ON MATTERS OF DUBIOUS INTEREST
Nobody really trusts the media now, so I asked Gemini to replay some of Jeffrey Epstein’s insults to Trump in the recently released horde of materials. . . . Well, they may have been friends once. Continue reading “Trump and Epstein Cannot Escape AI”
“Only a bad person would celebrate violence or make crass jokes about it,” [Jon] Stewart said before sharing a series of clips of MAGA stars laughing and joking about the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
Continue reading “Two and Two Are Five”
We forget how bad things were in 2016 before Trump’s inaugural. Blacks were strongly behind Clinton but some, like Don King, were stumping for her opponent. The dialogue that follows will be part of my new book. Continue reading “Ugly People, Ugly Language”
There is no way to ignore Trump, but you can work around him. This seems to be what the world is finding. A personal answer might be: rediscovering connections to the significant people and circumstances that were part of one’s life history, reaffirming your values. For me this meant recognizing how I sustained myself for 91 years in this strange world. I tried various roads to avoid the sinkholes. Continue reading “After Trump, Making Connections”
It’s like Trump’s fiasco with the tariffs. And what a sick thrill it must be to dismantle a well-functioning government branch. Now he would abolish the Department of Education—created by an act of Congress so it’s likely that he will not succeed. Trump can’t order the Department out of existence but he can harass it and cut funds and people to destroy its good works and functions.
―We got to carve it up in such a way that it doesn’t start a war, Vlad. We cut off most of their weapons, but we got to give Z. something.
―Well, I know that. But, like you, I won’t permit that scumbag to join NATO. The threat to peace then blows up tenfold, and I won’t fight all of Europe. Continue reading “Trump and Putin Meet on Ukraine”
Nobody likes to eat crow. So here’s David Rothkopf, another public intellectual who refuses to do so: “In my view, not only is Donald Trump a terrible choice to be our president, but that Kamala Harris would have been an exceptionally good leader for America.” Well, David, I endorsed her too, but it’s over and she was partly responsible for blowing it. So let us move on and hear how other prominent liberal critics expiated their guilt.
Well, why not? They are bombarded with constant negative scrutiny: that the race is too close to call, that the Harris campaign has screwed up royally, that the pollsters are all over the lot, that the choice of Tim Walz was a disaster.
Zak Cheney-Rice, a sharp writer for New York Magazine, tells us some of the things that have made for this “autumn chill” on the campaign. The joyous liberal response after the demise of Biden has given way to anxiety and jitters. I think the biggest problem is that Harris looks unsettled and has pivoted to the center. Per Zak, she “has betrayed [the campaign’s] original promise of unbridled possibility, the consequences of which will reverberate beyond November 5 regardless of who wins.”
Walz successfully went after Vance before their debate, then played nice during their encounter. Worse, from my point of view, is Harris’s failure to move off the Biden stance on Gaza and Israel. Young voters are particularly turned off by this. Zak says:
Israel’s brinkmanship is an issue in which Harris has failed to create meaningful daylight not only between herself and Trump but between herself and the unpopular Biden. The result will be her co-ownership of atrocities against Gazan civilians as well as further confirmation that, for all the history-making potential of her candidacy, we have seen these politics before.
Harris wants voters to embrace change but she is not giving them a real roadmap of how to get there. For many, I believe, it looks like more of the same, and they have clearly repudiated Biden. Trump will wave his magic wand and all will be well. In his rallies, he pledges to end the war in Ukraine “in twenty-four hours.”
Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before.
Maybe MAGA means “Magic AGAin.” When these people have lost power over things they value, magical thinking gives them a sense of control. Obviously, this notion is fundamental to Trump’s appeal. For such voters, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. From that point of view, as many have pointed out, Harris is really the unknown quantity. She is offering them what they perceive as more of the same policies that have made their lives dismal.
Some of us remember Lyndon Johnson renouncing the presidency in 1968, one of his finest moments. Some of us remember Nixon being forced out under pressure. Now we hold our collective breaths to see what Joe Biden will do. If he doesn’t resign, there is no hope of beating Trump in the next election. The results of which we leave to your imagination.
In one sense his decision will rest in the hands of his family, his wife Jill and his longtime followers. The more senile Joe has become, the more they have protected him. He offers us few press conferences, infrequent unstaged interviews, clichéd speeches, and the same old downhome Scranton working class bullshit. Senile people forever keep on referencing the past.
As someone who has done debate prep, it appeared to me that he likely had no professional coaching and relied solely on his White House cronies (Ron Klain, Bob Bauer et al.). James Carville said it too: “He doesn’t have advisers. He has employees.” Odds are they stuffed him with the obvious issues and canned responses. No professional coach would have let him appear as he did. Pee in your pants, call in sick, for God’s sake.
