Monday, February 26, 2018

If this is what conservatism has become, count me out. By Max Boot

I’m used to being vilified by the far left as a bloodthirsty neocon warmonger for the Original Sin of having supported the invasion of Iraq along with 72 percent of the American public. It has been a little more surprising to be simultaneously vilified by the far right as a dangerous left-winger.

David Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine accused me of going “full leftist” for acknowledging that racism and sexism remain pervasive problems. Breitbart called me, with ironic quotation marks, the “Washington Post’s ostensibly new ‘conservative’ columnist,” because, among other sins, I support gun control and immigration. American Greatness wrote that I am a “soulless, craven opportunist” whose “brain is broken,” because I compared President Trump’s indifference to the 2016 Russian election assault to a president ignoring 9/11. For the same offense, Jack Posobiec — an Internet troll notorious for pushing the theory that Hillary Clinton was running a child-sex ring out of a Washington pizza parlor — said I was “sick” and a “Russian propagandist.” In the Orwellian language of the far right, someone who wants to combat Russian aggression is a “Russian propagandist,” whereas someone who echoes Russian propaganda is putting “America first.”
In the past I would have been indignant at such attacks and eager to assert my conservative credentials. I spent years writing for conservative publications such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Commentary magazine and working as a foreign policy adviser for three Republican presidential campaigns. Being conservative used to be central to my identity. But now, frankly, I don’t give a damn. I prefer to think of myself as a classical liberal, because “conservative” has become practically synonymous with “Trump lackey.”
Richard Brookhiser, a longtime stalwart at National Review, summed up the Trump effect: “Now the religious Right adores a thrice-married cad and casual liar. But it is not alone. Historians and psychologists of the martial virtues salute the bone-spurred draft-dodger whose Khe Sanh was not catching the clap. Cultural critics who deplored academic fads and slipshod aesthetics explicate a man who has never read a book, not even the ones he has signed. . . . Straussians, after leaving the cave, find themselves in Mar-a-Lago. Econocons put their money on a serial bankrupt.”
Principled conservativism continues to exist, primarily at small journals of opinion, but it is increasingly disconnected from the stuff that thrills the masses. I remember as a high school student in the 1980s attending a lecture at UCLA by William F. Buckley Jr. I was dazzled by his erudition, wit and oratorical skill. Today, young conservatives flock to the boorish and racist performance art of Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. The Conservative Political Action Conference couldn’t find room for critics of Trump, save for the brave and booed Mona Charen, but it did showcase French fascist scion Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.
The career of Dinesh D’Souza is indicative of the downward trajectory of conservatism. He made his name with a well-regarded 1991 book denouncing political correctness and championing liberal education. Then he wrote a widely panned 1995 book claiming that racism was no more, and it was all downhill from there. In 2014 he pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws. Now, as the Daily Beast notes, he has become a conspiratorial crank who has suggested that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was staged by liberals, that Barack Obama is a “gay Muslim” and Michelle Obama is a man and that Adolf Hitler, who sent 50,000 homosexuals to prison, “was NOT anti-gay.” He managed to sink even lower last week by mocking stunned Parkland school-shooting survivors after the Florida legislature defeated a bill to ban assault weapons: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”
It is hard to imagine anything more cruel and heartless, but for a bottom-feeder like D’Souza it’s all in a day’s work. As he wrote in his 2002 book “Letters to a Young Conservative,” “One way to be effective as a conservative is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most, and then keep doing it.” (Thanks to Windsor Mann for the quote.) That, in a nutshell, is the credo of today’s high-profile conservatives: Say anything to “trigger” the “libtards” and “snowflakes.” The dumber and more offensive, the better. Whatever it takes to get on (and stay on) Fox News and land the next book contract!
Naturally, just as drug addicts need bigger doses over time, these outrage artists must be ever more transgressive to get the attention they crave. Coulter’s book titles have gone from accusing Bill Clinton of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” to accusing all liberals of “Treason,” of being “Godless” and even “Demonic.” Her latest assault on the public’s intelligence was called “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!”
If this is what mainstream conservatism has become — and it is — count me out.

