7.28 Bryn Stole in the Times: “in the last decade or so, the crowds at large scale re-enactments have dwindled. Longtime hobbyists are aging out and retiring — soldiers in their 50s and 60s filled much of the camp at Gettysburg — and younger people aren’t marching onto mock battlefields in nearly the same numbers. . . .But many are more introspective about it. In the 1980s and ’90s, “the whole tone of the country was different,” said Thomas Downes, 68, a retired machinist from Cleveland, who has been re-enacting for the Union side for 38 years. “Up until the last five or 10 years, the social causes of the war did not come into what we do,” he said. “We were paying tribute to the fighting man. It wasn’t ‘I’m racist and I want to glorify slavery,’” he said. “Nobody really thought a lot about the social reasons of why the South went to war. It was just these poor guys who were underfed, undermanned, underequipped, fighting valiantly to the last man, until they couldn’t stand anymore.” Brad Keefer, a 61-year-old corporal in the Union re-enactor ranks and a professor of history at Kent State University, said: “Re-enactors look at the war as a four-year period between 1861 and 1865 in which you can cut out all the stuff leading up to the war and very much ignore everything that happened afterward.”
7.28 Maureen Dowd in the Times: “As a young real estate developer, he would hang out at Yankee Stadium and study the larger-than-life figures in the V.I.P. box: George Steinbrenner, Lee Iacocca, Frank Sinatra, Roy Cohn, Rupert Murdoch, Cary Grant. He was intent on learning how they grabbed the limelight. “In his first big apartment project, Trump’s father had a partner connected to the Genovese and Gambino crime families,” said Michael D’Antonio, another Trump biographer. “He dealt with mobbed-up suppliers and union guys for decades. When Trump was a little boy, wandering around job sites with his dad — which was the only time he got to spend with him — he saw a lot of guys with broken noses and rough accents. And I think he is really enchanted by base male displays of strength. Think about ‘Goodfellas’ — people who prevail by cheating and fixing and lying. Trump doesn’t have the baseline intellect and experience to be proficient at governing. His proficiency is this mob style of bullying and tough-guy talk.” As Steve Bannon noted approvingly, Trump has a Rat Pack air, and as O’Brien said, Trump was the sort of guy who kept gold bullion in his office. Trump’s like a mobster, D’Antonio said, in the sense that he “does not believe that anyone is honest. He doesn’t believe that your motivations have anything to do with right and wrong and public service. It’s all about self-interest and a war of all against all. He’s turning America into Mulberry Street in the ’20s, where you meet your co-conspirators in the back of the candy store.”
7.28 Mark Polizzoti in the Times: “Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous statement in 1956 — “We will bury you” — ushered in one of the Cold War’s most dangerous phases, one rife with paranoia and conviction that both sides were out to destroy the other. But it turns out that’s not what he said, not in Russian, anyway. Khrushchev’s actual declaration was “We will outlast you” — prematurely boastful, perhaps, but not quite the declaration of hostilities most Americans heard, thanks to his interpreter’s mistake.”
7.28 Bret Stephens on how to beat Trump in the Times: People want leaders. Not ideologues. Not people whose life experiences have been so narrow that they’ve been able to maintain the purity of their youthful ideals. Not people whose principal contact with political life comes in the form of speeches and sound bites rather than decisions and responsibilities. Not people who think proving a point is tantamount to getting something done, or who mistake pragmatism and bipartisan compromise with selling out. There’s a word for these sorts of people: governors. John Hickenlooper. Deval Patrick. Maggie Hassan. Andrew Cuomo. Want to defeat Trump? Look thataway.
7.27 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: “Ryan will be remembered for the debt he leaves behind and the lack of courage in failing to stand up to Trump and to restrain his own members, who at times have actively sought to obstruct an investigation into a foreign power’s attack on our democracy. I cannot think of a worst legislative legacy for a modern speaker. The House was diminished by his presence, and the country was ill served.”
