The New York Times – in the wake of an almighty outcry – has thought again about that bright idea of giving a US Senator space to say let’s have the military go to war on the citizenry.

Fewer but better op-eds; sounds like a plan. Now if only they would send David Brooks on his way.

Trump has decided wellllllllllll maybe he won’t fire Esper after all because hey who needs the tsuris this close to an election am I right.

Trump had been [gone] ballistic, said people familiar with the situation, about a news conference Esper held where the defense secretary tried to distance himself from the president’s church photo op on Monday and said he didn’t support sending the military into U.S. cities at this time — a move Trump had said he was considering. The president was so angry he had told aides he was considering dismissing Esper, one of the people said.

But a day later, the view inside the White House was that the president was now unlikely to do so given how close it is to the election, those people said, with one senior administration official saying that removing Esper “is not worth the shakeup five months from an election.”

So because it’s a day closer to the election, he decided nah.

Yeah, sure, guys. What you mean is he had yet another ego-meltdown yesterday and by today he had calmed down a little, like any toddler. A tip: we’re not going to vote for him just because he didn’t fire Esper. Nope. That’s not going to happen.

Trump’s anger with Esper came as a string of former military officials began speaking out against the president’s handling of the demonstrations across the country. Esper’s direct predecessor, James Mattis, publicly slammed Trump’s response to the protests over the death of George Floyd, saying in a piece published in The Atlantic magazine on Wednesday statement the president “tries to divide us” and calling his “bizarre photo op” in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church “an abuse of executive authority.”

Has he smashed all his toys with a hammer yet?

Esper had not cleared his plans for the news conference with the White House beforehand, one person said.

Esper said that he was aware of the Monday night plan to visit the church — where Trump posed for photos holding a Bible — but had not known what would happen there.

…

He also said he did not support invoking a 213-year-old Insurrection Act, something Trump had been considering, to deploy active-duty U.S. troops to respond to civil unrest in cities across the country.

It’s a wonder Trump hasn’t fed him to the lions.

[Editorial note: you can’t be ballistic (unless you’re a weapon), you can only go ballistic. The idiom is going ballistic, not being it. You’re welcome.]

Christing fuck.

Play the second clip.

Adding: Doucette has a whole long thread of these.

What was Barr’s role?

Attorney General William Barr was part of the decision to expand the perimeter around the White House Monday, CBS News has confirmed, pushing protesters who were assembled there from the area before President Trump delivered remarks and walked across the street to survey a damaged historic church.

A Justice Department official told CBS News the decision was made late Sunday or early Monday morning to move the perimeter keeping protesters from getting close to the White House back one block. The official said it was a coordinated decision, and Barr advised it was the correct move.

…

The Justice Department official said the president’s movement’s did not have any bearing on the decision to extend the perimeter around the White House. Barr went to observe the scene at Lafayette Park after visiting a command center Monday afternoon and was surprised to see it hadn’t been moved as intended. The official said Barr then met with police to discuss moving the perimeter. Afterward, officers began pushing protesters from the park.

The decision was made to move the perimeter Sunday night or Monday morning, then later Monday Barr took a look and was shocked shocked to see that nothing had happened and told the police to hurry up and get it done. It was SHEER COINCIDENCE that Trump went marching up to that church moments later. Sheer coincidence I tell you.

Trump actually pumped his nasty little fist at the cops on Monday.

Barr held a press conference just now (or perhaps is still holding it).

Adding:

Andrew Coyne at the Globe and Mail says Trump just wants to watch the world burn, which I think is a good way of putting it.

It is hard to assess how much Donald Trump is the cause of his country’s disintegration, and how much the consequence. Suffice it to say that the times brought forth the man: the perfect embodiment of all the fears and resentments – of foreigners, of minorities, of liberal elites – of the Republican base.

They found in Mr. Trump a vehicle for their nihilism and their rage, perhaps the least suitable candidate for high office in the entire United States – a petulant, insecure man-child, so wholly lacking in intelligence, competence, integrity or emotional stability as to be disqualified in most states from driving a bus, let alone leading what was once the most powerful country on Earth.

Driving a bus, though, is a very skilled and high-stress job, if you think about it (and/or if you ride buses a lot). Trump is definitely the last person you want to see at the wheel.