End of article

Some reviews of Earin M2 on Amazon (inJapanese)

N
5.0 out of 5 stars
この手のモノでは現時点で最高
February 25, 2018
Color: Black|Verified Purchase
主に前モデルとの比較になります。GALAXY　NOTE8で音楽をきいています

・音の途切れ…解消！！。凄いです、ほぼ無しと言っていいくらい解消されました。100回が1回になったくらい
・音質…前モデルと同等かな、ここはBTとしてはもともと満点だったので、今回も満点。そこらの有線より良い音です。
・左右自動判別・切替…イヤーピースに左右の概念がありません。地味に便利です。
・環境音取り込みモード…凄く便利です。音楽止めたら、マイクで周りの音を拾ってくれます。（調整可）
・デザイン、装着感…前モデルより確実にカッコイイです。フィットします。
・タッチ操作…これも凄く便利。耳をトントンで快適操作。
・充電ケース…前モデルはゴムに頼っていましたが、今回はマグネット。進化を感じますし、使い勝手良好！重量が増したのはマイナスかな
・納期…9月にポチったのに2月になりました。しかし、待っただけの価値は十分ありました。

以上…前モデルの不満点をすべて解決し、便利機能を追加してきました。特に音が途切れないのは本当に快適です。もうずっとEARIN信者でいこうと思います。
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars
良いです。
February 24, 2018
Color: Black|Verified Purchase
昨年8月に注文して先ほどやっと届きました。apt-x接続できる数少ない完全ワイヤレスイヤフォンで、貴重です。音質は素人の感想ですが、apt-x接続はノイズが少なく、M-2が届くまでのつなぎとして使っていたeonfineのイヤフォンより良いです。駅などの人込みでは使用していませんが、家で使っている限りでは左右で途切れることもありません。充電器もコンパクトでカッコ良い。半年待って買って良かったです。
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K
5.0 out of 5 stars大満足！！！
February 23, 2018
Color: Black
接続:1日渋谷で使いました。一度も途切れることはありませんでした。満員電車でも地下鉄でも途切れなかったのでかなりのものだとおもいます！

音質:完全独立型のイヤホンにしてはいいほうだとおもいます。少し音がこもってる感じはありますが、イヤーピースを変えると良くなりました！コンプライだと音がこもるので、シリコンのイヤーピースをオススメします！イヤーピースを変えてもケースに全然収まります！

その他:個人的にはトランスパレンシー機能がとても気に入っています！コンビニなどで音楽を止めて起動するとイヤホンをはずさずに周りの音がハッキリと聞こえるので便利です！ペアリングもとてもはやくケースからとりだして耳にはめたらいつのまにかペアリングが完了しています。

追記:バッテリーの持ちは音楽再生でだいたい3時間半くらいですかね

迷ってる方にはオススメしたい商品です！
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いぬのすけ
5.0 out of 5 stars
利便性は最高、音質はそこそこ ←イヤーチップ交換で結構いい音
February 22, 2018
Color: Black
少々音はこもり気味ですが小型なワイヤレスという点を重視するなら許せる範囲です。※追記あり
数千円レベルのイヤホンよりはいい音しているとは思います。
充電器兼ケースも小型ですし小型軽量に3万出す感じですけど個人的には大満足。
汚い耳の写真を付けてますが、フランケンにもならないのがとても良い感じ。
左右を自動判定してくれるのは地味ですけどとても便利。

遮音性は高め。
屋内ですが尻ポケットにiPhone7を入れて動いても接続は切れません。
タッチでの操作は便利ですけど位置調整で触ってしまうので慣れるまでは鬱陶しいかも。

※追記
シリコン製のイヤーチップ(SpinFit)に変えた所、篭りは解消しかなり良い音になりました。
遮音性は落ちて、低音も控えめになりますがこちらの方が好みです。
ただSpinFitは長く充電器に両方入りませんでしたので根本を少し切りました。
交換でかなり音が変わるのでイヤーチップ遊びが楽しめそうです。
また混雑している東海道線の東京→横浜間の夜の通勤時間帯でも切れませんでした。

America doesn’t need Russia to ruin democracy. It can do it itself. By Anne Applebaum

America doesn’t need Russia to ruin democracy. It can do it itself.

