Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, February 6, 2021
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53 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Yeah. Sure. No connection at all. Consider my Fruede to thoroughly schadened.
Pretty powerful moment.
Biden Bars Trump From Receiving Intelligence Briefings, Citing ‘Erratic Behavior’
That’s gonna sting. In addition to worrying about him shooting his mouth off about what he
readwas told was in the intel, I’d be worried about the security of the briefing documents at Mar-a-Lardo.This is what you get when you put Floriduh Man in charge.
@OzarkHillbilly:
No kidding. Who would be dumb and gullible enough to believe a network would have “as part of…planned changes” canceling its highest-rated program?
*remembers the political affiliation of Fox News’ audience*
Oh, well. Carry on.
Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki has embraced normalcy – is it working?
Boring is good.
@sam:
Jim Brown 32 has told us that these briefings aren’t a big deal, and I believe him, but I still feel better knowing they’re out of Trump’s hands. I trust Trump’s predecessors; I don’t trust Trump with even relatively innocuous information.
And I have to confess that I’m spiteful enough to take pleasure in Trump being thwarted.
@CSK: Up until now, he probably didn’t even want them.
@Jax:
He’d want them because his predecessors got them.
Even if he got them, I doubt he’d bother to read them, since he can’t/won’t read. But who knows who else would get their hands on them?
@sam:
A lost opportunity for our intelligence community to spread disinformation…
@Jax:
@CSK:
My understanding is that he paid little attention to them.
But he’s beholden to his nature. If you tell him he can’t have something he doesn’t even want, like any other toddler he’ll now demand it.
Hm. Maybe we should get Biden to tell him he cannot have any cyanide?
@CSK: It’s a legitimacy issue as well, how is the Great Negotiator going to peddle his schtick to foreign entities and officials if he has been “cut off” from intel briefs.
Hell, Soros wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole now! /s
@Sleeping Dog:
Yes. It would be interesting if they sent Trump false briefings and then tracked where the information appeared.
@Kathy:
As Rick Wilson pointed out, this prevents Jared from monetizing the briefings.
@owen:
I wonder how much credence Merkel, Macron, Johnson et al. put in anything he told them even when he was president.
@CSK:..I wonder how much credence Merkel, Macron, Johnson et al. put in anything he told them even when he was president.
A tiny amount.
@Mister Bluster:
I love that picture. A roomful of exasperated adults trying to get a toddler to eat his broccoli.
I’ve seen a meme of it with Trump sitting in a high chair with a bowl of cereal inverted on his head. That was probably the thought bubble over the heads of all the grown-ups.
@sam: As a private citizen, could Trump even get a security clearance to receive these briefings. There were a lot a questionable grantings of clearance in his administration.
@CSK: True, but I was thinking more along the lines of Vlad Putin, Rod Duterte, Al Lukashenko, etc.
@Owen:
He was their useful fool/tool. I think Putin in particular found him convenient for screwing up things. I certainly don’t think Putin regarded Trump as a heavyweight on the world stage. Trump was someone to be manipulated, not to be taken either seriously or literally.
An actual Republican with a spine and a sense of right and wrong. Ben Sasse unloaded on what he describes as a “cult of personality.”
‘The weird worship of one dude.”
“Personality cults aren’t conservative.”
“Acting like politics is a religion? Isn’t conservative.”
Ben Sasse, conservative Nebraskan and I agree: this is a cult of personality and it is quasi-religious.
@OzarkHillbilly: Good. As long as this Country takes stock in skin color we can talk about colorblind society to the cows come home–non white people will always stand out.
I’ve thought about this recently and I do believe its possible to shift a portion the weight of the conversation on “race” from skin color to ethnicity. We could start this shift by a simple change to Gov’t and commercial sector forms. We could build a framework that acknowledges a society of 1 race “homosapiens”–but multiple ethnicities i.e. hispanic-americans, african-americans, native-americans etc. I would try to come up with something better than european-americans for white people. Too loaded a term with the history of colonization and all.
While admittedly this is only a cosmetic change–I think it sets the conditions for a broader shift as young people grow up in the new framework. We are conditioned to believe “race” is a different in kind where ethnicity can be passed as a difference in degree.
@sam: Probably would not have done this because of the precedent. POTUS is the original classifier of all Intel in USG so he gets to control the briefing Trump gets. I would have essentially only allowed him Open Source intelligence in his brief that could readily be found at NPR, CNN, and AP.
It would have been a good troll as well.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Woah! Woah! This POS is the product of Georgia. Florida has plenty of nuts but this one isn’t from our cornucopia.
@CSK: I don’t know for certain but I’d be surprised if former-POTUS’ got the same version of the PDB that the sitting POTUS gets. If they did, Biden’s action would actual set a good precedent. Need to know is need to know. The purpose of intel is to empower the decision-maker to make the best possible next move. Ex POTUS is out of the seat and not making decisions–so no need for Intel.
