This gets to a point I tried to make last night on Special Report (scroll to around 9:05 for the video). My friend Mollie Hemingway is absolutely right when she says there are double standards at work here. The Obama administration got away with things — inappropriately sharing intelligence, influencing investigations, attacking the media — without a fraction of the gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth we’ve seen from the mainstream media, and without inviting a special counsel.
But the essential reason we got a special counsel and a media feeding frenzy is that Trump seems determined to do everything he can to invite chaos and hysteria to his administration.
The idea that the media or some shadowy cabal of “Never Trumpers” forced the president to fire James Comey in a comically incompetent manner is ludicrous. No one was holding Ivanka Trump hostage in a Motel 6 when Donald Trump confessed to Lester Holt that his administration’s explanation for why Comey was fired was a lie or forced Trump to admit that he fired Comey for his handling of the Russia investigation.
.. Now, as someone who’s been writing for two years that Trump was lying when he said he could be presidential — to himself and to everyone else — I’m tempted to ask, “What took you so long?”
If Trump could simply hold a tune — about jobs, tax reform, etc. — for a few months, his poll numbers would creep up, some good policy might get enacted, and, crucially for Trump, he would earn some political capital that might take the bite out of whatever Mueller finds, if he finds anything at all. Alternatively, keeping his fan base loyal but alienating everyone else is a recipe for staying in the mid 30s for the rest of his term and taking down the GOP majority in the House.
.. In Western mathematics, our ways of knowing include formalized reasoning or proof, decontextualization, and algorithmic thinking, leaving little room for those having non-Western mathematical skills and thinking processes.
.. Mathematics tells us that individual is intellectually lacking. Mathematics formulae also differentiate between the classification of a war or a genocide and have been used to trick indigenous peoples out of land and property.
.. It was Rousseau who first, or at least most famously, leveled the indictment against the tyranny of science in his First Discourse.
.. All of this prattle about “algorithmic thinking” is just Romanticism with a fresh coat of paint.
..The model we came up with for distinguishing between war and genocide involves this mysterious craft called “counting.” But it also involves other things such as motives, means, and other aspects of what serious people call historical context. These criteria do not come from math, they come from politics, morality, and reason. All math does is count the dead. It takes human intelligence to place the dead in context. The Spanish Flu killed millions. It wasn’t genocide.
.. Blaming math for what people do with it should disqualify you from teaching math.
It’s also immoral, self-indulgent, and dangerous nonsense. We use math to make vaccines and model how to get them to indigenous peoples. We use math to feed the hungry. Teaching children that Western math is pernicious is the very essence of perniciousness. It is also incandescently stupid. Do Chinese computers use Confucian math?
.. How much head-popping hysteria have we had to put up with about the evils of teaching “creationism”?
Steve Bannon Was Doomed
He was damned the moment he was cast as a puppeteer. That means there’s a puppet in the equation, and no politician is going to accept that designation
.. Trump went so far as to suggest that he was barely acquainted with Bannon before August 2016, when Bannon joined his presidential campaign. Wrong. Trump had been a guest on the radio show that Bannon used to host nine times.
.. He didn’t grapple with who Trump really is. Trump’s allegiances are fickle. His attention flits. His compass is popularity, not any fixed philosophy, certainly not the divisive brand of populism and nationalism that Bannon was trying to enforce.
Bannon insisted on an ideology when Trump cares more about applause
.. He has means for revenge. He also has a history of it.
.. Bannon’s deputy, Stephen Miller, who has been cozying up to Kushner
.. if you want to be the Svengali, you have to play the sycophant. That was a performance beyond Bannon’s ken.
The End Is Nigh
A man, filled with fear and insecurity, created a hatemongering character and followed it out the window. And a woman, filled with fear and insecurity, hunkered down and repeated bad patterns rather than reimagining herself in an open, bold way.
.. From Cohn, he learned about winning, without regard to right and wrong. And from Steinbrenner, he learned about indiscriminately grabbing the limelight.
.. “Donald was not a big night life person, except for Le Club,” said one former Steinbrenner staffer. “He was always very likable in those days. He had a big personality, but he was the youngest of the group. He was never arrogant or full of himself. He always was respectful and pleasant to everybody.”
.. Before he jumped into the presidential race, Trump was seen as bombastic, vulgar, a bit of a buffoon and a cave man, but there was also, as Tina Brown put it, “a cheeky brio.”
.. “he was set up as the Decider and a very discerning judge of character.”
.. If he had stuck with his judicious TV boss persona in a race that fused politics, social media and reality TV, who knows what would have happened?
.. But he created another character for the Republican primaries
.. “He saw the crowd’s adulation and it drove him. He started to get the biggest cheers for saying the most offensive things.
.. “He detached himself from himself. I don’t think he believes in the Muslim ban or half the things he’s saying. It was more, ‘If this gets applause, I do it,’ in a Pavlovian dog kind of way. He just got into this character.
.. And the irony of all this is, he didn’t have to. He could have run as an outsider with a populist message without all the evil and mean components.”
.. Hillary started as a young lawyer on the House Watergate committee, yet she never learned how paranoia can act as an acid on dreams. She couldn’t dismantle her wall of secrecy and defensiveness and level with the public and the press; instead, she built the wall higher and clung to attack dogs like David Brock and Sidney Blumenthal, needing to surround herself with people, no matter how dubious, who would walk the plank for her.
.. The Clintons have earned $230 million over the last 15 years, and if Hillary becomes the first woman president and Bill becomes the first first lad, they will reap many tens of millions more in book money and speeches afterward. So why buckrake on the eve of her campaign with Goldman Sachs speeches?
.. The problem with Donald Trump is: We don’t know which of the characters he has created he would bring to the Oval Office.
The trouble with Hillary Clinton is: We do know. Nobody gets less paranoid in the White House.
Trump punks the media
The Republican nominee scores free airtime to promote his new hotel and veterans’ endorsements after promising an announcement on his birther obsession.
The media took the bait. The cable networks offered wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s plane taxiing at Reagan National Airport (cozying near Hillary Clinton’s own “Stronger Together” jet). With Trump running late for the 10 a.m. news conference, the image of an empty podium was flashed for more than an hour. And when Trump finally did appear, he got more than 20 minutes of free airtime promoting his new Washington hotel and showcasing endorsements from Medal of Honor recipients.
Only after that extended infomercial did Trump deliver the goods — a speedy statement that Obama was indeed born in the United States, coupled with a blatantly false accusation that Hillary Clinton started the conspiracy to begin with.
The media got punked.
“It’s hard to imagine this as anything other than a political Rick-roll,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper vented on air after Trump’s hotel event. His colleague John King followed up with, “We just got played.”.. “He opened the event making a plug for his hotel, he has a new hotel so in a sense, you could say he was leveraging five years of birther conspiracy to promote his hotel. Now we have been listening to veterans and military officials praising Donald Trump. He has lined up quite a bit of support onstage.”
.. It was a cunning move on Trump’s part — entice the media with a topic that was dominating the news cycle, package it with a promotion for his brand new hotel, and then add in bona fide military heroes and Medal of Honor recipients, for whom cutting away from quickly could be viewed as disrespectful.
.. but there’s the competing feeling that news organizations have almost let too much slide to have any bargaining power at this point,”
.. “The TV pool traditionally doesn’t participate in events that our reporters or producers are not allowed to attend.”
.. “Right now, Trump has it all,” the Washington Post’s Robert Costa said on MSNBC on Friday morning. “He has his property debuting in D.C. He’s on every network. He’s at the center.”