NBC News: RFK Jr. Says a Trump White House Would Immediately Push to Remove Fluoride From Water
Mediaite: Biden Clenches Fists, Grits Teeth As He Calls Trump Someone You Want to ‘Smack in the Ass’ in Scranton Rant
The Hill: Trump Says He ‘Shouldn’t Have Left’ the White House in 2021
(TMD)
When George Washington was 12, he began copying by hand “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” The first rule states: “Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present.” Rule No. 65 says: “Speak not injurious words, neither in jest nor earnest; scoff at none though they give occasion.”
A 1949 U.S. Army pamphlet, “Personal Conduct for the Soldier,” offers similar prescriptions. In the foreword, Gen. Omar Bradley noted that good conduct was as applicable to the civilian as the soldier. Under the section titled “Self Control”: “You make a fool of yourself every time you let the old mind and body get out of control. . . . If you lose self-control, you’re like a ship without a rudder.” The section on “The Courteous Leader”: “Most great leaders are kind and courteous. . . . The leader who treats his men badly will find that his men behave badly. . . . A courteous attitude toward all races, nationalities, and religious faiths helps a man get along with people.”
… Mr. Trump has no self-control. He lashes out at immigrants, religious groups and military heroes. He lies with reckless abandon. In August, in what was outlandish even by Mr. Trump’s standards, he reposted on Truth Social a picture of Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton above a crude sexual joke. Just last week he was regaling a crowd about Arnold Palmer’s anatomy. These are things a disturbed 15-year-old boy would do, not the commander in chief, not the man who holds the nuclear codes, not the leader of the free world.
More recently, Mr. Trump called Ms. Harris “mentally impaired” and a “s— vice president.” This is a former president of the United States, a man who might represent the nation again. And for those of you who dismiss this kind of language or, worse, defend it, if Mr. Trump is re-elected you shouldn’t be surprised if this kind of aberrant behavior continues. And everything about it will affect the future of the nation.
Being a person of good character matters. Doing what is right matters because when a leader exhibits honor, integrity and decency, it instills those qualities in the culture of the institution and in the next generation of leaders. What will the culture of America look like if Donald Trump is re-elected? What will the next generation of leaders look like if they are followers of Donald Trump?
William McRaven, Trump Fails George Washington’s Civility Test (unlocked)
From the horse’s — ahem! — mouth
I can’t not pass along this link to the New York Times Editorial Board (unlocked).
This is not fake news. It’s from his own mouth.
I understand that Kamala Harris is pretty unpalatable. At least because my state’s electors are going to Donald Trump anyway, I will vote for a Third Party ticket, as I’ve said repeatedly.
You can figure out your own response, but if Trump wins and does have of the vicious things he’s promising, there’s going to be a lot of buyer’s remorse and phony “how was I to know … ?”
Don’t be among tomorrow’s remorseful buyers.
Sociopathy
It would never occur to members of the reality-based community to shoehorn more than 100 false or misleading claims into a single two-hour speech, as Donald Trump did on March 2, 2019. The whole idea of spewing lies strikes them as bizarre and sociopathic (which it is).
Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge
Just plumb worn out
[Y]ou don’t need to think Trump is a fascist to be sick and tired of his show.
How cynical can politics get?
We thought we’d seen everything in politics, but you really can’t top the spectacle of Democrats attacking California GOP Rep. David Valadao for—get this—voting to impeach Donald Trump. Democrats are more worried about Mr. Trump having coattails than they are that he’ll destroy democracy.
“David Valadao turned his back on President Trump and the whole MAGA movement,” says a new TV spot running in California’s 22nd district. The ad cites the five-term Congressman’s vote to impeach Mr. Trump in early 2021 and runs a clip of him saying, “We don’t need President Trump.” The ad concludes: “With a record like that, who needs David Valadao?”
The ad is sponsored by the Democratic group Voter Protection Project, which is funded by House Majority PAC, which is associated with the House Democratic leadership.
Is the Grey Lady secretly pro-Trump?
In a cosmos apparently consisting mostly of fun-house mirrors, there apparently are people who think POTUS 2024 is close because prestige media have been too easy on Trump.
Freddie deBoer is having none of it:
Donald Trump is a uniquely divisive politician with a lot of baggage who still inspires deep love from vast throngs of people. This election is very tight because Kamala Harris is and has always been a limited politician who has particular difficulty speaking off the cuff, because the Democrats are a feckless center-right party who stand for nothing and thus can’t offer any compelling alternative to the Republicans, and because we live in a country with bozo citizens ruled by a corrupt and evil plutocrat class. But it’s also very tight because Donald Trump is extremely popular with about a third of the population in the United States, a county with an apathetic citizenry and an idiotic presidential election system, such that a guy only a third of the country likes can win the presidency.
…
Let’s look at the headlines of some recent pieces from the NYT Opinion section.
A Racist Joke at Trump’s New York Rally Could Be a Costly Mistake
Onstage in New York, Trump Gazes Lovingly at His Reflection
That Revolting Rally Was a Sign of Weakness
My Fellow Republicans, It’s Time to Say Enough With Trump: The time has come for my fellow Republicans to put country above party.
Trump Says the Country Is ‘Dying.’ The Data Say Otherwise: Look at trends, not anecdotes.
Why Trump Has an Edge With These 11 Michigan Voters - Even Though They Don’t Like Him
Trump’s Biggest Con: Pretending to Support American Workers
Anita Hill: The Smearing of Kamala Harris
‘Crazy’ Is Beginning to Sound Like an Understatement [it’s Trumpers who are crazy, if you couldn’t guess - ed.]
MAGA Unchained in Madison Square Garden: Trump’s big rally featured unadulterated racism and more talk of “enemies from within.”
Michelle Obama: ‘I Am Asking You, From the Core of My Being, to Take Our Lives Seriously’
The Real Reasons the G.O.P. Is Spending Millions on Anti-Trans Ads: Republicans are banking on an issue that isn’t a priority for voters - trans rights.
Two Billionaires, Two Newspapers, Two Acts of Self-Sabotage [because they didn’t put out endorsements saying Trump is bad -ed.]
Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being ‘Never Trump’
How Bad Do You Want It, Ladies? — Donald, your insecurity is showing
Could Eminem Snap Gen X Voters Back to Reality? [by saying Trump is bad - ed.]
Trump Acts Erratically. Is This Age-Related Decline?
Don Jr. Is Making Plans [e-e-e-evil plans! -ed.]
Maggie Haberman on What an Unleashed Trump Might Do [bad stuff! -ed.]
The Guardrails [That Kept Trump Caged In, Metaphorically -ed.] Failed. Now It’s Down to Us.
Trump Is Telling Us What He Would Do. Believe Him: The former president’s most disturbing statements are not bluster. They are a road map to what he will do if elected again.
How Trump Could Bankrupt Social Security
Trump’s Election Reversal Dreams Are Dead [score one for the good guys!!! -ed.]
There Are Four Anti-Trump Pathways We Failed to Take. There Is a Fifth.
Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy and the Unconfirmables of a Second Trump Administration -Back in the White House, Trump would get input from a bestiary of nihilists, destructionists and even criminals. [are criminals worse than “destructionists”? — ed.]
Why Trump’s Closing Argument Is Full of ‘Locker Room Talk’
James Carville: Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win
America Is Playing With Fire: It’s both frightening and disturbing to think that American voters could once again make someone as unhinged and unbridled as Donald Trump the president [unhinged AND unbridled! -ed.]
A Second Trump Administration Would Be a Carnival of Corruption and Greed
Why the Oil and Gas Industry Is So Afraid of Kamala Harris: The Democratic candidate’s agenda takes climate change seriously
Sorry, Trump: ‘There Is No American Race or Blood That Outsiders Can Pollute’
The One Thing About Trump I Am Not Worried About: This time around, it would be much harder for Trump to try to steal the election
Trump’s Charity Toward None: The Catholic Church’s latest scandal: fawning over Donald
American Business Cannot Afford to Risk Another Trump Presidency: Donald Trump is not running as a champion of business. He is running as a tribune of populist grievance.
My friends: that all comes from about ten days of the paper’s Opinion section.
It’s incredible that so many people sincerely believe that the Times is a secretly pro-Trump publication, as they don’t even bother to pretend that their op/ed section is a space where actual pro-Trump sentiment is going to be shared, outside of a once-or-twice a year novelty piece. (Pieces which inevitably result in Democrats pissing their pants in rage, to no effect.) There is indeed a loud right-of-center contingent there, but they’re all Never Trumpers, or else they’re like Ross Douthat, which is to say firmly, safely outside of mainstream Trumpist culture war. David French is the country’s most prominent Never Trumper, and Bret Stephens is a Never Trumper, and Pamela Paul is a Never Trumper, and David Brooks is inhabited by the ghost of David Broder. If they go so easy on Trump, why can they not scare up a single authentically pro-Trump voice for the Opinion page?
Big Mommy is Not Coming to Save Us
I gotta say, though, that the Trump era has been very kind to the Grey Lady.
Whose idea was it to present Latter-day Saint voters with beer koozies and coffee mugs? The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins chronicled the “thunderously incompetent” rollout of the “Latter-Day Saints for Trump” campaign, and how it might actually have electoral consequences ….
(Via The Morning Dispatch)
Both figures are the phoniest presidential candidates in modern American history. The difference is that the obviously unstable Trump is a first-rate monstrosity. Harris is a second-rate mediocrity.
I thought Michelle Obama was intelligent. Then she appealed to male voters with this:
So fellas, before you cast your vote, ask yourselves: What side of history do you want to be on?
Talking about sides of history is stupid and offensive.
Have you ever looked after toddlers who insist on showing you everything they have done—terrible stick-figure drawings, what they’ve left in the potty—and demand that you admire it? If you have, then you’ve experienced something very similar to Donald Trump’s performance at a Fox News town hall yesterday in Cumming, Georgia, with an all-female audience.
U.S. News and World Report: We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for ‘The Apprentice’
I want to apologize to America. I helped create a monster.
For nearly 25 years, I led marketing at NBC and NBCUniversal. I led the team that marketed “The Apprentice,” the reality show that made Donald Trump a household name outside of New York City, where he was better known for overextending his empire and appearing in celebrity gossip columns.
To sell the show, we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty. That was the conceit of the show. At the very least, it was a substantial exaggeration; at worst, it created a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.
Via The Dispatch
Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”
David Rothkopf, the host of the podcast Deep State Radio, beheld Trump’s descent this week from “being periodically adrift” to something stranger and more savage: “He’s one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” (Mary Azoy, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Steven Rauch, Claremont, Calif., among many others)
Donald Trump himself is “the enemy within.”
The good news is that 1 in 10 Republicans aren’t buying what Trump is selling. The bad news is that 9 in 10 Republicans are chumps.
Think about it: Trump says something stupid, the newspapers report it, and he insists it’s “fake news.” Trump is behind in the polls, and he insists they are “fake polls.” The election comes out the same way the polls did—with Trump losing—and he insists it’s a “rigged election.” As the political philosopher Raylan Givens put it, “You run into an a–hole in the morning, you ran into an a–hole. You run into a–holes all day, you’re the a–hole.” Maybe it’s the case that the news is all fake and the polls are phony and the elections are rigged and we’re having all these hurricanes because shadowy Jews control the weather and the Bilderbergers put that worm in Bobby Kennedy’s brain … or maybe—hear me out!—Donald Trump is a loser, a charlatan, and an incompetent who won in a freak election in 2016 thanks mainly to his status as a genuine celebrity among the merely “Fox News famous.” You don’t have to be Occam and you don’t need a razor to cut through the bulls—t.
Look at the Republican Party today: Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Hulk Hogan, and Donald Trump. For Pete’s sake, if I were to write that the Republican Party needs to get rid of that handsy weirdo, you’d have to ask: Which one? It’s the only way Republicans know how to reach across the aisle, as it were.
No wonder that 1 in 10 Republicans say they’re going to vote for Harris in November. One wonders a good bit about the other nine.
Cheney’s argument for Harris is a classical liberal version of the GOP’s “Flight 93 election” reasoning from 2016. It’s a basic matter of proper prioritizing: Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy. If you hand power back to Trump, he’ll crash the constitutional order. The conservative thing to do under the circumstances is to storm the cockpit by backing Harris, who’ll at least keep the plane in the air.
…
Nothing about Democrats’ Supreme Court “reform” nonsense is going to land Kamala Harris or Chuck Schumer under federal indictment for numerous felonies. Nor would anything prevent voters who dislike seeing Congress tinker with the judiciary from punishing Democrats severely at the polls. If, on the other hand, Trump had successfully connived, defrauded, and intimidated his way into remaining in power for a second term after losing an election, all institutional checks designed to make the executive accountable to the people he serves would have been defeated. What he did wasn’t just a difference in magnitude relative to what Democrats hope to do with the court—it was a difference in kind.
… Trump has actually tried to overturn a presidential election. For all her faults, Kamala Harris has done nothing remotely comparable. Right-wingers keen to draw civic equivalencies between the two have a knack for glossing over that. Both nominees have proposed certain indefensible ideas; only one has taken America to the brink to show that he means business.
