Lily Salter's Blog, page 951

A plea to my fellow Bernie comrades: It’s time to start taking left-wing sexism seriously

I don’t know about you, but for me, the raging war between Bernie Bros and the Hillarybots has reached peak absurd. Last week, when I complained on Facebook about anti-Hillary sexism, a pro-Sanders commenter accused me of angling for a job in the Clinton administration. Drats! I exclaimed as I shook my fist. My fiendish plot to secure employment with Team Hillary—which has included such diabolically counterintuitive stratagems as contributing to a forthcoming anthology titled "False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton" and writing a cover piece for the Nation opposing her candidacy—foiled! If it weren’t for those meddling Facebook commenters . . . On the other side of the coin, also on Facebook, I’ve experienced the joy of having feminism mansplained to me by male Hillary supporters. And the attacks keep coming: on Twitter, journalist Tom Watson vilified me and the other feminist writers of the anti-Hillary book—who include such luminaries as Barbara Ehrenreich and Roxane Gay—as being from “the [Doug] Henwood school of hate.” Ah yes . . . because a book that is written and edited entirely by women, and is in fact about a woman, must, in the end, be all about a dude, ammiright? (Though, to be fair, afterward Watson did offer an apology of sorts). Then for good measure, Garance Franke-Ruta, editor in chief of YahooPolitics, attacked the book’s contributors as “feminists against women in power.” But as any feminist who has commented on the 2016 election could tell you, such nasty aspersions have been par for the course. Feminists on both sides of the Hillary vs. Bernie contest have had their motives attacked and their feminism mocked and impugned. But there are serious feminist cases to be made for both candidates. In fact, the feminist divide on the 2016 election reflects a classic feminist dilemma between liberal feminists and socialist feminists, and the politics of representation vs. the politics of redistribution. Essentially, both sides are arguing about that most vital of feminist questions: How do we bring about gender justice? Supporters of Hillary Clinton would likely emphasize the importance of breaking glass ceilings and advancing women’s leadership. They would argue that having more women leaders will help defeat sexism and have a positive impact on women as a class. No woman should be denied leadership opportunities because of her gender—on that principle all feminists would agree. But is having more women in power really a game changer for the average woman? The record is mixed. History shows that, from political leaders like Margaret Thatcher (who abhorred feminism) to CEOs like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer (who banned feminist-friendly flexible work policies), female leadership is not always pro-woman. In the private sector, there’s little compelling evidence that female leadership benefits the typical woman worker. One study found that a Norwegian law mandating that corporate boards be 40 percent female benefited women at the top, but that those gains did not trickle down to women generally. On the other hand, there is evidence that female elected officials tend to be more supportive of women’s issues and interests, and that female leaders may well produce a role model effect by inspiring girls to aim higher in their educational and professional goals. But those of us who are socialist feminists are less concerned about glass ceilings than about sticky floors—which is, of course, where most women workers tend to dwell. Socialist feminists are intensely interested in the material conditions of women’s lives and the economic roots of women’s oppression. Our theory of feminist changes holds that the most effective route to women’s liberation lies not in changing the gender composition of the ruling class, but in transforming systems and structures. Some of our key goals include massive wealth redistribution, ending the gendered division of labor, valuing care work, and radically altering workplace policies and norms. We look to the democratic socialist societies in Europe, which have achieved lower rates of  mortality and economic inequality than the U.S., and where women enjoy a smaller gender wage gap, higher labor force participation, and, yes, more female elected officials, and we think, why can’t we do it here? We know that European-style policies like paid leave, universal childcare, a living wage, strong unions, shorter work hours, and generous social welfare benefits are structurally necessary for women to achieve equality, which is why we so ardently support them. In practice, of course, many feminists, myself included, share both liberal and socialist goals, supporting women’s leadership as well as substantial economic redistribution and serious workplace reforms. But which candidate you’re supporting in 2016 likely depends on which set of goals you prioritize.The appeal of Hillary Clinton to feminists is obvious. Throughout the long march of feminism over the past half-century, Hillary has been there. Decades before feminism became kinda cool, she identified as an out-and-proud feminist. Electing a woman to the presidency could help normalize female power, and clearly, it means a great deal to millions of American women. I’m a hard-bitten anti-Hillary cynic myself, but even I feel moved when I consider that in 2016, when my two oldest nieces will be voting in a presidential election for the first time, they will likely have the opportunity to cast their votes for a woman president. But the problem for socialist feminists is that, when it comes to the issues we care most about, Hillary has shown extraordinarily poor judgment. Her record—which includes bashing teachers unions, sitting on the board of Wal-Mart, defending catastrophic welfare “reform,” voting in favor of lower estate taxes and a credit card-friendly bankruptcy bill, and supporting imperialist military adventures like Iraq—raises alarm bells so loud they make your ears hurt. In contrast, Bernie Sanders has displayed excellent judgment on these core feminist concerns (and many others). Not only has he been a staunch ally on critical feminist issues like choice and equal pay, but he also cast votes against welfare reform, NAFTA, Iraq, bailing out the banks, and other terrible neoliberal policies. He is also far more deeply committed to the economic issues that are crucial to ending the oppression of women. For example, he’s supporting a $15 minimum wage and Kirsten Gillibrand’s paid family leave bill; Hillary has done neither. In the context of a Republican Congress, passing any substantive Democratic legislation is likely to be a doomed exercise. But which candidate do you think would be more aggressive in using executive orders to help workers and rein in the banks? And who do you believe is more likely to make the kind of appointments that are essential to creating progressive public policies? The feminist case for Bernie Sanders is so compelling that pro-feminist Bernie supporters should be shouting it to the rooftops. And yet, a small but vocal minority of Bernie proponents seem less interested in making this case than in mocking and belittling Hillary-supporting feminists. Sady Doyle, who recently penned a Tumblr post about why she supports Clinton, writes that Bernie supporters responded by calling her “sugarbush” and “sweetie,” making “jokes about me fucking Presidential candidates,” and “screaming about how evil I am.” Sounding like those conservatives who rant that people of color are “the real racists,” Sanders supporter Ari Paul denounced Salon writer Amanda Marcotte as “the real sexist,” claiming that Marcotte is practicing “misogyny” because “Ms. Clinton’s sole defining feature is her genitalia in Ms. Marcotte’s world.”  Salon political writer Ben Norton has opined that “Clinging to your identity group ‘regardless of its policies’ is not politics; it is high-school clique drama.” Also in Salon, Daniel Denvir wrote that “The notion that Hillary Clinton is a feminist choice because she is a qualified woman is a really very caricatured identity politics.” What these writers conspicuously fail to mention is that in 2008, many of these Hillary-supporting feminists who allegedly vote with their vaginas backed Obama over Clinton. And I am 100 percent confident that the day any of them would ever vote for a female Republican presidential candidate would be the day that (in the immortal words of Claude Porter) hell goes Methodist. Dudes, here’s a free tip. If you want to discourage Hillary supporters from “clinging” to what you refer to as “identity politics,” willfully misrepresenting their arguments and treating their concerns about sexism so contemptuously won’t exactly do the trick. The problem with the pro-Bernie knuckleheads—who, again, are a distinct minority of Bernie supporters—is not that these guys disagree politically with Hillaryites. That is a disagreement that I obviously share. It’s their airy denials of what Michelle Goldberg described as ”any claims that sexism shapes perceptions of Clinton,” their haughty dismissals of the value of the first woman president as “mere” symbolism, and their portrayal of feminist Clinton supporters as dumb, shallow chicks who care only about dumb, shallow chick stuff. When they’re accused of sexism, the Bernie Bros tend to react angrily. But our culture is saturated with misogyny, and there’s no reason to believe the left is immune to it. Sadly, left-wing misogyny has a long and sordid history. Sexism in the abolitionist movement in the 19th century, and then again in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, is what sparked the first and second waves of feminism. Some lefties did—and sometimes still do—dismiss feminism as bourgeois triviality. Some white men on the left assume that they, and they alone, are the bearers of universal egalitarian values. By the same token, when Hillary supporters impugn the feminism of women who support Bernie, that is gross and completely unacceptable. I have personally been on the receiving end of these kinds of attacks, and they make me furious. And I hate it when Hillary and her supporters make bogus charges of sexism, as they sometimes do. Yet I have to say, I’ve seen many sexist smears of Hillary backers perpetrated by the Bernie Bros, but relatively few nasty attacks on pro-Bernie women by Hillary-supporting feminists. For those of us who back Bernie, a debate about whether (some) Bernie supporters are sexist or not is absolutely not the one we want to be having. The first rule of advocating for any cause is “don’t be an asshole to potential converts,” but unfortunately a few pro-Bernie types are gleefully abandoning this principle. What I find so deeply frustrating is that, in my experience, if you scratch beneath the surface of a feminist Clinton supporter, what you’ll often find is someone who is very much open to Bernie. On countless occasions, I’ve heard pro-Clinton women admit that they like Bernie a lot, and that their politics are actually far closer to his than to Hillary’s. The longing for the kind of socialist alternative Bernie represents is palpable. And polls confirm Bernie’s appeal to women: they show that Bernie’s supporters, like Hillary’s, are about equally divided between men and women. So here’s some unsolicited advice to my pro-Bernie comrades. When you’re arguing the case for Bernie, lay off the petulant sniping and ugly personal attacks, and stick to policy and ideas. Focus on the contrast between Hillary’s crappy record and Bernie’s stellar one; Bernie’s strong, substantive proposals for a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, and breaking up the banks, vs. Hillary’s weak, vague or nonexistent ones. Ask them what incentive Hillary will have to move left if there’s no organized pressure, in the form of Sanders and his supporters, for her to do so. And finally, remember that when you portray feminist desires for a female president as illegitimate, and treat feminist Hillary supporters with sneering condescension, you do great damage to our cause. That should alarm you. Unless, that is, you care more about puffing up your own ego than advancing socialist politics.

