Attention to the Unseen

Trita Parsi and Stephen Wertheim write: This week Democrats plunged into two controversies that portend danger for the party as the 2020 election season begins. Both centered on freshman representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who, not coincidentally, came to America as a Somali refugee and is now one of the two first Muslim women in Congress. Absent an open debate about the party’s values on foreign policy, Democrats are hurtling toward an election more divisive than the one in 2016….

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Andrew McCabe writes: On Wednesday, May 10, 2017, my first full day on the job as acting director of the FBI, I sat down with senior staff involved in the Russia case—the investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. As the meeting began, my secretary relayed a message that the White House was calling. The president himself was on the line. I had spoken with him the night before, in the Oval Office, when he…

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Jamelle Bouie writes: Only a handful of Democrats in Congress (and just one Democrat-adjacent presidential contender) identify as “socialist,” but they appear to be the chief targets of President Trump as he faces a confident Democratic opposition in the House of Representatives. “We are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” he said in his State of the Union address two weeks ago, declaring that “America will never be a socialist country.” The White House actually presaged…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump plans to declare a national emergency so he can bypass Congress and build his long-promised wall along the border even as he signs a spending bill that does not fund it, the White House said Thursday. The announcement of his decision came just minutes before the Senate voted 83-16 to advance the spending package in anticipation of final passage on Thursday night by the House. Mr. Trump’s decision to sign it effectively ends…

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George Monbiot writes: Modern governments respond to only two varieties of emergency: those whose solution is bombs and bullets, and those whose solution is bailouts for the banks. But what if they decided to take other threats as seriously? This week’s revelations of a catastrophic collapse in insect populations, jeopardising all terrestrial life, would prompt the equivalent of an emergency meeting of the UN security council. The escalating disasters of climate breakdown and soil loss would trigger spending at least…

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"They don't look like Indians to me." Here's a 1993 clip of our racially sensitive president at a Native American affairs committee. https://t.co/pm1J3Hpy6F — Justin Kanew (@Kanew) February 10, 2019 The Washington Post reports: Rep. Ilhan Omar rejected President Trump’s call for her resignation by accusing him of having “trafficked in hate your whole life” while she privately has tried to make amends with her Jewish colleagues for her anti-Semitic comments. The Minnesota Democrat, who fired back at Trump on…

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The Washington Post reports: Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a billionaire real estate investor who is one of President Trump’s closest confidants, apologized Wednesday after defending Saudi Arabia in the wake of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killing and saying the United States has committed “equal or worse” atrocities. Barrack’s remarks on Khashoggi, made Tuesday at a summit in Abu Dhabi organized by the Santa Monica-based Milken Institute think tank, were first reported by Dubai’s Gulf News. “Whatever happened in Saudi Arabia, the…

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Jonathan Powell writes: The British political system used to be seen as one of the wonders of the world. A hundred years ago last month, Max Weber, the great German sociologist, gave a seminal lecture on “The Profession and Vocation of Politics” in Munich. Speaking in the chaotic and revolutionary aftermath of the First World War, he expressed his admiration for the British system and the way its politicians and officials managed to maintain prosperity and stability while allowing a…

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