Attention to the Unseen

Fintan O’Toole writes: Vincent Gookin, the 17th-century English colonist in Ireland, wrote ruefully that “the unsettling of a nation is an easy work; the settling of a nation is not”. One way to understand why the Irish question has been so fatal for the Brexit project is to think about two islands and their degrees of unsettlement. For Britain, the Brexiters have done the easy work of unsettling a nation. Both parts of Ireland, meanwhile, have been involved in the…

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The Guardian reports: Theresa May is being urged to give her MPs free rein to vote for a second referendum, with a new group of ministers poised to back another public ballot on Brexit. Cabinet ministers are making fresh pleas for a new approach after the prime minister’s bleakest week in office, which has left her authority seriously damaged and led some Tory MPs to fear it will become impossible for her to govern. Senior figures in the government are…

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George Packer writes: Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start. I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison. Those abuses are nonpartisan and always with us. So is vote theft of the kind…

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The New York Times reports: When Senate investigators wanted to know why Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, met with the head of a Russian bank under sanctions shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Kushner explained that, as far as he had been told, the bank chief had “a direct line to the Russian president.” It is easy to see how. The bank — Vnesheconombank, or VEB — is owned by the Russian government and overseen directly by Mr. Putin’s…

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Jeffrey Toobin writes: President Trump said some time ago that he believes his personal finances should be off limits to investigators. In an interview with the Times in July, 2017, he asserted that if Robert Mueller, the special counsel, sought to investigate the Trump family’s business dealings he would be crossing a “red line.” When, later that year, several news reports suggested that Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records relating to Trump’s businesses, the President reportedly told members of…

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Sarah Grant and Chuck Rosenberg write: [W]e thought it would be worthwhile to look back at the dossier and to assess, to the extent possible, how the substance of Steele’s reporting holds up over time. In this effort, we considered only information in the public domain from trustworthy and official government sources, including documents released by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office in connection with the criminal cases brought against Paul Manafort, the 12 Russian intelligence officers, the Internet Research Agency…

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"My generation betrayed the young generation." Conservative peer Lord Heseltine says it is "appalling…that our young people are being ignored" over Brexit, in the latest Ways To Change The World podcast. pic.twitter.com/qWzBxuNHsg — Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) December 12, 2018

Peter Beinart writes: [B]esides their hostility to liberal democracy, the right-wing autocrats taking power across the world share one big thing, which often goes unrecognized in the U.S.: They all want to subordinate women. To understand global Trumpism, argues Valerie M. Hudson, a political scientist at Texas A&M, it’s vital to remember that for most of human history, leaders and their male subjects forged a social contract: “Men agreed to be ruled by other men in return for all men…

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