Bret Stephens and Frank Bruni with Thane Rosenbaum

15:33
viewers and listeners you know one
lesson I learned when I was the editor
of The Jerusalem Post is that the most
stereotyped people in the world and I by
stereotype people I don’t mean Jews or
Palestinians I mean this kind of Jew or
that kind of Palestinian they’re always
going to font they’re always going to
surprise you if you actually practice
journalism you will
go and meet settlers who are also like
hippie stoners and you know you think oh
the settlers they’re all these
right-wing fanatics but there’s always a
flip side you will meet Palestinians
including Palestinians affiliated with
radical organizations that also have
their surprises and journalism at its
best always has to make large allowances
for the capacity to be surprised by the
people that you are otherwise most eager
to stereotype I think where we go wrong
in big ways is when we fall prey to
those stereotypes I mean why was for
instance the the story about UVA the
rape hoax at UVA why was that so readily
believed because so many prejudices that
we had or at least segments of the media
had about white entitled frat kids at
UVA behaving in certain ways all of them
seem to be confirmed by that by that
narrative so people jumped on and said
well this has got to be right because
this is the classic the classic UVA frat
boy and this is how you might expect
they would behave and of course this
turned out to be one of the big egg on
your faces story that not only nevermind
damaged the journalists in question or
Rolling Stone magazine I think damaged
the profession as a whole and it also by
the way damaged victims of rape because
they would always have to live under the
burden well you never know because there
was that there was that UVA story and I
think this is this is true not simply as
journalists but as human beings you
always have to look at someone and say
I’m expecting this I have to I have to
there has to be some large allowance in
my mind that they will not be the people
who will conform to the stereotype that
I had about them and I might add going
to the times destroyed a great many
stereotypes I had harbored when I was at
The Wall Street Journal good about the
kind of people are at the times good you
know and to add to what Brett’s saying I
mean some of the most stereotyped some
of the most stereotyped people in
America by journalists are Trump voters
and
some of the stereotypes hold true but
some Donen I mean I remember him it’s
one of the reasons why it’s important to
get out there I remember going to an
early Trump rally in South Carolina just
before its primary and spending a couple
of hours there interviewing the voters
who’d come and each of those people
their take on reality wasn’t the same as
mine it wouldn’t have been the same as
Brett Caesar but each of them had a
specific and thought out reason why they
found Donald Trump attractive and none
of those reasons fit neatly into the
stereotype of Trump voters and I think I
mean I’ve always been under the under
the position if we want to under if we
want to get beyond Donald Trump we have
to understand in a real way and not a
superficial stereotypical way what made
him so appealing to so many voters
because we’re not going to reach those
voters with someone else unless we
understand that well sorry Brett you may
remember that when you were on Bill
Maher a year ago you responded to this
point exactly that there is a kind of
liberal blue state prejudice about a
Trump voter and that in fact there’s
other ways to see them and understand
him and there’s the very point that
Frank is making I’m gonna get back to
that Innes and later hopefully I want to
talk about what you think that the cause
of Trump how he became our president
we’ll get to that in a moment but I want

to first go back since we talked about
two of your columns I want to get to one
of yours that just came out today wasn’t
actually a column it was a much more
extended essay and and wanted I think he
very frequently read and because this is
the Y M H a people in this room might
care about this essay in particular and
this is really about progressive
liberalism and the politics that is not
unfamiliar to Frank and its obsession
with Israel the deemed Immunization
deluded the legitimacy of Israel and how
that oftentimes this kind of woke nests
progressiveness also slides into
anti-semitism and why is it that those
people who are who feel most strongly

The Kids Aren’t All Right

And why should they be?

One of the problems with elite universities is that they accustom students to a sense of prestige that’s both superficial and inhibits a certain kind of risk-taking and genuine nonconformity. Obviously that’s not universally true but it is hard to move off the beaten path when the one before you seems well-lit and glittering. It’s also a truism that failure is life’s great teacher, and whatever else the beneficiaries of the cheating may get, they are being deprived of something ultimately more valuable.

The larger question is whether this scandal exposes how rotten the entire enterprise of higher education has become. I personally think the four-year college model is crazy — it should be three years, as it is in England. And that’s just for starters. We need to reinvent the model root-to-branch. That’s one of the reasons I’m against making college available to all: You are merely funneling more students into a system of increasingly dubious value.

Gail: Kids who can’t afford to go to college and who would benefit from college should get government funding. But the loan system is a different question. It’s worrisome. I’ve always wondered if high school graduates should have to work a year or two — volunteer programs count — before they can commit to an expensive education.

Bret: Agree completely. Frankly every 18-year-old at any level of income would benefit from a year of service of some sort. I know I would have, and I’d love to see my children take a gap year or two before college.