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Processing atrocities like Paris, from afar: “When you start losing control of your curiosity is a good time to stop”

Last week’s Paris attacks terrorized the city, but they’ve also horrified and disoriented people all over the world. How does the trauma spread out from its actual site through media coverage and word of mouth? What kind of damage can it do to people thousands of miles away? Salon spoke to Dr. Arieh Shalev, Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center. Shalev has worked for two decades on post-traumatic stress disorder, for many of those years in Israel. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. For the people directly involved in Paris, or people who know them, it’s clear that the attacks are traumatizing. But how does it work on people experiencing this at a distance – seeing the attacks on television, reading about them, hearing about them? What we should be using as a measure is what we call emotional distance. It has to do with what you hear in the news and the media, and how relevant it is to you, and to what extent you identify. There’s not a general rule to that. We know from 9/11 that the way media presented it was criticized, showing bodies falling from the Twin Towers. It was perceived as being traumatic enough to stir strong reactions, particularly in children. Enough that after a few days they stopped broadcasting [those images]. That’s my way of understanding the decision taken by the French media and supported by the authorities not to broadcast [images] that will be traumatizing to people. Some forms of informing the public can be traumatizing, not on the scale of being there – but we’re best avoiding them. If the victims are people who belong to your social group, who you identify with, it’s one thing. Everyone makes his own emotional distance from traumatic events. Atrocities shortcut the emotional distance – they are universally perceived as something so incongruous that you keep thinking about it. When you talk about emotional distance, you mean that people who go to see rock bands, who are musicians, might be closer to this, because of the location of one of the attacks. Yes – but think about people who have been traumatized before, for whom this is a direct reminder of something that’s happened in the past. In Jerusalem, we had PTSD patients we’d been treating for years. We knew each time there was a terrorist attack that they’d come to the clinic: Everything is reactivated and they relive the original trauma. That’s a painful way of being reminded. That level of emotional distance would be very hard to take. What’s the responsible way for the media to cover these things? The media needs to inform us. How should it handle images? We’re used to the media using the emotional dimension to draw reader’s attention. In events such as this, the trend to over-express the emotion is a bit counterproductive. What about visual images? Visual images bypass the filters we have – one has to be very careful with them. I’ve been looking at the U.S. media over the last two days. Most of them conveyed grief and sadness, which is okay, and fewer conveyed horror. On one hand, we’re attracted – we want to listen to the shooting, but we better be protected. What’s the healthy way for an individual to engage with these tragedies? Does it make sense to have a news blackout – to stop paying attention? You should remain in some control of your exposure. Many of my friends were telling me they could not stop watching, and then I found myself digging into websites, and on and on. At some point, you do more than is good for you when you cannot stop. It’s that moment when it becomes something you’re not control of – that’s the right time to stop. We need to be informed; we’re information-seekers. It helps us cope with things, the most we know. But at some point it become redundant. When you start losing control of your curiosity is a good time to stop. How do you talk to children about this? That seems like a tricky situation. You don’t want to keep them completely in the dark, but you don’t want to traumatize them. There’s a way of engaging children we do all the time as adults – we filter information for them. To an extent, kids will respond based on the way we present information. They know, because everyone knows. Just keeping silent, not saying anything, will not serve a purpose. What they learn from that is that you – the adults -- feel uncomfortable or afraid or unwilling for some reason. So they assume there’s something very dramatic. The most important part is to be with them, tell them the factual truth. “Those are bad things happening, but there are good things – we are together here, we are safe here. I’m going to protect you.” Telling things while also conveying a safety message is a good way to communicate. Another way is to listen to the kids – they know something, they’ll tell you what they know. Let them ask questions. I always have my daughter initiate the conversation – I’m here to talk about it, but what do you think is happening? Rather than lecturing or reading a text someone else taught you. The good way to talk to a child is to listen, and then respond.Last week’s Paris attacks terrorized the city, but they’ve also horrified and disoriented people all over the world. How does the trauma spread out from its actual site through media coverage and word of mouth? What kind of damage can it do to people thousands of miles away? Salon spoke to Dr. Arieh Shalev, Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center. Shalev has worked for two decades on post-traumatic stress disorder, for many of those years in Israel. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. For the people directly involved in Paris, or people who know them, it’s clear that the attacks are traumatizing. But how does it work on people experiencing this at a distance – seeing the attacks on television, reading about them, hearing about them? What we should be using as a measure is what we call emotional distance. It has to do with what you hear in the news and the media, and how relevant it is to you, and to what extent you identify. There’s not a general rule to that. We know from 9/11 that the way media presented it was criticized, showing bodies falling from the Twin Towers. It was perceived as being traumatic enough to stir strong reactions, particularly in children. Enough that after a few days they stopped broadcasting [those images]. That’s my way of understanding the decision taken by the French media and supported by the authorities not to broadcast [images] that will be traumatizing to people. Some forms of informing the public can be traumatizing, not on the scale of being there – but we’re best avoiding them. If the victims are people who belong to your social group, who you identify with, it’s one thing. Everyone makes his own emotional distance from traumatic events. Atrocities shortcut the emotional distance – they are universally perceived as something so incongruous that you keep thinking about it. When you talk about emotional distance, you mean that people who go to see rock bands, who are musicians, might be closer to this, because of the location of one of the attacks. Yes – but think about people who have been traumatized before, for whom this is a direct reminder of something that’s happened in the past. In Jerusalem, we had PTSD patients we’d been treating for years. We knew each time there was a terrorist attack that they’d come to the clinic: Everything is reactivated and they relive the original trauma. That’s a painful way of being reminded. That level of emotional distance would be very hard to take. What’s the responsible way for the media to cover these things? The media needs to inform us. How should it handle images? We’re used to the media using the emotional dimension to draw reader’s attention. In events such as this, the trend to over-express the emotion is a bit counterproductive. What about visual images? Visual images bypass the filters we have – one has to be very careful with them. I’ve been looking at the U.S. media over the last two days. Most of them conveyed grief and sadness, which is okay, and fewer conveyed horror. On one hand, we’re attracted – we want to listen to the shooting, but we better be protected. What’s the healthy way for an individual to engage with these tragedies? Does it make sense to have a news blackout – to stop paying attention? You should remain in some control of your exposure. Many of my friends were telling me they could not stop watching, and then I found myself digging into websites, and on and on. At some point, you do more than is good for you when you cannot stop. It’s that moment when it becomes something you’re not control of – that’s the right time to stop. We need to be informed; we’re information-seekers. It helps us cope with things, the most we know. But at some point it become redundant. When you start losing control of your curiosity is a good time to stop. How do you talk to children about this? That seems like a tricky situation. You don’t want to keep them completely in the dark, but you don’t want to traumatize them. There’s a way of engaging children we do all the time as adults – we filter information for them. To an extent, kids will respond based on the way we present information. They know, because everyone knows. Just keeping silent, not saying anything, will not serve a purpose. What they learn from that is that you – the adults -- feel uncomfortable or afraid or unwilling for some reason. So they assume there’s something very dramatic. The most important part is to be with them, tell them the factual truth. “Those are bad things happening, but there are good things – we are together here, we are safe here. I’m going to protect you.” Telling things while also conveying a safety message is a good way to communicate. Another way is to listen to the kids – they know something, they’ll tell you what they know. Let them ask questions. I always have my daughter initiate the conversation – I’m here to talk about it, but what do you think is happening? Rather than lecturing or reading a text someone else taught you. The good way to talk to a child is to listen, and then respond.Last week’s Paris attacks terrorized the city, but they’ve also horrified and disoriented people all over the world. How does the trauma spread out from its actual site through media coverage and word of mouth? What kind of damage can it do to people thousands of miles away? Salon spoke to Dr. Arieh Shalev, Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center. Shalev has worked for two decades on post-traumatic stress disorder, for many of those years in Israel. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. For the people directly involved in Paris, or people who know them, it’s clear that the attacks are traumatizing. But how does it work on people experiencing this at a distance – seeing the attacks on television, reading about them, hearing about them? What we should be using as a measure is what we call emotional distance. It has to do with what you hear in the news and the media, and how relevant it is to you, and to what extent you identify. There’s not a general rule to that. We know from 9/11 that the way media presented it was criticized, showing bodies falling from the Twin Towers. It was perceived as being traumatic enough to stir strong reactions, particularly in children. Enough that after a few days they stopped broadcasting [those images]. That’s my way of understanding the decision taken by the French media and supported by the authorities not to broadcast [images] that will be traumatizing to people. Some forms of informing the public can be traumatizing, not on the scale of being there – but we’re best avoiding them. If the victims are people who belong to your social group, who you identify with, it’s one thing. Everyone makes his own emotional distance from traumatic events. Atrocities shortcut the emotional distance – they are universally perceived as something so incongruous that you keep thinking about it. When you talk about emotional distance, you mean that people who go to see rock bands, who are musicians, might be closer to this, because of the location of one of the attacks. Yes – but think about people who have been traumatized before, for whom this is a direct reminder of something that’s happened in the past. In Jerusalem, we had PTSD patients we’d been treating for years. We knew each time there was a terrorist attack that they’d come to the clinic: Everything is reactivated and they relive the original trauma. That’s a painful way of being reminded. That level of emotional distance would be very hard to take. What’s the responsible way for the media to cover these things? The media needs to inform us. How should it handle images? We’re used to the media using the emotional dimension to draw reader’s attention. In events such as this, the trend to over-express the emotion is a bit counterproductive. What about visual images? Visual images bypass the filters we have – one has to be very careful with them. I’ve been looking at the U.S. media over the last two days. Most of them conveyed grief and sadness, which is okay, and fewer conveyed horror. On one hand, we’re attracted – we want to listen to the shooting, but we better be protected. What’s the healthy way for an individual to engage with these tragedies? Does it make sense to have a news blackout – to stop paying attention? You should remain in some control of your exposure. Many of my friends were telling me they could not stop watching, and then I found myself digging into websites, and on and on. At some point, you do more than is good for you when you cannot stop. It’s that moment when it becomes something you’re not control of – that’s the right time to stop. We need to be informed; we’re information-seekers. It helps us cope with things, the most we know. But at some point it become redundant. When you start losing control of your curiosity is a good time to stop. How do you talk to children about this? That seems like a tricky situation. You don’t want to keep them completely in the dark, but you don’t want to traumatize them. There’s a way of engaging children we do all the time as adults – we filter information for them. To an extent, kids will respond based on the way we present information. They know, because everyone knows. Just keeping silent, not saying anything, will not serve a purpose. What they learn from that is that you – the adults -- feel uncomfortable or afraid or unwilling for some reason. So they assume there’s something very dramatic. The most important part is to be with them, tell them the factual truth. “Those are bad things happening, but there are good things – we are together here, we are safe here. I’m going to protect you.” Telling things while also conveying a safety message is a good way to communicate. Another way is to listen to the kids – they know something, they’ll tell you what they know. Let them ask questions. I always have my daughter initiate the conversation – I’m here to talk about it, but what do you think is happening? Rather than lecturing or reading a text someone else taught you. The good way to talk to a child is to listen, and then respond.

