It's Time to Listen To and Evangelize Trump Voters

Remember this? (Caution: Not safe for work.)

 

I've been thinking about this a lot because, after Super Tuesday, it seems likely that Donald Trump will be the de facto Republican nominee for president. And even a lot of Republicans agree that this is bad. It's even worse if Trump ends up president. So how do we stop him? How do we stop a candidate when every attack on him seems only to make him stronger?

Maybe we think evangelically.

I'm not saying this in the religious sense. I am saying this in the sense that we non-Trump-loving Americans do something that's not tried all that often anymore: We should make a concerted, respectful effort not just to turn our own voters to the polls, but to convince our fellow citizens that a vote for Trump is wrong — not just from our worldview, but from theirs.

Why Michael Hayden Lacks Credibility on the CIA, Trump, and Torture

Color me skeptical:

During his appearance on “Real Time,” Hayden cited Trump’s pledge to kill family members as being among his most troubling campaign statements. 

“That never even occurred to you, right?” Maher asked. 

“God, no!” Hayden replied. “Let me give you a punchline: If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.” 

“That’s quite a statement, sir,” Maher said. 

“You are required not to follow an unlawful order,” Hayden added. “That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict.”

Michael Hayden's actual track record:

…SIEGEL: Toward the end of your tenure at the Center Intelligence Agency, the question of interrogations became extremely controversial. You advised your successor – President Obama’s nominee, Leon Panetta – what to say about waterboarding. I want you to tell us what your guidance was. 

HAYDEN: Yeah. I simply said do not use the word torture and CIA in the same sentence ever again. You can object to some of the enhanced interrogation techniques. You can, in your heart of hearts, believe they meet some legal definition of torture. But Leon, you’re taking over a workforce that did these things in good faith, that did these things with the assurance of the attorney general that they indeed were not torture. Do not accuse them of felonies. 

SIEGEL: As a matter of institutional politics or as a matter of truth? 

HAYDEN: Well, certainly as a matter of truth. Look, I get it. Honest men differ. A lot of good people describe these things as torture. The definitive legal judgment under which the agency was operating – and, you know, sooner or later, Robert, somebody’s got to call balls and strikes, and that’s the way it is.

Gee. I wonder if the CIA could get a lawyer to say it's OK to do bad things to terrorist families, — to call those "balls and strikes" — despite what the Geneva Conventions say?

I wonder....

In the December debate with Cassel, Yoo was asked: "If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?" 

Yoo: "No treaty." 

Cassel: "Also no law by Congress? That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo [that went to the president]." 

Yoo: "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that."

Draw your own conclusions.

"Parents Have a Secondary Role": Beware This False Hillary Clinton Meme

A smart conservative friend posted this to Facebook today:

Only problem: Hillary Clinton has never said or written anything like this, as far as I can tell. What she DID say in "It Takes A Village" is this:

And this:

Yes, I purchased a $14 Kindle copy of "It Takes A Village" just to debunk this meme today. You're welcome.

On the KKK, Trump Borrows from the Republican Playbook

Let's first of all admit one thing: When it comes to David Duke and the Klan, Republicans have generally been pretty good about the repudiation thing. Republicans have long been very good about being against undeniably explicit, overt, no-doubt-about it racism.

Still, I can't help but hear about this:

CNN anchor Jake Tapper repeatedly asked Donald Trump on Sunday to denounce David Duke's support for his candidacy, but Trump insisted he didn't know anything about the former KKK grand wizard. 

"Even if you don't know about their endorsement, there are these groups and individuals endorsing you. Would you just say unequivocally that you condemn them and you don't want their support?" he asked Trump. 

But Trump again insisted again he didn't know about Duke: 

I have to look at the group. I mean, I don't know what group you're talking about. You wouldn't want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about. I have to look. If you would send me a list of the groups, I will do research on them. And certainly I would disavow if I thought there was something wrong.

And I can't help but think about this:

It is true that Republican leaders have previously steered clear of endorsing Birtherism. But they have also steered clear of denouncing it. Pressed to denounce Birtherism, Republicans have evaded it. (Eric Cantor: “I don't think it's an issue that we need to address at all. … I don't think it's nice to call anyone crazy.” John Boehner: “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think. Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people.”) They danced delicately around the question because Birthers constitute an important segment of the Republican coalition they could not afford to alienate. The same logic drove Mitt Romney to publicly solicit and accept Trump’s endorsement four years ago, an event that prompted little complaint from conservative intellectuals.

