The generals are ignoring Trump. That's bad.

This isn't good for democracy. Josh Rogin, on President Trump's decision to withdraw some troops from Germany:

One reason it will take time is that, according to multiple senior administration officials, the Pentagon won’t submit the options for implementing the withdrawal that Trump wants. Trump’s request for such plans was communicated to the Pentagon in a classified Cabinet memo signed by national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien and initialed by Trump, officials said. But the Pentagon is treating Trump’s demand as if doesn’t carry the authority of an actual presidential decision. The generals are effectively ignoring it.

“Whatever you think about the specifics of withdrawing troops from Germany, there’s nothing heroic about deliberately ignoring the president’s expressed intentions,” a senior administration official said.

There's a temptation to figure that if Trump is for something, anybody opposing it must be right. But that's not the case here. The generals are substituting their own judgment for the president's -- and that's not how it is supposed to work. They are supposed to obey the president's lawful orders. As far as I know, his order to withdraw is lawful.

And this doesn't just happen to Trump. Here's something I wrote in 2010, during the Obama presidency:

Bob Woodward's new book reminds us of an important proposition: American democracy and long-term war are a bad mix.

It's certainly bad for democracy. One of the most disturbing revelations is the lengths that President Obama went to in order to ensure the military obeyed his orders in Afghanistan -- dictating a six-page single-spaced document dictating the terms of 2009's surge of 40,000 troops to that country. Why the detail? Because the president felt sure his generals and admirals would find "wiggle room" to violate the spirit of the order setting a 2011 deadline to begin drawing down troops there.

The American Constitution is clear: The president is the commander-in-chief. He makes the country's big decisions about how we fight war. Generals and admirals give their best military advice, and then execute the decisions the president has made. But top military officials clearly see themselves as political players in the process, lobbying the president and circumventing his orders. Woodward reports Gen. David Petraeus told his staff Obama was "(messing) with the wrong man." Such reports should concern anybody concerned with Constitutional order.

Nothing has changed. We're overdue for a reset on civil-military relations. The generals need to remember who is the boss. It's not them -- not as long as we can plausibly claim to be a democracy.

I miss the blogosphere

The blogosphere, back in the day, made me feel smarter and more informed.

The Twittersphere occasionally does that. Mostly, it makes me feel like it's really easy to get into a fight -- that it invites the forming and hardening of opinions, rather than creating a space to try to understand situations, or arrive at conclusions that don't adhere to a binary pole.

I'm still trying to figure out how to manage myself on Twitter. I would love it if I could find a read-only version of the website, but that doesn't seem possible. Self-control is required. Which, online, is not my specialty.

What I'm going to try to do:

* Spend less time reading Twitter.

* Use it, when posting, as a sort of RSS for my blog and Instagram. I'm hoping the time taken to explain myself better will A) keep me from knee-jerk posts, slow me down and B) thus make me use my brain more.

In other words: I'll do less responding directly to tweets. If I can't take time to craft a thoughtful comment that's blogworthy, then it's probably not worth the 10 seconds it takes to dunk.

I've tried and failed before to find ways to make Twitter work for me better. This may also fail. But I feel like I have to try.

The Democratic Party is very against* sexual harassment.

News:

The Democratic candidate challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse in Nebraska lost the backing of the state party Monday after it was revealed that he had made graphic sexual comments about a campaign staffer in a group text.

In the messages, obtained by the Associated Press, candidate Chris Janicek asked a group that included the staffer whether they should use campaign dollars on “getting her laid.”

“Our Democratic Party has no tolerance for sexual harassment,” NDP Chair Jane Kleeb said in a statement on the party’s website. “Our Party will not extend resources or any type of support to any candidate that violates our code of conduct and doesn’t treat men and women with the dignity and respect they deserve.”

This is frankly an easy stance for the party to take, since Janicek probably has no real chance of beating Sasse. Call me back when senior party officials stop regretting that Al Franken is no longer in the Senate.