By Anne Applebaum for The Washington Post
6-7 minutes

Enrage the base. Use violent language. Create fear and anxiety. Talk the country down, tell everybody that things are getting worse. Promote division — sort Americans into “us” and “them,” in speech and online. Undermine democracy itself: Hint heavily that the vote is rigged, that the system is broken, that the nation’s ideals are trash. Engage in voter suppression, too: Discourage potential opponents from going to the polls at all. Imply that your rivals are crooks or thieves, and lie about their records.
These were the tactics used by the Russian “Internet Research Agency” during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, brilliantly exposed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s indictment. We’ve all marveled at how clever they were, how precisely they were aimed at American divisions, how they undermined our Constitution. We’ve been startled by the fake Russian Facebook pages, promoting fake groups called “Being Patriotic” or “Blacktivist.” We’re amazed at the Russian Twitter bots, the teams of “supporters” who were actually bits of computer code, cheering on the president and boosting the “popularity” of his fans.
There’s only one thing we’ve forgotten: These were the same tactics used by Donald Trump himself.
From the beginning, Trump’s campaign sought to exploit the inherently divisive properties of social media, to reach carefully targeted groups with different messages. In South Florida, Cubans got angry missives about President Barack Obama’s Cuba policy, warning that Hillary Clinton would continue it. Their Haitian neighbors received stories about Clinton’s supposed failure to help Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake, in an attempt to persuade them not to vote. Meanwhile, people who dislike both Haitians and Cubans were simply told, over and over again, that Trump would build a wall.
Fake followers, often in large numbers, were of course part of Trump’s game plan, just as they are part of most political campaigns in most countries. Provocative trolls and websites that promoted conspiracy theories were a part of the Trump campaign, too. “Pizzagate” — the bizarre theory that Clinton was running a pedophile ring in the basement of a D.C. pizzeria — was not a Russian invention, but it might as well have been. Remember: This was an entirely phony theory, spun out of Clinton campaign emails leaked by Russian hackers that actually inspired an armed man to drive from North Carolina, enter the pizzeria and demand to see the nonexistent children in the nonexistent basement. That bizarre episode was ginned up by Americans, among them conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, a confidant of the president. At the height of the madness, Jones declared, “When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her” in a video that was watched hundreds of thousands of times.
So similar were their methods and language that it is not easy to pull the fake Russian stories and the fake Trump stories apart: Both the Russian trolls and Trump trolls made up wild stories from the hacked emails, which served the same purpose for both. At times, the two moved even closer: After a year of investigations, no one has yet explained why Trump, at some point in the summer of 2016, began repeatedly using stories and slogans that originated on Russian website Sputnik, or even on Russian state television, at his campaign rallies. “Obama created ISIS” and “Hillary will cause World War III.” Did Trump know he was using stories invented by Russian propagandists? Given the frequency of contacts between Trump campaign staff and a wide range of Russians, I find it impossible to believe he did not. But the main point is that in any case, they had become indistinguishable.
From a legal point of view, of course it matters who learned from whom during the U.S. election and how. National security also demands that we respond to the Russian intervention in our democracy and others. Russian support for extremist and anti-democratic political parties all across the West has been growing over the past decade, including funding and other support as well as propaganda. This was considered a fairly niche concern when I first started writing about it a few years ago, and I’m glad it’s now getting the attention it deserves.
Still, let’s be honest: The elimination of Russian influence from U.S. cyberspace would not prevent another Pizzagate. A shutdown of Russian bots will still leave swarms of American bots free to deceive American voters. By its very nature, social media makes disinformation campaigns possible on a larger scale than ever before: Its algorithms encourage deep polarization, and its promise of anonymity opens the door to fraud. By its very nature, American society seems to be susceptible to these campaigns, too. Mueller’s indictment shouldn’t end our investigation into this problem. We should consider it just the beginning.
Read more from Anne Applebaum’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.

