George Washington: Role Model for Giving Up Power

89:48
is going on here if we could have pulled
the soldiers in the Army and Potomac at
Gettysburg right after Gettysburg and
said what did you accomplish here they
would have talked all about Union that
is what they would have talked about
first to last first to last it was a war
about Union it was a war about Union
that also killed slavery and most white
Americans eventually supported
emancipation but they but not for the
reasons we’d want them to they don’t
care about black people
wish they did they didn’t they saw
emancipation as a tool to defeat the
rebels to punish what they considered
oligarchy slaveholders they didn’t think
slaveholders believed in democracy they
saw them as oligarchs they call them
oligarchs all the time the South is not
what the founders had in mind and they
could work it out in their mind that
even though a lot of the founders are
prominent slaveholders the documents and
the traditions that they bequeath
unionists in the loyal States would have
said the oligarchic slaveholding south
is totally out of step with this they
are inimical to the intent of the
founders and if they succeed in tearing
the nation apart oligarchs everywhere
can point to the United States and say
see we told you people are not capable
of self-government look at them they
can’t even have a presidential election
can’t even do that they rip their nation
apart that’s what’s at stake that’s what
and if the Union gives you those things
what is your obligation as a male a
white male of military age your
obligation is you pick up a musket and
you go do your small R Republican duty
and who is your model there who is the
model for disinterested Republican
service Stuart’s Washington George
Washington didn’t even take a salary
during the American Revolution and
George Washington did something twice
that absolutely blew people’s minds at
the time he didn’t do it once he did it
twice at the end of the Revolutionary
War
he gave up power he was the
Generalissimo they couldn’t believe it
in Europe he what did he show he’s not
Julius Caesar he’s not Oliver Cromwell
he is a man with small our Republican
virtue he went back to Mount Vernon then
he’s made president he would have been
president for life if he wanted to be
FDR had to think about it Washington
didn’t they would have just elected he
until they hauled him out of the
Executive Mansion but he did it again
he gave up power a second time and it
just absolutely mystified most people in
Europe how that could happen
didn’t mystify Americans they said this
is that’s the point
he’s the point he’s the model so in our
own little way each of us were all
members of the third Vermont in our
little way we are emulating George
Washington

What the Times got wrong about kids and phones

strict approaches aimed only at limiting screen time aren’t the most effective. You have to be a role model and engage alongside your kids, a notion that the Times stories largely skirted.

.. But when parents take the time to appreciate and connect with their kids’ digital interests, it can be a site of connection and shared joy”—and a way to mentor kids to discover their own creativity.

 

‘The President Speaks for Himself’

To most people with any awareness of Arizona politics, Mr. Arpaio is an abomination to the rule of law, the principle of equal justice and plain decency.

.. abusing and humiliating them, refusing to stop even after a federal judge told him to, and arresting journalists for reporting on it all.

.. Yet to President Trump, Mr. Arpaio is a role model: a man for whom the “rule of law” means that he can do what he wants when he wants, who humiliates those weaker than him and mocks those who try to constrain him, who evades scrutiny and accountability — in short, a perfect little tyrant.

.. The Arpaio pardon is not only morally reprehensible on its own, it is also in line with Mr. Trump’s broader attitude toward law enforcement. Consider his affection for the Milwaukee County sheriff, David Clarke, an Arpaio in waiting who has called activists in the Black Lives Matter movement “terrorists” and who runs a county jail where inmates have a tendency to die under suspicious circumstances.

.. During the presidential campaign,

  • Mr. Trump endorsed the use of torture on terrorism suspects,
  • encouraged supporters at his rallies to assault protesters and
  • made racially tinged comments about a judge overseeing a case involving Trump University.

In his seven months as president, Mr. Trump has

  • attacked federal judges who ruled against the administration’s travel ban;
  • tried to impede investigations into his allies, including Mr. Arpaio;
  • and exhorted police officers to treat suspects roughly — which earned a quick rebuke from his own Justice Department and police officials around the country.

