At The Atlantic, Adam Serwer dissects the southern deification of confederate general Robert E. Lee.

In the Richmond Times Dispatch, R. David Cox wrote that “For white supremacist protesters to invoke his name violates Lee’s most fundamental convictions.” In the conservative publication Townhall,  Jack Kerwick concluded that Lee was “among the finest human beings that has ever walked the Earth.” John Daniel Davidson, in an essay for The Federalist, opposed the removal of the Lee statute in part on the grounds that Lee “arguably did more than anyone to unite the country after the war and bind up its wounds.” Praise for Lee of this sort has flowed forth from past historians and presidents alike.

This is too divorced from Lee’s actual life to even be classed as fan fiction; it is simply historical illiteracy.

White supremacy does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental convictions.” White supremacy was one of Lee’s most fundamental convictions.

Stripped from mythology, Serwer notes, the real Lee ordered the torture of recaptured slaves, refused to free slaves after a plantation owner freed them in his will, captured free black Americans in the north to sell as slaves in the south, refused to exchange captured black soldiers, who he asserted to now be property of southern citizens, and turned a blind eye, post-war, to violence perpetrated against black citizens by the white students then under his control. Monuments to Robert E. Lee should no more grace southern towns than monuments to Saddam Hussein should tower over Iraqi squares.

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—War was about oil—Wolfowitz:

If confirmed, this will be explosive:

Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war [...]

The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.

Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

Shit. Assuming the report is accurate, Wolfy has undercut the "pretend" reason for war (WMDs) and admitted the real reason (oil), all in a single week.

If a political party continues to do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result each time, it is doomed to failure. Unfortunately, while the left flank of the party is genuinely working the base, the Democratic Party establishment is sticking to the status quo.

Too many party members are continuing to spend an inordinate amount of time on Donald Trump the scumbag, and Donald Trump the Russian stooge. This is effectively the same strategy that lost Democrats the Electoral College.

President Obama gave a speech in Columbus, Ohio, a few weeks before the election that was powerful. Yet in retrospect, his words were ineffective when it came to many Trump voters. The video below includes the most striking snippets.

After pointing out that Trump is the encapsulation of all the venom and misinformation the Republicans have been spewing for decades, President Obama said the following:

"If your only organizing principle has been to block progress," Obama continued. "And block what we tried to do to help the American people every step of the way? So you are not even consistent anymore. You claim the mantle of the party of family values. And this is the guy you nominate? And stand by and endorse and campaign with? Until finally at the eleventh hour, you withdraw your nomination? You don't get credit for that."

During my half century on Earth, two summers really stand out as magical: 1987 and 2000. And given recent events, surely we are all about due for another exceptional summer! It turns out summer 2017 could be that very season. Because near its end, a scant few days before Labor Day, there will be the grandest spectacle the sky can provide as a total solar eclipse cuts a diagonal swath across the U.S., moving from sea to shining sea on August 21. The image above shows that everyone in the lower 48 will get to see a serious partial eclipse. And it looks like just a little traveling will carry millions into one of those zones of precious totality. They say the difference between a total and partial solar eclipse is … well, fill in the blank yourself!

The last time I saw a really good eclipse was so long ago it’s mostly grayed out by early childhood. I was barely in grade school back in 1970, in the Bluegrass State, when the total eclipse region cut a line up the east coast from Florida through DC, all the way to Maine. But after all those years, I still remember the actual eclipse: around noon, with the sun blazing overhead on a warm, clear March day, it started getting dim and the world grew still, almost deathly quiet. We ran back and forth between looking at the event using the pinhole technique and watching it on TV. From Kentucky, the eclipse was about an 85 to 90 percent event.

But this one—this one—will cruise the entire U.S. as a full and total solar eclipse, an extremely rare event all around. There’s an interactive tool here. Other than that, come below the fold and learn just how rare it is, and when it will be coming to a sky near you.

