Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 845
March 4, 2016
The new “Ghostbusters” and race: Why it matters that Leslie Jones isn’t playing one of the scientists
Yesterday, the trailer for this summer’s all-female “Ghostbusters” reboot finally hit the Internet. Seeing Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones suited up and ready to fight the paranormal had fans bursting with excitement—except for one problem: Jones’ character, Patty, is a streetwise MTA worker, while her co-stars play scientists. Patty joins the team after offering her knowledge of the city, as well as her uncle’s hearse to drive. “You guys are really smart about this science stuff, but I know New York,” Patty says. In a response video posted to YouTube, Akilah Hughes called Jones’ character “a minstrel show… the loud, screaming thing in the room.” Leslie Jones defended the portrayal on Twitter, writing that an MTA worker wrote to her to thank her for giving subway employees a “semblance of humanness.” The MTA worker wrote to Jones, “That glass in the [booth] have folk thinking I'm invisible, that I'm not a college graduate, and a producer, comedian, writer, actor, etc. I'm a verb.” Jones’ response is an important reminder that MTA workers deserve to have their stories told onscreen, too. And yet critics of the trailer could have a reason to be worried. The glimpses of Patty we see in the trailer are reminiscent of decades of tokenization in cinema, which reduces people of color—and specifically black women—to being portrayed as mammies, “Magical Negroes,” and token black friends. These characters rarely have their own developed narrative arcs or rich inner lives and primarily exist to service the white characters in their quest for fulfillment. While these characters pay lip service to racial inclusion, they are reduced to second-class citizens onscreen. The invaluable TV Tropes website—a bible for common patterns and stereotypes in media—provides a helpful overview of the “Black Best Friend” character. Who is the Black Best Friend? “She's never too busy to lend an ear, or come along on your wacky schemes,” the site explains. “She is flawless to the point of being unreal. … Is it because she has no love life, no apartment, and no family? It's hard to say, but there's one thing for sure. She has a cell phone, and never ignores your calls.” There are countless examples of this character in film and television. Prominent Black Best Friends include Elena Tyler, Felicity Porter’s studious classmate on “Felicity”; Mercedes on “Glee,” the New Directions member who temporarily serves as Kurt’s beard in the show’s freshman season; and Wallace on “Veronica Mars,” who is paired up with the teen drama’s only other black character (Tessa Thompson), as if by default. These characters are frequently reduced to narrative afterthoughts: In early episodes of “New Girl,” the writers had such little clue what to do with Winston that they made it a running joke in the show. Just because a person of color is in a supporting role doesn’t mean they have to be a token. As “New Girl” found its tone, the eternally drifting Winston became one of the strongest—and most delightfully offbeat—characters on the show. The program also became one of the few on television (along with “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) to have two black men in key roles, after Damon Wayans Jr., who appeared in the pilot, rejoined the cast. On “Community,” Shirley, played by Yvette Nicole Brown, smartly upends the trope: Bubbly on the service, her friendly smile hides what Brown calls a well of “suppressed rage.” Blogger Zeba Blay writes, “She speaks in a soft, sing-song voice that periodically breaks out into a deep bellow of sass when somebody crosses her. In a TV show that’s very meta about TV shows, it’s almost as if Brown’s role is to be always aware of that bubbling Sassy Black Woman below, and suppress it.” In the Amy Heckerling film “Clueless,” Dionne has long been a fan favorite because she gets to do what so few Black Best Friends get to do: be confident and independent. She has her own relationships and an entire world outside of Cher’s. She is no one’s accessory. Vice’s Vanessa Willoughby recalls that growing up, the character was an important role model. “Dionne was a new kind of black girl on film: one who refused to sacrifice her blackness to fit in,” she writes. Unfortunately, these handful of good examples only illustrate how commonly movies that feature black characters get it wrong. Mid-’90s teen films like “10 Things I Hate About You” and “She’s All That” cast actresses like Gabrielle Union and Lil’ Kim as props for their white counterparts. In “The Craft,” the coven’s only black witch, Rochelle, gets 25 lines in the whole script. Most of her dialogue consists of relaying information about the white characters. For example: “Nancy's sorry about what happened in biology. And she's mean to everybody, so don't take it personally.” She may as well be human window dressing for white women’s stories. This happens constantly in Hollywood, even in movies that should be about black women’s stories. In Tate Taylor’s “The Help,” Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer (who won an Oscar for her performance) are reduced to glorified supporting parts. The protagonist of the film is Skeeter, played by Emma Stone, who interviews them about their experiences working as maids. Blay writes, “[T]hanks to the telling of their struggles, [Skeeter] gets a swanky reporting job in New York by the end and, of course, solves racism.” Hollywood can do better by dismantling stereotypes and allowing women to tell their own stories, but it too often does not. Producers, writers and directors like these kinds of roles because they are familiar and comfortable for white audiences, who are used to seeing themselves in positions of authority and control over black lives. Casting Leslie Jones to play a scientist, and thus be on equal footing with her castmates, is relinquishing decades of power. If IndieWire’s Andre Seewood argues that we’ve reached a point of “Hyper-Tokenism,” in which characters like Jones’ receive more screentime and presence on the film’s promotional materials but not greater agency in the film, and we need to keep demanding more than inclusion. Thirty years ago, Ernie Hudson played a similar role in the original “Ghostbusters,” the only member of the crew not to be a scientist. He had 30 lines in the whole script, many of which are simply “Aw, shit,” “Oh no,” or “Let’s go!” Nearly three decades later, director Paul Feig has promised that the troop’s only black member would have a “bigger part.” Leslie Jones is right: MTA workers and black women working in all kinds of professions should be represented on film. Patty can be powerful, real, and also work behind a ticket counter. Hopefully, her story will be treated as just as important as those of the other women around her.Yesterday, the trailer for this summer’s all-female “Ghostbusters” reboot finally hit the Internet. Seeing Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones suited up and ready to fight the paranormal had fans bursting with excitement—except for one problem: Jones’ character, Patty, is a streetwise MTA worker, while her co-stars play scientists. Patty joins the team after offering her knowledge of the city, as well as her uncle’s hearse to drive. “You guys are really smart about this science stuff, but I know New York,” Patty says. In a response video posted to YouTube, Akilah Hughes called Jones’ character “a minstrel show… the loud, screaming thing in the room.” Leslie Jones defended the portrayal on Twitter, writing that an MTA worker wrote to her to thank her for giving subway employees a “semblance of humanness.” The MTA worker wrote to Jones, “That glass in the [booth] have folk thinking I'm invisible, that I'm not a college graduate, and a producer, comedian, writer, actor, etc. I'm a verb.” Jones’ response is an important reminder that MTA workers deserve to have their stories told onscreen, too. And yet critics of the trailer could have a reason to be worried. The glimpses of Patty we see in the trailer are reminiscent of decades of tokenization in cinema, which reduces people of color—and specifically black women—to being portrayed as mammies, “Magical Negroes,” and token black friends. These characters rarely have their own developed narrative arcs or rich inner lives and primarily exist to service the white characters in their quest for fulfillment. While these characters pay lip service to racial inclusion, they are reduced to second-class citizens onscreen. The invaluable TV Tropes website—a bible for common patterns and stereotypes in media—provides a helpful overview of the “Black Best Friend” character. Who is the Black Best Friend? “She's never too busy to lend an ear, or come along on your wacky schemes,” the site explains. “She is flawless to the point of being unreal. … Is it because she has no love life, no apartment, and no family? It's hard to say, but there's one thing for sure. She has a cell phone, and never ignores your calls.” There are countless examples of this character in film and television. Prominent Black Best Friends include Elena Tyler, Felicity Porter’s studious classmate on “Felicity”; Mercedes on “Glee,” the New Directions member who temporarily serves as Kurt’s beard in the show’s freshman season; and Wallace on “Veronica Mars,” who is paired up with the teen drama’s only other black character (Tessa Thompson), as if by default. These characters are frequently reduced to narrative afterthoughts: In early episodes of “New Girl,” the writers had such little clue what to do with Winston that they made it a running joke in the show. Just because a person of color is in a supporting role doesn’t mean they have to be a token. As “New Girl” found its tone, the eternally drifting Winston became one of the strongest—and most delightfully offbeat—characters on the show. The program also became one of the few on television (along with “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) to have two black men in key roles, after Damon Wayans Jr., who appeared in the pilot, rejoined the cast. On “Community,” Shirley, played by Yvette Nicole Brown, smartly upends the trope: Bubbly on the service, her friendly smile hides what Brown calls a well of “suppressed rage.” Blogger Zeba Blay writes, “She speaks in a soft, sing-song voice that periodically breaks out into a deep bellow of sass when somebody crosses her. In a TV show that’s very meta about TV shows, it’s almost as if Brown’s role is to be always aware of that bubbling Sassy Black Woman below, and suppress it.” In the Amy Heckerling film “Clueless,” Dionne has long been a fan favorite because she gets to do what so few Black Best Friends get to do: be confident and independent. She has her own relationships and an entire world outside of Cher’s. She is no one’s accessory. Vice’s Vanessa Willoughby recalls that growing up, the character was an important role model. “Dionne was a new kind of black girl on film: one who refused to sacrifice her blackness to fit in,” she writes. Unfortunately, these handful of good examples only illustrate how commonly movies that feature black characters get it wrong. Mid-’90s teen films like “10 Things I Hate About You” and “She’s All That” cast actresses like Gabrielle Union and Lil’ Kim as props for their white counterparts. In “The Craft,” the coven’s only black witch, Rochelle, gets 25 lines in the whole script. Most of her dialogue consists of relaying information about the white characters. For example: “Nancy's sorry about what happened in biology. And she's mean to everybody, so don't take it personally.” She may as well be human window dressing for white women’s stories. This happens constantly in Hollywood, even in movies that should be about black women’s stories. In Tate Taylor’s “The Help,” Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer (who won an Oscar for her performance) are reduced to glorified supporting parts. The protagonist of the film is Skeeter, played by Emma Stone, who interviews them about their experiences working as maids. Blay writes, “[T]hanks to the telling of their struggles, [Skeeter] gets a swanky reporting job in New York by the end and, of course, solves racism.” Hollywood can do better by dismantling stereotypes and allowing women to tell their own stories, but it too often does not. Producers, writers and directors like these kinds of roles because they are familiar and comfortable for white audiences, who are used to seeing themselves in positions of authority and control over black lives. Casting Leslie Jones to play a scientist, and thus be on equal footing with her castmates, is relinquishing decades of power. If IndieWire’s Andre Seewood argues that we’ve reached a point of “Hyper-Tokenism,” in which characters like Jones’ receive more screentime and presence on the film’s promotional materials but not greater agency in the film, and we need to keep demanding more than inclusion. Thirty years ago, Ernie Hudson played a similar role in the original “Ghostbusters,” the only member of the crew not to be a scientist. He had 30 lines in the whole script, many of which are simply “Aw, shit,” “Oh no,” or “Let’s go!” Nearly three decades later, director Paul Feig has promised that the troop’s only black member would have a “bigger part.” Leslie Jones is right: MTA workers and black women working in all kinds of professions should be represented on film. Patty can be powerful, real, and also work behind a ticket counter. Hopefully, her story will be treated as just as important as those of the other women around her.
