Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

It's safe to say that race in America right now is the dividing issue between the two parties.  One party is fine with Trump and his racism, the other party vehemently opposes him according to a new CBS/YouGov poll out this weekend.

Today, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump's handling of race relations and racial issues, but these views – like many others on the president – are dramatically split by partisanship and by race.

Eighty-two percent of blacks disapprove and 73 percent of Hispanics disapprove. Whites are evenly split (49 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove) and views among them fall along party lines.

Americans are divided on how they read the president's intentions on matters of race. Forty-five percent of Americans feel the president tries to treat whites and racial minorities the same, including eight in 10 Republicans who describe his intentions that way. But 51 percent of Americans feel the president tries to put the interests of whites over racial minorities – including more than eight in 10 Democrats who feel this way.

Understand that a majority of Americans believe Trump champions white nationalism, and that this is the intent of his policies and actions.  White voters are split on this of course.

Seventy-three percent of African-Americans feel the president tries to put the interests of whites ahead of minorities, and 58 percent of Hispanics feel the president tries to put whites ahead of minority groups.

Americans who think the president tries to put the interests of whites ahead of minorities overwhelmingly say they disapprove of this.

Views on how the president handles race are connected to overall views of him, particularly for his political opponents. Six in 10 Democrats say the way that the way the president handles race relations matters a lot in their overall opinion of him, and they give him low marks overall. Republicans report little connection: only 18 percent of Republicans say the way that the president handles race relations matters a lot to how they evaluate him.

And this is really the key.  Fewer than one in five Republicans think Trump's handling of race matters.  They are okay with it.

 

Trump Cards, Con't

If you hire nothing but opportunistic liars and dispose of them when their usefulness to you ends, you automatically have plausible deniability when they inevitably turn on you.

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway responded to allegations that President Donald Trump is a racist, saying "none of us would be" at the White House if that were true.

Conway also told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl on "This Week" that in the two years she has worked for Trump, she has “never a single time heard him use a racial slur about anyone.”

Conway was responding to a new book by former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman who describes Trump as a racist and that she has heard him use racial slurs.

“I think that Omarosa unfortunately has undercut her own credibility,” Conway told Karl. “This is somebody who gave a glowing appraisal of Donald Trump the businessman, the star of 'The Apprentice,' the candidate, and indeed the president of the United States. She told your own network, Jon, ABC News, the day after she was fired from the White House that she had resigned … She said she never heard him use the N-word.”

Conway is lying of course about never hearing Trump use a racial slur, but she's actually correct about Omarosa Manigault Newman having no credibility and being a liar as well. "You can't believe the liars calling me a liar now, who lied for me previously when they were working for me, because we all know they are liars" has been Trump's defense for decades, and he knows exactly how to play that game.

It's the same defense Trump's people are using in the Manafort trial this week.

Rick Gates, former associate and protege of Paul Manafort, is testifying in the latter’s trial. Gates has already pleaded guilty to felony charges and is cooperating with the government. Under questioning by the prosecution he admitted committing multiple financial crimes with Manafort, as well as stealing from Manafort himself. On cross examination the defense hammered Gates, forcing him to further admit to his own many frauds and deceptions, including an extramarital affair.

Gates is a liar and a fraud. He’s testifying to help himself out in his own case. He carries a lot of baggage to that witness stand.

And he’s the government’s star witness.

Although that may seem bizarre, it’s a common occurrence in complex criminal cases. Often the best way — and sometimes the only way — for the government to learn what happened is to persuade someone who was on the inside to plead guilty and cooperate. Participants in an illegal enterprise may provide the crucial details necessary to convict others involved — typically those a few rungs higher up the criminal ladder. But such witnesses are subject to withering attacks on their own credibility and present real challenges for the government.

No matter where Mueller goes from here, whatever evidence presented against Trump that is obtained from Manafort or Gates or Michael Flynn for example, Trump and his supporters will scream LIARS and FAKE NEWS and ignore it.

Whether or not our media actually cuts through that noise, I have no idea.

Sunday Long Read: The Forever War

For my generation, the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11 are the defining events of our lives, all the way back to the first Gulf War when I was in high school.  We've always been at war in Baghdad and Kabul it seems, I've known dozens of friends over the years who have served in those wars and some who never came back.  Our Sunday Long Read this week is C.J. Chivers's piece in the NY Times Magazine on the War Eternal, and in 2018, we're still in Afghanistan, still fighting, and we'll never, ever leave.

In early October, the Afghan war will be 17 years old, a milestone that has loomed with grim inevitability as the fighting has continued without a clear exit strategy across three presidential administrations. With this anniversary, prospective recruits born after the terrorist attacks of 2001 will be old enough to enlist. And Afghanistan is not the sole enduring American campaign. The war in Iraq, which started in 2003, has resumed and continues in a different form over the border in Syria, where the American military also has settled into a string of ground outposts without articulating a plan or schedule for a way out. The United States has at various times declared success in its many campaigns — in late 2001; in the spring of 2003; in 2008; in the short-lived withdrawal from Iraq late in 2011; and in its allies’ recapture more recently of the ruins of Ramadi, Falluja, Mosul and Raqqa from the Islamic State, a terrorist organization, formed in the crucible of occupied Iraq, that did not even exist when the wars to defeat terrorism started. And still the wars grind on, with the conflict in Afghanistan on track to be a destination for American soldiers born after it began.

More than three million Americans have served in uniform in these wars. Nearly 7,000 of them have died. Tens of thousands more have been wounded. More are killed or wounded each year, in smaller numbers but often in dreary circumstances, including the fatal attack in July on Cpl. Joseph Maciel by an Afghan soldier — a member of the very forces that the United States has underwritten, trained and equipped, and yet as a matter of necessity and practice now guards itself against.

On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad, with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures, have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command. Astonishingly expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in 2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as if distant war is a presumed government action.

As the costs have grown — whether measured by dollars spent, stature lost or blood shed — the wars’ architects and the commentators supporting them have often been ready with optimistic or airbrushed predictions, each pitched to the latest project or newly appointed general’s plan. According to the bullhorns and depending on the year, America’s military campaigns abroad would satisfy justice, displace tyrants, keep violence away from Western soil, spread democracy, foster development, prevent sectarian war, protect populations, reduce corruption, bolster women’s rights, decrease the international heroin trade, check the influence of extreme religious ideology, create Iraqi and Afghan security forces that would be law-abiding and competent and finally build nations that might peacefully stand on their own in a global world, all while discouraging other would-be despots and terrorists.

Aside from displacing tyrants and leading to the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden, none of this turned out as pitched. Prominent successes were short-lived. New thugs rose where old thugs fell. Corruption and lawlessness remain endemic. An uncountable tally of civilians — many times the number of those who perished in the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001 — were killed. Others were wounded or driven from their homes, first by American action and then by violent social forces American action helped unleash.

The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, each of which the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build and support, are fragile, brutal and uncertain. The nations they struggle to rule harbor large contingents of irregular fighters and terrorists who have been hardened and made savvy, trained by the experience of fighting the American military machine. Much of the infrastructure the United States built with its citizens’ treasure and its troops’ labor lies abandoned. Briefly schools or outposts, many are husks, looted and desolate monuments to forgotten plans. Hundreds of thousands of weapons provided to would-be allies have vanished; an innumerable quantity are on markets or in the hands of Washington’s enemies. Billions of dollars spent creating security partners also deputized pedophiles, torturers and thieves. National police or army units that the Pentagon proclaimed essential to their countries’ futures have disbanded. The Islamic State has sponsored or encouraged terrorist attacks across much of the world — exactly the species of crime the global “war on terror” was supposed to prevent.

Almost two decades after the White House cast American troops as liberators to be welcomed, large swaths of territory where the Pentagon deployed combat forces are under stubborn insurgent influence. Areas once touted as markers of counterinsurgency progress have become no-go zones, regions in which almost no Americans dare tread, save a few journalists and aid workers, or private military contractors or American military and C.I.A. teams.

Across these years, hundreds of thousands of young men and women signed on in good faith and served in the lower and middle ranks. They did not make policy. They lived within it.

Now a second generation enters the war they have known every day since they were born.  It's no way to run a country, I figure, it's a far greater tragedy than Vietnam or Korea ever was for my parents and grandparents, but here we are, still fighting, and there's zero chance we'll ever stop.