George Packer's Blog, page 161

The Coming Crisis in Mosul

A humanitarian catastrophe is looming over northern Iraq. As many as a million people are expected to stream out of Mosul when Iraqi government forces, backed by the United States, move to retake the city from ISIS, which took control two years ago. The much anticipated military operation could begin as early as next month, but aid workers here say they do not have anywhere near the resources, money, or manpower to deal with the expected human tide.

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Even Peace May Not Save Syria
Morning Cartoon: Thursday, September 8th
Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Voice of ISIS, Is Dead

A Significant Deal Between the U.S. and Israel

Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu met at the United Nations on Wednesday—their conversation was, as expected, tactful, punctuated by smiles and banter. The President—whose Administration just signed a Memorandum of Understanding (M.O.U.) with Israel, committing to a ten-year, thirty-eight-billion-dollar aid package—has reason, this election season, to stress his contribution to Israel’s military strength. “We want to make sure that Israel has the full capabilities it needs in order to keep the Israeli people safe,” Obama told the press before the meeting. Netanyahu, who has openly allied with Congressional Republicans—and has been attacked at home for damaging relations with the President in the process—has reason to show gratitude for the Administration’s largesse. “The military aid deal fortifies Israel’s security and makes sure it can defend itself, by itself, against any threat,” he said.

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My Vote
Afternoon Cartoon: Friday, September 23rd
Trump Warns That Clinton Will Rig Debate by Using Facts

How the Maker of the EpiPen Made Government Its Ally

In most respects, Wednesday’s congressional hearing into Mylan Corp.’s steep price increases on the EpiPen followed an all-too-familiar script. Mylan’s C.E.O., Heather Bresch, was berated by legislators for the price hikes, and for her $18.9-million pay package. Bresch tried, feebly, to explain that Mylan doesn’t actually make that much money from the EpiPen, and was careful never to offer the only real explanation for why the product costs six times as much as it did in 2007, namely that the company kept raising prices because it could. The politicians got their soundbites. Bresch got to state her case. And, at day’s end, nothing meaningful had changed. As Representative Elijah Cummings accurately put it in his opening statement, “The industry will take their punches. But then they go right ahead and keep raising their prices.”

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Daily Cartoon: Friday, August 26th
The New Obamacare Economy
Life-Expectancy Inequality Grows in America

Hillary Clinton: Dead-On Comic, Dull Politician

It’s a truism in comedy that the hardest role is that of the straight sidekick, the bemused Abbott who, standing in for the audience, uses subtle facial expressions and clarifying questions to allow Costello’s frenzy to have its full absurdist impact. This morning, Hillary Clinton revealed herself to be an excellent sidekick—one with a bit more kick than most—the sharp, funny person her friends have told us about. She was a guest on Zach Galifianakis’s “Between Two Ferns,” an acerbic, occasional series on the comedy Web site Funny or Die. Usually, Galifianakis, who plays a rude, clueless talk-show host, picks movie-star foils—Brad Pitt, Will Ferrell, Steve Carrell—and it’s clear that the back-and-forth insults are all in good fun. Though one previous political guest was President Obama, who jabbed Galifianakis with more abuse than he received. (The success of Obama’s appearance in boosting health-insurance enrollment among millennials is the reason Clinton decided to appear.) In the Clinton interview, Galifianakis brought up the e-mail scandal, Donald Trump’s racism, pantsuits, and misogyny. Clinton presented a persona who was sometimes annoyed and weary, other times earnest, but always at the right straight pitch. The stakes in this particular bit were not merely laughs. The real joke of this episode was that a man even more loathsome and ill-prepared than the one Galifianakis plays may well become our next President. Only once, in a brief exchange, did Clinton make the over-all subtext explicit. She said that if Trump wins the election, she will “try to prevent him from destroying the United States.” It was not a laugh line.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Bill Clinton’s Goodbye to C.G.I.
How the Reaction to Trump Could Be Good for the Climate
Catching Up with Richard Nelson, Real-Time Election Playwright

Bill Clinton’s Goodbye to C.G.I.

There were many moving moments in Bill Clinton’s speech at what may have been the final meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, in New York, on Wednesday. He described helping millions of people get water-purification kits, and seeing a newborn boy in Indonesia, in a camp for displaced survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and being asked to choose a name for him. (He picked one that meant “dawn” in the local language.) There were some dizzying moments, too. One came when he began explaining the tagline for this year’s C.G.I. meeting, which was “Imagine All the People.” As with many people his age, Beatles moments “haunted” his birthdays, he said. For example, on his sixty-fourth birthday, he had just finished playing golf with Rolando Gonzalez-Bunster—he gestured toward the audience, where Gonzalez-Bunster, an international energy businessman who is on the foundation’s board, was sitting—when his phone rang. It was Paul McCartney, who sang him “When I’m 64,” a surprise that his wife had arranged. (“That was Hillary’s best present—I think the best one she ever gave me.”) And that reminded him of the time that Jon Bon Jovi sang “Help!” at a C.G.I. event and the other time, at one of his birthday parties, when Bon Jovi offered to sing “American Pie,” except that Bill told him that, while he loved that song, he’d rather hear “Here Comes the Sun.” That whirl of connections and associations brought him back to “Imagine” (which was also played during the event), and the time he’d heard a children’s choir sing that song at the eightieth birthday party of Shimon Peres, the former Labor Party Prime Minister of Israel, which was also attended by “his old adversary, Ariel Sharon.” As the audience was left to ponder that tableau, Clinton added, “Hard to imagine, in the world of bloodlust politics today.”

