President Trump: "It was an illegal investigation. It was started illegally. Everything about it was crooked. Every single thing about it. There were dirty cops. These were bad people." pic.twitter.com/TFnblYAWj5
— CSPAN (@cspan) April 10, 2019
Watch that video. The Donald is growing recognizably more unhinged, more dishonest, more grandiose, by the day; he is not stable.
The New York Times has an editorial today that ought to be required reading.
Advisers like Kellyanne Conway, lawmakers like Senator Lindsey Graham and the former House Speaker Paul Ryan, party apparatchiks like the Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel and a whole host of Trump-friendly media personalities may not personally share the president’s views or policy aims. But their willingness to swallow some of the administration’s cruelest acts renders them complicit. Neither their reputations nor their consciences should be wiped clean.
Correct. As tempting as it is to blame Trump and such as Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen et. al. for the Trump administration’s serial indecencies — those indecencies had enablers. Border personnel, for instance, could have refused to tear apart families — and somebody should have blown the whistle on the failure to keep records the very day that the separations began.
It would be difficult to overstate the contemporary, real-time relevance of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of Eichmann’s trial and his defense that he was “just following orders” that originated way over his pay grade. No. Orders do not relieve you of moral responsibility, any more than the demands of an Invisible Wizard in the sky can relieve you of moral responsibility.
Trump is enabled by ignorance — an astonishing number of Americans appear to know nothing whatever about their own country — and, worse, uncountable failures of character. #Resist.
Dwight McKissic is still annoyed that the Southern Baptist Convention is unable to find suitable minorities for upper-level positions within the denomination.
Five Entities: Southern Baptist Executive Committee (EC), Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS), International Mission Board (IMB), New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS), and Lifeway.
There are five questions that I plan to forward to five SBC entities (listed above), who have hired, or will be hiring a President for each entity, in the months ahead. If I get actual, specific answers to these questions …
The questions ask for hard numbers: How many minority applicants, how many were short-listed, et cetera, et cetera.
I have mixed feelings about this.
I don’t blame McKissic for being unhappy with the denomination’s foot-dragging on ending its ugly history of racism, and I think that at least some of the SBC leadership sincerely wants a more inclusive environment.
But Ma and Pa Kettle out in the pews are never going to welcome minorities, especially here in the south — and that’s the way that is. These are Trump supporters who are ready to crash the entire country because they know they’ve lost the culture wars, and they think blacks and browns and college-educated women already have too much influence.
I dislike head-counts because they inevitably, unavoidably, conduce to quotas and corresponding injustices.
On Sunday evening, news broke that Kirstjen Nielsen was leaving her job as head of the Department of Homeland Security. The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted that according to people close to Nielsen, one reason she hung on as long as she did was because “she was aware how awful life would/will be for her on the outside,” given her role in defending Donald Trump’s policies.
Let’s make it so.
[ … ]
The fact that she evidently didn’t go as far as an erratic and out-of-control Trump wanted is immaterial; she should be a pariah for going as far as she did.
I suspect that highlighted portion is true for many of Trump’s staff, especially Sarah Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, two of the most dishonest and downright ridiculous figures in our public life. Their careers are over — Over. — when Trump leaves office, and it’s hard to imagine they don’t know it. They probably feel they need to do their getting while the getting is good.
Let’s be clear about this, too: There are lines you don’t cross even when the boss says otherwise. We know what happens when people don’t understand that.
More than 2-years ago I made the not-very-daring prediction that Trump’s election would be ruinous for the Evangelical Right. How could it be otherwise when …
Donald Trump is a corrupt madman, and …
Evangelicals adore him.
Thus:
Third, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and that will eventually sink into public consciousness, as in, Wait a minute! What are you saying? The church people gave us that piece of sh*t p***y-grabber?! Yep, they did — and that will be the tale of how the Evangelical Right and ‘movement so-called conservatism’ committed political suicide. They might make some noise, occasionally score a small victory … but they are done. The Trump administration, with its inevitable serial indecencies and corruptions, is their achievement, and they will never live it down.
What do you know? Public scorn for the Evangelical Right just continues growing.
From Esquire:
Amid all the chaos and cruelty, perhaps the one enduring benefit of Donald Trump’s presidency will be The Great Unvarnishing. The acidity of Trump’s public persona — his blatant narcissism and vindictiveness and lack of ethics and selfishness and greed — has worn on the top coat of paint many people have applied to themselves, gradually exposing what lies beneath. It isn’t often pretty. All the pretense has gone straight out the window as the president has seized control of one of our two major political parties while saying the quiet parts out loud.
No one pretends Donald Trump is an ethical person. He and his allies scarcely even pretend he is a president for all Americans. Everyone knows for whom he is the president: The Base, and especially the core Republican constituency of White Evangelical Christians.
Presidential candidate, and out gay, Pete Buttigieg got into the act, too, addressing Vice-Preidence Pence: “If you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me — your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
But wait! Famous deep-thinker Erick Erickson says Buttigieg isn’t much of a Christian at all.
I mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 7, 2019
W-h-e-e-e-e-e — this is fun. And this is why clear-headed grown-ups don’t take theology seriously: There is no way to settle differences because it’s an illogical mish-mash that sums to nonsense.