Trump suddenly drops out of CPAC and draws swift conservative scorn: “Not the last time Donald Trump will abandon conservatives”
After shamelessly fessing up to blatantly flip-flopping on immigration during Thursday night's Fox News GOP debate, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump suddenly announced that he was backing out of addressing this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. Secured with, yet another, round of vows from his rivals pledging their support to the eventual Republican presidential nominee, Trump's campaign released a statement canceling his CPAC speech in favor of campaigning in Kansas, which votes on Saturday. The Trump campaign statement, released Friday afternoon as the Los Angeles Police Department held a press conference announcing an apparent breakthrough in the decades old OJ Simpson case, misspelled where Trump was campaigning (again), and was widely mocked on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status... https://twitter.com/JGreenDC/status/7... https://twitter.com/darth/status/7058... In any case, conservatives who were just in an uproar at the mere indication Tea Party Senator Marco Rubio may not be attending CPAC last week, were quick to lash out at Trump's last minute decision. (The Rubio campaign and CPAC eventually agreed on a schedule): https://twitter.com/Zigmanfreud/statu... https://twitter.com/CPAC/status/70580... While CPAC may only be willing to express its "disappointment" in Trump's decision, right now, conservatives on Twitter are hardly holding back their hurt at Trump's apparent dismissal of the conservative movement -- after all, Trump has attended the conservative confab numerous times before: https://twitter.com/Phil_Mattingly/st... https://twitter.com/BenSasse/status/7... https://twitter.com/charlescwcooke/st... https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status... https://twitter.com/cjosiedoe1/status... https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/statu... https://twitter.com/mboyle1/status/70... https://twitter.com/JayCaruso/status/... https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/... https://twitter.com/JimmyPrinceton/st... But, of course, there remain the faithful: https://twitter.com/NolteNC/status/70... https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/stat... https://twitter.com/DrJerryFowler/sta... https://twitter.com/DonaldsAngel/stat... There is speculation that Trump's decision was brought on by the threat of a planned protest during his address. The National Review reported this week that a "tricorn-hat-wearing revolutionary" planned a 300-person strong walk-out of Trump's talk Saturday. We "are going to get up at one time to go the bathroom," William Temple said. “We’re not going to put up with him." In fact, several of the conservative conference speakers are openly hostile to a Trump candidacy: And the GOP civil war rages on.After shamelessly fessing up to blatantly flip-flopping on immigration during Thursday night's Fox News GOP debate, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump suddenly announced that he was backing out of addressing this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. Secured with, yet another, round of vows from his rivals pledging their support to the eventual Republican presidential nominee, Trump's campaign released a statement canceling his CPAC speech in favor of campaigning in Kansas, which votes on Saturday. The Trump campaign statement, released Friday afternoon as the Los Angeles Police Department held a press conference announcing an apparent breakthrough in the decades old OJ Simpson case, misspelled where Trump was campaigning (again), and was widely mocked on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status... https://twitter.com/JGreenDC/status/7... https://twitter.com/darth/status/7058... In any case, conservatives who were just in an uproar at the mere indication Tea Party Senator Marco Rubio may not be attending CPAC last week, were quick to lash out at Trump's last minute decision. (The Rubio campaign and CPAC eventually agreed on a schedule): https://twitter.com/Zigmanfreud/statu... https://twitter.com/CPAC/status/70580... While CPAC may only be willing to express its "disappointment" in Trump's decision, right now, conservatives on Twitter are hardly holding back their hurt at Trump's apparent dismissal of the conservative movement -- after all, Trump has attended the conservative confab numerous times before: https://twitter.com/Phil_Mattingly/st... https://twitter.com/BenSasse/status/7... https://twitter.com/charlescwcooke/st... https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status... https://twitter.com/cjosiedoe1/status... https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/statu... https://twitter.com/mboyle1/status/70... https://twitter.com/JayCaruso/status/... https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/... https://twitter.com/JimmyPrinceton/st... But, of course, there remain the faithful: https://twitter.com/NolteNC/status/70... https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/stat... https://twitter.com/DrJerryFowler/sta... https://twitter.com/DonaldsAngel/stat... There is speculation that Trump's decision was brought on by the threat of a planned protest during his address. The National Review reported this week that a "tricorn-hat-wearing revolutionary" planned a 300-person strong walk-out of Trump's talk Saturday. We "are going to get up at one time to go the bathroom," William Temple said. “We’re not going to put up with him." In fact, several of the conservative conference speakers are openly hostile to a Trump candidacy: And the GOP civil war rages on.
Is Michael Bloomberg getting serious about a presidential run? This curious move has fueled new speculation
In a move sure to fuel rumors that Michael Bloomberg will launch an independent presidential bid, the New York Times reports that Bloomberg's personal website was recently transferred from his company's servers to an independent server. The Times reports that MikeBloomberg.com was hosted on the servers of Bloomberg, L.P. until Feb. 14, when it was moved to a server run by Amazon.com. The news led to speculation that the transfer could be motivated by federal campaign finance laws, which prohibit corporations from making contributions of cash or services to candidates. As the Times explains, "[B]usiness executives running for office can either divorce their campaign from their business, as Mr. Bloomberg did when he ran for mayor, or painstakingly reimburse their company from their campaign funds." The timing of the move is not insignificant: the Feb. 14 transfer came just days after Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump cruised to victories in the New Hampshire primaries. A third-party Bloomberg candidacy is generally believed to be most likely in the event of a November election pitting Sanders against Trump. While Trump has continued to surge, Sanders appears less likely to win the Democratic nomination after Hillary Clinton's Super Tuesday victories. A Bloomberg run seems less plausible on March 4 than it did on Feb. 14, but it can't yet be ruled out. The former New York City mayor is running up against his own self-imposed deadline for deciding on a presidential run. In January, the Times reported that Bloomberg would announce a run by early March, the latest point at which he could get his name on the presidential ballot as an independent in all 50 states. Even if he ultimately does not run, Bloomberg is reportedly interested in a cabinet position in a Clinton administration: https://twitter.com/JHWeissmann/statu... a move sure to fuel rumors that Michael Bloomberg will launch an independent presidential bid, the New York Times reports that Bloomberg's personal website was recently transferred from his company's servers to an independent server. The Times reports that MikeBloomberg.com was hosted on the servers of Bloomberg, L.P. until Feb. 14, when it was moved to a server run by Amazon.com. The news led to speculation that the transfer could be motivated by federal campaign finance laws, which prohibit corporations from making contributions of cash or services to candidates. As the Times explains, "[B]usiness executives running for office can either divorce their campaign from their business, as Mr. Bloomberg did when he ran for mayor, or painstakingly reimburse their company from their campaign funds." The timing of the move is not insignificant: the Feb. 14 transfer came just days after Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump cruised to victories in the New Hampshire primaries. A third-party Bloomberg candidacy is generally believed to be most likely in the event of a November election pitting Sanders against Trump. While Trump has continued to surge, Sanders appears less likely to win the Democratic nomination after Hillary Clinton's Super Tuesday victories. A Bloomberg run seems less plausible on March 4 than it did on Feb. 14, but it can't yet be ruled out. The former New York City mayor is running up against his own self-imposed deadline for deciding on a presidential run. In January, the Times reported that Bloomberg would announce a run by early March, the latest point at which he could get his name on the presidential ballot as an independent in all 50 states. Even if he ultimately does not run, Bloomberg is reportedly interested in a cabinet position in a Clinton administration: https://twitter.com/JHWeissmann/statu... a move sure to fuel rumors that Michael Bloomberg will launch an independent presidential bid, the New York Times reports that Bloomberg's personal website was recently transferred from his company's servers to an independent server. The Times reports that MikeBloomberg.com was hosted on the servers of Bloomberg, L.P. until Feb. 14, when it was moved to a server run by Amazon.com. The news led to speculation that the transfer could be motivated by federal campaign finance laws, which prohibit corporations from making contributions of cash or services to candidates. As the Times explains, "[B]usiness executives running for office can either divorce their campaign from their business, as Mr. Bloomberg did when he ran for mayor, or painstakingly reimburse their company from their campaign funds." The timing of the move is not insignificant: the Feb. 14 transfer came just days after Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump cruised to victories in the New Hampshire primaries. A third-party Bloomberg candidacy is generally believed to be most likely in the event of a November election pitting Sanders against Trump. While Trump has continued to surge, Sanders appears less likely to win the Democratic nomination after Hillary Clinton's Super Tuesday victories. A Bloomberg run seems less plausible on March 4 than it did on Feb. 14, but it can't yet be ruled out. The former New York City mayor is running up against his own self-imposed deadline for deciding on a presidential run. In January, the Times reported that Bloomberg would announce a run by early March, the latest point at which he could get his name on the presidential ballot as an independent in all 50 states. Even if he ultimately does not run, Bloomberg is reportedly interested in a cabinet position in a Clinton administration: https://twitter.com/JHWeissmann/statu...
Bill O’Reilly, drunk or just awkward? An in-depth analysis of his slurry, bizarre GOP debate show
After Thursday night's Fox News GOP debate, each candidate separately guested on a live "O'Reilly Factor." After a supposedly "awkward" leadoff interview with Trump and a few intermittent speech blips, some are positing host Bill O'Reilly went a little heavy on the pre-show sauce.
The speculation appears to have originated with Patton Oswalt's Twitter, and then spread thenceforth:
https://twitter.com/pattonoswalt/stat... https://twitter.com/pattonoswalt/stat...Be that as it may, until President Trump has something to do with it, we live in a democratic society with due process. It would be negligent not to presume O'Reilly sober until proven sloshed. So let's break it down.
Donald Trump:
O’Reilly keeps his composure quite well in the Trump spin-room interview. He interrupts Trump’s tired “(Mitt Romney’s) a failed candidate” spiel in typical fashion. He asks Trump why he thinks he "engender(s) so much loathing” from his own party. His posture is impeccable:
He does get a little too friendly with Melania, but, to be fair, Trump initiates the exchange to ease the tension after suggesting that O’Reilly ask his therapist why his coverage of the Trump campaign has become increasingly negative.
“I think I’ve been fair,” O’Reilly reverses, even after Trump introduces “my boy Eric” so as to avoid a heated post-debate debate. To poke a bear like Trump, you’d have to be drunk, stupid, Mitt Romney, or a combination thereof.
O’Reilly will not stop: “You wanna give me an example?” And when Trump says no, “C’monnn!”
Thankfully for everyone’s sake, O’Reilly finally recognizes he’s hit a dead end and switches gears, this time looking ahead to the Convention this July in Cleveland. Unable to find the words “brokered convention,” O’Reilly settles for, “the under table thing.”
Marco Rubio:
A little blip right off the bat: He calls it the "post-Factor" instead of the "post-debate Factor." Splitting hairs here; he still has the benefit of my doubt.
I don't know if this is the case, but I might start watching "The Factor" more if he treats all his interviewees like he did Rubio. After talking about Trump the entire time, O'Reilly gave Rubio the last 30-or-so seconds to explain how he'll win Florida. Then, squeezing in the last word, Bill says, "I don't think it's gonna work." And throws to commercial. Fuck objectivity; that was beautiful.
Ted Cruz:
O'Reilly messes up the name of his show again — a serious blow to his case for sobriety. Bill has a certain smug cadence, resting on the last word in a clause, which he's mastered over a century on-air. "Continuing nowww with The Factorrr" was what he was going for. At the last second, though, he tried to fit in "Special Edition of," then decommitted. In a vacuum, the stumble is a brain fart. But up against his shaky performance thus far, it's fair to get suspicious.
It looks like something silly made have happened or been said during the commercial break, because Cruz appears to be chuckling at the onset of his interview:
Cruz looks like (is) a cocky shit whenever he's not orating, though. So I don't want to read too much into it. This is the same face he made when he passed Ben Carson in the hallway at the New Hampshire debate:
Unless you're willing to argue Carson was hammered in New Hampshire (I kind of am) this evidence is circumstantial.
The defining moment in the Cruz interview is O'Reilly's battle with the word "durability." Five-syllable words with that many vowel-sounds are a drunk man's Rubik's Cube. And "durability" is a word no sober person could ever screw up. "Durable" is the go-to adjective for winter jackets, gutter guards, and GM trucks; you can't fall asleep with the TV on and not subconsciously learn the word.
O'Reilly's flub was the result of slurred speech, not a brain malfunction. And that's O.K. The campaign cycle is unbearably dragged out. It's bad enough just to be a mildly informed voter, much less a journalist or network pundit. I've never survived a whole GOP debate and been able to pronounce my own name by the end. Throw me in front of a camera afterwards and my meltdown would be far greater than a few mispronounced words. In this sense, O'Reilly is an icon.
John Kasich:
Now that we've come to terms with O'Reilly's buzz, it comes off as charming. And Kasich is a cute li'l non-factor, anyway. So loosen your tie, grab a nightcap, and enjoy.
Like Cruz, Kasich also starts off his interview giggling. And why not? When you've already lost, you've got nothing to lose.
“I’m gonna say this right out loud. I hope I don’t embarrass you," O'Reilly begins. "You’re far and away the best on policy in the field.” This is kind of the beltway equivalent of ‘You’re my best friend, man! No, seriously, I mean it! You are!’
Then Honesty Bill brings his friend John back down to earth with some sobering words, telling Kasich, "You're not exciting," and, "If you weren’t in Virginia, Rubio would’ve won.” Harsh, yes, but it's what Kasich needs to hear. It's called tough love. It's what this race needs and what only business-drunk Bill O'Reilly can provide.
Watch Bill O'Reilly do his thing and decide for yourself below, via Fox News:
Watch the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com">... the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com">... Watch the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com">... the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com">...After Thursday night's Fox News GOP debate, each candidate separately guested on a live "O'Reilly Factor." After a supposedly "awkward" leadoff interview with Trump and a few intermittent speech blips, some are positing host Bill O'Reilly went a little heavy on the pre-show sauce.
The speculation appears to have originated with Patton Oswalt's Twitter, and then spread thenceforth:
https://twitter.com/pattonoswalt/stat... https://twitter.com/pattonoswalt/stat...Be that as it may, until President Trump has something to do with it, we live in a democratic society with due process. It would be negligent not to presume O'Reilly sober until proven sloshed. So let's break it down.
Donald Trump:
O’Reilly keeps his composure quite well in the Trump spin-room interview. He interrupts Trump’s tired “(Mitt Romney’s) a failed candidate” spiel in typical fashion. He asks Trump why he thinks he "engender(s) so much loathing” from his own party. His posture is impeccable:
He does get a little too friendly with Melania, but, to be fair, Trump initiates the exchange to ease the tension after suggesting that O’Reilly ask his therapist why his coverage of the Trump campaign has become increasingly negative.
