The Right-Wingers Behind the Mueller Smear Campaign Are Guilty of Everything They Accuse Democrats of Doing

The right-wing canard that Democratic operatives pay women to invent allegations of sexual assault also looks particularly rich this week, in light of allegations by two women that men who identified themselves as Burkman and an unnamed Surefire employee offered them money to talk about nonexistent encounters with Mueller. 

Christina Cauterucci

After Fanning the Flames of Anti-Semitism, Trump Is Hiding Behind the Pro-Israel Defense

Jordan Weissmann

The hack gap: how and why conservative nonsense dominates American politics

Insulting rank-and-file Republicans (even if it was only about half of them) was treated as a huge national scandal. Republican Party politicians and conservative pundits harped on the line, providing a point of party unity at a time when many party and movement stalwarts were reluctant to actually praise Trump. The mainstream press covered the controversy intensively, and left-of-center pundits weighed in with a range of takes, including one from yours truly, which concluded that Clinton really had messed up by violating “the norm against attacking the other party’s constituents” rather than its politicians.

This past Friday, meanwhile, President Trump said that 100 percent of people planning to vote Democratic in the upcoming midterms — a majority of the electorate, in other words — are “crazy.” Nobody cared and almost nobody even noticed.

Matthew Yglesias

A White House report points out that Mao and I both like low health care costs. True, but…

Health care systems where the government sets prices are more efficient than those where prices vary dramatically from one health plan to another, and this lowers costs across the board for patients. As Mao, Lenin, and I all agree (as do leaders of every other wealthy planet in the world): That’s a good thing.

Sarah Kliff

The White House, definitely not scared of socialism, issues report on why socialism is bad

Because Swedes can’t afford pickup trucks. Also because Stalin.

Dylan Matthews

4 ways to fix "fake news"

If your Facebook feed is filled with garbage, it means you were reading garbage in the first place. The algorithm simply gives you more of what you crave.

Jim VandeHei

Donald Trump’s Perverse Advantage

But the media focus on her misjudgment, her character and whether she had the right stuff for the White House underscores the absurdity of our current politics, in terms of the advantage it confers on the president. We expect much of anyone stepping forward to challenge him. We expect absolutely nothing of him.

Frank Bruni

The biggest lie Trump tells is that he’s kept his promises

A raft of populist pledges have been left on the cutting room floor.

Matthew Yglesias

The Man Who Broke Politics

There’s something about Newt Gingrich that seems to capture the spirit of America circa 2018. With his immense head and white mop of hair; his cold, boyish grin; and his high, raspy voice, he has the air of a late-empire Roman senator—a walking bundle of appetites and excesses and hubris and wit. In conversation, he toggles unnervingly between grandiose pronouncements about “Western civilization” and partisan cheap shots that seem tailored for cable news. It’s a combination of self-righteousness and smallness, of pomposity and pettiness, that personifies the decadence of this era.

…

But few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.

…

These days, Gingrich seems to be revising his legacy in real time—shifting the story away from the ideological sea change that his populist disruption was supposed to enable, and toward the act of populist disruption itself. He places his own rise to power and Trump’s in the same grand American narrative. There have been four great political “waves” in the past half century, he tells me: “Goldwater, Reagan, Gingrich, then Trump.” But when I press him to explain what connects those four “waves” philosophically, the best he can do is say they were all “anti-liberal.”

McKay Coppins

Trump Says The Federal Reserve Is the “Biggest Threat” to His Presidency. So Why Hasn’t He Done Anything About It?

Ultimately, Trump’s goal in criticizing the central bank seems to be distancing himself from any damage they inadvertently inflict on the economy. But the president has had the opportunity to pick a Fed board that would better reflect his own intuitions about interest rates. If his failure to do so backfires on the economy, he’ll deserve all the blame that inevitably comes his way.

Jordan Weissmann

The rigging of American politics

Political systems depend on legitimacy. In America, that legitimacy is failing.

Ezra Klein

Proportional representation could save America

Matthew Yglesias

Max Boot, Jackie Robinson, and the racism problem in the Republican Party

Max Boot could have had an awakening decades ago — if he’d listened to black conservatives.

Jane Coaston

Why this political scientist thinks the Democrats have to fight dirty

I think Democrats should have this debate, but my point is that no policy platform is going to win three or four consecutive national elections for Democrats because we know policy isn’t what decides elections; that’s not how most voters make decisions.
...

People just don’t seem to make the connection between policies and the party in power.

So, for example, the Democrats passed Obamacare and gave millions of people heath care, and yet tons of people who benefited from it have no idea what it is or how they benefited. And it’s like that with a lot of policies — voters simply don’t connect the dots, and so they reward or punish the wrong party.

I think the idea that we’re going to deliver these benefits to people and they’re going to be like, “Thank you Jesus, thank you for everything that you’ve done, let me return you with a larger majority next time,” is just nonsense. It’s the wrong way to think about politics. 
...

I don’t think we can restore order by respecting rules that are not respected by Republicans. I do believe we’ll have to find a way to end this procedural war at some point, but now is not that time. Republicans need to know what it’s like to be on the other end of normative violations. The Republicans are behaving like a party that believes it will never be held accountable for anything they’re doing, and so far they haven’t been.

David Faris & Sean Illing

‘This guy doesn’t know anything’: the inside story of Trump’s shambolic transition team

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Big Short, reveals how Trump’s bungled presidential transition set the template for his time in the White House

Michael Lewis

It’s Time for Democrats to Play Hardball With the FBI

One has to consider only that Republicans have spent years accusing former FBI director and lifelong Republican James Comey of orchestrating a cover-up for Hillary Clinton to understand how the GOP would react if, say, an FBI investigation into a Democratic Supreme Court nominee was being overseen by a graduate of the nominee’s law school and a former colleague.

It’s time for Democrats to realize that the rules have changed. It’s not enough to simply rely on most federal law enforcement officials being well-intentioned, nonpolitical figures trying to do the right thing under tough circumstances.

Matthew Miller

Brett Kavanaugh proves the Never Trump movement was a sham all along

This is actually how we got Trump.

Zack Beauchamp

The “dollar auction” theory can help explain the Kavanaugh chaos

A game theory experiment for how both parties are thinking of the Supreme Court nominee.

Lee Drutman

'A Kind Of Vague Hostility': Michael Lewis On How Trump Loyalists Run Agencies

On the story which concludes the book, about a woman in Oklahoma who prayed for a tornado to destroy her barn

First let's explain why Miss Finley wanted her barn gone: Her husband had killed himself in the barn, and she imagined this act of destruction would come and kind of ease her pain — she wouldn't have to stare at the barn any longer. And what she doesn't imagine is that the same tornado that's going to come take her barn is going to destroy her house, and she didn't want that.

And I thought it was a kind of a lovely metaphor for what Trump voters imagine — or how their imaginations work, or how the human imagination works. It imagines the destruction it wants; it imagines the destruction it wants Trump to inflict on the things it doesn't like about the government.

It doesn't imagine all the collateral damage — it doesn't imagine the damage it will actually do. And I think this failure of the imagination is somewhere near the center of what we're going through right now.

Michael Lewis

Why It’s Time to Rename the Russell Office Building

There is little in Richard Russell Jr.’s career that recommends him for this enduring honor.

Joshua Zeitz