Me @TheWeek: Block Christopher Wray's nomination to the FBI

In a stunning failure of self-promotion, I neglected to mention here my debut at TheWeek.com. I'm really thrilled to have been published there — the ranks of commentary writers are about as good as any publication in the country, so I feel lucky.

The subject of my debut? Christopher Wray, Donald Trump's nominee to lead the FBI. My take? Don't confirm him:

There's an old legal concept known as "the fruit of a poisonous tree." The idea is that if evidence is tainted — say, if police got a confession without reading a suspect his rights — then all information learned as a result of that evidence is inadmissible in court. The message to lawyers is clear: You don't get to take advantage of doing things the wrong way. 

American government is not a court of law. But with President Trump, there's plenty of reason to think that the tree — the whole damned orchard, in fact— is filled with toxins.

It's obviously not a good idea to halt all governance while Donald Trump is under investigation. But the FBI position is different, for reasons I explain in the piece. Please! Read the whole thing!

The straight line connecting tribalization, demonization, and Trump's Russia scandal

I’ve been thinking about this awful tweet from the awful Dennis Prager.

  Which led me to this tweet this morning quoting a Fox News personality:
 And I’m a bit discouraged. 

Let me preface: I’m not quite a “pox on both your houses guy.” All things being equal, I find liberalism superior to conservatism, and I don’t make apologies for it. But I do think political tribalism blinds us to the ways that we’re very similar to our rivals, and that awareness of those similarities is a hedge against hubris.

Among Democrats and liberals, I often hear a refrain that goes something like this: “Republicans don’t play by the rules. They’ll do anything to win, and when it comes down to it, they’ll stick with each other. Not like our side, which is weak and too willing to play by the rules. We have to be as tough as they are.”

Having spent time in the out Internet provinces of both conservatism and Trumpism, I can tell you this: Rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives say precisely the same thing about the other side. A lot. (I know what some of my liberal friends are going to say: “They’re wrong!” But they’re not, entirely.)
 
Best I can tell, both sides believe it. Best I can tell, neither side really examines why the other side thinks that. Everybody has their reasons, I assure you, and it’ll probably be worth examining that in another post. 

But one result of our ongoing demonization is this: It removes any moral or ethical barriers we might otherwise observe. The only object is to win — or avoid losing — by any means necessary. The other guys are going to do it. We should too! All of which makes the race to the bottom a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meeting with the Russians? In a way, that’s not a transgression of the norms, but a fulfillment of what the norms have become.

How to disrupt that race? No idea. Ugh.

If Donald Trump was a good human being, we wouldn't be in this mess

I've been wondering lately: What would the world be like if Donald Trump was a good guy and not a man of such transparently ill character whose corruption and classlessness infects all around him?

A pause: I don't like attributing character flaws to people with whom I disagree. Usually, they're good — or good enough — people with different opinions! But with Trump, the crappiness of his character is key to the critique of him. It's unavoidable.

Let's apply the question to this week's big scandal — the newly reported meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer he thought might provide Russian government dirt on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.

If the people around Donald Trump had been both smart and patriotic, we wouldn’t be waking up this week to news that his son met with a Russian lawyer to dig up “dirt” in Hillary Clinton. We would’ve found out last summer — and it might’ve provided the boost he needed to win the presidency.

News of Trump Jr.’s meeting broke this week, adding to the appearance of a White House under siege and a legal noose tightening around the president’s inner circle. All of this — this part of the scandal, anyway — could’ve been avoided if the Trump campaign had just done two things:

• Called the FBI.
• Held a big press conference announcing why they’d called the FBI.

This approach would’ve had two advantages. It would’ve been the right thing to do. And it would’ve helped Trump look like a real American leader — someone selfless enough to sacrifice a possible advantage if taking that advantage meant doing dirty business with the country’s rivals.

There was precedent for this: Back in 2000, Al Gore’s campaign received a tape showing George W. Bush’s debate preparations — and promptly sent it along to federal investigators.

''I looked at it, and I said, 'I shouldn't have this and shouldn't be looking at this,''' said former Rep. Tom Downey, the Gore adviser who received the tape. ''I knew that it was serious stuff.”

Gore, of course, ended up narrowly losing the presidency. Trump narrowly won.

But imagine what our politics might look like right now if the Trump campaign called the FBI then held the press conference. Imagine the campaign bounce he might’ve received if he’d made a statement like, say, this:

"The Russians tried to give us damaging info on our opponent but even though that might have given us an advantage, it wouldn't be the right thing to do for our country. We are all Americans."

