Reposted in full -

I shamelessly copy/pasted this in the FT Comments (with attribution!) just to see what would happen.  The response was overwhelming.  One of Josh's best:

There are smart terrible people and dumb terrible people. While they're both dangerous in positions of power, the dangers they represent are significantly different. We've been watching the now multi-day war between Donald Trump and the Khan family. Trump has managed the amazing feat of finding himself savaging the mother of a dead American soldier who literally had never said a word against him. What is most important about understanding what is happening here, however, is not the callousness or shamelessness of Trump's behavior. It is that it all could have been so easily avoided - not the damage to the Khan family but the damage to Trump himself. This may seem like a perverse way of looking at what has unfolded. But it's actually the most instructive for understanding Trump's actions, how his mind works and the sort of danger he represents.

Any political operative or communications professional, indeed anyone with some moral imagination and common sense would know how to handle this situation. Assuming you wanted to maintain the policies blocking Muslim immigration, you would simply say: "I grieve for the Khans' loss and I very much respect their opinion and their courage. But I believe the policy I have outlined is necessary for our national security for the following reasons ..."

Simple. Wouldn't solve the original offenses that lead to their speech against Trump. But it would cut off more damaging engagement and at least suggest (whether or not it were true) that Trump is a man of empathy who believes that harsh policies are necessary.

You will never win a fight savaging the parents of a dead soldier. So it's a fight you simply don't engage in. A smart terrible person would get this and say something along the lines of the quote I noted above. Trump doesn't seem terribly bright. But this isn't about intelligence as we test it with logic puzzles. Realizing that this would be the only way to respond requires a level of self-awareness a narcissist lacks and a degree of impulse control Trump simply does not have. Empathy or any moral consciousness would get you there too. But remember, we're focusing here on the difference between a smart terrible person and a dumb terrible person both of which lack those qualities.

When Khizr Khan and his wife Ghazala appeared at the Democratic convention they attacked and shamed Trump. He no doubt experienced it that way and the chorus of approbation the Khans received from virtually every part of the political spectrum deepened his sense of humiliation and loss of status and standing. As I've noted in so many contexts, the need to assert dominance is at the root of all of Trump's actions. His whole way of understanding the world is one made up of dominators and the dominated. There's no infinite grey middle ground, where most of us live the vast majority of our human relationships. That's why even those who are conspicuously loyal are routinely humiliated in public. In that schema, Trump simply had no choice but to lash out, to rebalance the equation of dominance in his favor. It's an impulse that goes beyond reason or any deliberation. That's what left so many would-be or maybe allies flabbergasted at how or why he would have walked straight into such a buzzsaw of outrage.

For a narcissist like Trump, the rage and emotional disequilibrium of being dominated, humiliated is simply too much to bear. He must lash out. What he said inone of his tweets responding to the Khans is perhaps the most telling. "I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond?" The use of the adverb "viciously" is a good tell that Trump is a narcissist. But setting that aside, most people would know that the answer is "No, you're not." Certainly you're not allowed to respond in the sense of attacking back. Their son died serving the country. You don't get to attack them. Someone with a moral consciousness who is capable to empathy would understand this through a moral prism. A smart terrible person would understand it as a matter of pragmatism. Smart terrible people spend time to understand human behavior, even if the moral dimension of it is invisible to them or a matter of indifference. Just as importantly, they have impulse control.

A smart terrible person can be an effective, even a good leader, if the interests of the country line up with his or her personal interests. I'm not advising it. But it's possible. Indeed, history shows various examples of it. But a dumb terrible person is almost always dangerous. Trump's mix of rage and insecurity are so unbridled that it is not simply that he is unable to protect others from their impact. He cannot even protect himself from the damage they create.

-  "Understanding the Trump-Kahan War", Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo

Terra incognita

Day 1 of the unsurprisingly screwy GOP convention.  We knew it was going to be a train wreck - how could it not be?  So we just had to watch to see just what kind of train wreck it would turn out to be. But it's always the little thing - the small detail - that you didn't expect that tends to grab your attention.

In this respect, Melania did not disappoint. It was small and stupid and insignificant but in many ways it was the perfect embodiement of Trumpian incompetence and flim-flam: a microcosim of all things Trump. That they would go on to blame CNN was almost genetically pre-ordained: attack, attack, attack.

The story of course that is much bigger than Melania's pathetic plagiarism has been the focus - right out of the box - of the GOP's hastily thrown together circus.  Complete with its menagerie of C-list celebreties (Chachi? Really?), paranoids and deranged ex-politicians, violence, bloodshed and betrayal by political enemies were the themes of the day. As ever, fearmongering, self-pity, resentment and forging identity through defining and de-legitimising the “other” (“liberals”, purveyors of “political correctness”, BLM, week-knee’d appeasers, Christian-haters, etc.) were the tools.

