Monday Trump Dump

Image from Reddit via Giphy.

Trump responds to allegations from British prime minister:

“Number one I’m not stupid, I can tell you that right now. Just the opposite. I don’t think I’m a divisive person. I’m a unifier.” (Via Independent)

Well, then, that settles that. Who would know better than the man himself? He's not so sure whether he's divisive or not, but he's positive on the stupid issue. No pussyfooting or equivocation, no "I have no recollection of being stupid" or "it depends on what the meaning of 'stupid' is". Just boldly acknowledging the fact.

Brooks's Imaginary Problem

Alfred Hitchock's The Lodger, 1927. Via somebody's Tumblr.

Shorter David Brooks, "Clinton's Imagination Problem", New York Times, April 6 2016:

Hillary Clinton seems very nice, but her ideas for revitalizing the lives of Appalachian coal miners whose livelihood has disappeared are just the same old stale Democratic nostrums, like trying to create new jobs to replace the lost ones. Instead, she needs to consider some fresh approaches such as that of David Cameron's Conservative Party in Britain, of reweaving the social fabric through relationship counseling and parenting classes. I mean who needs a job when you can get a social reweave?

So he's returned from his excellent adventure in West Virginia, though it remains unclear whether he ever did manage to get out of that hotel room; the only West Virginia experience he discusses is reading the local papers (Charleston Gazette-Mail) online.

From which he learned, of course, that things are pretty dire in West Virginia, as he probably might have suspected already. Indeed he might have been afraid to leave his hotel room, under the impression that the entire population consists of fiendish drug addicts, which would be an exaggeration. As he did earlier this week, he offers some evidence that he recently did go outdoors in Pennsylvania for some reason, and there, certainly, the drug addicts are pretty much wall-to-wall:

A Simple Matter of Fairness

Marguerite de La Motte and Claire McDowell in The Mark of Zorro (1920). Via Fritzi, of course.

David Brooks misses the good old days ("What Republicans Should Say", January29 2016) :

For a few decades, American and British conservatism marched in tandem. Thatcher was philosophically akin to Reagan. John Major was akin to George Bush.

That's precisely 1.2 decades when the tandem act was in effect, from Reagan's inauguration in 1981 to Clinton's in 1993 (Thatcher was prime minister 1979-90, Major 1990-97), but you were saying?

But now the two conservatisms have split. The key divide is over what to do about the slow-motion devastation being felt by the less educated, the working class and the poor.