Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled everything on his effort to derail President Obama’s Iran diplomacy. He openly supported his 2012 general election opponent. He even accepted a secret invitation to speak before a joint session of Congress for the express purpose of trying to sabotage a signature element of the Head of State’s foreign policy agenda. It’s widely agreed across the political spectrum that at the level of top leadership, US-Israel relations are at their lowest point in decades, despite the fact that the security relationship has actually grown closer and more robust since 2009. The only debate is whether confronting the dangers of the Iran deal merited the risk to the relationship. So Netanyahu bet everything and he lost. With those facts, you might be thinking that for most politicians this would be a terrible setback or even the end of their career. But, as Asher Schechter explains here, nothing could be further from the case.
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AP: Muslims say they’re looking for a place to bury their dead. Locals say it’s a plot to gain a foothold in the small rural Texas town of Farmersville.
Has Donald Trump finally done it? Finally gone too far?
Coming from Trump, the comments seem more ridiculous than outrageous. And let’s not forget that, only a decade ago, Republicans ran an entire presidential campaign around a more pervasive and aggressive denigration of another decorated Vietnam combat vet’s service record. But whatever I think of it, will Trump’s latest outrage finally sink him with his growing ranks of supporters? I very much doubt it.
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As long as I created confusion over this, here’s what I meant: Obama no longer gives a fuck. I assume you don’t give fucks when you simply have none left to give. It’s a supply-side phenomenon, which I think squares with most our personal experience. And when I thought of Obama’s sometimes Achilles’ heel of extreme accommodation of his adversaries, often getting little or nothing in return, it occurred to me that President Obama had been overdrawing his fucks account for sometime. Let’s call it deficit spending in fucks. And now, he has none left. I noted that he may have private reserve for extreme or personal need. But basically he is out of fucks to give.
You have probably seen by now the remarks Donald Trump made today not only belittling John McCain’s status as a war hero but mocking him for having been captured by the North Vietnamese. McCain “is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said to Frank Luntz, who was moderating at the event in Ames, Iowa.
You should watch the whole exchange because it actually manages to be more sneering and caustic than it comes across in print, and it’s pretty terrible in print (video here).
But Trump wasn’t finished there.
The “fucks” at the bottom of Josh’s post about Obama having no fucks left to give are not typos or a hack.
Responding to Rick Perlstein’s piece on the rise of Trump coinciding with the final surrender of the Confederate flag, Paul Krugman remarks on the self-reinforcing nature of the Silent Majority myth:
So why shouldn’t they rally around The Donald? The elite considers him ridiculous, but the base has been told again and again that the elite is corrupt and anti-American. The base has also been told again and again that it represents the true views of everyone except Those People. So why shouldn’t they go with someone who is their kind of guy, in style as well as substance?
The Silent Majority myth is for me the most cognitively dissonant part of the self-mythology that conservative white America is under constant siege: Forces with vastly superior numbers don’t typically find themselves surrounded and under siege.
I’m a fan of Glenn Thrush. For me, he is in Politico but not of it. But I think he gets this take on Obama, coming off his fractious and steely Iran deal press conference, simply wrong. The image is of a president frantically trying to cram as much legacy as he can into the final quarter of his presidency. No Drama Obama has been replaced by a man who is testy and impatient. As often happens late in a president’s term, many key advisors – the ones most able to rein in his more unlovely tendencies – have gone on to their post-presidential lives. That, I think, is a fair characterization of Thrush’s article. It’s not at all what I see.