Reversals

• Somewhere, in a universe not far away: Late Thursday, President Hillary Clinton announced that she had ordered cruise missile strikes on a Syrian military airfield, in retaliation for President Assad’s use of chemical weapons on a rebel-held village filled with civilians. With her in the situation room at the White House as the attack unfolded were her son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky; her top political strategist, Sidney Blumenthal (even though his seat on the National Security Council had just been taken away); Secretary of State Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the Patagonia clothing company; her Commerce Secretary, Terry McAuliffe; Neera Tanden, her domestic policy adviser; Philip Reines, her press spokesman; and Naomi Klein, a leftwing writer whose pseudonymous article “The Flight 93 Election” caught Clinton’s favor after it described a Trump presidency as “Russian roulette with a semi-auto.” The lack of any military brass in the room was not remarked upon by official Washington and the mainstream media, which largely cheered Clinton’s unilateral and surprising move. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Clinton’s action was “the right thing to do” and House Speaker Paul Ryan called it a “proportional response” to Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, a top member of the Foreign Affairs committee, told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press yesterday that while he has been a fierce critic of Clinton, he was “glad” she bombed Syria, saying “There’s a new sheriff in town,” arguing that her very unpredictability was a good thing: “If you’re an adversary of the United States and you don’t worry about what Clinton may do on any given day, then you’re crazy.”

• Back on Earth One, the smart kids on Meet the Press picked up on an item from last Thursday’s First Post and showed that they didn’t really get it. After host Chuck Todd analyzed some of the latest “palace intrigue” in the Trump White House, which he noted pits the national populist Stephen Bannon (note that they’ve stopped saying “white nationalist”) against the supposed “Democratic wing” of son-in-law out Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump, he posted this image and said, “Imagine the alternative here. It was written in something called Civil Hall [sic] by a man named Micah Sifry. ‘President Hillary Clinton quietly sent her son-in-law, investment banker Marc Mezvinsky, to Iraq on Monday, while Clinton’s husband has largely stayed out of the White House and remained at home in New York, her daughter, Chelsea, has also taken an unpaid role in the administration while continuing to run the family foundation and earning five and six-figure fees giving speeches to corporations with interests in Washington.'”

• Meet the Press guest Danielle Pletka of the rightwing American Enterprise Institute quickly responded, “Totally credible. Totally credible.” Todd replied, “Yeah.” Pletka continued,”It would happen. And by the way, to be fair, everybody would have said exactly the same thing that they said about Jared Kushner going to Iraq. People would be critical. The problem with Hillary was she had her daughter and a foundation and it looked corrupt. And, you know what?”

• No, no, no, no, no. Clinton wouldn’t appoint her son-in-law to anything, let alone give him the wide range of responsibilities Kushner’s been already handed (and Chuck Todd left out of my quote, conveniently). But yes, I can see the Sabbath gasbags of Meet the Press taking seriously a hypothetically crazy Clinton Administration in just the same way they’ve normalized Trump. Sunday, as I implied above, Trump “critic” Lindsay Graham really did turn cartwheels of joy at Trump’s suddenly bellicose behavior, and no one batted an eye. And many leading Democrats in Congress, supposedly fierce resisters of Trump, rushed to praise his bombing of Syria (prompting strong pushback from Credo Action and MoveOn.org, as well as first-term Congressman Ro Khanna, as Vox’s Jeff Stein reports).

• Writing in The Atlantic, Republican analyst David Frum explains why Trump’s strike on Syria is so troubling. Starting with this: “Voters and citizens can expect literally zero advance warning of what Donald Trump will do or won’t do. Campaign promises, solemn pledges—none are even slightly binding. If he can reverse himself on Syria, he can reverse himself on anything.”

• Oh, and NBC News’ William Arkin, Cynthia McFadden, Kevin Monahan and Robert Windrem are reporting that the NSC review of North Korea policy is presenting Trump with the options of moving nuclear weapons to South Korea and targeting the country’s leader Kim Jong-un and other senior leaders for assassination.

• In other news…

• Trump’s impulsive attack on Syria is bringing more of the coded anti-Semitism of his far-right followers out into the open, reports Taly Krupkin for Israel’s Ha’Aretz newspaper.

• It looks like design thinking is not “in” at the White House. A brainstorming session focused on crystallizing Trump’s 100-day themes, complete with “whiteboard, markers and giant butcher-block-type paper” did not go well, reports Shane Goldmacher for Politico.

• Opposition watch: Crowdpac co-founder Paul Hilder has a long essay titled “The Revolution Will be Digitized” in the UK’s Prospect Magazine exploring the rise of everything from Trump and Brexit to Bernie Sanders, and tying in some claims about the role of psychographic targeting in the first case and distributed organizing in the third.

• Indivisible has relaunched its website with several new features, including an in-depth resource library for group organizers and an internal discussion platform called Mobilize.

• One thing the Indivisible movement needs to break: comparisons to the Tea Party, which was heavily funded by billionaires. Here, for example, is Kate Zernike of The New York Times, reporting on whether an upcoming House race in Georgia will be the movement’s “Scott Brown moment.” (Political reporters are obsessed with imposing narratives on mass movements; 99 percent of the time those frames turn out to be useless.)

• Bernie Sanders has launched a podcast, “The Bernie Sanders Show.”

• What sharing economy? The new trend among gig economy start-ups: hire full-time workers and treat them well, reports Miranda Katz for BackChannel.

• Gov-tech: Ryann Ellis of the Association for Talent Development looks at how cities are turning to start-ups and short-term sprints to solve tough gov-tech problems while routing around procurement bottlenecks.

• Media matters: Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras’ forthcoming film “Risk” on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks will air this summer on Showtime. As Jim Rutenberg reports for The New York Times, the film may have started with an admiring approach but has gone through some changes as Assange’s role on the world stage has developed. It should also be interesting to see how Poitras treats Jacob Applebaum, a crypto-activist who has been a close collaborator of hers, but recently was forced to leave the Tor Project after many allegations of sexual harassment.

• Your moment of zen: “When Pixels Collide.” How an April Fool’s stunt on Reddit turned into a world-wide game of art-making. Read (and stare at) the whole thing, and contemplate this: “Perhaps the most amazing thing is that on an anonymous, no-holds-barred space on the internet, there were no hate or racist symbols at all.”

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