and I became entranced by the fading skyline of the city. “He was like my protector, my boyfriend, my first real friend. You see when I was 12 I was beaten so badly by my father for being what I was that for two years I couldn’t sit up straight. My collarbone had been completely shattered by my father who beat me with a fry pan after I told him I wanted to try taking dance lessons. I had bruises everywhere all the time, and I think the kids at school just felt sorry for me. Everybody knew, and yet nobody ever did anything. When I was 13 I ran away from home, I couldn’t stand it anymore. For months I slept on this bench in the park, stole food from grocery stores, slept in people’s trash…” He looks up from the dashboard and glances at me in the rear-view. “Then I met Ben. He lived with his mom nearby and one day while he was walking through the park, he bumped into me and we became best friends. He took me in the next day, his mom giving me the spare bedroom, giving me new clothes, enrolling me in school...Ben and I were inseparable, the best of friends. Nobody ever picked on me at school because of him, nobody ever hit me…” “This whole time I had been harboring so much love and affection for him and never told him…one night his mom had to work late and we snuck into her liquor cabinet and got drunk, just the two of us. We danced and broke things and laughed…and then we just…Kissed. Just like that. It was magnetic, it felt so right. He was much taller and bigger than me, and his big hands held me against him and his lips pressed against mine…I was so happy. You ever felt that way about someone? How all these bad moments have lead you to one absolutely perfect one?” “All the time,” I say to him, meaning it. “One day his mom walked in on us, you know, doing stuff…” he’s shaking his head as and running his hands over the steering wheel. “She told me she couldn’t have a son behaving that way…That I had to leave. That night before I left he gave me this ring,” he’s looking at his pinky again, the lights of the cars going by shining against the gold band, “and told me to remember him when I wore it.” “I think it’s really amazing that you kept it,” I say, not knowing what else to tell him, stunned at how honest he was being with a perfect stranger, happy he felt comfortable around me. “Thanks man, I’m glad I did.” “So what did you do after you left?” I ask him, genuinely curious. “I lived in the park for a long time…went home with random guys. Some of them were good to me, and some of them weren’t…. I ended up driving a cab so I could pay for school. I finished high school, went to community college and got an associates. I worked at a bank, eventually got transferred to Chicago, and now I live here. I drive for uber because I could really use the extra cash.” We’re pulling up to my building now and I’m getting ready to get out of the car when he stops me. “Can you just give me one more minute?” He asks me, turning around in his seat to face me. I can see that he’s crying. I hesitate, but decide that another minute talking with him can’t hurt, and it seems like he really needs it. I tell him I can stay a little longer. “Do you ever feel like a freak?” he says, rubbing his nose which is starting to drip with snot. “Sometimes,” I say, trying to reassure him. “I think we all do every now and then.” “I do all the time,” he says to me, wiping his eyes. He holds his hands out in front of me. “My hands are so small and pudgy, my nose (he points to his nose) is huge and misshapen. It just all looks so wrong to me sometimes, it makes me so mad.” Feeling the conversation shifting in a different direction than it had been the rest of the car ride, I do my best to make him feel better. “I hate my nose,” I explain to him, “I feel endlessly insecure about it. I broke it when I was little and it’s been crooked ever since. It’s the only thing I notice in photos of me. Everybody has things they don’t like about themselves, everyone has things that make them insecure, but those things make us who we are. You have a great nose! I think it’s very handsome.” He Chuckles and wipes his eyes. “You’re very sweet,” he says, turning again to face me. “That’s just the problem, though. I don’t want to be handsome. I want to be beautiful.” At this point it’s easily been more than a minute but I don’t move from my seat in the back of the car. The driver starts to sob, and all I can do is sit and watch. In school we learned that sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is sit in silence, that sometimes you do a disservice to someone by filling that silence. We learned that when people are feeling pain, personal pain that you aren’t 100% privy to, the best thing you can do is let them feel it. You disrespect somebody’s pain by telling them not to cry, you disrespect somebody’s pain by taking that silence away. So I sat there for several minutes while my uber driver sobbed into his hands. I did my best to respect his pain, to understand that I could not take it away. “I know you have to go,” he says to me, blowing his nose into a napkin he’s pulled from the glove compartment. “I know you must think I’m a crazy person…I feel like I am, too.” “I don’t,” I tell him, and I genuinely feel that way, even though I’m not quite sure what’s going on. I hold out my hand for him to shake, preparing to depart from the car. “What was your name? I never asked,” I say, waiting for him to take my hand and shake it. “I never gave it,” he says quietly, looking at my hand like he’s unsure what to do with it. “People call me Mitch,” he says, gently taking my hand to shake. “But my real name…is Emily.” Suddenly I understand what’s going on. “I drive Uber at night so I can pay to finally be who I know I’ve always been. I’ve never told anybody about it, ever. Your fare from tonight will give me just enough to start the process.” We shake. “Well, Emily,” I say, breaking my hand away from hers, “I can’t think of a better way to spend my money or my evening. I’m honored you told me. I hope you get everything you want, but you should know, you’re beautiful already.” She starts to cry again, says thank you, and turns around to face the wheel again. “You’ve shown me great kindness tonight,” she says, fumbling with her keys in the ignition, “Take this, please. I collect them.” She hands me a lightweight gold ring. “I get them at the dollar store and give them to people important to me. I know they’re cheap, but… I think they’re beautiful.” She places the ring in my hand, and folds my fingers around it. “Happy thanksgiving,” she says. “Happy Thanksgiving Emily,” I say back. I get out of the car and she drives away, leaving me a little shell-shocked, a little sad, but mostly leaving me hopeful. If someone like Emily can find the courage and the strength to be who they are, then I can be brave in my own life, too. I think during this politically volatile time we forget that the people being persecuted are real people, not just statistics on the news or faceless tweets. They’re real people with real pain, and if pain can’t unify us, then really what can? We need to be mindful of it, we need to be cognoscente of one another’s struggle, one another’s suffering. Only then can we help each other. Only then can we heal. Happy holidays. XO James

27 notes · View notes

hawthornewhisperer · 7 years

Text

Fairly Screechy THOUGHTS about 406

GUYS WE GOT AN INTERRUPTED LOVE CONFESSION ON A BEACH HOLY SHIT I HAVE A LOT TO SAY ABOUT THAT SO STAY TUNED.

But first: Raven continues to be the best, and I am enjoying her refusal to forgive Murphy. I didn’t love the insinuation that he hates himself more for what he did to her, simply because we’ve seen no evidence of that and I prefer Murphy to remain my Cockroach Prince with vague wooby tendencies that he tends to dismiss and not my Fully Woobified Prince but everything else about that storyline-- Luna being perfect, Raven being a ball of anger and determination, Murphy being a moderately helpful asshole-- was amazing so I’ll allow it.

Monty continues to be the MVP of my life while Jaha has been downgraded to a Disappointment on Several Fronts. Monty bringing up Wells was an excellent OH SNAP moment, and I do like that this show uses Wells as their trump card but only sparingly. (Also we need a new phrase for trump card; it’s giving me anxiety now thanks to the president.) Using Wells too often would feel exploitive, and for awhile there it seemed like they’d forgotten him entirely. But once or twice a season his name should be brought back as the Platonic Ideal of a Human, because he WAS.

Beard Dad was similarly amazeballs this episode as he tried to keep Murder Child #2 in line and considered adopting Murderous Elf Prince as Murder Child number #3, but his storyline was caught up in the complete abject mess that is Octavia’s motivations which was less satisfying.

And like...here’s the thing about Octavia and her anger this episode: I like that the show doesn’t give us easy solutions to things like grief, but her character arc feels out of order, especially because of 405. In 405 we had Octavia risking her life to protect her people and giving Ilian an impassioned speech about how revenge doesn’t help and then...she’s back to revenge again? It’s also very unclear why she’s so angry with Murderous Elf Prince. Sure, he sort of condemned them all to die, but it wasn’t personal and she’s acting like it is, which is weird. I honestly think it would have been better to have someone else warn Arkadia that Azgeda was coming (maybe Ilian could have done it to get people out of the way before he burned it?) and then have Monty take Octavia’s place with Niylah to try and talk Murderous Elf Prince out of it while Octavia was off healing with Indra. It would have robbed us of that beautiful Bellamy-Clarke-Octavia triad shot at the end of 405 (and Bellamy holding his baby sister like on the day she was born, *sob*) but it would have made more sense in terms of her character. (It sort of felt like “Marie is contracted to be in this episode and we don’t have time for a separate storyline for Octavia with Indra, so fuck it she’ll be fine for 405 and back to Murder Child for 406.”) But that adjustment would have also taken away Bellamy’s angst which I am more interested in, so it’s sort of a wash.

Clarke’s scene with Niylah was lovely and healing and I’m very happy she has someone like Niylah in her life, but honestly I was so distracted by how fine her compartments were that I couldn’t pay too much attention. Arkadia EXPLODED in the last episode, and Clarke’s room was...not touched by that at all, apparently. (Yes I know Monty said they lost half of the sleeping quarters which implies the other half were fine, but like...IT EXPLODED. EXPLODED.)

But REALLY what I want to talk about is the Fury Roadtrip, because Bellarke+ Roan being action heroes was everything I ever wanted. I loved that they basically took turns dealing with Roan, because he is King of Annoying Them just as they are King and Queen of Annoying Him In Return. So much mutual annoyance and respect; it was seriously the greatest thing ever.

Sidenote: I like that despite the fact that Arkadia was responsible for massacring their army, the Trikru guys were like “hey can we get a ride?” I’m fine with them moving on, but being carpool buddies level friends feels strange. Also, Roan: CLOSE THE BACK FLAP IF YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE UNDERCOVER. Your men can peek out the gaps in the side to keep an eye on things. This is not rocket science, as Raven will gladly tell you.

Particular things I liked: Bellamy’s hesitation to uncover the body, where you could see him bracing himself to find Clarke dead, followed by almost instantaneous relief that it wasn’t her and guilt that it was one of Roan’s men. Bellamy was having a no good very bad day, but at least Clarke was still alive. Naturally, I also adored every single fucking thing about the car chase, from Bellamy and Roan bickering to Roan JUMPING FROM ONE MOVING CAR TO ANOTHER to Clarke being our favorite crafty slytherin and slowing down/elbowing the guy with a sword to her throat so Bellamy could snipe him. Bellamy and Clarke’s relieved smiles at each other after that was like pure sunshine on a dreary day, because even while in separate speeding trucks they’re In The Drift.

Hookay, so: Octavia, Clarke, and Bellamy’s feelings. I have a lot to say about this, but I do like that this episode established two things: 1) Bellamy is not giving up on Octavia and 2) Clarke is not giving up on Bellamy. His “you gave us a scare” to O was so heartbreakingly gentle and relieved, so to be faced with her anger after that felt like a slap in the face, as I think it was intended. It bothered him, but he’s still not going to let it slide.

What we saw on the beach though, was basically how Bellamy and Clarke are seeing the future-- he sees an inescapable end, and she sees hope. His entire refrain this episode was essentially “we don’t have enough time for Octavia to forgive me,” while Clarke was like “NO WE HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD WE WILL SURVIVE THIS.” He’s got the pressure of a ticking clock behind him, but Clarke isn’t accepting that and so she’s not in “say your last words to the people you love” mode yet. But very significantly, Bellamy is. Octavia hates him but he doesn’t want to die with things the way they are, so he’s going back to face her until they make things right. He tried to tell Clarke that he loved her (and importantly, I don’t think he expected reciprocity there-- that was just a I need you to know this moment) but Bellamy knows Clarke, and he knows that if the nightblood solution isn’t working she will stay on Science Island until they find something that does. With the radiation looming, he’s not sure she will ever make it back to Arkadia, so he’s not saying this with any hope of a future. He’s saying it because everything is ending and he doesn’t want to die with things left unsaid.

But Clarke is back in fighting mode (partially thanks to Bellamy in 403) and so she’s not ready to hear his goodbyes. She’s going to tell him to go home and wait for his sister to come around, because that’s what he needs right now-- Octavia. She’s telling him him he’s special (which is kiiiind of a weird thing to say about siblings, but Clarke was also clearly speaking for herself there and also she doesn’t have a sibling so I’ll allow it) and then says she’ll see him later. Clarke still believes they have a future, and that’s really fucking important in terms of understanding where they are in that moment.

Also...guys, he was gonna say that he loved her. On a beach. What a romantic, dramatic prince of everything I love him so much.

#the 100 s4 spoilers #406 spoilers #the 100 meta #bellarke #thoughts with hawthornewhisperer

72 notes · View notes

fughtopia · 7 years

Photo

Kate Aronoff

An environmentalism that can actually save the planet must do battle with corporations. Mainstream environmental groups have done the opposite.

One of the biggest problems with the neoliberal wings of the Democratic Party and the environmental movement is pretty simple: They both could kill us all.

For some time, the two tendencies have run parallel to one another. During the Reagan years, just before Bill Clinton began pushing for welfare reform and expanding the war on drugs, Fred Krupp, CEO of the Environmental Defense Fund, set out to chart his own “third way” for big greens. The “Third Stage,” as he called it, would swap the “relentlessly negative” tone of “polluter-pays” environmentalism for market-based approaches and partnerships with major corporations — fossil fuel companies included.

The strategy caught on, earning him the ears of both Bush administrations and Clinton. Green organizations’ staff in DC ballooned to help lobby and curry favor with politicians. All of a sudden, big business wasn’t the enemy anymore — they were the solution.

When Democrats and mainstream environmentalists tacked rightward in an effort to capture the center, they each lost touch not just with working people, but with the ability to imagine solutions of the scale needed to curb the greatest threat to human existence ever known, climate change. To avert the latter and fight the Trumpian right, each need to shake their enduring faith in the power of free markets.

Rather than Clinton-style market-friendly technocracy, we need an environmentalism that includes redistribution. It’s our only hope for digging out of this mess.

Big greens didn’t shift right in a vacuum. Krupp’s pitch would be followed several years later by a similar one from the New Democrats, an extension of a shift that began in the 1970s.