Sunday, February 25, 2018

Why the hard-right activists at CPAC love Trump so much By Paul Waldman

Why the hard-right activists at CPAC love Trump so much
By Paul Waldman Email the author
February 23 at 1:24 PM
“We’ve come a long way together,” President Trump told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference today. But near the beginning of his speech, Trump acknowledged that he wasn’t always embraced by the CPAC crowd. As late as 2016, when he pulled out of the conference in the midst of the primary campaign, his appearances generated controversy and debates about whether he was ideologically pure enough to qualify as a real conservative.

“Do you remember,” he asked the crowd, “I started running and people said, ‘Are you sure he’s a conservative?’ I think now we proved that I’m a conservative.”

In his speech, Trump made expansive claims about how he has accomplished more than any president in history and spoke about the shooting in Parkland, Florida, temporarily quieting the crowd before bringing them back to cheers with a vision of armed teachers blowing away attempted mass shooters. As he did at many of his campaign rallies, Trump read the lyrics to “The Snake,” a song about a compassionate woman who takes a snake into her home; the snake then bites her. Trump uses this song to explain why it’s foolish and naive to admit immigrants to America who because of their evil natures will try to kill us.

And when in passing he mentioned his 2016 primary opponent, it prompted chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” It wasn’t the first time the chant had rung out during the conference, which is a bit ironic given that on this very day, Rick Gates would become the third former Trump aide to plead guilty to criminal charges.

The CPAC crowd was unbothered, because at last they have a president who not only supports their agenda but also reflects their entire approach to politics, someone perfectly at home in the carnival atmosphere of extremists and outright nutballs for which CPAC has always been known. Yesterday, longtime GOP consultant John Weaver tweeted:

Weaver was both right and completely wrong. The fact is that CPAC is a far better embodiment of conservatism in the age of Trump than any Heritage Foundation policy forum.

That isn’t to say that the attendees don’t care about traditional conservative ideology. But while they are cheered by the actions this administration has taken on matters like cutting taxes, slashing environmental regulations and undermining the safety net, what really endears Trump to them is as much about style as it is about substance.

It’s partly that Trump mirrors them in his obsession with critics and enemies. The form of hard-right conservatism that dominates the conference is particularly concerned with liberals — how awful they are, how much they should be hated and feared, and what means might be used to infuriate them.

Which is why having a friendly administration in Washington always presents a challenge for the kind of activists who come to CPAC. They draw their strength from opposition (just as liberal activists are drawing strength now), and it can be difficult to generate the passionate anger that feeds your movement when your side is in charge. But through everything he does, Trump brings a furious intensity to what would normally be the most mundane proceedings of the political world, not least because of his constant search for enemies (the news media, immigrants, Democrats) he can demonize and vilify.

But there’s an even more important reason the CPAC crowd loves Trump: He has, so far anyway, succeeded using the political model they’ve advocated for decades.

The hard-right always said that moderation was for losers, and the formula for victory has two parts: pure conservative positions on policy, and scorched-earth political tactics. Which is exactly what Trump did in 2016 and has continued to do.

They’ve realized, as everyone else has (or should have), that Trump’s momentary rhetorical nods to moderation on issues such as DACA are meaningless; when it comes time to actually make policy, he won’t deviate from conservative dogma. Just as important, Trump won in 2016 with a strategy that could have been written by the CPAC attendees: Vilify immigrants, attack Muslims, curse the news media even as it props you up, foment hate and fear, make wild and baseless accusations about your opponent, and even promise to jail her should you win. Don’t pretend that those who disagree with you are people of good will who happen to be mistaken; proclaim that they’re evil. Above all, focus all your attention not on “reaching out” to an increasingly diverse America but on mobilizing the old America, the one where white Christians are the only people who matter.