“I think I’ve been fair,” O’Reilly reverses, even after Trump introduces “my boy Eric” so as to avoid a heated post-debate debate. To poke a bear like Trump, you’d have to be drunk, stupid, Mitt Romney, or a combination thereof.
O’Reilly will not stop: “You wanna give me an example?” And when Trump says no, “C’monnn!”
Thankfully for everyone’s sake, O’Reilly finally recognizes he’s hit a dead end and switches gears, this time looking ahead to the Convention this July in Cleveland. Unable to find the words “brokered convention,” O’Reilly settles for, “the under table thing.”
Marco Rubio:
A little blip right off the bat: He calls it the "post-Factor" instead of the "post-debate Factor." Splitting hairs here; he still has the benefit of my doubt.
I don't know if this is the case, but I might start watching "The Factor" more if he treats all his interviewees like he did Rubio. After talking about Trump the entire time, O'Reilly gave Rubio the last 30-or-so seconds to explain how he'll win Florida. Then, squeezing in the last word, Bill says, "I don't think it's gonna work." And throws to commercial. Fuck objectivity; that was beautiful.
Ted Cruz:
O'Reilly messes up the name of his show again — a serious blow to his case for sobriety. Bill has a certain smug cadence, resting on the last word in a clause, which he's mastered over a century on-air. "Continuing nowww with The Factorrr" was what he was going for. At the last second, though, he tried to fit in "Special Edition of," then decommitted. In a vacuum, the stumble is a brain fart. But up against his shaky performance thus far, it's fair to get suspicious.
It looks like something silly made have happened or been said during the commercial break, because Cruz appears to be chuckling at the onset of his interview:
Cruz looks like (is) a cocky shit whenever he's not orating, though. So I don't want to read too much into it. This is the same face he made when he passed Ben Carson in the hallway at the New Hampshire debate:
Unless you're willing to argue Carson was hammered in New Hampshire (I kind of am) this evidence is circumstantial.
The defining moment in the Cruz interview is O'Reilly's battle with the word "durability." Five-syllable words with that many vowel-sounds are a drunk man's Rubik's Cube. And "durability" is a word no sober person could ever screw up. "Durable" is the go-to adjective for winter jackets, gutter guards, and GM trucks; you can't fall asleep with the TV on and not subconsciously learn the word.
O'Reilly's flub was the result of slurred speech, not a brain malfunction. And that's O.K. The campaign cycle is unbearably dragged out. It's bad enough just to be a mildly informed voter, much less a journalist or network pundit. I've never survived a whole GOP debate and been able to pronounce my own name by the end. Throw me in front of a camera afterwards and my meltdown would be far greater than a few mispronounced words. In this sense, O'Reilly is an icon.
John Kasich:
Now that we've come to terms with O'Reilly's buzz, it comes off as charming. And Kasich is a cute li'l non-factor, anyway. So loosen your tie, grab a nightcap, and enjoy.
Like Cruz, Kasich also starts off his interview giggling. And why not? When you've already lost, you've got nothing to lose.
“I’m gonna say this right out loud. I hope I don’t embarrass you," O'Reilly begins. "You’re far and away the best on policy in the field.” This is kind of the beltway equivalent of ‘You’re my best friend, man! No, seriously, I mean it! You are!’
Then Honesty Bill brings his friend John back down to earth with some sobering words, telling Kasich, "You're not exciting," and, "If you weren’t in Virginia, Rubio would’ve won.” Harsh, yes, but it's what Kasich needs to hear. It's called tough love. It's what this race needs and what only business-drunk Bill O'Reilly can provide.
Watch Bill O'Reilly do his thing and decide for yourself below, via Fox News:
Watch the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com">... the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com">... Watch the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com">... the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com">...
“Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer”: Senator “confirmed” as notorious murderer on Wikipedia as campaign gets new life
"Sad Chris Christie" and "Ben Carson Wikipedia" had their 15 minutes in the spotlight, but only one meme from the Republican presidential primaries has real staying power: "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer." It's a movement that has spawned t-shirts, a Twitter feed and even an e-book: "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer: A Time Travel Romance." None other than Public Policy Polling recently found that 38 percent of Florida voters think it's possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. Yes, that's a real poll. The debate raged on in the Wild West of Cruz's Wikipedia page on Friday morning:
We're pretty certain that Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac Killer. The infamous Bay Area homicides occurred in 1968 and 1969 and Cruz was born in 1970. (Although his birth certificate is Canadian... Isn't Donald Trump looking into this?) As yet, Ted Cruz hasn't gone on the record saying he's not the Zodiac."Sad Chris Christie" and "Ben Carson Wikipedia" had their 15 minutes in the spotlight, but only one meme from the Republican presidential primaries has real staying power: "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer." It's a movement that has spawned t-shirts, a Twitter feed and even an e-book: "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer: A Time Travel Romance." None other than Public Policy Polling recently found that 38 percent of Florida voters think it's possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. Yes, that's a real poll. The debate raged on in the Wild West of Cruz's Wikipedia page on Friday morning:
We're pretty certain that Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac Killer. The infamous Bay Area homicides occurred in 1968 and 1969 and Cruz was born in 1970. (Although his birth certificate is Canadian... Isn't Donald Trump looking into this?) As yet, Ted Cruz hasn't gone on the record saying he's not the Zodiac."Sad Chris Christie" and "Ben Carson Wikipedia" had their 15 minutes in the spotlight, but only one meme from the Republican presidential primaries has real staying power: "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer." It's a movement that has spawned t-shirts, a Twitter feed and even an e-book: "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer: A Time Travel Romance." None other than Public Policy Polling recently found that 38 percent of Florida voters think it's possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. Yes, that's a real poll. The debate raged on in the Wild West of Cruz's Wikipedia page on Friday morning:
We're pretty certain that Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac Killer. The infamous Bay Area homicides occurred in 1968 and 1969 and Cruz was born in 1970. (Although his birth certificate is Canadian... Isn't Donald Trump looking into this?) As yet, Ted Cruz hasn't gone on the record saying he's not the Zodiac.
We're pretty certain that Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac Killer. The infamous Bay Area homicides occurred in 1968 and 1969 and Cruz was born in 1970. (Although his birth certificate is Canadian... Isn't Donald Trump looking into this?) As yet, Ted Cruz hasn't gone on the record saying he's not the Zodiac."Sad Chris Christie" and "Ben Carson Wikipedia" had their 15 minutes in the spotlight, but only one meme from the Republican presidential primaries has real staying power: "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer." It's a movement that has spawned t-shirts, a Twitter feed and even an e-book: "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer: A Time Travel Romance." None other than Public Policy Polling recently found that 38 percent of Florida voters think it's possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. Yes, that's a real poll. The debate raged on in the Wild West of Cruz's Wikipedia page on Friday morning:
We're pretty certain that Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac Killer. The infamous Bay Area homicides occurred in 1968 and 1969 and Cruz was born in 1970. (Although his birth certificate is Canadian... Isn't Donald Trump looking into this?) As yet, Ted Cruz hasn't gone on the record saying he's not the Zodiac."Sad Chris Christie" and "Ben Carson Wikipedia" had their 15 minutes in the spotlight, but only one meme from the Republican presidential primaries has real staying power: "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer." It's a movement that has spawned t-shirts, a Twitter feed and even an e-book: "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer: A Time Travel Romance." None other than Public Policy Polling recently found that 38 percent of Florida voters think it's possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. Yes, that's a real poll. The debate raged on in the Wild West of Cruz's Wikipedia page on Friday morning:
We're pretty certain that Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac Killer. The infamous Bay Area homicides occurred in 1968 and 1969 and Cruz was born in 1970. (Although his birth certificate is Canadian... Isn't Donald Trump looking into this?) As yet, Ted Cruz hasn't gone on the record saying he's not the Zodiac.
Cornered Neocons: Trump’s heresy on foreign policy has put Republican hawks in nightmare scenario — backing Hillary Clinton
“The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives...We should've never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. You call it whatever you want...They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.” - Donald Trump A Trump nomination is a nightmare for the Republican establishment. There are many reasons why that's so, some more obvious than others. To begin with, a Trump-led ticket would mean not just a third consecutive term for the Democrats, it would also result in down-ballot defeats and perhaps even the loss of their majority in the Senate – that's reason enough to panic. But one of the less discussed concerns surrounding Trump has to do with foreign policy; specifically, the fact that Trump doesn't have one, and what he has said scares the hell out of Republican hawks. We saw a glimpse of this at a recent Republican debate, in which Trump popped the conservative bubble and said what no one else on that stage would – that the Iraq War was a mistake; that zealots exploited questionable intelligence for ideological purposes; and that military adventurism has made us and the world less safe. These are all indisputably true claims, and yet Republicans can't accept them. It's heresy in the GOP to question the neoconservative paradigm – just ask Rand Paul. It's assumed, as an article of faith, that America is the moral leader of the world; that we must not only defend our values across the world, we must also use force to remake it in our image. This is the thinking that gave us the Iraq War. It's the prism through which most of the GOP still views international politics. Trump – and Bernie Sanders – represents a departure from this paradigm. Although it's unlikely to happen, a Trump-Sanders general election would have been refreshing for at least one reason: it would have constituted a total rejection of neoconservatism. Most Americans understand, intuitively, that the differences between the major parties are often rhetorical, not substantive. That's not to say substantive differences don't exist – surely they do, especially on social issues. But the policies from administration to administration overlap more often than not, regardless of the party in charge. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Much of the stability is due to money and the structure of our system, which tends toward dynamic equilibrium. And there are limits to what the president can do on issues like the economy and health care. But one area in which the president does have enormous flexibility is foreign policy. Which is why, as Politico reported this week, the GOP's national security establishment is “bitterly digging in against” Trump. Indeed, more than any other wing of the Republican Party, the neoconservatives are terrified at the prospect of a Trump nomination. “Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” said Eliot Cohen, a former Bush official with neoconservative ties. Trump would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy.” Another neocon, Max Boot, says he'd vote for Clinton over Trump: “She would be vastly preferable to Trump.” Even Bill Kristol, the great champion of the Iraq War, a man who refuses to consider the hypothesis that he was wrong about anything, is threatening to recruit a third party candidate to derail Trump for similar reasons. Just this week, moreover, a group of conservative foreign policy intellectuals, several of whom are neocons, published an open letter stating that they're “united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.” They offer a host of reasons for their objections, but the bottom line is they don't trust Trump to continue America's current policy of policing the world on ethical grounds. Trump isn't constrained by the same ideological conventions as other candidates, and so he occasionally stumbles upon unpopular truths. His comments about the Iraq War are an obvious example. But even on an issue like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Trump says what any reasonable observer should: we ought to maintain neutrality and work to solve the dispute with an eyes towards our national interest. Now, Trump couldn't explain the concept of “realism” to save his life, but this position is perfectly consistent with that tradition. And if Republicans weren't blinkered by religious fanaticism, they'd acknowledge it as well. The same is true of Trump's nebulous critiques of America's soft imperialism, which again are sacrilege in Republican politics. To be clear: Donald Trump is a lunatic; he isn't fit for public office. His ascendancy is a national embarrassment and the latest signpost on the road to idiocracy. Saying he isn't a neoconservative does not imply he has an alternative worldview, or even a vague notion of America's role in the world. He's merely a blank slate, a question mark, someone the establishment can't reliably bend to their will. Reagan, too, was a blank slate, but he was malleable, like George W. Bush. Trump, on the other hand, is an exquisite marriage of ignorance and confidence – no one has any idea what he'll do. There is a similar – but not identical – dynamic on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton would be an infinitely better president than Trump – that's obvious. But there's no way around the fact that she represents the status quo on foreign policy, which is why neocons are far more comfortable with her than with Trump. And it's not just Clinton's support of the Iraq War, about which everyone knows. It's also her positions on Libya and Syria and Iran, all of which have been maximalist and interventionist. Her views on Israeli-Palestinian relations aren't particularly encouraging either. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have only one thing in common: they're appealing to people who've lost confidence in their party's establishment. As a whole Democrats, are immeasurably saner on foreign policy, but there's a dominant center-right wing of the party, and Hillary Clinton is arguably to the right of that. Sanders' economic populism gets a lot of attention (as it should), but, like Trump, he's articulated some simple but important truths in this campaign. The difference is that Trump's foreign policy is contained entirely in the quote above, whereas Sanders has laid out a comprehensive vision, which rejects accepted wisdom and offers a sustainable alternative to interventionism. While it's unlikely that Trump has given serious thought to any of these questions, we can, at least, credit him for being honest about our recent history, as Sanders has been. Again, we're unlikely to see a Trump-Sanders general election. As it stands, Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination. If that happens, she'll be our next president, and in many ways that will be a good thing, considering the alternative. But it won't lead to a major shift in our foreign policy. And that's unfortunate, because Trump's popularity suggests, among other things, that the country is weary of war and utopian entanglements in the Middle East.“The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives...We should've never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. You call it whatever you want...They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.” - Donald Trump A Trump nomination is a nightmare for the Republican establishment. There are many reasons why that's so, some more obvious than others. To begin with, a Trump-led ticket would mean not just a third consecutive term for the Democrats, it would also result in down-ballot defeats and perhaps even the loss of their majority in the Senate – that's reason enough to panic. But one of the less discussed concerns surrounding Trump has to do with foreign policy; specifically, the fact that Trump doesn't have one, and what he has said scares the hell out of Republican hawks. We saw a glimpse of this at a recent Republican debate, in which Trump popped the conservative bubble and said what no one else on that stage would – that the Iraq War was a mistake; that zealots exploited questionable intelligence for ideological purposes; and that military adventurism has made us and the world less safe. These are all indisputably true claims, and yet Republicans can't accept them. It's heresy in the GOP to question the neoconservative paradigm – just ask Rand Paul. It's assumed, as an article of faith, that America is the moral leader of the world; that we must not only defend our values across the world, we must also use force to remake it in our image. This is the thinking that gave us the Iraq War. It's the prism through which most of the GOP still views international politics. Trump – and Bernie Sanders – represents a departure from this paradigm. Although it's unlikely to happen, a Trump-Sanders general election would have been refreshing for at least one reason: it would have constituted a total rejection of neoconservatism. Most Americans understand, intuitively, that the differences between the major parties are often rhetorical, not substantive. That's not to say substantive differences don't exist – surely they do, especially on social issues. But the policies from administration to administration overlap more often than not, regardless of the party in charge. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Much of the stability is due to money and the structure of our system, which tends toward dynamic equilibrium. And there are limits to what the president can do on issues like the economy and health care. But one area in which the president does have enormous flexibility is foreign policy. Which is why, as Politico reported this week, the GOP's national security establishment is “bitterly digging in against” Trump. Indeed, more than any other wing of the Republican Party, the neoconservatives are terrified at the prospect of a Trump nomination. “Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” said Eliot Cohen, a former Bush official with neoconservative ties. Trump would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy.” Another neocon, Max Boot, says he'd vote for Clinton over Trump: “She would be vastly preferable to Trump.” Even Bill Kristol, the great champion of the Iraq War, a man who refuses to consider the hypothesis that he was wrong about anything, is threatening to recruit a third party candidate to derail Trump for similar reasons. Just this week, moreover, a group of conservative foreign policy intellectuals, several of whom are neocons, published an open letter stating that they're “united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.” They offer a host of reasons for their objections, but the bottom line is they don't trust Trump to continue America's current policy of policing the world on ethical grounds. Trump isn't constrained by the same ideological conventions as other candidates, and so he occasionally stumbles upon unpopular truths. His comments about the Iraq War are an obvious example. But even on an issue like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Trump says what any reasonable observer should: we ought to maintain neutrality and work to solve the dispute with an eyes towards our national interest. Now, Trump couldn't explain the concept of “realism” to save his life, but this position is perfectly consistent with that tradition. And if Republicans weren't blinkered by religious fanaticism, they'd acknowledge it as well. The same is true of Trump's nebulous critiques of America's soft imperialism, which again are sacrilege in Republican politics. To be clear: Donald Trump is a lunatic; he isn't fit for public office. His ascendancy is a national embarrassment and the latest signpost on the road to idiocracy. Saying he isn't a neoconservative does not imply he has an alternative worldview, or even a vague notion of America's role in the world. He's merely a blank slate, a question mark, someone the establishment can't reliably bend to their will. Reagan, too, was a blank slate, but he was malleable, like George W. Bush. Trump, on the other hand, is an exquisite marriage of ignorance and confidence – no one has any idea what he'll do. There is a similar – but not identical – dynamic on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton would be an infinitely better president than Trump – that's obvious. But there's no way around the fact that she represents the status quo on foreign policy, which is why neocons are far more comfortable with her than with Trump. And it's not just Clinton's support of the Iraq War, about which everyone knows. It's also her positions on Libya and Syria and Iran, all of which have been maximalist and interventionist. Her views on Israeli-Palestinian relations aren't particularly encouraging either. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have only one thing in common: they're appealing to people who've lost confidence in their party's establishment. As a whole Democrats, are immeasurably saner on foreign policy, but there's a dominant center-right wing of the party, and Hillary Clinton is arguably to the right of that. Sanders' economic populism gets a lot of attention (as it should), but, like Trump, he's articulated some simple but important truths in this campaign. The difference is that Trump's foreign policy is contained entirely in the quote above, whereas Sanders has laid out a comprehensive vision, which rejects accepted wisdom and offers a sustainable alternative to interventionism. While it's unlikely that Trump has given serious thought to any of these questions, we can, at least, credit him for being honest about our recent history, as Sanders has been. Again, we're unlikely to see a Trump-Sanders general election. As it stands, Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination. If that happens, she'll be our next president, and in many ways that will be a good thing, considering the alternative. But it won't lead to a major shift in our foreign policy. And that's unfortunate, because Trump's popularity suggests, among other things, that the country is weary of war and utopian entanglements in the Middle East.“The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives...We should've never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. You call it whatever you want...They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.” - Donald Trump A Trump nomination is a nightmare for the Republican establishment. There are many reasons why that's so, some more obvious than others. To begin with, a Trump-led ticket would mean not just a third consecutive term for the Democrats, it would also result in down-ballot defeats and perhaps even the loss of their majority in the Senate – that's reason enough to panic. But one of the less discussed concerns surrounding Trump has to do with foreign policy; specifically, the fact that Trump doesn't have one, and what he has said scares the hell out of Republican hawks. We saw a glimpse of this at a recent Republican debate, in which Trump popped the conservative bubble and said what no one else on that stage would – that the Iraq War was a mistake; that zealots exploited questionable intelligence for ideological purposes; and that military adventurism has made us and the world less safe. These are all indisputably true claims, and yet Republicans can't accept them. It's heresy in the GOP to question the neoconservative paradigm – just ask Rand Paul. It's assumed, as an article of faith, that America is the moral leader of the world; that we must not only defend our values across the world, we must also use force to remake it in our image. This is the thinking that gave us the Iraq War. It's the prism through which most of the GOP still views international politics. Trump – and Bernie Sanders – represents a departure from this paradigm. Although it's unlikely to happen, a Trump-Sanders general election would have been refreshing for at least one reason: it would have constituted a total rejection of neoconservatism. Most Americans understand, intuitively, that the differences between the major parties are often rhetorical, not substantive. That's not to say substantive differences don't exist – surely they do, especially on social issues. But the policies from administration to administration overlap more often than not, regardless of the party in charge. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Much of the stability is due to money and the structure of our system, which tends toward dynamic equilibrium. And there are limits to what the president can do on issues like the economy and health care. But one area in which the president does have enormous flexibility is foreign policy. Which is why, as Politico reported this week, the GOP's national security establishment is “bitterly digging in against” Trump. Indeed, more than any other wing of the Republican Party, the neoconservatives are terrified at the prospect of a Trump nomination. “Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” said Eliot Cohen, a former Bush official with neoconservative ties. Trump would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy.” Another neocon, Max Boot, says he'd vote for Clinton over Trump: “She would be vastly preferable to Trump.” Even Bill Kristol, the great champion of the Iraq War, a man who refuses to consider the hypothesis that he was wrong about anything, is threatening to recruit a third party candidate to derail Trump for similar reasons. Just this week, moreover, a group of conservative foreign policy intellectuals, several of whom are neocons, published an open letter stating that they're “united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.” They offer a host of reasons for their objections, but the bottom line is they don't trust Trump to continue America's current policy of policing the world on ethical grounds. Trump isn't constrained by the same ideological conventions as other candidates, and so he occasionally stumbles upon unpopular truths. His comments about the Iraq War are an obvious example. But even on an issue like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Trump says what any reasonable observer should: we ought to maintain neutrality and work to solve the dispute with an eyes towards our national interest. Now, Trump couldn't explain the concept of “realism” to save his life, but this position is perfectly consistent with that tradition. And if Republicans weren't blinkered by religious fanaticism, they'd acknowledge it as well. The same is true of Trump's nebulous critiques of America's soft imperialism, which again are sacrilege in Republican politics. To be clear: Donald Trump is a lunatic; he isn't fit for public office. His ascendancy is a national embarrassment and the latest signpost on the road to idiocracy. Saying he isn't a neoconservative does not imply he has an alternative worldview, or even a vague notion of America's role in the world. He's merely a blank slate, a question mark, someone the establishment can't reliably bend to their will. Reagan, too, was a blank slate, but he was malleable, like George W. Bush. Trump, on the other hand, is an exquisite marriage of ignorance and confidence – no one has any idea what he'll do. There is a similar – but not identical – dynamic on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton would be an infinitely better president than Trump – that's obvious. But there's no way around the fact that she represents the status quo on foreign policy, which is why neocons are far more comfortable with her than with Trump. And it's not just Clinton's support of the Iraq War, about which everyone knows. It's also her positions on Libya and Syria and Iran, all of which have been maximalist and interventionist. Her views on Israeli-Palestinian relations aren't particularly encouraging either. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have only one thing in common: they're appealing to people who've lost confidence in their party's establishment. As a whole Democrats, are immeasurably saner on foreign policy, but there's a dominant center-right wing of the party, and Hillary Clinton is arguably to the right of that. Sanders' economic populism gets a lot of attention (as it should), but, like Trump, he's articulated some simple but important truths in this campaign. The difference is that Trump's foreign policy is contained entirely in the quote above, whereas Sanders has laid out a comprehensive vision, which rejects accepted wisdom and offers a sustainable alternative to interventionism. While it's unlikely that Trump has given serious thought to any of these questions, we can, at least, credit him for being honest about our recent history, as Sanders has been. Again, we're unlikely to see a Trump-Sanders general election. As it stands, Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination. If that happens, she'll be our next president, and in many ways that will be a good thing, considering the alternative. But it won't lead to a major shift in our foreign policy. And that's unfortunate, because Trump's popularity suggests, among other things, that the country is weary of war and utopian entanglements in the Middle East.