Gail: Our current government loan program is terrible. It helps schools grow by building up unnecessary programs and of course encourages kids to take out huge debt they’ll be dragging around for half their lives. The for-profit schools are the most egregious offenders. Many of them rake in a ton of money by making promises they can’t deliver on — great high-paying jobs that never materialize. I’m not sure students should even be able to get federal loans for for-profit schools. What do you think?

Bret: I don’t share your profound skepticism regarding for-profit schools, but I think you’re right on this point. The federal government should not be indirectly subsidizing for-profit entities, period, especially when they have a questionable track record of achieving the results they promise. Then again, I’m skeptical of federal student loans in general, because I think they help drive up the cost of tuition, exacerbating the problem they’re intended to solve.

.. Gail: What we need is so simple — strong background checks on gun purchases, a ban on rapid-fire weapons that make it easy to mow down dozens of people. But I wonder sometimes if we could up the ante. Require that everybody who buys a gun has to be able to demonstrate both an understanding of gun safety and a minimal level of marksmanship. The one thing we don’t talk about is how inept many gun owners are. You need a decent amount of skill to be able to hit a target, particularly if you’re nervous or on the move. Unless, of course, your target is a mass of people at prayer.

.. Bret: None. And it is particularly disappointing to see a Republican like Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, a so-called constitutional conservative, vote with the president just weeks after he delivered a statement denouncing the national-emergency declaration. It means that Republicans have no higher principle than their own political self-preservation.

So now it will be up to the Supreme Court to act to defend the separation of powers. Don’t be surprised if Chief Justice John Roberts or another conservative justice delivers the majority opinion against the president, along with the court’s liberal wing. As we both know, the Trump presidency makes for strange bedfellows.

 

Time for Netanyahu to Go

Israel’s prime minister increasingly resembles America’s 37th president.

When the final chapter on Benjamin Netanyahu’s political life is written — and it may be a long time from now — he is likely to go down as the Richard Nixon of Israel: politically cunning, strategically canny, toxically flawed.

The flaws came further to light on Thursday when Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced that he would indict the prime minister on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Netanyahu called the inquiry “a witch hunt” and accused Mandelblit of being “weak,” sounding (surely not by coincidence) just like Donald Trump on the subject of Jeff Sessions and the Russia investigation.

Israeli law allows Netanyahu to contest the indictment through a hearing, a process that could take as long as a year. He has no intention of resigning and hopes to win a fifth term when elections are held on April 9.

Perhaps he will. He shouldn’t.

That’s not because Netanyahu is necessarily guilty, or guilty of much. Previous Israeli leaders, including Yitzhak Rabin, have been subject to legal inquests that hinge on relatively trivial crimes. The charges against Netanyahu — the most serious of which involves the claim that he helped a businessman obtain favorable regulatory decisions in exchange for positive media coverage — are still far from conclusive.

Netanyahu’s solution has been to scrounge for votes on the farther — and farthest — right. A few of those votes will come from Otzma Yehudit (or “Jewish Power”), a racist party descended from Rabbi Meir Kahane’s outlawed Kach Party. Its leader, Michael Ben-Ari, was denied a United States visa because Washington rightly considers Kach a terrorist organization. If Netanyahu manages to cobble together a ruling coalition, Ben-Ari could become a power broker within it.

That alone is reason enough to want to see Netanyahu given the boot. Add to the list his

Netanyahu is a man for whom no moral consideration comes before political interest and whose chief political interest is himself. He is a cynic wrapped in an ideology inside a scheme.

Nor is the blight simply moral. Jews the world over face a swelling and increasingly deadly tide of anti-Semitism, while Zionism has become a dirty word in left-wing circles. To have an Israeli prime minister lend credence to the slur that Zionism is a form of racism by prospectively bringing undoubted racists into his coalition is simply unforgivable. It emboldens the progressive assault on Israel. It leaves its defenders embarrassed and perplexed.

Most seriously, it weakens a central element in the defense of Israel and the Jews: moral self-confidence. Anti-Israel slanders may abound, but they will do little to hurt the state if a majority of Israelis understand they have no serious foundation in truth. Netanyahu’s behavior jeopardizes that confidence.

The Bezos Story Is Big

And it’s got a little bit of everything.

Yes, Bezos has dealt with it brilliantly. It helps — how shall I put this delicately? — that his pride got the better of his embarrassment, and that there was nothing embarrassing about his pride.

.. It also helps that Bezos has the financial means and journalistic tools to get to the bottom of the hacking. I don’t know if the government did the hacking — the truth is probably prosaic, but Pecker’s friendship with Trump raises an eyebrow — but if it did it would be a scandal for the ages.