7.26 Shepherd Smith on Fox: “Journalists are not the enemies of the people.It’s quite the opposite … It’s a cornerstone of our republic.”
7.25 Sen. Ben Sasse: “This trade war is cutting the legs out from under farmers and White House’s ‘plan’ is to spend $12 billion on gold crutches. … This administration’s tariffs and bailouts aren’t going to make America great again, they’re just going to make it 1929 again.”
7.25 Paul Ryan: “Snark sells, but it doesn’t stick.”
7.25 Quartz:
Americans’ views on whites becoming a minority by 2043
Mostly positive 64% Mostly negative 31%
7.26 Elizabeth Bruening in the Post: This particular horror — Trump and his failures, whatever ridiculous thing he has said or done today, whatever international incident he causes on Twitter tomorrow, however authentic the next panic is — will pass. What will last is the frank revelation of a point that, while ugly and dark, is at least true: You really don’t have the choices you ought to in American democracy, because of decisions made without your consent by people of wealth and power behind closed doors. It’s possible to continue to participate in a democracy after that. But not with a quiet mind.
7.25 Mitch Landrieu to Jonathan Capehart: “The way that most white people have a discussion about race is, well, we had the Revolution, then we had the Civil War, and then we had the civil rights movement. Okay, that’s good. We’re done with that because we elected a black president,” Landrieu explained. “On race, what I’ve learned over time, since the time that I was born until today, is that you can’t go around it; you can’t go over it; you can’t go under it. You actually have to go through it and talk through it so there can be some reconciliation. And we really haven’t had that.”
7.25 Jeffrey Sachs in the Post: China’s inevitable advances will in no way prevent the United States from making similar progress, but only if Trump and the Republicans drop their anti-science stance, support the American system of government-business-academic innovation and direct efforts toward the true needs of the 21st century, notably zero-carbon energy and non-polluting industries. There is no future in trade wars, hot war or the polluting industries of the past.
I’m very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election. Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats. They definitely don’t want Trump!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2018
7.24 Max Boot in the Post: Trump and his apologists pretend that the Russian intervention — including the WikiLeaks revelations — was no big deal. That beggars belief. Even if the Russians had failed, they still attacked our democracy. Yet they didn’t fail: Trump won. Russian disinformation wasn’t the only factor in the outcome and was probably less important in the end than FBI Director James B. Comey’s announcement 11 days before the election that he was reopening the Clinton email investigation. But Watts concludes: “Without the Russian influence effort, I believe Trump would not have even been within striking distance of Clinton on Election Day.” That is the inconvenient truth the Putin Republicans won’t admit.
7.24 Steve Schmidt on MSNBC: “It’s not just that there’s no other spokesperson for the executive seat of power in a Democratic Republic anywhere in the world where you see that type of lying. It`s that there has never been a spokesperson for the executive seat in power who is such a prolific liar as Sarah Sanders. She is straight out of Baghdad Bob. It’s truly remarkable the magnitude of her daily lying. But look, this is all part of a political strategy and I’ve talked about it before. Trump uses mass rallies and constant lying to incite fervor in a political base. Two, he scapegoats minority populations and casts them to be blamed for every problem in the world. Three, he allows for his supporters to feel victimized, to feel victimized by the scapegoated populations. Everyone is a victim in Trump Nation by design. It’s part of the fuel. The [fourth] thing is the conspiracy, the coordination of the conspiracy between the deep state, the nefarious sources … And then, lastly, the assertion that Trump is above the law by Trump himself, that Trump defines what is reality, that Trump defines what’s truth and that Trump asserts heretofore unasserted powers for the executive in the United States that have never been asserted in history before. These five things are happening, they’re happening on a daily basis. The assault on the press, on the free media. We still have a First Amendment in this country, but he is as hostile to the free media as any president has ever been and any president could conceivably be in the United States. And so all of these things together are not isolated, it’s part of a pattern, it’s part of a strategy, and it’s going to do grave damage to American democracy. And this is a moment in time where Republican leaders who have been complicit, have been silent, have been cowardice, are called on to defend the institutions not of conservatism, not of the small ‘l’ liberalism that the Democratic Party embraces, but the fundamental pillars of a liberal democratic society which he is weakening every day.”
