{"id":180513,"date":"2017-03-27T19:16:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-28T00:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/03\/27\/good-point-10\/"},"modified":"2017-03-27T19:16:00","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T00:16:00","slug":"good-point-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/03\/27\/good-point-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Point"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Marcie &#8220;Emptywheel&#8221; Wheeler gives us a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.emptywheel.net\/2017\/03\/25\/the-lesson-trump-has-thus-far-not-taught-us-civilian-casualties\/\">bright side to the Trump administration<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">I have a confession. <\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s something I like about the Trump Administration. <\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s the way that his unpopularity taints long-standing policies or practices or beliefs, making people aware of and opposed to them in a way they weren\u2019t when the same policies or beliefs were widely held under George Bush or Barack Obama. Many, though not all, of these policies or beliefs were embraced unquestioningly by centrists or even avowed leftists. <\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been keeping a running list in my mind, which I\u2019ll begin to lay out here (I guess I\u2019ll update it as I remember more). <\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">Expansive surveillance<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">The <a href=\"https:\/\/lawfareblog.com\/destroying-presumption-regularity\">presumption of regularity<\/a>, by which courts and the public assume the Executive Branch operates in good faith and from evidence<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">Denigration of immigrants<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">Denigration of Muslims<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">Denigration health insurance <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: blue;\">As an example, Obama deported a huge number of people. But now that Trump has expanded that same practice, it has been made visible and delegitimized. <\/p>\n<p>In short, Trump has made things that should always have been criticized are now being far more widely so.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s true.&nbsp; Obama&#8217;s war on whistle-blowers is unprecedented, he was the deportation president, he terrorized half a dozen with drone strikes, and he expanded surveillance beyond Dick Cheney&#8217;s wildest dreams.<\/p>\n<p>The so-called left never had an objection to what Obama was doing, but now, even the far right is wondering about things like the surveillance state.<\/p>\n<p>Obama normalized a lot of bad things, and now Trump is abnormalizing those same excesses.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s kind of like watching your mother-in-law going over a cliff in your brand new car.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Marcie &#8220;Emptywheel&#8221; Wheeler gives us a bright side to the Trump administration: I have a confession. There\u2019s something I like about the Trump Administration. It\u2019s the way that his unpopularity taints long-standing policies or practices or beliefs, making people aware of and opposed to them in a way they weren\u2019t when the same policies or &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[491,413,370,573,369,374,366],"class_list":["post-180513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-barack-obama","tag-civil-rights","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-donald-trump","tag-espionage","tag-politics","tag-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180513"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}