Trump still could’ve railed against “Crooked Hillary.” He still could’ve charged that her email setup as Secretary of State had made America less secure. But he could’ve put questions of collusion with Russia largely to rest, and — for once — maybe even made himself look a little more like a statesman instead of a two-bit schemer. “More in sadness than in anger” would’ve been a good look for a politician attempting to appeal to moderates.

That would’ve taken some imagination, though. That would've taken some moral fitness — or the smarts to try to appear fit once in awhile.

Instead, the Trump campaign played to character, choosing to pursue the dumb, obvious, “let’s screw our enemies” power move. And when that didn’t work, he went public asking the Russians to release any info they had on his opponent.

The trouble with Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, from the beginning, has been his inability to get out of his own way. His determination to avenge slights and be in control — but only in the most rudimentary fashion — led him to fire James Comey, to attack the “Morning Joe” crew, to slam veterans like John McCain and to pick fights with Rosie O’Donnell, to get his pound of flesh but to almost always get it in a fashion that leaves his presidency as collateral damage.

Given the choice between blunt-force trauma and the smart, silent shiv — or merely doing the right thing and being nice people — Trump and his minions choose blunt force every time. I'm not sure they're aware that different possibilities exist.

If Trump had tried to be a bigger, better man, he might right now have a bigger, better presidency. All he and his campaign had to do was the right thing. They didn’t. Of course they didn’t.

Cross-posted at SixOh6.

Why smart conservatives should love the Bechdel test

I'm shocked, shocked that a National Review writer has decided to take issue with the "Bechdel test." The test, as I'm sure you know, is a very simple way to check if your movies have even a moment in them that isn't dude oriented. Here's Wikipedia:

The Bechdel test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.

And here's NRO's Kyle Smith:

In the past few years, the Bechdel Test has begun popping up casually in reviews like a feminist Good Housekeeping Seal of approval. Take this appreciation last month of the 1992 film A League of Their Own, published by Katie Baker on the site The Ringer: “It is, in my possibly blinded by love but also correct opinion, one of the best sports movies there is. And it is an honest ode to women and sisters and friendships, with a story that breezes through the Bechdel test by the end of the opening scene.” Hey, and you know what? Tom Selleck’s Matthew Quigley appears almost immediately in Quigley Down Under. Hurrah, this film breezes through the Cowboy Test by the end of the opening scene! Neither of these two tests gives you any hint as to the worth of a film, and furthermore neither of them tells you anything about a film’s general feminist wokeness. It doesn’t even tell you whether the film is entirely about a woman.

A couple of observations:

•You know why the "Cowboy Test" is ridiculous? Because there have been a million fricking movies about cowboys. We actually have no need of further cowboy movies — though, admittedly, I'd watch one if a good one came along — because just about every permutation of the genre has been exhausted. The Bechdel test was invented, meanwhile, because such female-centric moments were relatively rare.

•Smith is right that the Bechdel test doesn't tell you about the worth of a film or its feminist bona fides. Nobody makes those claims for it! (Check the video above for confirmation of this.) Instead, the underlying question is this: Does this movie contain a single moment that's not all about the guys in it? It is the very minimum a movie can do, in other words, to put a female perspective onscreen.

• Which means that the Bechdel test doesn't do much to constrain movie art: The art itself is pretty constrained — the movie business has increasingly been designed to appeal to and arouse the passions of teenage boys. To the degree female characters are designed to appeal to this demographic, it's not often with their agency apart from men in mind.

The Bechdel test was created because movies are so dude-oriented that getting such a moment was unexpected, to be noted.

Smith says the Bechdel test is irrelevant because women don't make the kinds of movies that reap big box office. "Have a wander through the sci-fi and fantasy section of your local bookstore: How many of these books’ authors are female? Yet these are where the big movie ideas come from. If a woman wants the next Lord of the Rings–style franchise to pass the Bechdel Test, then a woman should come up with a story with as much earning potential as J. R. R. Tolkien’s."

Which is ... stupid. Tell the makers and viewers of Wonder Woman that they don't like sci-fi adventure. For the love of god, tell my nerdy-ass wife — but give me a head start out of the room.

Hollywood discovers that there's an audience for women-centric movies every couple of years, then promptly forgets it. Using that amnesia to justify the ongoing omission of women and women's perspectives from our films isn't just dumb — it's clearly leaving a lot of money on the table.

