BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

Jump to content

  • 1071 Pages +
  • « First
  • 766
  • 767
  • 768
  • 769
  • 770
  • Last »
  • You cannot start a new topic
  • You cannot reply to this topic

Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#15341 User is offline   hrothgar 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 15,371
  • Joined: 2003-February-13
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Natick, MA
  • Interests:Travel
    Cooking
    Brewing
    Hiking

Posted 2020-May-14, 02:51

View PostChas_P, on 2020-May-13, 18:02, said:

If the choice were Trump vs JFK I would vote for JFK in a heartbeat. If the choice were Trump vs WJC I would probably vote for Clinton (WJC, not HRC). But if the choice is Trump vs ANY of today's Democrats, I'm voting for Trump. As for
"recognizing crap", I'm not sure Biden knows where he ***** last.


Remember back in the before times, when Chas tried to insist that he didn't actually like Trump and was trolling the libs?

BTW, anyone else find it amusing that JFK, Bill Clinton, and Trump are all well extremely well known for committing sexual offenses and Chas is very careful to qualify that voting for women is unacceptable to him... Guess we know one quality that he selects for.
Alderaan delenda est
0

#15342 User is offline   Trinidad 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 4,531
  • Joined: 2005-October-09
  • Location:Netherlands

Posted 2020-May-14, 04:08

View Posthrothgar, on 2020-May-14, 02:51, said:

Remember back in the before times, when Chas tried to insist that he didn't actually like Trump and was trolling the libs?

BTW, anyone else find it amusing that JFK, Bill Clinton, and Trump are all well extremely well known for committing sexual offenses and Chas is very careful to qualify that voting for women is unacceptable to him... Guess we know one quality that he selects for.

I am not saying that I like Chas_P's political ideas, but this is simply data mining on a sample size of 3. You should know that this is ridiculous, but you imply that it "could be significant". I could make a similarly bold statement that Chas, despite his emphasis on the letter 'P', has a remarkable preference towards presidents that have a name starting with 'J' (regardless whether it is John or Jefferson). There is no basis for an association of Chad with the letter 'J' and there is also no basis for the association of Chad to the "relational behavior" of these three presidents.

Rik
I want my opponents to leave my table with a smile on their face and without matchpoints on their score card - in that order.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!), but “That’s funny…” – Isaac Asimov
The only reason God did not put "Thou shalt mind thine own business" in the Ten Commandments was that He thought that it was too obvious to need stating. - Kenberg
0

#15343 User is offline   hrothgar 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 15,371
  • Joined: 2003-February-13
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Natick, MA
  • Interests:Travel
    Cooking
    Brewing
    Hiking

Posted 2020-May-14, 05:14

View PostTrinidad, on 2020-May-14, 04:08, said:

I am not saying that I like Chas_P's political ideas, but this is simply data mining on a sample size of 3. You should know that this is ridiculous, but you imply that it "could be significant". I could make a similarly bold statement that Chas, despite his emphasis on the letter 'P', has a remarkable preference towards presidents that have a name starting with 'J' (regardless whether it is John or Jefferson). There is no basis for an association of Chad with the letter 'J' and there is also no basis for the association of Chad to the "relational behavior" of these three presidents.

Rik


Perhaps Chas' well documented history of racist postings has biased me to think that he is a sexist as well...
Alderaan delenda est
2

#15344 User is offline   cherdano 

  • 5555
  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 9,516
  • Joined: 2003-September-04
  • Gender:Male

Posted 2020-May-14, 05:57

View PostChas_P, on 2020-May-13, 18:02, said:

If the choice were Trump vs JFK I would vote for JFK in a heartbeat. If the choice were Trump vs WJC I would probably vote for Clinton (WJC, not HRC). But if the choice is Trump vs ANY of today's Democrats, I'm voting for Trump. As for
"recognizing crap", I'm not sure Biden knows where he ***** last.

Thank you for your eloquent persuasive contribution. I thought I'd cast my vote for Biden if I had one, but given the points you make, I have reconsiderd.
The easiest way to count losers is to line up the people who talk about loser count, and count them. -Kieran Dyke
0

#15345 User is offline   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,190
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2020-May-14, 06:34

View Posthrothgar, on 2020-May-14, 05:14, said:

Perhaps Chas' well documented history of racist postings has biased me to think that he is a sexist as well...


