Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 5:06 PM, for 9h 55m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1948, a Hindu nationalist assassinates Mohandas Gandhi. On this day in 1866, 9th Wisconsin Infantry musters out: “The 9th Wisconsin Infantry mustered out after serving in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas, including the Battle of Prairie Grove. It lost 191 enlisted men during service; 77 were killed and 114 died from disease.”
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Eliot Cohen contends Americans Are Rising to This Historic Moment (“The commitment of ordinary citizens to democratic ideals is being tested each day—and its enduring strength is containing the damage of Trump’s presidency”):
A writer usually itches to rewrite any article that is more than a week old: I confess to no such temptation with my first article for The Atlantic, published a year ago. I stand by every word. I think now as I did then that Trump will not grow into his job, “because the problem is one of temperament and character;” I continue to think that to be associated with him “will be for all but the strongest characters, an exercise in moral self-destruction;” and most importantly, “There is nothing great about the America that Trump thinks he is going to make; but in the end, it is the greatness of America that will stop him.”
That last is the key point, and the one I find myself returning to, a year later. Trump himself is not an interesting human being. In Shakespearean terms, he is no Richard III, but rather the dumb, vicious, lecherous, and unsuccessful Cloten of Cymbeline. Nor is there anything particularly intriguing about the brown-nosing and spinelessness of his enablers among politicians and scribblers. They have no excuses, and when the end comes—and it will, be it in seven years, or three, or sooner than that—they will not have much in the way of reputations left to defend. Nor should they.
No, at the end of a year in which American global credibility and reputation has taken a hit from which it cannot fully recover, in which neo-Nazis have been assured by the leader of the Free World that there are some fine people among them, and in which the ethnic divisions of the United States have been exacerbated by a president who seemed to enjoy baiting hapless American citizens who hail from Puerto Rico and who agitated for the political prosecution of his defeated opponent in the last election, the vital signs of American democracy are surprisingly good.
(Cohen – who sees Trump’s harm quite clearly, yet is optimistic. Perhaps, but one can suggest reasonably that we’ll see far worse before Trump meets his political ruin.)
➤ Jay Rosen writes of Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer (“A conflict in the journalist’s code was created by a president wholly unfit for the job”):
If nothing the president says can be trusted, reporting what the president says becomes absurd. You can still do it, but it’s hard to respect what you are doing. If the president doesn’t know anything, the solemnity of the presidency becomes a joke. That’s painful. If they can, people flee that kind of pain. In political journalism there is enough room for interpretive maneuver to do just that.
This is “normalization.” This is what “tonight he became president” is about. This is why he’s called “transactional,” why a turn to bipartisanship is right now being test-marketed by headline writers. This is why “deal-making” is said to be afoot when there is barely any evidence of a deal.
What they have to report brings ruin to what they have to respect. So they occasionally revise it into something they can respect: at least a little.
➤ Franlin Foer describes The Plot Against America (“Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington”):
For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship. Manafort would swim naked with his boss outside his banya, play tennis with him at his palace (“Of course, I let him win,” Manafort made it known), and generally serve as an arbiter of power in a vast country. One of his deputies, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists, “You have to understand, we’ve been working in Ukraine a long time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure … In every ministry, he has a guy.” Only a small handful of Americans—oil executives, Cold War spymasters—could claim to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. The power had helped fill Manafort’s bank accounts; according to his recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.
…
When Paul Manafort officially joined the Trump campaign, on March 28, 2016, he represented a danger not only to himself but to the political organization he would ultimately run. A lifetime of foreign adventures didn’t just contain scandalous stories, it evinced the character of a man who would very likely commandeer the campaign to serve his own interests, with little concern for the collective consequences.
Over the decades, Manafort had cut a trail of foreign money and influence into Washington, then built that trail into a superhighway. When it comes to serving the interests of the world’s autocrats, he’s been a great innovator. His indictment in October after investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges money laundering, false statements, and other acts of personal corruption. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) But Manafort’s role in Mueller’s broader narrative remains carefully guarded, and unknown to the public. And his personal corruption is less significant, ultimately, than his lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life’s story.
➤ Bret Stephens ponders The G.O.P.’s Bonfire of the Sanities:
Alas, [Sen. Ron] Johnson’s suspicions are only of a piece with other paranoid G.O.P. effusions. That includes the supposed loss of five months’ worth of texts between Page and Strzok, which on Tuesday President Trump called “one of the biggest stories in a long time” — until the bureau said they were recovering the texts on Thursday.
Or the contrived furor over former National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s “unmasking” of Trump team officials, who, it turned out, were trying to set up a dubious back channel to Russia without notifying the outgoing Obama administration.
Or the outlandish and swiftly refuted claim that the British government had spied on the Trump campaign.
Or the appalling falsehood, aggressively insinuated by Fox’s Sean Hannity, that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was the victim of a political assassination in the summer of 2016.
Or, for that matter, the very idea that the F.B.I. is dedicated to destroying the Trump presidency. Recall this is the same bureau that, wittingly or not, probably did more than any other arm of government to create the Trump presidency in the first place, in part because disgruntled F.B.I. field agents were intent on forcing James Comey to reopen the Clinton email investigation 11 days before the election.
➤ It’s a Super Blue Blood Moon tomorrow (that’s astronomy with a marketing twist):
On Jan. 31, 2018, the a supermoon and lunar eclipse (blood moon) will occur. It also happens to be the second full moon of the month, known as the blue moon. The show starts just before dawn in the western United States. — When, Where and How to See it: https://www.space.com/39208-super-blu…