“Stop trying to get elected for the right reasons,” conservative political consultant Dick Morris advised Bill Clinton in 1994. “Just try to get elected.” He would explain the approach at length for a PBS documentary years later:

From the left, take the idea that we need day care and food supplements for people on welfare. From the right, take the idea that they have to work for a living, and that there are time limits … Get rid of the garbage of each position … and move up to a third way. And that became a triangle, which was triangulation.

Triangulation would come to define the Democrats’ strategy for the next several decades, just as the Third Stage of environmentalism would inform greens.

As Democrats endeavored to “end welfare as we know it,” adopting the racist language of “superpredators” from the Right, greens worked with companies like Walmart and McDonalds on sustainability strategies — even as those same companies were facing down challenges from environmental justice advocates. By design, each warmed to the corporate world, embracing, as Ezra Klein would put it, “liberal ends through market means.”

Environmentalists from the World Wildlife Fund to the Nature Conservancy cozied up to Republicans to craft corporate-friendly legislation. As Naomi Klein details in This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate, some greens literally took to digging up fossil fuels directly.

The Third Stage and Third Way were far from mutually exclusive. Al Gore, Clinton’s Vice President-turned-planetary crusader, has been among the loudest advocates for both. Gore has made a fortune since his tenure in the Oval Office as a sustainable investor. He was also among the first public luminaries to meet with Trump in the days after his election. Billionaire and former New York City Michael Bloomberg has had a market-friendly climate awakening as well, having just released a book cheerily titled A Climate of Hope.

Perhaps most infamously, the environmentalists’ and the Democrats’ Third Way tendencies found common ground in the doomed 2010 push for cap and trade, which would have allotted polluters a set number of credits denoting the quantity of greenhouse gasses (the “cap”) they could spit into the atmosphere. The main body pushing for the bill was the US Climate Action Partnership, the primary members of which were the country’s largest green groups.

With majorities in the House and Senate and a president recently elected on an enormous popular mandate, USCAP should have had no trouble passing climate legislation early on in Obama’s first term. Instead, the bill imploded.

Its failure was thanks in no small part to Republican obstructionism and a well-funded disinformation campaign. But blame also fell squarely on the bill’s advocates. Prioritizing getting a bill — any bill — through the legislature, USCAP members haggled behind closed doors with the GOP to eke out a compromise, prioritizing bipartisanism while abandoning both climate science and grassroots support.

From the jump, cap and trade was weighed down by a tangle of market-based incentives, ridden with outs for corporations to continue polluting. Explaining how the policy would bring down emissions was challenging enough. Convincing ordinary people why they should support it was even more of an uphill battle — not that the biggest organizations involved in pushing for cap-and-trade much cared.

The EDF worked tirelessly to bring big business into the fold. Through negotiations, the bill only got worse. Had it passed in its final form, Waxman-Markey would have restricted the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions — a goal now pursued by Trump’s allies.

Why was the bill so terrible and the process of crafting it so inept? Analyzing the deal in a 2013 report, political sociologist Theda Skocpol issued a scathing critique of the organizations involved, with an eye to paths forward for greens and anyone else hoping to avert planetary-scale catastrophe.

“I find the global-warming movement to be tone-deaf to valid majority concerns about increased costs,” Skocpol summarizes. “Almost all families now use carbon-intensive forms of energy to light and warm their homes. Because these families have not seen real wage increases in decades, they are extremely sensitive to even modest price increases in life necessities.”

Technocratic demands like cap-and-trade, in other words, make it easy for the fossil fuel industry and the Right to paint climate change as a concern of elites, who can afford to drive hybrid cars, install solar panels on their homes, and bear the cost when corporations send regulatory fines downstream. Any politically viable climate policy will have to give working people a material stake in supporting it — not a fear that that they’ll be forced to shoulder its costs.

The Climate Is Already Great

The cap and trade debacle, following on the tails of the collapse of UN climate talks in Copenhagen the year prior, prompted a moment of reckoning for the climate movement. While even the most conservative of green groups remain communist specters to some on the Right, their allegiance to corporate interests — most egregiously the fossil fuel industry — has discredited the likes of the EDF and Nature Conservancy among the most dynamic parts of the climate movement. (Plenty of climate and environmental justice campaigners, rooted in communities dealing with the extractive industry’s toxic impacts, never trusted them in the first place.)

Compare such groups to 350.org, Friends of the Earth, and other confrontational environmentalist organizations that have strong track records of taking on oil tycoons, having developed strongly anti-corporate stances and campaigns since the advent of Occupy Wall Street and the fossil fuel divestment movement. No struggle seems to exemplify this more radical tendency better than those against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, which, thanks largely to leadership from indigenous communities and communities along the pipelines’ routes, put the fossil fuel companies squarely in their aim.

Rather than cooperation between environmentalists and corporations, fights against Big Oil in the heartland have relied on deep and often difficult alliances between native tribes, ranchers, college students, and Beltway greens. Facing pressure from below, big green organizations came to rediscover an approach they had long shunned: militancy.

But even as its leading proponents have been relegated to the fringes of the climate movement, the Third Stage legacy has left a quieter, more pernicious footprint among environmentalists: A blind trust in the invisible hand’s ability to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

Appropriately, Bloomberg articulates the position best. Coal plants, he wrote in the New York Times recently, “are closing because consumers are demanding energy from sources that don’t poison their air and water, and because energy companies are providing cleaner and cheaper alternatives … no mandate from Washington is forcing these companies to act — just their own self-interest.”

As he and countless other headlines since the election have proclaimed, the momentum for clean energy and for climate action is too great for even Trump to stop. Investors and consumers have seen the light. Give them a level playing field, Bloomberg argues, and the invisible hand will sort the problem of climate change out for us. In other words, the climate is already great.

More: Jacobin

#climate change #fossil fuel #big oil #greens #environmentalists #know your enemies #forget the carrot #reach for the stick

1 note · View note

bountyofbeads · 4 years

Text

America’s Self-Sabotage in the Middle East

The consequences of these decisions will extend far beyond the region itself.

By KATHY GILSINAN | Published January 6, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted Jan 7, 2020 |

The Trump administration is still celebrating the death of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian military commander the president called “the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world.” But in a single hectic weekend after the killing, virtually all of America’s other goals in the Middle East took a significant hit.

The U.S. wants to stop Iran from going nuclear; Iran said it would ditch the last restrictions on its nuclear program. The U.S. wants to check Iran’s influence throughout the region; one of America’s closest allies, Iraq, incensed that the U.S. struck Soleimani on its own soil when he was there as a guest of the government, gave Iran a victory in a nonbinding parliamentary vote asking U.S. forces to leave the country—which a commander in the counter-ISIS mission in Iraq said in a letter he would honor, sparking confusion and forcing Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to deny any plans to leave Iraq. The U.S. wants to keep the Islamic State down through its Iraqi partner forces; the relationship is now damaged, and the U.S. coalition has paused its counter-ISIS operations in the country to focus on guarding against Iranian attacks.

Depending on what happens next, all of this could add up to big opportunities for two U.S. enemies—if ISIS can reconstitute and Iran can expand its influence.

The chaos extends beyond Iraq and Iran, and had been gathering for months before this weekend. It has hit worried allies in the Gulf, who in recent months have seen their shipping lanes and oil infrastructure targeted and have quietly tried to tamp down tensions with Iran. It has emboldened dictators like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erodğan, who is flexing his strength in Libya after intervening, counter to American wishes, against American allies in Syria. And it has damaged friendships with European allies, who keep scrambling to deal with Donald Trump’s impulsive decisions—and have just barely recovered from his surprise attempt to withdraw from Syria last fall.

Regardless, this could lead to victory for Trump anyway, because he’s made clear his one overriding goal: to leave the Middle East.

Except that up until Monday he was mostly getting further in. The U.S. has sent thousands of additional troops to the region, as well as a contingent of marines to guard the U.S. embassy in Iraq after protesters tried to storm it last week. Thousands of additional troops have headed to the Middle East since last week; another 14,000 have deployed since May. Trump just this weekend vowed not to leave Iraq. But even if he does get out of one Middle Eastern country, he has also threatened to strike into another, threatening to hit targets within Iran if it “strikes any Americans, or American assets.”

Pentagon officials have consistently characterized their repeated deployments to the region as defensive measures. Even after the U.S. struck five sites in Iraq and Syria that the military says were linked to Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah group, which the U.S. blames for the death of an American contractor in a rocket attack right after Christmas, Esper said: “The United States military responded [and] took defensive actions ... striking a combination of the command and control or weapons caches with considerable effect.” Ditto the unprecedented hit on Soleimani, which Trump said was to stop an “imminent and sinister” attack.

Absent more information on the specific plot the administration said it disrupted—Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told reporters that a failure to act would have been “culpably negligent”—it’s hard to say whether the benefits were worth the costs. If the U.S. did in fact stop an attack that could have taken “hundreds” of American lives, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed, it may have been worth it. The problem is that Trump lies routinely, and his officials just as routinely cover for him. The New York Times reported that even some Trump officials were skeptical of the intelligence, and said that one U.S. official described the intelligence as simply “another Monday in the Middle East.” As my colleague Peter Nicholas wrote last week: “Trump faces the gravest foreign-policy crisis of his tenure at a time when his credibility has been shredded.”

Another example occurred just this weekend. After Trump tweeted he had a 52-target list including sites “important to Iran & the Iranian culture,” Pompeo responded to criticism that targeting cultural sites would be a war crime. “President Trump didn’t say he’d go after a cultural site,” Pompeo said on Fox News. “Read what he said very closely.” Hours later, Trump, en route to Washington after a two-week vacation in Florida, told a journalist: “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural [sites]? It doesn’t work that way.” At a press gaggle today, the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway confused matters further: “Secretary Pompeo said yesterday that we will be within the law, and I think that Iran has many … strategic military sites that you may cite are also cultural sites … He didn’t say he’s targeting cultural sites.”

These are the same people insisting that the world is a safer place during the cascade of bad news that has followed Soleimani’s death—even as the State Department told all U.S. citizens in Iraq to leave immediately.

Yet the general’s killing only accelerated trends that were already under way. Iran had been blowing through its commitments under the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal for months by the time its leadership announced yesterday that it wouldn’t observe any more of the agreement’s limits on its nuclear program. The Trump administration left the nuclear deal in 2018 and vowed to get a better one—one that would check Iran’s proxy violence and missile development in addition to its nuclear program. None of those things have happened.

As for Iran’s growing influence in the region, Pompeo tends to trace it to the nuclear deal, which gave Iran sanctions relief he says has been used to fund terrorism. But Iran’s recent expansion started much earlier, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which gave Iranian-backed militias a foothold in the country and a base from which to attack U.S. forces. The anti-ISIS fight only empowered them further as the Iraqi government relied in part on them to beat back the insurgents. Iraq has ever since been struggling to bring them under government control. And the U.S. has spent millions of dollars training Iraqi forces and trying to pull the country out of Iran’s orbit. Meanwhile, the Syrian conflict, in which Iranian forces and their proxies have backed Bashar al-Assad, has helped the country consolidate what officials call a “Shia crescent” of influence extending from Iran, through Iraq, and into Syria and Lebanon. The Iranian military has also conducted joint exercises with China and Russia.

And once again, part of the ISIS fight is on hold. Not only have the Americans paused their cooperation with Iraqi units since Soleimani’s killing; the rest of NATO has suspended its operations in Iraq too. This is the second time in three months that counter-ISIS operations have had to be stalled; the first was after Trump opted to move U.S. forces in northeastern Syria out of the way of a Turkish attack against America’s Kurdish allies there.

In the short term, Trump officials keep saying their goal with Iran is to “restore deterrence,” that each additional movement of troops to the region—or as of last week, each military strike—aims to stop the cycle of violence by making clear to Iran the consequences of its actions. The problem is that if the Iranians aren’t deterred, they may take violent steps of their own for much the same reason the U.S. has: to prove that there are consequences.

One advantage to having mutually contradictory policy goals is that when one fails, another might succeed. Yes, what the military calls the “enduring defeat of ISIS” achieved “by, with and through” local partners like the Iraqis may now be coming to an end—it’s hard to be “with” them if you’re leaving. But that’s just the goal of executive-branch institutions like the State Department and the Pentagon. As for the president himself—and even though he’s declared that the U.S. is not leaving unless the Iraqis pay for the air base the U.S. constructed in their country—his real preference has been clear since the 2016 election campaign. “We should have never been there in the first place,” he said in October 2017. “Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand,” he said two years later.

The contradictions are not just between Trump and the rest of his administration, but within Trump himself. He has twice now declared the defeat of ISIS and tried to leave Syria, only to get talked out of it. He professes to hate war, but he loves killing bad guys. What happens after they’re dead is someone else’s responsibility.

*********

IT’S 2003 ALL OVER AGAIN

It doesn’t require much squinting to see the ways the Iran crisis resembles the lead-up to the Iraq War.

By David A. Graham, Staff writer | Published Jan 6, 2020 |The Atlantic | Posted January 06, 2020 |

The U.S. stands on the brink of an unpredictable war in the Middle East.

The president, fairly untutored in foreign affairs, ran for office promising to pull back from American commitments overseas. But the vice president and a powerful Cabinet secretary, seeing a chance to follow through on their deep-rooted ideological commitments, have pushed him to take military action in a moment of opportunity, ramifications be damned.

Even as civilian leaders march toward war, military officers seem unprepared or at least startled by the administration’s belligerence. The government justifies its actions with vague statements about intelligence information and by claiming spurious links to the September 11 attacks, and top officials insist that American actions will lead to dancing in the streets of Iraq. But it becomes quickly clear that the administration hasn’t done much advance planning or thought out its future steps.

It’s 2002–03, as the George W. Bush administration heads toward the war in Iraq, but it’s also the current crisis with Iran. Each new piece of information about President Donald Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian General Qassem Soleimani produces sobering parallels with the situation 17 years ago. That should give the nation pause, and raise some pointed questions for the Trump administration.