Perhaps those who still support Trump do so because they see so much of themselves in him.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
0

#15346 User is offline   kenberg 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 11,051
  • Joined: 2004-September-22
  • Location:Northern Maryland

Posted 2020-May-14, 06:42

Re chas post and responses :

I worry that on Wednesday Nov. 4 the Dems will have a really good argument to explain how unfair it is that Biden lost.

I much prefer a celebration of Biden winning.

For this celebration to take place, Biden needs votes of people other than, say, Winston and Richard. And other than mine. I hope that they are working on that.

We will see how the campaign goes. My own view of Trump is that I would rather have a duck, any duck, in the oval office. But others might not think the choice is that clear, and I hope the strategists are not just writing them off. Not everyone has seen the brilliant arguments I have presented here on the WC.

Winning is good. Complaining about the unfairness of losing is not good. It's game time.



Ken
0

#15347 User is offline   Trinidad 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 4,531
  • Joined: 2005-October-09
  • Location:Netherlands

Posted 2020-May-14, 07:07

View Posthrothgar, on 2020-May-14, 05:14, said:

Perhaps Chas' well documented history of racist postings has biased me to think that he is a sexist as well...

That is an entirely different data set...

Rik
I want my opponents to leave my table with a smile on their face and without matchpoints on their score card - in that order.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!), but “That’s funny…” – Isaac Asimov
The only reason God did not put "Thou shalt mind thine own business" in the Ten Commandments was that He thought that it was too obvious to need stating. - Kenberg
0

#15348 User is offline   Winstonm 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 17,190
  • Joined: 2005-January-08
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
  • Interests:Art, music

Posted 2020-May-14, 07:55

What is the crime of Obamagate? Obamagate = Presidenting while black.

I'm afraid John is right that there will be no crushing defeat of Trump - as this election is a referendum on white privilege, i.e., a reenactment of the Civil War in America. And it has already lasted nearly as long.


Quote

If you’re looking to pin down the crime that Donald Trump has accused President Obama of committing, don’t look in the criminal code. For now, at least, “OBAMAGATE!” is not listed in Title 18, the crimes and criminal procedure section of the United States Code. But even if it were, Attorney General Bill Barr might have a tough time building a case against the former president.

That’s because the crux of what is ostensibly being alleged against Obama—that he illegally investigated the Trump campaign while he was president—could never be, by Barr’s own definition, a crime.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
0

#15349 User is offline   shyams 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 1,544
  • Joined: 2009-August-02
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:London, UK

Posted 2020-May-14, 10:16

In my (uncharitable) opinion, the definition of a crime depends on who is committing it --- i.e. different standards for Republicans and Democrats. Quite similar to how MeToo works --- different standards for Kavanaugh and Biden.
0

#15350 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2020-May-14, 10:54

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias said:

Even when pundits win twitter debates with Josh Hawley, even engaging in them on any level is a win for his strategy of obtaining a reputation as populist thinker while casting rigid party line votes.

10-4 Matt, but how is this relevant for engaging with all of the other trolls?
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#15351 User is offline   cherdano 

  • 5555
  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 9,516
  • Joined: 2003-September-04
  • Gender:Male

Posted 2020-May-14, 12:24

View Postkenberg, on 2020-May-14, 06:42, said:

Re chas post and responses :

I worry that on Wednesday Nov. 4 the Dems will have a really good argument to explain how unfair it is that Biden lost.

I much prefer a celebration of Biden winning.

For this celebration to take place, Biden needs votes of people other than, say, Winston and Richard. And other than mine. I hope that they are working on that.

Are you working on that?

