Category: Politics

Bret Stephens is a conservative opinion columnist for the New York Times. Many of his pieces have struck me as entirely wrong-headed, but he has two saving graces: he is a staunch Never-Trumper, and, even for a professional columnist, he has a hell of a way with words.
His piece in today’s paper is a case in point. . . .

I have a list of ideas for blog topics that I’ve collected over the last several months. Many of them have to do with politics. But as I sat down to draft today’s post, I found I had little appetite for pursuing any of the political topics on my list of ideas. Maybe that’s because my prime impetus for blogging about politics has been my indignation with the Trump presidency, and now that he’s on his way out, that motivation has diminished. Or maybe it’s because we’re in a kind of political limbo — Donald Trump has stopped even pretending to govern the country, and Joe Biden isn’t yet in office. . . .

I subscribe to very few email newsletters, one of which is Robert Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter, one of the most thoughtful and persuasive political newsletters I’ve found. Wright’s essays are almost always longer than I feel I have the patience for, and yet I’m usually glad to have read them.

It was from reading Wright’s newsletter that I discovered that I’m a “progressive realist” when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. If you’re not familiar with that term, I encourage you to look at this article in which Wright defines it. . . .

Bret Stephens is an opinion columnist for the New York Times. He’s a conservative, a former deputy editorial page editor at the Wall Street Journal, hired by the Times to help ensure that its op-ed page reflects a diversity of political opinions. I often find his opinion pieces entirely wrongheaded, but his column in yesterday’s paper was a bullseye. . . .

This year’s presidential election and Donald Trump’s seemingly ceaseless challenges to its legitimacy have provided the American public with a civics lesson the likes of which we’ve never seen. The abstruse process for determining the winner of an American presidential election has never been more widely discussed and elucidated. Before this year many of us assumed that the winner of an election was determined on Election Day or shortly thereafter. We may have understood that there were subsequent technical steps required to certify the results, but few of us realized how convoluted that pathway is . . .

One thing that makes writing a daily blog daunting, especially when I comment on politics, is finding something to say that hasn’t already been said by half-a-dozen professional columnists. I often find myself thinking, after reading an opinion piece in the paper, “What a great point. I wish I’d thought of that.” So it’s gratifying when, once in a great while, I say something on this blog and only later see the same point made elsewhere. . . .

Jennifer and I realized this morning that the experience of reading the newspaper has become less fraught of late as it’s no longer dominated by news about Donald Trump and his four-year reign of cruelty, narcissism, and lies. To be sure, Trump hasn’t disappeared from coverage entirely, or even from the front page — he is still president, after all — but there are distinct signs that he is drifting toward irrelevance. . . .

Much has been made of the extraordinary amount of free publicity that newspapers, networks and cable news channels gave Donald Trump early in his 2016 presidential run. . . . Soon, those same news outlets will have a tough choice to make. Once Trump is out of office, will they dial back the attention they pay to him to a level commensurate with his reduced station, or will they continue to chase the clicks and eyeballs that Trump coverage ensures? . . .