Smart conservatives, you'd think, might embrace the Bechdel test for this reason if for nothing else: It just might help them make a ton of cash from an underserved audience.

Cross-posted from SixOh6.

Guns are not *just* inanimate objects

My latest at PennLive:

No, guns are not just "inanimate objects." 

Yes, guns are tools. And yes, those tools don't operate without humans making the decisions. 

But guns are a different type of tool. They are designed for one purpose only:
To kill. 

The simple fact is that guns are qualitatively different, are designed and made to be dangerous -- are prized, in fact, for the amount of injury and death they can inflict -- and that makes them worth considering differently than we do, say, a wrench.

I also show why the "cars kill people too" argument is (ahem) fatally flawed. Please give it a read!

War in North Korea is not inevitable - no matter what the hawks say

Speaking of the way Americans are sold wars of choice as no choice at all:

While the Kim regime is technically a Communist government, the ideology that governs North Korea is known as “Juche” (or, more technically, “neojuche revivalism”). The official state ideology is a mixture of Marxism and ultra-nationalism. Juche is dangerous because it is infused with the historical Korean concept of “songun,” or “military-first,” and it channels all state resources into the North Korean military—specifically its nuclear program. Juche is not a self-defensive ideology. Rather, it is a militaristic and offensive belief system. If the North gets a fully functional nuclear arsenal, they will use those weapons to strike at their American, South Korean, and Japanese enemies.

Get that: If North Korea gets the right combination of nukes and missiles, it will definitely attack the United States. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion: "Given these facts, why should we waste precious time on negotiations that will only empower the North and weaken the rest of us? We should be preparing for conflict on the peninsula, not begging the North to take more handouts from us as they build better nuclear weapons."

But there's plenty of reason not to believe that North Korea will automatically strike the United States if it's capable.

Here's why. If North Korea launched nukes at America, America would launch its nukes at North Korea. Everybody knows this. The North Koreans know this. This is not in doubt. It is difficult to establish one's dominance over a continental peninsula if you, along with the peninsula, are smoking, radioactive ash.

As NBC News reports: "The country says it wants a nuclear bomb because it saw what happened when Iraq and Libya surrendered their weapons of mass destruction: their regimes were toppled by Western-backed interventions. It wants to stop others, namely the administration of President Donald Trump, from toppling its totalitarian regime."

The North Korean regime is awful. But that penchant for self-preservation means it's unlikely to start a war that will end with its destruction. Understand, there's a long history of this. America's hawks warned that Iran's mullahs had a messianic ideology that would cause them to lash out with nuclear weapons once they were capable; we invaded Iraq because we didn't want Saddam Hussein to prove he had weapons "in the form of a mushroom cloud."

The essential idea is always that nations unfriendly to the United States are so irrational, care so little for their own survival, that they're willing to commit civilizational suicide via a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies. But it hasn't happened yet.

So when hawks make that case for war, make them prove it. Point out that history hasn't worked out that way so far. Point out that we've invaded a country to no good end because of similar thought processes. But never merely accept that we have to choose war. It's not inevitable, no matter how much hawks sell it as such.

Cross-posted at SixOh6.

Self-restraint in North Korea

This has been stuck in my craw for the last day or so.

The unusually blunt warning, from Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the commander of American troops based in Seoul, came as South Korea’s defense minister indicated that the North’s missile, Hwasong-14, had the potential to reach Hawaii. 

“Self-restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war,” General Brooks said, referring to the 1953 cease-fire that halted but never officially ended the Korean War. “As this alliance missile live-fire shows, we are able to change our choice when so ordered by our alliance national leaders. 

“It would be a grave mistake for anyone to believe anything to the contrary.”

You know what else is a choice? Making war.

There's something awful and dangerous about the idea that war is a default position, that it takes an act of will not to send thousands of soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen into combat to inflict death on a widespread scale.

 This is particularly true in North Korea, where it seems likely the regime is developing nuclear weapons as a means of protecting itself from interference from superpowers like the United States. The likelihood they'll actually start a war? Pretty low.

Which means we'd be starting a war for the purpose of ... making sure they can't retaliate if we decide to go to war with them. That seems like a terrible squandering of life in order to prevent an unlikely outcome.

 Listen, the North Korean regime is — as George W. Bush once said — loathsome. But if our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved this century, going to war against loathsome regimes doesn't necessarily result in a net improvement.

 But their provocations do not require an armed response. Anybody who tells you differently might have an itchy trigger finger.