The public still doesn’t have good clarity on how, why, and when the president made the call to kill Soleimani in an air strike on January 3, but a picture is gradually emerging. The Washington Post reports that “Trump’s decision to approve the killing of Iran’s top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, [came] at the urging of [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo and Vice President [Mike] Pence.” Pompeo in particular had been pushing for a more violent response to Iran for months, and was deeply disappointed when Trump abruptly called off a punitive air strike last summer.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports, top Pentagon officials were “stunned” by Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani, the most extreme of several options. In the favored patois of the military, initialisms, this smacks of CYA: Having offered the president this option, commanders now seem to be backing away from it. Nonetheless, it also indicates differences of judgment between Cabinet secretaries and the military.

This sounds a lot like the run-up to the Iraq War. We now know that Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Bush White House had been seeking regime change in Iraq from the start of the administration. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld began seeking a pretext to begin a war with Iraq. But some military commanders were wary. By 2002, the U.S. was already engaged in a war in Afghanistan, attempting to root out Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, which had perpetrated the attacks. Some generals questioned the wisdom of launching another major war, or argued that the U.S. would need a much larger armed force than the administration intended to send. Dissenters, including Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, were forced out.

In the Trump administration, there’s already been an exodus of defense officials who challenge the president. Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned roughly a year ago after a disagreement about Syria policy. Brett McGurk, the top envoy for fighting the Islamic State, also quit. On Monday, Pentagon Chief of Staff Kevin Sweeney, a Mattis hire, resigned, though no reason was immediately offered for his departure.

To bring the public around to support the war in Iraq, the Bush administration offered a range of justifications. By misconstruing, twisting, or concocting intelligence, the White House overstated the Iraqi weapons-of-mass destruction program and warned that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Bush and Cheney claimed that Hussein was closely tied to al-Qaeda, creating a putative link between the 9/11 attacks and a war in Iraq. The vice president said an American invasion would inspire celebrations in the streets of Iraq, similar to those after the Allied re-conquest of France: “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” he said on Meet the Press.

But after the invasion, no weapons of mass destruction were found. Cheney, who had scolded the press for not reporting the Saddam–al-Qaeda connection, later admitted there wasn’t one. And while many Iraqis were pleased to be rid of Saddam, there was not the widespread jubilation Cheney expected—and conditions have gone downhill since then. Following the successful toppling of Saddam, Iraq saw looting, widespread violence, sectarian strife, and the rise of ISIS (to offer a drastically summarized version). As many as 200,000 civilians have died in Iraq. Nostalgia for Saddam is common. Over the weekend, in the wake of the Soleimani strike, the Iraqi Parliament voted to expel U.S. forces, in anger over what it viewed as a violation of sovereignty.

Compare that effort to sell the war with this moment. The administration has claimed that it killed Soleimani because of intelligence about an impending strike that would kill Americans, but there are already questions about how convincing or urgent that intelligence really was. Vice President Pence, echoing Cheney and Bush, falsely tried to claim a link between Soleimani and the 9/11 attacks. Pompeo, echoing Cheney, claimed that Iraqis were “dancing in the street for freedom” after the Soleimani strike, and while he tweeted a video that showed a small celebration, it was misleading, especially in light of the parliamentary vote.

Aside from the false justifications behind it, one reason the Iraq invasion turned into a disaster was a lack of planning for what would happen after the initial military phase of the war. Similarly, it appears that Trump acted impulsively and without much thought for what would happen after Soleimani’s death.

The White House still hasn’t offered a persuasive explanation for the authority under which it assassinated Soleimani, citing the 1943 killing of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the planner of the Pearl Harbor attacks—but Japan and the U.S. were in a declared war at the time, while the U.S. is not at war with Iran. Other than a vague suggestion that Iran will come to the bargaining table, and threats of severe responses (including potential war crimes) if Iran retaliates, Trump hasn’t articulated what steps he expects next in the confrontation. And the U.S. appears to have been caught flat-footed by the Iraqi parliamentary vote, and, according to Axios, tried unsuccessfully to stop it.

It doesn’t even require much squinting to see the ways the Iran crisis resembles the lead-up to the Iraq War. Practically the only thing that’s left is for Trump to claim that he was against killing Soleimani all along.

Just because the parallels are striking doesn’t mean this moment will turn out just like the Iraq War did. It’s very difficult to forecast next steps, but it also would be difficult to replicate the greatest foreign-policy blunder in America’s history. The scope of hostilities right now is much narrower, encompassing only one military commander, and while there is a risk of Iranian retaliation, the U.S. and Iran have been engaged in a hot-and-cold proxy conflict for decades. The current flare-up is really just the latest episode in the extended Iraq disaster.

Yet the factors that made the Iraq War a disaster are present here: false and dubious claims; hubristic thinking; lack of foresight and planning; civilian-military divides; ideology eclipsing practical strategy. All of this means that while the Iran crisis may not be a disaster on the scale of the Iraq War, it could easily be a disaster. Karl Marx famously wrote that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” There’s no reason it can’t repeat itself as just another tragedy, though.

*********

Soleimani Was Failing

Trump should have left Soleimani alive and in place, but made him operationally ineffective by killing his deputies.

By Kori Schake, Contributing writer and the Deputy Director-General of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She teaches in War Studies at King’s College. | Published January 7, 2020 7:00 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted January 7, 2020 |

Hard to say he didn’t deserve it. Qassem Soleimani was responsible for 11 recent attacks on U.S. facilities in Iraq even before the one that killed a U.S. contractor; Iranian attacks on neutral, civilian shipping in the Gulf; the attack on Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia; IEDs that killed hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. He was the architect of Iran’s strategy of mobilizing militias to destabilize neighboring states and the brutal strategy of bleeding Syria dry.

While we may not be at war with Iran, Soleimani has been at war with the United States for 15 years. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is incorrect that “this war started when the JCPOA was entered into,” but Iran’s proxy attacks did increase after the nuclear agreement came into force, and they have increased significantly since the U.S. withdrew from the agreement.

The previous two American presidents all considered killing Soleimani as part of the Iraq War effort. And President Donald Trump had been incredibly—even perhaps damagingly—restrained in not overtly retaliating for attacks on shipping, Aramco, U.S. bases, and the embassy in Iraq. American allies in the Middle East and beyond were worried about the U.S. reestablishing deterrence, by which they mean retaliating to show the Iranians and other potential predators that it wouldn’t let them get away with these acts of war.

So the administration was justified in killing Soleimani—but that doesn’t mean it was a good idea.

The fact is that much of Soleimani’s strategy had begun to falter, and in ways advantageous to U.S. interests. While Soleimani fought the ground war in Syria on Bashar al-Assad’s behalf, only Russian intervention prevented Assad’s fall. Russia will dictate the terms of Syria’s future, not Iran. Iraq’s Kurdish president had succeeded in preventing a pro-Iranian successor to pro-Iranian Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. The protests in Iraq and Lebanon were about corruption and unrepresentative governance, which Iran was associated with because of its influence in those countries even before Iranian-affiliated militias responded violently. In the case of Iraq, they killed more than 500 protesters and wounded a staggering 19,000.

Iran’s strategy of gaining depth beyond its borders succeeded because it was opaque. Soleimani’s desire for credit—pictures from regional battlefields, chairing the Iraqi-government meeting that decided whether Abadi would remain in power—removed the plausible deniability of Iranian orchestration, activating nationalistic antibodies in Iraq and Lebanon.

It’s possible, even likely, that recent attacks by Iran on U.S. bases in Iraq were an overt attempt to distract from the validity of protests in Iraq. In that, Soleimani may have succeeded in death at what he was failing to achieve in life. Judging by the crowds at Soleimani’s funerals in Iran, his killing erased fissures between Iranians and their government, at least temporarily.

Iraq, meanwhile, may well determine that it’s more secure without U.S. forces. Trump’s threat not to leave Iraq unless remunerated for the cost of bases built in that country are damaging to the relationship. Who wants that kind of friend?

Losing the strategist of Iranian proxy warfare would be a cheap price to pay for Iran to achieve a rapprochement between the government and its people, and a U.S. exit from Iraq. That’s especially the case since the proxy strategy may have been reaching its limits under Soleimani, and he’d created a capable cadre of deputies.

The better strategy would have been to leave Soleimani alive and in place, but to make him operationally ineffective by killing his deputies, as the U.S. has done with al-Qaeda deputies. Taking out a deputy draws less press, but sends a powerful message; the strategy places the onus of escalation on Iran and gives the U.S. the benefit of a public posture of restraint. It’s what the Eisenhower administration called “quiet military measures” during the 1958 Berlin crisis.

But since Trump decided to go after the Quds Force commander, he should at least have coordinated with countries that host U.S. bases or that have deployed forces in furtherance of U.S. interests in the Middle East. He did not. When the U.S. leaves allies out of the loop, those allies become less likely to contribute to future coalitions, leading to more strain on U.S. forces. Trump also made it abundantly clear that he thinks only of America, first and last, when he tweeted that the U.S. would respond to any attacks on U.S. service personnel specifically. That is a poor way to repay the 78 other countries and four international organizations participating in the fight against the Islamic State for their dedication.

Perhaps the most generous take on the Soleimani killing is that it merely hastened negative outcomes that would have happened anyway. Iran would likely have restarted enrichment at its nuclear plants, and continued attacks on U.S. interests and commerce passing through the Gulf. U.S. troops may have left Iraq, given Trump’s well-publicized efforts to abandon operations there.

As so often with the Trump administration, the problem is less the policy position than the execution. The administration has a way of maximizing the costs and minimizing the benefits of its actions.

*********

Soleimani’s Ultimate Revenge

In his death, the Iranian general may cost the United States far more than it gained by his killing.

By William J. Burns, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Jake Sullivan, Senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | Published Jan 07, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted Jan 7, 2020

The death of Qassem Soleimani is a sobering blow for the Iranian regime. Soleimani embodied everything the regime wanted to project about itself—influence, ruthlessness, agility, confidence. He kept Iran’s enemies awake at night, and his theocratic masters sleeping soundly in a world of real and imagined threats at home and abroad.

For years, Tehran’s leadership talked fatalistically about Soleimani as a “living martyr,” but it surely did not anticipate President Donald Trump’s audacious targeted killing. Now the Iranians will seek vengeance—methodical, cold-blooded, and nasty. They will look to avoid an all-out war with the United States that they cannot win. But they will also look to turn a tactical blow into a strategic boon.

Unlike the Trump administration, which cannot reconcile its desire to get tough on Iran with its desire to leave the region altogether, the Iranian regime has a strategy, tethered to the realities, dysfunctions, and limits of the Middle East. Its tactics are often ugly; its capacity for misreading the terrain is sometimes self-defeating; and the pain and stupidities it inflicts on so many across the region, let alone its own people, can be horrific. But it does connect its means to its desired ends: keeping the clerics in power, keeping its imperial project in the region alive, and keeping sworn enemies, including America, off balance and out of its neighborhood.

No one really knows what comes next, not even the protagonists themselves. But as the dust settles, the collateral damage from the strike on Soleimani will likely be greater than the Trump administration bargained for. Indeed, the strike already appears to be feeding the gnarled ambitions of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, by producing a more unified regime with a tighter grip at home; an even more precarious American military position in Iraq and Syria, with the Iraqi Parliament now calling for U.S. withdrawal; and the death of the Iranian nuclear deal and the whole notion of diplomacy with the Great Satan. All this will cost the United States far more than Soleimani’s killing cost Iran. In his death, Soleimani may exact his own final act of revenge against the United States.

One of the iron laws of foreign policy is that just because you can do something, or just because it’s morally defensible, doesn’t make it a smart thing to do. Both of President Trump’s predecessors adhered to that law when it came to the question of whether to go after Qassem Soleimani. Trump, however, is enamored with actions that his predecessors avoided, and stubbornly convinced that he can get his way with the unilateral application of American power.

For Iran’s supreme leader, Soleimani’s killing was both a personal wound and an affirmation of his darkly suspicious worldview. Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal last year had already reconfirmed his deep skepticism about the wisdom of negotiating with the Americans. The elimination of Soleimani may give pause to Khamenei and the hard men around him about the wisdom of frontal assaults on U.S. personnel, but in other ways it returns them to a world in which they’re far more comfortable. It’s a world with a clear enemy at the gate, a mortal threat that makes it easier to control domestic pressures for reform and dismiss international pressures for diplomacy. And it’s a world in which Iran has a wide array of lethal tools and loyal proxies, and a well-practiced ability to manipulate a neighborhood it knows far better than Americans do.

Strategically, the Iranian leadership will see no shortage of opportunities.

At home, it will use the action against Soleimani to change the channel, seeking to divert the popular frustrations that only a short time ago deeply unnerved the regime. Reformism was already a spent force in Iranian politics. Parliamentary elections next month will bury it—hardening the grip of reactionaries and all but ensuring the rise of their choices for the next president and eventually the next supreme leader.

Already tiptoeing away from compliance with the nuclear agreement, the regime will now feel obliged to take significant leaps, including the resumption of higher levels of uranium enrichment. Other signatories can no longer make a credible case that they can get Trump back to the negotiating table or deliver Iran the promised economic benefits. The only question about the nuclear deal now is the manner and pace of its expiration. With the treacherous genie of Iran’s nuclear program heading out of the bottle, a whole series of dilemmas will reemerge, from the dangers of military preemption to the risks of a regional nuclear-arms race.

The wider regional consequences could be equally negative for American interests—particularly in Iraq. For Tehran, ironically, the U.S. killing of Soleimani offers a convenient escape from the anti-Iranian anger that Soleimani’s own policies stirred up. Barely a month ago, the Iranian consulate in Najaf was torched by an Iraqi Shia mob accusing Iran of violating Iraqi sovereignty; now the Americans are a more urgent target for that same charge. Tehran will do everything in its power to make America’s military presence in Iraq operationally and politically unsustainable. It will stoke Iraqi emotions and push a very fragile Iraqi government to demand our withdrawal, and an angered Shia clerical establishment to do the same—tempting an American president who doesn’t really want to be there in the first place. In the meantime, Iranian proxies will continue to try to humiliate Americans in Iraq, and look for opportunities to threaten U.S. facilities.

