Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
NEW: NYT columnist David Brooks draws a second salary for leading an Aspen Institute project funded by Facebook, Jeff Bezos’ dad, & others. He didn’t disclose this to readers. The Times refused to say if the paper was aware of Brooks’ second salary: https://t.co/7WN3zrtrKp
— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) March 3, 2021
Professional ethics are for the little people, eh, Mr. Brooks?…
Easy Targets Open Thread: BoBo Brooks Is Back on His… Thought LeadershipPost + Comments (159)
I think what Mitt did in voting for removal was genuinely honorable and even courageous, given the amount of blowback he’ll get from wingers. I predicted at the time that he’d get no love from the professional centrists for it, not even from those who said “McCain is Churchill” every time he wrote a sternly worded tweet. As predicted….
Instead of spending the past 3 years on Mueller and impeachment suppose Trump opponents had spent the time on an infrastructure bill or early childhood education? More good would have been done.
— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) February 5, 2020
I said it once before (on twitter) but it bears repeating: Bret Stephens is bad but he’s just the frat boy who yells dumb stuff at women, pulls Cs in his classes, and coasts through life on daddy’s money and connections. David Brooks is the fraternity president who lies to the cops about the pledge’s body they stuffed in the chimney.
One thing that I’ve had the misfortune to learn as I’ve gotten older is that some people are bad. Not bad on the outside/good on the inside, not “flawed”, just bad, irredeemably, sociopathically bad. David Brooks is one of these people.
This also bears repeating: Only one thing matters: voting out as many of these clowns in the Senate as we can. Give here to the Balloon Juice Senate fund which is split between the eventual Democratic nominees in Maine, Iowa, NC, Arizona, Georgia, and Colorado. We’ve only got a few more days of trial so trying to raise as much as I can while the sun shines. I raised the goal to 25K.
White House staffer: “Moral in the White House has never been lower. It’s like a revolving door here, except most aides who leave aren’t being replaced. I’m sick of all the chaos & really concerned about how this will affect my career & my family. I didn’t sign on for this shit.”
— Jon Cooper ? (@joncoopertweets) August 30, 2018
Any political appointee that either accepted their position after the first week of February 2017 and everyone who has not resigned has signed on for this shit.
A senior National Security Council official proposed withdrawing some U.S. military forces from Eastern Europe as an overture to Vladimir Putin during the early days of the Trump administration, according to a former administration official in the room with him.
[….]p>According to the ex-colleague, Harrington considered it a gesture to the Kremlin that would enable the nascent Trump administration to see if its desire for a friendly relationship with Russia would be reciprocated. It was included in a strategy paper that, conspicuously to the former official, made no mention of Russia as either a competitor or adversary.
Do you wanna see me crawl across the floor?Post + Comments (88)
This article about Bannon’s pseudo-intellectual nonsense that everyone’s been talking about is epic! This isn’t even the highlight:
Bannon, described by one associate as “the most well-read person in Washington,” is known for recommending books to colleagues and friends, according to multiple people who have worked alongside him. He is a voracious reader who devours works of history and political theory “in like an hour,” said a former associate whom Bannon urged to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “He’s like the Rain Man of nationalism.”
THIS is the highlight. I knew Taleb could bring the word soup but this is next level:
“They look like the incarnation of ‘antifragile’ people,” Taleb said of the new administration. “The definition of ‘antifragile’ is having more upside than downside. For example, Obama had little upside because everyone thought he was brilliant and would solve the world’s problems, so when he didn’t it was disappointing. Trump has little downside because he’s already been so heavily criticized. He’s heavily vaccinated because of his checkered history. People have to understand: Trump did not run to be archbishop of Canterbury.”
And this this idiot who pals around with Peter Thiel is a deep thinker too:
Moldbug’s dense, discursive musings on history—“What’s so bad about the Nazis?” he asks in one 2008 post that condemns the Holocaust but questions the moral superiority of the Allies—include a belief in the utility of spreading misinformation that now looks like a template for Trump’s approach to truth. “To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable [sic] demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army,” he writes in a May 2008 post.
In one January 2008 post, titled “How I stopped believing in democracy,” he decries the “Georgetownist worldview” of elites like the late diplomat George Kennan. Moldbug’s writings, coming amid the failure of the U.S. state-building project in Iraq, are hard to parse clearly and are open to multiple interpretations, but the author seems aware that his views are provocative.
There was too much nonsense for me absorb the first time through so I’m going to be rereading it.
Go read a book you illiterate son of a bitchPost + Comments (209)
I’ve always hated “when they go low, we go high”. I prefer this (from The Untouchables): “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”
While I don’t know if that’s exactly the right attitude for Democrats to take, there’s no doubt that Dahlia Lithwick (via rikyrah) is certainly onto something:
This isn’t a call to become tolerant of awful behavior. It is a call for understanding that Democrats honored the blue slip, and Republicans didn’t. Democrats had hearings over the Affordable Care Act; Republicans had none over the tax bill. Democrats decry predators in the media; Republicans give them their own networks. And what do Democrats have to show for it? There is something almost eerily self-regarding in the notion that the only thing that matters is what Democrats do, without considering what the systemic consequences are for everyone.
[….]In the event that you doubt that the war is asymmetric, ask yourself how long it took for the same GOP that was disavowing Moore a month ago to embrace him, and to embrace him again in the face of new evidence. Ask how long it took from when Trump made it clear that he would wage war on Robert Mueller for Hugh Hewitt—purporting to speak on behalf of “a large swath of responsible center-right observers”—to call for an investigation into Mueller. This because a former FBI official sent pro-Hillary texts that now raise, according to Hewitt, “the possibility of shattering public confidence in a number of long-held assumptions about the criminal-justice system generally and the FBI and the Justice Department specifically.” The president just claimed the FBI is “in tatters,” but it’s the former official, who Mueller pulled off the investigation for the texts, who shatters confidence in the agency?
[….]Unilateral disarmament is tantamount to arming the other side. That may be a trade worth making in some cases. But it’s worth at least acknowledging that this is the current calculus. It’s no longer that when they go low, we get to go high. They are permanently living underground. How long can we afford to keep living in the clouds?
I think some of the nasty shit Republicans are doing is short-sighted and will bite them in the ass. Democrats are now winning the 18-29 age group by 30 points in elections. It could be that in ten years, the national Republican party will be in the kind of shape the California Republican party is now, and that Democratic supermajorities are commonplace at many levels of government.
But, even if that’s true, will our country still be here after Republicans are through with it?
I’ll tell you this: when Democrats get control of states in 2018 and 2020 — and they will — they need to gerrymander back, not turn things over to a panel. And I’d like to see some measures taken to make it so that older people are less likely to vote. Maybe schedule a Matlock marathon on A&E on election days.
Everybody knows that the dice are loadedPost + Comments (325)
Candidate Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump Organization received an email in September 2016 offering a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents, according to an email provided to congressional investigators.
I love this description:
The current state of the Russia probe is this: Russians showed up 20 times saying they wanted to collude. Trumpers said they’d love to collude each time. But somehow they never found the right moment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 8, 2017
In other words, it’s sort of an influence operation rom com. But the really frustrating kind where it’s completely implausible that the two love birds never hook up. https://t.co/HgZKJoodw2
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 8, 2017