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America’s latest round of anti-immigrant racism has some disturbing historical parallels

On Tuesday, the Daily Mail—always one of Britain's more caustically jingoistic newspapers—was raked over the coals for running a political cartoon depicting Middle Eastern refugees as a shadowy horde overrunning Europe like rats. To drive the point home, the cartoon contained lots of rats running alongside the evil foreigners coming across the European border. Many pointed out the overt similarities between the Mail's 2015-style racism and Nazi propaganda about the Jewish threat. Running drawings which would meet Hitler's approval is actually a return to historical form for the Mail, which openly supported fascism back in the 1930s.

By sheer coincidence, Tuesday also saw Donald Trump warning about Syrians "pouring" into the U.S.—a direct echo of a notorious Mail headline from 1938 which complained of German Jews "pouring" into the U.K. Throw in the many governors vowing to bar Syrians from their states (because they might be ISIS plants) and you have a an anti-immigrant recipe that's been concocted many, many times before.

The history of America alone is littered with wave after wave of anti-immigrant bigotry. (You might think that the American capacity for prejudice would have been exhausted by its historic and defining racism towards black people, but hatred always likes to spread itself around.) From the Irish to the Germans to the Chinese—the first ethnic group to be explicitly barred from entering the United States—immigrants have repeatedly been treated with appalling hostility when they first arrive on American shores, seen as a threat to the natural order of things.

Those parallels would be powerful on their own, but it gets worse. Times of war have only served to exacerbate the tendency to whip up a frenzy about immigrants, as certain groups come to be viewed with extreme suspicion. America is the country that interned its Japanese citizens, of course, believing them to be a fifth column, but it's also the country that resisted taking in large numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, partially because people were worried that they would be spies for the Germans. (Seriously.) Even after the dangers that Jews faced were exceedingly clear, Americans still overwhelmingly opposed letting them into the country. Presumably, the Daily Mail and all of those governors would have agreed. Better not to take the risk, right?

Now it is the turn of Syrians to become Enemy Number One. Never mind that they're trying to escape both ISIS and Bashar al-Assad—about as horrific a combination as any people has ever faced. Never mind that all of the Paris attackers appear to be EU citizens, not refugees, or that refugees to the United States face an extremely lengthy and cumbersome vetting process. When you're trafficking in cheap racism and fear, you don't need facts.

It is a safe bet that the people currently racing to keep those nasty Syrians out of America and Europe would preach their opposition to Japanese internment, or say that the relative indifference shown to Jews during World War II is a shameful part of history. They do not seem to realize that they are writing another chapter of that history themselves. That is no great surprise, though—we never do learn, do we? ISIS must be overjoyed.