Frankly, Trump is so manifestly unfit for office in ways that Harris isn’t that basing the case against him on his 2020 coup plot arguably does him a favor by overlooking what a full-spectrum cretin he is.
…
Defeat Trump, save the plane, and then get ready to start barking at Captain Kamala Harris on which way she should steer. It’s straightforward from here.
Trump’s rejection of the rule of law is comprehensive: He’s upset that people suspected of crimes like shoplifting aren’t prosecuted, yet he’s also furious that he is himself subject to prosecution when accused of crimes. Earlier this month, he promised retribution for those members of the law-enforcement community who have tried to hold him accountable, “which will include long term prison sentences.” In other words: They would lose not only their pension or car, but their freedom. He also promises to pardon those who ransacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Policing is only for those Trump hates. He and his friends get a pass.
David A. Graham, Trump’s Dark Turn Toward Police Violence
Another person wrestling with it is Mitt Romney, who’s on his way out of the Senate and into an uncertain future. If ever there were a man teed up for a happy retirement, it’s him; he has money to burn and a famously big, loving family to enjoy. But he doesn’t sound happy. “How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids? I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group,” he complained with exasperation recently to The Atlantic.
The person his kids and grandkids might need protecting from is the Republican nominee for president. Mitt is so worried about Donald Trump abusing executive power to harass the Romney family that it’s contributed to his decision not to endorse Kamala Harris, according to the Washington Post. When Trump talks about “retribution” against his political enemies, Romney takes him literally and seriously.
Should he? Is Trump’s “retribution” chatter an empty threat designed to motivate his fans to vote? Or is he bonkers enough to order a revenge campaign from the Oval Office?
“It doesn’t matter,” you might say, fairly enough. Whether Trump’s demagoguery is strategic or proof of insanity, he’s unfit for office either way. And American voters seem to agree that it doesn’t matter, as there seem to be enough of them who don’t care about either the question or the answer to reelect him. “Affectation or bonkers?” is a question for serious citizens, not ours.
Trump’s promises of retribution against his political opponents is classic autocratic behavior and utterly plausible, especially insofar as he plans to avoid having any “adults in the room” in his second term — only ass-kissers. Please do not vote for this monster.
When he was governor of Indiana, Mike Pence was widely hated, and I couldn’t understand why, let alone share the hatred. Now, because he obeyed the law , instead of obeying Trump, on 1/6/2021, there’s a tendency to imagine him with a halo.
But until he apologizes convincingly for a preplanned stunt at taxpayer expense during his Vice Presidency, he’ll get no more than tepid support from me.
#hypocrisy #retribution #policing #Mitt_Romney #Mike_Pence #costly_stunts
I rise to defend my smart phone against the partisans of flip phones and Light Phones.
On my smart phone, I can:
I am not evangelizing, but I am explaining why you’re not going to shame me out of my smart phone.
Special Counsel proposes making public more evidence from Trump election case. Trump plans massive shake-up of US Justice Department. Trump threatens to prosecute Google for showing ‘bad stories’ about him.
How can anyone who passed high school civics consider voting for this man?
Nick Catoggio, on Trumpworld rallying around newly-indicted NYC Mayor Eric Adams:
The cultiest element of Trump’s very culty political movement is that it has its own internal morality that supersedes traditional morality. That’s why so many creeps, crooks, and kooks are drawn to it. Like any cult leader worth his salt, Trump offers acceptance and community to those who find such things hard to come by in respectable society.
MAGA’s internal morality is based on two principles. First, Trump’s needs trump all other interests, political, moral, or legal, without exception. Second, one’s moral worth is measured by how antagonistic one is toward the enemy. No one who hates the right people can be truly “bad,” no matter how badly they’ve behaved in conventional moral terms.
You see, Eric Adams is not happy with all the immigrants in New York City. The enemy of my enemy is my friend — conditionally, of course.
CNN: Study Asked 10 And 11-Year-Olds About Trump And Harris. These Are The Themes That Came Out
Interviewer: “What’s the first word that pops into your head when you hear the name Kamala Harris?”
Fourth grader: “Liar”
Interviewer: “What’s the first word that pops into your head when you hear Donald Trump?”
Different fourth grader: “Pure evil.”
As the claims about the Haitian immigrants and their pet-munching ways began imploding this weekend, J.D. Vance turned up on the Sunday shows to declare that he regrets nothing. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Springfield’s representative in the Senate boasted to CNN.
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