Trolls will love Peeple: Even with anti-bullying controls, “Yelp for People” still sounds like a nightmare
Five months after Peeple caused international outrage over its plans to become a “Yelp for People,” the much-maligned app is set to launch in the App Store on Monday. In an email to its mailing list on Thursday, Peeple assured users that the main criticisms of the app have been taken into account and its functionality adjusted accordingly. Specifically, users, who can rate people in three categories—professional, personal and dating—will have complete control over what goes on their profile, no one will be able to add anyone else to the app (although you can invite others to join), you can deactivate your profile and there will be no star ratings. In that email and on its website, Peeple stated, “We are a concept that has never been done before in a digital space. We want character to be a new form of currency. Peeple will provide you a safe place to manage your online reputation while protecting your greatest assets by making better decisions about the people around you.” In listing its offerings on its site, the app boasts that it will help “build positive relationships” by letting users “boost up the people you know and form stronger relationships by having a 2 way communication system based on feedback and recommendations.” The rest of its messaging is similarly focused on the supposed benefits the app will offer. I’m not so naïve to think that such an app won’t provide trolls with the opportunity to bombard users with an onslaught of hate. Sure, Peeple has now made it so that you can control what goes up on your profile, but you’ll still see those messages—as Peeple has amply learned firsthand. The app recently asked on Facebook “What do you say to your haters?” The post was accompanied by a screenshot of a message they’d received saying “Go f—k yourself” to which they’d responded “Go love yourself.” Which raises the question: why would anyone voluntarily sign up for yet another forum where they are asking to be validated by the masses? By requiring Facebook and phone number verification, Peeple is trying to ensure that only those who actually know us are leaving us feedback, but in the online world, “knowing” is a broad term. I interact with potentially thousands of people in my social media channels that I don’t know personally. They are of course welcome to leave comments on my articles or respond go to my social media already. I don’t need another outlet for people I know (or “know”) to appraise me. While giving users the opportunity to approve all content that goes on their profile does assuage one of the most widespread criticisms of the app’s first iteration—that people could hate on each other without recourse—that won’t always be the case. Peeple co-creator Julia Corddray told The Calgary Herald that the free app plans to implement a paid “truth license” that would allow anyone to see all reviews of them, even if they weren’t approved by the user. She said, “If a mom wants to look up a coach for her kids, she can see all the amazing things on that person’s profile, but maybe there’s some areas of improvement for that person. So when the mom upgrades to the truth license, she’ll be able to see all the recommendations on the back-end that the coach never published on their profile.” In other words, the claim in their FAQ in resonse to “What happens if someone sends me a negative recommendation?” that “Recommendations never go live without your permission. You can delete any recommendation from your inbox” doesn’t actually mean that that feedback will remain unseen. The user can delete it, but can’t, apparently, prevent it from being accessed by those willing to pad Peeple’s pockets to download the license. Even if they got rid of the “truth license,” then they’d have created another problem: any messages that are approved are likely to be overly glowing. After all, who’s really going to accept a comment that, even if true, says something like, “Arrived at date reeking of alcohol” or “Always forgets my birthday” or “Doesn’t know how to run a meeting?” Probably nobody. So if all we’re going to get are the kinds of statements that read like we wrote them ourselves, what’s the point? Setting aside the potential that still exists for haters, trolls and abuse, even if we lived in Peeple’s utopia and the app were only used to offer genuinely thoughtful, positive recommendations, we should be asking ourselves why we need this kind of external validation. It’s one thing for LinkedIn to have recommendations that employers can use to help evaluate candidates, but what is it saying about our culture that the app’s founders think we need to be recommended as humans regarding our everyday actions? Shouldn’t decency, kindness and friendliness be things we do simply because they reflect the kind of people we want to be, rather than something that has to be quantified? When the app was first announced, blogger Harry T. Dyer wrote, “In Peeple, we will literally be treated as objects, as commodities, and ranked on our pros and cons. The agency will be removed for the person being ranked and rated; instead, they will become non-agentic – unable to act and make a choice. They are literally being acted upon, they are being judged against subjective opinion. The subjective opinion of others that you have encountered becomes an object that is used to rank you and rate you.” Even with the new supposed safeguards in place, the specter of a world where formalized “reviews” are valued more highly than actual human interaction, is a sad commentary on how we communicate. Especially for an app named Peeple, there’s something deeply impersonal about the idea that we would actively court such recommendations, holding them up as a tribute to our true selves. I don’t need the friend whose baby I just visited to tell me via an app that she appreciates my feeding pears to her child. If I were single, I wouldn't want my dates chiming in when they got home and rating my outfit and conversation. Similarly, if I’ve wronged or neglected someone in my life, I’d rather they tell me upfront than via their electronic device. I’d be similarly wary of someone who sent me a link to their Peeple profile as “proof” that they’re a good friend (or date or worker). Just because we’re in a world of 24/7 connectedness doesn’t mean we should be foisting off even more of our lives onto technology. How about, instead of inputting your kudos into your iPhone, you tell someone directly. You can even email them. I can guarantee that will mean a hell of a lot more to the recipient than even the most glowing testimonial on Peeple. On its site, Peeple states that “There are endless reasons as to why we would want this reference check for the people around us.” But for the same reasons I don’t want to make a new best friend via an app, I don’t believe that such a “reference check” can ever do justice to who we are as actual, complex people. I’m not against technology—I love it and it’s my primary means of conducting business and keeping up with friendships. But there are also limits to technology that Peeple’s founders don’t seem to understand. You can care about your reputation, online and off, without relying on the extremely sketchy, potentially harmful, means of an app like this. I agree with Peeple that “character” is a form of currency, but I strongly disagree that they’ve got the solution. In her forthcoming essay collection “Real Artists Have Day Jobs (And Other Awesome Things They Don’t Teach You in School),” Sara Benincasa advocates creating an “executive board” for your own personal development, similar to the kinds businesses form. She writes, “The board members should be people you trust. They should have sharp minds, good hearts, and a generosity of spirit. They may not all agree with one another, which is absolutely fine. Your aim in selecting them is to get a variety of perspectives on your life from people who are invested in your well-being but who can remain clear-eyed enough to give you a logical evaluation.” In other words, use the revolutionary act of talking directly to people you know to find out the kinds of things that Peeple users would rate you on. We’re already constantly told that we should be measuring ourselves online—often with numbers, such as with Klout scores, or followers, or engagement. We’re inundated with ways to compare ourselves to others and offer ourselves up to be ranked and rated. Peeple is doing it with words, but it still boils down to the same thing: asking for and encouraging us to judge each other, and rely on those results to inform how we live our lives. The backlash against Peeple was strong last fall for a good reason, and while they’ve been good at going viral, which they seem especially proud of, I hope that we can find ways of assessing ourselves in the personal and professional arenas that aren’t so artificial or rife with potential pitfalls. Peeple is free, but you know what’s also free? Asking those whose opinions you care about how you could be a better friend, date or employee. It may mean making yourself more vulnerable, but the answers you’ll get are going to be far more valuable than those passed through the filter of an app like this.
Bernie really is dragging Hillary left: Evolving climate policy offers hope for progressives
With Super Tuesday’s primary returns and caucus results now tallied, commentators are declaring that Bernie Sanders faces a tougher path to victory than ever. But even if the Vermont senator does not become the nominee this summer, his campaign, combined with the efforts of environmental groups such as 350.org, Sierra Club and Greenpeace, has already had an enormous impact on the conversation Democrats are having around climate. Last spring, Hillary Clinton launched her campaign with a fairly strong environmental platform — especially compared with past Democrats who won the nomination. Shortly afterward, Bernie Sanders rolled out a far more aggressive agenda, including bans on fossil fuel extraction on public lands and via offshore drilling, and a complete ban on fracking. Sure, his plan was impractical, given a likely Republican Congress, but it drew the battle lines. “In 2008, we were lucky to hear about climate change at all,” says Cassady Sharp, a spokesperson for Greenpeace’s democracy campaign. “And now we have Democratic candidates — and when Martin O’Malley was in the race this was true too — basically fighting over who has the better climate plan.” It makes sense for candidates to take bold stands; climate is one of the top issues millennials care about, and polling indicated it was a factor in the Iowa caucus. The urgency of climate change and the need to address it has become alarmingly evident over the last several years, and with the economic concerns of the financial crisis playing a less central role than they did in 2008, voters are demanding climate action. Sanders’s longtime focus on both climate change and the big-money influences that have slowed America’s response to it have won him the support of many strong climate advocates. The super PAC Climate Hawks Vote has ranked Sanders in the top 10 percent of senators on the environment every year since they started ranking senators in 2011, and ranked him the top senator in the 113th Congress. “With Bernie you can see his recent record in the Senate, he’s pretty strong,” says Sharp. Friends of the Earth endorsed Sanders last summer, and high-profile environmental activists like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein have written favorably of his campaign. “Gentle reminder: the climate decisions in the next 5 years will shape the future of humanity. Hillary cannot be trusted. Vote #BernieSanders,” Klein tweeted before Super Tuesday. Perhaps more importantly, Sanders’s policy platform has given activists who care about climate change a goalpost to steer Clinton toward. And it’s been working. Though Clinton at first equivocated on opposing the Keystone Pipeline and Arctic drilling, she came out against both before the Obama administration took a clear stand. Last October, she announced her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that the Obama administration supports but that environmentalists worry would lead to a spate of lawsuitsby corporations seeking to strike down environmental regulations that hurt their business. Environmental groups are continuing to push Clinton further, with activists popping up at campaign stops, cellphone cameras rolling, ready to get her on the record. When, on Feb. 4, one New Hampshire activist asked, “Would you ban the extraction of oil, gas and coal on public lands?” Clinton immediately replied, “That’s a done deal.” It was a stance she hadn’t taken before. And when, last Thursday, at a South Carolina rally, Carolina Arias, a University of North Carolina student, asked whether Clinton would “make sure we do not support trade deals that exacerbate climate change,” Clinton indicated that her priority would be strengthening the Paris accords, not renegotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she has already condemned, or pushing the similar Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which she has not. “We really need to put our efforts into enforcing and carrying out the Paris climate deal,” Clinton told the crowd, “because that gives us the best chance to bring the world around before it’s too late.” “Every time somebody provokes her on the campaign trail she seems to get stronger and stronger,” says Greenpeace’s Sharp. Jason Kowalski, a spokesman for 350 Action, which conducts bootcamps to train activists on how to get candidates on the record, agrees that momentum is moving in activists’ direction. “This is our moment, when we are much stronger than the fossil-fuel industry,” Kowalski told Bloomberg. “Once these decisions go behind closed doors, the lawyers and the lobbyists of the oil industry will outpower us.” Environmental groups want Clinton to reject dirty energy money starting now, before the general election. According to a Greenpeace tally, Clinton has so far accepted $126,200 from 53 oil and gas industry lobbyists, and 11 lobbyists connected to the industry have bundled more than $1 million in contributions to her campaign. (The industry has thrown many times that much at the Republican primary contests.) She also left the campaign trail to attend a fundraiser with a group invested in offshore drilling and fracking operations shortly before the Iowa Caucus. The optics were not great — she was criticized for the decision — and the Sanders campaign used the episode for its own fundraising. Last month, as Nevada was gearing up for its Democratic caucuses, Greenpeace flew a “thermal airship” over the Las Vegas strip. Similar to a hot-air balloon, the airship was able to hover over the city for several hours before the wind picked up. The message on its side:Hillary: Say No to Fossil Fuel $$$. “We heard from some people working on her campaign that they were nervous we’d do it again,” says Greenpeace’s Sharp. “So we’ll definitely be doing it again.” Activists say they hope to next get Clinton to sign a pledge not to accept money from fossil fuel interests, and to go on the record against fracking. Sanders has already done both. In fact, some of Sanders’s Super Tuesday wins might be partly due to his position on fracking. Oklahoma, where he won 52 percent of the vote, has been rocked by increasingly violent earthquakes in recent years, a phenomenon connected to the fracking boom in the state. Colorado, another state where Sanders triumphed, has also seen an explosion in oil and gas industry activity. Sanders is even leading Clinton in coal country, in spite of his strong climate positions. Other states that are ground zero in various environmental battles head to the polls in the next few weeks: Ohio, which has also been rocked by fracking-related earthquakes, votes on March 15; Washington state, where voters are fighting against facilities to ship fossil fuels to market, votes on March 26. So the Democratic frontrunner might evolve a good deal more on climate before the general election.With Super Tuesday’s primary returns and caucus results now tallied, commentators are declaring that Bernie Sanders faces a tougher path to victory than ever. But even if the Vermont senator does not become the nominee this summer, his campaign, combined with the efforts of environmental groups such as 350.org, Sierra Club and Greenpeace, has already had an enormous impact on the conversation Democrats are having around climate. Last spring, Hillary Clinton launched her campaign with a fairly strong environmental platform — especially compared with past Democrats who won the nomination. Shortly afterward, Bernie Sanders rolled out a far more aggressive agenda, including bans on fossil fuel extraction on public lands and via offshore drilling, and a complete ban on fracking. Sure, his plan was impractical, given a likely Republican Congress, but it drew the battle lines. “In 2008, we were lucky to hear about climate change at all,” says Cassady Sharp, a spokesperson for Greenpeace’s democracy campaign. “And now we have Democratic candidates — and when Martin O’Malley was in the race this was true too — basically fighting over who has the better climate plan.” It makes sense for candidates to take bold stands; climate is one of the top issues millennials care about, and polling indicated it was a factor in the Iowa caucus. The urgency of climate change and the need to address it has become alarmingly evident over the last several years, and with the economic concerns of the financial crisis playing a less central role than they did in 2008, voters are demanding climate action. Sanders’s longtime focus on both climate change and the big-money influences that have slowed America’s response to it have won him the support of many strong climate advocates. The super PAC Climate Hawks Vote has ranked Sanders in the top 10 percent of senators on the environment every year since they started ranking senators in 2011, and ranked him the top senator in the 113th Congress. “With Bernie you can see his recent record in the Senate, he’s pretty strong,” says Sharp. Friends of the Earth endorsed Sanders last summer, and high-profile environmental activists like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein have written favorably of his campaign. “Gentle reminder: the climate decisions in the next 5 years will shape the future of humanity. Hillary cannot be trusted. Vote #BernieSanders,” Klein tweeted before Super Tuesday. Perhaps more importantly, Sanders’s policy platform has given activists who care about climate change a goalpost to steer Clinton toward. And it’s been working. Though Clinton at first equivocated on opposing the Keystone Pipeline and Arctic drilling, she came out against both before the Obama administration took a clear stand. Last October, she announced her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that the Obama administration supports but that environmentalists worry would lead to a spate of lawsuitsby corporations seeking to strike down environmental regulations that hurt their business. Environmental groups are continuing to push Clinton further, with activists popping up at campaign stops, cellphone cameras rolling, ready to get her on the record. When, on Feb. 4, one New Hampshire activist asked, “Would you ban the extraction of oil, gas and coal on public lands?” Clinton immediately replied, “That’s a done deal.” It was a stance she hadn’t taken before. And when, last Thursday, at a South Carolina rally, Carolina Arias, a University of North Carolina student, asked whether Clinton would “make sure we do not support trade deals that exacerbate climate change,” Clinton indicated that her priority would be strengthening the Paris accords, not renegotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she has already condemned, or pushing the similar Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which she has not. “We really need to put our efforts into enforcing and carrying out the Paris climate deal,” Clinton told the crowd, “because that gives us the best chance to bring the world around before it’s too late.” “Every time somebody provokes her on the campaign trail she seems to get stronger and stronger,” says Greenpeace’s Sharp. Jason Kowalski, a spokesman for 350 Action, which conducts bootcamps to train activists on how to get candidates on the record, agrees that momentum is moving in activists’ direction. “This is our moment, when we are much stronger than the fossil-fuel industry,” Kowalski told Bloomberg. “Once these decisions go behind closed doors, the lawyers and the lobbyists of the oil industry will outpower us.” Environmental groups want Clinton to reject dirty energy money starting now, before the general election. According to a Greenpeace tally, Clinton has so far accepted $126,200 from 53 oil and gas industry lobbyists, and 11 lobbyists connected to the industry have bundled more than $1 million in contributions to her campaign. (The industry has thrown many times that much at the Republican primary contests.) She also left the campaign trail to attend a fundraiser with a group invested in offshore drilling and fracking operations shortly before the Iowa Caucus. The optics were not great — she was criticized for the decision — and the Sanders campaign used the episode for its own fundraising. Last month, as Nevada was gearing up for its Democratic caucuses, Greenpeace flew a “thermal airship” over the Las Vegas strip. Similar to a hot-air balloon, the airship was able to hover over the city for several hours before the wind picked up. The message on its side:Hillary: Say No to Fossil Fuel $$$. “We heard from some people working on her campaign that they were nervous we’d do it again,” says Greenpeace’s Sharp. “So we’ll definitely be doing it again.” Activists say they hope to next get Clinton to sign a pledge not to accept money from fossil fuel interests, and to go on the record against fracking. Sanders has already done both. In fact, some of Sanders’s Super Tuesday wins might be partly due to his position on fracking. Oklahoma, where he won 52 percent of the vote, has been rocked by increasingly violent earthquakes in recent years, a phenomenon connected to the fracking boom in the state. Colorado, another state where Sanders triumphed, has also seen an explosion in oil and gas industry activity. Sanders is even leading Clinton in coal country, in spite of his strong climate positions. Other states that are ground zero in various environmental battles head to the polls in the next few weeks: Ohio, which has also been rocked by fracking-related earthquakes, votes on March 15; Washington state, where voters are fighting against facilities to ship fossil fuels to market, votes on March 26. So the Democratic frontrunner might evolve a good deal more on climate before the general election.