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The fearmongering has worked: Plurality of GOP voters now say Donald Trump best equipped to handle terrorism following Paris attacks

Surprise, surprise. According to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll,33 percent of Republicans voters say Donald Trump is the presidential candidate best equipped to deal with terrorism, the highest showing for any GOP candidate. While Friday's terror attacks have caused Republican voters to rethink their support for Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and John Kasich, a full 36 percent indicated that their confidence in The Donald as commander-in-chief only rose after Paris. “When you look at Paris," Trump said the day after the deadly attacks. "You know the toughest gun laws in the world, Paris — nobody had guns but the bad guys ... you can say what you want, but if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allowed to carry, it would’ve been a much, much different situation.” On Monday, the New York real estate magnate said he would "strongly consider" shutting down mosques in the U.S. as president. Last night, he also revealed his grand plan to deal with the Syrian refugees. "In Syria, take a big swatch of land, which believe me, you get for the right price, okay? You take a big swatch and you don't destroy all of Europe," Trump suggested after he said he would ban any further relocation to the U.S. “A friend of mine lives in Minnesota and he calls me up and he says, ‘Can you imagine, it’s 130 degrees in Syria and now they want to send some of them up to Minnesota where it’s 30 degrees,” he told supporters at a rally in Knoxville, Tennessee on Monday. “These people are going to be very very unhappy,” he argued. “It’s cold, and beautiful, but it’s cold.” According to World Vision, 12 million refugees have fled Syria since the war began in 2011. It is apparently this tough talk and bravado that conservatives who criticized President Obama's more measured press conference at the G20 had hoped for immediately following Friday's terror attack. For a plurality of Republican voters, loud declarations of war and sweeping rhetoric assailing whole swaths of people by a presidential candidate is appealing and The Donald is delivering the goods.Surprise, surprise. According to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll,33 percent of Republicans voters say Donald Trump is the presidential candidate best equipped to deal with terrorism, the highest showing for any GOP candidate. While Friday's terror attacks have caused Republican voters to rethink their support for Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and John Kasich, a full 36 percent indicated that their confidence in The Donald as commander-in-chief only rose after Paris. “When you look at Paris," Trump said the day after the deadly attacks. "You know the toughest gun laws in the world, Paris — nobody had guns but the bad guys ... you can say what you want, but if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allowed to carry, it would’ve been a much, much different situation.” On Monday, the New York real estate magnate said he would "strongly consider" shutting down mosques in the U.S. as president. Last night, he also revealed his grand plan to deal with the Syrian refugees. "In Syria, take a big swatch of land, which believe me, you get for the right price, okay? You take a big swatch and you don't destroy all of Europe," Trump suggested after he said he would ban any further relocation to the U.S. “A friend of mine lives in Minnesota and he calls me up and he says, ‘Can you imagine, it’s 130 degrees in Syria and now they want to send some of them up to Minnesota where it’s 30 degrees,” he told supporters at a rally in Knoxville, Tennessee on Monday. “These people are going to be very very unhappy,” he argued. “It’s cold, and beautiful, but it’s cold.” According to World Vision, 12 million refugees have fled Syria since the war began in 2011. It is apparently this tough talk and bravado that conservatives who criticized President Obama's more measured press conference at the G20 had hoped for immediately following Friday's terror attack. For a plurality of Republican voters, loud declarations of war and sweeping rhetoric assailing whole swaths of people by a presidential candidate is appealing and The Donald is delivering the goods.

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From “great world religion” to “barbarism”: Watch the candidates’ very varied responses to Paris attacks

“My infant died. He should have been with me”: The horror too nightmarish to comprehend

Yesterday, Amber Scorah published an essay about the death of her infant son under circumstances that are almost too nightmarish to bear: On the day she returned to work after three months’ maternity leave, only a few hours after being left at daycare for the first time, her son stopped breathing and died. The piece, which was published in the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, is both heartbreaking and unnerving. There are no accusations of abuse or neglect, there is nothing violent, nothing out of the ordinary. Instead, Scorah, with tremendous composure, leaves us only with a question: Why did she have to send her son to daycare in the first place? Why was she forced to leave her son in the care of people who were, however well-meaning, strangers?

 The harsh answer, which Scorah acknowledges, is that she had to go back to work to keep her job and her health insurance. Her partner freelanced and did not receive benefits. Still, the unease she felt at the prospect of parting with her son did not relent. Scorah asked her employer for additional leave, without pay, but the request was denied because according to the HR department, "there was no system in place that allowed for extending maternity leaves." She managed to find a daycare close to her office so she could visit her son during the day and breast-feed. In essence, she did all she could short of leaving her job to stay close to her son. But after half a day apart Scorah’s son was lost permanently.

 Scorah does not condemn her employer or the daycare or the people working there. Rather, her critique is of a culture of employment that places a negative value on parental leave. Many people assume that parents in this country are not given longer or more flexible paid parental leave because it’s simply too expensive— too expensive for companies and too expensive for individual workers. This turns out not to be true. Others might assume that longer leaves are not offered because they’re not necessary or beneficial to babies and mothers, that infants and young children do just as well within our country’s patchwork, improvised, unregulated and wildly uneven system of daycare centers and facilities. This is also not true. As Scorah herself points out, parental leave reduces infant death, gives us healthier, more well-adjusted adults and helps women stay in the workforce. And yet despite these proven benefits, our country persists as one of the most unaccommodating and unsupportive among industrialized nations when it comes to parental leave.

For all the risk that is inherent in raising a child, for all the safeguards we try to install, literal and metaphorical, for the hours spent agonizing over everything from shoes to schools, we still live in a moment of explicit paradox: Parents are expected to do everything they possibly can to keep their children safe (and can face legal repercussions for failing to meet arbitrary, ad hoc standards of safety) but are often given little opportunity to be with and care for their children if they want to remain in the workforce and advance in their careers. Despite our idealization, fetishization and sentimentalization of parenthood and childhood, we often don’t seem to actually like or value parents and children, or so it would seem from a policy perspective. At the very least, we remain deeply ambivalent about the roles parents and children play in our society, the sacrifices we (we as individuals, we as employers, we as public servants) are willing to make for them, and the importance we assign to integrating them into our workplaces and communities.

Scorah admits that she has no way to know if her son would be alive today if she had not left him that day, or if the care he received at the daycare contributed in any way to his death. It is entirely possible, she admits, that the timing of the tragedy was not causal but coincidental. And yet this insistence hardly makes her story less harrowing or mitigates the awfulness of what she now must endure, not just the loss of her child, but the uncertainty and second-guessing and endless self-interrogation, the curse of wondering how things might have been different if she’d been given more options. She writes simply: "My infant died in the care of a stranger when he should have been with me: our culture demanded it.” It requires only a slight remove to view the coldness and cruelty of this demand, a demand far too many working parents face.

Why, Scorah asks, “should parents have to play this roulette with their weeks-old infant? To do all they can possibly do to ensure that their baby is safe, only to be relying on a child-care worker’s competence or attentiveness or mood that day?” More specifically, she wonders why the mother of a weeks-old or months-old infant, a mother who does not feel that she or her child is ready for sustained separation, be forced to choose between her infant’s well-being and her job.

It is a question that gnaws at every working parent, one that is almost as existential as it is practical. The offices of pediatricians are filled with pamphlets about proper installation of carseats and the benefits of breast-feeding and the ill effects of screentime, but there is no flier called, “So You’ve Decided to Entrust Your Infant to a Stranger.” Mountains of books and exabytes worth of blogs implore us to know the facts, to stay informed, to be vigilant and responsive and alert. We are told never to let them out of our sight or to allow them to talk to strangers, to wear them, to swaddle them, to feed on demand, to let them self-wean, to help them self-regulate, to build their self-esteem. And we are told, most of all, to trust our instincts, to follow our gut. We are told, or at least I was, that every mother should do what’s best for her own child and should make decisions accordingly. But when we say this to each other, we don’t really mean it. Or, we mean it when it’s convenient, when a mother’s instinct and preference don’t challenge the status quo, or undermine convention, or force an employer into the uncomfortable position of having to be flexible, accommodating or human.

Scorah does not know why her 12-week-old son died the day she left him. She only knows that the day it happened, she did not feel ready to be apart from him. She asked her employer for a little more time, just a couple more months of unpaid leave. It hardly seems like an extravagant request. And while she points out that the 12 weeks she was given was generous by American standards, the callousness of the response she received points to a larger, unacknowledged and disturbing cultural trend— a growing incompatibility between American capitalism and healthy parenting. Most parents will do anything within their power to assure nothing bad happens to their children. We make sacrifices to our own freedom and our children’s freedom in this regard, and we condemn parents who take unpopular or unsanctioned risks. But what happens when our culture forces parents to assume risks for the benefit or convenience of those in power? And what happens when a culture that implores us to protect our children from all perceived harm, offers us neither the tools, nor the flexibility, nor the support this requires?          

