Новости за 07.04.2017

“I don’t need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce,” wrote the dour Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran in his first work, On The Heights of Despair. “For I am the only one that lives without hope.” This is a fine summation of Donald Trump’s operational philosophy. He listens to everyone and no one, changing his mind on a dime, doing whatever the last person told him to do. He pits factions against each other... Читать дальше...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has changed the Supreme Court for good. On Thursday, Democrats successfully filibustered President Donald Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch, the 49-year-old arch-conservative from the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado. Senate Republicans responded by changing the rules to require only a simple majority to confirm Supreme Court nominees, which was already the rule for all other federal judicial appointments. The immediate outcome was bad... Читать дальше...

As a candidate, Donald Trump swaggered about how he’d order the military to do what he wanted. “They won’t refuse,” he said during a Republican debate, defending his call for the military to “take out” terrorists’ families. “They’re not gonna refuse me. Believe me.” He also claimed to have unique expertise. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me,” he said at a rally in Iowa. The U.S. missile strikes on a Syrian air base on Friday make clear a different reality: The Pentagon, not the White House... Читать дальше...

I never thought I’d identify with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the other Trump associates who are under scrutiny for their contacts with the Kremlin. Yes, their meetings with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak sound fishy. Yes, they failed to disclose direct exchanges with Russian intelligence agents at a moment when Russia was apparently meddling in the U.S. election. But what about my own dealings with Russian envoys?

Despite being a notorious grifter, Donald Trump was an unintended mark for Fox News. That’s great news for them. For the rest of us? Alex Pareene and Brian Beutler discuss the collateral damage in episode 51 of Primary Concerns.

Google “Walter White,” and his face glowers at you from the sidebar of your search results, the toxic extreme of an archetypal character who was ubiquitous in the early years of this decade: the male anti-hero. The problem with Breaking Bad, as I saw it, is that it became a voyeuristic morality play about manhood and power. Watching Walt enact an escalating series of masculinity rites (beating on teenage bullies, playing chicken with oncoming traffic, etc.) in his tighty-whities was never interesting to me. Читать дальше...

Rand Paul has finally found a use for Donald Trump.

During last year’s Republican primaries, Paul referred to Trump’s popularity as a “loss of sanity,” dubbing his rival “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag.” “We’ve got an empty suit here,” he said, “full of bravado but not full of anything really meaningful for the country.” After Trump suggested the government should surveil mosques in America, the libertarian senator pushed back hard. “Yes, we should follow people who are a risk,” Paul said. Читать дальше...

One name.

Even according to a fevered editorial from the Wall Street Journal, the entire alleged scandal involving former National Security Adviser Susan Rice boils down to her request to unmask “at least one” name of a Trump transition official that appeared in finished intelligence reports.

Based on that one name, President Donald Trump on Wednesday claimed in an interview with the New York Times that Rice may have broken the law. “I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story,” Trump insisted. Читать дальше...