What was so intoxicating to the hard right wasn’t just that Trump ran that kind of campaign, but that he won with it. As far as they’re concerned, he proved that they were right all along.

And he has continued that strategy in office. Trump has made more than clear that he has little interest in being president of all Americans; whether his base is happy is all that matters. In 2020, he’s going to follow the same strategy to try to get reelected.

I happen to think that lightning won’t strike twice, and that strategy won’t succeed again. But whether it does or doesn’t, it won’t change the minds of conservative activists that it’s the only path to victory. Though they may turn on him if he loses, for now Trump is the leader they’ve always yearned for.

A frighteningly large number of Americans support arming teachers

CPAC has always been ‘out there.’ Now the rest of the GOP is, too.

No wonder Wayne LaPierre is freaking out

Democrats are now firmly behind single-payer. Thanks, Trump and Republicans.

Angry about Trump and gun violence? Do this now, Democrats.

Paul Waldman is a contributor to The Plum Line blog, and a senior writer at The American Prospect. Follow @paulwaldman1

Learning to trust again. By Lee Drutman

Learning to Trust Again
“Objectivity” may never have been the right thing to look for in the media.
By LEE DRUTMAN
February 23, 2018

Illustration by Alex Nabaum
In January, the Knight Foundation issued a new report on “trust, media, and democracy.” It was a long document—71 pages, with eight headings atop 28 bullet points in the “Key Findings” section alone—and took a detailed look at why modern news organizations struggle to “fulfill their democratic responsibilities of informing the public and holding government leaders accountable.” The report identified many contributing factors, but none more than the perception among the public that the nation’s news organizations weren’t being objective. According to a Gallup-Knight survey conducted for the report, fewer than half of all Americans could think of a news source that “reports the news objectively.” Political partisanship had, apparently, so eroded trust that respondents to a “media trust scale” rated their belief in the news at an abysmal 37 out of 100.

Implicit in both the report and its findings was the assumption that journalism should be objective and nonpartisan—and that the current state of affairs is unusual because it lacks both qualities. It represents a nostalgia for the supposed glory days when the press was the hero behind Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and when integrity and independence mattered to journalists and publishers. “If I’ve lost Cronkite,” Lyndon Baines Johnson (reportedly) said, “I’ve lost the country.” These are concerns over which the current president likely does not lose much sleep.

Widespread objective, nonpartisan media did once exist in this country, from roughly the 1950s to the late 1970s. But at the time, that was something new, too. Before that, there was no press other than the partisan press. Newspapers controlled by the Federalists branded Thomas Jefferson an “infidel,” while the Democratic-Republican press called George Washington a “traitor.” Before journalism became a “profession” in the Progressive Era, newspaper editors organized parties and held meetings in their offices. So if the passage of modern objective news is lamentable, it is also not all that surprising. Objective reporting in this country arose from a unique confluence of circumstances: a consolidation of distribution technologies (more network television and fewer local newspapers), broad political consensus and bipartisanship, and a strong professional credo of independence. These factors came together like never before and perhaps never again.

With the advent of television, networks began experimenting with serious news programs, eventually enshrined in the 30-minute network news programs of the 1960s. People watched. Lots of them. What choice did they have? Americans consumed more or less the same news, which made it easier to agree on a single set of facts and narratives. Such consensus, unthinkable today, also stemmed from the existing political dynamics. In the postwar years, Democrats and Republicans were not the attack-oriented and ideologically disciplined teams they have become today but rather two loose, overlapping coalitions, with national programs similar enough to one another’s that they didn’t require entirely different facts and values to justify their existence. Political leaders might quibble with the tone or emphasis of news coverage—Nixon was famous for this—but what, really, could they do about it? The mainstream media served as both information gatekeeper and arbiter of fairness. There was no place else to go.