Public schools’ new public enemy: Inside a Netflix billionaire’s charter crusade
When pondering the best way to transform and improve America’s K-12 public schools, do the ideas that first come to mind include: ditching locally elected school boards? Placing grade-school kids in overcrowded computer labs for hours at a time with unproven software and inexperienced teachers? Telling children from poor homes that test scores are the only results that matter? Or putting high-tech entrepreneurs who have financial stakes in the digital tools being road-tested on students on the private boards running those schools? These are all cornerstones of the charter school movement that has grown out of Silicon Valley, supported by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has spent more than $400 million to promote technology-driven charter schools. And they’re being championed by Netflix founder-CEO Reed Hastings, who just launched a $100 million foundation where he is likely to become one of America’s highest-profile figures pushing this anti-democratic, tech-centric, corporate-inspired vision to recast America’s public schools. “The underlying mentality that Hastings shares with Gates is that computers revolutionized commerce, revolutionized business, revolutionized manufacturing, so now why can’t computers revolutionize education,” said Anthony Cody, a retired high school teacher from Oakland, Calif. and critic of billionaire-led charter schools and their high-tech takeover of the learning process. “In their minds, it is inevitable that it will. The only question is what will be the delivery method.” The charter school movement emerged in the 1990s as a way to innovate in individual public schools. But over the last decade the movement has evolved into a franchise-dominated industry, where a tight circle of interrelated for-profit and non-profit players are doing everything they can to privatize public education. Across the country, super wealthy foundations—including the Walmart-backed Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—have put more than $1 billion into creating 6,700 charter schools. Besides Gates, there may be no figure more widely identified with the computers-will-fix-everything mindset than Northern California’s Hastings. Hastings, 55, has been pushing charters for two decades. Last winter, he made national news when he gave the keynote address to the California Charter Schools Association’s (CCSA) convention and said locally elected school boards were hurting schools and should be replaced by privately run boards, like those at charters. Hastings, an ex-president of the California State Board of Education appointed by a Democratic governor, noted that the public might not buy this anti-democratic conclusion, but encouraged his movement players to look beyond the fact that “school boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years.” “The most important thing is that they [charters] constantly get better every year… because they have stable governance—they don’t have an elected school board,” said Hastings—even though that narrative of stability and steady improvement has not proven itself out at charters he’s helped found. Nevertheless, Hastings hammered home a note that’s echoed across both his business career and his life as a charter advocate: that rapid growth is the solution. “What we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily,” Hastings said. “The work ahead is really hard because we’re at 8 percent of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90 percent, so we have a lot of catchup to do… We have to continue to grow and grow.” Hastings’ remarks were hardly the first salvo between charter proponents and elected school boards. But coming from one of Silicon Valley’s best-known entrepreneurs, they quickly drew negative reactions, especially because Hastings has aligned himself with one of the most hubris-filled sectors of the charter movement: technology executives who believe the only thing stopping Silicon Valley from saving America’s public schools are clunky school boards, needless government regulation and skeptical lifelong educators. Hastings’ comments were cynically greeted by the Washington Post’seducation blog, where he was labeled part of the billionaire boy’s club of “Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Mark Zuckerberg, various Waltons… some of the prodigiously wealthy who have decided that they know how public education can be ‘fixed’ and have plowed big money into it,” as the Post's Valerie Strauss wrote. Yet “after billions of their dollars have been spent for pet projects, the real problems facing public schools remain.” Strauss’ last point is crucial. Hastings’ slap at elected boards, while offensive, wasn’t unique. Gates said the same thing when he extolled “mayoral control” of urban schools. “Instead of having a committee of people, you have that one person,” Gates said, “where we’ve seen the willingness to take on some of the older practices and try new things.” The problem, as Strauss noted, is that many of these “pet projects” have yet to deliver on their hype as a pathway out of poverty for poor kids. The darker reality is that these schools are in fact doubling as product development centers for the fabulously rich and their well-connected associates. High-Tech Experiments Flounder Hastings’ track record is a prime example of this pattern in action. He helped launch Rocketship Education, a chain of computer-learning centered schools whose grandiose business plan envisioned educating 1 million students in 50 cities, as many as are educated in New York City, the nation’s largest school district. But as EdWeek.org and the
San Jose Mercury News
have extensively reported, Rocketship’s ambitious plans badly failed to keep the network's foremost promise: to continue raising student test scores. The notion that higher test scores are the best way to track student accomplishment is controversial in itself. Many educators argue that there’s far more to learning. Nonetheless, Rocketship believes the best way to educate poor kids is to put 150 young students in front of computers for hours at a time, in large lab classes where there are more technicians than experienced teachers. The curriculum’s emphasis is on correctly answering questions, which, asEducation Weekly and the Mercury News reported, created so much pressure on students that many became sick. As Cody notes, this approach minimizes what traditional teachers believe is necessary—the transmission of developmentally appropriate interpretation, communication and social skills, as well as paying personal attention to students whose home lives may be filled with factors complicating their ability to learn. Yet Rocketship and the software firms plying this “blended learning” experiment has been one of Hastings' priorites. Last winter, he donated $2 million to start a $17 million fundraising drive for the chain. Reality, however, took hold last spring as the chain's student test scores “plummeted,” as the Mercury News put it. There was also teacher burn-out, fear among non-unionized faculty of criticizing the curriculum, and raised eyebrows after the chain’s founder left to create a software firm that sold its wares back to Rocketship—an organization supported by taxpayers and philanthropy. Rocketship postponed expansion plans in Texas, and even Hastings spoke about taking a pause to figure out what was wrong and how to keep growing. “Rocketship sort of assumed they could work with existing hardware and software,” Cody explained, referring to the learning tools and answer-oriented agenda put before students. “At Rocketship, kids are three hours a day in a computer lab with 150 students in a room, two to three lab techs, and one 'teacher' that supervises the whole thing… They describe what they do as personalizing the learning experience.” It’s not surprising that the founder of Netflix would find putting kids in front of digital devices that track what they are doing and relying on software formulas to tell them what they need to do next, an attractive educational strategy. It many respects, device-centered tracking and user analysis is what Silicon Valley has developed to trace consumer-buying patterns. In the public school world, tracking test scores—Bill Gates’ emphasis—has become the coin of the realm, largely because it is faster and can be done more easily on a large scale than assessing other indices of learning that are not metric-centered, but track other ways children gain intellectual and life skills. Rocketship is not the only example of a Hastings project that exposes the problematic nature of tech-centric learning. Many studies—including a trio released last fall and funded by the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation—have found that most of the kids in cyber-centered learning environments fall drastically behind their brick-and-mortar peers. Khan Academy, which has been backed by Hastings, produces online videos on math problems. Even though it has been a viral sensation, experienced teachers have called it sloppy and imprecise. These initiatives are emblematic of the corner of the charter school world that Hastings inhabits. Like Gates’ support of test-centered curriculum, there are Silicon Valley biases and imperatives driving them. One is that digital data can replace the judgments and knowledge of experienced teachers. The other is that reducing the ratio of teachers to students, which cuts personnel costs (and feeds the mindset that there’s big money to be made in privatizing public education), is of no consequence to student learning. It’s hardly news that entrepreneurs see profits in developing online tools, even if it may be yearsbefore their effectiveness can be assessed—such as by seeing how cyber-schooled kids fare once they enroll in colleges and universities. Outsider, Entrepreneur, Democrat Hastings didn’t begin his career as an education reformer by trashing school boards and pushing tech-centric solutions that can scale. But tracing his involvement in California’s education reform movement for the past two decades reveals what brought him there. People who know him describe him as a quasi-liberal, an ex-Peace Corp volunteer who taught in Africa and then came back and made several fortunes as a math whiz, computer programmer and tech entrepreneur. They see him as an idealist who has given millions to bankroll state ballot measures and candidates who share his vision—particularly with charter schools. But his business experience and successes have shaped him over the years and led to a growing hubris that’s all too common among high-tech executives—the belief the world be a better place if only it could be more like them. Hastings, who lives in the counterculture-embracing coastal town of Santa Cruz, has always played by his own rules. Today, he comes across as a mild-mannered, graying, goateed man in his mid-50s who prides himself on trusting his intuition and following up with hard work. Decades ago, Fortune magazine said “he was as hard-headed as they come. So much so that he earned the nickname ‘animal.’” He grew up in suburban Boston, went to liberal arts college in Maine where he majored in math and ran the outdoors club, and after a bad experience in a Marine Corps officer-training program, joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Swaziland to teach math. He then went to Stanford University, where he earned a computer science degree. Afterward, he created a company that made software tools for Unix developers called Pure, which was bought for $750 million in 1997—his first fortune. He soon left and enrolled in another masters program at Stanford, in education, and got involved in California politics. In 1998, he teamed up with education experts he met at Stanford to write a state ballot measure to repeal a cap on the number of charter schools that could open across California in one year. The state’s charter law, passed in 1992, allowed 100 schools to open annually and not more than 10 per school district. After paid circulators got the signatures needed to get the measure on the ballot, the legislature stepped in and passed a bill lifting the cap. The same year, Hastings became the CEO of TechNet, a new Silicon Valley lobbying group whose members were all CEOs who also backed federal candidates from both parties. Here, he again saw how money, power and influence converge and could bring about political results. In 2000, Hastings took aim at another statewide reform—lowering the vote needed, from two-thirds to 55 percent, to pass school bonds. Hastings gave $1 million to Proposition 39, which passed, delighting the state’s teachers unions. That year, Democratic Gov. Gray Davis appointed Hastings to the state Board of Education, where he became president in 2001. Among their issues was how to test students’ progress. In 2004, he was nominated for another term by then-Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Democrats blocked him in response to his support for teaching 2.5 hours a day of English in bilingual kindergartens (previously 90 percent of the instruction was in Spanish). “I lacked political deftness,” he told a pro-charter website last year. Hastings shifted his focus to a new business, Netflix, the idea for which came after being charged a late fee at a video store. But he was a steady and reliable donor to state and federal candidates, usually Democrats, and to education-based campaigns in California. Many of his candidates did not win, reporterstracking the state’s biggest donors found. By 2005, Hastings was not just a dedicated supporter of charters, but was saying that public education’s future depended on schools being run like private corporations. “If public schools don’t adopt the same principles of competition and accountability as exist in the private and nonprofit sectors, they will continue to deteriorate,” he said in 2005, explaining his philosophy on the New School Venture Fund website, a Silicon Valley grant-making hub he helped to create that has invested in charters and education software. “More and more parents with means will send their children to private schools, and the institution will become like Medicare, an alternative for only the most disadvantaged.” (Medicare is the federal government’s popular health plan for people 65 and older; in early 2016 it had 49.5 million recipients.) Hastings also complained that even though his world was “littered” with business people who wanted to help the situation, he saw no overarching plan to improve K-12 schools, apart from supporting new charters. “One way to permanently impact the system would be to have 10 to 20 percent of California schoolchildren enrolled in charter schools,” he said in 2005, foreshadowing his own advocacy. “That would be critical mass, and enough of a force to induce a competitive dynamic in the system.” The Million-Dollar Check Writer It wasn’t unusual for Hastings to write quarter-million dollar checks, or more, to campaigns and causes. In 2014, he gave $247,000 to a successful state ballot measure that rolled back sentences for non-violent crimes. In 2012, he gave $1 million to support a successful ballot measure drafted by Gov. Jerry Brown to raise taxes on the wealthiest Californians. That year he also gave $250,000 to a failed measure to end the state’s death penalty. But his top priority has primarily been charter schools and computer-centered learning. In 2014, Hastings gave $1.5 million to the California Charter Schools Association Advocates, which, as the Los Angeles Times wrote, “transferred much of the money to an affiliated political action committee that supported candidates in the 2015 Los Angeles Board of Education elections,” where there was a big fight brewing over how quickly charter schools could expand in L.A., the nation’s second largest school district. Another billionaire, Eli Broad, had floated a plan to turn half of the city’s schools into charters in eight years; just last month, the L.A. school board soundly rejected that proposal. More recently, Hastings has increased his support for educational software developers. As the pro-charter EducationNext.org explained in a profile last winter, “Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has given millions of dollars to start charter schools. He’s put millions more into developing education software to personalize learning.... And he is not a fan of school boards.” The article continues, showing the small and entwined world of charter operators and elite high-tech businesses: “Hastings provided start-up funding for the Aspire Public Schools charter network and helped start and fund EdVoice, a lobbying group, and the NewSchools Venture Fund, which supports education entrepreneurs. He’s given money to Sal Khan of Khan Academy to develop teaching videos—and a dashboard to track student progress—used in the U.S. and around the world. Hastings also supports Rocketship Education, which blends adaptive learning on computers with teacher-led instruction. He’s on the board of the California Charter Schools Association; the KIPP Foundation; DreamBox Learning, an education technology company; and the Pahara Institute, which provides fellowships to education leaders.” Hastings' announcement in January that he was creating a $100 million foundation to focus on education suggests he will not only keep doing what he has been doing—as exemplified by his support of Rocketship and software firms putting largely untested ideas in charter schools—but also step up the pace. Last winter, he told a pro-charter website that one takeaway from the Rocketship turmoil of falling test scores was that software was best for teaching “subjects with correct answers,” but “it will take 5 to 10 years of hard work to figure out” how to use it to teach an interpretive subject like history or literature. It’s worth pondering that comment. Rocketship has plans to keep on expanding into new states and opening more schools in low-income communities. Hastings’ $100 million donation undoubtedly will allow this and related experiments to continue and grow, whether or not device-centered classrooms in charter schools will prove to help or hurt students. Last fall, Hastings affirmed his long game philosophy: because he’s a billionaire, he can impose pet projects on public schools. “The key in management is you have to have your long-term, stable, successful picture. And motivate people—employees, suppliers, investors toward that picture,” Hastings told CNBC. “There will be uneven amounts of execution toward it, potentially doubts at times if it’s achievable. But you can’t get concerned.”