But in any case, I am all for trying to win over votes. But if you think any Democrat in 2020 has a chance of winning chas_p's vote, then I have a lot of bridges full of email servers in Ukraine to sell you.
The easiest way to count losers is to line up the people who talk about loser count, and count them. -Kieran Dyke
1

#15352 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2020-May-14, 14:19

Posted Image
No pride.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#15353 User is offline   johnu 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 4,828
  • Joined: 2008-September-10
  • Gender:Male

Posted 2020-May-14, 16:33

Donald Trump Refuses To Wear Mask At Mask Supplier, Suggests Testing Is ‘Overrated’

Quote

Trump did not wear a mask during his visit, and neither did his chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

Reinforcing the anti-mask, anti-social distancing quackery of his right fringe supporters who are reading and listening to Fox Propaganda and other alt-right conspiracy sites. Sadly, some people who don't know any better are also watching what the Grifter in Chief is doing and saying and follow his example. They don't have the luxury of getting tested daily, and only being in the presence of people who are now tested daily.

Quote

President Donald Trump on Thursday griped about the pressure he’s facing to increase the ability to test people for the coronavirus, saying that testing might be “overrated” anyway.

“We have the best testing in the world. Could be that testing is, frankly, overrated. Maybe it is overrated,” Trump said during a visit to Owens & Minor, a medical supply company in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that distributes masks and other products.

“You know, they always say, ‘We want more, we want more,’ because they don’t want to give you credit. Then we do more, and they say, ‘We want more,’” he added.

Testing in the wealthiest and one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world has been a massive failure. The US wasted and frittered away months before coming out with a test that didn't do what it was supposed to do, now has many tests being given that are not much better than flipping a coin. When some estimates from experts say the US needs 3 million to 10 million tests per day, we are in the quarter million per day range.

No wonder the Grifter in Chief is now trying to discredit testing. It isn't important to fail in testing if testing was never even necessary. If the Grifter can convince enough people they don't need a test, he could boast that his “Anybody that wants a test [for the coronavirus] can get a test.” claim will be true. Just like severe PPE shortages were a figment of the liberal press imagination, because there was more than enough PPE available for everybody.

The US has done 10 million tests in 4 months. Wuhan China is planning to do 11 million tests in 10 days. Maybe the US could dream of doing that many tests in a year or two.
0

#15354 User is offline   kenberg 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 11,051
  • Joined: 2004-September-22
  • Location:Northern Maryland

Posted 2020-May-14, 16:57

View Postcherdano, on 2020-May-14, 12:24, said:

Are you working on that?

But in any case, I am all for trying to win over votes. But if you think any Democrat in 2020 has a chance of winning chas_p's vote, then I have a lot of bridges full of email servers in Ukraine to sell you.





Probably neither Chas nor I will change our voting plan. If you take any one person, it might well seem that they will not change their view. But should we then just save time and money and hold the election next week? Voters change their minds. Which voter? I don't know. But some.

So I suppose/hope that someone is thinking about how to bring the net change in favor of Biden
Ken
0

#15355 User is offline   Chas_P 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 1,511
  • Joined: 2008-September-03
  • Gender:Male
  • Location:Gainesville, GA USA

Posted 2020-May-14, 17:47

View Postcherdano, on 2020-May-14, 12:24, said:

But if you think any Democrat in 2020 has a chance of winning chas_p's vote, then I have a lot of bridges full of email servers in Ukraine to sell you.


Thank you, Arend, for an astute observation of the blatantly obvious.

I love the whiskys from your country, especially the single malts from Islay.

Cheers.
0

#15356 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2020-May-15, 06:26

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Quote

It’s becoming more and more obvious that President Donald Trump has simply stopped dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, and has no particular plan for confronting its economic fallout either. In both cases, he’s pretty much substituted wishful thinking for action. The Atlantic’s David Graham had a good item about this disengagement earlier in the week, followed by one from Ezra Klein arguing that “the White House does not have a plan, it does not have a framework, it does not have a philosophy, and it does not have a goal.”

What surprised me was political scientist Lee Drutman’s conclusion, based on Klein’s article, that “the debate over what to do has polarized with depressing haste, because ‘winning’ in Washington is not defeating the virus, but winning the next election.” I argued a bit with Drutman on Twitter about this, but it’s worth a longer discussion. My basic sense is that Trump isn’t nearly concerned enough with winning re-election, and that the current catastrophe is in part a consequence of that.

