National

Ed Kilgore on Mein Fuhrer Trump's next policy step:

On the outside chance that Trump is elected president, we should all pray this is his last stop on the road to a very different America where religious tests are suddenly constitutional and huge categories of people are treated as presumptive terrorists. He's already called for a database of all Muslims and for monitoring and perhaps shutting down mosques. More generally, he's already promising to do everything within his power to alienate allied countries with significant Muslim populations, while ignoring the suffering of the Muslims who are the primary victims of ISIS and their ilk. But one can theoretically imagine the next Trump step: maybe expulsions of Muslims already here; maybe the compulsory wearing of yellow crescents; and maybe something worse we have yet to imagine.

I have heard some objections to the comparison of Trump to Hitler. The objection holds that Trump has not killed 8 million Muslims and thus he has committed no Holocaust, and therefore to to compare him to Hitler cheapens the Holocaust. My rejoinder to that is "yet." He is most definitely following down the path of Hitler. So we must stop him now lest he commit a second Holocaust.

Q: There is a voter in western Sussex that he might offend. A: Why is John Carney so worried about calling out Trump for his beyond the pale fascism?

House Speaker Paul Ryan broke from his habit of avoiding comment on the 2016 presidential race to strongly condemn Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigration to the US during Tuesday’s House GOP press conference. “What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for and more importantly it's not what this country stands for," Ryan said.

Harry Enten notes that the GOP establishment may need religious voters to stop Donald Trump from marching to the Republican presidential nomination. And to that end, they will have to embrace a man they despise: Ted Cruz. “To beat Trump, the establishment may have to defeat him in Iowa, but recently, the Iowa caucuses have been unwelcoming to establishment-approved candidates. Still, there’s a way to square that circle. The GOP establishment doesn’t need to win Iowa — it just needs Trump to lose. And the establishment may have to rely on an old frenemy to make that happen: born-again and evangelical Christians.” Cruz is leading Iowa now because he has taken away evangelical Christians from Ben Carson. It is time for the Establishment to embrace Ted Cruz. Hahahaha. Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

“I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion goes against everything we stand for and believe in.” — Dick Cheney, quoted by the Washington Examiner, on Donald Trump’s call for banning Muslims from entering the United States. The Republican Party has reached a point with Donald Trump where they have to repudiate him such that he is banned from all Republican primary ballots and refused nomination or, each and every Republican alive today is branded with his politics, that of fascism. Your choice, Charlie Copeland. Colin Bonini. Greg Lavelle. Mike Castle. If you all have any decency left, you will condemn him and kick him out of the party, and refuse to put his name on the Delaware GOP ballot. Or, you're Nazis.

It must be nice to be Jack Markell at this point in his career. He can just troll the shit out of Republican fuck-wits all he wants.

Delaware Governor Jack Markell, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery in the United States, announced on Sunday a resolution to officially apologize for his state’s role in slavery. "We must publicly and candidly acknowledge the lasting damage of past sins – damage that continues to reverberate more than 150 years after the abolition of slavery," Markell told worshippers at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington, Delaware, his office said. The ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution officially ended U.S. slavery on Dec. 6, 1865. Via Reuters

Someone should ask John Carney about this. I wonder what his half hearted agreement would sound like in 3 to 4 weeks?

Matthew Yglesias at Vox on last night's Oval Office address, which I thought was pretty good. But why was it necessary?

The Oval Office address represents Obama's best effort to meet the psychological needs of a frightened nation under attack while sticking on a policy level with a restrained policy that Obama recognizes is emotionally unsatisfying but that he regards as offering the best chance for success. [...] We saw in Paris that firearms attacks lead major newspapers to leap toward declarations like "war in the heart of Paris" (la guerre en plein de Paris) and "this time it's war" (cette fois, c'est la guerre) that are, of course, reminiscent of the post-9/11 declaration of a "war on terror." But a war against whom? And with what purpose in mind? Public policy wars are at times metaphorical (war on poverty, war on drugs) but given that terrorism is a matter of hard security, a literal military war is clearly what the media and the political system desire. But it's far from clear that extended control over physical territory abroad is necessary for orchestrating violent acts in Western cities. On the contrary, as the president said last night drawing more western troops onto Muslim soil appears to be one of ISIS' objectives:

We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That's what groups like ISIL want. They know they can't defeat us on the battlefield. ISIL fighters were part of the insurgency that we faced in Iraq, but they also know that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops and draining our resources, and using our presence to draw new recruits.

The attack in San Bernardino was new and horrifying. But the problem of ISIS is not new. The previous American policy — airstrikes, training, diplomatic work in Syria, no big ground troop presence — was already the policy that Obama thought most likely to succeed. A new attack appears to require a new response, but there is no new response that Obama thinks makes sense.