And continuing with the theme of stupidity, here is an AI-generated video that speaks much truth.
WARNING: Do not watch if you are offended by crude language.
Reflections, Observations, and Analyses Pertaining to the Canadian Political Scene
And continuing with the theme of stupidity, here is an AI-generated video that speaks much truth.
WARNING: Do not watch if you are offended by crude language.
Sadly, the deity does not come off well here. Perhaps a celestial defamation lawsuit is in order? I imagine the punitive damages would be severe.
In the movie, Forrest Gump famously replied when asked if he was stupid, "Stupid is as stupid does."
It is advice American voters should ponder in 2024:
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
In these fraught times, what are critical thinkers to do, other than to muse and despair? It is a question I often ask myself as I watch the United States implode, and worry that the sickness that has besieged its people is having an undeniable influence on politics in Canada. One needs only examine our crazed right-wing for evidence of that.
But the problem seems much worse south of the border, largely due to the cowardice of those seeking the Republican presidential nomination or currying other political favour. With few exceptions, they would rather see the American Republic fall than reduce their own competitive chances. They have freely given themselves over to the darkest of human impulses.
Some Republicans in Congress are still willing to criticise Trump on certain issues and a few, such as Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, are outspoken in their conviction that he is unfit for office. Others, such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have either retired or been ousted.
But most party leaders have stayed silent and fallen into line, apparently terrified of alienating Trump’s fervent support base in what critics describe as political cowardice. Even his main opponents in the party’s presidential primary race have dodged the issue or endorsed his claim of a Democratic witch-hunt and “deep state” conspiracy.
And the sad truth is that with each indictment, Trump's popularity amongst his unhinged base increases. Without principled opposition, that cannot change.
Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist and co-founder of The Lincoln Project, which is merciless in its denunciation of Trump, makes some observations worth noting.
“Not one of the serious candidates – there aren’t many in the primary field – are making any kind of argument other than this is illegitimate, this is wrong, [special counsel] Jack Smith’s the real criminal, all these crazy things. Not one of the serious ones is saying this guy should be in prison, not in the White House.
“I don’t think this is a moment where Trump has been harmed in the primary; it’s solidified it. He’s going to be on TV every minute of every day for weeks and weeks and weeks and every time that happens the fundraising for the other Republicans dries up, their ability to communicate a messaging stops, none of it works. The whole thing is set of perverse incentives and it’s an almost inescapable trap for the rest of the field.”
A different set of rules seems to apply to the orange demagogue. Seemingly without consequences, he openly mocks, slanders and threatens those who stand in his way.
At a court hearing in Manhattan in April, Justice Juan M. Merchan, who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s state prosecution on charges stemming from a hush payment to a porn actress, warned the former president to refrain from making comments that were “likely to incite violence or civil unrest.”
Justice Merchan’s admonition came after Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social saying that “death and destruction” could follow if he were charged in the case in Manhattan.
That same month, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who was presiding over a federal rape and defamation lawsuit filed against Mr. Trump by the writer E. Jean Carroll, warned the former president to stop posting messages about the case. The ones he had already written were “entirely inappropriate,” the judge said.
Mr. Trump had derided the case on social media as a “scam” and personally mocked Ms. Carroll.
After the hearing in front of Justice Merchan, Mr. Trump returned to Florida and to his customary practice, calling the district attorney who brought the New York charges against him, Alvin L. Bragg, a “criminal,” and Justice Merchan himself “a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family.”
Days after Judge Kaplan issued his warning, Mr. Trump attacked him too, saying on a trip to one of his golf courses in Ireland that the judge was “extremely hostile.”
We live in dystopian times, times when selling one's soul for political gain has become commonplace; those who should be protecting their democracy with every fiber of their being have abandoned their responsibilities as they jockey for personal gain.
Sadly, there appears to be few who are willing to save the people from themselves.
Although I am not a big fan of his novels, Don Winslow has been releasing some really interesting videos on Twitter. This is one of them:
For those planning their nuptials, here is a word of advice: make sure Donald Trump isn't there to offer a toast.