 

           

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We can’t embrace hate now: In Paris, after the prayers, check-ins and acts of kindness, the real tests of compassion will begin

As I write this, it is about 14 hours since I first heard what was happening in Paris last night. Like most monumental events, there's a distinct before and after. Before: I was binge-watching Aziz Ansari's new Netflix show "Master of None" and lackadaisically shopping online. After: I am so very grateful that my family and friends were not in harm's way even as my heart breaks for those not as lucky. After: I am mostly numb, sleepless and drinking too much coffee. I’ll switch to wine by lunch. After: I look at my two blissfully unaware babies and try for normal, smiling at their little jokes, going through the motions of a regular Saturday, albeit one where we stay inside. It's raining in Paris, kids, so we'll stay indoors. Raining terror and anger and sadness—something so big that no one will likely find the words to explain it, to themselves, much less to their children. Like many other expats here, I was in Manhattan for 9/11. I was in Paris for Charlie Hebdo. I am in Paris today. Each time, it feels like this. The streets are empty. There’s a certain remove. Perhaps because we are not designed to understand the senseless and the tragic. Distance protects. Even if all my Parisian friends and family come out of this unscathed, we will know someone or someone’s someone who did not. Who, as I sit here with faltering words, has to identify a body or keep vigil by a hospital bedside. Or is simply gone. My husband, a former war correspondent and now the head of documentaries at a French network, was up the entire night, buzzing with that journalist thrill of pulling a major story together. “We need to find the stories,” he said as he walked out of the house at 9 a.m. That’s what we’re left with now. Stories. In the coming days, we’ll see and hear even more of the horrible and the heroic. We’ll mourn the innocents, the ones who were excited to go to a rock concert or were craving a bowl of noodles on a Friday night. We’ll shake our fists at the faceless and the dead who perpetrated this horror. We’ll shake our heads at government and organized religion. We’ll open our social media accounts—our digital hearts—for binary hugs and solace. We’ll mean well. By god, we’ll mean well: #PorteOuverte. Last January, every person who had ever shared breathing space with me meant well. Are you OK? Stay safe! Thinking of you. So glad you’re fine. (Really? You didn’t care if I was fine when you called me a chink in high school.) With great tragedy comes a great need to feel connected to it, I observed drily to my husband. I am the only person from my podunk suburb to settle in Paris. I’m the tenuous link between a Philly housewife and a world-shaking event. “OMG, my old classmate lives in Paris!” I imagined her clucking over a shitty mixed drink at a sports bar with CNN on the big screen. “Let me FB her!” My husband sort of knew one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, I confided to friends that same week. (I am no better, and probably worse, than anyone. At least they’re not trying to capitalize on their degrees of separation from atrocity. They’re not making a pitch list of newspapers and magazines.) The emails and notifications flew in furiously as my After began. The scale of this attack meant hundreds of pings and likes that, along with the chaotic newsfeeds, kept me up until 4 a.m. Facebook hastily created a safety check and I just barely rolled my eyes before marking myself and my husband as safe. Honestly, it was a relief to see Paris friends and acquaintances also marked safe. She’s fine. He’s fine. Thank you, Big Brother Facebook. French flag profile pictures started multiplying, #prayforparis trending and, instead of viewing it with cynicism and criticism (what does a photo or a hashtag do, anyway?), I liked every status and comment. This time, this third time around the terrible block, I let go of my Befores, the micro-aggressions and historical hurts. I read only the compassion—and my compressed heart ached slightly less for it. Choosing forgiveness, recognizing kindness. This is the only After I can live in. As we hold our breaths and strain for safety, I hope that compassion is the story we choose to tell. Post-9/11, we New Yorkers cradled ourselves and each other for a weird, wonderful while — until the battle horns sounded and we realized we could ignore civilian casualties as long as they were of a different color and religion. Fourteen years of war and exponential hate later, I sit tight at home with my children, wondering whether the world will embrace humanity or vengeance. And I pray for Paris. I pray for us all.As I write this, it is about 14 hours since I first heard what was happening in Paris last night. Like most monumental events, there's a distinct before and after. Before: I was binge-watching Aziz Ansari's new Netflix show "Master of None" and lackadaisically shopping online. After: I am so very grateful that my family and friends were not in harm's way even as my heart breaks for those not as lucky. After: I am mostly numb, sleepless and drinking too much coffee. I’ll switch to wine by lunch. After: I look at my two blissfully unaware babies and try for normal, smiling at their little jokes, going through the motions of a regular Saturday, albeit one where we stay inside. It's raining in Paris, kids, so we'll stay indoors. Raining terror and anger and sadness—something so big that no one will likely find the words to explain it, to themselves, much less to their children. Like many other expats here, I was in Manhattan for 9/11. I was in Paris for Charlie Hebdo. I am in Paris today. Each time, it feels like this. The streets are empty. There’s a certain remove. Perhaps because we are not designed to understand the senseless and the tragic. Distance protects. Even if all my Parisian friends and family come out of this unscathed, we will know someone or someone’s someone who did not. Who, as I sit here with faltering words, has to identify a body or keep vigil by a hospital bedside. Or is simply gone. My husband, a former war correspondent and now the head of documentaries at a French network, was up the entire night, buzzing with that journalist thrill of pulling a major story together. “We need to find the stories,” he said as he walked out of the house at 9 a.m. That’s what we’re left with now. Stories. In the coming days, we’ll see and hear even more of the horrible and the heroic. We’ll mourn the innocents, the ones who were excited to go to a rock concert or were craving a bowl of noodles on a Friday night. We’ll shake our fists at the faceless and the dead who perpetrated this horror. We’ll shake our heads at government and organized religion. We’ll open our social media accounts—our digital hearts—for binary hugs and solace. We’ll mean well. By god, we’ll mean well: #PorteOuverte. Last January, every person who had ever shared breathing space with me meant well. Are you OK? Stay safe! Thinking of you. So glad you’re fine. (Really? You didn’t care if I was fine when you called me a chink in high school.) With great tragedy comes a great need to feel connected to it, I observed drily to my husband. I am the only person from my podunk suburb to settle in Paris. I’m the tenuous link between a Philly housewife and a world-shaking event. “OMG, my old classmate lives in Paris!” I imagined her clucking over a shitty mixed drink at a sports bar with CNN on the big screen. “Let me FB her!” My husband sort of knew one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, I confided to friends that same week. (I am no better, and probably worse, than anyone. At least they’re not trying to capitalize on their degrees of separation from atrocity. They’re not making a pitch list of newspapers and magazines.) The emails and notifications flew in furiously as my After began. The scale of this attack meant hundreds of pings and likes that, along with the chaotic newsfeeds, kept me up until 4 a.m. Facebook hastily created a safety check and I just barely rolled my eyes before marking myself and my husband as safe. Honestly, it was a relief to see Paris friends and acquaintances also marked safe. She’s fine. He’s fine. Thank you, Big Brother Facebook. French flag profile pictures started multiplying, #prayforparis trending and, instead of viewing it with cynicism and criticism (what does a photo or a hashtag do, anyway?), I liked every status and comment. This time, this third time around the terrible block, I let go of my Befores, the micro-aggressions and historical hurts. I read only the compassion—and my compressed heart ached slightly less for it. Choosing forgiveness, recognizing kindness. This is the only After I can live in. As we hold our breaths and strain for safety, I hope that compassion is the story we choose to tell. Post-9/11, we New Yorkers cradled ourselves and each other for a weird, wonderful while — until the battle horns sounded and we realized we could ignore civilian casualties as long as they were of a different color and religion. Fourteen years of war and exponential hate later, I sit tight at home with my children, wondering whether the world will embrace humanity or vengeance. And I pray for Paris. I pray for us all.