In both cases, the play is the same: Ignore the obvious racism of your constituency by pleading ignorance of a sort. A Venn diagram of KKK members and birthers wouldn't be a perfect circle, but it would be close enough that it's not hard to see a through line.

Again: The Republican-conservative establishment laid the groundwork for this. As Jonathan Chait said this week: "It has been a bracing experience for conservative elites to behold when the forces they have successfully harnessed for so long shake free and turn against them." Again, let us resist Trumpenfreude. But let's not kid ourselves about the foundations of it.

Netflix Queue: "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny"

Three thoughts about "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny"...

• I've seen a few reviews calling this a "cheap knockoff" of the original. I don't think that's entirely fair. For one thing, you can only be a virgin once, and the first time we saw rooftop wire work in the first movie was an astounding revelation to many of us Western movie watchers. (There is however a great ice-fighting scene in this edition.) And no, this movie doesn't have the aching, epic artistry that Ang Lee brought to the original. Watched on its own terms, though, it's fun Friday night flick. In some ways, it feels more "Chinese" than the original, which was famed for marrying Western storytelling sensibilities to Chinese martial arts flicks.

• If you're going to connect this movie to another, the better comparison might be 1994's "Wing Chun," which starred by Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen — same as this movie — and even had the same director, Woo-Ping Yuen. The two movies share more comic outlook; there's even a brief callback to "Wing Chun's" great table-fighting scene. The two "Crouching Tiger" movies contain a brand name — thanks Netflix! — but the newer movie reaches farther back in its references.

• Michelle Yeoh is 53. Goddamn.

On Trumpenfreude

One of the problems with today's era of hyperpolarization is the temptation to take pleasure when one's political rivals are running around in a tizzy — even when said tizziness is caused by something that will ultimately cause you and your side pain as well.

Take Donald Trump.

Max Boot and Bill Kristol, in particular are two conservatives who never found a war they couldn't excitedly cheer on. Kristol, in particular, is known for simply being wrong on every great question that's faced the United States for the last few decades.

And today, they're both tweeting up a storm, trying — vainly, I suspect — to rally Republicans against Trump. The panic is manifest:



And so on. And admittedly, in the pit of my stomach, my instinctive response is this:

Tee hee! This is the world you guys helped make! Now you have to live in it! Tee hee!

It's the wrong response. The world in which Trump is conceivably the GOP nominee is a world where Trump is conceivably the president — and in any case, probably coarsens our culture a little further so that even if he fails, we're a little more complacent the next time a Trump-like figure runs.

RIP Harper Lee

Harper Lee, Author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Dies at 89 - The New York Times

At the same time, her stark morality tale of a righteous Southern lawyer who stands firm against racism and mob rule struck a chord with Americans, many of them becoming aware of the civil rights movement for the first time. The novel had its critics. “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to friend shortly after the novel’s appearance. Some reviewers complained that the perceptions attributed to Scout were far too complex for a girl just starting grade school and dismissed Atticus as a kind of Southern Judge Hardy, dispensing moral bromides.

All I'll say about To Kill a Mockingbird is this: It's a fairy tale.

That's not a criticism. Fairy tales instruct. Fairy tales inspire. Fairy tales have "the moral of the story."

When the book appeared, in 1960, America desperately needed the fairly tale that Harper Lee gave us. We needed to hear that this country, at its best and most just self, extended justice fairly to everybody, no matter the color of our skin. That wasn't a completely unknown idea — the Civil Rights movement was well underway by then — but having the message delivered by a Southern writer, somebody who clearly loved the South, helped the idea spread a bit more quickly, I think.

It wasn't a perfect book. We're not a perfect society. There's still a long way to go to meet that ideal. But Harper Lee, god bless her, gave us a nudge in the right direction.

Why I Miss Having a Car: The Music

It's been more than seven years since we moved to Philadelphia and sold our car. For the most part, it's been a good thing: Every step we take — and every gallon of gasoline we don't burn — has been healthier both for us and the environment.

I only occasionally miss having a car. Our experience of the city is certainly different than it otherwise would be: It's much more located in the environs of where we live than it would be if we just go in the car and went whenever and wherever we get the notion. Relying on transit requires planning, which can be the death of "let's go over to Kensington to grab a bite." So I miss that.

