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In today’s edition:
- Republicans want to abandon Zelensky and take us back to the 1930s
- Going back to the beginning in Genesis
- Two GOP Senate candidates show the party’s squalor
Back to the 1930s
Here’s an idea to chew on: “We like to think that great accomplishments in American history are the result of broad national consensus. More often they are the triumph of one worldview over another.”
It comes from Robert Kagan’s big essay comparing the anti-Ukraine views of many Republicans today to the original “America First” philosophy of the 1930s. The accomplishment in question is the United States’ entry into World War II, which, Robert writes, “was the victory of a liberal worldview over an anti-interventionism rooted in a conservative anti-liberalism.”
That same fight is being fought today — well, the philosophical one, not the world war … yet. Interventionism’s win then established an ethos of American captaincy that lasted until now; a victory this fall by Donald Trump could undo it all if he goes on, as promised, to cut off U.S. commitments to European security, ostensibly because European countries aren’t meeting NATO’s defense spending targets.
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Meanwhile, David Ignatius interviewed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, where defense is the only thing on anybody’s mind. Zelensky said Ukraine might have to establish deterrence by more aggressively attacking airfields, energy facilities and other strategic targets across the Russian border. That is, unless the United States provides Ukraine with more weapons first — a prospect still possible under President Biden but unlikely under Trump.
The former president and his acolytes aren’t only reheating isolationism, either. They’re whipping up all the 1930s conservative fixins, too, including high tariffs and anti-immigrant xenophobia.
Robert explains how the severing of U.S. commitments would take us back to not only a 1930s worldview but a 1930s world, too — one “of many heavily armed powers engaged in a multipolar arms race, ever poised for conflict … only this time with nuclear weapons.”
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He wryly notes one way Trump would surely get his wish in this chaotic world: Yes, these powers “will be spending more than 2 percent of their GDP on defense.”
Chaser: Fareed Zakaria cautions that liberals must not use illiberal means to defeat Trumpism. He sees a warning in NBC’s hiring and firing of Ronna McDaniel.
Bonus chaser: Jen Rubin takes a different lesson from the McDaniel debacle and wonders in her latest newsletter whether the media will learn it, too.
The story of Hagar
Okay, just a bit more Bible before this weekend’s Easter and Passover next month, because, as novelist Marilynne Robinson writes in a consideration of Genesis, the book where being began, “there is always more to consider.”
Robinson’s focus is on the story of Hagar, a servant girl and surrogate for Abraham and Sarah cast into the wilderness — and relative obscurity; she is not typically known to those with only passing biblical familiarity.
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But Robinson writes that within Genesis, Hagar has more in common with Abraham, revered patriarch of multiple faiths, than anybody else does. “This is relevant to the much larger question of [God’s] relationship to the whole human world,” Robinson writes. “That [Hagar] is a woman, a slave and a foreigner makes this question especially interesting.”
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Chaser: Gene Robinson writes that Trump’s Bible-selling grift is destined to backfire. And Ann Telnaes has a bitey cartoon on the matter.
More politics
Let’s send you off into the weekend with an all-timer George Will insult — one you can use Saturday night when the guy next to you at the bar is shouting too loud:
“The new breed of anti-conservative Republicans think persuasion, and the patience of politics, is for ‘squishes,’ a favorite epithet of proudly loutish Trumpkins, who, like Lake and Moreno, seem to think the lungs are the location of wisdom.” (Italics mine; invective his.)
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George is bemoaning the quality of the Senate candidates the GOP is presenting voters, especially that of Kari Lake in Arizona and Bernie Moreno in Ohio. And their politics are as bad to George as their temperaments. First, they’ve flip-flopped plenty and seem to hope you’ll just forget, but what they’ve settled on, George writes, would put them alongside “other chips-off-the-orange-block in a Senate caucus increasingly characterized by members who have anti-conservative agendas.”
Then again, remember Robert Kagan’s essay: Maybe the agenda isn’t so much anti-conservative as just old-school conservative — 1930s-old.
Chaser: Maybe Trump will forget Lake’s and Moreno’s flip-flops, too. Dana Milbank writes that Trump can’t seem to remember very much these days.
Smartest, fastest
- Justice Samuel Alito’s job is to interpret the Constitution, but Ruth Marcus wonders whether his obsession with abortion medication means he might in fact be happier running the FDA.