7.24 President Trump, speaking to the VFW convention in Kansas City: “And just remember: what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
7.23 Elissa Schappell: I was just remembering the great kindness and generosity you showed me at SPY and how grateful I will always be.
To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018
7.20 Amber Phillips in the Washington Post: If Trump doesn’t face consequences from leaders of his party and administration for his unexplained overtures to Russia, it seems he almost certainly won’t from his party’s voters either. Their loyalty to him has so far found no boundary. Trump continues to demonstrate, in increasingly astounding ways, that he is remaking the party into whatever he and he alone wants it to be.
7.19 The Daily Beast: Current and former American diplomats are expressing disgust and horror over the White House’s willingness to entertain permitting Russian officials to question a prominent former U.S. ambassador. One serving diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was “at a [expletive] loss” over comments that can be expected to chill American diplomacy in hostile or authoritarian countries — a comment echoed by former State Department officials as well….“It’s beyond disgraceful. It’s fundamentally ignorant with regard to how we conduct diplomacy or what that means. It really puts in jeopardy the professional independence of diplomats anywhere in the world, if the consequence of their actions is going to be potentially being turned over to a foreign government,” the U.S. diplomat told The Daily Beast
7.19 Karen Tumulty in the Post: Trump’s reluctance to accept his own intelligence agencies’ consensus view of Russia’s actions is rooted, at least in part, in his sense of grievance. He cannot see anything but a challenge to the legitimacy of his own election as president, and a refusal by his adversaries to acknowledge his achievement in beating 16 other Republicans to win the nomination, and then former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the electoral college. “He has an internally programmed response,” Gingrich said. “I’m not defending it, but that’s what it is.” What Trump says may not be the truth — except for what it tells you about Trump himself.
7.19 New York Times: Trump was thoroughly briefed on the Russian efforts two weeks before his inauguration — yet he has continued to muddy the water over the Kremlin’s culpability since.
7.18 Financial Times: In an appalling display, the US president refused to endorse the verdict of his own intelligence agencies that Russia had deliberately intervened in the 2016 US presidential election. Instead, he gave equal credit to the “extremely strong and powerful” denial of such interference issued by President Putin. Mr Trump followed this up with a baffling and self-serving rant against his domestic critics — name-checking all his usual foes from Hillary Clinton to the FBI. …Mr Trump has undermined his country and his office in a series of important ways. His performance in Helsinki made it absolutely clear that the US president places his own political survival and personal vanity above any belief in the rule-of-law.
7.18 Went with Cara to see Beautiful: The Carole King Musical
7.18 The European Union hit Google with a record antitrust fine of $5.06 billion
7.18 Joshua A. Geltzer and Nicholas Rasmussen in the Post: Presidents must stop asking when they can be “done” with counterterrorism. Instead, they must focus on identifying the sustainable investments the United States needs for an ongoing defense and to go on the offensive whenever we need to neutralize a particularly grave threat. Only this approach can realistically keep Americans safe from terrorism while allowing presidents to focus on the growing storm of other national security issues.
7.18 Max Boot in the Post: the stench from President Trump’s execrable performance in Helsinki only grows more putrid with the passage of time. The leader of the sole superpower was simpering and submissive in the face of a murderous dictator’s “strong and powerful” lies.It is ludicrous to pretend that changing “would” into “wouldn’t” might have changed Trump’s message, which included a conspiratorial rant about the FBI and not a word of specific censure of Russian crimes. Having committed a “Kinsley gaffe” (i.e., saying what he really thought), the president couldn’t bring himself to convincingly read the “clarification” concocted by some over-clever spinmeister. He felt compelled to add that the election “meddling” could have been the work of lots of “other people” besides the Russians, thereby negating the point of the exercise.