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See ISIS up close: Vivid context for Paris attacks in this chilling Frontline documentary

Anyone wondering about horrors that took place in Paris and the bloodthirsty style of the Islamic State should consider watching a Frontline documentary that premieres Tuesday on PBS. “ISIS in Afghanistan,” of course, was made before the coordinated attacks on the French capital, and it does not discuss the way fighters plan major attacks or move into non-Islamic regions. The documentary's 32 minutes are hardly exhaustive – there is a lot left to know and there are no major surprises here. But the team gives a sense of how terrorist groups see each other, and some of the way they pass their hatred on to the next generation. Overall, it’s a chilling portrait. The segment begins in a car with a broken windshield. Most of the program follows journalist Najibullah Quraishi, who worked for eight months to come to a remote mountainous region and see ISIS close up. It’s a landscape of stone walls, dry riverbeds, rocky roads and deep green vegetation; Quraishi speaks to militants and watches them train kids for holy war. In regions like this, ISIS acts like the government it wants to become – it collects taxes and runs schools that educate kids from the age of 3 as well as military schools that train children in combat. A major theme of the program is the tension between ISIS and the Taliban. The former is still the smaller group – there are apparently only about 1,000 ISIS fighters in Afghanistan, with more coming in from Saudi Arabia and Europe -- but they are more ambitious and more international than the older group. “We want the Islamic system all over the world,” a former Taliban officer who defected to ISIS says. “And we will fight for it.” Apparently ISIS pays better than other terrorist groups – enough to let local men feed their families. “The Taliban are puppets to Pakistan,” one militant says, “while ISIS answers only to God.” Many of the most frightening images involve children. We see small kids reciting the term “jihad,” being lectured on the theory and practice of holy war as their teacher pulls out a large gun with which to “defend the faith” against infidels. He passes around a hand grenade. The teacher hands a blond child a pistol, asks him to aim and shoot. We hear teenagers training to become suicide bombers for ISIS. “I’m ready when they give the order,” one says. “The garden of the caliphate wants a river of blood from us,” a teacher says to his children. While it focuses most closely on ISIS, the segment also visits a Taliban cell’s forest hideout. (Members of the Taliban are not especially fond of ISIS and wonder why they need to assert their Islamic status. “We’re already Islamic.”) The terrorists who speak in “ISIS in Afghanistan” don’t exactly let us into their psychology; the segment ends without giving a real sense of what motivates them besides raw hatred and a desire for pay. There is no real analysis. But Frontline offers an up-close portrait of what lengths desperate people are willing to go to. Last week, we saw some of the consequences.Anyone wondering about horrors that took place in Paris and the bloodthirsty style of the Islamic State should consider watching a Frontline documentary that premieres Tuesday on PBS. “ISIS in Afghanistan,” of course, was made before the coordinated attacks on the French capital, and it does not discuss the way fighters plan major attacks or move into non-Islamic regions. The documentary's 32 minutes are hardly exhaustive – there is a lot left to know and there are no major surprises here. But the team gives a sense of how terrorist groups see each other, and some of the way they pass their hatred on to the next generation. Overall, it’s a chilling portrait. The segment begins in a car with a broken windshield. Most of the program follows journalist Najibullah Quraishi, who worked for eight months to come to a remote mountainous region and see ISIS close up. It’s a landscape of stone walls, dry riverbeds, rocky roads and deep green vegetation; Quraishi speaks to militants and watches them train kids for holy war. In regions like this, ISIS acts like the government it wants to become – it collects taxes and runs schools that educate kids from the age of 3 as well as military schools that train children in combat. A major theme of the program is the tension between ISIS and the Taliban. The former is still the smaller group – there are apparently only about 1,000 ISIS fighters in Afghanistan, with more coming in from Saudi Arabia and Europe -- but they are more ambitious and more international than the older group. “We want the Islamic system all over the world,” a former Taliban officer who defected to ISIS says. “And we will fight for it.” Apparently ISIS pays better than other terrorist groups – enough to let local men feed their families. “The Taliban are puppets to Pakistan,” one militant says, “while ISIS answers only to God.” Many of the most frightening images involve children. We see small kids reciting the term “jihad,” being lectured on the theory and practice of holy war as their teacher pulls out a large gun with which to “defend the faith” against infidels. He passes around a hand grenade. The teacher hands a blond child a pistol, asks him to aim and shoot. We hear teenagers training to become suicide bombers for ISIS. “I’m ready when they give the order,” one says. “The garden of the caliphate wants a river of blood from us,” a teacher says to his children. While it focuses most closely on ISIS, the segment also visits a Taliban cell’s forest hideout. (Members of the Taliban are not especially fond of ISIS and wonder why they need to assert their Islamic status. “We’re already Islamic.”) The terrorists who speak in “ISIS in Afghanistan” don’t exactly let us into their psychology; the segment ends without giving a real sense of what motivates them besides raw hatred and a desire for pay. There is no real analysis. But Frontline offers an up-close portrait of what lengths desperate people are willing to go to. Last week, we saw some of the consequences.Anyone wondering about horrors that took place in Paris and the bloodthirsty style of the Islamic State should consider watching a Frontline documentary that premieres Tuesday on PBS. “ISIS in Afghanistan,” of course, was made before the coordinated attacks on the French capital, and it does not discuss the way fighters plan major attacks or move into non-Islamic regions. The documentary's 32 minutes are hardly exhaustive – there is a lot left to know and there are no major surprises here. But the team gives a sense of how terrorist groups see each other, and some of the way they pass their hatred on to the next generation. Overall, it’s a chilling portrait. The segment begins in a car with a broken windshield. Most of the program follows journalist Najibullah Quraishi, who worked for eight months to come to a remote mountainous region and see ISIS close up. It’s a landscape of stone walls, dry riverbeds, rocky roads and deep green vegetation; Quraishi speaks to militants and watches them train kids for holy war. In regions like this, ISIS acts like the government it wants to become – it collects taxes and runs schools that educate kids from the age of 3 as well as military schools that train children in combat. A major theme of the program is the tension between ISIS and the Taliban. The former is still the smaller group – there are apparently only about 1,000 ISIS fighters in Afghanistan, with more coming in from Saudi Arabia and Europe -- but they are more ambitious and more international than the older group. “We want the Islamic system all over the world,” a former Taliban officer who defected to ISIS says. “And we will fight for it.” Apparently ISIS pays better than other terrorist groups – enough to let local men feed their families. “The Taliban are puppets to Pakistan,” one militant says, “while ISIS answers only to God.” Many of the most frightening images involve children. We see small kids reciting the term “jihad,” being lectured on the theory and practice of holy war as their teacher pulls out a large gun with which to “defend the faith” against infidels. He passes around a hand grenade. The teacher hands a blond child a pistol, asks him to aim and shoot. We hear teenagers training to become suicide bombers for ISIS. “I’m ready when they give the order,” one says. “The garden of the caliphate wants a river of blood from us,” a teacher says to his children. While it focuses most closely on ISIS, the segment also visits a Taliban cell’s forest hideout. (Members of the Taliban are not especially fond of ISIS and wonder why they need to assert their Islamic status. “We’re already Islamic.”) The terrorists who speak in “ISIS in Afghanistan” don’t exactly let us into their psychology; the segment ends without giving a real sense of what motivates them besides raw hatred and a desire for pay. There is no real analysis. But Frontline offers an up-close portrait of what lengths desperate people are willing to go to. Last week, we saw some of the consequences.