Even short of a withdrawal, pressure to constrain the U.S. military in Iraq will have serious effects on a campaign against ISIS that is far from over. Trump has made no secret of his inclination to pull remaining American forces out of Syria, and the Iranians will turn up the heat to try to encourage that instinct. Mounting protests in Lebanon against Iran and Hezbollah will at least temporarily recede, deferring the hopes of Lebanese whose nonviolent, cross-sectarian demonstrations held the promise of a new political era in that embattled country.

In the Gulf, our partners are losing their enthusiasm for an American confrontation with Iran. They are spooked by Trump’s oscillation between non-reaction and extreme reaction and the Iranians’ demonstrated will and capacity to hit them where it hurts most. The Iranians could eventually stage further attacks on Saudi oil facilities or Gulf shipping, as a reminder that neither the Gulf Arabs nor the global economy will escape the consequences of conflict between Tehran and Washington.

As we’ve argued before, we’re at this dangerous juncture because of Trump’s foolish decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal, his through-the-looking -glass conception of coercive diplomacy, and his willing hard-line enablers in Tehran. When the deal was in place, Iran remained an adversary—but U.S. unmanned aircraft weren’t being shot down by Iran in international waters, Gulf shipping and infrastructure weren’t being hit by Iranian mines and missiles, and U.S. personnel weren’t being targeted by Shia militias in Iraq. Abandoning the nuclear agreement, on our own and with no evidence of Iranian cheating, started a predictable cycle of escalation and brinkmanship. It is a cycle that Trump has accelerated with muscular bluster and “maximum pressure,” unconnected to realistic aims or careful foresight.

The Trump administration is not the first U.S. administration to engage in magical thinking in the Middle East, but the contradictions in its approach have set a new standard. The president came into office promising to undermine Iran’s regional reach and to secure a “better deal” on its nuclear program—all while drawing down America’s military presence in the region and rejecting credible diplomacy.

At the beginning of 2020, a dispassionate reckoning would conclude that the United States is not only further from those goals than it was three years ago, but also more exposed to the unpredictable risks of escalating conflict with Iran and the vast insecurities of the Middle East, the original land of unintended consequences. The wisdom of particular tactics, including the killing of Qassem Soleimani, is best judged by the strategic results they produce. America is stumbling into a tragedy of its own making. And the Iranian regime is poised to once again reap the rewards, turning Soleimani’s loss into a long-term gain.

*********

An Extraordinarily Dangerous Moment

To keep his promise to kill an achievement of Obama’s, Trump has been willing to break his promise to get us out of wars in the Middle East.

By Ben Rhodes, Former deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama | Published January 07, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted January 07, 2020 |

n a november night in 2013, Barack Obama delivered a statement about an interim nuclear deal that had just been reached, freezing Iran’s program in place. When he was done, I walked with him back to the entrance of his residence, watched by the stoic portraits of former presidents. “Congratulations,” I said. “You just made sure that we won’t have a war with Iran during your presidency.”

“That’s probably true,” he said, considering the question. “But I want to make sure that the next president doesn’t have to go to war either.”

Obama was referring to the need to reach a comprehensive deal that rolled back Iran’s nuclear program. It would take almost two years of painstaking negotiations to get there, but the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) accomplished that objective. Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran destroyed the core of a reactor that could have produced plutonium for a bomb; removed two-thirds of its centrifuges, the machines that can enrich uranium for a bomb; shipped 98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium (enough for 10 bombs) out of the country; and submitted to the most comprehensive international inspections regime ever put into place to monitor a nuclear program.

These achievements are worth revisiting, because any hope of saving the Iran deal likely died with the killing of Qassem Soleimani. Indeed, it’s no surprise that the Iranian government has indicated that it will no longer abide by the limits on its nuclear program imposed by the JCPOA.

ow did we get here? The debate over the Iran deal was among the most acrimonious of the Obama years. Throughout 2015, congressional Republicans stridently opposed it. Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia worked to marshal opposition. Think tanks churned out alarmist reports about the JCPOA. Tens of millions of dollars were spent by outside groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and United Against Nuclear Iran urging Congress to kill the deal. To prevent that legislation from passing, we worked frenetically to muster 41 Democratic Senate votes to uphold a filibuster. Indeed, the fact that it was far easier for George W. Bush to take the United States into an unnecessary war in Iraq than it was for Barack Obama to secure a nuclear deal to avoid one with Iran says something deeply strange and alarming about our country and its politics.

As soon as he began his run for the presidency, Donald Trump anointed himself the most strident of the JCPOA’s opponents, calling it “the worst deal ever negotiated.” It is likely, of course, that Trump couldn’t even describe the Iran deal’s terms. He failed to articulate a different set of nuclear restrictions, or to offer his views on the nature of centrifuges that Iran should be allowed to operate, or the research and development it should be permitted to perform. Trump simply wanted to destroy anything that Obama built and to satiate right-wing supporters who had their own reasons for opposing the JCPOA. What Trump could do is lie about the Iran deal, and he did so relentlessly.

Upon becoming president, Trump encountered an inconvenient truth: The Iran deal was working. Trump’s own intelligence community and military leadership confirmed that Iran was complying with the JCPOA’s terms; his own secretary of defense argued publicly that staying in the JCPOA was in America’s interest; and all the other parties to the deal—the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China—opposed Trump’s instinct to pull out. After Trump refused to certify that Iran was complying with the JCPOA (even though it was), even Republicans in Congress quietly refused to reimpose sanctions. And after Trump demanded a better deal, French President Emmanuel Macron offered him the opportunity to pursue one through negotiation, provided that the JCPOA stayed in place. Despite all this evidence and all these efforts, Trump withdrew from the Iran deal in May of 2018 and started reimposing sanctions.

Few recent presidential decisions have been proved to be so spectacularly wrong in such a short period of time.

Trump said that in withdrawing from the JCPOA, he would be in a stronger position to stop Iran’s provocations across the Middle East. The opposite has proved to be the case. Iran has already resumed aspects of its nuclear program that were restricted under the JCPOA. And over the past year alone, Iran or its proxies have shot down a U.S. drone, harassed and seized oil tankers, bombed Saudi oil infrastructure, killed unarmed protesters, and resumed rocket attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq. During the implementation of the Iran deal, by contrast, there wasn’t a single such rocket attack from a Shia militia. Trump initiated the escalatory cycle that led us to this extraordinarily dangerous moment.

It is ironic that the killing of Qassem Soleimani could put the final nail in the coffin of the Iran deal. In the Obama White House, we assessed that Soleimani opposed the JCPOA, and that he led a hard-line flank that viewed the Iranian foreign minister who conducted the negotiations with suspicion. This view was often mocked by Iran-deal opponents, who declared that there was no distinction between hard-liners and more moderate Iranian officials. Indeed, U.S. hawks regularly foreclose opportunities for diplomacy by wrongly seeing the government of any adversary as a monolith. But now, in the wake of Soleimani’s assassination, that debate is largely moot: As mourners flood the streets, all of Iran’s leaders are consolidating around a harder line, vowing to chase the United States out of the region.

We have already seen the consequences of this latest escalation in Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign come into focus. Iraqi leaders are demanding that we leave their country, after Americans sacrificed thousands of lives and spent more than $1 trillion there; new restrictions are inhibiting the fight against ISIS; Iran is casting off the remaining limits on its nuclear program. In the months and years to come, we should expect renewed attacks against U.S. interests—and Americans—from Iran and its proxies. In contrast to the international unity that enabled the achievement of the JCPOA, Trump’s abandonment of it has alienated the United States from our closest allies. And in his other signature foreign-policy initiative—negotiations with North Korea—Kim Jong Un is pushing forward with his own nuclear and missile programs, perhaps having drawn the lesson that you cannot trust the United States to keep a nuclear deal.

In response, Trump and his chief lieutenant on Iran—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—have sought to deflect blame to the JCPOA. While blaming the Iran deal for the consequences of Trump pulling out of the Iran deal is absurd, this argument should come as no surprise. Trump’s Iran policy was formulated in opposition to Obama, not with an eye toward actual governing. His is a worldview that relies on false charges, hyperbolic rhetoric, and assertions of strength as an end in itself, and not as a means to achieving something. At a Cabinet meeting last year, Trump sat at the table with a Game of Thrones–style poster that read “Sanctions are coming,” as if it were all just a movie, and not real life.

By contrast, the Iran deal was designed to address reality, and discharge the responsibilities of governing. Like any such effort, it was imperfect, and left all parties dissatisfied. For the Iranians, it was flawed because it didn’t lift all sanctions; it did, however, offer relief from certain sanctions and the prospect of further relief if Iran continued to comply. For us, it was flawed because the JCPOA’s most effective restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program expired in 10 or 15 years—but that was 10 or 15 more years of assurance than having no deal in place, and further negotiations that built upon the JCPOA were always an available option. Finally, the JCPOA didn’t stop Iran’s ballistic-missile program or its support for terror in the Middle East; however, the JCPOA did ensure that a regime that has ballistic missiles and supports terror was verifiably prohibited from obtaining a nuclear weapon. That was the whole point. You don’t make nuclear deals like that with your friends.

Indeed, imagine how the current crisis would feel if Iran already had nuclear weapons.

Governing isn’t about making demands on other countries that will never be achieved just because they sound good back in Washington. And the presidency certainly isn’t a movie. When “sanctions are coming,” real people get hurt and terrible things can happen in the real world. One legacy of the JCPOA is that it demonstrates the utility of a different approach.

As Trump confronts the consequences of a crisis of his own creation, he can thank Obama for the fact that Iran doesn’t yet have the means to produce a nuclear weapon. He can thank Obama for the fact that Iran’s nuclear program is set back from where it was in 2015. He can thank Obama for the inspections regime that has functioned effectively. By contrast, the result of Trump’s policy—designed for Fox News sets and campaign rallies—has been a more hard-line Iranian politics, an Iranian adversary that has stepped up its provocations, and a newly unconstrained Iranian nuclear program.

Barack Obama did achieve a deal good enough to prevent his successor from having to go to war with Iran. But now, despite all that work, a de facto state of war exists between the United States and Iran. To keep his promise to kill an achievement of Obama’s, Donald Trump has been willing to break his promise to get us out of wars in the Middle East. In doing so, he has tragically proved Obama right: The choice all along was between the Iran deal or an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program and some form of war.

*********

0 notes

marymosley · 5 years

Text

More Scream Than Substance: Why the Senate Missed The Point Of Barr’s Testimony

Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on Barr hearing and its aftermath. The Democrats continue to focus on Barr rather than the report. Congress now has 98 percent of the original report available to it. Only two percent was redacted from the sealed copy in conformity with federal law barring the release of grand jury material. Less than ten percent of the report is redacted in the public version and only a small percentage in the key obstruction section is redacted. However, the leadership prefers to fight over the remaining two percent and the Barr letter than to commence actual impeachment proceedings against Trump. I wrote back in 2017 that the Democratic leadership has long been opposed to any actual impeachment of Trump. There are obvious reason why the Democratic leaders are opposed to removing Trump. That position has held firm as leaders struggle to assure voters that they want to impeach without actually impeaching. The result is a mutual effort by Congress and White House to run out the clock. The result is political theater at its worst.

Here is the column:

High profile hearings in Congress often look like a casting call for B-Grade actors reading a low budget slasher film script. The key is that look of shock and disgust regardless of what the witness answers. The standout performer is Senator Cory Booker, who has mastered that “I Know What You Did Last Summer” look, even when asking the most mundane or mixed questions. He knows that, in this genre, the script is less important than the optics.

Indeed, the hearing with Attorney General William Barr this week seemed, at times, to involve two scripts for two different movies, with Barr reading from the 2000s “Drag Me To Hell” while Senate Democrats read from the 1970s “I Spit On Your Grave.” Senator Mazie Hirono did not even stop to listen for his responses before denouncing his failure to answer questions.

Some new information was shared, such as the fact that special counsel Robert Mueller slowed the release of his report by ignoring requests from Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to identify grand jury information in advance. There was also Barr stating he and Rosenstein asked Mueller to reach a conclusion on all crimes. Barr effectively shifted the burden over to Mueller on such questions. Claims by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Barr lied under oath are simply unfounded and unfair.

Yet, Barr stumbled to answer when Senator Kamala Harris asked, “Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation of anyone?” Barr got caught up with the meaning of “suggest” then categorically denied that anyone had asked he open any investigation but said, “I’m trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest.’ I mean, there have been discussions of matters out there.” Just like the seasoned former prosecutor she is, Harris pounced on his answer and suggested that someone might have “hinted” or “inferred.”

This is why both compound and vague questions are generally barred in actual cross examination. Barr looked evasive and uncomfortable, even though he explained that his concern was that conversations clearly did cover possible investigations but he was never asked to open one. The distinction makes for bad television but is a legally important point here.

President Trump has repeatedly crossed the traditional line of separation between the White House and the FBI, with his probing of officials like former FBI Director James Comey on the status or direction of the Russia investigation. While I have been critical of Comey, he was absolutely right in his objections to the inquiries from Trump. Past presidents generally avoided meeting alone with FBI directors, much less recklessly pressing them on investigations that touched on political or personal interests.

A demand from the White House for an investigation can raise serious questions of political influence over prosecutorial decisions. However, the line can be blurry. Presidents often call for investigations on issues of national importance. After a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, for example, President Obama held a press conference in which he was heralded for announcing that he had ordered the Justice Department and the FBI to both “independently investigate the death of Michael Brown.”

The Justice Department is part of the executive branch, and there is often discussion of the priorities and controversies involved in its investigations. For that very reason, Democrats were not aghast when former Attorney General Eric Holder publicly proclaimed he was a “wingman” for Obama. Likewise, Democrats applauded Obama when he ordered the Justice Department not to prosecute certain immigration cases. The line that cannot be crossed is the direction or influence of such an investigation.

Anyone can ask the Justice Department to look into allegations of criminal conduct. The Justice Department then makes an independent decision on whether to investigate. This includes members of Congress, who often call upon the Justice Department to investigate individuals despite their interests. Indeed, Harris has repeatedly done so, including calling for the Justice Department inspector general to investigate Barr. There is nothing improper in such a request, even if it has more political than legal merit.

