“RESOVLVED [sic],” the resolution reads, complete with a sloppy typo that would’ve been caught by an attentive proofreader or even a word processor from the previous millennium, “That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention…”
In short, they say they’re doing a great job, they’d like four more years of doing said great job with Trump nominally at the helm.
This election’s no longer a referendum on liberal vs. conservative — it’s been reduced to a choice between semi-competence and a toxic, self-serving, half-assed autocratic cult of personality.
“Der Feuerteufel” (it means “firestarter” but literally translates as “fire devil”), which appeared on the cover of Germany’s premier news magazine “Der Spiegel”. Tap to see at full size.
Last month, this painting appeared on the cover of Der Spiegel (here’s the international edition, in English), the most-read news magazine not just in Germany, but Europe as well. Its title is Der Feuerteufel (the firestarter), and its subtitle is Ein Präsident setzt sein Land in Brand (“a president sets fire to his country”).
Is it possible to neuter a dog twice? It certainly appears to have happened to the bitch in the lower right-hand corner.
Worth reading
The recent Rolling Stone article on Lindsey Graham has a great quote from former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt that perfectly summarizes Graham and lot of other people who’ve hitched their fortunes, identities, and hopes to Trump’s incredibly corrupt wagon:
“People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now,” Schmidt says. “The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”
Not true. The idea of birthright citizenship is a big enough deal that there’s a highfalutin’ Latin term for it: jus soli (“right of the soil”), and many countries have it.
It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s statement, made a week before the mid-term elections, as a stunt — but it’s more than that. It’s an attempt to prime people to take an idea that was formerly out-of-bounds and move the Overton Window so that it’s now possible to discuss, and eventually make palatable. It’s all in the service of making overt bigotry acceptable again, and it’s more than just a stunt:
Hey, Democratic friends: YES, the attack on birthright citizenship is a political stunt. Yes, it’s unconstitutional and his reasoning is based in lies. But it’s also a terrifying attack on many people. PLEASE do not call it a distraction or argue we should ignore it.
Now what we need is for more media organization to stop simply and uncritically reporting Trump’s statements, but make factual corrections when needed:
We have deleted a tweet about President Trump’s claim that the U.S. is the only country that grants birthright citizenship because it failed to note that his statement was incorrect.
