Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.,  has some sound advice for Democrats:

Celebrate victory. Explain what you’ve achieved. Defend it from attack. Change the public conversation in your favor. Build on success to make more progress.

And for God’s sake, don’t moan about what might have been.

President Biden and Democrats in Congress are on the cusp of ending their long journey through legislative hell by enacting a remarkable list of practical, progressive programs.

This will confront them with a choice. They can follow the well-tested rules for champions of social change. Or they can repeat past mistakes by letting their opponents define what they have done and complain about the things left undone.

Republicans and the media will inevitably try to shape the negative narrative.  Don't let that be the dominant one.

Will Bunch looks at the trial of Kenosha killer Kyle Rittenhouse and sees it as part of a"55-gallon drum of highly flammable political rage" (may hit paywall):

In 2021, the post-and-possibly-pre-Trump American right has taken on many trappings of a violent cult — from the bullying, intimidating style of base conservatives who’ve screamed at or physically threatened local election officials or small-town school board members and even their families, to the Virginia crowd that seem to venerate a Trump flag from the Capitol on Jan. 6 shockingly similar to the Nazis’ worship of a “blood flag” from Hitler’s 1923 “beer hall putsch,” to the Trump-led effort to turn Ashli Babbitt — a Jan. 6 insurrectionist shot and killed by law enforcement as she attempted to lead the mob into the inner sanctums of Congress — into a worshiped martyr.

This is a 55-gallon drum of highly flammable political rage — not something that you want to come anywhere near with a lighted match. Unfortunately, Monday marks the launch of a Wisconsin murder trial with the potential for exactly that. It’s not just that the hotly disputed case of Kyle Rittenhouse — the now 18-year-old Illinois teen who picked up an AR-15-style rifle to join vigilantes during the August 2020 unrest after a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisc., and then killed two people and wounded a third during a series of altercations — could lead to near-term unrest, although there is surely that potential.

The greater risk to the republic is that a successful self-defense argument from attorneys for Rittenhouse — already a cause célèbre for the Trumpian right, which raised the $2 million to release him on bail — will be interpreted by all of the worst people as a sign from the U.S. justice system that it’s not only OK but heroic for citizens to take up arms for their perceived — and in too many cases invented — grievances.

Invented, indeed.  A lot of this has the unmistakable stink of an organized, radical movement that's being well- funded by the usual suspects, à la the Tea Party.  The Rittenhouse trial is the latest match, but not the only one, that has the potential to ignite violence.

CNN interviewed Virginia political pollster and guru Larry Sabato, who had this take on tomorrow's election in Virginia:

I'm ancient and I've been here in Virginia since the 1960s, and I've noticed one little thing. Every time a Republican is either behind or in a really close race, they find a way to drag race into the campaign.

Every time. Every time.

Sometimes it's immigrants. Sometimes it's blacks. Sometimes it's Latinos, or other groups.

This critical race theory discussion... it isn't in the ads, it's in the stump speeches.

"Critical race theory" is a way of speaking to whites and saying to whites: "Don't let the blacks take over." "They have already taken over. They have already taken over. Stop them. This is your chance to stop them."  

Tomorrow, in Virginia, is our chance to stop them.

Coup memo author John Eastman continues to prove he's an unrepentant insurrectionist:

In another awkward videotape “gotcha,” extremist Donald Trump team attorney John Eastman slammed “spineless” Republican state lawmakers who refused to reject the results of a legitimate presidential election.

Eastman boasted about a massive video conference call involving himself, Trump and Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani with 300 Republican state legislators after Joe Biden’s victory, urging them to throw out election results.

“And they all spinelessly wouldn’t do anything,” complained Eastman, who authored the infamous “coup memos” on how to usurp American voters’ pick for president. “Even though we’d given them all the evidence ... they wouldn’t do it,” he added, apparently referring to nonexistent evidence of voter fraud.

“Look, I very much wish it were otherwise,” he said. “But these guys are spineless. If we take them out in the primaries in 2022, and the pre-condition for getting elected is we’re going to fight this stuff, maybe we’ve got an opportunity.”

Padded cell, stat!

The Glasgow summit on climate change (COP26) may well be the "inflection point" President Biden has called it.  Umair Irfan discusses what's on the agenda, what's at stake, and why all eyes are on the U.S.:

The US has the dubious distinction of being the only country to complete a 360-degree turn on the Paris agreement. It helped convene the accord in 2015, yet former President Trump withdrew the US in 2020. President Biden signed an executive order in January to rejoin and the US was formally back in the Paris accord in February.

Since the US is the wealthiest country in the world and the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, it plays a prominent role in climate negotiations and has an even greater obligation to act on the crisis. At COP26, the US not only has to make up for lost time, it also has to rebuild trust with other countries and show that it’s willing to be more ambitious.

“There is this sense of exhaustion about how long is it going to take for one of the biggest emitters in the world to do its fair share,” Rachel Cleetus, the clean energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Vox’s Rebecca Leber earlier this month.

Tell us about "exhaustion"!

Finally, you can find a far more eclectic and far more comprehensive link to posts from around the Internet over at Infidel 753's place.  Run, don't walk.