That was the point: to invert every norm or expectation, not only of public life, but of ordinary human behaviour; to render those norms and expectations, by a combination of their callousness and his shamelessness, impotent. The point was to “send a message,” although as Mr. Trump and his enablers in the Republican political class intuited, the message was less of rebellion than credulity.

The results are all around us: the world’s worst death toll from the novel coronavirus; the worst economic collapse since the Depression; the worst race riots since 1968. Mr. Trump wasn’t the immediate cause of any of these, but he has made each measurably worse, whether by the incompetence of his administration, the incoherence of his policies or the toxicity of his rhetoric. Elect someone to blow up the system, it turns out, and you will be picking up the pieces for years.

The U.S. accordingly gives every indication of coming apart, torn along lines of race, class, ideology and region, with Mr. Trump gleefully pulling at each frayed seam. Every institution of authority that might have mitigated the damage has been attacked and undermined. Every belief or movement that might have exacerbated it – racists, gun nuts, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists of all kinds – has been cultivated.

And torn along other lines too. There are the lines of political orientation, related to moral orientation. There are the lines of egotism versus public-mindedness. There are the lines of being an absolute shit at all times versus not doing that. There’s the embrace of hatred and violence and domination versus trying to do better than that.

Worst of all has been the collapse of trust. It is true that Mr. Trump can be trusted to always do the worst possible thing in any situation – to do it not in spite of expert recommendations to the contrary, but because of them.

But even here the sense of bad faith is inescapable. He does things not because he believes in them – for he does not believe in anything – but because they make him feel good in the moment, or because they might benefit him in some way. He lies, not because he wants to be believed, but to advertise his disdain for the very notion of truth as distinct from falsehood. He gives orders, not because he has anything he wants done, but as tests of loyalty for his underlings.

I think that’s right. There’s no there there. Lots of pundits still claim he’s diabolically clever but I don’t think so – I think he’s random in the way Coyne describes, and that his randomness is what his fans love about him.

Jennifer Rubin collects a number of distancings and rebukes from military boffins:

We do not yet know precisely why Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper publicly broke with President Trump on Wednesday, renouncing the use of the Insurrection Act as a means to deploy the military against civilian demonstrators. We can surmise, however, that Pentagon brass was finally fed up and prevailed upon Esper to speak out.

It’s unnerving when it’s the military having to remind the civilian government that we’re not supposed to have military government.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, who had accompanied Trump on his march across Lafayette Square, put out a memo on June 2, which read like a not-very-subtle rebuke of Trump’s attempt to use the military to suppress protesters:

1. Every member of the U.S. military swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution and the values embedded within it. … We in uniform — all branches, all components, and all ranks — remain committed to our national values and principles embedded in the Constitution.

…

3. As members of the Joint Force-comprised of all races, colors, and creeds — you embody the ideals of our Constitution. Please remind all of our troops and leaders that we will uphold the values of our nation, and operate consistent with national laws and our own high standards of conduct at all times.

I didn’t know he’d done that. Never mind about the combat fatigues then – I withdraw my suspicion that he meant to add to the intimidation factor by marching to the church in them.

Rubin cites James Miller’s resignation from the Science Defense Board and

Gen. David Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, and Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria, superintendent of the Air Force Academy, also spoke up this week in support of the protests for racial justice, with Silveria directly repudiating use of violence against fellow Americans.

In addition, Air Force Gen. Joseph L. Lengyel, who heads the National Guard Bureau, put out a statement Wednesday entitled “We Must Do Better,” denouncing the racism that has resulted in the deaths of so many unarmed African Americans, urging Americans to listen and learn and reminding us, “Everyone who wears the uniform of our country takes an oath to uphold the Constitution and everything for which it stands.” He declared that if they are to uphold their oath as service personnel and “decent human beings” they must uphold the oath.

And the biggest wallop of all was from Mattis.

Mattis’s unprecedented rebuke raises a number of issues.

First, he was widely and justifiably criticized for failing to speak out previously against Trump, not even to share direct observations that might persuade lawmakers and Americans that Trump is unfit for office. That failure remains, and we do not know whether speaking up earlier would have deterred Trump from further action. Nevertheless, no one should diminish the importance of his action, which may carry sway with other current military officials, Congress and the public. It is late, but it better than anything we have heard from any other former administration official. (Contrast Mattis’s action with the refusal of former national security adviser John Bolton, who chose to hold back direct knowledge of Trump’s alleged impeachable conduct for the sake of a book deal.)

Second, it remains unclear whether Mattis will hold any sway with Republican lackeys in the Senate who refuse to break with Trump — or worse, who try, as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) shamefully did, to outdo Trump in vowing to use the military against civilians. Most of them long ago tied themselves to Trump’s mast, willing to go down with the him — and take the country with them — rather than be on the receiving end of a Trump Twitter tirade.

There’s also the fact that some of them are every bit as evil as Trump is. They stick to him because they like his fascist leanings.

Hot times. Bloomberg yesterday afternoon:

Ex-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis condemned his former boss, President Donald Trump, over his aggressive rhetoric and strategy to quell protests that erupted after the death of an unarmed black man in police custody.

…

The sharply worded and unprecedented rebuke from Trump’s first defense chief will raise pressure on the president, who this week threatened to dispatch active duty troops to quash protests and drew widespread condemnation when the square in front of the White House was forcibly cleared before he walked to a historic church to hold a Bible for photographers.

The president responded Wednesday evening saying that he “didn’t like his ‘leadership’ style or much else about” Mattis. “His primary strength was not military, but rather personal public relations,” Trump wrote in one of a pair of tweets.

Oh, interesting, because Trump’s primary strength is not military or governmental or intellectual or policy-wonkish or diplomatic or judicial or public spirited, but rather fomenting rage and hatred.

Mattis’s statement, first published in The Atlantic, came on what had already been a rough day for the defense establishment.

Trump’s current secretary, Mark Esper, angered White House officials by publicly distancing himself from Trump’s potential use of the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active duty forces to cities confronting protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

So Esper publicly distanced himself from Trump’s military takeover plans. Good!

It remains to be seen if Mattis’s denunciation will have lasting political power, but it strikes at the heart of what the president has pitched as one of his strengths: His fulsome praise of the military as part of his “America First” approach to the world, even while he frequently accuses the national security establishment of trying to undermine him and his administration.

Part of his Murka First approach yes but also part of his love of force and domination as opposed to argument and persuasion – part of his mindless love of violence and hatred and rage. He doesn’t have any serious understanding of the military, much less of foreign policy, he just loves the association with maximum violence.

Despite Trump’s praise of Mattis when he took office, by the end of the defense chief’s tenure, their relationship was shattered. Upon his departure, Mattis he issued a blunt resignation letter that amounted to a public reproach of Trump’s “America First” mantra.

“We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances,” Mattis wrote. “Because you have the right to have a secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

What I’m saying. Trump doesn’t give an actual shit about our security, prosperity and values or the solidarity of our alliances. He just wants to order people killed and then watch the real-life war movie.

In his statement this week, Mattis took aim at Esper, too. Without naming the Pentagon chief, but citing the military jargon the Defense secretary and other top officials have used in describing the geography of the current protests, Mattis said, “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.”’

Esper had used the “battlespace” term during a call with governors on Monday, before U.S. authorities used smoke bombs and pepper-spray-like devices to clear out the peaceful protest outside the White House.

Jeezus. I missed that. Battlespace!

But since then apparently Esper has gone all squishy like Mattis so now he’s on the naughty stool too.

President Donald Trump confronted his Defense secretary, Mark Esper, after the Pentagon chief publicly opposed the idea of deploying the military to contain protests, according to people familiar with the matter.

Separately, the president later asked top advisers if they thought Esper could still be effective in his position, two people familiar with the discussions said on Wednesday night.

…

Esper met with Trump in the Oval Office after telling reporters at the Pentagon that active-duty military forces to perform law enforcement within the U.S. is “a matter of last resort” and that the National Guard was better suited to the task.

…

The defense chief also appeared to back away from his boss by saying that while he knew he would be joining Trump to walk into Lafayette Square in front of the presidential residence on Monday, he was not aware of specific plans, including what would happen when the group reached St. John’s Episcopal Church.

He said he knew they were going to the church but not that it was for a photo op.

(Well, given Trump, what else would it be? Hardly a quiet thoughtful visit to ask how everyone is doing.)

His remarks generated irritation at the White House, where three Trump aides who asked not to be identified said the secretary should have moderated his comments to draw less of a distinction with the president.

No, actually, quite the reverse. Everyone’s comments should draw a huge distinction between self and Trump, because Trump is a murderous violence-loving racist monster.

Meanwhile The New York Times has seen fit to publish an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton saying send in the soldiers.

This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s.

New York City suffered the worst of the riots Monday night, as Mayor Bill de Blasio stood by while Midtown Manhattan descended into lawlessness. Bands of looters roved the streets, smashing and emptying hundreds of businesses. Some even drove exotic cars; the riots were carnivals for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements.

…

Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.

I haven’t seen many “elites” doing that. What I’ve seen is mostly people pointing out that there are some people taking advantage of the protests along with some right-wing provocateurs and some lefties who like violence; in short it’s a mix.

The pace of looting and disorder may fluctuate from night to night, but it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”

This venerable law, nearly as old as our republic itself, doesn’t amount to “martial law” or the end of democracy, as some excitable critics, ignorant of both the law and our history, have comically suggested.

Oh yes, very comical. Meanwhile there is absolutely no reason not to trust Donald Trump to do such a thing with the utmost caution and respect for the rights of all.

Yes but that was completely different because the people threatening the Michigan legislators were white. White, I tell you, white.

I retweeted this on Monday:

He shared them today. Jeffrey Goldberg introduces:

James Mattis, the esteemed Marine general who resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 to protest Donald Trump’s Syria policy, has, ever since, kept studiously silent about Trump’s performance as president. But he has now broken his silence, writing an extraordinary broadside in which he denounces the president for dividing the nation, and accuses him of ordering the U.S. military to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens.

The full statement is at the end.

I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.

It is a wholesome and unifying demand – an entirely reasonable demand. Why doesn’t everyone just agree on that?

I suppose because it implies that we don’t already have equal justice under the law, and that must mean American hasn’t been made great again, or indeed ever, at least not great in the sense of providing equal justice under the law. Unquestioning patriotism outweighs equal justice.

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

With military leadership standing alongside right after peaceful protesters were gassed out of the way. Not their finest hour.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

And that’s why presidents are forbidden to sic the military on the population.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.

First step is getting Trump out. Without that it’s hopeless.

Oh come ON.

Excuse me excuse me. Slight problem with that. The bombing damage was caused by Nazi Germany. By an external enemy with large plans for global domination and genocide. Trump’s short walk was a short walk against fellow citizens who were demonstrating against violent policing. See the difference? Churchill: Nazis. Trump: fellow citizens demonstrating.

The White House is not just equating Trump with Churchill, it’s also equating US citizens (and residents) with Nazis.

Mind you, Churchill was perfectly capable of unleashing the police on his own fellow citizens. He was no fan of the 1926 General Strike, naturally, Tory that he was. But Churchill inspecting bomb damage during the blitz was not making war on fellow citizens; Trump was doing exactly that.

Carolyn Sale at the Centre for Free Expression on another shunning:

In late March, Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, was asked to resign from her role as the Department of Anthropology’s associate chair, undergraduate programs, on the basis that one or more students had gone to the University’s Office of Safe Disclosure and Human Rights and the Dean of Students, André Costopolous, to complain about her without filing formal complaints. All Professor Lowrey has been told is that she is somehow making the learning environment “unsafe” for these students because she is a feminist who holds “gender critical” views. 

Imagine, if you will, a black associate professor being asked to resign from a role as as the Department of Anything’s associate chair of undergraduate programs on the grounds that she is an anti-racism activist who holds anti-racism views.

It makes every bit as much sense. Feminism advocates equal rights for women, anti-racism advocates equal rights for black people. There’s more to it than that in both cases; both forms of activism are based on analysis of the roots of the existing inequality; nevertheless that’s the core. Students who want feminists with gender-critical views silenced want feminism silenced. You can’t have feminism that’s not allowed to be for and about women any more than you can have anti-racism that’s not allowed to be for and about people of color. White people don’t get to say what anti-racism can talk about, and men don’t get to say what feminism can talk about, even if those men say they are women.

Apparently, Lowrey’s very openness about her views is a problem. Should a course have gender or sex as a central theme, on day 1 she offers a summary of her views along with the declaration that no student need agree with her about any of it, as she did this year with her course “Anthropology of Women.” As she cleaves to a feminism that asserts the continuing importance of biological sex and feminist projects of resisting patriarchal oppression, her views put her out of step with much current thinking about the nature of gender, which from the seminal work of Judith Butler forward takes sex to be a social construct.

The “seminal” work of Judith Butler should not be made mandatory in universities. Agreement with Judith Butler should not be made mandatory in universities. Judith Butler should always be optional.

Lowrey refused to resign from her service role and insisted that if the University wished to dismiss her from it, it would need to put its reasons for doing so in writing. She subsequently received a letter from the Dean of Arts Lesley Cormack dismissing her from her service role without offering any specifics as to why. The letter simply declares that the Dean believes that “it is not in the best interests of the students or the University” for Lowrey to continue in it.

Honestly it’s as if trans ideology were plutonium in reverse – if you refuse to touch it YOU NEED TO BE SCRUBBED WITH WIRE BRUSHES AND BLEACH.

Having been disciplined without any concrete charges presented to her, Lowrey refers to what is happening to her as “McCarthyite.” As she has been confronted not with any specific complaint, but only with the broad claim that her views constitute an amorphous “harm,” we might find ex officio proceedings during the English Reformation an equally apt analogy for what she is experiencing; ex officio proceedings permitted those accused of supposedly heretical beliefs to be excommunicated, sometimes even executed, on the basis of secret disclosures to ecclesiastical judges of evidence never made public. Whichever analogy you prefer, this kind of disciplinary action against a professor, in which administrators refuse to offer any specific charges in relation to student complaints about a professor’s ideas, is inappropriate at a university in a democratic country twenty years into the twenty-first century. 

If the “harm” is amorphous then it’s not really harm.

At its most alarming, the University of Alberta’s position appears to be that where students have a “perception” that an idea or a set of ideas harms them, it does not matter what the precise complaints are in regard to the person holding the ideas (or indeed whether there is any precise complaint). Lowrey has been expressly told that it doesn’t matter if any of the claims students are making about her are true.

I wonder if this applies in any other discipline at the University of Alberta. Can students try that with economics? Physics? Computer science?

Asking that question is itself a crime, isn’t it.

This is not good.

Word is they’re required to identify. Without insignia and names they could be anybody – Proud Boys, KKK, Stephen Miller’s private army, anybody.

Oh hey it turns out Trump didn’t go to the bunker to hide from the meany protesters, he went to inspect it. Because that’s what presidents do: they inspect the various rooms in the White House. They inspect for rat turds, for termite damage, for mold, for leaks, for fire hazards, for slippery bits, for toxins, for toadstools growing up through the floor, for rust, for stains, for splinters, for spills, for scratching by cats or weasels or gerbils, for bats, for spiders, for sour milk, for canned goods that have passed their “best by” date, for light bulb failures, for crooked blinds, for ugly curtains…frankly it’s a never-ending job.

During an interview with Fox News radio host Brian Kilmeade on Wednesday morning, Trump denied reports that he had taken shelter in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center out of safety concerns, claiming that he had gone down there for a mere inspection during the day on Friday before the protests turned violent that night.

“I went down during the day and I was there for a tiny little short period of time, and it was much more for an inspection,” he told Kilmeade.

Much more. Definitely. Presidents need to inspect the bunker because who the hell else is going to do it? Presidents also do all the cooking and the cleanup afterwards.

“Nope, they didn’t tell me that at all,” he replied when the Fox News host asked if the Secret Service had told him they needed to bring him down to the bunker for security reasons. “But they said it would be a good time to go down, take a look because maybe sometime you’re going to need it.”

“Sir, take a look, sir, because, sir, maybe you’re sir going to need it sir. You might sir need it sir, so right now would sir be a fabulous sir time to sir go look at it sir. Looking sir at it is crucial sir to its sir effectiveness sir.”

Trump claimed he’s visited the bunker “two or three times, all for inspection” (later in the interview, he said the visits were “two and a half, sort of, because I’ve done different things”).

He pissed in it? He raped a staffer in it? He drew on the walls in it?

The President insisted again that he was only down there “for a very very short period of time, very very short period of time.”

What I love about his use of language is the scrupulous avoidance of redundancy.

“I can’t tell you who went with me, but a whole group of people went with me as an inspecting factor,” he said.

Oh good, more eyes. Always good to have more eyes. You can’t have too many eyes inspecting the bunker.

The President also addressed his widely criticized photo-op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Monday, which he had reportedly done merely to be seen outside the White House after having become upset by reports that he retreated to the bunker.

He denied ordering law enforcement to forcibly remove non-violent protesters and people at the church (including clergy) with teargas in order for him to stage the performance.

“I didn’t say, ‘Oh, move them out.’ I didn’t know who was there,” Trump told Kilmeade.

Oh really? Who did order it then? Who’s the freelance?

Robert Kagan in the Post:

Anyone concerned about the state of America’s democracy ought to have been troubled Monday at the sight of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, striding behind Donald Trump during his presidential show of force at Lafayette Square. Dressed in combat fatigues and walking with Attorney General William P. Barr, national security adviser Robert O’Brien and others, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer did more than make himself part of the tableau of Trump’s photo op and campaign commercial. Milley gave tangible meaning to the president’s threat to deploy the U.S. military to put down “domestic terror” in the United States.

Why combat fatigues forgodsake? Why on earth? He wasn’t going into combat, so what the fuck? He was walking to a church a block away from the White House for a photo op, not addressing troops in a war zone. Why did he put on a costume?

The president’s call for military deployments against protesters was not some random Trumpian effusion. He and his advisers and supporters are building a legal justification for deploying troops on American streets. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper advised the nation’s governors to “dominate the battlespace,” by which he meant American cities. Prominent Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), a close Trump ally and presidential aspirant, called for deploying “the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry — whatever it takes,” against the “insurrectionists,” a deliberate reference to the Insurrection Act of 1807, which gives the president broad powers to deploy federal troops. Trump tweeted that Cotton’s suggestions were “100% Correct.” This is the context in which Milley appeared with the president in his battle fatigues. It is the context in which a U.S. Army helicopter descended to rooftop level in Washington’s Chinatown hours later, frightening and scattering protesters in a “show of force” that snapped trees and nearly injured the fleeing civilians.

They are at the very least toying with the idea of a military coup. They’re not shying away from it in horror, they’re considering it and testing the waters and staging dry runs. They’re doing this at the behest of a cheap corrupt real estate developer who race-baited and pussy-grabbed his way into the presidency. Why? I don’t know. Profound genuine love of fascism, maybe.

Another one quits:

A Department of Defense adviser has resigned, effective immediately, from the military’s science board, citing what he believed to be a violation of conduct from Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.

In his resignation letter to Esper, which was obtained by The Washington Post, James Miller Jr., who served as the US undersecretary of defense for policy from 2012 to 2014, recalled that he swore an oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and “to bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” similar to what the defense secretary had done before he took office.

“On Monday, June 1, 2020, I believe that you violated that oath,” Miller wrote to Esper.

It was the one where they gassed peaceful protesters to clear the way for Trump’s Walk to the Church photo op. Esper and Army General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went with Trump on that walk of shame.

“Law-abiding protesters just outside the White House were dispersed using tear gas and rubber bullets — not for the sake of safety, but to clear a path for a presidential photo op,” Miller wrote. “You then accompanied President Trump in walking from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church for that photo.”

And by doing so he endorsed it. Constitution? Remember that?

“You must have thought long and hard about where that line should be drawn,” Miller wrote. “I must now ask: If last night’s blatant violations do not cross the line for you, what will?”

“Unfortunately, it appears there may be few if any lines that President Trump is not willing to cross, so you will probably be faced with this terrible question again in the coming days,” he added. “You may be asked to take, or to direct the men and women serving in the US military to take, actions that further undermine the Constitution and harm Americans.”

That’s a safe bet.

George Will has torn a long painful strip off Bunkie. It’s a good read.

… this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.

…The president’s provocations — his coarsening of public discourse that lowers the threshold for acting out by people as mentally crippled as he — do not excuse the violent few. They must be punished. He must be removed.

Social causation is difficult to demonstrate, particularly between one person’s words and other persons’ deeds. However: The person voters hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please don’t be too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.

…

The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.

If Trump reads it he won’t understand it. Too many hard words.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Like an awkward impulse buy.