And if your name is Donald Trump, you also take the opportunity to talk once again about how a corrupt system screwed you out of a second term.
The chance of Donald Trump being convicted in his upcoming Senate trial is remote. There are far too many Republicans happy to forgive and forget (read that as fear of losing support of the Trump hordes).
There is, however, a quite valid alternative to Senate conviction, as Jennifer Rubin writes:
A criminal trial, both on the former president’s attempt to strong-arm Georgia election officials to change the state’s vote totals and his incitement before the Jan. 6 violent insurrection (coupled with his refusal to immediately and definitively call a halt to the uprising), would serve multiple purposes. If the Senate will not ban him from holding office, a criminal conviction — should Trump be found guilty — would almost certainly do the trick (or at least, we should hope it would in the era of right-wing conspiracy theories).
A criminal conviction would guarantee that Trump cannot run for future office, but it would serve perhaps an even more important function:
[A] criminal trial could provide a severe deterrent for future presidents who attempt to retain power through violence. It is not enough to mouth the empty platitude that the ex-president’s behavior was “unacceptable” if there are no adverse consequences. Without punishment, his failed coup would remain an open invitation to future presidents to try the same sort of power grab. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe observes, “Impeachment is about getting rid of officeholders who endanger the republic by abusing their powers, not about punishing them for their crimes. Punishment still must be meted out if the rule of law is to be respected and wrongdoers are to be held accountable.”
Moreover, as long as the hardcore MAGA crowd keeps repeating the Big Lie that the election was stolen, the need for a full factual airing of the white supremacist plot and the ex-president’s own attempt to induce Georgia to commit voter fraud remains. “If Trump is still maintaining the big lie after January 6, knowing his words have the power to incite violence, then it seems to me it’s potentially indicative of both his intent on the 6th and continued intent to engage in sedition,” says former prosecutor Joyce White Vance. “It’s certainly an interesting piece of evidence for prosecutors to have.”
Donald Trump has made a life and career out of evading consequences for his behaviour and actions. A criminal trial and conviction would go a long way toward rectifying that longstanding injustice.
The him here, of course, would be Donald Trump who, true to form, will never accept the fact that he has been voted out of office. Despite failed efforts at promoting outrageous claims of voter fraud and bogus lawsuits being filed and rejected, the Orange Ogre is still clinging to the delusion that he can remain president.
As reported in News and Guts, the Washing Post writes of an extraordinary call Trump made to Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger:
In the call, Trump urges the fellow Republican to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn the president’s defeat in the state. The Post writes:
The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”
Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected his assertions, explaining that Trump is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 12,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.
You can listen to excerpts of that call below:
It would seem you can take the Donald out of the White House, but you can't take the Don out of the Donald.
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God only brought one guy back from the dead on Easter. Trump is here to bring back the whole economy on Easter 2020. Enjoy this clip (possibly, like, the best ever), share and be sure to subscribe to Making Podcasts Great Again (@TrumpPod) - new every week! pic.twitter.com/aUifVWRzfh
— J-L Cauvin (@JLCauvin) March 24, 2020
Trump uses a pretty small working vocabulary. This doesn’t seem to be a conscious strategy, though it works as well as if it had been. Much was made during primary season of the way in which reading-level algorithms (unreliable though they are) found his speeches pitched at fourth-grade level, ie the comprehension of an average nine-year-old.
The workhorses of his rhetoric are charged but empty adjectives and adverbs. Things are “great”, “wonderful”, “amazing”, “the best”, or they’re “crooked”, “fake”, “unfair”, “failing”. He sprinkles intensifiers liberally: “a very, very, very amazing man, a great, great developer”.Concisely put, the simple language mirrors a simple mind or, as the NYT succinctly put it, Trump has the intellectual depth of a coat of paint.
"There's never been a more popular police officer in this province than Ron Taverner..."And then there is this whopper:
"The front-line police officers, the OPP, are more excited than anyone. They're looking forward to actually having a commissioner that actually cares about the front-line people."