Mostly, though, what I miss, is something silly: The ability to sing at the top of my lungs.

I was taking a long walk this afternoon on Market Street, listening to Pandora, when I was suddenly gripped by the urge to start singing along -- loudly -- to Arcade Fire. I looked around to see if I'd get caught. Sure enough: There were too many people around. I'd look like a crazy man if I just started belting.

That's less a problem when you're on the highway. Yes, cars passing you can and do see that you're performing a full-blown concert. But there's still enough privacy that it doesn't matter.

I realize now, years later, that my car was the primary place I experienced music -- and also, the primary place I experienced a certain kind of joy in unashamedly throwing myself into the music. Owning a car in Center City would be a pain in the ass -- it's not a need, and would be an expensive luxury -- but I miss it.

Three Thoughts about Ta-Nehisi Coates and "Between the World and Me"

Three thoughts about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”:

• This is a relentlessly political book — how could it not be? — and yet attempts to respond to the book from within the typical left-right Democratic-Republican construct of punditry seem to be insufficient to me — they come to the book, as with other political debates, without curiosity, for the sake of trying to win an argument. Let’s try again. This is an American black man telling us how he perceives living as a black man in America today: It contains no policy prescriptions, no endorsement of party or candidate, no 10-point campaign for better living. We haven’t found the right way to talk about this book yet.

Sam Brownback's Kansas shows the GOP id unleashed. It's not very pretty.

I think it's been increasingly clear for a couple of years now that the GOP isn't so much "anti-tax" as "anti-tax on...

Posted by Joel Mathis on Friday, June 12, 2015

Twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!

Twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!

Posted by Joel Mathis on Tuesday, June 9, 2015

On Marco Rubio's finances

My first pass was to give Marco Rubio a pass on this. Lots of Gen-Xers got hit by the recession in ways they're still...

Posted by Joel Mathis on Tuesday, June 9, 2015

How Should Christians Respond to Gay Behavior They Consider Sinful? A Lapsed Mennonite Replies Awkwardly to Bishop Silva

JOHN 8:

The Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to deny her cake and flowers at her wedding."

Now: Anybody with passing familiarity with the Christian Bible probably can spot right away that this is not a faithful retelling of the incident in John 8. Instead, it’s a telling of scripture as I re-imagined it in light of the law, passed recently in Indiana, allowing shopkeepers to discriminate against gays. My conservative writing/debating partner, Ben Boychuk, has told me on several occasions that my effort was “glib,” but I disagree. Satirical, yes, but considered satire, with a purpose that was quite serious: To suggest that Christians might want to reconsider this issue in light of an age-old question: What Would Jesus Do?

Of all the responses I received — and I continue to receive them, weeks later — none was quite as surprising as my discovery that the Bishop of Honolulu, Larry Silva, took my column and made it the centerpiece of his Sunday homily a few weeks ago. Suffice it to say, he did not agree with my outlook. He deserves to be quoted at length. (And, in fact, I’ll be writing at some length here, so you might as well settle in.)

I no longer get to call myself a coffee snob.

The Washington Post says we're drinking bad coffee:

People in this country, on the whole, are actually drinking worse coffee today than they have in the past. And the reason appears to be that they value cheapness over quality — and convenience over everything. "A lot of people in America would take a sip of single origin high-end coffee and not appreciate the taste," said Howard Telford, an industry analyst at market research firm Euromonitor. 

The rise of coffee pods, which come pre-ground, provides what is without question the most compelling evidence of the country's desire for convenience. Sales of coffee pods have grown by a blistering 138,324 percent — yes, 138,324 percent — over the past 10 years, according to data from Euromonitor. They have have jumped more than tenfold since 2009 alone. And they're still rising at an annual clip of more than 30 percent.

To which I say: You can have my K-cup coffee maker when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

It's not that I like "bad" coffee. It's just that I pretty much only drink home coffee at 5 a.m., when I wake up and jump immediately into my work day. I don't have time to grind whole beans, or to linger over the pour-over method. I just need caffeine.

When I'm out and about, though, I'm pretty choosy about my coffee, dropping into places that do take time to linger of the production of a cup and make it tasty. Americans tend to mix high and low culture, anyway. I just happen to do it with coffee.