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Just one attack away from the abyss: America is on the brink of a revived politics of fear

A few weeks ago, I spoke with the New York Times’ Charlie Savage about “Power Wars,” his new book on the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies. Savage’s book is long and dense (in a good way), but rather than try to encompass its whole narrative in our relatively brief conversation, I focused instead on the Christmas Day attack of 2009. And if that strikes you as odd, just take a gander at how American politics has responded to the atrocities perpetrated against innocent civilians in Paris last week. But before we turn to Paris, let’s talk about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s unsuccessful attack first. Aside from introducing the phrase “underwear bomber” into our lexicon, that near-miss disaster’s influence on our culture has been negligible. But according to Savage, that attempted mass murder, despite its ultimate failure, was like “Obama’s 9/11.” From that day on, his approach to the policies that make up the “war on terror” — surveillance, military commissions, drone strikes, etc. — would never be the same. One reason why has to do with the attack itself. More specifically, it has to do with the fact that Abdulmutallab’s failure, according to Savage’s reporting, was entirely his own. He wasn’t thwarted because of anything having to do with U.S. policy; he simply got unlucky (thank God). If “Rick & Morty” is correct, and there is an infinite number of alternative universes out there — well, in most of them, Obama’s first Christmas as president features the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The other reason why the underwear bomber has had such an outsize influence on the present administration has to do with the way the news was greeted by Obama’s political foes. His attempts to reform some of Bush’s practices were being stymied already; and many in the administration worried about time and energy being drained from other priorities, like the Affordable Care Act or Dodd-Frank. The underwear bomber made everything worse, and tipped the administration’s internal balance of power in the skeptics’ favor. Here’s how Savage put it to me during our chat:

Republican critiques that [Obama] was dismantling some of the things that Bush had put into place suddenly got a lot sharper; and the sense was, if there was another attack, and if it succeeded, the blood would be on his hands … So inside the Obama administration, [it came to be believed that if] there is another attack, and it actually succeeds, Obama [would] be a failed, one-term president … [E]verything he came in there to do, including things that [had] nothing to do with national security, would fail.

There’s no doubt that civil libertarians and other critics of the national security state will find that justification severely lacking. Although we all know it’s true, no one wants to admit (or accept) that political expediency usually trumps fundamental rights. But it’s worth looking back on the episode from today’s vantage, especially in the wake of the terrorist attack in Paris. Because Obama realized something in 2009 that is just as relevant today. And it’s something I think many progressives have forgotten. Despite all the death and suffering, despite our promises to never again make the same mistakes, American politics is still just one step removed from the abyss. One successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil; that’s it. That’s how close we are to a return of the toxicity that poisoned this country in the years after 9/11. That’s how close we are to the dark days of 2002, when our politics was characterized by a nightmarish combination of hysteria and belligerence. If you don’t believe me, I think this list of recent stories can give you a good sense of the way America’s responded so far to the massacre in Paris. Jeb Bush, who supposedly represents the sensible adults within the Republican Party, is reiterating his call to discriminate against refugees on the basis of religion. Meanwhile, the party’s 2016 front-runner, Donald Trump, is vowing to “strongly consider” shuttering some American mosques if he becomes president. The governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi and Texas have all vowed not to accept Syrian refugees. And in Congress, a powerful GOP senator wants to shut down the government for the same reason. In other words, the norm against explicitly discriminating against Muslims — which was admittedly always rather weak — has been essentially abandoned. Remember how George W. Bush would insist, repeatedly, that Islam was “a religion of peace”? Those days are gone. When it comes to Muslims, the GOP has discarded any pretense of opposing a war of religion. The Lindsey Grahams of the world, who want the U.S. to lead a “religious war,” have won. Easily. If you’re hoping that the media will perform more admirably now than it did in the years after 9/11, when jingoist groupthink nearly became a requirement for inclusion in the mainstream? Sorry, but the news isn’t better there, either. The New York Observer, for example, recently published an Op-Ed recommending France consider “harsher measures,” like “the internment of potential jihadists”; elite journalists, such as Politico’s Ben White, are sounding like they did in the run-up to Iraq. A leading reporter for CNN is demanding the president explain why he won’t just “take out these bastards.” The racism, the bigotry, the fear-mongering, the fantasies of redemption through violence — anyone who lived through the immediate post-9/11 period remembers it all too well. They remember how this willful embrace of militarism, suspicion, tribalism and fear led to unprecedented human rights abuses — at home and abroad — as well as a war that cost trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and accomplished nothing beyond replacing Saddam Hussein’s evil with one that, impossible as it seems, is somehow even worse. Keep in mind: This was all in response to an attack in Paris, the capital of a country most Americans have never visited — which, as recently as last week, was nothing more than a means to get a cheap laugh from conservative audiences. I shudder to imagine what the reaction would be like if what happened in Paris had taken place in Los Angeles, New York or Dallas instead. Obama is routinely described as a treasonous crypto-Muslim as it is already; if an attack happened on his watch, impeachment proceedings would begin within weeks. Now, whether Obama’s response to the Christmas Day attack of 2009 was right — both morally and in terms of policy — is a profoundly difficult question. And it’s one about which reasonable, intelligent and civic-minded people can differ. But to anyone who didn’t know it already, America’s response to the heinous violence in Paris should leave no doubt: We have not outgrown the war on terror, not remotely. We are just one attack away from being pulled back into that void once again.A few weeks ago, I spoke with the New York Times’ Charlie Savage about “Power Wars,” his new book on the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies. Savage’s book is long and dense (in a good way), but rather than try to encompass its whole narrative in our relatively brief conversation, I focused instead on the Christmas Day attack of 2009. And if that strikes you as odd, just take a gander at how American politics has responded to the atrocities perpetrated against innocent civilians in Paris last week. But before we turn to Paris, let’s talk about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s unsuccessful attack first. Aside from introducing the phrase “underwear bomber” into our lexicon, that near-miss disaster’s influence on our culture has been negligible. But according to Savage, that attempted mass murder, despite its ultimate failure, was like “Obama’s 9/11.” From that day on, his approach to the policies that make up the “war on terror” — surveillance, military commissions, drone strikes, etc. — would never be the same. One reason why has to do with the attack itself. More specifically, it has to do with the fact that Abdulmutallab’s failure, according to Savage’s reporting, was entirely his own. He wasn’t thwarted because of anything having to do with U.S. policy; he simply got unlucky (thank God). If “Rick & Morty” is correct, and there is an infinite number of alternative universes out there — well, in most of them, Obama’s first Christmas as president features the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The other reason why the underwear bomber has had such an outsize influence on the present administration has to do with the way the news was greeted by Obama’s political foes. His attempts to reform some of Bush’s practices were being stymied already; and many in the administration worried about time and energy being drained from other priorities, like the Affordable Care Act or Dodd-Frank. The underwear bomber made everything worse, and tipped the administration’s internal balance of power in the skeptics’ favor. Here’s how Savage put it to me during our chat:

Republican critiques that [Obama] was dismantling some of the things that Bush had put into place suddenly got a lot sharper; and the sense was, if there was another attack, and if it succeeded, the blood would be on his hands … So inside the Obama administration, [it came to be believed that if] there is another attack, and it actually succeeds, Obama [would] be a failed, one-term president … [E]verything he came in there to do, including things that [had] nothing to do with national security, would fail.