Presidential debates generally are more style than substance, and they are a perfect vehicle for a convincing conman. Trump rapidly floats his same (or worse) whoppers and gets away with it uncontested. He paralyzes our analytical powers and takes obvious joy in manipulating people. Many want to believe him because it’s their form of heroin. In the flood of this the truth cannot prevail; people like Truthful Joe cannot prevail.
Part of the problem is that Biden has usually wanted to avoid being in the public eye―and the public hasn’t been crazy about seeing him either. Lili Loofbourow in the WaPo nicely put it this way: “Biden’s unwillingness and inability to court attention has, for example, made it difficult for him to sell the public on his achievements.”
There have been many comments urging Biden to quit—and many urging the opposite. Among the best and most forthright of the former is Tom Friedman’s. He urges his friend Joe Biden to step aside.
I had been ready to give Biden the benefit of the doubt up to now, because during the times I engaged with him one on one, I found him up to the job. He clearly is not any longer. His family and his staff had to have known that. They have been holed up at Camp David preparing for this momentous debate for days now. If that is the best performance they could summon from him, he should preserve his dignity and leave the stage at the end of this term.
Finally, it’s not overly dramatic to say that the state of the nation is at stake and we face a drastic challenge to democratic rule. Your decision, like it or not, is a political one―to win the election. You can discount everything else: the mess that will be wrought on the Democratic convention if Biden drops out, loyalty to the party and the president, the shortcomings of other challengers. Trump made it this way. He cannot survive.
I was twenty-five, fresh out of graduate school at the University of Chicago and had just finished a Master’s degree. I had my doubts whether I’d be up for the grind of getting a Ph.D. and decided to take a year and test out whether teaching English could finally be my profession. At twenty-five you really don’t know what you’re doing.
I got accepted into what is now called the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, formerly a teachers college in the remote middle of Wisconsin, and God it was cold there. Back then in 1959 the college was evolving into a more liberal arts institution and later became part of the UW system.
Anyhow, I joined the junior faculty and taught English to what were mostly rural and unsophisticated white kids. I was nervous and unsure in my first classes and had no idea how to communicate to these unspoiled, smiling children from another planet.
The McCarthy era had just passed but was still fouling the political air, certainly in my liberal circle. I’ve written before about how the Army-McCarthy hearings brought about my political exit from a Republican family that to some degree tolerated him.
Anyhow, in one of my first classroom recitals I called out the Senator as some kind of sick despot. The kids just sat there, but one guy, we can call him Jay, got up and announced that the class was no place for politicking and that basically I should keep my political opinions to myself.
I was taken aback and, after later talk with faculty friends, realized that maybe Jay was right. Political controversy was not welcome in that environment, and the Senator of course was from Wisconsin.
I saw some reference to him in the recent blaring discussions over the Ivy presidents and the GOP’s general anger over their waffling responses. Big Donor Bill Ackman has made much noise about firing the presidents and holding all those students protesting Israel to account. Larry Summers, a former Harvard president, agreed with him but said “asking for lists of names is the stuff of Joe McCarthy.”
We haven’t yet realized the depth of the Senator’s vicious pursuit of communists, but an attempt to bring down those hated liberal universities might be in the offing. One must remember that counselor Roy Cohn was the source of Joe McCarthy’s atrocities, just as he later became consigliere to Donald Trump. There is no honor among thieves.
According to several reports, Tucker Carlson got fired for using the “c-word” in reference to one of his bosses. And the Fox newsroom apparently was awash in unwholesome epithets, often sexual in nature. Such is the state of far-right conservatism. But heavy-duty expletives, once stigmatized by politicians and the media, now prevail everywhere.
You surely have noticed this. Films and pop music seem to glory in their ever more funky language. The staid New York Times now grudgingly accepts profanity. So does NBC News and many major media outlets. It seems to be coin of the realm to spice up stories with otherwise little merit.
Readers of this blog know that I’m not a prude about language. I counted eight stories with the word “bullshit” in them, but I like to avoid the stronger stuff unless it’s in a quote. Hot words lose their punch quickly, particularly with overuse. And the purpose is not blasphemy anymore; it’s putting on an act of being streetwise and hip.
When I was much younger I used foul language a lot. Sometimes it was just a lazy way to make a point or impress a listener, and sometimes that was worth doing. You have to develop a kind of good taste in when and how you swear. That’s lacking in so much of what we hear and see in the media today.
Though this linguistic indulgence began before him, Trump is largely responsible for how such language (and behavior) has flourished. His language is key to how his followers respond to him. Does it help the rest of us understand him? I don’t know. If I called him a coarse motherfucking pussy-grabber, does that clarify anything?
Bless E. Jean Carroll for pursuing her case and telling her story. The Post’s Ruth Marcus says that we need to hear these repellent stories over and again “to remind ourselves of how far Trump has dragged us down into the gutter with him, reduced to his level of tawdry entitlement.”
“Tawdry entitlement.” That really says it all, doesn’t it? Language, as someone said, is the window to the soul.