Many plays by Shakespeare and writers of his time are profoundly political (European visitors were shocked at what the English companies got away with, for you simply could not be so political in any other European country), and if the director does not recognise this, or seeks to foist on plays some obvious contemporary ‘relevance’ that has nothing to do with the issues that are addressed in the plays, then that is a recipe for rendering the plays as dead as doornails. European (non-Anglophone) productions of Shakespeare, and particularly Kosintsev’s great film versions, often recognise the politics of the plays far better than most Anglo-Saxon productions do. I think that after the Civil Wars, it became difficult to address political matters on the English stage, and then in the Victorian Age, individualism, the growing lack of a sense of the common weal, and mere pathos came to dominate the theatre – and this continued into the 20th century in the Anglophone world. ‘Politics’ was thought to be in rather bad taste, an attitude that pervades modern journalism in the Anglophone sphere, particularly the USA, with its ‘both-sides-ism’. ‘”Hamlet” is about Hamlet,’ said Peter Brook in an interview on Japanese television about his pared-down version, a very unsatisfactory remark that went with a very unsatisfactory production – it is this attitude that I take strong issue with in my essay on the production. This is not to say that there not have been productions that recognise the importance of the political: Michael Bogdanov’s come to mind, and there is a very good RSC production of ‘Julius Caesar’ with an all-black cast, directed by Greg Doran. Speaking of this last play, there’s a wonderful film of it performed in Italian by the denizens of a high-security prison in Italy (that is, by men who are members of the Mafia and other ‘societies’): these men absolutely understand hierarchy, intimidation, vaunting, the politics etc from the inside, and it shows: ‘Caesar Must Die’, directed by Paolo & Vittorio Taviani.

There was also the matter of censorship: censorship in Shakespeare’s time was there, of course, but it was rather loose. But in 1737 a law was brought in that put the Lord Chancellor’s office in charge of licensing plays for performance – Robert Walpole didn’t want any satirical takes on his government appearing on stage. In the 19th century, Ibsen was banned from the British stage. The first great British political play in Britain in the 20th century was Harley Granville Barker’s ‘Waste’ (1907), which was banned from public performance by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and remains still too little known.

And speaking of popes and the Catholic church…

Seven months pregnant, Manuela, a mother of two, said she miscarried at her modest home in rural El Salvador. But the police, and a judge, didn’t believe her. They charged and convicted her for aggravated homicide, sentencing her to 30 years in prison.

But Manuela only served two of those years. In 2010, she died alone in a hospital of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease her lawyers say caused her to miscarry. 

More than 140 women have been charged under El Salvador’s total ban on abortion since 1998, incarcerated for up to 35 years in some of the world’s most notorious prisons. Like Manuela, many say they never had an abortion, but instead claim that after suffering a miscarriage they were wrongfully convicted when their doctors accused them of intentionally terminating their pregnancies. 

Women’s bodies belong to everyone but themselves.

For more than 20 years, El Salvador — a tiny Central American country struggling with brutal gang violence and a record-high homicide rate — has completely banned abortion, including in situations when the procedure could save the patient’s life. The total ban was lobbied for by the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that became particularly powerful in the country after its devastating civil war. In 1998, the church was successful in cementing the ban into El Salvador’s constitution, adding an amendment to say that “life begins at conception.”

“No one should act against a life once it has been conceived,” said Father Edwin Banos, a social media savvy millennial priest based in Metapan, El Salvador, who’s thrown public support behind the country’s anti-abortion laws.

Easy for him. He’ll never have his body taken over by someone else without his consent. That happens to other people, people not like him, and he thinks he has the right to force them to share the inside of their bodies with someone else even when they don’t want to.

Even Catholic archbishops don’t want Trump polluting their sites.

President Trump drew fresh criticism from religious leaders on Tuesday when he and first lady Melania Trump visited a shrine to Pope John Paul II in Washington, D.C.

The trip to to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine drew a sharp response from Washington Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory, who said, “I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles.”

They do have some principles in common, like the subordination of women for instance.

The visit took place less than 24 hours after an Episcopal bishop said the president had used the Bible as a prop during a photo op outside the historic St. John’s Church.

Trump uses everything as a prop. He doesn’t value anything for itself, he values only what makes him look richer or more dominant or both. His wife is a prop, his children are props, the Oval Office is a prop, that desk that he keeps naming is a prop, Tony Fauci is a prop, Barr is a prop, generals are props, soldiers are props, the crowd is a prop, the helicopter is a prop, the Rose Garden is a prop. People who call him Sir are a prop. We’re a prop.

The Saint John Paul II National Shrine, which sits on the edge of the campus of Catholic University, was created by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal group. It was designated a national shrine by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2014.

Why do the bishops get to designate a national shrine? For that matter what is a national shrine, and why do we have any? We don’t have a state religion, so why should we have national shrines? I certainly don’t see any pope as a national anything; the papacy is a monstrous institution.