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In today’s edition:
WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight- Her own home state might have ended Nikki Haley
- Or did it? What Haley can do now — or could have done differently.
- One woman’s story shows the awful toll of disordered eating
- This isn’t the end for the activists that got Alabama to call embryos people
What’s left for Nikki Haley
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, surprising no one, lost to former president Donald Trump on Saturday in her home state of South Carolina’s primary. Or, in Kathleen Parker’s words, Haley “was forced to concede to a spoiled, abusive misogynist.”
Kathleen, who hails from the same state, explains how and why the South’s “good ol’ boys” turned their backs on the woman who really ought to be “the next president of the United States.” One lengthy condemnation of South Carolina as a “cultural desert” is particularly damning.
George Will holds out some stranger-things-have-happened hope for Haley. He writes that Trump is as stale as “cold pizza washed down by flat beer,” and the great many Super Tuesday states deserve to say whether they want another serving.
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Haley, he writes, can keep steadily deflating the Trump blimp held aloft by nothing other than exaggerated claims of wealth and a false aura of invincibility.
But Jim Geraghty, like most, thinks that a candidacy that was already kaput is kaput-er. The South Carolina loss leaves Haley running what he calls a protest of Trump, not a real race against him — “and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
The anti-Trump Republican minority is just that — a minority — but not so small that it can be ignored, Jim says, and it deserves someone to remind the party that it need not acquiesce to MAGA’s every desire. Haley’s best remaining reward might be the privilege of saying “I told you so” if Trump loses again to President Biden … but doesn’t that sound delicious?
For now, the only mantra Haley has is “what if?” Imagine, Jen Rubin writes, how the primaries might have gone had Haley come out swinging as hard as she is now that she’s lying on the mat.
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Jen would be the first to admit that given the GOP’s thrall to Trump, there’s no guarantee that things would have gone differently, but there’s chance a “totally unorthodox campaign” (with three key pointers from Jen) would have pulled in enough independents, anti-Trump Republicans and even Democrats to make a difference — or at least “provoked a Trumpian meltdown.”
One consolation from Jason Willick: Some evidence suggests that if Trump wins the presidency, he would probably fail in an attempt to become an American autocrat. Jason reviews new research on past efforts to subvert democracies across the globe; most fail, and the conditions under which they succeed, Jason concludes, are unlikely to occur in the United States.
“Probably fail,” though? “Unlikely to occur”? Jason is no more keen than the rest of us to leave the future of our republic up to a Magic 8 Ball. His consolation, he cautions, is no cause for complacency.
From author Emmeline Clein’s op-ed on eating disorders, adapted from her forthcoming book, “Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm.”
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Clein’s piece contains more awful statistics such as the above and jarring facts; anorexia, she explains in one, recently became the first mental illness in the United States for which people have proposed a terminal diagnosis — a.k.a. one that affirms the sufferer’s “conviction that their life isn’t worth saving, a diagnosis as deadly as their disease.”
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But what hits hardest in the op-ed is Clein’s profile of a real woman she calls Alyssa, who fought anorexia for years. She follows Alyssa from her first wish to kill herself — “realizing that a dress she wanted to wear for her bat mitzvah would not fit her” — to her family huddled around her in hospice as she died of malnutrition.
Alyssa wrote her own story, too. It’s complicated, but Clein gives it space. She writes, “I want to let the dead tell their stories without putting words in their hungry mouths.”
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Chaser: Last year, Kate Cohen wrote that if we can’t cancel diet culture for ourselves, we at least owe it to our kids.
More politics
Facing national backlash, Alabama’s legislature and executive backpedaled so speedily from the state judiciary’s decision last week categorizing frozen embryos as children that they left the ruling hanging midair, Looney Tunes-style.
Thank goodness. Ruth Marcus wrote that the scripture-riddled opinion was basically ushering in the Alabama theocracy. Or as Alexandra Petri satirized, “You know what they always say about people: They are invisible to the naked eye and can be stored conveniently in vials in a hospital freezer. They are discernible only to God and the Alabama judiciary.”
The Editorial Board cautions, however, that although Alabama might avoid an in vitro fertilization crisis now, antiabortion activists will not be dissuaded.
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The rock-solid national consensus on protecting IVF is reassuring, the board writes. But the fact that Alabama’s high court ruling still happened despite it “is a sobering moment for anyone who thought the post-Roe push to roll back reproductive freedom had ended, or would be narrowly focused.”
Smartest, fastest
- David Ignatius reports that Israel and Hamas are still inching to a cease-fire deal.