There’s no doubt that civil libertarians and other critics of the national security state will find that justification severely lacking. Although we all know it’s true, no one wants to admit (or accept) that political expediency usually trumps fundamental rights. But it’s worth looking back on the episode from today’s vantage, especially in the wake of the terrorist attack in Paris. Because Obama realized something in 2009 that is just as relevant today. And it’s something I think many progressives have forgotten. Despite all the death and suffering, despite our promises to never again make the same mistakes, American politics is still just one step removed from the abyss. One successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil; that’s it. That’s how close we are to a return of the toxicity that poisoned this country in the years after 9/11. That’s how close we are to the dark days of 2002, when our politics was characterized by a nightmarish combination of hysteria and belligerence. If you don’t believe me, I think this list of recent stories can give you a good sense of the way America’s responded so far to the massacre in Paris. Jeb Bush, who supposedly represents the sensible adults within the Republican Party, is reiterating his call to discriminate against refugees on the basis of religion. Meanwhile, the party’s 2016 front-runner, Donald Trump, is vowing to “strongly consider” shuttering some American mosques if he becomes president. The governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi and Texas have all vowed not to accept Syrian refugees. And in Congress, a powerful GOP senator wants to shut down the government for the same reason. In other words, the norm against explicitly discriminating against Muslims — which was admittedly always rather weak — has been essentially abandoned. Remember how George W. Bush would insist, repeatedly, that Islam was “a religion of peace”? Those days are gone. When it comes to Muslims, the GOP has discarded any pretense of opposing a war of religion. The Lindsey Grahams of the world, who want the U.S. to lead a “religious war,” have won. Easily. If you’re hoping that the media will perform more admirably now than it did in the years after 9/11, when jingoist groupthink nearly became a requirement for inclusion in the mainstream? Sorry, but the news isn’t better there, either. The New York Observer, for example, recently published an Op-Ed recommending France consider “harsher measures,” like “the internment of potential jihadists”; elite journalists, such as Politico’s Ben White, are sounding like they did in the run-up to Iraq. A leading reporter for CNN is demanding the president explain why he won’t just “take out these bastards.” The racism, the bigotry, the fear-mongering, the fantasies of redemption through violence — anyone who lived through the immediate post-9/11 period remembers it all too well. They remember how this willful embrace of militarism, suspicion, tribalism and fear led to unprecedented human rights abuses — at home and abroad — as well as a war that cost trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and accomplished nothing beyond replacing Saddam Hussein’s evil with one that, impossible as it seems, is somehow even worse. Keep in mind: This was all in response to an attack in Paris, the capital of a country most Americans have never visited — which, as recently as last week, was nothing more than a means to get a cheap laugh from conservative audiences. I shudder to imagine what the reaction would be like if what happened in Paris had taken place in Los Angeles, New York or Dallas instead. Obama is routinely described as a treasonous crypto-Muslim as it is already; if an attack happened on his watch, impeachment proceedings would begin within weeks. Now, whether Obama’s response to the Christmas Day attack of 2009 was right — both morally and in terms of policy — is a profoundly difficult question. And it’s one about which reasonable, intelligent and civic-minded people can differ. But to anyone who didn’t know it already, America’s response to the heinous violence in Paris should leave no doubt: We have not outgrown the war on terror, not remotely. We are just one attack away from being pulled back into that void once again.

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Chris Christie is winning the a**hole primary with his callous refugee stance: Not even “3 year old orphans” welcome

It's off to the races. Republican elected officials across the country spent the better part of Monday out-demagoguing each other on the issue of Syrian refugees in the face of Friday's terror attack in Paris and President Obama's defiant call to reject the “dark impulse” to turn our backs on the thousands of refugees fleeing war. But with hours still left to go, it's safe to say that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wins the distinction of most callous GOP response of the day. In an apparent reversal of his position from two months ago, Christie now says that the United States is not capable of accepting any Syrian refugees for fear of importing terrorism, not even "three year old orphans." Christie's callous dismissal of the plight of war orphans stands in stark contrast to his own sentiments from weeks ago. "We saw the image of that 4-year-old little boy drowned in Syria," Christie said back in September, referring to the harrowing image of a young child laying motionless on a beach shore. "We can’t have those kinds of things.” But in an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt today, Christie gave these revised comments: https://twitter.com/hughhewitt/status... Earlier in the day, President Obama chided Republicans who rushed to conflate Syrian refugees with Friday's terror attack or ISIL. “When I hear folks say maybe we should accept the Christians but not the Muslims. When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful, that’s not American, that’s not who we are” Obama said. Christie joins a growing list of Republican governors who have declared their states Syrian refugee free zones: Ohio https://twitter.com/FoxBusiness/statu... Louisiana https://twitter.com/BobbyJindal/statu... Wisconsin https://twitter.com/ScottWalker/statu... Kansas  https://twitter.com/govsambrownback/s... Arizona  https://twitter.com/dougducey/status/... Indiana  https://twitter.com/GovPenceIN/status... Arkansas  https://twitter.com/AsaHutchinson/sta... https://twitter.com/AsaHutchinson/sta... Alabama  https://twitter.com/GovernorBentley/s... Texas https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/sta... Florida  https://twitter.com/FLGovScott/status... North Carolina https://twitter.com/PatMcCroryNC/stat... Michigan https://twitter.com/onetoughnerd/stat... Idaho https://twitter.com/ButchOtter/status... Georgia https://twitter.com/GovernorDeal/stat... Nebraska  https://twitter.com/GovRicketts/statu... https://twitter.com/GovRicketts/statu... Massachusetts  https://twitter.com/cbsboston/status/... Illinois  https://twitter.com/wics_abc20/status... Oklahoma  https://twitter.com/PCornellCNN/statu... Mississippi https://twitter.com/courtneyannj/stat... Tennessee  https://twitter.com/3onyourside/statu... Maine https://twitter.com/WCSH6/status/6663... New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan is the only Democrat to have called for a halt of the Syrian refugee resettlement program so far. Rand Paul announced he planned to introduce legislation barring all visas, including student and travel visas, from 30 so-called "high-risk nations." “I’m getting calls nonstop from my state saying we don’t think this a good idea to bring in refugees when we’re not certain they aren’t coming here to attack us,” Paul said explaining the move. The United States has only extended a welcoming hand to an additional 10,000 refugees from the war torn nation over the next two years, but every Republican presidential candidate has either called for only allowing Christian Syrians to enter the country or halting resettlement all together. According to World Vision, 12 million refugees have fled Syria since the war began in 2011 and the organization estimates half of those fleeing refugees are children.It's off to the races. Republican elected officials across the country spent the better part of Monday out-demagoguing each other on the issue of Syrian refugees in the face of Friday's terror attack in Paris and President Obama's defiant call to reject the “dark impulse” to turn our backs on the thousands of refugees fleeing war. But with hours still left to go, it's safe to say that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wins the distinction of most callous GOP response of the day. In an apparent reversal of his position from two months ago, Christie now says that the United States is not capable of accepting any Syrian refugees for fear of importing terrorism, not even "three year old orphans." Christie's callous dismissal of the plight of war orphans stands in stark contrast to his own sentiments from weeks ago. "We saw the image of that 4-year-old little boy drowned in Syria," Christie said back in September, referring to the harrowing image of a young child laying motionless on a beach shore. "We can’t have those kinds of things.” But in an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt today, Christie gave these revised comments: https://twitter.com/hughhewitt/status... Earlier in the day, President Obama chided Republicans who rushed to conflate Syrian refugees with Friday's terror attack or ISIL. “When I hear folks say maybe we should accept the Christians but not the Muslims. When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful, that’s not American, that’s not who we are” Obama said. Christie joins a growing list of Republican governors who have declared their states Syrian refugee free zones: Ohio https://twitter.com/FoxBusiness/statu... Louisiana https://twitter.com/BobbyJindal/statu... Wisconsin https://twitter.com/ScottWalker/statu... Kansas  https://twitter.com/govsambrownback/s... Arizona  https://twitter.com/dougducey/status/... Indiana  https://twitter.com/GovPenceIN/status... Arkansas  https://twitter.com/AsaHutchinson/sta... https://twitter.com/AsaHutchinson/sta... Alabama  https://twitter.com/GovernorBentley/s... Texas https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/sta... Florida  https://twitter.com/FLGovScott/status... North Carolina https://twitter.com/PatMcCroryNC/stat... Michigan https://twitter.com/onetoughnerd/stat... Idaho https://twitter.com/ButchOtter/status... Georgia https://twitter.com/GovernorDeal/stat... Nebraska  https://twitter.com/GovRicketts/statu... https://twitter.com/GovRicketts/statu... Massachusetts  https://twitter.com/cbsboston/status/... Illinois  https://twitter.com/wics_abc20/status... Oklahoma  https://twitter.com/PCornellCNN/statu... Mississippi https://twitter.com/courtneyannj/stat... Tennessee  https://twitter.com/3onyourside/statu... Maine https://twitter.com/WCSH6/status/6663... New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan is the only Democrat to have called for a halt of the Syrian refugee resettlement program so far. Rand Paul announced he planned to introduce legislation barring all visas, including student and travel visas, from 30 so-called "high-risk nations." “I’m getting calls nonstop from my state saying we don’t think this a good idea to bring in refugees when we’re not certain they aren’t coming here to attack us,” Paul said explaining the move. The United States has only extended a welcoming hand to an additional 10,000 refugees from the war torn nation over the next two years, but every Republican presidential candidate has either called for only allowing Christian Syrians to enter the country or halting resettlement all together. According to World Vision, 12 million refugees have fled Syria since the war began in 2011 and the organization estimates half of those fleeing refugees are children.

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