Monday Reading

 

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

Today, confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be a Supreme Court Associate Justice will begin:

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s mission is simple as her confirmation hearings to become the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court start Monday: Don’t fall for the traps.

Jackson, 51, will spend three days testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, playing her role in what President Joe Biden, a former chairman of that panel, once called a “kabuki dance.” Like past nominees, Jackson in all likelihood will seek to skirt controversy and resist attempts to pin her down on divisive issues that might come before the court, such as gun rights and affirmative action.

Jackson has successfully navigated the process before. Last year she won confirmation to be a federal appeals court judge in Washington and in 2013 she was approved to be a district judge. But the stakes have grown, and Republicans, many still rankled by contentious hearings for former President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, may try to trip her up on key election-year issues like crime.

We've already discussed the scurrilous attacks Republicans are preparing to make, mostly to set a narrative for the mid-term elections that Democrats are soft on crime. It's not likely to keep Brown Jackson off the Court, but Republicans will try to smear her anyway, because it's who they are.

Former Republican hatchet man Rick Wilson warns about the coming flip by Republicans on Ukraine:

... Republican leaders are desperately trying to find a weak spot in Biden’s handling of this war. Even if there is unity for a moment, they will soon lay any mistake, or misstep, or outcome where the Russians prevail at Biden’s doorstep.

If that sounds cynical, I would ask: Have you met my former party?

It wants to play the most beloved game in the GOP playbook: that the Democrats are weak on defense. In my decades as a GOP ad maker and strategist, I made some pretty notorious ads about it. And I can tell you they work. [snip]

Republicans specialize at turning Democratic successes overseas into disasters. It’s a slow-burn strategy designed to trigger an outrage culture that doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. GOP leaders don’t care about reality; their audience doesn’t care about the truth, and their political media apparatus always stays on message. [snip]

Democrats haven’t sorted out a simple reality yet; the GOP will soon try to flank Biden on Ukraine. Some, like Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), will try to box him in on a no-fly zone — ignoring the negative externality of a nuclear exchange — while others will push him further than he wants on lethal aid to Ukraine. Win or lose, the GOP will declare that Biden blew his main chance. Even many sober foreign policy thinkers in the GOP will try to leverage Democratic “weakness” in Ukraine in the 2022 elections.

But let’s also be honest about the landscape: A not-so-secret faction of the GOP is rooting for the bad guys in this one. We’ve already heard that from the Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) wing of the party. Many Republican base voters are dictator-curious and believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is the savior of White, straight, law-and-order Christianity; the virus of Trumpian hyper-nationalism, with its constant call to reject alliances, diplomacy, smart power and multilateral action, has deeply infected the GOP.

He knows his treasonous rats, all right.

Philip Bump at the Washington Post explains why "we have a free speech problem 'problem,'" in his astute analysis of a recent, grossly off-base editorial in the New York Effing Times:

Friday’s Times column on the same subject — titled “America has a free speech problem” — is the rhetorical equivalent of activating every fire station in the city because someone smelled smoke. A lot of people are worried without a lot of because these specific things happened to them. That and an odd bit of partisan both-sidesing, conflating the left’s engagement in criticism with the right’s leveraging the law to control speech, one of which is more of a risk to the First Amendment than the other.  [snip]

Americans now have different boundaries for speech and behavior about race and gender than in years past. That means that some people very familiar with the old boundaries suddenly find the ground shifting beneath their feet. That can seem like a new infringement on speech when, instead, it’s a change in how speech is received.

“Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country,” the Times wrote on Friday: “the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.” This isn’t really true (in addition to being an obvious erroneous conflation “right” and “ability”). Instead, the change is often that what triggers “shaming” or “shunning” isn’t the same as what might once have done so.

He concludes:

Older Americans have been used to following their own agreed-upon guidelines for speech for decades and have enforced those guidelines through sheer force of scale. So now it becomes politically useful when appealing to conservative older people to elevate “cancel culture” as a left-wing threat. And, in the Times-Siena poll, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they feel less free than they once did to share their views.

None of this is to say that there are not moments of discomfort surrounding free expression nor situations in which people are likely to face blowback for public comments that is being distorted or misinterpreted — on infrequent occasions even with negative personal consequences.

It is, instead, to say that speaking freely, which the Times conflates with “free speech,” has always been something subject to cultural standards. Those standards are currently changing, as is the way in which speech is able to be heard. We’re navigating that. The real threat, as always, isn’t 20 people chiding someone in Twitter mentions but, instead, in passing laws to restrict what people do on Twitter in the first place.

This "Reader's Digest" version of Bump's article doesn't do it justice;  it should be read in its entirety.

McSweeney's Maureen McEly has a hilarious essay on the pitfalls of a "strict policy of only educational toys" for her baby:

“Mother, I tire of the coding caterpillar.”

The words send a chill up my spine, not just because of the outsized vocabulary that sounds, frankly, unsettling, coming out of the mouth of someone who doesn’t even have all of her teeth, but because I know what’s next: she wants more. More educational toys. More knowledge. But I’m unable to keep up, and to be honest, I’m no longer sure I want her to learn more.

She already speaks more languages than I do, and I’m almost certain she’s been mocking me in Mandarin. Plus, the coding caterpillar taught her how to actually code. She built a functional robot out of an old Oscar the Grouch toy and a broken microwave. She shouldn’t be able to do that, right? She doesn’t even know how to pee on the potty!

Finally, a visit to Infidel 753's link round-up to posts from around the Internet is again recommended, as is his recent essay on "The paper bear" that is war criminal Putin's Russia.