He will be the best commissioner that the OPP has ever seen."
He also praised Taverner as “a cop’s cop” and insisted OPP officers have been ringing his phone off the hook.Sadly, people like Ford and Trump, as I wrote in a recent post, are oblivious to their limitations, instead fancying themselves to be the smartest person in the room. This delusion prompts them to make the kinds of statements that invite only ridicule and dismissal from discerning minds, while having a totally different effect on their base of supporters.
“Trump’s appeal as a presidential candidate depends significantly on the belief that he is a truth-teller who will have nothing to do with the conventional language of politics,” warning that:Without doubt, this analysis is equally applicable to Mr. Ford's acolytes, who show cult-like to their man, despite his manifest incompetence, an incompetence that Martin Regg Cohn addresses at some length in his column today:
“We shouldn’t confuse anti-rhetorical ‘truth telling’ with actually telling the truth. One of the advantages of this positioning is that once listeners are convinced that you’re not trying to deceive them in the manner of a regular politician, they may switch off the critical faculties they usually apply to political speech and forgive you any amount of exaggeration, contradiction, or offensiveness. And if establishment rivals or the media criticize you, your supporters may dismiss that as spin.”
Our embattled premier is uniquely accursed because he is so often the author of his own misfortune. At year-end, Ford keeps running the ball into his own end zone — colliding with allies, trampling on teammates, fumbling at every turn, blinded by hubris.Unquestionably, my post barely scratches the surface of how demagogues abuse language. Clearly, however, an informed awareness is the best defence against such debasement succeeding, but that awareness can only come with an engaged and thinking electorate, the greatest enemy of people like Doug Ford and Donald Trump.
... the arc of the interview was that eventually Derek Black went off to college out of state and found himself contending with educated people who would systematically shred the studies and pseudo-science Black cited in support of his beliefs that, for example, there are IQ differences between races.After the terrible events of Charlottesville, Black expected a full-throated denunciation by all politicians, despite the fact that the 'protesters' had used code words well-known in racist circles, such as "protecting our history and culture."
In short, Black himself received a humiliating education, decided white supremacy was a fringe movement for ignorant, angry people and publicly abandoned it. In return, his family basically disowned him.
That Donald Trump did not immediately denounce the marchers (though he read a boilerplate repudiation from a teleprompter on Monday), said Black, was "weird" and was taken as somewhat of a victory by his racist former fellow travellers, some of whom had shouted "Hail Trump" at the rally.The consequence of this abysmal failure of national leadership was far-reaching:
Then came Trump's news conference on Tuesday, Aug. 15, when he said that some of the marchers in the white nationalist rally were "very fine people" and focused on criticizing the counter-protesters and those who wanted to take down the statue of Lee.
Ask yourself this: how in heaven's name do "fine people" find themselves among torch-waving men shouting about non-white minorities and "blood and soil?" (Look up the provenance of that slogan). And why would a fine person not bolt at the first chant of "Jews will not replace us?"
Trump then said: "You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name [Emancipation Park]."
Now. Look at those last three words: "to another name." Donald Trump, president of the United States, not only thought there were fine people among the white supremacist marchers, he refused to say "Emancipation Park."
Derek Black, listening in a coffee shop, said Trump's words "took my breath away."To fight an evil, one must first be able to name it. Trump's conscious choice not to denounce racism in any credible way, along with his pardon of convicted racist Joe Arpaio, leaves little doubt that a racist is now occupying the White House.
The president had, in his view, validated the white supremacist messaging strategy in a stroke.
What they heard, he said, was "Donald Trump thinks we're fine." All the people who just needed a little extra nudge, to be told their son would be denied university because of affirmative action, or that an immigrant would take their jobs, had just been nudged.
Black called it the most important moment in the history of the modern white nationalist movement. David Duke and other white supremacists rejoiced. They've crawled out from under their rocks and are basking in their president's complicity.
“Have you ever wondered what it really means to be white? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably ‘no.’ But here is your chance!” the description reads.A criticism of the white race? That has proven too much for David Murphy, a Wisconsin state assemblyman,
“Critical Whiteness Studies aims to understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy.”
