Agree? Disagree? Discuss

Don’t miss the two Vanity Fair articles below, but first:

1. Either you knew at the time you were the target of Russian tweets and social media posts designed to lower your opinion of Hillary Clinton — or they worked.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss.

2. The thrice-stayed 90-day travel ban is now moot. It was designed to keep the bad hombres from flooding in while we did an emergency assessment of the current 18-to-24-month vetting system to see whether it was sufficiently extreme.

(It had to be sprung on the world without notice, lest thousands of terrorists hop the next Air Syria flight, stream through JFK without visas, and wreak havoc. As in fact they did. The Bowling Green massacre? The terror in Sweden? I blame the so-called “judges” for those.)

Given the urgency, Trump surely waited not a day to begin his 90-day review. So it must be complete by now, and the element of surprise is gone, so the legal wrangling should cease.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss.

3. The best of several reasons to filibuster Neil Gorsuch: simple fairness. Mitch McConnell set the rules when he — controversially — overruled the Constitution and wouldn’t allow Merrick Garland a vote. We had to wait, he said, to see which party the PEOPLE favored in 2016. (Not the Electoral College, the people.) So now we know; and, as argued here, Gorsuch could be next, but only after Merrick Garland. Those were Mitch’s rules. No fair changing them just because he didn’t like the outcome.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss.

And now . . .

By my high school chum Howard Blum in Vanity Fair: HOW EX-SPY CHRISTOPHER STEELE COMPILED HIS EXPLOSIVE TRUMP-RUSSIA DOSSIER.*

And by T.A. Frank who doubtless went to high school somewhere also: THE TERRIFYING TRUTH BEHIND THE TRUMP-RUSSIA MESS (“Attempts to eject Trump prematurely could unleash demons far worse than any that we’re seeing now”) — a caution to liberals like me:

While I’m going to use most of my words today to try to talk down Donald Trump’s enemies, we can’t overlook that we have a president who acts like a nut job: euphoric at midnight, paranoid a few hours later about phantom prowlers on the roof. Let’s leave aside the debate over how much of a point Trump may have had when he accused Barack Obama of being a “Bad (or sick) guy” who had overseen efforts to “tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process.” (As they say on Twitter, huge if true.) Even if the accusation were perfectly accurate—which no one, including Trump, seems to believe—the manner in which he chose to reveal it was less that of a president than that of a dementia patient screaming that his clothes have been stolen by the nursing staff. There’s no way that a series of misspelled four A.M. tweets, sandwiched next to a lament about The Apprentice, is the work of someone playing 28-dimensional chess. It’s the work of someone who found a chess set and had to go to the hospital after swallowing two rooks and a knight. . . .

Yet he thinks we shouldn’t be too quick to assume the worst — or attempt removal. Read the rest.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss.

Have a great weekend.

*The criticism that Steele misspelled Alfa Bank (“Alpha Bank”) seems thin. Transliterated from the Russian, which is how Steele may have been reading most of his documents, it’s just as easily transliterated either way, and so — even though the bank is, assuredly, Alfa Bank — an easy mistake to make.