Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept reminds us, in re Mr. Trump's recent missile strike on a Syrian airbase, that "in every type of government, nothing unites people behind the leader more quickly, reflexively or reliably than war." Today he became President, our "liberal" media tell us, though, gosh, what a low bar they set for this guy -- he stops shouting at everyone for an hour and he "becomes President"; he blows up an airbase the Syrian government was able to clear out beforehand and he "becomes President."
Sen. McConnell (E-KY) says President Obama never targeted Syrian use of chemical weapons like President Trump supposedly did -- but Mr. McConnell actually opposed Mr. Obama's efforts to throw missiles at Syria for the same reason! Will our "liberal" media challenge him on this obvious lie? They will not -- although, to be fair, some journalists may be failing to question Mr. McConnell not out of cowardice, but out of disgust. Hey, I don't talk to evil people, either, if I can avoid it.
The Rights and Dissent blog finds the New York Police Department's new body camera policy wanting. Folks who reflexively dismiss body cameras have had years to persuade me and haven't done so yet, but the New York Civil Liberties Union makes two good points: the NYPD's policy won't capture all police encounters, though encounters that seem calm at first can always escalate, and the policy also doesn't give the public a whole lot of access to videos, even though, you know, the police serve the public.
While the headline "How Merrick Garland Could Torment Trump" is a bit of clickbait, the former Obama Supreme Court nominee did author a 1985 Harvard Law Review article that describes how to fight deregulatory efforts like the one Mr. Trump is undertaking. And a 1983 Supreme Court decision (on a case Mr. Garland argued successfully as a corporate lawyer) declared that our government "could change their minds about the value of a particular regulation" but "could not ignore evidence they considered when putting the rule on the books in the first place." This maps well onto our notion that regulations meet specific, legally-mandated ends, and you can't just throw out the regulations unless you're going to achieve those same ends in some other way.
Finally, though I really shouldn't be spending any more time on horse-race coverage like this, Steve Bannon's allies are supposedly trying to convince Mr. Trump not to fire him, by saying it'd alienate his "base," which consists of "the people who didn't vote for 20 years." Ah, no -- his base consists of the same people who were energized by the "war on terror," then the budget deficit, then the Tea Party, then "Regulation Nation," then "Blue Lives Matter." The right-wing establishment leads them around from outrage to outrage, and Mr. Trump is in no danger of losing them, no matter what he does with Mr. Bannon. (And yeah, when the "Bannon ally" spoke of "the Cohns of the world," I'm pretty sure he just meant "Jews.")
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