There’s no way to know what’s really in the president’s mind. But we can compare his actions with what a president determined to be re-elected would probably do. A lot of Trump’s critics have claimed that he’s deliberately risking American lives by boosting the economy to improve his chances in November. And it’s true that he seems concerned mainly with re-opening businesses these days. But there are at least two reasons to doubt that this preference is due to the election. For one, public-health experts and economists broadly agree that opening too soon will be a disaster. For another, even if there is a trade-off, there’s no particular reason to think that restoring jobs at the cost of more illness and death will be a good electoral deal for Trump.

At any rate, the evidence that Trump has an economic plan is just as weak as the evidence that he’s engaged in dealing with the coronavirus.

What I think is more likely is that Trump simply isn’t finding this aspect of the presidency very much fun. You might remember when President George H.W. Bush declared that he didn’t like broccoli: “And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!” Trump acts this way about doing most of the mundane jobs of the presidency. Thus his newly invented scandal, “Obamagate.” As the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser points out: “For Trump, spending the week attacking Obama, no matter what the subject, is the political equivalent of retreating to his bedroom and hiding under the blanket. It’s his safe space, his comfort zone.” Except it’s not so much a political equivalent as it is a retreat from politics altogether, along with the duties and responsibilities of his office.

A politician who desperately wanted re-election would’ve been hard at work, from the moment he or she was alerted to the danger, attempting to contain the pandemic and limit the economic damage, and would persevere no matter what the setbacks, never wavering in an effort to produce the policy results that might lead to a big win in November. Such presidents might sacrifice the long term for the short term, as Lyndon Johnson did in goosing the economy in 1964, or Richard Nixon did in 1972. But they would never just give up when things went wrong.

That’s not this president. That’s not Donald Trump.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#15357 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2020-May-15, 06:48

From Cornelia Griggs at NYT (March 2020):

Quote

I’ve had hard conversations this week. “Look me in the eye,” I said to my neighbor Karen, who was spiraling to a dark place in her mind. “I make this personal promise to you — I will not let your children die from this disease.” I swallowed back a lump in my throat. Just the image of one of our kids attached to a tube was jarring. Two weeks ago our kids were having a pizza party and watching cartoons together, running back and forth between our apartments. This was before #socialdistancing was trending. Statistically, I still feel good about my promise to Karen because children do not seem to be dying from Covid-19. There are others to whom I cannot make similar promises.

A few days later, I got a text from another friend. She has asthma. “I’m just saying this because I need to say it to someone,” she wrote. She asked that if she gets sick and has a poor prognosis, to play recordings of the voice of Josie, her daughter. “I think it would bring me back,” she said. Josie is my 4-year-old’s best friend.

Today, at the hospital where I work, one of the largest in New York City, Covid-19 cases continue to climb, and there’s movement to redeploy as many health care workers as possible to the E.R.s, new “fever clinics” and I.C.U.s. It’s becoming an all-healthy-hands-on-deck scenario.

The sky is falling. I’m not afraid to say it. A few weeks from now you may call me an alarmist; and I can live with that. Actually, I will keel over with happiness if I’m proven wrong.

Alarmist is not a word anyone has ever used to describe me before. I’m a board-certified surgeon and critical care specialist who spent much of my training attending to traumas in the emergency room and doing the rounds at Harvard hospitals’ intensive care units. I’m now in my last four months of training as a pediatric surgeon in New York City. Part of my job entails waking in the middle of the night to rush to the children’s hospital to put babies on a form of life support called ECMO, a service required when a child’s lungs are failing even with maximum ventilator support. Scenarios that mimic end-stage Covid-19 are part of my job. Panic is not in my vocabulary; the emotion has been drilled out of me in nine years of training. This is different.

We are living in a global public health crisis moving at a speed and scale never witnessed by living generations. The cracks in our medical and financial systems are being splayed open like a gashing wound. No matter how this plays out, life will forever look a little different for all of us.

On the front lines, patients are lining up outside of our emergency rooms and clinics looking to us for answers — but we have few. Only on Friday did coronavirus testing become more readily available in New York, and the tests are still extremely limited. Right next to my office in the hospital, a lab is being repurposed with hopes of a capability to run 1,000 tests a day. But today, and likely tomorrow, even M.D.s do not have straightforward access to testing across the country. Furthermore, the guidelines and criteria for testing are changing almost daily. Our health care system is mired in situational uncertainty. The leadership of our hospital is working tirelessly — but doctors on the ground are pessimistic about our surge capacity.

