The poet-president did a private reading of some new pieces yesterday, at his meeting with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency gearing up for the start of the hurricane season, of which Washington Post got hold of an audio recording. There's a simple structure, drily comic tone, and unexpected granularity in the works, which greatly heightens the fantastical oddity of the things he says.
Alternative Facts
by Donald J. Trump
I. Hurricane Harvey
Sixteen thousand people,
many of them in Texas,
for whatever reason that is,
people went out in their boats
to watch the hurricane.
That didn’t work out too well.
That didn’t work out too well.
"I thought you were bringing the beer!" Hurricane viewing party, Houston, 28 August 2017, photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images. In fact it's a volunteer rescue party, saving people's lives, but television images of calm and colorful scenes like these have inspired Trump to imagine an entirely new narrative, like that of the Washington tourists who came out in carriages with blankets and picnic baskets to watch the First Battle of Bull Run.
Fox News media analyst Lauren Ashburn on Sunday suggested that former prisoner of war Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl could be a Taliban sympathizer because he was released after five years of captivity wearing a Muslim "smock."
Ah, fascists! Ilias Kasidiaris of Greece's far-right Golden Dawn party, who tried to beat up two left-wing members of parliament, both women, last Friday, on live national television, was locked up in the TV studio after people called the cops and escaped by busting in the door—now he's announced he's going to sue the women, for "unprovoked defamation", and the TV station for illegal detention.
David Brooks comes out all apocalypytic all of a sudden:
many Republicans have now come to the
conclusion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes. Yuval
Levin expressed the sentiment perfectly in a definitive essay for The Weekly Standard called “Our Age of Anxiety”:
“We have a sense that the economic order we knew in the second half of
the 20th century may not be coming back at all — that we have entered a
new era for which we have not been well prepared. ... We are, rather, on
the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state,
which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the
future of American capitalism."
Jeez, collapsing due to its internal contradictions! Ever hear that before?* And after Götterdämmerung, where are we bound? What's the new social order going to be like?
It's going to be like 1927! or maybe 1890, before that damned Grover Cleveland pushed the income tax in with the tariff bill! Because
the current model shifts resources away from the innovative sectors of
the economy and into the bloated state-supported ones, like health care
and education. Successive presidents have layered on regulations and
loopholes, creating a form of state capitalism in which big businesses
thrive because they have political connections and small businesses
struggle.
You didn't think we were going to get Denmark, did you? It's the retroactionary program—when Romney's elected, they're going to Restore the Future, right? get rid of all that sleek blond wood and stainless steel of the future as we know it in favor of what? Steampunk, of course!
*You have to check this out from ExurbanDoug, a quiet Brooks disciple, born to blush unseen and waste his sweetness on the summer air. Presumably he gets these great big ideas atop his great big lawnmower tractor.
¡Todos se asemejan! The website RNCLatinos.com, wooing the Spanish-speaking vote for the Republicans, wanted a nice picture of jolly brown children to demonstrate their friendly feelings. They probably meant Spanish-speaking children, but what they got was a mixture of kids from different parts of Asia, as you can see from the original at Shutterstock. Apparently the gaffe is being repaired, but here's a screenshot—lest we forget.
Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (R-18), the lawmaker who crafted
the state’s controversial anti-immigration law, SB 1070, also known as
the “Papers, please” law, was thrice denied a venue for a fundraiser
scheduled for Thursday afternoon, June 14. According to the Arizona Capital Times,
the former legislator asked two Mexican restaurants and a public school
library to host the event, only to be told to please campaign somewhere
else.
The fundraising event was originally planned to be held at Macayo’s
restaurant in Phoenix, but the plan was scuttled by activist Dee Dee
Garcia Blase of Arizona’s Tequila Party, a conservative Latino group
formed in reaction to the deportation-happy Tea Party. Garcia Blase
organized a protest to be held outside the restaurant during the event
and contacted Macayo’s corporate offices, which led the restaurant to
cancel the event on Thursday morning.
Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (R-Mesa). From Mesa Arizona Now!
How do you like the outfit? And how do you like this outfit, from Tucker ("I am so not gay") Carlson's Daily Caller, celebrating "with hot American women" for Flag Day on Thursday?
And this one?
Abbie Hoffman. Via Tristero at Digby's Hullaballoo.
(a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as
a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or
property.
(b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.
(c) The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.
(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or
drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but
always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always
arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red
below, should be used for covering a speaker’s desk, draping the front
of the platform, and for decoration in general.
(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in
such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in
any way.
(Apologies to Monsieur Bouffant for appropriating all his research here; I didn't mean to, but the image of Senator Pearce is my discovery and once I had that I couldn't stop.)
