While we've had our work featured on The Colbert Report before, this is a first — Rachel Maddow featured our May/June 2017 cover prominently this week, quoting extensively. Powerful stuff — so proud of how this turned out and grateful to have worked with the talented Thomas Danthony on such a poignant cover!
Quoting Maddow:
"Do you sleep too much or too well? Are you too relaxed? Do you have low blood pressure? A lack of anxiety? Not a care in the world? If so, there's a cure for that. Foreign Affairs is out with a new issue today, it's titled "Present at the Destruction? Trump in Practice." It's illustrated with this handy sort-of-pictogram of… maybe that's Air Force One jetting directly into… I dunno? Volcanic eruption? Mushroom cloud? Giant mountain? End of the world? You get the idea. And that picture and that title set the tone for the content of this new issue of Foreign Affairs.
There's a detailed look at the initial behavior of this new president on foreign affairs and how if that behavior continues that could lead directly to three brand-new separate wars with three different countries. There's also a long piece about why the experts believe you probably don't have to worry about an immediate descent into full-on fascism any time soon but yeah, we are maybe sliding into what the experts might call a "competitive authoritarianism." Oh.
The editor of Foreign Affairs is Gideon Rose. He opens this hair-raising collection today with this question — it's actually a game, more than a question — the game is "Stupid or Nefarious?"
Quote: "Every administration spins, fights with the press and the bureaucracy, pushes its own agenda, and tries to evade intrusive oversight. But ordinary White Houses do not repeatedly lie, declare war on mainstream media institutions, pursue radical goals while disdaining professional input, and refuse to accept independent scrutiny… how seriously you take these behaviors depends on how you assess the motivations behind them, generating a game that some have taken to calling 'Stupid or nefarious?' …Do slow appointments to the administration signal poor management or a deliberate attempt to 'deconstruct the administrative state' …Is dismissing experienced senior officials en masse just a clumsy way of handling a presidential transition or a purge of potential obstacles and whistleblowers? …Are all the lies mere venting or a deliberate plot to distract critics and undermine reasoned discourse?"
That's your choice — stupid or nefarious? Stupid or nefarious. I would like to take door number three, please. If those are my options."
— Rachel Maddow