Take the latest request from Senate Democrats for an investigation into Barr and Rosenstein reaching a conclusion on the obstruction evidence after Mueller had refused to do so. They wrote in a letter to the Justice Department inspector general, “It is unclear what statute, regulation, or policy led the attorney general to interject his own conclusion” that the conduct of the president did not amount to obstruction of justice here.

It is a bizarre question since the United States Code says, “All functions of other officers of the Department of Justice and all functions of agencies and employees of the Department of Justice are vested in the attorney general,” with a couple narrow exceptions dealing with administrative judges and prisons. The Justice Department makes the prosecutorial decisions, and the ultimate decision maker here is the attorney general.

What makes the request even more curious is the omission of the more obvious question. Why did Mueller not reach a decision? As I wrote on the day that Barr released his summary of the Mueller report to Congress, it is perfectly incomprehensible that Mueller did not reach a conclusion. After reading his report, his reasons for refusing are even more inscrutable.

The special counsel is mandated to “provide the attorney general with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the special counsel.” While the report references the Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting president, nothing suggests that a special counsel cannot reach a conclusion on the evidence of criminal conduct by a president. If there was any doubt on Justice Department policy, it should have been clarified when Barr and Rosenstein, who oversee Mueller, pressed him to reach a conclusion. Barr still cannot explain the rationale for a special counsel not reaching a conclusion.

He is not alone. Democrats have also called for an investigation of what they view as a “lack of impartiality” under the attorney general. Harris expressed surprise that Barr did not personally review the underlying evidence, consisting of millions of documents and records, collected by Mueller before reaching his conclusion on obstruction. What she ignored is that such an independent review would have negated the work by Mueller. As Barr correctly stated, “We accepted the statements in the report as factual record. We did not go underneath it to see whether or not they were accurate.” Democrats presumably would want him to do that instead of substitute his own facts for those of the special counsel.

Harris was not wrong in pressing Barr on any White House pressure to open investigations. However, there is nothing improper with the White House raising priorities and controversies with the attorney general. What raises serious ethical concerns is when those cases directly impact a president or his campaign. An attorney general should push back on anything he or she views as efforts to influence prosecutorial decisions.

Of course, every good slasher film has a sequel, and there are several in the works in this case with the calls for Mueller, Rosenstein, and former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify. Congress has every right to call on these officials, and the suggestion from Trump that he will block McGahn would be entirely unjustified. But if Congress truly wants answers and not just optics, it might try keeping the jump scares to a minimum.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.

More Scream Than Substance: Why the Senate Missed The Point Of Barr’s Testimony published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

0 notes

theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

Kanye West visited the White House Thursday, ostensibly to discuss criminal justice reform. That didn’t really happen.

Instead, West, seated across from Trump in the Oval Office, surrounded by reporters, launched into a rambling soliloquy that touched on seemingly everything else, including planes, the 13th Amendment, and mental health.

Rolling Stone’s Ryan Bort described the scene:

He pitched the president on a plane to replace Air Force One called the “iPlane 1.” He talked about how he had been misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder (he was actually just sleep-deprived). He became the first person to publicly say “motherfucker” in the president’s office. Bloomberg White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs called it the wildest Oval Office event she’s ever seen.

A particularly surreal moment came when West explained why he finds Trump so appealing. “I’m married to a family where there’s not a lot of male energy going on,” he said. “There’s something about … I love Hillary. I love everyone. But the campaign ‘I’m With Her’ just didn’t make me feel, as a guy that didn’t get to see his dad all the time, like a guy who could play catch with his son. There was something about when I put this hat on that made me feel like Superman. That’s my favorite superhero. You made a Superman cape for me.”

While initial reports said West would visit the White House to talk about policy, the meeting served a second, arguably more important purpose: to mark the culmination of months of highly publicized exchanges between Trump and West. Just six months ago, West began effusively praising the president, referring to him as a “brother” and fellow wielder of “dragon energy,” before posting images of himself wearing a signed “Make America Great Again” hat.

That was followed by a string of shared compliments between the two that continues, with West notably grabbing the mic after a recent taping of Saturday Night Live to express his support for the president. “If someone inspires me and I connect with them, I don’t have to believe in all they policies,” West told the audience, shortly after claiming that Democrats conspired “to take the fathers out the home and promote welfare.”

West isn’t limited to only praising Trump. He’s also tweeted approvingly about far-right commentators like Turning Point USA’s Candace Owens, who called Black Lives Matter protesters, “whiny toddlers pretending to be oppressed” and said that post-Charlottesville concerns about rising white nationalism are “stupid.” West has also attracted attention for his own comments that “slavery was a choice” and his more recent remarks that the 13th Amendment — which outlawed slavery — should be abolished.

It’s all marked a controversial — and in some ways confusing — evolution for the rapper and producer who famously declared “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” back in 2005. (West attempted to walk back his prior comment back on Thursday, saying that the remark represented a “victimized mentality.”) In his earlier years, West positioned himself as a black artist unafraid to discuss the realities and possibilities of blackness.

That he has thrown his support behind a White House at odds with those things — and that his support has been followed by West renouncing much of his past self — has been a strange thing to witness.

But in 2018, some of that confusion may be misplaced. After all, West’s interactions with and praise of Trump date back further than this year. And West first flirted with far-right imagery and weird ideas about slavery years ago, well before Trump entered the political stage.

What we are seeing now then, may not exactly be something completely new. But West’s evolution from outspoken rapper to outspoken rapper and prominent Donald Trump supporter has still been one that has captured a fair amount of attention, not only for what it reveals about West himself, but for how it has come to capture concerns about race and racism in the Trump era.

West has long been known for his tendency to make a public spectacle, whether through on the fly comments or behavior. There was 2004 when, after losing a Best New Artist Award at the American Music Awards, the rapper left the show, later telling reporters that he was “robbed.” One year later, West slammed media depictions of black hurricane victims and declared that President Bush didn’t care about black people during a telethon raising funds for survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Then there was his 2009 outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards, in which he cut off Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to declare that Beyoncé had the superior video. The VMAs moment also put West in the path of another president, Barack Obama, who was caught on a hot mic calling the rapper a “jackass” for his outburst. West later referenced the incident in his 2010 single “Power” with the line, “they say I was the abomination of Obama’s nation.”

As each of these moments unfolded, West’s track record became a bit more clear. The outbursts showed that West was not only willing to blurt out what was on his mind at any given moment, but also that he was aware of how to take an event and put his thoughts and opinions front and center.

This belief, coupled with West’s larger than life self-image — the rapper wore a crown of thorns on a 2006 Rolling Stone cover and declared himself Yeezus seven years later— suggested that West wanted to wield influence over more than music. He wanted to be seen as a leader of American culture itself.

That belief was not entirely unfounded — West was one of the most prolific producers of the 2000s and helped expose a number of artists to the industry — and he’s become as well known for his outbursts as his own hits. But while West has always been controversial, his boasts and outbursts in the 2000s were seen as fitting into a broader commentary on race and racism that was at times reflected in his music, a reminder that one of the biggest artists of the decade was confident in his blackness and wanted to challenge those who he perceived as disrespecting that.

But over time, he started to push boundaries in ways that were harder for fans to defend.

One moment that is perhaps particularly relevant in hindsight: In 2013, well into the promotional tour for West’s sixth album Yeezus, he was spotted wearing a coat with a Confederate battle flag patch on its sleeve. The flag also made an appearance on tour apparel.

When a Los Angeles radio station asked West about the flag that year, he gave an answer that tracks pretty closely with some of his more recent statements:

“React how you want,” he said. “Any energy is good energy. You know the Confederate flag represented slavery in a way – that’s my abstract take on what I know about it. So I made the song ‘New Slaves.’ So I took the Confederate flag and made it my flag. It’s my flag. Now what are you going to do?”

In the years following the Confederate flag incident, West wouldn’t speak as much about politics, though he was photographed with his wife Kim Kardashian West and Hillary Clinton in 2015, the same year that he proudly claimed that he would run for president in 2020. A year later, West offered a more direct commentary on politics during a post-election stop on his Saint Pablo Tour. This time, West was very clear about who he was supporting, telling concertgoers, “If I would’ve voted, I would’ve voted for Trump.”

Prior to this, West had referenced Trump’s wealth in a handful of songs and the 2016 video for “Famous,” in which a naked figure of Donald Trump joined West in bed with synthetic replicas of Kim Kardashian West, Taylor Swift, and others.

But in his speech onstage that November, West explained that it was Trump’s speaking style, not his policies, that were so attractive: “There’s nonpolitical methods to speaking that I like, that I feel were very futuristic. And that style, and that method of communication, has proven that it can beat a politically correct way of communication.”

A month later, West was spotted in Trump Tower for a meeting that West said was about “multicultural issues.” As they stood in front of reporters, then-president-elect Trump spoke of the rapper as if he were an old friend. “We’ve been friends for a long time,” Trump told reporters. “We discussed life.”

At the time, West’s meeting with Trump sparked confusion, but was mostly seen as a reflection of the two men’s somewhat similar personalities and desire to for status. As Constance Grady wrote for Vox, West and Trump shared a mutually beneficial relationship, by “filling a void in each other’s public personas. Kanye uses Trump in his lyrics to signal the idea that he has access to wealth and power. Trump mentions Kanye in his interviews to signal the idea that famous people like him.”

By 2018, that relationship would attract much more scrutiny.

More than a year after West met with Trump in New York, and after several months of silence on Twitter, the rapper returned to the platform this past spring. His first tweets were relatively simple, announcements for upcoming albums and random bits of self-help knowledge. But then West began tweeting about politics, and later, Trump.

He started with an April 21 tweet about Owens. “I love the way Candace Owens thinks,” West noted, offering little explanation of exactly what he liked. A day later he tweeted, “The thought police want to suppress freedom of thought.” And three days after that, he began tweeting about the president.

“You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him,” West tweeted on April 25. In another message, he shared an image of himself wearing a signed Make America Great Again hat. “Love who you want to love. That’s free thought. I’m not even political. I’m not a democrat or a republican,” West tweeted that same day.

The messages quickly drew attention, including from Trump, who thanked West for the support and offered his own words of praise, tweeting that the rapper “performed a great service to the Black Community.” All the while, West continued to argue that his support of Trump was not due to any policy, but rather his support of the president’s thoughts and approach to politics.

When West faced criticism for his support, he countered that he was “refusing to be enslaved by monolithic thought,” arguing that critics were angry that he had broken with the beliefs of other African Americans and that black people were too focused on racism.

Things took a further turn when West began making comments on the history of racism and slavery in America that alternated between misinformed half-truths and wholly incorrect statements. While West said a lot of things in a relatively short period, the most notable was that “slavery was a choice,” a comment that fits into a long history of minimizing the damages of slavery. West initially doubled down by tweeting out apocryphal quotes from Harriet Tubman and comparing himself to Nat Turner, but later deleted the majority of his more controversial tweets from this moment.

For a brief period, as West geared up for a busy summer of album releases, it seemed like his political commentary would cease. But West called renewed attention to this conversation in September after his outburst at Saturday Night Live, which was followed by the aforementioned tweets calling for the abolition of the 13th Amendment.

Those comments reignited a storm of controversy around the rapper that largely revolves around two things: 1) his vocal support of Trump that is often accompanied by claims minimizing the historical and current effects of racism, and 2) his tendency to make completely inaccurate remarks about race and slavery.

However, this is not simply about what all of this means for West, but how it has been used to advance narratives about race and racism that affect others. There is a concern that West’s comments and support give cover to a presidential administration that has pursued a policy agenda that will negatively affect communities of color. Writer and author Ta-Nehisi Coates captured this concern in an essay about West earlier this year:

West might plead ignorance—“I don’t have all the answers that a celebrity is supposed to have,” he told Charlamagne. But no citizen claiming such a large portion of the public square as West can be granted reprieve. The planks of Trumpism are clear—the better banning of Muslims, the improved scapegoating of Latinos, the endorsement of racist conspiracy, the denialism of science, the cheering of economic charlatans, the urging on of barbarian cops and barbarian bosses, the cheering of torture, and the condemnation of whole countries. The pain of these policies is not equally distributed. Indeed the rule of Donald Trump is predicated on the infliction of maximum misery on West’s most ardent parishioners, the portions of America, the muck, that made the god Kanye possible.

West’s statements have made it clear that he does not understand this, or that if he does, he doesn’t care. On Thursday, he noted that it was Trump’s masculinity and his “male energy,” not his policy proposals, that made him a more attractive pick than Hillary Clinton. In an interview earlier this year, West said that “feeling is more important than thought. I had enough of the politics.”

In May, T.I., a rapper who has repeatedly collaborated with West and featured on his single, “Ye vs. the People,” told radio program the Breakfast Club that West was largely unaware of Trump policies like the travel ban.

“He loves the thought of [Trump]. … He defied all odds … and in his mind, that’s how it is,” T.I. explained. “He don’t know the things we know because he has removed himself from society to the point that it don’t reach him.”

But, even if West sees himself as removed from politics, it is impossible to separate his support of Trump from it. When West supports Trump and says he wants to talk about criminal justice reform and violence in Chicago for example, he is saying that he wants to sit with a president who has advocated for implementing stop and frisk in the city and whose attorney general is actively trying to stop a police consent decree between Chicago and the state of Illinois from going into effect.

Though West is willing to say that he disagrees with the president on some aspects of policing, statements like “we kill each other more than police officers” are more than enough to cancel that out.

Trump has repeatedly thanked West for his public statements of support, crediting them for a supposed increase in support from black voters (this was not actually the case), while conservative commentators have argued that West’s support is proof that Trump and the Republican Party at large are not racist. West, meanwhile, claims he’s changed the image of Trump supporters and MAGA-branded apparel. Even as West continues to declare his independence from politics, he is increasingly being positioned as a political ally not just to Trump, but to conservative politics in general.

The White House is revealing both a core misunderstanding of black politics and a cynicism about race in holding up West — even as he continues to make missteps on a range of political topics and makes grossly inaccurate remarks about racism and slavery — as an example for black voters to follow. While conservatives and Trump seem comfortable with West, they are by no means able to speak about race in a way that will move large numbers of the demographic to which they claim to be reaching out.

