Atlanta police decide they don't have to 'protect and serve' if they don't want to

WaPo:

Hours after the Fulton County district attorney announced felony murder and other charges against the former Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old black man, in the back, a number of Atlanta police officers called in sick just before a shift change Wednesday evening.

“This is not an organized thing, it’s not a blue flu, it’s not a strike, it’s nothing like that,” Vince Champion, a spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, told NBC News. “What it actually is is officers protesting that they’ve had enough and they don’t want to deal with it any longer.”

Let's be clear what's going on here: Atlanta Police on Wednesday night decided it was more important for them to protect their impunity from accountability than it is to protect the public. That they did so in organized fashion - Champion's denial of such is transparent BS - gives lie to the whole idea of "a few bad apples." Police violence is a cultural problem, aided and abetted even by the "good cops" who stick with their brothers even when they shouldn't.

I have been a critic of the "defund the police" slogan, because I suspect most Americans think the police are necessary and won't sign onto efforts they think will abolish the police. But the arrogance of the Atlanta Police will make the abolitionists' job easier. The cops are acting more like a protection racket - Nice city you have here. A shame if anything happened to it. - than the guardians of law and order.

John Bolton reveals the problem with 'intellectual Trumpism'

Washington Post:

Mr. Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Mr. Bolton in the book regularly includes phrases like “(the opposite of the truth)” following some quote from the president. And Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton’s but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless.

“His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy,” Mr. Bolton writes. “That had its pros and cons.”

This has been obvious for some time - Trumpism is Trump - but that hasn't prevented a cottage industry of writers like Henry Olsen and Victor Davis Hanson or pretty much anybody on the roster of the Claremont Institute to offer an intellectual sheen and overarching consistency to the president's lurching from one crisis to the next. Some of this is to give something undeserving of respect a respectability, but I think some of it is also an effort to steer Trumpism for their own desires. The former effort is spin at best, a lie at worst. The latter effort is probably a doomed project - Trump will be Trump, and if he decides its in his interest to dump his putative allies and propagandists to adopt a different agenda, he most certainly will. 

Did progressivism cause the Tulsa Massacre?

Not going to link this. But still worth understanding the Trumpist perspective.

A couple of thoughts:

* AmGreatness is pretty closely associated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative outfit whose primary role these days is to provide an intellectual sheen for Trumpism. There long-term project, though, sees the original sin of America mostly in terms of the rise of progressivism in the early 20th century, along with with the "administrative state" it helped enable. Some of these critiques have merit -- Woodrow Wilson was really a racist asshole! -- but it is also the proverbial man with the hammer who sees the whole world as a nail. The errors of Herbert Croly explain everything bad in the United States, even when they don't, really. Ascribing the Tulsa massacre to progressivism is ridiculous. 

* Why? Because Americans were enslaving and killing African Americans long before progressivism reared its head in the United States. The KKK was not a left-leaning outfit. Americans didn't need ideology to kill black people. It's what we've always done. 

To be fair, AmGreatness acknowledges that, but only in throat-clearing fashion. 

* Anyway, for the AmGreatness crowd, racism doesn't seem to exist, except in that A) it can make the left look bad, or B) when it does happen, it's actually "multiculturalists" criticizing and opposing white conservatives on college campuses. Meanwhile, the AmGreatness crowd is pretty terrified of the influence of minorities in the country's culture. Make of that what you will.

I can honestly say that racism in American life has come from the left, the center, and the right. I don't think Trumpist conservatives are willing to make the same concession. I'll leave it to others to decide whether that position is held in good faith.

A fun thing to do when you're watching a great movie...

...is to look it up on Wikipedia. A lot of times, you find out stuff that enriches your understanding of the film, or gives you new movies to check out.

For example, we're watching TOKYO STORY this week.

Wikipedia:

"Ozu and screenwriter Kōgo Noda wrote the script in 103 days, loosely basing it on the 1937 American film Make Way for Tomorrow, directed by Leo McCarey."

Which got me interested in MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW.

Again, Wikipedia:

"Orson Welles said of Make Way for Tomorrow, "It would make a stone cry,"[2] and rhapsodized about his enthusiasm for the film in his booklength series of interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles. In Newsweek magazine, famed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris named it his #1 film, stating "The most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly."[3]"

MWFT is not available on any streaming service. Which means I have to hunt it down on DVD.

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.