.. Even now the connections are tantalizing. Why is Pecker “apoplectic” about Bezos’ investigation into who leaked the story to the Enquirer and whether the leak was politically motivated? And how might the potential withdrawal of legal immunity that Pecker obtained last year in connection with his handling of Trump’s hush money payments to his mistresses affect the Southern District’s investigation of Trump’s probable violations of campaign-finance laws?

Going forward, I think we need to start describing all of these ties as the Axis of Pecker. Just saying.

.. But I think context and intention matter. Billy Crystal did “blackface” for a Sammy Davis Jr. impression, and I don’t think Crystal is racist in any respect. Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman, to name a few boldface names, have all done blackface. If we’re going to start excommunicating people from public life for this, we’re going to destroy a lot of people who almost surely intended no harm.

Gail: Yeah, but I don’t remember Billy Crystal doing his act with a guy wearing a sheet.

Bret: That’s true. And I think that’s in a different league in terms of offensiveness. But again, I think we need to better understand the context, whether it was connected to a pattern of behavior, and whether it was ever repeated. And again, we are talking about an incident from 35 years ago followed by an admirable life without any hint of racial bias.

Right now, Northam’s real moral jeopardy is that he has contradicted himself and is doing a duck-and-cover move. He has a good opportunity to rise above it, first by clarifying how exactly that photo ended up on his yearbook page — and whether he’s one of the people in the picture, as he now claims he isn’t — and then by explaining why the casual racism of a past generation mustn’t be communicated to the present.

.. There was a time when I thought term limits were a great idea. But I’ve cooled on it. When you’ve got a politician who isn’t going to be able to run for re-election, you’ve got a politician spending a whole lot of time planning how to get the next job. Plus you get a lot of … strange people. Rest my case.

.. I’m as eager as anyone to see what’s in Trump’s tax returns. But how do Democrats handle this to make sure it doesn’t redound to Trump’s political benefit?

.. You mean how do they avoid having so many people investigating him the public begins to feel sorry for him?

.. I mean, going down every rabbit hole means that you are going to come up empty many times. That can do as much to obscure criminal behavior as it can to expose it, and to desensitize the public to the significance of truly scandalous disclosures when they are merely bobbing in the sea with not-so-scandalous ones.

.. It doesn’t help when cable TV is obsessing about this stuff 24/7. I think the investigations would be better helped if news about them came out only once every other week, with Representative Adam Schiff or someone like him saying: Here’s the stuff we’ve learned, here’s why it matters, here’s what we’re going to look into next and here’s why.

Gail: Well, cable TV does cover other stuff — I’m just sitting here watching CNN cover climate change in Louisiana. But the producers know what the public is obsessing about, and so do politicians. When they see their constituents these days, the first question a lot of them get isn’t “How’s the infrastructure bill doing?” It’s “What are you going to do about Trump?”

.. I think Trump’s calculation is that he can do a Groundhog’s Day in reverse: That is, shut down the government again and again, and behave worse with each successive iteration. This rallies his base while, at some point a majority of Americans will say, “Just give him his darn wall.” Or so he figures. But we’ll have to see how he reacts to the “agreement in principle” that the House and Senate seem to have reached.

The alternative narrative, and the more convincing one, is that Trump has continued to play games with the livelihoods of American workers for the sake of a bit of fencing that solves nothing except his own political problems.

One thing that is becoming clear is the G.O.P. campaign theme for 2020. They are going to claim Democrats are the party of

  • socialism,
  • open borders,
  • nationalized health care, and an
  • environmentalist agenda that will wind up outlawing
    • air travel and
    • steaks and maybe even
    • milk, too.

The Republicans are indeed ranting now about the Green New Deal, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats put forward. A.O.C. did mention eliminating “emissions from cows or air travel,” but — contrary to Trump’s swipes — that was a rather lighthearted description of a perfect future rather than a part of the plan.

And Trump has been playing the socialism card, but I don’t think it’s going to work. There are a number of Democrats who’d like to move toward a society that offers health care for everyone, free college tuition for those who can’t afford to pay, and federal work programs for the unemployed — paid for by much higher taxes on the rich. Most Americans want the same things. If the Democrats are smart about the way they present the programs, things should be fine.

I am aware, Bret, that this sort of talk causes you great pain. That’s why we’re in different political camps.

.. It causes me great pain because I’m attached to no party: I can’t support the Trumpian G.O.P. but I can’t support the Democrats, either, as long as they’re repudiating their belief in traditional liberalism for the sake of an anticapitalist, ruinously expensive policy agenda. I would love to hear a Democrat say, as Hillary Clinton did, we are not Denmark! And I fear the Democrats’ new progressivism will so turn off voters that they’ll re-elect Trump as the better of two bad alternatives.

All of which is to say, we’ll have plenty to converse about in the months ahead. And maybe we might even disagree a bit more.

Gail: Amen.