Can we get to 3000 new Prime members in our 2015 sign up drive? As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, that was the aspirational goal we set for ourselves when we kicked off this year’s drive back on September 21st. But it seemed so far-fetched that I didn’t announce it publicly. But we have three weeks left in 2015. And we’re not that far off the mark. We’re currently at 2380 new Prime sign ups. Just 620 sign ups more and we’re there. That’s a lot to get in three weeks. But not impossible. Quite frankly, building membership for Prime is critical to the future of the site. Here’s why. If you’re a regular reader of TPM, I invite you and ask you to sign up. It’s important. Just click right here. Thank you.
You may think of Donald Trump as a crafty blowhard intuiting the darkest recesses of the American mood and riding that wave into ever-escalating racist incitement, militant derp and extremism. But this evening it occurred to me that it may not be that at all. Perhaps this isn’t just some grand ego trip but an epic social psychology experiment in which we are all unwitting participants. You probably know about the notorious Milgram Experiment, conducted by the late Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961. In the experiment subjects were tested to see how far they would go in inflicting extreme pain – escalating electric shocks – on other test subjects simply because a figure in authority, the person running the experiment, told them to do so. So how far would the subjects go?
In his unprecedented call to bar Muslims from entering the U.S., Donald Trump explicitly aligned himself with the fringiest of the anti-Muslim crusaders.
Texas’ big move to bar any Syrian refugees has virtually collapsed in a heap of big talk, weak legal arguments, and bravado. It’s remarkable how quickly the effort basically disintegrated.
Okay folks, it’s time!
Time to send in your nominations for the 9th Annual – yes 9th, Good Lord! – Golden Duke Awards. It’s not the holiday season without the Golden Duke Awards, TPM’s annual homage to the year’s best purveyors of public corruption, outlandish behavior and The Crazy. (The awards are named in honor of Congressman-turned-inmate-turned-ex-con Randy “Duke” Cunningham. See the letter Cunningham sent one-time TPM reporter Ryan Reilly back in 2011. Yes, we’ve been doing this so long, Duke Cunningham isn’t even in jail anymore.)
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Wingnut Nevada legislator will fly to Paris, Syria herself to start shooting refugees before they can seek asylum in America.
Ted Cruz, the GOP’s new great mainly white hope versus Donald Trump, explodes into first place in Iowa.
With everything else going on, I wanted to return to a theme I’ve be writing about in one form or another for almost 15 years. And quite apart from the counter-terrorism and military policies we pursue in fighting terrorism, there are a great number of people, often “policy intellectuals” but not always, for whom the ‘war on terror’ is a channel for their own grandiosity, personal boredom or wish that they lived at a more dramatic historical moment.
I first wrote about this at length about a dozen years ago when I reviewed (“The Orwell Temptation“) Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism for The Washington Monthly. This was Berman’s stab at standing himself up as the Orwell of the “War on Terror” and giving the whole effort an intellectual heft, gravity and pedigree. In other words, not just a vast counter-terrorism operation but a war of ideas, something that smart guys write career-making books about. Like Orwell. We’re thankfully many years since this sort of grandiose intellectualism was in vogue on this topic. But we are seeing a rapid return.
I wanted to share with you TPM Reader BF’s take on my weekend post (“The Condundrum“) and the President’s speech. I want to do so not only because I think he makes good points that are worth considering but also because he captures a viewpoint I have heard from a number of people in recent days. In so many words, they agree with President Obama on the policy merits. But they do not believe his rhetoric and his policies are connecting with the public in a visceral way or reassuring them that he takes the threat seriously, appreciates their fears or has a plan on a scale to address the threat.
I’d like to propose that there is another conundrum to consider. That is, in short, whether it may make sense to “over-react” in order to prevent something even worse down the line.
The president’s speech was just what I expected. Serious, reasonable, thoughtful. But will it do anything to cut into support for someone like Trump? Will it actually reassure anyone who is genuinely frightened of Muslims becoming radicalized and launching attacks in their backyard? I don’t think so. Obama’s speech, as sound as it was on policy grounds, won’t do any of the things he hopes in terms of convincing the skeptical public that he is doing enough or all that is possible.