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Easily the most disturbing part of a disturbing Saturday for this country was watching the tame police response to white men marching around as a heavily armed "militia." You have the Governor of a large state explicitly admitting to reporters that the police stood on the sidelines while people were beaten and killed – which I'm pretty sure falls under any definition of a riot – because they claimed they were outgunned by fat white losers in eBay tactical gear.

Really? Because in Ferguson the police were able to summon up almost out of thin air armored vehicles from Operation Iraqi Freedom, snipers, military-caliber rifles, and more body armor than anyone thought the Kevlar industry was capable of producing.

Police militarization is nationwide and totally out of control. Yet here the police responsible for handling a literal Nazi rally claimed they just couldn't stand up to someone's unemployed biker uncle.

When black people riot, "We heard they might have guns" is all the justification needed for any level of violence short of air strikes. Gas, skull-cracking riot police, armored vehicles, you name it…all because someone torched the payday loan place in a strip mall. In Charlottesville a person was actually killed by one of the marchers, yet the police did what they always do when white guys decide that they want to play GI Joe while avoiding all that pesky exercise that the military requires: They let their silence and inaction serve as a tacit endorsement.

Are all of the cops who were present simpatico with Nazis?

Of course not. But they're more than willing to let them do anything they want in stark contrast to how public gatherings of anything other than right-wingers are treated. If you're a white guy, dressing up like Army Man is enough, in the eyes of law enforcement, to make you some kind of legitimate Citizen Enforcer. Don't tell me there's no issue with policing when black men without guns are routinely shot by police while white men openly carrying loaded rifles in the middle of a civil disturbance walk away without a scratch.

It's almost as if "not sufficiently well armed" is an excuse to justify behavior that functionally endorses what white supremacists are doing. Why did they go lightly armed to a multi-state Nazi rally despite the history of violence from those groups?

Whether they do it intentionally or not, police respond to these things markedly differently because hey, it's white boys, they're good boys, we know they don't mean no harm.

Maybe some of the weak response is out of support for white supremacy, but I bet 99% of it is the institutionalized racial biases that police in this country simply refuse to look at: a gathering of white people is Not Dangerous, a gathering of black people is.

Stop making excuses. Yeah, Richard Spencer got arrested for 30 whole minutes. Big fucking deal. Yeah, there were police present (standing there watching for the most part). Compare it to the number of people arrested and injured by police at any other public gathering of similar size in this country and the problem will become clear.

And once again, remember, one of the mob *literally killed someone* who was there to protest their presence.

Just imagine all the same facts – the guns, the torches, the mob mentality, the murder – if 5,000 black guys took the place of the people who showed up. Tell me how many would have gotten out of there alive, and tell me that the police would have lightly armed themselves and then used that as an excuse to stand around with thumbs in asses.

The National Guard might not even have sufficed for Trump in that case. The regular army would have been called out to kill every last one of the Thugs. And unless you just heard of the United States for the first time today, any part of you eager to deny that is just a voice in your head encouraging you to fool yourself.

You know how I love metaphors.

From the mid-1990s until the beginning of the recession in 2008 the academic job market was great. I can't speak for every field, but in mine a Ph.D. holder from a reasonably good institution would, if applying broadly, get a tenure-track academic job in a year or two of trying. This is not to say everyone got a great job, but as long as one was not terribly picky it appeared that a job could be found with time and effort.

Then state budgets collapsed and there was a severe retraction. The market went from Great to barely extant for the last few years of the previous decade. We're talking a dozen jobs for hundreds of job searchers. That kind of Bad. Everyone urged calm and predicted that it would recover. "Calm" is a hard thing to come by when you're unemployed. But I landed a temporary job, as some of you may recall, and then after four full years of applying for everything I got a tenure-track job.

The job market has of course gotten better. But here's the thing – it's still bad.

It is dawning on people in this profession that the job market may never be Good again.

It can only be considered good in comparison to the year(s) in which it was at rock bottom. By the standard of the years in which it was actually good, it remains solidly crap.

That same sinking feeling is creeping into the way I feel about the state of American politics at present. There's little doubt that this is the nadir; it can't get much worse without the system collapsing and being replaced with an entirely new framework. And someday Trump will be gone and things will be Better. Literally anyone, even the other GOP candidates from 2016, would be an improvement over this guy because at the very least they might manage not to get us all killed with their damn Twitter account.

But there's a distinct possibility that this, like the current job market across professions, is just a new normal. We've re-set the bar at an abysmally low level and we can expect politics to be Less Bad in the future, but it is time to face the fact that it will never be Good again.
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We've normalized some very abnormal things recently and even without Donald Trump there will be a Trumpist candidate in every election for the foreseeable future because nothing successful will avoid endless imitation. He won the nomination and the election, so why wouldn't someone try the same playbook?