And nowhere were the changes more pronounced than at our family compound on the Androscoggin River in Greene, Maine. The barbecue, hosted by the family, was well attended by many members of the white working class who probably all voted for the current president. For some reason, I seem to find myself politically isolated in deep red districts. The attendees were mostly small business owners in the building trades or in agriculture. They were almost all Maine natives, with the dry wit and easy sociability that I have found to be fairly common in my new neighborhood. A Garth Brooks CD was playing, allowing us to enjoy the sound of I’ve Got Friends in Low Places as a pontoon boat slowly drifted down the Androscoggin River with a fisherman casting his line.

If the fisherman got lucky, he might have caught a fish or two, but the Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention would caution him against consuming more that six to 12 fish per year. Yes, you can catch the fish, but you shouldn’t eat very many of them because of the past dioxin discharges from paper mills on the river. The Androscoggin did not always look as beautiful as it does today.

In the wake of Donald Trump firing the FBI director heading the investigation into potential links between unprecedented Russian hacking directed at boosting his presidential campaign and members of the campaign themselves, a prime concern was whether the White House would succeed in installing a new director more amenable to curtailing those investigations—as, allegedly, Trump asked Comey to do before his dismissal.

It now looks like a more appropriate question should have been: Does the White House have the capacity to staff the position at all?

President Donald Trump is still looking for a new FBI director more than three weeks after he fired James Comey, and sources familiar with the recruiting process say it has been chaotic and that job interviews led by Trump have been brief. [...]

While the department has compiled a long list of candidates for the White House, there has been no “clear framework or logic for who was interviewed and why,” said one of the sources.

Another of the three sources described the process as chaotic and said that in one interview, Trump spoke mostly about himself and seemed distracted.

That indeed sounds like the Trump we know.

The good news here is that the longer it takes for Team Trump to fill the position, the longer the FBI's investigations can continue without an additional layer of impediment. It also appears that whether the person chosen is qualified, competent, experienced, or none of those things will be left to a roll of the dice, because nobody in the White House, from top to bottom, knows what the flying monkey hell they are doing.

Yes, I admit it.  I am indeed a social justice warrior.

I believe in the ideals and goals espoused by Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. King, and Mandela. I believe this world can be significantly more just, more tolerant, more accepting, more open, and more fair to all persons of all backgrounds, creeds, perspectives, orientations, and religions. I believe these things are possible in our homes, in our work spaces, and within our educational zones. 

However, I don’t believe this can always be done simply, or sometimes without a measure of sacrifice, or without some level of backlash and conflict. There are those who stand strong against any effort to seek social justice, to seek greater tolerance and greater freedom.

They mock the very idea of social justice itself as a crock. They argue that it is merely the mutterings of triggered snowflakes attempting to make the world soft and safe and fluffy.

Most of these would call themselves seekers of pure and total free speech. In reality, they are just using complex arguments to justify and rationalize hate speech, bigotry, and intolerance.

Or to put it another way: dickishness.

A new report issued this week details a fascinating, real-life experiment. Imagine, for a second, if New York City had announced that, after years of NYPD officers stopping hundreds of thousands of people—overwhelmingly black and Latino, almost nine out of 10 of whom were found to have broken exactly zero laws, with only 6 percent of them actually being arrested—the new policy was going to result in 97 percent fewer street stops. In other words, 29 out of every 30 stops would, well, stop.

If it had made such an announcement, the usual suspects—looking at you Rudy Giuliani and, of course, popular vote loser Donald Trump—would have issued apoplectic pronouncements about the coming crime wave, and the naivete of liberals who don’t understand how to protect law-abiding citizens. Although it never made such an announcement, the aforementioned numbers describe exactly what New York City did. And do you know what happened to the rate of murder and violent crime? It kept dropping too, with 2016 showing the lowest levels ever recorded.

As a result of a lawsuit that culminated in the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy being found unconstitutional, here’s what happened to the number of stops:

• 2011: 685,724
• 2013: 191,851
• 2015:   22,563

Additionally, according to the court-appointed federal monitor who produced the report, the long-standing ethnic and racial disparity in stops shrank significantly as well. Look at that—progressive policies that actually follow the Constitution both reduce crime and protect the rights of innocent people of color. Yes, yes: just silly facts.

