President Trump breaks so many of the normal rules of politics that it can sometimes be hard to know when his tweets and comments are truly newsworthy. Even by his standards, though, the past several days have stood out. Consider:
Trump said on Monday that a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs” wearing “dark uniforms” had been headed to the Republican National Convention to do “big damage.” The claim is similar to a baseless conspiracy theory that spread online over the summer, well before the convention.
He has declined to condemn the killings of two protesters in Kenosha, Wis. He instead defended the 17-year-old charged in the shootings — a Trump supporter named Kyle Rittenhouse — saying he was acting in self-defense. Trump also promoted a Twitter post that called Rittenhouse “a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump.”
He defended violence committed by his supporters in Portland, Ore., who fired paintballs and pepper spray at Black Lives Matter protesters.
He compared the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha to missing “a three-foot putt” in a golf tournament.
He claimed that “people that you’ve never heard of” and “people that are in the dark shadows” are controlling Joe Biden.
He claimed Democrats were trying to “destroy” suburbs with “low-income housing, and with that comes a lot of other problems, including crime.” He added that Cory Booker — one of the highest-profile Black Democrats — would be “in charge of it.”
He predicted that the stock market would crash if Biden won.
He said that Biden, at the Democratic National Convention, “didn’t even discuss law enforcement, the police. Those words weren’t mentioned.” In fact, Biden held a discussion at the convention on policing, with a police chief.
Trump claimed that he “took control of” the situation in Kenosha by sending in the National Guard. In fact, Wisconsin’s governor, not the president, sent the National Guard.
He retweeted messages asserting that the pandemic’s death toll was overstated. Evidence indicates the opposite is true.
He said that protests against police brutality were actually a secret “coup attempt” by anarchists “trying to take down the President.”
Biden has taken a very different approach to the unrest in Kenosha, Portland and elsewhere. He has told no apparent untruths, and he has criticized violence from both the political left and right — even though many liberals, whose votes Biden needs, are uncomfortable with any criticism of people on their side of the debate.
G.O.P. reaction. The Times tried to reach about a dozen leading congressional Republicans and ask for their reaction to Trump’s claims. “None cared to comment,” Mark Leibovich writes. Senator Mitt Romney offered one of the few public responses, calling the president’s comments “simply jaw-dropping.”
VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!
P.S. I just ordered this mask (above) for myself as well as my husband and three adult children. Oh, did I say VOTE?... 😏
SONG: We Americans by The Avett Brothers
BOOK: A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America by Philip Rucker, Carol Leonnig
POEM: Third Time's a Charm by David Kirby
Don’t you wish the president would just shut up?
I mean, why comment on everything all the time.
Let’s hear it for silence. Yes, the helicopter of the world
is always circling overhead, but only rarely and usually
never does it suddenly fix its spotlight on the genius
that is you. What does he expect, a chattering dolphin
to rear up in front of his every tweet/answer to
a journalist/remark to a staffer who’s not supposed
to leak it but does and go chee-chee-chee-chee?
Mozart ends The Magic Flute with the words
“Triumphant strength has rewarded beauty and wisdom
with an eternal crown,” but he was Mozart.
Even ordinary jibber-jabber can go too far, as when
you give someone a present and they say
“You didn’t have to do that” and you think, “I know
I didn’t have to, but I wanted to, though I’m having
second thoughts now,” or someone brings a casserole
to your potluck, and you say, “Oh, how lovely,”
and they say, “Yeah, but it’s way salty, plus I left it
in the oven too long,” and you think, “My, doesn’t
that sound delicious!” Actually it was Mozart’s
librettist Emanuel Schikaneder who wrote the end
of The Magic Flute as well as the rest of it, but still.
Doesn’t the president have speech writers?
The divorce firm of Thyden Gross and Callahan
works out of Friendship Village, Maryland (I’m not
making this up) and recently represented a wealthy
Islamic gentleman who invoked the ancient law
of talaq by saying “I divorce thee” three times
to his wife and bestowing the sum of $2,500
on her while retaining the bulk of their two million
dollar estate for himself. The Maryland Court
of Appeals said no, however, stipulating that
the talaq did not afford the same protections
of due process, prenuptial agreements,
and division of property that Maryland law did,
a ruling in which the court is joined by
those Islamic scholars who say it isn’t right to
invoke the talaq in one sitting and that there
should at least be a period of time between
the “three strikes” as well as other learned
devotees of that venerable faith who say
the talaq is reprehensible and shouldn’t be
used at all. Every time the president goes
yada-yada-yada, I wish Mitch McConnell would say,
“I impeach thee, I impeach thee, I impeach thee”
and he’d disappear like the witch in The Wizard
of Oz, and here I’m just referring to the president’s
banal and mendacious utterances and not
the ugly ones like grabbing somebody by their
you-know-what. In this respect he could at least
take lessons in subtlety from 18th century German
writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who said
of the prostitutes he encountered in London
that “they attach themselves to you like limpets”
and “they seize hold of you after a fashion
of which I can give you the best notion by the fact
that I say nothing about it.” Now you’re talking.
[David Kirby, 10/13/19 : “I have misgivings about the current move to impeach. That process is usually used to convince the people that the president is a bad person, but we already know that. Too, I bet this president would be delighted; it’ll just give him another chance to feel sorry for himself. No, I’d prefer that he just go away. That’s called magical thinking, as is this poem’s call for Mitch McConnell to do the deed.”]
QUOTE: "When you blame others, you give up your power to change." ~ Robert Anthony
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