Original Source -> Kanye West’s confounding political evolution, explained

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

0 notes

investmart007 · 6 years

Text

United States | Closing Remarks at the U.S.-India 2+2 Dialogue

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/dzMHdS

United States | Closing Remarks at the U.S.-India 2+2 Dialogue

United States – MINISTER SWARAJ: (Via interpreter) Secretary of State Mr. Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mr. Mattis, my cabinet colleague Mrs. Nirmala Sitharaman, ladies and gentlemen, and my friends from the media: We have just concluded our talks in the first-ever 2+2 Dialogue between India and the United States. As you know, this new dialogue format was decided by Prime Minister Modi and President Trump during their first meeting in Washington, DC, in June 2017. This decision reflects our leaders’ desire to further elevate our bilateral strategic communication on cross-cutting defense and security issues.

Friends, this is the first visit abroad by Secretary Pompeo and Secretary Mattis together. This is also Secretary Pompeo’s first visit to India after becoming foreign minister, and this is also my first meeting with him. Naturally, we have had a lot of issues to discuss during this meeting. Prior to the 2+2 Dialogue, I had a bilateral meeting with Secretary Pompeo, and during this meeting we reviewed the direction of our bilateral relations in recent months, and we exchanged views on a number of regional issues of shared concern.

The recent decision by the United States to put India in the list of countries eligible for Strategic Trade Authorization Tier-1 license exemption reflects India’s robust and responsible export control policies. During our meeting today, we also agreed to work together to secure India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group at the earliest.

Friends, an important element of our strategic partnership is our rapidly growing trade and investment ties. Faster growth in these areas and deeper people-to-people connections are a source of strength for our strategic partnership. Rapidly growing economies are giving rise to new opportunities and a basis for more intense economic engagement. This supports development of manufacturing, promotes knowledge and innovation, creates jobs, and also provides critical resources for growth.

The United States is emerging as a supplier of energy to India as well. We recognized and supported efforts made by the two sides to address trade-related issues on both sides so as to make trade balanced and mutually beneficial.

With respect to the H1-B visa, we have requested Secretary Pompeo to ensure a nondiscriminatory and predictable approach to the H1-B visa (inaudible), given its high impact on innovation, competitiveness, and people-to-people partnership. All of these are a vital source of strength for our relationship, and I said to Secretary Trump[1] given the friendship between Trump and Prime Minister Mr. Modi, we know that all of our people believe that nothing will ever happen detrimental to our relations between these two countries, and I requested Secretary Pompeo to ensure that we live up to the beliefs of the people of our countries.

In the context of our four ministers, we have a growing convergence of views between our countries on the Indo-Pacific. Our respective approaches towards this concept have been outlined by our leaders, by President Trump at the APEC meeting last year, and by Prime Minister Modi at the Shangri-La Dialogue this summer. We see the Indo-Pacific region as a free, open, and inclusive concept with ASEAN centrality at the core and defined by a common, rules-based order that both our countries are pursuing.

We welcome the United States interest in expanding its economic footprint in this region, as this complements our own efforts. We agreed to strengthen our bilateral cooperation as well in order to achieve the common goals related to connectivity and infrastructure, and work together with other partners in this region as well to achieve these goals.

Friends, in order to fight terrorism we have considerably advanced our cooperation. Last year, the terrorist designations dialogue was established and other mechanisms as well to promote cooperation in counterterrorism. We have agreed to deepen cooperation in international forums like the United Nations and the Financial Action Task Force.

We welcome the recent designations of Lashkar e-Tayyiba terrorists by the United States. They underscore the international community’s scrutiny over the threat of terrorism emanating from Pakistan, which has affected India and United States alike. On the 10th anniversary of the 26/11 attacks, we recognize the importance of justice and retribution for the masterminds behind this terrorist attack.

We also discussed the situation in South Asia in some detail. India supports President Trump’s South Asia policy. His call for Pakistan to stop its policy of supporting cross-border terrorism finds resonance with us. We want to also ensure that the call for Pakistan to stop using terrorism as an instrument of state policy.

We discussed the ongoing efforts by India and the United States in promoting an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned, and Afghan Government-controlled reconciliation process, and this brings together all ethnic groups and political formations in the country. We also had productive exchanges on other regional issues as well.

Today, overall, I am highly satisfied with our conversation today. The 2+2 meeting has helped shared efforts of both sides to promote a whole-of-government approach for our strategic priorities. India and the United States, as the largest and oldest democracies in the world, each pursuing its independent foreign policies, have many shared global objectives. As equal partners in cooperation our two countries can benefit not only the people of their own countries, but also become a factor for peace and stability in the wider world.

We have agreed to closely monitor the implementation of the decisions taken today. Secretary Pompeo and I have decided to remain in touch regularly through the new hotline which has been established between our foreign ministers and defense ministers. And we will thus be able to remain continuously in touch, by myself and our defense minister, Mrs. Sitharaman.

MODERATOR: (Inaudible) States, Mr. Michael Pompeo, to give his remarks.

SECRETARY POMPEO: Good afternoon. On behalf of the United States, I would like to thank Minister of External Affairs Swaraj and Minister of Defense Sitharaman for hosting Secretary Mattis and me for this first-ever U.S.-India 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue. It is truly historic and important. Thank you.

This is my first trip to India as Secretary of State, and it is an honor to travel here for such an important and successful event. Later today, Secretary Mattis and I will meet with Prime Minister Modi. We look forward to discussing how best to advance the U.S.-India relationship, one that is in a new era of growth under his leadership and that of President Trump.

Today’s 2+2 meeting is symbolic of our increasingly close partnership. We had many productive and forward-thinking conversations on our bilateral relationship, our shared future, and how we can cooperate in promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific.

As the two largest democracies in the world, the United States and India are deeply bound by our shared values. We have a responsibility to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific that reflects those values: the rule of law; national sovereignty; good governance; the protection of fundamental freedoms, rights, and liberties; free, fair, and reciprocal trade relationships; and peaceful resolutions of territorial and maritime disputes.

We know our peoples’ ability to exercise their economic and personal freedoms depends on a strong and stable security environment. To that end, today our two countries enter into an ambitious plan to elevate our security cooperation across a number of areas. The Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement is a major step forward in our defense collaboration and coordination. It will allow us to better protect the freedom and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific.

We also agreed on the scope and scale of military cooperation with India as our major defense partner – a unique status that the United States has granted to India. I’ll let Secretary Mattis speak on this in more detail.

Today we also discussed a number of pressing regional and global issues, including Afghanistan and North Korea, and how our two countries can work together more closely to address each of those. We also committed to deepen our already strong counterterrorism cooperation.

On economic matters, President Trump recognizes the long-term strategic importance of India’s economy playing a productive role in the world’s most dynamic and fastest-growing region. He is intent on ensuring the United States, India, and all countries can responsibly reap the benefits of an Indo-Pacific that is open, free with fair trade and investment.

As just one example of President Trump’s commitment, Secretary of Commerce recently announced Strategic Trade Authorization Tier-1 status for India just a few weeks ago. This will further facilitate high-technology exports from the United States to India. The United States will continue to practice partnership economics with India and all the other countries in the region. We seek to unlock the unparalleled potential of our private sectors to meet the region’s developmental, energy and infrastructure needs, and to create an environment in which businesses and countries can thrive when they play by the rules.

Today also marks another milestone for our relationship. Thanks to intense advocacy from the United States, 10 years ago today the Nuclear Suppliers Group voted to allow India to engage in trades of civilian nuclear materials and technologies. That vote and the subsequent Section 123 civil nuclear agreement opened a path for our strategic relationship to grow, bolster defense and commercial cooperation and expanded our people-to-people ties. We now look forward to what we can achieve over the next 10 years. In particular, we look forward to finalizing the Westinghouse civil nuclear project that will provide clean and reliable power to millions of Indians.

I want to close by again thanking our Indian hosts for your generosity that you have shown to me and my colleagues. The United States will continue to work with India to foster greater security and prosperity for our nations, the Indo-Pacific region and indeed the world.

And with that, I invite the Minister of Defense to make remarks.

MODERATOR: Thank you, sir. It is my now pleasure to request (in Hindi) Nirmala Sitharaman to deliver her remarks to the media.

MINISTER SITHARAMAN: Secretary of State – Defense of the United States, Mr. James Mattis, United States Secretary of State Mr. Michael Pompeo, my respected senior colleague (in Hindi) Sushma Swaraj, friends from the media, and ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.

We have just concluded a most productive, positive, and purposeful meeting. I wish to thank Secretaries Mattis and Pompeo for their vision and commitment. We deeply value their support for stronger ties between India and the United States. Our discussions today were marked by the deep friendship that characterizes relations between the greatest democracies of the world. The commitment of India and the United States to defend our shared democratic values and expand on our common interests is clear and unwavering. In today’s meeting, we reaffirmed our intention to cooperate in every possible way to ensure peace and stability as well as to realize the aspirations of our peoples for continued economic growth, prosperity, and development. We will also work together to combat the persisting threat of terrorism and other shared security challenges. In our discussions, we explored the instrumentalities necessary to deliver on those shared objectives.

Ladies and gentlemen, defense cooperation has emerged as the most significant dimension of our strategic partnership and as a key driver of our bilateral – overall bilateral relationship. The momentum in our defense partnership has imbued a tremendous positive energy that has elevated India-U.S. relations to unprecedented heights. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi had succinctly stated at his address to the U.S. Congress a year ago, India’s relations with the U.S. has overcome the hesitations of history. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of defense.

Today, India’s defense forces carry out extensive training and joint exercises with the United States. Our joint exercises have acquired greater complexity and newer dimensions both bilaterally and in wider formats. To enhance our synergies in this area, we have decided to carry out for the first time a tri-services joint exercise with the United States off the eastern coast of India in 2019. We are also putting in place an enabling framework for closer cooperation between our defense forces.

The signing of the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement, LEMOA, in 2016 and the Helicopter Operations from Ships other Than Aircraft Carriers, the HOSTAC, earlier this year were important steps in this direction.

The signing of the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement, COMCASA, today will enable India to access advanced technologies from the U.S. and enhance India’s defense preparedness. Maritime security has been a focus area of our participation and cooperation. To deepen our ties in this area, we will expand our interactions on maritime domain awareness. The United States has renamed its Pacific Command, responsible for relations with India, as Indo-Pacific Command. Reflecting a wider global participation and partnership, we will also enhance our interactions with the United States military’s Central Command.

Friends, one of the focus areas of the discussions was on expanding the scope and content of the U.S.’s designation of India as its major defense partner. We welcome the recent decision to elevate India to STA Tier-1 status for access to advanced technologies, especially in the defense field. I’m confident that this and other measures to follow will enable our defense industry cooperation to make speedy progress for mutual benefit. We highlighted the major reforms being implemented by the government to promote defense manufacturing in India under the Make in India initiative, including setting up of defense manufacturing corridors.

We welcome the U.S.’s positive response to India’s request to nominate a point of contact in the U.S. Department of Defense to help address procedural complexities and facilitate Indian companies to join the manufacturing supply chains of the U.S. defense companies. We also identified cooperation in defense innovation as a major area of emphasis for the future.

As our defense needs become increasingly driven by technology, this is both necessary and timely. I am particularly thankful to have Secretary Mattis, who has spent several years in Silicon Valley, as our interlocutor in taking this aspect of our ties forward. The memorandum of intent between our defense innovation agencies, which has been signed virtually last night, is a first step in this direction.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conclusion of the first-ever Ministerial 2+2 between India and the United States is a concrete manifestation of the vision of our leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump, to take the India-U.S. relationship to a new level. Our leaders recognize that it is no longer viable to address foreign and defense issues in a compartmentalized manner. In today’s meeting, we were able to discuss a range of issues relating to our ties in a strategic framework and identify steps to take forward our relationship.

Our discussions have paved the way for a new era in India-U.S. defense and strategic engagement. Given our shared interests, we are confident that we can work together to promote peace, economic prosperity and security in our region and beyond. I once again thank Secretary Pompeo and Secretary Mattis for their engagement in promoting the India-U.S. partnership. Thank you.

MODERATOR: Thank you, ma’am. And finally, may I call upon the Secretary of Defense of the United States, Mr. James Mattis, to deliver his statement to the media.

SECRETARY MATTIS: Well, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, and Minister Swaraj and Minister Sitharaman, just thank you for the warm hospitality and the professional discussions that we have had here today. It’s a pleasure to be back in New Delhi among friends and representing the United States alongside Secretary of State Pompeo. And Minister Sitharaman, I would just say that I wholeheartedly concur with how you characterized the defense relationship in your statement just now.

Today’s fruitful discussion illustrated the value of continued collaboration between these two coequal democracies. It’s a strong relationship between the world’s two largest democracies and it did not begin with those of us sitting here before you. We inherited it, and now we ensure it is even stronger when we pass it to our successors on a higher trajectory than we received it.

Since India gained its independence in 1947, our nations have shared a fundamental respect and love of freedom. Just three years after India’s independence, Prime Minister Nehru visited the United States – in his words, and I quote – “On a voyage of discovery of the mind and heart of America.” Today, Secretary Pompeo and I bring the same spirit that Prime Minister Nehru carried to Washington almost 70 years ago, promoting the cooperation which both our countries earnestly desire.

Today’s successful and highly productive meeting, the first ever 2+2 between our nations at the ministerial level, has further bolstered our strong defense relationship, as you just heard. We reiterated our highest respect for each other’s sovereignty and committed to work together for a safe, secure, prosperous and free Indo-Pacific, one that is underpinned by the rule of law.

We appreciate India’s role as a stabilizing force on the region’s geographic front lines. Your nation understands better than many peace and prosperity are only attainable when all respect the principles of territorial integrity, freedom of navigation, freedom from coercion. All of these are fundamental to the rules-based order. Only then, to borrow Prime Minister Modi’s words, can nations small and large prosper free and fearless in their choices.