- In a remembrance of the late longtime senator, Karen Tumulty writes that Joe Lieberman’s unyielding convictions were both his superpower and his weakness.
- Boeing once again ejected its chief executive this week. Megan McArdle wishes the airplane maker good luck with a soft landing.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Turning back the clock
Decades that feel like eons
Let there be caution
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. Have a great weekend!
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You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
Here’s an idea to chew on: “We like to think that great accomplishments in American history are the result of broad national consensus. More often they are the triumph of one worldview over another.”
It comes from Robert Kagan’s big essay comparing the anti-Ukraine views of many Republicans today to the original “America First” philosophy of the 1930s. The accomplishment in question is the United States’ entry into World War II, which, Robert writes, “was the victory of a liberal worldview over an anti-interventionism rooted in a conservative anti-liberalism.”
That same fight is being fought today — well, the philosophical one, not the world war … yet. Interventionism’s win then established an ethos of American captaincy that lasted until now; a victory this fall by Donald Trump could undo it all if he goes on, as promised, to cut off U.S. commitments to European security, ostensibly because European countries aren’t meeting NATO’s defense spending targets.
Meanwhile, David Ignatius interviewed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, where defense is the only thing on anybody’s mind. Zelensky said Ukraine might have to establish deterrence by more aggressively attacking airfields, energy facilities and other strategic targets across the Russian border. That is, unless the United States provides Ukraine with more weapons first — a prospect still possible under President Biden but unlikely under Trump.
The former president and his acolytes aren’t only reheating isolationism, either. They’re whipping up all the 1930s conservative fixins, too, including high tariffs and anti-immigrant xenophobia.
Robert explains how the severing of U.S. commitments would take us back to not only a 1930s worldview but a 1930s world, too — one “of many heavily armed powers engaged in a multipolar arms race, ever poised for conflict … only this time with nuclear weapons.”
He wryly notes one way Trump would surely get his wish in this chaotic world: Yes, these powers “will be spending more than 2 percent of their GDP on defense.”
Chaser: Fareed Zakaria cautions that liberals must not use illiberal means to defeat Trumpism. He sees a warning in NBC’s hiring and firing of Ronna McDaniel.
Bonus chaser: Jen Rubin takes a different lesson from the McDaniel debacle and wonders in her latest newsletter whether the media will learn it, too.
Okay, just a bit more Bible before this weekend’s Easter and Passover next month, because, as novelist Marilynne Robinson writes in a consideration of Genesis, the book where being began, “there is always more to consider.”
Robinson’s focus is on the story of Hagar, a servant girl and surrogate for Abraham and Sarah cast into the wilderness — and relative obscurity; she is not typically known to those with only passing biblical familiarity.
But Robinson writes that within Genesis, Hagar has more in common with Abraham, revered patriarch of multiple faiths, than anybody else does. “This is relevant to the much larger question of [God’s] relationship to the whole human world,” Robinson writes. “That [Hagar] is a woman, a slave and a foreigner makes this question especially interesting.”
Chaser: Gene Robinson writes that Trump’s Bible-selling grift is destined to backfire. And Ann Telnaes has a bitey cartoon on the matter.
Let’s send you off into the weekend with an all-timer George Will insult — one you can use Saturday night when the guy next to you at the bar is shouting too loud:
“The new breed of anti-conservative Republicans think persuasion, and the patience of politics, is for ‘squishes,’ a favorite epithet of proudly loutish Trumpkins, who, like Lake and Moreno, seem to think the lungs are the location of wisdom.” (Italics mine; invective his.)
George is bemoaning the quality of the Senate candidates the GOP is presenting voters, especially that of Kari Lake in Arizona and Bernie Moreno in Ohio. And their politics are as bad to George as their temperaments. First, they’ve flip-flopped plenty and seem to hope you’ll just forget, but what they’ve settled on, George writes, would put them alongside “other chips-off-the-orange-block in a Senate caucus increasingly characterized by members who have anti-conservative agendas.”
Then again, remember Robert Kagan’s essay: Maybe the agenda isn’t so much anti-conservative as just old-school conservative — 1930s-old.
Chaser: Maybe Trump will forget Lake’s and Moreno’s flip-flops, too. Dana Milbank writes that Trump can’t seem to remember very much these days.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Turning back the clock
Decades that feel like eons
Let there be caution
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. Have a great weekend!
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