The blazing tire fire now parked in the Oval Office is never going to get better. He is never going to rise to the demands of the job; he is never going to be more than the lazy, ignorant, forever-lying ball of self-absorbed fury. He is transparently suffering from mental illness. His tweets and speech patterns will someday be used in history books alongside paragraphs attempting to explain why his supporters and party worked so feverishly to hide evidence of his incapacity despite the man himself laying it bare at every opportunity.

That last one is certainly intriguing. But it was no accident; his "social media director" also took the opportunity presented by a terrorist attack to attack the mayor of London directly, an odd strategy for a non-sociopath.

Truly, in the hours after an attack, there can be no more noble priority than … attacking the enemies of Donald J. Trump. This is because, and those future history books will likely spend a good deal of time explaining this as well, everyone currently installed in the White House is every bit as much of an ignorant, malevolent sack of shit as the preeminently incapable leader is. There are no adults in the building; if impeachment takes place, it will have to be followed by fumigation to have any noteworthy effect.

To show the level of incompetence under display here, while it took Trump only twelve hours between the cursory we stand with London post and attacking the London mayor, his White House was also contemplating sending Trump to London this week as show of solidarity. Imagine the level of boobery required to think Trump or any Trump designee would be welcomed in the city as if none of the rest of his rhetoric had happened. Truly, it is Trumpesque.

There is also something a bit bizarre and distinctly unseemly about a Trump White House leaking so much froth and spittle over an overseas "terrorist attack" that, here in America, would likely be lost in the background noise of everyday violence no member of the White House pretends to give a damn about. We can easily deduce from the content of tweets that his only intention was to stoke anti-Muslim fears in order to further push his personal anti-Muslim agenda; if there was any concern over the violence itself, over Trump’s attempts to instigate a wider panic, it was lost in translation.

Jerk. Liar. Bully. Thug. Con artist. Scumbag. Asshole.

In the four months since the inauguration of Donald Trump, these terms have regrettably become aptly descriptive staples of our political lexicon. We’ve officially arrived at a dystopian moment in our nation's history when our elected officials don’t earn respect because they don't give it. If it isn’t a flippant remark from a Republican “representative” to his outraged constituents at a health care town hall, it’s Trump shoving another world leader to get to the front of the line, a Republican sailing to victory after publicly assaulting a journalist, or an entire Republican Congress looking the other way as allegations of treason engulf the Trump administration in seemingly never ending scandal. It feels as though everywhere we turn we are inundated with not just unbridled arrogance and entitlement, but a refusal by the “powers that be” to hold any of the bad actors accountable.

In fact, it's as though acting badly has now become a virtue in Trump’s America, and those who behave the worst are being rewarded rather than punished for their misdeeds. Or to quote Donald Trump explicitly, “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” So we watch in horror and disgust as the man who bragged about getting away with serial sexual molestation not only fires the very people tasked with leading the investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, but boasts about his efforts to obstruct justice. By day he makes the mundane rounds required of the office, but by night he’s a keyboard commando, hurling defensive accusations and insults at his detractors online in response to the latest breaking corruption allegations.

He has become the social media equivalent of Christian Bale’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, prowling the Twitter streets wielding his cellphone as a makeshift chainsaw. He inhabits the fantasy world of his own self-serving mind, in which nothing he does is wrong or unjustifiable, and his actions are rendered legitimate and lawful simply by virtue of the fact that he took them. He and his underlings spare no expense in defending the indefensible.  

In this vein, Trump has much in common with the garden-variety sociopath, who as most seasoned prison wardens will tell you is “innocent” of every crime that led to his conviction.

We’ve heard a lot about Russian meddling recently. What we don’t hear about is how more than 50 years of corporate special interest group propaganda fattened the U.S. up, priming our country for Russian influence on the 2016 election.

Let’s think about conservative propaganda using a communications concept: signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).  

Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is a measurement used in communications to compare the level of desired signal to the level of background noise.

In analog communications, such as AM/FM radio or analog television broadcasts, a high SNR ratio means that you will receive a signal with little static or interference.