Equally important was that newspapers underwent a dramatic consolidation around this time. For decades, small cities in the United States had morning and evening newspapers with different political slants. Take Charleston, West Virginia, which published the conservative Daily Mail in the morning and the liberal Gazette in the afternoon. As television and radio expanded, the subscription base of newspapers collapsed, sinking news diversity along with it. Chains like Knight Ridder and McClatchy and Scripps took over the smaller markets, pushing out the other voices and imposing a wide-gauge, politically neutral uniformity. Between 1945 and 1968, the number of cities with two or more daily newspapers declined by more than 60 percent. Circulations at the remaining large publications swelled, and the publishers chose to accommodate subscribers, and of course advertisers, by catering to a broad—and yes, objective—range of political views.

The nonpartisan news consensus began to unravel in the 1980s. Cable television imposed a new kind of pressure on the broadcast networks, forcing them to forgo the serious, fact-based news that was the staple of objective, nonpartisan professional journalism in favor of eye-grabbing sensationalism. In 1969, 58 percent of network news stories had “civic affairs” content; by 1997, that number had fallen to just 36 percent. In 1987, Reagan revoked the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to provide balanced news coverage, and conservative talk radio exploded: Between 1990 and 2009, the number of news or talk radio stations increased more than sixfold, reaching 53 million listeners per week. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News, which became the first partisan national television news network, forever altering the norms and underlying values of the profession. The internet did the rest.

The current wave of media consolidation has not resulted in more objectivity, as anyone who has ventured online for a read knows. Opinion-oriented blogs and full-fledged opinion web sites have supplanted many of the outlets of traditional media in influence, resulting in a sprawling range of partisan content. Professional norms have adapted to the dynamics of the new reality, self-optimizing for the powerful emotions of anger, threat, and outrage. This is great for political engagement—see Fox News—but bad for objectivity.

Is there a way to reverse the trend? Probably not. U.S. politics is now organized largely around national issues, which makes pragmatic compromise harder: People are less likely to give ground on these broad, symbolic issues, which tend to take on an all-or-nothing quality in the service of zero-sum partisan warfare. More important, Republican ideology has evolved from a vague antipathy to academics and intellectuals into an all-out hostility to almost all forms of science and expertise. Note that in the Knight Foundation report, it is Republicans who overwhelmingly—67 percent—claim to see a “great deal” of media bias, while only 26 percent of Democrats do. For people consuming rightward media, truth is not the stuff of fact checks and scientific method. It has an almost religious quality and is a matter of faith and feeling.

Technology will surely change again. Perhaps in a new era of virtual reality, the costs of news production will rise, and so, too, will the barriers to entry, pushing the bloggers and political hotheads out of the game and restoring objectivity. But even if the hot takers depart, opinions in hand, there is no guarantee that something good will replace them: Lack of news diversity could easily translate into centralized, totalitarian power, which may be one reason why the anti-tyranny ethos of the early United States produced a First Amendment that protected the free press.

More likely, Americans will have to learn to live with partisan media, which is the norm in most democracies, just as conflict and contestation are democratic norms (consensus politics deprives voters of meaningful choices). Partisan media can amplify existing partisan divisions—see Fox News yet again—but mostly they reflect them. In a political system divided on fundamental questions of science, religion, and national identity, the question of what responsible media looks like will only get more pressing—but it can’t be answered in terms of “objectivity.”