As a courtesy, I think it would be appropriate for them to receive a carve out, heavily Open Source report with some milquetoast assessments from DNI. Trump I would troll with an Open Source content brief pulled from NPR.com. He’d get his brief. I’d even have them include some coloring sheets.
@Michael Reynolds:
You could have guessed this, but the Trumpkins absolutely loathe Sasse. “Quisling” is one of their politer terms for him.
Actually, the insane hatred they bear for Sasse simply serves as an illustration of how cultish the Trumpkins are. No criticism of their idol, however mild, will be tolerated.
@Michael Reynolds: I love that the Nebraska Republican poobahs are called the State Central Committee. Right out of Stalin era Soviet Union.
Substituting for vacationing (???) Luddite, we have this excerpt from the annals of jurisprudence–or jurisimprudence as the case may be:
Judge Trevor McFadden, a 42-year-old appointed to the bench by Donald Trump, has decided that Jenny Cudd gets to leave custody pending trial for a “work-related bonding retreat,” as reported by Buzzfeed’s Zoe Tillman who is all over these riot hearings. You know, Black defendants rounded up for vaguely matching the description of someone who knew someone who once mentioned marijuana should really try the “but what about my vacation” excuse. I’m sure it will be applied fairly! MAGA! And long live the American justice system, where if you have the right lawyer (or right judge as the case may be) you get the best outcomes of anywhere.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Well, Ms. Cudd stoutly maintains that she “broke no law,” so what the hell. Right?
File under “O Snap: Epic”
https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/1328880922272309249
Whoops, I see Jordan has taken it down and that’s the wrong link.
Here’s a copy:
http://forums.sailinganarchy.com/uploads/monthly_2021_02/076C0EC2-93FD-4936-9526-25A70A6F9AE4.jpeg.e1900e8a0d84c648c007dd67309d473a.jpeg
These soldiers singing inside the Library of Congress will give you chills The acoustics kinda suck but it’s pretty cool.
@Michael Reynolds: For what it’s worth, the Nebraska Republican Party is preparing to censure Sen. Sasse.
@dazedandconfused: Some people should just stfu.
@Scott:
No, he likely could not. He owes too much money. Because money is one of the top motivators of disclosing intelligence, he’d be considered high risk and would be unlikely to be granted a security clearance.
@Jen:
True, but at the POTUS level security clearances are moot. A POTUS has complete control of over that process. He can issue one to anyone. He can declassify anything and everything too.
This appears to be Trump click bait to me. The issue was generated entirely by a Biden’s response to a question crafted solely for the purpose of getting a negative quote about Trump from Biden. Trump was cut off the moment he was no longer POTUS, and as Trump revels in being despised by Biden, there is no reason to expect that Trump has asked Biden for access. I suspect the press’s desire for Trump-bait will be a distraction for Biden for some time to come.
@Jim Brown 32: Given CRISPR technology I’ve been wondering what would happen if it turns out skin or hair color is changeable? What effect would it have on racism if anyone could be any color they wanted? I’m not naive enough to think it would end racism, rather I’m just wondering at how it would affect society and individuals.
@MarkedMan:
It has already been done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_LeJfn_qW0
@MarkedMan: I am sooooo gonna be a rich, dark velvet purple. I’ll keep my hair, it’s pretty much all white, it’ll look great with the purple. 😉
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Nope, no vacationing here, busy girding my loins for another evening in the wunnaful, a-wunnaful world of consumer retail in the day of Covid. Also, tried 3x to get the vacation tale up, then gave up and passed it on to one whose Google-fu is much greater than mine. Thanks for posting it!
@Jax: When my hair grew back after chemo, I died the stubble a vibrant electric blue before going into oncology. When the nurse complimented me on my stylish coif, I innocently replied, “I dunno, it just grew back this way.” Stunned silence and worried looks followed, until they remembered I was the guy who’d wear a rubber clown nose and a panda mask to weekly chemo rounds. Purple will rock!
@Jim Brown 32:
That I think was part of the basis for the rise of the term African American in the first place–it was meant to shift the focus from color to ancestry (and shared cultural heritage, to an extent). One of the problems, though (which these movements for linguistic change repeatedly fail to grasp) is that changing terminology doesn’t do much to change the way people think. It’s the equivalent of trying to fix a car with a paint job. Whether you say African American or black or Black or something else, everyone’s thinking the same thing.
And keep in mind that our “conversation” over race has always been about more than skin color–think of light-skinned blacks or the entire way “Hispanic” is seen as a racial category.
@flat earth luddite:
I like your style.
@Kylopod:
As are “Jewish” and “Arab”, and as were “Irish” and [insert offensive term for southern Europeans here] until quite recently. (I’m pretty sure that, for my mother-in-law, “Irish” is still a racial descriptor.)
