Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week

When he took the post of attorney general, William Barr was widely viewed as a conservative man of high integrity and independence that prominent people in politics and the press thought would be a big improvement in the Trump regime. But after his mischaracterization of the Mueller report in a “summary” that distorted its contents, Barr was soon being described in some of the press as a Trump toady. More evidence of the accuracy of that description has flowed steadily ever since. But then came the ABC interview this week in which Barr said Trump’s tweeting was making it “impossible “ to do his job. Suddenly, Barr was reported in some media as having recovered some of his reputation.  Jon Alsop at the Columbia Journalism Review writes—Angry Barr and whether the press is getting played:

Barr’s ABC interview, it seems, was an effort to wind back the clock. Did it work? News stories in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal credited him, respectively, with a “remarkable rebuke” and “striking criticism” of the president. Barr, the Times added, had “publicly challenged Mr. Trump in a way that no sitting cabinet member has.” Elsewhere, however, skepticism of Barr’s motives abounded. [...]  In a tweet, Ari Melber, chief legal correspondent at MSNBC, offered a pithy rewording of what Barr said: “I stand by intervening to help a convicted Trump adviser, but I wish Trump did not admit what we are doing on Twitter.”

Given Barr’s record as attorney general, skepticism is healthy. But the framing of Barr as Trump’s lapdog risks obscuring a much more important fact. Barr is probably being truthful when he says he’s doing what he thinks is right—because, on available evidence, the subservience of the Justice Department to the will and power of the president is what he thinks is right. Barr believes in the centralization of presidential power—just to the point, critics say, where the president is effectively above the law. Barr reached that view independently of Trump.

A year ago, when the Senate voted to confirm Barr, his views were hardly a secret; we just chose not to emphasize them. Since then, a succession of magazine articles—in the New Yorker, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere—have elucidated his troubling judicial philosophy. (In a provocative essay for the New York Review of Books, Tamsin Shaw compared Barr to Carl Schmitt, the “Crown Jurist” of Nazi Germany.) But day-to-day reporting still tends to overlook it, or to mention it only in passing. That’s regrettable, since Barr’s conception of the presidency will likely have consequences that outlast Trump. “If those views take hold, we will have lost what was won in the Revolution—we will have a chief executive who is more powerful than the king,” Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, told the New Yorker. “That will be a disaster for the survival of the Republic.” [...]

TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES 

QUOTATION

“Black people are dying in our cities, crossing oceans, in resource wars not of our making. … Indeed, it is obvious that Black peoples’ lives are disposable in a way and fashion that is radically different from other groups globally. It is from this stark reality of marginalization that I want to propose that any new policy actions in the North American contest ought to pass what I will call the Black test. the Black test is simple: it demands that any policy meet the requirement of ameliorating the dire conditions in Black peoples’ lives. … When a policy does not meet this test, then it is a failed policy, from the first instance of its proposal.”  ~~Rinaldo Walcott, “Left and liberal colour blindness imperil real change for Black people” (2016)

TWEET OF THE DAY

Remember when Nancy Pelosi wore a head scarf and Republicans went nuts that she was a secret Muslim? https://t.co/5CBORel7GB

— David Waldman-1, of Yorktown LLCâÂ�¢ (@KagroX) February 15, 2020

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2002—The death of the Republican dog whistle:

In the idealized version of the GOP primary, establishment Republicans would curry favor with their Wall Street pals while sending coded dog whistles to their foot soldiers—on race, immigration, reproductive freedoms, etc. Those dog whistles would motivate the GOP base without revealing their true radical nature to the American mainstream. It was a genius system while it worked, one that saw no parallel on the progressive side.

But the days of the dog whistle are over. The election of President Barack Obama created an entire cottage industry trying to prove how un-American and Kenyan he supposedly is, while Republicans like Rep. Pete Hoekstra run blatantly anti-Asian ads. Republicans laugh about electrocuting immigrants who will cut off your head in the desert if they're not stopped, while passing laws openly hostile to brown people. Attacks on homosexuals have escalated to new hysterical highs as society becomes more tolerant and open to equality

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