Haitians are — culturally, my wife Fran and I have seen this when we’ve been down in Haiti — education is prized. So when you look at all of these things, people who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.
- Mike DeWine, Republican Governor of Ohio
This week's featured posts are "Where the race stands" and "Lessons from the Haitian Fright".
This week everybody was talking about the debate
One featured post discusses where the race stands post-debate. This note is just about the debate itself. [video, transcript]
All week, MAGA has been throwing stuff at the wall to try to explain how their God-Hero got completely outclassed by a Black woman he has claimed is "dumb as a rock". So far I've heard:
- It didn't happen. Trump actually won. But apparently that story wasn't convincing even in MAGA-World, so they also had to come up with explanations for Trump's defeat.
- The moderators were against him. It wasn't fair to fact-check him more just because he lied more frequently and more outrageously than Harris. Moderators should have sat there stone-faced when Trump claimed babies are being executed after birth, immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, or that Trump was being "sarcastic" when he admitted that he had lost the 2020 election.
- Kamala must have gotten the questions ahead of time. Obviously there is no way Harris could have anticipated that she would be asked about inflation, abortion, immigration ...
- Kamala's earring was really an earphone. I suspect this claim is motivated by jealousy. Trump's handlers wish he had been wearing an earphone, so they could have kept yelling "Forget about crowd sizes! Get back to inflation!"
- Kamala was using witchcraft. Seriously. Lance Wallnau, the so-called "father of American Dominionism" detected the "occult empowered deception, manipulation, and domination" on Harris' side, and believes that "something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum". Clearly we need to throw her in a lake and see if she floats. This theory has one advantage over all the others: It explains why Trump floundered. (How could Harris knowing the questions cause Trump to sound like a raving lunatic?) But if Kamala is secretly the reincarnation of Marie Laveau -- I can sort of see a resemblance -- it all makes sense. He rambled and told outrageous lies not because he's old and his brain never did work very well, but because she cast a spell of confusion on him. [BTW: MAGA really should thank me for doing that bit of historical research. If it catches on, we'll know they read the Sift.]
Trump managed to pull a bunch of that together into this totally sane and rational Truth Social post:
ABC FAKE NEWS has been completely discredited, and is now under investigation. Did they give Comrade Kamala the questions? It was 3 on 1, but they were mentally challenged people, against one person of extraordinary genius. It wasn’t even close, as is now reflected in the polls. I WON THE DEBATE!
About the polls ... well, no, they don't say Trump won the debate. But why would Trump start telling the truth at this late date?
My favorite post-debate meme went something like: "No wonder Trump thinks Harris is a Marxist. She just publicly owned him."
Trump has taken a lot of well-deserved ridicule for claiming to have only "concepts of a plan" on healthcare. (He's been using that phrase at least since 2019.) Paul Krugman explains what's going on here: The "phenomenal" healthcare plan Trump has been vaguely discussing since 2015 provides affordable coverage to all Americans. But there are really only two ways to do this:
- The government insures people directly, as in Bernie's Medicare for All proposal.
- The government subsidizes private insurance, as in ObamaCare.
Trump has repeatedly said these options are both "disasters", so he's stuck. He can fantasize about having an all-singing all-dancing program that solves everybody's problems. But there's no way to flesh out that fantasy, so it never develops beyond a "concept".
BTW: Trump's "concepts of a plan" flashed me back to a party scene in "Annie Hall", where you overhear some random guest saying: "Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea."
The eating-cats-and-dogs thing grew into its own featured post.
and shots fired on Trump's golf course
We don't know much yet. Sunday, Secret Service agents clearing the hole ahead of Trump spotted a gun barrel in the bushes. They engaged a man who ran away. Reportedly, shots were fired, but whether any were fired by the man in the bushes or just by the agents is unclear. Trump was unharmed. The man, a White American, is now in custody. He appears to be strongly pro-Ukraine, but it's not clear whether that was his motive in stalking Trump.
Trump supporters online have been irresponsibly linking this apparent assassination attempt to the previous attempt, and blaming both on a mysterious "them". Here's Marjorie Taylor Greene:
They are trying to kill him!!! They will do anything to stop him from winning.
As a firmly anti-Trump liberal, let me say this: I don't want him killed and I'm glad nothing came of this attempt. I want Trump discredited, not dead. I want to see him defeated in the election, and I want him to get fair trials on his indictments. If he does go to trial again, I will be rooting for him to be convicted and sentenced to jail. But I don't want him killed. A Trump assassination would probably only unleash something worse on America.
and Laura Loomer
I've decided not to touch the rumors that Trump and Loomer are having an affair. Too often, when a woman rises to some form of prominence, hostile people claim she must be using sex somehow. It's wrong when Trump says it about Harris, and it's wrong here too.
But I don't need to lose my PG-13 rating to criticize Loomer, or to criticize Trump for associating with her. Last week, Loomer responded to a Kamala Harris tweet celebrating her Indian grandparents with a blatantly racist post:
If @KamalaHarris wins, the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.
That was too racist even for Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lindsey Graham. Always quick to take the high road, Loomer responded to Graham by asking him when he was going to come out of the closet.
The Bulwark's Sam Stein observed that if Republicans are worried about Trump being influenced by a conspiracy theorist, that ship sailed a long time ago. He provided a long list of Trump-promoted conspiracy theories going back to Vince Foster's suicide and questioning whether Osama bin Laden had really been killed.
Marcy Wheeler points out that the Loomer problem is the same as the Putin problem: Trump can be manipulated by flattery.
The problem isn’t Laura Loomer. She’s little different than all the other extremists who remain in Trump’s good graces by performing near-perfect sycophancy. The problem is precisely what Tim Walz warned: Trump’s narcissism and his ego make him weak, vulnerable to any person willing to use flattery to win their objectives. Trump’s aides are making the same argument Tim Walz is: that Trump doesn’t have the self-control to protect against extremists making him their ready tool.
and you also might be interested in ...
Just in case you had any doubt that Trump takes everything personally, he posted "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT" to Truth Social Sunday morning. I love the response from never-Trump Republican Rick Wilson:
Invading Moscow in the winter, fighting a land war in Asia, and going up against the Swifties. These are well regarded as key strategic mistakes in history.
And speaking of Taylor, I am struck speechless by Elon Musk's offer to "give you a child and guard your cats with my life". Usually when I see some outrageous statement, I can imagine some situation or some state of mind where I might be tempted to say something similar. But I've got nothing here. I have no idea what Elon could have been thinking.
In my post about the Haitian Fright, I forgot to mention a Chicago hotdog shop's attempt to make commercial hay out of the controversy:
Don't have time to read the Project 2025 manual? Listen to the song instead.
Various people have speculated that Republicans drummed up the Springfield pet-eating story to distract from something else. Here's one possibility: The Republican candidate running against Sherrod Brown for the Senate has been lying about selling off his business interests, and also about having an MBA.
But I find myself agreeing with David Roberts:
It is getting very difficult to determine which MAGA fiasco is supposed to be a distraction from the other MAGA fiascos.
and let's close with something visual
Some while ago I did a closing featuring a Dad who photoshopped his kids. It seems he's still at it. Here we see a demonstration of a basic principle of physics: Actions produce equal and opposite reactions.
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