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and the author of The Business of America is Lobbying.
@leedrutman

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

President Trump is losing control. By Paul Waldman

The Plum Line

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, and the Russia scandal in general, are driving this president around the bend, to the point where he is setting himself against not just the government he leads but also the interests of the United States of America. And everything we’ve seen up to now suggests that it will only get worse.
Multiple reports today from journalists covering the White House paint a picture of a president who spent the weekend seething with rage — at Mueller, at the media, at members of his administration, at the fact that he couldn’t play golf because it would have been unseemly in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting — and lashing out at everyone in sight, up to and including Oprah Winfrey. This is not a man with a firm command of his impulses.
Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker described President Trump’s weekend:

In a string of 10 Twitter messages — which began after 11 p.m. Saturday and ended around noon Sunday, and which included profanity and misspellings — Trump opened a window into his state of mind, even as Trump’s representatives at a global security conference in Germany advised jittery allies to generally ignore the president’s tweets.
Trump’s latest attacks built on remarks last week in which he misrepresented the evidence revealed by Mueller. He tweeted falsely, “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election.” He blamed President Barack Obama’s administration for doing “nothing” to stop the intrusion. Trump rebuked national security adviser H.R. McMaster for publicly saying the evidence of Russian interference was “incontrovertible.”
And he held the FBI responsible for last week’s devastating shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school that left 17 dead. Trump tweeted that the bureau was committing so many resources to the Russia probe that it missed “all of the many signals” about the shooter.

Many people are justifiably upset that the FBI received tips about the Parkland shooting suspect and didn’t follow up. But unless the Miami field office has been secretly running the Russia probe, I’m pretty sure that the agents involved in investigating Russia’s attack on American democracy are not the same ones responsible for fielding tips on troubled teenagers in Florida, as much of a threat as the latter might pose.
But Trump brings everything back to himself. If the FBI made a mistake anywhere, it can only be because it’s out to get Trump. There’s no issue — not even the murder of 17 people, most of them teenagers — that he won’t make about him. That’s why he’s so obsessed with the media, much more than the substance of any issue at hand: It’s the one place where he’s always the story and always the star.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Russia affair is that it would be so easy for Trump to act like something resembling a responsible president of the United States. He could simply say that whatever effect Russian meddling had on the 2016 election, it was unacceptable and the integrity of American elections must not be compromised. Then he could direct someone like Vice President Pence to lead a task force to make recommendations on how to secure elections in the future from both hacking and foreign propaganda efforts. Everyone would say that he’s doing the right thing, and he wouldn’t look so paranoid, dishonest and defensive.
But he can’t bring himself to do that. He obviously believes that if he even admits that Russia attempted to intervene on his behalf, then the legitimacy of his entire presidency will be called into question.
So at a moment when his own appointees atop the nation’s intelligence agencies are urgently warning that Russia is preparing to meddle in the 2018 and 2020 elections, their boss is all but telling them to stand down. No matter what Russia does, Trump won’t ever be willing to deal with the problem, because he’ll always feel that doing so will only validate his critics. Do you think Russian President Vladimir Putin knows that? I suspect he does.
It’s possible that various agencies of the government will, in spite of the president, manage to take reasonably effective steps to minimize the effects of Russian efforts to subvert our elections. But Putin must realize that he needn’t worry about anything that might require presidential approval, such as retaliatory actions aimed at punishing Russia for its assault on American democracy. That, we can be sure, isn’t going to happen as long as Trump is president. You don’t have to believe he’s being blackmailed or that he’s Putin’s puppet; all you need to know is that any admission of the truth of what happened in 2016 is intolerable for him.
We also should understand that whatever effort Russia makes at interfering in the 2018 elections will be happening at the same time as the Mueller investigation is reaching its critical point, which will make Trump even more resistant to doing anything about Russian meddling. As Mueller issues more indictments, Trump is certain to become angrier, more self-absorbed and more insistent that his great victory was pure and unsullied. This is a man who as of yesterday was still tweeting that “the Democrats, lead by their fearless leader, Crooked Hillary Clinton, lost the 2016 election. But wasn’t I a great candidate?”
With each new step Mueller takes, Trump will react by saying that none of it’s true and it’s all a conspiracy against him. When his aides tell him about some new Russian intrusion, he’ll ask not what’s necessary to defend the country, but how the whole thing is going to make him look. As he also tweeted yesterday, “They are laughing their asses off in Moscow.” At least he got that right.

Paul Waldman is a contributor to The Plum Line blog, and a senior writer at The American Prospect.