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Related:
Hillary Clinton: Dead-On Comic, Dull Politician
Trump and Clinton Get Ready for a Ninety-Minute Campaign
Tony Blair Praises Hillary Clinton and Issues an Appeal to Americans

Who Exactly Is Ahmad Khan Rahami?

Two Americans staged terrorist attacks this weekend, and reporters and law-enforcement officers have since been picking apart their lives, so that the details might be reconstituted as a plausible story. Ahmad Khan Rahami, who has been charged with planting bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey, injuring thirty-one people when one of his devices went off in Chelsea, has some of the history that we have come to look for: a trip to Pakistan, a sudden turn toward religion, an attempt by a family member to report him. Dahir Adan, who stabbed ten people in a mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on Saturday, before he was shot and killed by police, is a more puzzling case. No one seems able to explain what led him to this act.

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A Periodic Table of New York City Trash
New York’s Rational Response to Terror
A New Terror-Alert System

The Model for Donald Trump’s Media Relations Is Joseph McCarthy

One definition of judgment is the ability to distinguish outliers from outright liars, given that they tend to tell similar kinds of stories. Occasionally, an individual, by producing a great volume of mendacity, manages to occupy both categories. Donald Trump—fabulist, demagogue, and Presidential nominee—has raised unique challenges not only to the political system but to those tasked with writing about it. Earlier this week, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times, commented to Quartz that the paper would point out Trump’s lies and label them as such sans euphemism. A few weeks ago, this publication began a series inspired by the candidate’s hostile relationship with facts, titled “Trump and the Truth.” (As David Remnick noted in an introduction to that series, “No one here is suggesting that Trump is the only politician ever to unleash a whopper. In fact, Hillary Clinton has had her bald-faced moments—moments that are too kindly described as ‘lawyerly.’ “ But Trump is in a category of his own.) Early on, the incendiary candidacy of the Republican nominee drew warranted comparisons to the brand of racist populism that George Wallace deployed in his 1968 campaign, and to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 electoral insurgency. Yet there is a growing contentiousness over Trump’s relationship with the media. It suggests another forebear whose life and career are a virtual template for the paranoid demagogy that has defined the 2016 election: Donald Trump is the second coming of Joseph McCarthy.

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Related:
Trump and Clinton Get Ready for a Ninety-Minute Campaign
Tony Blair Praises Hillary Clinton and Issues an Appeal to Americans
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s View of Small-Town Decay and Support for Trump

Elizabeth Warren and the Wells Fargo Scandal

In case there was any doubt about Elizabeth Warren’s feelings toward John Stumpf, the C.E.O. of Wells Fargo, it was cleared up on Tuesday during a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee. “Okay, so you haven’t resigned, you haven’t returned a single nickel of your personal earnings, you haven’t fired a single senior executive,” Warren said to Stumpf, during an interaction that might properly be characterized as a verbal evisceration. “Instead, evidently, your definition of ‘accountable’ is to push the blame to your low-level employees who don’t have the money for a fancy P.R. firm to defend themselves.”

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From: Wells Fargo, Re: Closing the Accounts We Secretly Opened for You
How Regulation Failed with Wells Fargo
Elizabeth Warren, Insult Comic

Trump and Clinton Get Ready for a Ninety-Minute Campaign

What may turn out to be the most important ninety minutes in America’s political history will unfold Monday night, at Hoftstra University, when Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, and Donald J. Trump, the reality-show host and real-estate developer, meet for their first televised Presidential debate. The event has the potential to reduce an extended campaign to a few compressed, highly suspenseful moments of theatre. Few believe that any of the Clinton-Trump debates will rely heavily on substance; after all, these things have turned on a furtive glance at a wristwatch, when President George H. W. Bush debated Bill Clinton, the Arkansas governor, in 1992, or an eye roll and a sigh, when Al Gore debated George W. Bush, in 2000. If Gore knew a lot more than Bush about governance, Bush could act like a friendly, take-charge guy; voters may have figured, What the hell, he’ll learn on the job, and besides he has the wisdom of Dick Cheney to help him out.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Model for Donald Trump’s Media Relations Is Joseph McCarthy
Studio Notes on the 2016 Presidential-Election Screenplay
Tony Blair Praises Hillary Clinton and Issues an Appeal to Americans

Russia’s Election: Every Choice Was a Bad One

Suppose you had to choose between eating nothing at all and eating something that would immediately make you throw up. Or, say, between walking on hot coals and standing naked in an icy rain. Or between sleeping on a bed of nails and under a blanket of wood screws. The Russian language, honed over centuries of impossible choices, has a colloquial expression for that: oba khuzhe, meaning “both are worse.”

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Twenty-Five Years After the Failed Soviet Coup
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, August 16th
The Very Strange Writings of Putin’s New Chief of Staff