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Our Biden problem and our Trump problem are the same problem

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  Photo by Aaron Kittredge For the last few years, I've been asking a question: Will we know when American democracy ends?  I don't know. But it seems to me there's a real possibility it happened Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled that presidents -- well, Donald Trump, but supposedly all presidents -- have "absolute immunity" for official acts committed while in office. If the president is above the law, if there is no real way to stop him from abusing his power (and impeachment doesn't really count at this point; it's a dead letters) then ... what, exactly, restrains a president from acting tyrannically? So there's that. But that's not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about my friend Will Bunch, and his latest column at the Philadelphia Inquirer , which takes to task all the journalists who have focused obsessively on Joe Biden's age in the days since last week's disastrous debate. Dropping names — Whitmer! Shapir
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Tim Alberta's 'The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.'

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A funny thing happened while reading Tim Alberta's new book. I thought about becoming a Christian again. That's maybe not the reaction you would expect to have to "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," a deeply reported look at how (mostly white) evangelical Christians have deeply compromised their supposed values to embrace the corrupt and vulgar Donald Trump — not just lending him their votes transactionally, but enthusiastically embracing his slash-and-burn style of authoritarian politics. The corruption, grifting and thirst for power on display is all pretty well-documented by now, but it's still galling (again) to read it all in one place. Is *this* what Jesus would do? Alberta doesn't think so.  Jesus "talked mostly about helping the poor, humbling oneself, and having no earthly ambition but to gain eternal life," Alberta writes. "Suffice it to say, the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount ("Blessed are the meek ... Blessed are
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Margaret Atwood

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 From "The Blind Assassin":
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The permission structure of anti-Semitism

 Trump’s Menacing Rosh Hashanah Message to American Jews This Semitic sorting never ends well, because justifications for abusing Jews have a way of metastasizing. Permission structures for anti-Semitism are rarely restricted to their original target. Once a society starts accepting attacks on entire swaths of Jews—for being too liberal, too religious, too secular, too pro-Israel, too anti-Israel, too whatever—that acceptance will grow. And when Jewish existence becomes conditional on staying in the good graces of a non-Jewish actor or movement, it becomes an impoverished existence—provisional and precarious, forever looking over its shoulder.
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CB: Emily Wilson's Homeric bros

 How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern: And it rankles her that men whom she considers self-appointed guardians of the Western canon have questioned a woman’s fitness to do Homer justice. “Any woman who has lived with male rage at close range has a better chance of understanding the vulnerability that fuels it than your average bro. She learns firsthand how the ways in which men are damaged determine their need to wreak damage on others.”
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Commonplace book: Ross Douthat's religious conspiracies

 New Yorker: In one column, Douthat offered his own approach to assessing fringe ideas. “To be a devout Christian or a believing Jew or Muslim is to be a bit like a conspiracy theorist, in the sense that you believe there is an invisible reality that secular knowledge can’t recognize,” he explained. “But the great religions are also full of warnings against false prophets and fraudulent revelations."
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'Now, as ever'

"A declaration made by the poet and scholar Eve Ewing in 2017, at an event in our stores, resounds. 'No more than ever,' she said, 'I am sick of people saying, Now more than ever . ... By saying, 'Now as ever," by looking not to the next new thing but to the last enduring thing, we are more likely to grasp our unique and not not so unique challenges..." Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores
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