It’s a time-worn, well-trodden path taken by every demagogue in order to whip up a mass movement. Trump has just appropriated a GOP work-in-progress that has been under construction for over 30 years.  Republicans have been playing the victim card (oh-so-necessary in order for resentment or identity politics to work) for a long time.  Watching FoxNews for 5 minutes makes clear this is the essence of their highly successful business model.  The “War on Christmas”, portraying Obama as some kind if dictator, the crazy birther stuff, premising an absolute refusal to countenance even the most innocuous restrictions on guns on the certainty liberals will take them all away, the obsession about federal lands in the west, transgender bathrooms and gay marriage, Mexican illegals murdering, plundering and raping with abandon, Obamacare as a communist plot, prayer and teaching creationism in schools and – of course - Benghazi!(TM) are but a few examples of the same fundamental strategy since each of them serves dependably as a dog whistle to whip up the required frenzy whenever needed. This has had the added benefit of rendering it impossible to make progress on issues of importance.

Trump has taken what the GOP built and turned it up to 11.  I’m not saying people aren’t suffering (many are) nor am I saying they shouldn’t be angry about dysfunction in the US government.  But in turning in frustration to Trump, they’ve entered new territory: at the same time, it can also be said we’ve seen this movie before throughout history. It never ends well.

Josh Marshall:

We've become so inured to Trump's brand of incitement that it's barely gotten any notice that Trump had three parents whose children had been killed by illegal/undocumented immigrants tell their stories and whip up outrage and fear about the brown menace to the South. These were either brutal murders or killings with extreme negligence. The pain these parents experience is unfathomable.

But whatever you think about undocumented immigrants there's no evidence they are more violent or more prone to murder than others in American society. One could just as easily get three people whose children had been killed by African-Americans or Jews, people whose pain and anguish would be no less harrowing. This isn't illustration; it's incitement. When Trump first did this in California a couple months ago people were aghast. Now it's normal.

Underlying all of this is a demand for vengeance and punishment. If you haven't (and if you have the stomach for it) it's worth watching the speeches by Rudy Giuliani or - even more nutty - ret. Gen Michael Flynn. Again, Josh:

These are not normal convention speeches. It is only a small skip and a jump to the state legislator in West Virginia who demanded Clinton by executed by hanging on the National Mall.

The Trump campaign has always been about revenge and reclamation. Trump is a catalyst and a symptom - he's certainly not the cause. It is all borne of a social and cultural transformation that has been changing the country for some time, change that the GOP assiduously has hurried along. At the end of the day, they own their own destruction.

What has been unfolding in Cleveland is simply another example of the amateur grifterism that is everything Trump. Marshall is right: Trump happens to be a dangerous man for a dangerous moment. We can only hope the GOP hasn't brought the rest of us down with it.

Meanwhile, back in Crazytown . . .

Trump just gets wackier with each passing day.  And, in related news, Mike Pence appears to have a skeleton right out of the box.  That didn't take long.

Grab your popcorn . . .

Duh

Yes, perhaps this is indeed an example of why expansive open carry laws are stupid, illiberal and dangerous.

Finally, a real apology

Was it really so much to ask?

It's not quite 1968

But sometimes it feels like it. Josh's deeply thoughtful post gamely yet tepidly reassures. I'm not so sure myself. The danger from the extreme right feels different, and they are heavily armed.

Late update: here you go - it's all in the report. From 1968.

We ignored the signs then, and we'll ignore them again. The last thing politicians will do is confront reality.

Sadly, this seemed inevitable . . .

In the wake of the latest police shootings of unarmed black men, is it any wonder this would happen?

In prior shootings, as a final insult, it was the victims whose characters were dissected and assassinated in the media, leaving police conduct (the real issue) off the table. Police officers have by and large gone unpunished. People protesting peacefully were derided and deligitimised without mercy. Guns were assiduously flooded into the market courtesy of a determined NRA, which could only make the police jumpier with each passing day. The police duly became more militarised. With mandatory minimum sentence guidelines, more and more people have been swept into a nightmarish culture of mass incarceration and criminalisation.

And then they sent Tamir Rice's family the bill for his last ambulance ride.

Is it any wonder?

It's disgusting that I have to be grateful that my sons are not young black men.

Chilcot report in

Seven years late.  Nothing surprising: Tony's most egregious continuing mis-truth is the idea that his decision was honestly taken because they "believed" it was the right one.  He continues to advance the canard that the decision came down to whether or not the world would be better without Saddam.  Lie.  The decision came down to whether the evidence collected credibly supported unambiguous and unqualified warnings of imminent attack on western countries as a pretext for war.