The course explores “how race is experienced by white people.” But it also looks at how white people “consciously and unconsciously perpetuate institutional racism.”
who expressed outrage last week that taxpayers “are expected to pay for this garbage.”Using the time-honoured cudgel of funding, the assemblyman is expressing his aversion to what used to be one of the main missions of universities, the exploration, discussion and exchange of ideas:
“UW-Madison must discontinue this class. If UW-Madison stands with this professor, I don’t know how the University can expect the taxpayers to stand with UW-Madison.”Within his fiscal gun sights is not just the 'offending' professor, but also the university's administration for allowing this 'outrage' to occur:
In a statement emailed to The Washington Post, Murphy (R) said the decision to approve the class makes him question the judgment of university leaders.All of the above, by the way, was delivered without a hint of irony, suggesting that the good assemblyman's own intellectual reach is lamentably limited.
“I support academic freedom and free speech,” he said. “Free speech also means the public has the right to be critical of their public university. The university’s handling of controversies like this appears to the public as a lack of balance in intellectual openness and diversity of political thought on campus.”
“I could certainly as a citizen or as a father who pays part of my kids’ tuition roll my eyes and raise concerns about some of the classes,” Walker told the newspaper. “But our focus in the budget should be on overall performance and not individual classes.”No one can heave a sigh of relief at this anemic response, especially given the governor's own rather sordid record.
“The allure of Trump’s restaurant, like the candidate, is that it seems like a cheap version of rich,” Tina Nguyen wrote, saying the restaurant “reveals everything you need to know about our next president.”That seems to have led to this retaliatory tantrum:
"Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine," Trump tweeted Thursday morning.At one time, being personally and/or professionally attacked by an incoming president would have been a shocking notion to all but the most rabid among us. Now, I fear, it will simply become a common and expected feature of a Trump presidency, one that may have long term consequences.
"Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!"
According to reporter Daniel Dale, Mr. Trump told at least 560 lies during the course of his campaign. Some lies are audacious in that they are easily disproven – for example, when Mr. Trump claimed he did not tell U.S. citizens to “check out a sex tape” after tweeting to them to do so. Flagrant lying is a hallmark of despotism. It sends the message that one should not bother speaking truth to power when power is the only truth. It implies that the teller of the lie defines reality, no matter what evidence there is to the contrary, including the liar’s own words.It is that later sentence that gives one pause, since the MSM are becoming part of the problem:
... as inauguration looms, Mr. Trump’s team may not have to work too hard to keep the U.S. press in line. U.S. journalists, always his greatest ally due to corporate collaboration and fear of retaliation, [emphasis mine] are already mainstreaming the Trump administration’s most inflammatory ideas. To read the U.S. media today is to see a CNN debate on whether Jews are people, the Associated Press falsely tweet that the KKK has disavowed white supremacy, and countless mainstream media puff pieces on neo-Nazis that focus more on their fashion sense than their fascist beliefs.Will mainstream media thus become normalizers and apologists for the incoming demagogue? If the following is any indicator, there is much to be concerned about:
Donald Trump's campaign struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better media coverage, his son-in-law Jared Kushner told business executives Friday in Manhattan.The price of this access, it appears, was steep:
Kushner said the agreement with Sinclair, which owns television stations across the country in many swing states and often packages news for their affiliates to run, gave them more access to Trump and the campaign, according to six people who heard his remarks.
In exchange, Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary.And what about those outlets that insisted upon calling their own shots?
Kushner ... told the business executives that the campaign was upset with CNN because they considered its on-air panels stacked against Trump. He added that he personally talked with Jeff Zucker about changing the composition of the panels but Zucker refused. He repeatedly said in the panel that CNN wasn't "moving the needle" and wasn't important as it once was, according to three of the people present.So will this be the shape of things to come? Will the unofficial fiat be, "Play ball with the Trump administration or be denied access?"
The campaign then decided not to work as closely with CNN, and Trump ramped up his bashing of the cable network.