No person -- no politician, pundit, podcaster -- who surveys the events of the past days, weeks, years, and reacts by adopting the mantle of victimhood by lamenting the loss of Trump's social media or their followers, deserves any future role in deciding the course of this nation
The cavalcade of TV hosts, site owners, senators, administration officials, tweeting like they're waiting for a rail car to Treblinka because Twitter might deplatform them, is disgusting beyond any reasonable pale, and that culture of glossing over real inhumanity needs to end.
There are sitting members of Congress whose speeches have been flagged by the ADL; former governors who have defended the Confederate flag; and TV personalities who've reified white supremacy, trying to argue that the *real* fascists are deplatforming them. AFTER an insurrection.
Some of us have spent our entire careers chronicling this growing disease in our culture and the economic and cultural dynamics that feed it, and after it tried to impose rule by blood over 330 million Americans, we critics are still being assailed as the *real* aggressors.
Even the camp on the right that pivoted to anti-Trumpism published books with titles like "Liberal Fascism," *decades ago,* nourishing the same ghoulish illiberalism that led to this week. They praised cops, free markets, and "individual responsibility" as bludgeons to cow others
And now that there's the mildest chance of an accounting, a reckoning, for the forces that they unleashed for fun and profit, they're crying about illiberalism. They should never, ever be taken seriously again, never be paid for their demagoguery, never be booked, never be heeded
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Just an absolutely perplexing decision by Military dot com to publish a repellent apology for mass murder
"Sure he pled guilty and allocuted to going UA to kill all those people, mostly women and children, in their homes in the dead of night, but he insists they were bad dudes" is the sort of bad-faith jingoistic piffle that doesn't deserve a hearing in a reputable publication
Publishers face "both sides" pressure, as Mil dot com did when an astroturf group submitted this as a response to another column. One way to manage this is to publicly tell the "other" side their submission doesn't meet publication standards of facticity, good faith, and decency
Several former American diplomats to Ukraine hold Paul Manafort responsible for a siege against US Marines in Crimea by the pro-Russian partisans that employed him in 2006 -- a siege that undermined the Bush administration's relations with Ukraine. taskandpurpose.com/news/manafort-…
We spoke to several of those Marines back in 2016, when Manafort ran Trump's campaign. fusion.tv/story/338016/t…
I spoke with @maddow about Manafort's employ with the Party of Regions, the Kremlin-connected architects of that attack on the US Marines in Feodosia, back in 2017. msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/…
U.S. DEATHS, COVID, 1 DEC 2020: 2,473
U.S. DEATHS, COVID, 2 DEC 2020: 2,733
U.S. DEATHS, COVID, 3 DEC 2020: 2,706
U.S. DEATHS, COVID, 4 DEC 2020: 2,563
U.S. DEATHS, COVID, 5 DEC 2020: 2,445
Felt weird when the insurance-picked body shop that "fixed" my car after a collision couldn't get the electronic parking brake to work, but after replacing a rear caliper at home it appears they disconnected the parking brake motor to *keep* it from engaging when they got stumped
But this pairs nicely with the lingering mess of impact-glass shards, bad paint match, failure to replace the windshield, heavy overspray marks, disabled optical safety systems, and sudden post-bodyshop tendency of my radio station to change when the steering column turns
Don't use AutoNation Collision, is what I'm saying
Those last two paragraphs about the RNC official in this story about the pardons-bribery scandal, tho wsj.com/articles/bribe…
I do, however, feels it's bizarre to write about Elliott Broidy's central role in this new pay-for-play scandal, though, without *prominently* mentioning Broidy's matter of Michael Cohen, the $1.6 milllion, and the Playboy model nytimes.com/2018/04/13/us/…
Couple notes to add to this wild scoop by @ErinBanco and @swin24, which you absolutely must read, about Pompeo running a "salt the earth" strategy on US-Iran relations: thedailybeast.com/trump-tells-po…
Last night on @MehdiHasanShow, @tparsi and @barbaraslavin1 discussed precisely this possibility: that the Trump admin and its ME allies want to deepen tensions with Iran to prevent them from having any rapport with a Biden admin: