Category: The Current Situation
For someone who can’t quote a Bible verse off the top of his head, posing with it reverently is high hypocrisy. It’s also poor preparation, given all the pandering he does to the religious right — as the saying goes, “Even the devil can cite scripture for his own purpose.”
But to clear protestors with tear gas just to get a photo op to put your faux piety on display? And without checking with the church, bishop or priest? There’s just no bottom with Trump — he can always go lower.
For context, see this USA Today article: ‘I am outraged’: DC bishop denounces Trump’s church visit after police clear protesters with tear gas, or this New York Times article: Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church.
And in case you’re not familiar with that story, I’ll let Wikipedia do the explaining in plain English.
For those of you who want something closer to the source material, you can consult the Bible in a few places:
Here’s El Greco’s rendition of the same scene:
One of the people featured in The Daily Show’s Heroes of the Pandumbic — a supercut of Fox News talking heads and Republicans either downplaying or dismissing the coronavirus threat — was “Dr. Drew” Pinsky, internist-turned-celebrity doctor, whom you might know from Loveline, Dr. Drew Midday, and his voyeurism-disguised-as-therapy show, Celebrity Rehab.
Dr. Drew is one of those people that the public turn to for medical advice, so I consider my posting this supercut of him downplaying or dismissing the threat posed by the novel to be a public service:
The original was posted by Yashar Ali on Twitter:
Dr. Drew is a snake oil salesman. Really terrible stuff here. What a disgrace. pic.twitter.com/Eh35Ky8yVO
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) April 4, 2020
More “Dr. Drew” videos that didn’t age well
File this one for future reference, folks.
Also worth checking out
Fox News lied, and people died, which features Heroes of the Pandumbic, a supercut of Republicans and Fox New downplaying or dismissing the coronavirus.
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.”
Just about every country in the Americas offers birthright citizenship, a.k.a. jus soli.
A certain president* who had trouble disavowing neo-Nazis at a rally that ended in a murder and who had to be persuaded to explicitly by his son-in-law and daughter to denounce anti-semitism after a mass killing at a synagogue claimed last night in an interview for Axios on HBO (I’m not linking to it) that the US is “the only country in the world where a person comes in, has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits.”
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.
If you go to Wikipedia, there’s a page on jus soli, and it lists the countries that have unrestricted jus soli…
…as well as countries that have jus soli with some restrictions:
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.
— Christina Reynolds (@creynoldsnc) October 30, 2018
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.
— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) October 30, 2018