Don’t blame ‘Washington.’ Blame the GOP. By Catherine Rampell

Dysfunctional Washington refuses to work out its differences to solve problems that matter to Americans.
So say pundits and policy activists, perhaps hoping that diffuse criticism, rather than finger-pointing, will yield a government willing to govern.
But the problem isn’t “Washington.” It isn’t “Congress,” either. The problem is elected officials from a single political party: the GOP.
Republicans in the White House and Congress are the ones standing in the way of helping “dreamers.” They are not merely obstructing gun reform but also rolling back existing gun-control measures.
You’d never know it from the usual “blame Washington” rhetoric, but there are lots of common-sense policy changes, on supposedly unsolvable issues, that large majorities of voters from both parties support.
These include protecting dreamers, the young undocumented immigrants brought here as children. In a recent Quinnipiac poll, 81 percent of Americans, including 68 percent of Republicans, said dreamers should be allowed to stay and eventually apply for citizenship. Other polls have had similar results.
And yet, dreamers are scheduled to start losing their protected status in two weeks.
Who set this in motion? President Trump, a Republican.
And who has blocked a legislative fix? Republican lawmakers. Call it caving or call it compromise, but Democrats have repeatedly ceded ground on their immigration principles — including by agreeing to fund a border wall.
The Senate held three votes last week to help dreamers. All three failed.
The first was on a “clean” proposal that offered dreamers citizenship. Nearly all Democrats voted for it; all but four Republicans voted against it.
There was also a bipartisan “compromise” plan. It included a path to citizenship for dreamers, funding for border security and a prohibition on dreamers sponsoring parents for legal status. That also failed, with nearly all Democrats voting for it and nearly all Republicans against.
Finally there was a plan to protect dreamers in exchange for gutting the legal immigration system, an idea that until recently resided only among the far-right fringe. Only this bill did a majority of Republicans support, even though they knew it was DOA thanks both to Democratic opposition and to defections within their own party.
On guns, too, Congress has been portrayed as generically dysfunctional, always at reasonable-people-can-disagree loggerheads. But here, too, there is widespread agreement among voters — from both parties — on modest gun-control measures.
Nine in 10 Republicans support background checks for all gun buyers. The same share supports preventing the mentally ill from purchasing guns.
Majorities of Republican voters also support banning gun modifications that can make semiautomatic guns more like automatic ones; barring gun purchases by people on terrorist no-fly lists; banning assault-style weapons; and creating a federal database to track gun sales.
Again, that’s what Republican voters want. Those preferences have been ill-served by NRA-funded Republican politicians, however.
Republican lawmakers killed universal background-check bills considered after Sandy Hook and San Bernardino. They voted against reinstating the assault weapons ban five years ago, and not a single Republican is co-sponsoring the same proposal now in the Senate. Last year, Republicans voted to roll back an Obama-era rule that would have made it harder for people with mental illness to buy a gun.
And the Republican House has already passed the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which would force states that prefer stricter gun-control measures to cede their ability to enforce them, states’ rights be damned.
Commentators have been tiptoeing around some of these patterns, calling Congress “deadlocked” and slamming Democrats for being “unwilling to consider compromise.” Even the awe-inspiring Marjory Stoneman Douglas High student survivors, while calling for stronger gun-control measures, have appeared cautious about disproportionately picking on Republicans.
“I was very partisan in the beginning and violently attacking the GOP. I was angry and scared. Now I know that people from every party are supporting us. Everybody is demanding change,” junior Cameron Kasky tweeted when a critic accused him of spouting “Democrat talking points.”
Kasky is, of course, correct that Americans of all parties demand change. But politicians of all parties do not.
Kasky, his classmates and other survivor advocates using language urging nonpartisan “compromise” may understandably fear alienating possible allies in their righteous cause.
That may well be the right calculus in these politically tribal times.
But for the rest of us, obscuring which politicians stand in the way of that elusive “compromise” may instead allow them to keep getting away with it.

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.