But this is Donald Trump’s rule of law — a display of personal dominance disconnected from concerns about law and order, equality or the Constitution.

Jennifer Garner’s Good-Girl Image Has Become Her Business

Jennifer Garner hasn’t been a major movie star in years. So why are gossip magazines so invested in her?

.. good girls praise their husbands and their children on social media. They don’t cuss publicly. They have two glasses of wine, max. Good girls might have a job, but nothing in a power position. Good girls have domestic hobbies. Good girls don’t wear earrings that are too big or skirts that are too short or heels that are too high. Good girls use Match.com or eHarmony but never Tinder. Good girls might not be regular churchgoers, but they definitely believe in God. Good girls got him to put a ring on it. Good girls go to bars only in packs of other good girls. Good girls don’t want to talk about that one time they ended up in bed with someone they didn’t know. Good girls aren’t necessarily liberal or conservative, but they don’t think it’s very nice to talk about politics on Facebook. Good girls are legion. They’d never dream of making another woman feel bad about herself. And yet they so often do.

.. Fox argued that the idea of the “good girl” was one of three ways of controlling women’s submissive place in society.

  1. The most extreme and obvious way is through seclusion, in which women are not allowed entrance into the male spheres of society.
  2. The second is protection, in which women are allowed access, but only with a male chaperone or guide.
  3. The third, Fox argued, is normative restriction, in which women are ostensibly free, but still highly controlled — only the control comes from within, through the internalization of how a proper, acceptable, happy woman should act, look, and speak.
  4. And the primary way women have historically and contemporarily restricted themselves is through adherence to the idea of the “good girl.”

.. Girls are also surrounded by suggestions that they self-objectify — but only for show, and never for their own pleasure. Like Garner’s character in Alias, a good girl might put on lingerie to play a character, but only so long as she knows, and everyone else knows, that she remains a good girl beneath.

.. In order to maintain her brand’s viability — and bankability — Garner must continually prove her goodness. When her husband cheats on her with the nanny, she decides to fight for the family. When he continues to date the nanny, the family continues to go on vacations together — because it’s better for the kids. Goodness, at least in its American puritanical form, is all about suffering: The amount you endure, with a smile on your face and a “bless his heart” when asked about your husband’s back tattoo, is a testimony to just how truly good you are.

 .. When she finally filed for divorce after nearly two years of separation, “sources” emphasizedthat she wasn’t ready for dating because Affleck was the love of her life. All of Garner’s decisions — including the one to have Affleck live in their pool house, and then nearby — were purportedly in service to “the important important thing: their children.” See: the invitation for Affleck to accompany Garner when she goes to speak in the Bahamas, because, as one source told Us Weekly, “Jen feels it most beneficial for the kids to have their father present.” When the news broke that Affleck’s affair predated the dissolution of the marriage, she stayed in “mama-bear mode … putting the kids’ happiness first”
.. “She will always appear to be taking the high road,” Lainey Gossip explains. “Pleasant, keeping to herself, working on fitness with a friend.”
.. White female celebrities are a tough sell right now, but Garner — who has managed to market herself as both conservative and liberal, a good girl but not a good girl tainted by relation to Trump — fills a specific need.
.. The company employs a complex algorithm, tested across its titles and others, to determine which celebrities sell magazines at a given moment. They wouldn’t have put Garner on the cover if the data didn’t suggest that she sold. (The cover’s sales were up 18% over the week before).
.. The cover photo was not from Garner and Affleck’s recent trip to the Bahamas, but from a previous trip, two years ago, after they first publicly announced their divorce. Affleck may have accompanied Garner to the Bahamas with their children, but the magazine needed a photographic suggestion of their uncoupled happiness — so they just photoshopped a different color shirt on him and let the headline do the suggestive work.
Garner regularly provides evidence of her good-girl-ness, but when she doesn’t, the magazines and paparazzi and headline writers and “sources” do the work for her.
.. Garner might not be trying to tell other women how to live their lives, or shaming them for their inability to perform a certain type of femininity. But the salience of her image quietly does that work, regardless.