Amtrak begins its abandonment of the hinterlands

This isn't really a surprise, but it is sad:

Amtrak is ending daily service to hundreds of stations outside the Northeast, and you can blame the coronavirus pandemic, the railroad said this week.

Starting Oct. 1, most Amtrak long-distance trains will operate three times a week instead of daily, the company said in a memo to employees Monday.

Among the routes getting cut: My beloved Southwest Chief, which I've taken several times from the Kansas City area to Chicago. The last big trip I took before the pandemic, in fact, was a long weekend to the Windy City -- I gifted my dad with the trip. He had once worked on a track crew, and his father retired from Amtrak, but he had never taken a long train trip before. We spent the entire ride there in the observation car, kind of zen experience of meditating on the countryside in Missouri, Iowa and Illinois that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times.

It beats the hell out of air travel, that's for sure.

'I am not a racist.' Jimmy Fallon - and me

This is relatively minor in the scheme of things, but it is also very connected to the current moment, so I want to take a second with it.

Monday night, Jimmy Fallon apologized on air for the 20-year-old SNL in which he performed in blackface. It was fine as far as it goes, but he said one thing that stuck in my craw:

“I’m not a racist. I don’t feel this way,” Fallon explained.

I think this is something we white people should avoid saying when we commit racial fuckups. It's a kissing cousin to "some of my best friends are black" -- it reflects an effort not just to apologize for screwing up, or learning a lesson, but to assure everybody who can hear that the speaker (whatever stupid, mean or hurtful thing he or she just said) is really a good person.

And honestly, who cares?

Let me back up. I have fucked up on racial matters, in a way that drew national attention. It was painful -- but worse than that, much worse, it created pain in a community that I valued and treasured. Rightfully and understandably nobody cared if I thought of myself as a good person. They only cared what I had done. 

It's possible that if you search, you might find that younger version of me online somewhere telling people I'm not a racist. I remember making a conscious attempt not to defend myself in such a fashion, but the the temptation not to be a bad person -- and we see racism, rightly, as an indictment of the character of its practitioners -- that it can overwhelm the desire to simply apologize, to take your punishment, and to realize that in some people's minds you are forever tainted. 

Shame is not fun, but it is also much less pain than a lot of black Americans have to live with, dealing with oppressive and even deadly policing in their communities. So the best thing to do, in my mind, is to offer an unqualified apology, then put your head down and do the work of being better, and making it better. And do it quietly, instead of performatively -- because that is simply another way of letting everybody know that, no really, you're a good person.

Other people can't see our hearts. They can only see our deeds. So we white folks need to stop boasting about the content of our character and instead live it in everything we do. "I am not racist," isn't an apology. It's self-affirmation.

Trumpist Christianity isn't Christianity

McKay Coppins writes about President Trump's photo op at the church:

As I’ve written before, most white conservative Christians don’t want piety from this president; they want power. In Trump, they see a champion who will restore them to their rightful place at the center of American life, while using his terrible swift sword to punish their enemies.

If you believe in Christianity, you believe in a God who sent his son not to overpower his enemies, but to die at their hands. It is really that simple. And that is the opposite approach of Christians who seek to dominate their neighbors rather than love them.

Trumpist Christians aren't Christians, at least not in a religious sense. Sure, they may attend church. But mostly, they're another tribe -- a tribe that wants little more than what other tribes want. Power. Profane power.

It will not lead to salvation.

The president's "dominance" ideology

The president is talking a lot about "dominance" today.

It would be one thing if he was talking about "restoring order" in the wake of protests that have -- to some extent -- morphed into violence. (Some of it is real rebellion, some of it is simple looting, and some of it instigators trying to create disaster. I don't know how much of each go into the mix.) If the president simply was trying to bring about calm, that might be welcome.

Instead, he is talking about dominance.

That's different. It is undemocratic and authoritarian. But it reflects Donald Trump's truest ideology. More than appointing conservative judges, more than stopping immigration, his real goal is dominance -- those other goals simply help him achieve the thing he desires most of all.