When pondering the best way to transform and improve America’s K-12 public schools, do the ideas that first come to mind include: ditching locally elected school boards? Placing grade-school kids in overcrowded computer labs for hours at a time with unproven software and inexperienced teachers? Telling children from poor homes that test scores are the only results that matter? Or putting high-tech entrepreneurs who have financial stakes in the digital tools being road-tested on students on the private boards running those schools? These are all cornerstones of the charter school movement that has grown out of Silicon Valley, supported by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has spent more than $400 million to promote technology-driven charter schools. And they’re being championed by Netflix founder-CEO Reed Hastings, who just launched a $100 million foundation where he is likely to become one of America’s highest-profile figures pushing this anti-democratic, tech-centric, corporate-inspired vision to recast America’s public schools. “The underlying mentality that Hastings shares with Gates is that computers revolutionized commerce, revolutionized business, revolutionized manufacturing, so now why can’t computers revolutionize education,” said Anthony Cody, a retired high school teacher from Oakland, Calif. and critic of billionaire-led charter schools and their high-tech takeover of the learning process. “In their minds, it is inevitable that it will. The only question is what will be the delivery method.” The charter school movement emerged in the 1990s as a way to innovate in individual public schools. But over the last decade the movement has evolved into a franchise-dominated industry, where a tight circle of interrelated for-profit and non-profit players are doing everything they can to privatize public education. Across the country, super wealthy foundations—including the Walmart-backed Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—have put more than $1 billion into creating 6,700 charter schools. Besides Gates, there may be no figure more widely identified with the computers-will-fix-everything mindset than Northern California’s Hastings. Hastings, 55, has been pushing charters for two decades. Last winter, he made national news when he gave the keynote address to the California Charter Schools Association’s (CCSA) convention and said locally elected school boards were hurting schools and should be replaced by privately run boards, like those at charters. Hastings, an ex-president of the California State Board of Education appointed by a Democratic governor, noted that the public might not buy this anti-democratic conclusion, but encouraged his movement players to look beyond the fact that “school boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years.” “The most important thing is that they [charters] constantly get better every year… because they have stable governance—they don’t have an elected school board,” said Hastings—even though that narrative of stability and steady improvement has not proven itself out at charters he’s helped found. Nevertheless, Hastings hammered home a note that’s echoed across both his business career and his life as a charter advocate: that rapid growth is the solution. “What we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily,” Hastings said. “The work ahead is really hard because we’re at 8 percent of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90 percent, so we have a lot of catchup to do… We have to continue to grow and grow.” Hastings’ remarks were hardly the first salvo between charter proponents and elected school boards. But coming from one of Silicon Valley’s best-known entrepreneurs, they quickly drew negative reactions, especially because Hastings has aligned himself with one of the most hubris-filled sectors of the charter movement: technology executives who believe the only thing stopping Silicon Valley from saving America’s public schools are clunky school boards, needless government regulation and skeptical lifelong educators. Hastings’ comments were cynically greeted by the Washington Post’seducation blog, where he was labeled part of the billionaire boy’s club of “Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Mark Zuckerberg, various Waltons… some of the prodigiously wealthy who have decided that they know how public education can be ‘fixed’ and have plowed big money into it,” as the Post's Valerie Strauss wrote. Yet “after billions of their dollars have been spent for pet projects, the real problems facing public schools remain.” Strauss’ last point is crucial. Hastings’ slap at elected boards, while offensive, wasn’t unique. Gates said the same thing when he extolled “mayoral control” of urban schools. “Instead of having a committee of people, you have that one person,” Gates said, “where we’ve seen the willingness to take on some of the older practices and try new things.” The problem, as Strauss noted, is that many of these “pet projects” have yet to deliver on their hype as a pathway out of poverty for poor kids. The darker reality is that these schools are in fact doubling as product development centers for the fabulously rich and their well-connected associates. High-Tech Experiments Flounder Hastings’ track record is a prime example of this pattern in action. He helped launch Rocketship Education, a chain of computer-learning centered schools whose grandiose business plan envisioned educating 1 million students in 50 cities, as many as are educated in New York City, the nation’s largest school district. But as EdWeek.org and the
San Jose Mercury News
have extensively reported, Rocketship’s ambitious plans badly failed to keep the network's foremost promise: to continue raising student test scores. The notion that higher test scores are the best way to track student accomplishment is controversial in itself. Many educators argue that there’s far more to learning. Nonetheless, Rocketship believes the best way to educate poor kids is to put 150 young students in front of computers for hours at a time, in large lab classes where there are more technicians than experienced teachers. The curriculum’s emphasis is on correctly answering questions, which, asEducation Weekly and the Mercury News reported, created so much pressure on students that many became sick. As Cody notes, this approach minimizes what traditional teachers believe is necessary—the transmission of developmentally appropriate interpretation, communication and social skills, as well as paying personal attention to students whose home lives may be filled with factors complicating their ability to learn. Yet Rocketship and the software firms plying this “blended learning” experiment has been one of Hastings' priorites. Last winter, he donated $2 million to start a $17 million fundraising drive for the chain. Reality, however, took hold last spring as the chain's student test scores “plummeted,” as the Mercury News put it. There was also teacher burn-out, fear among non-unionized faculty of criticizing the curriculum, and raised eyebrows after the chain’s founder left to create a software firm that sold its wares back to Rocketship—an organization supported by taxpayers and philanthropy. Rocketship postponed expansion plans in Texas, and even Hastings spoke about taking a pause to figure out what was wrong and how to keep growing. “Rocketship sort of assumed they could work with existing hardware and software,” Cody explained, referring to the learning tools and answer-oriented agenda put before students. “At Rocketship, kids are three hours a day in a computer lab with 150 students in a room, two to three lab techs, and one 'teacher' that supervises the whole thing… They describe what they do as personalizing the learning experience.” It’s not surprising that the founder of Netflix would find putting kids in front of digital devices that track what they are doing and relying on software formulas to tell them what they need to do next, an attractive educational strategy. It many respects, device-centered tracking and user analysis is what Silicon Valley has developed to trace consumer-buying patterns. In the public school world, tracking test scores—Bill Gates’ emphasis—has become the coin of the realm, largely because it is faster and can be done more easily on a large scale than assessing other indices of learning that are not metric-centered, but track other ways children gain intellectual and life skills. Rocketship is not the only example of a Hastings project that exposes the problematic nature of tech-centric learning. Many studies—including a trio released last fall and funded by the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation—have found that most of the kids in cyber-centered learning environments fall drastically behind their brick-and-mortar peers. Khan Academy, which has been backed by Hastings, produces online videos on math problems. Even though it has been a viral sensation, experienced teachers have called it sloppy and imprecise. These initiatives are emblematic of the corner of the charter school world that Hastings inhabits. Like Gates’ support of test-centered curriculum, there are Silicon Valley biases and imperatives driving them. One is that digital data can replace the judgments and knowledge of experienced teachers. The other is that reducing the ratio of teachers to students, which cuts personnel costs (and feeds the mindset that there’s big money to be made in privatizing public education), is of no consequence to student learning. It’s hardly news that entrepreneurs see profits in developing online tools, even if it may be yearsbefore their effectiveness can be assessed—such as by seeing how cyber-schooled kids fare once they enroll in colleges and universities. Outsider, Entrepreneur, Democrat Hastings didn’t begin his career as an education reformer by trashing school boards and pushing tech-centric solutions that can scale. But tracing his involvement in California’s education reform movement for the past two decades reveals what brought him there. People who know him describe him as a quasi-liberal, an ex-Peace Corp volunteer who taught in Africa and then came back and made several fortunes as a math whiz, computer programmer and tech entrepreneur. They see him as an idealist who has given millions to bankroll state ballot measures and candidates who share his vision—particularly with charter schools. But his business experience and successes have shaped him over the years and led to a growing hubris that’s all too common among high-tech executives—the belief the world be a better place if only it could be more like them. Hastings, who lives in the counterculture-embracing coastal town of Santa Cruz, has always played by his own rules. Today, he comes across as a mild-mannered, graying, goateed man in his mid-50s who prides himself on trusting his intuition and following up with hard work. Decades ago, Fortune magazine said “he was as hard-headed as they come. So much so that he earned the nickname ‘animal.’” He grew up in suburban Boston, went to liberal arts college in Maine where he majored in math and ran the outdoors club, and after a bad experience in a Marine Corps officer-training program, joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Swaziland to teach math. He then went to Stanford University, where he earned a computer science degree. Afterward, he created a company that made software tools for Unix developers called Pure, which was bought for $750 million in 1997—his first fortune. He soon left and enrolled in another masters program at Stanford, in education, and got involved in California politics. In 1998, he teamed up with education experts he met at Stanford to write a state ballot measure to repeal a cap on the number of charter schools that could open across California in one year. The state’s charter law, passed in 1992, allowed 100 schools to open annually and not more than 10 per school district. After paid circulators got the signatures needed to get the measure on the ballot, the legislature stepped in and passed a bill lifting the cap. The same year, Hastings became the CEO of TechNet, a new Silicon Valley lobbying group whose members were all CEOs who also backed federal candidates from both parties. Here, he again saw how money, power and influence converge and could bring about political results. In 2000, Hastings took aim at another statewide reform—lowering the vote needed, from two-thirds to 55 percent, to pass school bonds. Hastings gave $1 million to Proposition 39, which passed, delighting the state’s teachers unions. That year, Democratic Gov. Gray Davis appointed Hastings to the state Board of Education, where he became president in 2001. Among their issues was how to test students’ progress. In 2004, he was nominated for another term by then-Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Democrats blocked him in response to his support for teaching 2.5 hours a day of English in bilingual kindergartens (previously 90 percent of the instruction was in Spanish). “I lacked political deftness,” he told a pro-charter website last year. Hastings shifted his focus to a new business, Netflix, the idea for which came after being charged a late fee at a video store. But he was a steady and reliable donor to state and federal candidates, usually Democrats, and to education-based campaigns in California. Many of his candidates did not win, reporterstracking the state’s biggest donors found. By 2005, Hastings was not just a dedicated supporter of charters, but was saying that public education’s future depended on schools being run like private corporations. “If public schools don’t adopt the same principles of competition and accountability as exist in the private and nonprofit sectors, they will continue to deteriorate,” he said in 2005, explaining his philosophy on the New School Venture Fund website, a Silicon Valley grant-making hub he helped to create that has invested in charters and education software. “More and more parents with means will send their children to private schools, and the institution will become like Medicare, an alternative for only the most disadvantaged.” (Medicare is the federal government’s popular health plan for people 65 and older; in early 2016 it had 49.5 million recipients.) Hastings also complained that even though his world was “littered” with business people who wanted to help the situation, he saw no overarching plan to improve K-12 schools, apart from supporting new charters. “One way to permanently impact the system would be to have 10 to 20 percent of California schoolchildren enrolled in charter schools,” he said in 2005, foreshadowing his own advocacy. “That would be critical mass, and enough of a force to induce a competitive dynamic in the system.” The Million-Dollar Check Writer It wasn’t unusual for Hastings to write