Make impeachment great again!
Seeing yourself from the outside (pretty literally)
For my money, one of the most valuable things about a mindfulness practice is that it can give you a more objective view of the world. A bit of critical distance from your feelings can let you see other people with less of the distortion that feelings often bring.
And the people you see more objectively can include you. When mindfulness works well, it can help you reflect on decisions you face and give yourself the kind of guidance you’d get from a wise counselor—someone not caught up in your internal struggles, someone viewing you from the outside.
If you’ve tried mindfulness practice and failed to get such benefits, there may be another way to give yourself counsel with some measure of detachment. A study published in the esteemed scientific journal Nature a few months ago reports on the use of virtual reality to let people see themselves, almost literally, from the outside—and advise themselves from that vantage point.
Impeachment should be about America first
This week, as the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry got underway, Rep. Adam Schiff, who is leading it, began his opening statement with these two sentences: “In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation's embrace of the West, and to fulfill Vladimir Putin's desire to rebuild a Russian empire. In the following years, thirteen thousand Ukrainians died as they battled superior Russian forces.”
The Washington Post’s editorial board, on the same day, struck a similar tone. “The heart of the case” for impeachment, the editors wrote, is that, in trying to get Ukrainian help for his 2020 re-election run, Trump “allied his administration with some of Ukraine’s most corrupt elements, and undercut its military defense at a time when its soldiers were fighting and dying.”
I don’t want to sound hard-hearted, but could we please leave the Ukrainian soldiers out of this? I think it’s a mistake for impeachment supporters to frame their case against Trump in terms of the geopolitics of Russia and Ukraine—bad for their case against Trump, bad for America, and bad for the world.
On Israel, Sanders and Warren depart from the script
The Democratic presidential candidates haven’t said much about foreign policy, and what they’ve said has often been frustratingly vague. This week brought a rare opportunity to compare their positions on a specific international development.
It started in Gaza, when Israel assassinated an Islamic Jihad military commander who was thought responsible for past missile attacks on Israel, including a strike in September that disrupted a Bibi Netanyahu campaign event. In response to the assassination (which also killed the commander’s wife), Islamic Jihad fired a barrage of missiles into Israel. Israel replied with more military strikes, which killed at least 30 additional Palestinians, including a number of civilians.
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates who weighed in—including Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Kamala Harris—reacted the way American politicians have often reacted to such things. They condemned the Palestinian rocket attacks, expressed solidarity with Israel, made no reference to Palestinian casualties and no mention of either the immediate precipitant of the missile barrage (the killing of the commander and his wife) or conditions that might have contributed to earlier missile attacks on Israel (most notably Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza, which has helped sustain extreme poverty).
The two exceptions were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
On CNN’s website, journalist Daniel Dale, who has relentlessly chronicled the president’s untruths during this presidency, lists “45 ways Trump has been dishonest about Ukraine and impeachment.”
The Wall Street Journal this week published the results of its big investigation into how Google has “increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged.” Google “made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay, contrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action.” Also, Google “boosts some major websites, such as Amazon.com and Facebook.” (Remember the neediest!) Google also fiddles with the “auto-complete” algorithm to reduce the chances that people will stumble onto such inflammatory subjects as immigration and abortion.
In the Columbia Journalism Review, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi vividly depicts how good Trump is at getting his favorite thing: attention. Al-Gharbi divides the number of mentions each recent president has gotten in the New York Times by the total number of words published by the Times (to correct for the growth in the latter during the online age) and gets this graph:
In Aeon, philosopher Catherine Wilson sings the praises of Epicureanism as a guiding philosophy and argues that it’s well suited to the modern world. As a lifestyle, Epicureanism is less self-indulgent than the current usage of the term might suggest, though less austere than Stoicism, which is now undergoing something of a revival, and on which Wilson throws a bit of shade.
In Dissent, Nicolaus Mills reviews a biography of Gen. George Marshall, architect of the Marshall Plan and Secretary of State under Truman, and suggests that Marshall’s “pragmatic engagement” would be an improvement on America’s foreign policy of recent decades.
The New York Times reports that, with President Evo Morales having been forced out of office by the military amid protests against him, many of Bolivia’s indigenous people worry that gains they enjoyed in recent years are imperiled. Morales, the first indigenous president in the country’s history, was replaced by a woman of European descent who initially appointed an all-European cabinet and has in the past called indigenous religious rituals “satanic.”
On the Israeli website 972, Menachem Klein explains how the unusual dynamics of this week’s conflict in Gaza reflect important changes in the relationship among Israel, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.
In New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore argues that impeachment could be a “calamity” for Democratic presidential candidates who are in the Senate (Sanders, Warren, Klobuchar, Booker, Harris, Bennet). Attending impeachment hearings—which would be in session six days per week—could keep them off the campaign trail for six weeks or more during the critical early phase of the primaries.