Making my rounds at the children’s hospital earlier this week, I saw that the boxes of gloves and other personal protective equipment were dwindling. This is a crisis for our vulnerable patients and health care workers alike. Protective equipment is only one of the places where supplies are falling short. At our large, 4,000-bed New York City hospital, we have 500 ventilators and 250 on backup reserve. If we are on track to match the scale of Covid-19 infections in Italy, then we are likely to run out of ventilators in New York. The anti-viral “treatments” we have for Covid-19 are experimental and many of them are hard to even get approved. Let me repeat. The sky is falling.

I say this not to panic anyone but to mobilize you. We need more equipment and we need it now. Specifically gloves, masks, eye protection and more ventilators. We need our technology friends to be making and testing prototypes to rig the ventilators that we do have to support more than one patient at a time. We need our labs channeling all of their efforts into combating this bug — that means vaccine research and antiviral treatment research, quickly.

We need hospitals to figure out how to nimbly and flexibly modify our existing practices to adapt to this virus and do it fast. Doctors across the globe are sharing information, protocols and strategies through social media, because our common publishing channels are too slow. Physician and surgeon mothers are coming together on Facebook groups to publish advice to parents and the public, to amplify our outrage, and to underscore the fear we feel for our most vulnerable patient populations, as well as ourselves and our families.

Please flatten the curve and stay at home, but please do not go into couch mode. Like everyone, I have moments where imagining the worst possible Covid-19 scenario steals my breath. But cowering in the dark places of our minds doesn’t help. Rather than private panic, we need public-spirited action. Those of us walking into the rooms of Covid-19-positive patients every day need you and your minds, your networks, your creative solutions, and your voices to be fighting for us. We might be the exhausted masked face trying to resuscitate you when you show up on the doorstep of our hospital. And when you do, I promise not to panic. I’ll use every ounce of my expertise to keep you alive. Please, do the same for us.

Unfortunately for the U.S., Trump does not have even an ounce of expertise when if comes to helping others and doing the hard work of governing.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#15358 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2020-May-15, 09:30

Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart said:

All the questions about UBI and deficits aside, in this @tylercowen and @Kasparov63 piece, I suspect that this line is backwards.

Quote

What the U.S. needs is the economic growth to pay for the huge deficits it has run up during the current crisis. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no deficit hawks in a pandemic. But before the U.S. establishes a huge new program to redistribute wealth, it needs to find a way to produce more of it. Greater redistribution will require higher productivity.

A superior distribution of buying power is a precondition for improving productivity, as that will catalyze higher investment.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#15359 User is offline   y66 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 6,496
  • Joined: 2006-February-24

Posted 2020-May-15, 09:38

Mike Konczal @rortybomb said:

Great @Neil_Irwin piece. Automatic renewal of core spending priorities (unemployment insurance, checks to families, state/local support, etc.) is essential, solving numerous economic and political problems at once. House Dems passing on it is a bad sign.

Economists Want to Put Stimulus on Autopilot. Congress Has Other Ideas.

The idea is to link government aid to certain indicators, like the jobless rate, so it shrinks or grows without further action by politicians.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
0

#15360 User is offline   PassedOut 

  • PipPipPipPipPipPipPip
  • Group: Advanced Members
  • Posts: 3,661
  • Joined: 2006-February-21
  • Location:Upper Michigan
  • Interests:Music, films, computer programming, politics, bridge

Posted 2020-May-16, 13:31

British Writer Pens The Best Description Of Trump I’ve Read

Quote

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of *****. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?' If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

A pretty fine description. And seeing all this, lots of folks do react: "Trump is my kind of guy."
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
4

  • 1071 Pages +
  • « First
  • 766
  • 767
  • 768
  • 769
  • 770
  • Last »
  • You cannot start a new topic
  • You cannot reply to this topic

80 User(s) are reading this topic
0 members, 80 guests, 0 anonymous users