Power will continue to flip back and forth between the parties, and if Democrats control some part of Congress in the future that will make things Less Bad. But all of the forces that made Trump possible, especially in the media and in the way Americans self-select twisted versions of reality to suit their own biases, will continue to exist. They'll continue to make following politics unpleasant and continue to keep dumb, spiteful candidates alive and active.

Liberals talk about the New Deal era a lot, almost as much as old white conservatives talk about the "good old days" of the 1950s. We don't even need to look that far in the past to find an era in which some consensus politics could be achieved (Nixon, for instance). As sad as it is, it might be time to face the reality that those days are gone for good, and any future politics can improve marginally upon what we have today without ever getting us close to Good again. Malaise is what a population feels when it sinks in that Better is still pretty bad – and the best they're likely to get.

"Freakish, embarrassing, and all too short." That's Matt Taibbi's summation of the tenure of Anthony Scaramucci in the White House. Last week ("American Heroes Week"!
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) may have felt like a millennium, but if you can believe it Mooch has only been on the job for something like eight days.
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Taibbi's observation is well-phrased but by no means a bold prediction. My reaction to seeing this Mario Cantone with Bone-itis cosplayer for the first time was, "Can we just skip ahead to the part where he's fired?
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" Whatever thrill there was in watching these people crash and burn is gone; this isn't fun anymore.

If Scaramucci matters, it is as an indication of Trump totally throwing in the towel. Not that he intends to quit or anything, but he appears to be done trying even in the quarter-assed way he may have been attempting to create the illusion of being Serious. This is the kind of person you hire when you not only intend to stop trying, but when you don't particularly care to hide the fact that you are done trying.

The goal at this point appears to be to make this coke-fueled vaudeville act so utterly idiotic that Americans check out altogether, at which point Trump can resume his plans to crash this plane into the side of a mountain so he and his friends can collect on the insurance policy. The journalists who are professionally obligated to cover this all day, every day are going to need treatment for PTSD if this goes on for four years.
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Watching news and following politics has never been a great joy for most people. It's more of a thing one does because it's good for you, like jogging or eating cauliflower.

Now it is getting to a point at which it is literally too inane to watch. That is not an accident. The point of Anthony Scaramucci is to make your urge to change the channel or close the browser overpowering the moment you see his idiot face or hear one syllable of his fifth-rate Joe Pesci impression. That is why his face is so punchable; the White House wants you to want to punch him. To hate him. To be so disgusted that you feel like you need to be pumped full of thorazine to watch 10 minutes of CNN. And above all they want you to look at Anthony Scaramucci and realize that just as it has gotten worse every day for six months now, it is only going to get worse as time goes on.

John McCain is the Beltway's wet dream – a man constantly talking about Solutions, bipartisanship, and his oft-troubled conscience. I think he enjoys being idolized by everyone on the Sunday Morning shows, constantly fawned over and taken seriously and never, ever challenged on his record or asked to explain why for all his hand-wringing his voting record is one of a reliable, party line Republican.

McCain and his like-minded compatriot Joe Lieberman sure talk a great deal about doing the right thing.
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They bring it up, in fact, far more often than they actually do it. And now, a week after giving his usual sanctimonious musings about how badly Congress needs to stop doing all these deeply Troubling things, he's rushing back to Washington to help his party pass a health care bill that not even the Senate has been allowed to see.

This is classic McCain. Everything about him as a politician is a myth. He has made a career out of playing the Moderate character to a tee and he wears the permanently pained expression that lets the Chuck Todds of the world conclude that he is constantly tormented by the battle between good and evil in his mind. He has mastered the Moderate the same way George Will mastered looking like a Smart Person without actually saying things that are smart. But that's it. It's an act. He plays the media like a performer manipulates an audience.
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Honestly, it took me a while to recognize this pattern. I felt legitimately bad for McCain in 2008, at least until he almost saddled the country with Sarah Palin. Frankly I hadn't paid a ton of attention to his voting record, and I was familiar with his Senate career mostly in the context of the McCain-Feingold legislation and his statements opposing torture during the G.W. Bush administration. So like everyone else, I thought of him as a Moderate.

It's natural to think that because we are constantly being told he is a Moderate, a voice of reason in a madhouse. But if you pay attention, you start to notice that he does shit like this all the time. He wrings his hands, he looks Troubled, he basks in the glow of some laudatory media coverage, and then he votes for it.
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Over and over. That's his game. From the outside we can only speculate what he gets out of it – Attention? Validation? Straight ego boost? – but his career is long enough to give us all the evidence we need to establish the pattern.

Look, I feel as sorry for him as I would if my bus driver said he had cancer. I feel badly for everyone with cancer. But look at what he is doing, not what he is saying or what is being said about him. That is the real John McCain, and there's very little Hero there.
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