Robert Samuelson to Middle Class: I find your lack of faith disturbing

Robert Samuelson says the middle class is thinning out because it doesn't believe hard enough:

What the middle class faces today is a crisis of faith. Being middle class is more than attaining some threshold income. It also involves embracing a set of beliefs that, unfortunately, have been severely shaken. 

Middle-class Americans believe in opportunity, stability, reward for effort, a brighter future and the ability to control their lives, as sociologist Herbert Gans showed in his 1988 book “Middle American Individualism.”

Anybody who endured any bout of unemployment during the Great Recession would be bound to have their faith in such precepts shaken. There's nothing like wondering if you're going to be poor forever to make you question the American dream. And that's true even if you got back on track, somehow. I've got a good job these days, one of the best I've had, but I'm also deeply aware of how fragile it all is — how lucky I am to have found my way back.  The underlying faith I used to have that things would generally be on an upward trajectory? Gone. I miss it.

Samuelson adds:

The economy is more random, unstable and insecure than we imagined. It is less susceptible to policy engineering. The fact that the upper classes can better shield themselves against its upsets naturally breeds resentment.

That's not quite right. The resentment is bred more from the fact that the upper classes are shielded by government from the vagaries of the economy more than the lower classes are. Banks were too big to fail, our tax dollars bailed them out, and executives kept on collecting bonuses. Middle class home buyers found themselves stuck with underwater mortgages,meanwhile, and got lectures about responsibility. The people most directly responsible for screwing the economy suffered little, if any, long-term consequences. The rest of us are still living with consequences in many cases. Hard to have faith when lived experience contradicts it.

The disaster that is the F-35

Yikes:

Total taxpayer losses in the failed Solyndra solar-energy program might come, at their most dire estimate, to some $800 million. Total cost overruns, losses through fraud, and other damage to the taxpayer from the F-35 project are perhaps 100 times that great, yet the “Solyndra scandal” is known to probably 100 times as many people as the travails of the F-35. Here’s another yardstick: the all-in costs of this airplane are now estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion, or a low-end estimate of the entire Iraq War.

Netflix Queue: The Master

Lots of thoughts inspired by my viewing of The Master on Netflix, but the easiest to convey is this: Joaquin Phoenix's face in this movie is an amazing thing, a craggy and broken down work of art. So amazingly photographed by Paul Thomas Anderson and his crew.

After New York: A question about police, protests, and the limits of politics

Since it now seems to be a common theme on the right that critics of police practices enabled the (horrible, awful, only-to-be-condemned) murders of two New York cops, a question:

What is a permissible level of protest regarding police activities?

What is a permissible level of criticism?

Are any protests or criticisms permissible, or do they by definition contribute to a lawlessness that endangers police lives and thus our civic order?

The war in Afghanistan is over. Long live the war in Afghanistan.

Well, that was anti-climactic:

The United States and NATO formally ended their war in Afghanistan on Sunday with a ceremony at their military headquarters in Kabul as the insurgency they fought for 13 years remains as ferocious and deadly as at any time since the 2001 invasion that unseated the Taliban regime following the Sept. 11 attacks.

We've been fighting and dying in Afghanistan for 13 years. We're going to keep on fighting and dying in Afghanistan ... only not quite as quickly as we have been. That's not war anymore? George Orwell, call your office.

Big-government conservatism

Robert P. George, natural law theorist extraordinaire, is in my morning paper:

Considered as isolated acts, someone's recreational use of narcotics, for example, may affect the public weal negligibly, if at all. But an epidemic of drug abuse, though constituted by private acts of drug-taking, damages the common good in myriad ways. This does not by itself settle the question whether drug prohibition is a prudent or effective policy. It does, however, undermine the belief that the recreational use of drugs is a matter of purely private choice.

A lot of my conservative friends are fans of George, I think, and look to him when making arguments against gay marriage. (He's talking about pornography in the current column, though.)

What's striking, though, is how closely this argument for drug prohibition mirrors the argument for, say, banning old-style lightbulbs in favor of more energy-efficient modern models — a project that caused no shortage of chest-beating among many of the same conservatives who are allied with George on matters of morality. It's an odd concept of liberty and governent's proper role in our lives that anguishes over lost light-bulbs but feels free to deny the marriage contract to individuals.