@dazedandconfused: Well, you know what they say about what happens to fighters who lead with their chin.
@dazedandconfused: The link your first post went to works just fine for the purpose, too. 😛
@DrDaveT:
What race does she think the Irish are?
I ask because I spent most of my life in Massachusetts, where when I was young the WASP contempt for Hibernians was still prevalent. Later in life, I had a colleague from Cincinnati whose father ordered her not to play with the Irish-surnamed children down the street.
@MarkedMan: There is no reason to think this can’t be done. My view is that Racism is simply the Western European and American form of factionalism. Humans simply are hierarchical social beings. We will simply find something else to build an “out group” from.
There are already signs this is already happening. I worked with Trumpies that have Ben Carson calendars and Allen West mugs in their cubicle. They adore these guys. It wouldn’t be unfair to say its not they they don’t like Black people–its just that they don’t like Black people that vote for Democrats. Lindsey G said as much in his debate–Black people are welcome anywhere in South Carolina as long as they are Republicans.
Then we have outgroups forming around those that have credentials and those that don’t–those that are educated and those not–those that live in the city and rural dwellers, etc. It would be interesting to see if designer children catches on–one of the joys of parenthood (at least to me) is the wonder of children that look like little versions of you or other family members.
@CSK:
Irish. Which, in her mind, is not “like us”.
@Jim Brown 32: when my daughter and I traveled to Europe last year, we briefly had to stop at a health clinic for her in the UK. She was filling out the intake form and came to the section on race/ethnicity. The choices included: white-British, white-Irish, white-other European; black-British, black-African, black-Caribbean; and so forth. My daughter looked at me bewildered and asked which box she should check. I traced my finger across the form and tapped on the word, “other.”
It really drove home for me how much race and ethnicity designations are socially derived and context-specific.
@Monala:
–Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era (2003)
@CSK:
Well, the panda mask (and several others) were gifts from Cracker, who was teaching in S Korea at the time. Far from KN95, but definitely uplifting of my morale. OTOH, I frequently wear really blinding aloha shirts, so my sense of style is… unusual?
@Jim Brown 32:
Neanderthal-American? We did pick up Neanderthal DNA after (most of) our ancestors left Africa. I’ve been eagerly waiting for white supremacists to start calling themselves Neanderthal Supremacists.
The Neanderthals weren’t quite a different species, as at least some of the Sapien-Neanderthal offspring were able to breed with the Sapiens.
I guess stressing the Neanderthal interbreeding kind of goes right against this, because that really seems like a difference in kind.
I don’t really think that papering over the differences between (insert generic word for semi-distinctive, overlapping genetic subgroup of humans lacking other meanings — I give up, let’s just say floofledorff) floofledorffs can work in this country. When one grouping of floofledorffs has been systemically oppressed for hundreds of years, and others have been exterminated, and still others are being held off with an ineffective wall… saying “but we’re all the same deep down inside” isn’t going to do it.
We have to embrace the other floofledorffs and recognize the different cultures and experiences that they bring (as well as different degrees of Neanderthal DNA and other bits of genetic drift) before we can get to “were all basically the same, except these white people look terrible in bright yellow, and huh, that group over there has some other random difference, and that one, but close enough.”
African-American is a uniquely American mix of the many ethnicities of Africa mixed with Neanderthal-Americans, and various other ethnicities at the edges. And there’s a very different culture. An American culture, which has faced adversity and struggle, and has created amazing art including basically all American music, plus 150 uses for the peanut.
Where people migrated out of Africa voluntarily, they’ve kept more of their culture for more generations. Even recent emigres here — Somali-Americans have as much to do with African-Americans as Vietnamese-Americans have to do with Japanese-Americans. Ignorant Neanderthal-Americans might group them with the same racial slur, but they’re very different.
The different floofledorfs are different in kind. Barack Obama was not going to be the same kind of President as Jimmy Carter, despite similarities in policy. And that shouldn’t be threatening.
And the Joe Biden who spent 8 years working with Barack Obama is a very different man than the Joe Biden who ran in 2008. I think he’s a better man. And I think recognizing and embracing those differences can make all of us better people — individually and as a country.
Finally, as my rambling needs to come to and end, I think that the pendulum that swings the focus between “we’re all the same deep down” and “celebrate the differences” always swings back to “we’re all the same deep down” when white folk start getting nervous about too much change too fast. Well, shit’s gotta change and I think it’s a bad time to take a breather.
But that’s easy for my lily-white Neanderthal ass to say.
@Gustopher:
The current scientific consensus is that they were. Being separate species doesn’t automatically mean “impossible ever to interbreed.” There are many organisms classified as separate species that can and do interbreed on occasion.
The dumbest man on the internet has been permanently suspended from Twitter: