Impeachment, the Pee Pee Tape, and Travis Reinking: 3 News Stories You Should Read Today – 4/24/2018
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The myth of an ending: why even removing Trump from office won’t save American democracy
It feels like this moment in history deserves a definitive ending. It won’t get one.
This yearning is for something, anything, to end the death loop that American democracy appears to be trapped in, for a big, dramatic blowup to fix the system’s ills. In the liberal imagination, that blowup typically takes the form of Trump’s removal from office, an event that sets us back to a path of normalcy and sane politics.
This yearning is understandable — but it is both dangerous and misplaced. Ending the Trump presidency will not fix, or even substantially ameliorate, most of the problems plaguing the American political system. They were mounting for years before he took office — indeed, they made him possible — and they will continue to plague us for years after he leaves.
TRUMP’S PEE-TAPE ALIBI IS FALLING APART
Meanwhile, the president continues to bend over backward for his friends in mother Russia.
Here’s a riddle for you: more than a year into his presidency, why has Donald Trump continued to treat Russia with the sort of respect and deference that U.S. allies, Barack Obama, kneeling N.F.L. players, the mayor of San Juan, Mika Brzezinski, CNN, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, The New York Times, NAFTA, sanctuary cities, and a large segment of the American public can only dream of? Since taking office 15 months ago, the president of the United States has leaked information about a classified Israeli intelligence operation to two Russian envoys; hesitated to blame the Kremlin for [the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy; exploded with rage when he found out the U.S. had expelled more Russian diplomats than European countries following the incident; congratulated Vladimir Putin on a totally unexpected election victory against the wishes of senior officials; and assured Russian officials that plans for sanctions announced by U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley—in response to the Kremlin’s support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose actions have been likened by Trump to those of an “animal”—were never gonna happen. In attempting to crack the case of the Eastern European country’s strange grip on its little American babushka doll, some have pointed to Trump’s business interests, while others have chalked it up to the current president’s well-documented obsession with oligarchs. Yet others have consistently come back to the idea that Russia has something on the president that he doesn’t want to get out. Could it be, say, video evidence that he witnessed Russian prostitutes peeing in a bed once slept in by his predecessor? Reason and logic tells us this cannot be possible . . . and yet, on Monday, a new report nudged the impossible a hair closer in the direction of credibility.
Travis Reinking Is What Happens When Black People Are ‘Criminals’ and White People Are Allowed to Be Invisible
A few months ago, during a conversation on Facebook about one of the many mass shootings committed by a white man (I forget which one), the homie Sai Grundy wrote that (paraphrasing) one of the byproducts of the criminalization of blackness is that white people are often able to elude suspicion by virtue of their whiteness. While we capture all of the attention, they sneak on by.
The most prominent recent example of this I can think of is Stephen Paddock, the (white) man who killed 58 people in Las Vegas. Imagine how invisible to everyone you must be—and how aware of your invisibility you must be—to somehow be able to collect 23 rifles in a hotel room in one of the busiest and most densely populated places in the world. He amassed a freakin’ arsenal and was able to do so without anyone stopping to ask him a question or inspect his room.
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