Opinion | If you work for Trump, quit now wapo.st/2mjNWuW?tid=ss… Staffers, Kelly, Pence, Mnuchin, Haspel, Coats, Sessions, Ross, O'Rourke, Mattis, Pompeo: #RESIGN
Whatever fantasy you had about saving the country by containing Trump's worst impulses was utter self-delusion. The only good you can do for your country now is to resign. Preferably, all together, in a single news conference.
You are *not* the only thing standing between Trump and his worst impulses. You are *not* obliged to stay in place because otherwise you'll be replaced by even more irresponsible toadies and flunkies. You *are* those toadies and flunkies: He doesn't listen to a word you say.
Thus you are enabling him. You are legitimizing him. You failed. #RESIGN.

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More from @ClaireBerlinski

Oct 7, 2018
His body was *dismembered?* It's nyti.ms/2Cv2Ys6 Perhaps it's best to wait to report that detail until we see forensic reports? The Turkish government is very capable, forensically--I've seen it in action. (Not least when my apartment was burgled).
If it's got a piece, or pieces, of a body, it will be very capable of figuring out to whom it belonged based on DNA evidence. There will be enough security footage to say without doubt not only whether he left the consulate--
--but where he went, if he was in one piece. And probably where the pieces went, if he was not. I can't see any way to smuggle a human body out of there without a forensic trace. The hypothesis that he left the consulate in pieces sounds like one worth investigating--
Read 6 tweets
Oct 6, 2018
Hollywood perpetrated the fantasy, sure, but that's Hollywood's job. The real culprit here is the federal government. The use of the polygraph to screen employees gives it a luster of official credibility. People insist they don't trust the federal government, but they do.
If authority figures use this thing, they figure, it must work. And the government uses it because it *does* work: It works to scare people senseless and extract confessions. That's presumably why Kavanaugh declared it was a useful tool of law enforcement. In that sense, it is.
But he's learned well why the government needs to think *very* carefully about promulgating fiction, however useful it may be and however noble the end. I don't believe the government should never lie. Of course there are circumstances under which it should and must.
Read 11 tweets
Oct 6, 2018
Yes, it's a good article. It's bizarre that we're even having this discussion, though. It's worth asking why Americans believe in polygraphs (no one else does, it's a uniquely American superstition). It has something to do with two cultural proclivities, I think.
First is the idea that everything can be done with technology. We worship "science," especially if we don't know much about it. "Science" can do and fix everything, to the point we people are willing to believe it can do the obviously impossible:
"Science" can tell us, definitively, what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

I suspect too that the less one knows about the hearts of men--particularly, that human personalities and emotions are tremendously complex and hard to understand--
Read 8 tweets
Oct 5, 2018
Well, we take our small consolations where we may. Senator Graham has, at least, spoken the truth about polygraphs.

But at this point, I'm game for dunking him in water to see if he floats--and frankly, I think we should go full Roman coliseum-plus.

Let me explain my vision.
If we're going to go out like this, let's do it with style. Let's be *the* most spectacularly entertaining and degenerate empire in history.

Let's build ourselves a proper coliseum. We stick Graham, Kavanaugh, a passel of shrieking harpies and Ronan Farrow right into it.
We go full-on ludi circenses. They have maim or trap their opponents--not kill them quickly--because the fight has to last long enough to please the crowd.

(We're the crowd.)

We get bored if it's not bloodier and more twisted than the last game.
Read 10 tweets
Oct 4, 2018
But what's so wrong with our political life that "six current and former senior national security officials" would leak information about an ongoing, Top Secret investigation? Do the American people need to know about this so urgently that everyone in China needs to know, too?
Why did these officials imagine the investigation was labelled "Top Secret?"

Why are we hearing about this from people not authorized to go on the record?
If this is classified "Top Secret" for a good reason, it should stay that way. If it isn't, why can't these officials tell us openly, using their names?

Is there a dispute in the intelligence community about whether this should be public? If so, why?
Read 6 tweets
Oct 3, 2018
You Idiot Reporters Are Making It Worse nationalreview.com/2018/10/kavana… Yep. An in doing so, contributing every bit as much as Trump to the destruction of precious norms of civility--ones so much easier to destroy than rebuild. Everyone--stop.
Your partisan hysteria, your preening self-righteousness, your eagerness, in every case, to view half of your fellow Americans as enemies to be destroyed, as opposed to than people with whom you're forever stuck on this continent--so you'd best learn to live with them---
--is killing our country. No melodrama in that, just a fact. Something called "America" will survive, but it won't be the free, self-confident, optimistic country we were given, it will be an irrelevant, shattered shell. You wouldn't want to kill our country---
Read 4 tweets

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