Claire Berlinski.'s Threads

Pompeo is a perfect example of this thing that just baffles me. He owes America *everything.* His grandparents immigrated from dirt-poor regions of Italy at the turn of the C19th. He graduated *first in his class* at West Point.

from Reuters:

\u201cSecretary of State Mike Pompeo cancelled his Europe trip at the last minute on Tuesday after Luxembourg's foreign minister and top European Union officials declined to meet him, European diplomats and other people familiar with the matter said\u201d
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) January 12, 2021

He has a law degree from Harvard. He was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. Went to DC and joined a blue-chip firm. Also made a fortune in private enterprise. America gave the grandson of dirt-poor immigrants the opportunity to do all of that.

He knows *damned well* what the Constitution says.

He's also seen enough of the world to know *damned well* how lucky he was to grow up in a country at peace, governed by that Constitution--and to know *damned well* what happens to a country in a civil war

--which is exactly the brink to which Trump has taken the United States, only recently the inarguable leader of the free world. We now have a GOP that thinks, "storming the capitol in an attempt to assassinate our elected leaders" is somewhere between "great" and "no biggie."

He knows *damned well* what the world thinks of us now, and how endangered we are because of it--and not just us, our generation, physically, but the idea of government of the people, by the people, for the people. It could, truly, perish from this earth-

Claire Berlinski.
@ClaireBerlinski

Some preliminary thoughts and questions about policing. All thoughts welcome, but especially thoughts from professional police officers, criminologists, sociologists, and people who've studied policing around the world:

I take as given that we need the police and will need them so long as the human species remains recognizably human. For any population x, some percentage will be dangerous predators, and without the police, we'll all be the prey.

We need the police. In principle, everyone should feel grateful to the men and women who do the difficult and dangerous work of finding and apprehending predators and bringing them before a court of law.

Yet in practice, it seems there's an immense public uneasiness with the police that it by no means confined to the US. The attacks on the police yesterday in France shocked and disgusted me. There's no possible justification for it.

Yet it's important to understand what the perpetrators were telling themselves about why they sought to kill the men who in principle protect them. The scenes represented a breakdown of some kind in both public trust and public discipline.

Claire Berlinski.
@ClaireBerlinski

If anyone in the US thinks France is doing any better with "expeditious vaccination," let me disabuse you of that conceit right now. Until recently, I've been fairly supportive of Macron's government. Tough job, tough people to govern.

After this? If I were a French citizen, I'd probably vote for the communists or the fascists (and those probably will be the options, at this rate). If the guys who're at least supposed to be competent technocrats can't manage a vaccination campaign--

--and offer idiotic excuses like, "Well, we're taking it slowly because, you know, France is full of lunatic anti-vaxxers and we don't want to frighten them"--I'm not making that up, folks, an aide to the health minister said exactly that, yesterday--

--why the hell would you put them back in office? If you want incompetent government, why not at least go for the gusto and get the incompetent ideologues your heart truly desires?

I do hope Macron realizes that if the non-insane French citizens don't get needles in their arms, fast--as in, "within a month, not within ten years," that's it for the Fifth Republic, because the French have had it. He was the Establishment's last chance.

Authors Claire Berlinski.