This week, liberals panicked over reports that Trump tried to fire Mueller. He was called an authoritarian, a fascist and a tyrant. But understand this: compared to Nixon, the guy’s a joke.

We all remember when Richard Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, right? For the same reason Trump wanted to fire Mueller: to, basically, stop an investigation from getting too close.

But do we remember who actually did the firing? First, Nixon tried to get his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to do it. Richardson refused, and resigned in protest. Undeterred by this act of civic conscience, Nixon ordered his deputy attorney general, Bill Ruckelshaus, to do it. Ruckelshaus refused, and resigned in protest.

Still undeterred, Nixon reached even further into his justice department, and there he found his willing worm: solicitor general Robert Bork. (Bork would go on to greater fame as Ronald Reagan’s failed nominee to the US supreme court.) The whole operation took less than a day.

So now we have Trump trying to fire Mueller. And what happens? His White House counsel threatens to resign, and Trump backs down immediately.

This is a man who made himself famous all across America by telling people, “You’re fired.” But axing the man investigating him? Turns out, that’s harder for Trump to do than he thought.

Here today, gone tomorrow

This week, the New York Times reported:

On 5,753 occasions from 2010 to 2016, the United States military reported accusations of “gross human rights abuses” by the Afghan military, including many examples of child sexual abuse. If true, American law required military aid to be cut off to the offending unit. Not once did that happen… American soldiers who complained [about the Afghan military’s use of sexual slaves] had their careers ruined by their superiors, who had encouraged them to ignore the practice.

In 2001, the war in Afghanistan was championed by many – including those on the left – as a war of liberation from sexual tyranny. The US military was celebrated by many – including, again, many on the left – as a conquering army of humanitarian purpose and principle.

Now that’s all forgotten.

This is how the rhetoric of moral urgency works. At one moment, issues are deemed intolerable to the liberal imagination. A decade or two later, they’re buried in the front section of the paper.

Have you never been Mello?

Last April, liberals dialed up the rhetoric of moral urgency over Bernie Sanders’s decision to endorse Democrat Heath Mello, who was running for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, and had a mixed record on abortion, casting several votes against choice.

Liberals had given a pass to Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine, who also had a bad record on reproductive choice. Yet, even though leading Democrats had claimed that abortion shouldn’t be a litmus test for the Democratic party, Sanders earned the special ire of mainstream liberals and Democrats. So special you might think their main concern wasn’t abortion but Sanders and his program.

Now comes a report that the Democrats are firmly backing Brad Ashford, who’s running to represent Omaha in Congress, even though Ashford voted for the same two anti-choice bills in Nebraska that Mello did.

One of Ashford’s competitors is the staunchly pro-choice Kara Easton, who backs single-payer and free college, both signature items of the Sanders left.

Emily’s List, the feminist organization with close links to the Democrats, hasn’t decided whether to support the dude who votes against abortion or the woman who’s solidly pro-choice.

Leaving you to wonder, once again, if the issue isn’t abortion but Sanders and his program.

The counter-life

Amid all the talk of Trump and the Republicans consolidating power, you’d never know that:

There have been more than 8,700 protests in the US since Trump’s inauguration, involving 6 to 9 million people, most of them opposing Trump. That’s 2-3% of the population. That’s a lot.

The attorney general of California – the largest state in the US, almost a country within a country – announced that any business cooperating with federal officials in their effort to report and deport undocumented workers will face prosecution and punishment, including fines up to $10,000.

Republicans and conservatives are having less success this year pushing socially divisive issues like transgender bathrooms. In the south, ballot items that have long tilted the political agenda to the right are being stymied and stalled in state legislatures across the region.

Meanwhile, progressives in one southern state are seizing control of the political agenda, putting on the ballot an amendment to restore voting rights to most convicted felons. Even if the initiative loses, it puts conservatives on the defensive, forcing them to argue on the left’s terms.

Prices at Trump hotels are way down.



A final thought:



Journalists and academics who care about liberalism and the Democratic party often don’t care about labor unions. New research from Vanessa Williamson, Alex Hertel-Fernandez and James Feigenbaum shows why they should.

Not only are the conservative policy effects of so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws, which cripple unions, major and dramatic; so are the electoral effects.

Describing the research of Williamson et al, Sean McElwee writes: “Right-to-work laws decreased Democratic presidential vote share by 3.5%. The decimation of the blue wall in 2016 may have been driven by Trump’s unique candidacy, but right-to-work laws had been weakening the foundation for years.”

Even if they don’t about unions for reasons of justice and equality, liberals should care about them for electoral reasons.

Corey Robin is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump

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