On Twitter, people like me regularly get called “sore losers” by Trumpeters. It just makes me roll my eyes. This is not about winning and losing. We all lost, even them, they just don’t know it yet.
You know, I am not a particular Kennedy apologist or an awed fan – I was 12 when he was murdered – but I have discussed Kennedy with historians. For his incredibly short tenure, he was a very important president.
Allowing a non-lawyer to be on the Supreme Court strikes me as a very American thing, in a good way. Another is that the speaker of the house doesn’t have to be a member of congress.
I very much believe in the Intentional Fallacy. If Donald Trump lies and dopes and bumbles and staggers his way into peace in the middle east, he gets credit for it. He owns it.
So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.
The odd thing is that Trump’s hand movements don’t seem to coordinate with the topic at hand. Most pols manage to make their hand movements correspond with the message, so a slash will accompany emphasis, etc.
You should support Israel not because it is Jewish but because it is a sane, secular democracy. You want Lebanon to be at peace. You don’t care much about Kuwait.
The intelligent Trump supporter will be someone who is so cynical about politics that he wants the world blown up, and doesn’t care if the person doing the blowing up is an obnoxious, infantile vulgarian. I don’t know where to find these people. Do you?
Reporters are not merely recording devices that take down what people say and repeat it in print; we are expected to use our knowledge and experience both for triage – deciding what’s important to cover and what isn’t – and for contextualizing, analyzing and such.
I don’t think there is prejudice against atheists the same way there is prejudice against fat people. I don’t think people hate or contemn atheists; I think people feel sorry for atheists.
It is hard to quantify the value of name recognition, but Donald Trump has gone from fame to international mega-fame. That has to be gargantuan when your business is your name.