We will continue working together to enhance and expand India’s role as a primary major defense partner, to elevate our relationship to a level commensurate with our closest allies and partners. Today we took, as you know, a significant step towards that goal by signing the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement. The landmark agreement deepens our military-to-military cooperation and our ability to share the most advanced defense technology, making us both stronger.

In addition, we agreed to increase and expand our engagement in the maritime domain with a new tri-service exercise. And Secretary Pompeo and I also gained insights on a range of issues from the DPRK sanction enforcement to counterterrorism cooperation, recognizing that both our nations have endured the effects of senseless terrorist attacks like those 10 years ago in Mumbai, which killed innocents from more than a dozen nations. We remember those lives lost as we approach the 10th anniversary of attacks this November.

Today, the steps we took will pave the way ahead for an even closer military relationship. Our meeting signified the bright future ahead for our two nations, indicating the growing trust we share as strategic partners. We look forward to meeting with Prime Minister Modi this afternoon, and welcome the opportunity to thank him for his strong leadership and to discuss the way ahead, and thank you very much.

—–

SOURCE: news provided by STATE.GOV on September 6, 2018.

#2+2 Dialogue #Dialogue between India and the United States #Lashkar e Tayyiba #Modi #Nirmala Sitharaman #Remarks at the U.S India Dialogue #secretary pompeo #South Asia policy #TodayNews #U.S India Dialogue #United States

0 notes

enchantingtigerbarbarian-blog · 6 years

Text

Chapter 5 - JARVANKA

JARVANKA

On the Sunday after the immigration order was issued, Joe Scarborough and his cohost on the MSNBC show Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, came for lunch at the White House.

Scarborough is a former Republican congressman from Pensacola, Florida, and Brzezinski is the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a high-ranking aide in the Johnson White House and Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor. Morning Joe had gone on the air in 2007 and developed a following among New York political and media types. Trump was a longtime devotee.

Early in the 2016 campaign, with a change of leadership at NBC News, it seemed likely that the show, its ratings falling, would be canceled. But Scarborough and Brzezinski embraced their relationship with Trump and became one of the few media outlets not only with a positive outlook on him, but that seemed to know his thinking. Trump became a frequent call-in guest and the show a way to speak more or less directly to him.

It was the kind of relationship Trump dreamed of: media people who took him seriously, talked about him often, solicited his views, provided him with gossip, and retailed the gossip he offered them. The effect was to make them all insiders together, which was exactly where Trump wanted to be. Though he branded himself as a political outsider, actually finding himself on the outside wounded him.

Trump believed that the media, which he propelled (in the case of Scarborough and Brzezinski, helping them keep their jobs), owed him something, and the media, giving him vast amounts of free coverage, believed he owed them, with Scarborough and Brzezinski seeing themselves as something like semiofficial advisers, if not the political fixers who had put him in his job.

In August, they had had a public spat, resulting in Trump’s tweet: “Some day, when things calm down, I’ll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend, @morningmika. Two clowns!” But Trump’s spats often ended in a tacit admission, however grudging, of mutual advantage, and in short order they were back on cordial terms again.

On their arrival at the White House, the ninth day of his presidency, Trump proudly showed them into the Oval Office and was momentarily deflated when Brzezinski said she had been there many times before with her father, beginning at age nine. Trump showed them some of the memorabilia and, eagerly, his new portrait of Andrew Jackson—the president whom Steve Bannon had made the totem figure of the new administration.

“So how do you think the first week has gone?” Trump asked the couple, in a buoyant mood, seeking flattery.

Scarborough, puzzled by Trump’s jauntiness in the face of the protests spreading across the nation, demurred and then said, “Well, I love what you did with U.S. Steel and that you had the union guys come into the Oval Office.” Trump had pledged to use U.S.-made steel in U.S. pipelines and, in a Trump touch, met at the White House with union representatives from building and sheet metal unions and then invited them back to the Oval Office—something Trump insisted Obama never did.

But Trump pressed his question, leaving Scarborough with the feeling that nobody had actually told Trump that he had had a very bad week. Bannon and Priebus, wandering in and out of the office, might actually have convinced him that the week had been a success, Scarborough thought.

Scarborough then ventured his opinion that the immigration order might have been handled better and that, all in all, it seemed like a rough period.

Trump, surprised, plunged into a long monologue about how well things had gone, telling Bannon and Priebus, with a gale of laughter, “Joe doesn’t think we had a good week.” And turning to Scarborough: “I could have invited Hannity!”

At lunch—fish, which Brzezinski doesn’t eat—Jared and Ivanka joined the president and Scarborough and Brzezinski. Jared had become quite a Scarborough confidant and would continue to supply Scarborough with an inside view of the White House—that is, leaking to him. Scarborough subsequently became a defender of Kushner’s White House position and view. But, for now, both son-in-law and daughter were subdued and deferential as Scarborough and Brzezinski chatted with the president, and the president—taking more of the air time as usual—held forth.

Trump continued to cast for positive impressions of his first week and Scarborough again reverted to his praise of Trump’s handling of the steel union leadership. At which point, Jared interjected that reaching out to unions, a traditional Democratic constituency, was Bannon’s doing, that this was “the Bannon way.”

“Bannon?” said the president, jumping on his son-in-law. “That wasn’t Bannon’s idea. That was my idea. It’s the Trump way, not the Bannon way.”

Kushner, going concave, retreated from the discussion.

Trump, changing the topic, said to Scarborough and Brzezinski, “So what about you guys? What’s going on?” He was referencing their not-so-secret secret relationship.

Scarborough and Brzezinski said it was all still complicated, and not public, officially, but it was good and everything was getting resolved.

“You guys should just get married,” prodded Trump.

“I can marry you! I’m an Internet Unitarian minister,” Kushner, otherwise an Orthodox Jew, said suddenly.

“What?” said the president. “What are you talking about? Why would they want you to marry them when I could marry them? When they could be married by the president! At Mar-a-Lago!”

* * *

Almost everybody advised Jared not to take the inside job. As a family member, he would command extraordinary influence from a position that no one could challenge. As an insider, a staffer, not only could his experience be challenged, but while the president himself might not yet be exposed, a family member on staff would be where enemies and critics might quite effectively start chipping from. Besides, inside Trump’s West Wing, if you had a title—that is, other than son-in-law—people would surely want to take it from you.

Both Jared and Ivanka listened to this advice—from among others it came from Jared’s brother, Josh, doubly making this case not only to protect his brother but also because of his antipathy to Trump—but both, balancing risk against reward, ignored it. Trump himself variously encouraged his son-in-law and his daughter in their new ambitions and, as their excitement mounted, tried to express his skepticism—while at the same time telling others that he was helpless to stop them.

For Jared and Ivanka, as really for everybody else in the new administration, quite including the president, this was a random and crazy turn of history such that how could you not seize it? It was a joint decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint job. Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the time came, she’d be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot). The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.

Bannon, who had coined the Jarvanka conflation now in ever greater use, was horrified when the couple’s deal was reported to him. “They didn’t say that? Stop. Oh come on. They didn’t actually say that? Please don’t tell me that. Oh my god.”

And the truth was that at least by then Ivanka would have more experience than almost anybody else now serving in the White House. She and Jared, or Jared, but by inference she, too, were in effect the real chief of staff—or certainly as much a chief of staff as Priebus or Bannon, all of them reporting directly to the president. Or, even more to the organizational point, Jared and Ivanka had a wholly independent standing inside the West Wing. A super status. Even as Priebus and Bannon tried, however diplomatically, to remind the couple of staff procedures and propriety, they would in turn remind the West Wing leadership of their overriding First Family prerogatives. In addition, the president had immediately handed Jared the Middle East portfolio, making him one of the significant international players in the administration—indeed, in the world. In the first weeks, this brief extended out to virtually every other international issue, about which nothing in Kushner’s previous background would have prepared him for.

Kushner’s most cogent reason for entering the White House was “leverage,” by which he meant proximity. Quite beyond the status of being inside the family circle, anyone who had proximity to the president had leverage, the more proximity the more leverage. Trump himself you could see as a sort of Delphic oracle, sitting in place and throwing out pronouncements which had to be interpreted. Or as an energetic child, and whomever could placate or distract him became his favorite. Or as the Sun God (which is effectively how he saw himself), the absolute center of attention, dispensing favor and delegating power, which could, at any moment, be withdrawn. The added dimension was that this Sun God had little calculation. His inspiration existed in the moment, hence all the more reason to be there with him in the moment. Bannon, for one, joined Trump for dinner every night, or at least made himself available—one bachelor there for the effective other bachelor. (Priebus would observe that in the beginning everyone would try to be part of these dinners, but within a few months, they had become a torturous duty to be avoided.)

Part of Jared and Ivanka’s calculation about the relative power and influence of a formal job in the West Wing versus an outside advisory role was the knowledge that influencing Trump required you to be all in. From phone call to phone call—and his day, beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely phone calls—you could lose him. The subtleties here were immense, because while he was often most influenced by the last person he spoke to, he did not actually listen to anyone. So it was not so much the force of an individual argument or petition that moved him, but rather more just someone’s presence, the connection of what was going through his mind—and although he was a person of many obsessions, much of what was on his mind had no fixed view—to whomever he was with and their views.

Ultimately Trump may not be that different in his fundamental solipsism from anyone of great wealth who has lived most of his life in a highly controlled environment. But one clear difference was that he had acquired almost no formal sort of social discipline—he could not even attempt to imitate decorum. He could not really converse, for instance, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He neither particularly listened to what was said to him, nor particularly considered what he said in response (one reason he was so repetitive). Nor did he treat anyone with any sort of basic or reliable courtesy. If he wanted something, his focus might be sharp and attention lavish, but if someone wanted something from him, he tended to become irritable and quickly lost interest. He demanded you pay him attention, then decided you were weak for groveling. In a sense, he was like an instinctive, pampered, and hugely successful actor. Everybody was either a lackey who did his bidding or a high-ranking film functionary trying to coax out his attention and performance—and to do this without making him angry or petulant.

The payoff was his enthusiasm, quickness, spontaneity, and—if he departed for a moment from the nonstop focus on himself—an often incisive sense of the weaknesses of his opponents and a sense of their deepest desires. Politics was handicapped by incrementalism, of people knowing too much who were defeated by all the complexities and conflicting interests before they began. Trump, knowing little, might, Trumpers tried to believe, give a kooky new hope to the system.

Jared Kushner in quite a short period of time—rather less than a year—had crossed over from the standard Democratic view in which he was raised, to an acolyte of Trumpism, bewildering many friends and, as well, his own brother, whose insurance company, Oscar, funded with Kushner-family money, was destined to be dealt a blow by a repeal of Obamacare.

This seeming conversion was partly the result of Bannon’s insistent and charismatic tutoring—a kind of real-life engagement with world-bending ideas that had escaped Kushner even at Harvard. And it was helped by his own resentments toward the liberal elites whom he had tried to court with his purchase of the New York Observer, an effort that had backfired terribly. And it was, once he ventured onto the campaign trail, about having to convince himself that close up to the absurd everything made sense—that Trumpism was a kind of unsentimental realpolitik that would show everybody in the end. But most of all, it was that they had won. And he was determined not to look a gift horse in the mouth. And, everything that was bad about Trumpism, he had convinced himself, he could help fix.

* * *

As much as it might have surprised him—for many years, he had humored Trump more than embraced him—Kushner was in fact rather like his father-in-law. Jared’s father, Charlie, bore an eerie resemblance to Donald’s father, Fred. Both men dominated their children, and they did this so completely that their children, despite their demands, became devoted to them. In both instances, this was extreme stuff: belligerent, uncompromising, ruthless men creating long-suffering offspring who were driven to achieve their father’s approval. (Trump’s older brother, Freddy, failing in this effort, and, by many reports, gay, drank himself to death; he died in 1981 at age forty-three.) In business meetings, observers would be nonplussed that Charlie and Jared Kushner invariably greeted each other with a kiss and that the adult Jared called his father Daddy.

Neither Donald nor Jared, no matter their domineering fathers, went into the world with humility. Insecurity was soothed by entitlement. Both out-of-towners who were eager to prove themselves or lay rightful claim in Manhattan (Kushner from New Jersey, Trump from Queens), they were largely seen as overweening, smug, and arrogant. Each cultivated a smooth affect, which could appear more comical than graceful. Neither, by choice nor awareness, could seem to escape his privilege. “Some people who are very privileged are aware of it and put it away; Kushner not only seemed in every gesture and word to emphasize his privilege, but also not to be aware of it,” said one New York media executive who dealt with Kushner. Both men were never out of their circle of privilege. The main challenge they set for themselves was to enter further into the privileged circle. Social climbing was their work.

Jared’s focus was often on older men. Rupert Murdoch spent a surprising amount of time with Jared, who sought advice from the older media mogul about the media business—which the young man was determined to break into. Kushner paid long court to Ronald Perelman, the billionaire financier and takeover artist, who later would host Jared and Ivanka in his private shul on Jewish high holy days. And, of course, Kushner wooed Trump himself, who became a fan of the young man and was uncharacteristically tolerant about his daughter’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism when that became a necessary next step toward marriage. Likewise, Trump as a young man had carefully cultivated a set of older mentors, including Roy Cohn, the flamboyant lawyer and fixer who had served as right-hand man to the red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy.

And then there was the harsh fact that the world of Manhattan and particular its living voice, the media, seemed to cruelly reject them. The media long ago turned on Donald Trump as a wannabe and lightweight, and wrote him off for that ultimate sin—anyway, the ultimate sin in media terms—of trying to curry favor with the media too much. His fame, such as it was, was actually reverse fame—he was famous for being infamous. It was joke fame.

To understand the media snub, and its many levels of irony, there is no better place to look than the New York Observer, the Manhattan media and society weekly that Kushner bought in 2006 for $10 million—by almost every estimate $10 million more than it was worth.