To enable effective communication, you want to maximize your SNR ratio—more signal, less noise.

This is directly addressed to white people who voted for Donald Trump, since much of the focus of his purported “sympathy” listening session with families who have lost a loved one due to the current opioid overdose crisis targeted white America. If you lost a loved one to opioids and happen not to be white, this is for you as well. 

There’s no telling how much attention you pay to news about Trump’s international stances, particularly when you’re wrestling with grief and loss. But in case you missed this: he has given a shout-out of approval to the current president of the Philippines, Rodrigo "Rody" Roa Duterte, for the job he is doing dealing with the drug crisis in that country. Trump even invited him to visit the White House. Give the transcript of their phone call a read, or read this article titled “Senators From Both Parties Blast ‘Outrageous’ Trump Call Praising Duterte for Anti-Drug Killing Spree”:

Donald Trump’s praise for Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous anti-drug campaign drew condemnation from leading foreign policy voices in both parties Wednesday, who were shocked the president would encourage what the State Department describes as “extrajudicial killings.”

The Intercept reported Tuesday that Trump told Duterte in a private call that he endorsed the murderous anti-drug campaign, which has killed well over 7,000 people. Duterte has unapologetically compared himself to Hitler and said he would “be happy to slaughter” millions of drug addicts in the Philippines.

Trump talks a good game with his seemingly sympathetic promises. But as someone who has been coping with the impact of addiction on families both personally and professionally for many decades, I’d like to share something an old-timer in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) said to me more than 30 years ago:

“Sympathy is in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.”

Trump’s words must match his deeds. Sympathy is useless. What is needed is empathy and positive budgetary action, and he has demonstrated neither. In fact the Duterte call, his budget proposals, and the pronouncement by his Attorney General Jeff Sessions calling for harsher penalties for those convicted for drug offenses all combine to tell the true tale.

Over the last day, alerts that send the little BBC News or Washington Post tunes chirping from my phone were surprisingly few, and while they did, of course, alert me to yet another terrorist incident in London, they also informed me that: The best-selling song in America is, shockers, not in English. that it’s dangerous to grill meat too long, and that there’s more to Wonder Woman’s origin story than Themiscyra. In short, London tragedy included, it looked pretty much like a typical news week — an all too normal week — and without a fresh infusion of Jared meeting with banksters or new evidence of Trump leaning on anyone, there’s not a mention of the Russia investigation of either the Post or the TImes. It’s almost as if … no it’s exactly as if, through constant repetition and an unending stream of revelations that result in no action, Trump has succeeded in completely desensitizing the nation. 

Which makes this the perfect morning to start with a new piece from Masha Gessen.

Can an autocrat be ridiculous? Can a democracy be destroyed by someone who has only the barest idea of what the word “democracy” means? Can pure incompetence plunge the world into a catastrophic war? We don’t like to think so.

We imagine the villains of history as cunning strategists, brilliant masterminds of horror. This happens because we learn about them from history books, which weave narratives that retrospectively imbue events with logic, making them seem predetermined. Historians and their readers bring an unavoidable perception bias to the story: If a historical event caused shocking destruction, then the person behind this event must have been a correspondingly giant monster. Terrifying as it is to contemplate the catastrophes of the 20th century, it would be even more frightening to imagine that humanity had stumbled unthinkingly into its darkest moments.

It’s possible to be both an idiot and a monster. In fact, one may almost predetermine the other. Trump’s inability to execute, on items large and small, doesn’t diminish his impact on the nation. In many ways, it makes it worse. Incompetence alone won’t doom Trump, and it certainly won’t save America.

… careful reading of contemporary accounts will show that both Hitler and Stalin struck many of their countrymen as men of limited ability, education and imagination — and, indeed, as being incompetent in government and military leadership. Contrary to popular wisdom, they are not political savants, possessed of one extraordinary talent that brings them to power. It is the blunt instrument of reassuring ignorance that propels their rise in a frighteningly complex world.

I’m going to break off here, but continue with this piece below the fold. Because it deserves it.