We didn’t do it, Antifa did it, but if we did do it, it was the right thing to do https://t.co/9dKSx2ER9x
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) January 7, 2021
This logic is all very Trumpian of course https://t.co/s11hft9Ilr
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) January 7, 2021
Democrats Haven’t Turned Back From 1968
The politics of identity and attack have supplanted the old liberal tradition, which favored national unity.
The next big change came in 1992 with the nomination and election of Bill Clinton. His moderate platform was similar to his peers’, but his political style was a departure. The concept of a permanent campaign came to the White House. Every move was measured against its short-term political value to the president. The Clinton team launched personal attacks against policy dissenters and against women who brought charges of sexual misconduct against the president. In 1996, Mr. Clinton accused Republican nominee Bob Dole of “trying to destroy Social Security and Medicare” through his support of a bipartisan entitlement-reform effort Mr. Clinton himself had previously praised. By 2001, when Mr. Clinton left the scene, say-anything attack politics had become the normal order of the day in the Democratic Party.
President Obama brought hope of a more tolerant, less deeply partisan politics. But he was surrounded by Clinton alumni who, for the most part, kept on as before. His signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, was introduced and passed only by Democrats—a sharp contrast to the bipartisan approaches taken by Johnson with his Medicare and Medicaid proposals, and by Ted Kennedy with his Medicare prescription-drug legislation. To pass ObamaCare, the White House and its allies launched a full-court press against all House Democrats, including moderates with doubts about its cost and coverage. The legislation passed narrowly, but 63 House Democrats lost their seats in the 2010 midterm elections. That left the body sharply divided between Republican and Democratic partisans, stalling the administration’s legislative agenda for the remaining six years of Mr. Obama’s presidency.
A Generation Emerging From the Wreckage
It’s not that the students are hopeless. They are dedicating their lives to social change. It’s just that they have trouble naming institutions that work.
.. The second large theme was the loss of faith in the American idea. I told them that when I went to public school the American history curriculum was certainly liberal, but the primary emotion was gratitude. We were the lucky inheritors of Jefferson and Madison, Whitman and Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy and King. Our ancestors left oppression, crossed a wilderness and are trying to build a promised land.
.. Others made it clear that the American story is mostly a story of oppression and guilt. “You come to realize the U.S. is this incredibly imperfect place.” “I don’t have a sense of being proud to be an American.” Others didn’t recognize an American identity at all: “The U.S. doesn’t have a unified culture the way other places do,” one said.
.. I asked them to name the defining challenge of their generation. Several mentioned the decline of the nation-state and the threats to democracy. A few mentioned inequality, climate change and a spiritual crisis of meaning. “America is undergoing a renegotiation of the terms of who is powerful,”
.. I asked the students what change agents they had faith in. They almost always mentioned somebody local, decentralized and on the ground — teachers, community organizers.
.. One pointed out that today’s successful movements, like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, don’t have famous figureheads or centralized structures.
.. one big challenge for this generation is determining how to take good things that are happening on the local level and translate them to the national level, where the problems are
.. I was also struck by pervasive but subtle hunger for a change in the emotional tenor of life. “We’re more connected but we’re more apart,” one student lamented. Again and again, students expressed a hunger for social and emotional bonding, for a shift from guilt and accusation toward empathy. “How do you create relationship?” one student asked. That may be the longing that undergirds all others.
Trent Franks, Accused of Offering $5 Million to Aide for Surrogacy, Resigns
Representative Trent Franks announced Friday that he would resign from Congress immediately after accusations emerged that he had offered $5 million to a female employee to be a surrogate mother for his children, and that she and another female employee worried that the lawmaker wanted to have sex as a means of impregnating them.
.. Mr. Franks’s net worth sits at nearly $30 million
.. Franks’s wealth derives primarily from stock in Trinity Petroleum, where he was chief executive
.. Mr. Franks and his wife have two children, twins born by a surrogate.
.. Mr. Franks was best known as one of the most socially conservative members of the House. In 2013, he came under harsh criticismfor remarking that “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low”
.. He also founded the Arizona Family Research Institute, a nonprofit associated with Focus on the Family, a socially conservative religious organization.
Video shows Kelly made inaccurate claims about lawmaker in feud over Trump’s condolence call
Trump lashed out on Twitter the next morning, calling Wilson’s account “totally fabricated” and stating that he had “proof.” Trump’s subsequent revelation that Obama had not called Kelly after his son’s death led to Kelly’s appearance in the briefing room Thursday.
.. In the Fox interview, Trump insisted that he did speak La David Johnson’s name in his conversation with his widow.
At the White House, Sanders accused reporters of fanning the flames of a sensational story. “It should have ended yesterday after General Kelly’s comments,” she said. “But it didn’t. . . . It’s still the bulk of the coverage on most every TV you turn on and most every newspaper that you open up today.”
She did not mention that Trump had tweeted again about the issue late Thursday, nearly eight hours after Kelly’s briefing room appearance.
“The Fake News is going crazy with wacky Congresswoman Wilson (D), who was SECRETLY on a very personal call, and gave a total lie on content!” Trump wrote.
.. In his defense of Trump on Thursday, Kelly accused Wilson of “selfish behavior.” And he asserted that Wilson, at the 2015 FBI building dedication in Miami, had “talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building, and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money, and she just called up President Obama, and on that phone call, he gave the money, the $20 million.”Wilson denied making such remarks. The Sun-Sentinel video shows that she recounted how she went into “attack mode” to ensure that Congress and Obama expedited a bill to name the building after the two fallen FBI agents in about four weeks.When initially told that such legislation could take as long as a year, Wilson recalled, “I said — I’m a school principal — and I said, excuse my French, ‘Aw, hell no, we’re going to get this done.’ ” She spread credit, offering praise for then-House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). She also praised the two agents, Benjamin Grogan and Jerry Dove, who were killed in a shootout with bank robbers in 1986 in Miami.
Peter Feaver, a Duke University political science professor who served as a special adviser at the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration, said Trump had erred by engaging in the political fight in the first place. “Every politically savvy person would have said, ‘You can’t criticize Gold Star families and have anything good come out — so just don’t bother,’ ” Feaver said. “If they criticize you, just take it.”
Save the Phony Weinstein Outrage, Republicans
Trump is more consistent. He is a pig in public as well as behind closed doors. In 1992, New York Magazine reported that he said the best way to deal with women is to treat them like excrement, though he used a more vulgar term. He has followed his own advice. His first wife, Ivana Trump, accused him of raping her in a fit of rage. (She later denied that the events she’d recounted were rape “in a literal or criminal sense,” but stuck to the underlying story.)
.. He owned beauty pageants and, by his own admission, would barge into changing rooms to ogle the naked contestants. The makeup artist Jill Harth said that he tried to rape her. Multiple women have accused him of groping and sexual harassment.
.. Somehow, in the wake of the Weinstein revelations, the president’s supporters appear to believe they hold the moral high ground. Donald Trump Jr. — a man who once said that women who can’t handle workplace sexual harassment “should go maybe teach kindergarten” — has been tweeting about Weinstein incessantly.
.. For the past 11 months, many feminists have been reeling from the defeat of the first female major-party presidential candidate by a predatory misogynist. The confirmation that a hugely powerful man who is supposed to be on our side is just as bad as Trump is shattering.
.. Yes, Ailes had to leave Fox News after charges that he’d demanded sexual favors from women in exchange for professional opportunities. But in the aftermath, conservatives did not ostracize him. Instead, Trump defended Ailes and defamed his accusers, then brought him on as an adviser