* * *

The New York Observer was, when it launched in 1987, a rich man’s fancy, as much failed media often is. It was a bland weekly chronicle of the Upper East Side, New York’s wealthiest neighborhood. Its conceit was to treat this neighborhood like a small town. But nobody took any notice. Its frustrated patron, Arthur Carter, who made his money in the first generation of Wall Street consolidations, was introduced to Graydon Carter (no relation), who had started Spy magazine, a New York imitation of the British satirical publication Private Eye. Spy was part of a set of 1980s publications—Manhattan, Inc., a relaunched Vanity Fair, and New York— obsessed with the new rich and what seemed to be a transformational moment in New York. Trump was both symbol of and punch line for this new era of excess and celebrity and the media’s celebration of those things. Graydon Carter became the editor of the New York Observer in 1991 and not only refocused the weekly on big-money culture, but essentially made it a tip-sheet for the media writing about media culture, and for members of the big-money culture who wanted to be in the media. There may never have been such a self-conscious and self-referential publication as the New York Observer.

As Donald Trump, along with many others of this new-rich ilk, sought to be covered by the media—Murdoch’s New York Post was the effective court recorder of this new publicity-hungry aristocracy—the New York Observer covered the process of him being covered. The story of Trump was the story of how he tried to make himself a story. He was shameless, campy, and instructive: if you were willing to risk humiliation, the world could be yours. Trump became the objective correlative for the rising appetite for fame and notoriety. Trump came to believe he understood everything about the media—who you need to know, what pretense you need to maintain, what information you could profitably trade, what lies you might tell, what lies the media expected you to tell. And the media came to believe it knew everything about Trump—his vanities, delusions, and lies, and the levels, uncharted, to which he would stoop for ever more media attention.

Graydon Carter soon used the New York Observer as his stepping-stone to Vanity Fair—where, he believed, he might have access to a higher level of celebrity than Donald Trump. Carter was followed at the Observer in 1994 by Peter Kaplan, an editor with a heightened sense of postmodern irony and ennui.

Trump, in Kaplan’s telling, suddenly took on a new persona. Whereas he had before been the symbol of success and mocked for it, now he became, in a shift of zeitgeist (and of having to refinance a great deal of debt), a symbol of failure and mocked for it. This was a complicated reversal, not just having to do with Trump, but of how the media was now seeing itself. Donald Trump became a symbol of the media’s own self-loathing: the interest in and promotion of Donald Trump was a morality tale about the media. Its ultimate end was Kaplan’s pronouncement that Trump should not be covered anymore because every story about Donald Trump had become a cliché.

An important aspect of Kaplan’s New York Observer and its self-conscious inside media baseball was that the paper became the prime school for a new generation of media reporters flooding every other publication in New York as journalism itself became ever more self-conscious and self-referential. To everyone working in media in New York, Donald Trump represented the ultimate shame of working in media in New York: you might have to write about Donald Trump. Not writing about him, or certainly not taking him at face value, became a moral stand.

In 2006, after Kaplan had edited the paper for fifteen years, Arthur Carter sold the Observer—which had never made a profit—to the then twenty-five-year-old Kushner, an unknown real estate heir interested in gaining stature and notoriety in the city. Kaplan was now working for someone twenty-five years his junior, a man who, ironically, was just the kind of arriviste he would otherwise have covered.

For Kushner, owning the paper soon paid off, because, with infinite ironies not necessarily apparent to him, it allowed him into the social circle where he met Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, whom he married in 2009. But the paper did not, irksomely for Kushner, pay off financially, which put him into increasing tension with Kaplan. Kaplan, in turn, began telling witty and devastating tales about the pretensions and callowness of his new boss, which spread, in constant retelling, among his many media protégés and hence throughout the media itself.

In 2009, Kaplan left the paper, and Kushner—making a mistake that many rich men who have bought vanity media properties are prone to making—tried to find a profit by cutting costs. In short order, the media world came to regard Kushner as the man who not only took Peter Kaplan’s paper from him, but also ruined it, brutally and incompetently. And worse: in 2013, Kaplan, at fifty-nine, died of cancer. So, effectively, in the telling, Kushner had killed him, too.

Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collective mind decides who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies. If you stay around long enough in the media eye, your fate, like that of a banana republic despot, is often an unkind one—a law Hillary Clinton was not able to circumvent. The media has the last word.

Long before he ran for president, Trump and his sidekick son-in-law Kushner had been marked not just for ignominy, but for slow torture by ridicule, contempt, and ever-more amusing persiflage. These people are nothing. They are media debris. For goodness’ sake!

Trump, in a smart move, picked up his media reputation and relocated it from a hypercritical New York to a more value-free Hollywood, becoming the star of his own reality show, The Apprentice, and embracing a theory that would serve him well during his presidential campaign: in flyover country, there is no greater asset than celebrity. To be famous is to be loved—or at least fawned over.

The fabulous, incomprehensible irony that the Trump family had, despite the media’s distaste, despite everything the media knows and understands and has said about them, risen to a level not only of ultimate consequence but even of immortality is beyond worst-case nightmare and into cosmic-joke territory. In this infuriating circumstance, Trump and his son-in-law were united, always aware and yet never quite understanding why they should be the butt of a media joke, and now the target of its stunned outrage.

* * *

The fact that Trump and his son-in-law had many things in common did not mean they operated on a common playing field. Kushner, no matter how close to Trump, was yet a member of the Trump entourage, with no more ultimate control of his father-in-law than anybody else now in the business of trying to control Trump.

Still, the difficulty of controlling him had been part of Kushner’s self-justification or rationalization for stepping beyond his family role and taking a senior White House job: to exercise restraint on his father-in-law and even—a considerable stretch for the inexperienced young man—to help lend him some gravitas.

If Bannon was going to pursue as his first signature White House statement the travel ban, then Kushner was going to pursue as his first leadership mark a meeting with the Mexican president, whom his father-in-law had threatened and insulted throughout the campaign.

Kushner called up the ninety-three-year-old Kissinger for advice. This was both to flatter the old man and to be able to drop his name, but it was also actually for real advice. Trump had done nothing but cause problems for the Mexican president. To bring the Mexican president to the White House would be, despite Bannon’s no-pivot policy from the campaign’s harshness, a truly meaningful pivot for which Kushner would be able to claim credit (although don’t call it a pivot). It was what Kushner believed he should be doing: quietly following behind the president and with added nuance and subtlety clarifying the president’s real intentions, if not recasting them entirely.

The negotiation to bring Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto to the White House had begun during the transition period. Kushner saw the chance to convert the issue of the wall into a bilateral agreement addressing immigration—hence a tour de force of Trumpian politics. The negotiations surrounding the visit reached their apogee on the Wednesday after the inaugural, with a high-level Mexican delegation—the first visit by any foreign leader to the Trump White House—meeting with Kushner and Reince Priebus. Kushner’s message to his father-in-law that afternoon was that Peña Nieto had signed on to a White House meeting and planning for the visit could go forward.

The next day Trump tweeted: “The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers . . .” And he continued in the next tweet . . . “of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting . . .”

At which point Peña Nieto did just that, leaving Kushner’s negotiation and statecraft as so much scrap on the floor.

* * *

On Friday, February 3, at breakfast at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown, an epicenter of the swamp, Ivanka Trump, flustered, came down the stairs and entered the dining room, talking loudly on her cell phone: “Things are so messed up and I don’t know how to fix it. . . .”

The week had been overwhelmed by continuing fallout from the immigration order—the administration was in court and headed to a brutal ruling against it—and more embarrassing leaks of two theoretically make-nice phone calls, one with the Mexican president (“bad hombres”) and the other with the Australian prime minister (“my worst call by far”). What’s more, the day before, Nordstrom had announced that it was dropping Ivanka Trump’s clothing line.

The thirty-five-year-old was a harried figure, a businesswoman who had had to abruptly shift control of her business. She was also quite overwhelmed by the effort of having just moved her three children into a new house in a new city—and having to do this largely on her own. Asked how his children were adjusting to their new school several weeks after the move, Jared said that yes, they were indeed in school—but he could not immediately identify where.

Still, in another sense, Ivanka was landing on her feet. Breakfast at the Four Seasons was a natural place for her. She was among everyone who was anyone. In the restaurant that morning: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman; Washington fixture, lobbyist, and Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan; labor secretary nominee Wilbur Ross; Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith; Washington Post national reporter Mark Berman; and a table full of women lobbyists and fixers, including the music industry’s longtime representative in Washington, Hillary Rosen; Elon Musk’s D.C. adviser, Juleanna Glover; Uber’s political and policy executive, Niki Christoff; and Time Warner’s political affairs executive, Carol Melton.

In some sense—putting aside both her father’s presence in the White House and his tirades against draining the swamp, which might otherwise include most everyone here, this was the type of room Ivanka had worked hard to be in. Following the route of her father, she was crafting her name and herself into a multifaceted, multiproduct brand; she was also transitioning from her father’s aspirational male golf and business types to aspirational female mom and business types. She had, well before her father’s presidency could have remotely been predicted, sold a book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, for $1 million.

In many ways, it had been an unexpected journey, requiring more discipline than you might expect from a contented, distracted, run-of-the-mill socialite. As a twenty-one-year-old, she appeared in a film made by her then boyfriend, Jamie Johnson, a Johnson & Johnson heir. It’s a curious, even somewhat unsettling film, in which Johnson corrals his set of rich-kid friends into openly sharing their dissatisfactions, general lack of ambition, and contempt for their families. (One of his friends would engage in long litigation with him over the portrayal.) Ivanka, speaking with something like a Valley Girl accent—which would transform in the years ahead into something like a Disney princess voice—seems no more ambitious or even employed than anyone else, but she is notably less angry with her parents.

She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men—the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.

Father and daughter got along almost peculiarly well. She was the real mini-Trump (a title that many people now seemed to aspire to). She accepted him. She was a helper not just in his business dealings, but in his marital realignments. She facilitated entrances and exits. If you have a douchebag dad, and if everyone is open about it, then maybe it becomes fun and life a romantic comedy—sort of.

Reasonably, she ought to be much angrier. She grew up not just in the middle of a troubled family but in one that was at all times immersed in bad press. But she was able to bifurcate reality and live only in the uppermost part of it, where the Trump name, no matter how often tarnished, nevertheless had come to be an affectionately tolerated presence. She resided in a bubble of other wealthy people who thrived on their relationship with one another—at first among private school and Upper East Side of Manhattan friends, then among social, fashion, and media contacts. What’s more, she tended to find protection as well as status in her boyfriends’ families, aggressively bonding with a series of wealthy suitors’ families—including Jamie Johnson’s before the Kushners—over her own.

The Ivanka-Jared relationship was shepherded by Wendi Murdoch, herself a curious social example (to nobody so much as to her then husband, Rupert). The effort among a new generation of wealthy women was to recast life as a socialite, turning a certain model of whimsy and noblesse oblige into a new status as a power woman, a kind of postfeminist socialite. In this, you worked at knowing other rich people, the best rich people, and of being an integral and valuable part of a network of the rich, and of having your name itself evoke, well . . . riches. You weren’t satisfied with what you had, you wanted more. This required quite a level of indefatigability. You were marketing a product—yourself. You were your own start-up.

This was what her father had always done. This, more than real estate, was the family business.

She and Kushner then united as a power couple, consciously recasting themselves as figures of ultimate attainment, ambition, and satisfaction in the new global world and as representatives of a new eco-philanthropic-art sensibility. For Ivanka, this included her friendship with Wendi Murdoch and with Dasha Zhukova, the then wife of the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, a fixture in the international art world, and, just a few months before the election, attending a Deepak Chopra seminar on mediation with Kushner. She was searching for meaning—and finding it. This transformation was further expressed not just in ancillary clothing, jewelry, and footwear lines, as well as reality TV projects, but in a careful social media presence. She became a superbly coordinated everymom, who would, with her father’s election, recast herself again, this time as royal family.

And yet, the larger truth was that Ivanka’s relationship with her father was in no way a conventional family relationship. If it wasn’t pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. It was business. Building the brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House—it was all business.

But what did Ivanka and Jared really think of their father and father-in-law? “There’s great, great, great affection—you see it, you really do,” replied Kellyanne Conway, somewhat avoiding the question.

“They’re not fools,” said Rupert Murdoch when asked the question.

“They understand him, I think truly,” reflected Joe Scarborough. “And they appreciate his energy. But there’s detachment.” That is, Scarborough went on, they have tolerance but few illusions.

* * *

Ivanka’s breakfast that Friday at the Four Seasons was with Dina Powell, the latest Goldman Sachs executive to join the White House.

In the days after the election, Ivanka and Jared had both met with a revolving door of lawyers and PR people, most of them, the couple found, leery of involvement, not least because the couple seemed less interested in bending to advice and more interested in shopping for the advice they wanted. In fact, much of the advice they were getting had the same message: surround yourself—acquaint yourselves—with figures of the greatest establishment credibility. In effect: you are amateurs, you need professionals.

One name that kept coming up was Powell’s. A Republican operative who had gone on to high influence and compensation at Goldman Sachs, she was quite the opposite of anyone’s notion of a Trump Republican. Her family emigrated from Egypt when she was a girl, and she is fluent in Arabic. She worked her way up through a series of stalwart Republicans, including Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and House Speaker Dick Armey. In the Bush White House she served as chief of the personnel office and an assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs. She went to Goldman in 2007 and became a partner in 2010, running its philanthropic outreach, the Goldman Sachs Foundation. Following a trend in the careers of many poiitical operatives, she had become, as well as an über networker, a corporate public affairs and PR-type adviser—someone who knew the right people in power and had a keen sensitivity to how other people’s power can be used.

The table of women lobbyists and communications professionals in the Four Seasons that morning was certainly as interested in Powell, and her presence in the new administration, as they were in the president’s daughter. If Ivanka Trump was a figure more of novelty than of seriousness, the fact that she had helped bring Powell into the White House and was now publicly conferring with her added a further dimension to the president’s daughter. In a White House seeming to pursue a dead-set Trumpian way, this was a hint of an alternative course. In the assessment of the other fixers and PR women at the Four Seasons, this was a potential shadow White House—Trump’s own family not assaulting the power structure but expressing an obvious enthusiasm for it.

Ivanka, after a long breakfast, made her way through the room. Between issuing snappish instructions on her phone, she bestowed warm greetings and accepted business cards.

0 notes