quarter-million dollar checks, or more, to campaigns and causes. In 2014, he gave $247,000 to a successful state ballot measure that rolled back sentences for non-violent crimes. In 2012, he gave $1 million to support a successful ballot measure drafted by Gov. Jerry Brown to raise taxes on the wealthiest Californians. That year he also gave $250,000 to a failed measure to end the state’s death penalty. But his top priority has primarily been charter schools and computer-centered learning. In 2014, Hastings gave $1.5 million to the California Charter Schools Association Advocates, which, as the Los Angeles Times wrote, “transferred much of the money to an affiliated political action committee that supported candidates in the 2015 Los Angeles Board of Education elections,” where there was a big fight brewing over how quickly charter schools could expand in L.A., the nation’s second largest school district. Another billionaire, Eli Broad, had floated a plan to turn half of the city’s schools into charters in eight years; just last month, the L.A. school board soundly rejected that proposal. More recently, Hastings has increased his support for educational software developers. As the pro-charter EducationNext.org explained in a profile last winter, “Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has given millions of dollars to start charter schools. He’s put millions more into developing education software to personalize learning.... And he is not a fan of school boards.” The article continues, showing the small and entwined world of charter operators and elite high-tech businesses: “Hastings provided start-up funding for the Aspire Public Schools charter network and helped start and fund EdVoice, a lobbying group, and the NewSchools Venture Fund, which supports education entrepreneurs. He’s given money to Sal Khan of Khan Academy to develop teaching videos—and a dashboard to track student progress—used in the U.S. and around the world. Hastings also supports Rocketship Education, which blends adaptive learning on computers with teacher-led instruction. He’s on the board of the California Charter Schools Association; the KIPP Foundation; DreamBox Learning, an education technology company; and the Pahara Institute, which provides fellowships to education leaders.” Hastings' announcement in January that he was creating a $100 million foundation to focus on education suggests he will not only keep doing what he has been doing—as exemplified by his support of Rocketship and software firms putting largely untested ideas in charter schools—but also step up the pace. Last winter, he told a pro-charter website that one takeaway from the Rocketship turmoil of falling test scores was that software was best for teaching “subjects with correct answers,” but “it will take 5 to 10 years of hard work to figure out” how to use it to teach an interpretive subject like history or literature. It’s worth pondering that comment. Rocketship has plans to keep on expanding into new states and opening more schools in low-income communities. Hastings’ $100 million donation undoubtedly will allow this and related experiments to continue and grow, whether or not device-centered classrooms in charter schools will prove to help or hurt students. Last fall, Hastings affirmed his long game philosophy: because he’s a billionaire, he can impose pet projects on public schools. “The key in management is you have to have your long-term, stable, successful picture. And motivate people—employees, suppliers, investors toward that picture,” Hastings told CNBC. “There will be uneven amounts of execution toward it, potentially doubts at times if it’s achievable. But you can’t get concerned.”
We the people, bathed in blood: American foreign policy is no less barbaric than Trump’s
The crowd that gathered in an airplane hangar in the desert roared with excitement when the man on stage vowed to murder women and children. It was just another Donald Trump campaign event, and the candidate had affirmed his previously made pledge not only to kill terrorists but to “take out” their family members, too. Outrageous as that might sound, it hardly distinguished Trump from most of his Republican rivals, fiercely competing over who will commit the worst war crimes if elected. All the chilling claims about who will preside over more killings of innocents in distant lands -- and the thunderous applause that meets such boasts -- could easily be taken as evidence that the megalomaniacal billionaire Republican front-runner, his various opponents, and their legions of supporters, are all crazytown. Yet Trump’s pledge to murder the civilian relatives of terrorists could be considered quite modest -- and, in its bluntness, refreshingly candid -- when compared to President Obama’s ongoing policy of loosing drones and U.S. Special Operations forces in the Greater Middle East. Those policies, the assassinations that go with them, and the “collateral damage” they regularly cause are based on one premise when it comes to the American public: that we will permanently suspend our capacity for grief and empathy when it comes to the dead (and the living) in distant countries. Classified documents recently leaked to the Intercept by a whistleblower describe the “killing campaign” carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command in Yemen and Somalia. (The U.S. also conducts drone strikes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya; the leaked documents explain how President Obama has institutionalized the practice of striking outside regions of “active hostilities.”) Intelligence personnel build a case against a terror suspect and then develop what’s termed a “baseball card” -- a condensed dossier with a portrait of the individual targeted and the nature of the alleged threat he poses to U.S. interests -- that gets sent up the chain of command, eventually landing in the Oval Office. The president then meets with more than 100 representatives of his national security team, generally on a weekly basis, to determine just which of those cards will be selected picked for death. (The New York Timeshas vividly described this intimate process of choosing assassination targets.) Orders then make their way down to drone operators somewhere in the United States, thousands of miles from the individuals slated to be killed, who remotely pilot the aircraft to the location and then pull the trigger. But when those drone operators launch missiles on the other side of the world, the terrifying truth is that the U.S. “is often unsure who will die,” as a New York Times headline put it. That’s because intel on a target’s precise whereabouts at any given moment can be faulty. And so, as theTimes reported, “most individuals killed are not on a kill list, and the government does not know their names.” In 2014, for instance, the human-rights group Reprieve, analyzing what limited data on U.S. drone strikes was available, discovered that in attempts to kill 41 terror figures (not all of whom died), 1,147 people were killed. The study found that the vast majority of strikes failed to take down the intended victim, and thus numerous strikes were often attempted on a single target. The Guardian reported that in attempts to take down 24 men in Pakistan -- only six of whom were eventually eliminated in successful drone strikes -- the U.S. killed an estimated 142 children. Trump’s plan merely to murder the relatives of terrorists seems practically tame, by comparison. Their Grief and Mine Apparently you and I are meant to consider all those accidental killings as mere “collateral damage,” or else we’re not meant to consider them at all. We’re supposed to toggle to the “off” position any sentiment of remorse or compassion that we might feel for all the civilians who die thanks to our country’s homicidal approach to keeping us safe. I admit to a failing here: when I notice such stories, sometimes buried deep in news reports -- including the 30 people killed, three of them children, when U.S. airpower “accidentally” hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last October; or the two women and three childrenblasted to smithereens by U.S. airpower last spring at an Islamic State checkpoint in northern Iraq because the pilots of two A-10 Warthogs attacking the site didn’t realize that civilians were in the vehicles stopped there; or the innumerable similar incidents that have happened with remarkable regularity and which barely make it into American news reports -- I find I can’t quite achieve the cold distance necessary to accept our government’s tactics. And for this I blame (or thank) my father. To understand why it’s so difficult for me to gloss over the dead, you have to know that on December 1, 2003, a date I will never forget nor fully recover from, I called home from a phone booth on a cobblestone street in Switzerland -- where I was backpacking at the time -- and learned that my Dad was dead. A heart attack that struck as suddenly as a Hellfire missile. Standing in that sun-warmed phone booth clutching the receiver with a slick hand, vomit gurgling up at the back of my throat, I pressed my eyes closed and saw my Dad. First, I saw his back as he sat at the broad desk in his home office, his spot of thinning hair revealed. Then, I saw him in his nylon pants and baseball cap, paused at the kitchen door on his way to play paddle tennis. And finally, I saw him as I had the last time we parted, at Boston’s Logan Airport, on a patch of dingy grey carpet, as I kissed his whiskered cheek. A few days later, after mute weeping won me a seat on a fully booked trans-Atlantic flight, I stood in the wan light of early December and watched the employees of the funeral home as they unloosed the pulleys to lower Dad’s wooden box into the ground. I peered down into that earthen hole, crying and sweating and shivering in the stinging cold, and tried to make sense of the senseless: Why was he dead while the rest of us lived? And that’s why, when I read about all the innocent civilians we’ve been killing over the years with the airpower that presidential candidate Ted Cruz calls “a blessing,” I tend to think about the people left behind. Those who loved the people we’ve killed. I wonder how they received the news. (“We’ve had a tragedy here,” my Mom told me.) I wonder about the shattering anguish they surely feel at the loss of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, friends. I wonder what memories come to them when they squeeze their eyes closed in grief. And I wonder if they’ll ever be able to pick up the pieces of their lives and return to some semblance of normalcy in societies that are often shattering around them. (What I don’t wonder about, though, is whether or not they’re more likely to become radicalized -- to hate not just our drones but our country and us -- because the answer to that is obvious.) Playing God in the Oval Office “It’s the worst thing to ever happen to anyone,” actor Liam Neeson recentlywrote on Facebook. He wasn’t talking about drone strikes, but about the fundamental experience of loss -- of losing a loved one by any means. He was marking five years since his wife’s sudden death. “They say the hardest thing in the world is losing someone you love,” he added. I won’t disagree. After losing her husband, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandbergposted about “the brutal moments when I am overtaken by the void, when the months and years stretch out in front of me, endless and empty.” After her husband’s sudden death, author Joan Didion described grief as a “relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” That squares with the description offered by a man in Yemen who had much of his extended family blown away by an American drone at his wedding. “I felt myself going deeper and deeper into darkness,” the man later told a reporter. The drone arrived just after the wedding party had climbed into vehicles strewn with ribbons to escort the bride to her groom’s hometown. Everyone’s belly was full of lamb and it was dusk. It was quiet. Then the sky opened, and four missiles rained down on the procession, killing 12. U.S. airpower has hit a bunch of other weddings, too. And funerals. Andclinics. And an unknown and unknowable number of family homes. The CIA’s drone assassination campaign in the tribal regions of Pakistan even led a group of American and Pakistani artists to install an enormous portrait of a child on the ground in a frequently targeted region of that country. The artists wanted drone operators to see the face of one of the young people they might be targeting, instead of the tiny infrared figures on their computer consoles that they colloquially refer to as “bugsplats.” It’s an exhortation to them not to kill someone else’s beloved. Once in a while a drone operator comes forward to reveal the emotional and psychic burden of passing 12-hour shifts in a windowless bunker on an Air Force base, killing by keystroke for a living. One serviceman’s six years on the job began when he was 21 years old and included a moment when heglimpsed a tiny figure dart around the side of a house in Afghanistan that was the target of a missile already on its way. In terror, he demanded of his co-pilot, “Did that look like a child to you?” Feverishly, he began tapping messages to ask the mission’s remote observer -- an intelligence staffer at another location -- if there was a child present. He’ll never know the answer. Moments later, the missile struck the house, leveling it. That particular drone operator has since left the military. After his resignation, he spent a bitterly cold winter in his home state of Montana getting blackout drunk and sleeping in a public playground in his government-issued sleeping bag. Someone else has, of course, taken his seat at that console and continues to receive kill orders from above. Meanwhile Donald Trump and most of the other Republican candidates have been competing over who can most successfully obliterate combatants as well as civilians. (Ted Cruz’s comment about carpet-bombing ISIS until we find out “if sand can glow in the dark” has practically become a catchphrase.) But it's not just the Republicans. Every single major candidate from both parties has plans to maintain some version of Washington's increasingly far-flung drone campaigns. In other words, a program that originated under President George W. Bush as a crucial part of his “global war on terror,” and that was further institutionalized and ramped up under President Obama, will soon be bequeathed to a new president-elect. When you think about it that way, election 2016 isn’t so much a vote to select the leader of the planet’s last superpower as it is a tournament to decide who will next step into the Oval Office and have the chance to play god. Who will get your support as the best candidate to continue killing the loved ones of others? Go to the polls, America.
