George Packer's Blog, page 123

How to Stop a Trump Supreme Court Nominee

President-elect Donald Trump will soon announce his nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. Once he does, we’ll know within just a few hours whether there is any chance that the Senate will reject his choice. That’s because the politics of Supreme Court appointments operates at the speed of the modern news media, not at the stately pace of the Justices’ deliberations.

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Trump and the Case of Congressional Ethics
Obama’s Sanctions and Putin’s Skilled Propaganda

Trump and the Case of Congressional Ethics

How much does Donald Trump care about congressional ethics? The principles at stake can’t bother him much, it’s reasonable to say, given the choices that he has made so far regarding his own conflicts, and in a hundred other areas. That is what congressional Republicans may have guessed when, late in the evening of Monday, a federal holiday, they made the dismantling of the Office of Congressional Ethics the first order of business for their new term. So much during the election year had pushed the limits of self-parody, so why shouldn’t they? For about eighteen hours, it looked like a triumph for legalized graft. Under the new measure, the ethics office would not be independent, would not be allowed to talk to the press, would not be able to do, really, anything. And the Republicans who had pushed their caucus to back it, led by Representative Robert Goodlatte, of Virginia, had done so in a closed meeting with no warning, as part of a package of rules changes. The G.O.P. representatives were absolutely correct in thinking that the Trump years are shaping up to be a bitter farce, in terms of good government, and a tragedy in other ways—bereft, for example, of real efforts to improve the lives of the most vulnerable Americans. What they were confused about was the part that they are expected to play. This became clear on Monday night, as critics from all sides pelted the congressmen with their own absurdity, and, the next morning, when Trump began to tweet.

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How to Stop a Trump Supreme Court Nominee
Obama’s Sanctions and Putin’s Skilled Propaganda

All Roads Lead to Aleppo

With the evacuation of the last of its armed rebels and their families, last month, the Syrian city of Aleppo is once again in the hands of the Assad government. Aleppo had a prewar population of more than two million people; it was not only Syria’s largest city and its industrial powerhouse but had an iconic place as one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, with a history dating back some eight thousand years. Before the war, Aleppo’s wealth of ancient buildings and its cosmopolitan mix of sects and peoples—Sunni Arabs, Shiites, Kurds, Turkmen, Alawites, Circassians, Chechens, Greeks, Assyrian and Armenian Christians, and even a few Jews—made it a matchless place in the modern Middle East. It remains to be seen what, of all that, has survived.

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The End of Democracy in Turkey
Obama’s Sanctions and Putin’s Skilled Propaganda

The End of Democracy in Turkey

Following the New Year’s Eve attack in Istanbul, democracy in Turkey is likely to enter a death spiral. The issue isn’t the attack itself, terrible as it was. On New Year’s Eve, a lone gunman made his way into the Reina dance club, which was jammed with revellers, and opened fire with an assault rifle, killing thirty-nine people and wounding dozens. The shooter has not yet been identified, but, in an Internet posting, the Islamic State claimed that one of its soldiers had done the job. In its typical deranged language, the group said that it had happily struck the revellers, “turning their joy into sorrows.” The attack, the group said, was in retaliation for air strikes and other military operations carried out by the “Turkish apostate government” against ISIS in Syria.

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All Roads Lead to Aleppo
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Japan Copes with the Disappearing Eel

One hot evening last July, I visited the Michelin-starred unagi, or eel, restaurant Nodaiwa, which sits in a quiet basement beneath Tokyo’s glamorous Ginza shopping district. Next door is the world’s most famous sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, which was the subject of a documentary from 2012 called “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” The restaurant is now so famous that a sign, written in English, sits outside its entrance, asking visitors not to take photographs.

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The Growing Gap Between the U.S. and the International Anti-Death-Penalty Consensus

Last week, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for a worldwide “moratorium on the use of the death penalty”—the sixth that the U.N. has approved in the past decade. Each one has gained the support of more of the organization’s members. The latest vote was a hundred and seventeen countries in favor to forty against. (Thirty-one abstained, and five did not vote.) In addition to a call for a halt to executions worldwide, the resolution urges countries that maintain the death penalty to increasingly restrict its imposition and to apply international laws that protect the rights of those facing the penalty. The rights include that a death sentence may be imposed only for the “most serious crimes,” defined as intentional crimes that have “lethal or other extremely grave consequences,” and that execution be carried out only after “a final judgment rendered by a competent court,” following a legal process that insures a fair trial and that provides access to appeal to a higher court and the opportunity to seek a pardon or a commutation of the sentence.

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Obama’s Sanctions and Putin’s Skilled Propaganda

This week saw an apparition that has not been observed for at least eight years in Washington D.C.: bipartisanship. Seven weeks after the election and five months after intelligence officials began circulating their suspicions that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee, the Obama Administration issued sanctions against Russia for interference in the American electoral process. President Barack Obama has been rightly criticized for his laggard response to these provocations, which the intelligence community has attributed to Russian hackers attempting to tilt the election in Donald Trump’s favor.

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The Winners and Losers in the New Syrian Ceasefire

Six years into the world’s grisliest war and worst humanitarian crisis, a ceasefire went into effect on Friday in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin, its co-mastermind, admitted that it is “fragile.” Two previous ceasefires—in February and September—lasted only weeks.The odds are stacked against this one bringing an end to all the fighting, since it deals with only one of multiple wars inside Syria, which have so far killed an estimated four hundred thousand people. But the current initiative—brokered by Russia and Turkey with Iranian support—is different from past efforts. It signals big shifts in the basics of the Syrian tragedy.

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No One Knows Whether Ronda Rousey Still Wants to Fight

How is a fighter supposed to sound after a big defeat? This past March, Conor McGregor, the brash Irish sensation, was pummelled and then choked into submission by Nate Diaz, a crafty veteran who was also a big underdog. In the cage after the fight, McGregor sounded as if he had already convinced himself that the catastrophic loss was no big deal. “I was inefficient with my energy,” he said, with a shrug. “These things happen, I learn, I grow. I took a chance, I came up weight”—Diaz had been the heaviest opponent of his career. “It didn’t work out. It is what it is. I’ll face it like a man, like a champion, and come back and do it again.”

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Grasping for Truth and Dignity in Tunisia

In 1988, when Hamida Ajengui was a teen-ager, she decided to stop getting her hair blown out and to cover it with a head scarf instead. Her parents, observant Muslims, were as accepting of her head scarf as they had been of her uncovered head. To be religious in Tunisia, after all, was as mainstream as speaking French—and it was often during their teens that girls decided it was time to put on the hijab. But when Ajengui showed up at school, the principal said that she couldn’t attend while covered. Surely, she thought, the country’s new President, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had taken power in 1987, must have been unaware of this injustice: even though the government had historically suppressed religion, Ben Ali had promised more freedoms. Ajengui gathered a group of girlfriends and boarded a tram to visit the Presidential palace, in Carthage, to tell him. They were stopped by the police and turned back. When they tried to make the journey again, they were arrested.

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The Hand of ISIS at Ohio State
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