- No party has a monopoly on faith, E.J. Dionne writes in a column contrasting Reps. Mike Johnson’s (R) and Rosa DeLauro’s (D) very different visions of religion.
- That governments are now buying and erasing medical debt as Occupy Wall Street folks once did is fine, physician Luke Messac and debt activist Astra Taylor write, but they have an even better idea.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … the Bye-Ku.
Twisting scripture makes
Alabama embryos
God’s frozen chosen
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, surprising no one, lost to former president Donald Trump on Saturday in her home state of South Carolina’s primary. Or, in Kathleen Parker’s words, Haley “was forced to concede to a spoiled, abusive misogynist.”
Kathleen, who hails from the same state, explains how and why the South’s “good ol’ boys” turned their backs on the woman who really ought to be “the next president of the United States.” One lengthy condemnation of South Carolina as a “cultural desert” is particularly damning.
George Will holds out some stranger-things-have-happened hope for Haley. He writes that Trump is as stale as “cold pizza washed down by flat beer,” and the great many Super Tuesday states deserve to say whether they want another serving.
Haley, he writes, can keep steadily deflating the Trump blimp held aloft by nothing other than exaggerated claims of wealth and a false aura of invincibility.
But Jim Geraghty, like most, thinks that a candidacy that was already kaput is kaput-er. The South Carolina loss leaves Haley running what he calls a protest of Trump, not a real race against him — “and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
The anti-Trump Republican minority is just that — a minority — but not so small that it can be ignored, Jim says, and it deserves someone to remind the party that it need not acquiesce to MAGA’s every desire. Haley’s best remaining reward might be the privilege of saying “I told you so” if Trump loses again to President Biden … but doesn’t that sound delicious?
For now, the only mantra Haley has is “what if?” Imagine, Jen Rubin writes, how the primaries might have gone had Haley come out swinging as hard as she is now that she’s lying on the mat.
Jen would be the first to admit that given the GOP’s thrall to Trump, there’s no guarantee that things would have gone differently, but there’s chance a “totally unorthodox campaign” (with three key pointers from Jen) would have pulled in enough independents, anti-Trump Republicans and even Democrats to make a difference — or at least “provoked a Trumpian meltdown.”
One consolation from Jason Willick: Some evidence suggests that if Trump wins the presidency, he would probably fail in an attempt to become an American autocrat. Jason reviews new research on past efforts to subvert democracies across the globe; most fail, and the conditions under which they succeed, Jason concludes, are unlikely to occur in the United States.
“Probably fail,” though? “Unlikely to occur”? Jason is no more keen than the rest of us to leave the future of our republic up to a Magic 8 Ball. His consolation, he cautions, is no cause for complacency.
From author Emmeline Clein’s op-ed on eating disorders, adapted from her forthcoming book, “Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm.”
Clein’s piece contains more awful statistics such as the above and jarring facts; anorexia, she explains in one, recently became the first mental illness in the United States for which people have proposed a terminal diagnosis — a.k.a. one that affirms the sufferer’s “conviction that their life isn’t worth saving, a diagnosis as deadly as their disease.”
But what hits hardest in the op-ed is Clein’s profile of a real woman she calls Alyssa, who fought anorexia for years. She follows Alyssa from her first wish to kill herself — “realizing that a dress she wanted to wear for her bat mitzvah would not fit her” — to her family huddled around her in hospice as she died of malnutrition.
Alyssa wrote her own story, too. It’s complicated, but Clein gives it space. She writes, “I want to let the dead tell their stories without putting words in their hungry mouths.”
Chaser: Last year, Kate Cohen wrote that if we can’t cancel diet culture for ourselves, we at least owe it to our kids.
Facing national backlash, Alabama’s legislature and executive backpedaled so speedily from the state judiciary’s decision last week categorizing frozen embryos as children that they left the ruling hanging midair, Looney Tunes-style.
Thank goodness. Ruth Marcus wrote that the scripture-riddled opinion was basically ushering in the Alabama theocracy. Or as Alexandra Petri satirized, “You know what they always say about people: They are invisible to the naked eye and can be stored conveniently in vials in a hospital freezer. They are discernible only to God and the Alabama judiciary.”
The Editorial Board cautions, however, that although Alabama might avoid an in vitro fertilization crisis now, antiabortion activists will not be dissuaded.
The rock-solid national consensus on protecting IVF is reassuring, the board writes. But the fact that Alabama’s high court ruling still happened despite it “is a sobering moment for anyone who thought the post-Roe push to roll back reproductive freedom had ended, or would be narrowly focused.”
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … the Bye-Ku.
Twisting scripture makes
Alabama embryos
God’s frozen chosen
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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