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Saturday, August 20, 2016

Let The Horse Race Commence!

Trump didn't apologize for ANYTHING and so, of course, pundits are acting as if he apologized for EVERYTHING.
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2 comments:

jimf said...

More Trumpery, from today's _New York Times_:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/opinion/trumps-hollow-regrets.html
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Trump’s Hollow ‘Regrets’
Charles M. Blow
AUG. 22, 2016

Donald Trump is the candidate who is so rigid in his perverted
self-righteousness that he doesn’t “like to have to ask for
forgiveness.” He says he has never even sought forgiveness
from God, the divine author and inspiration of his favorite book,
from which he struggled to name a favorite verse. . .

Precisely what does Trump regret? . . .

I don’t believe, even for a nanosecond, that he regrets the
personal impact of what he has said on anyone besides himself. . .

I believe that Trump regrets that, as Lindsey Graham put
it last week, “People are getting pretty nervous about our
candidate because he’s in a death spiral here and nobody
knows where the bottom is at.” Trump’s “regret” is just
a cynical ploy to set a bottom and bounce back.

But it will take more than the 75-plus remaining days of this
campaign to disassemble what it took 70 years of his life
to build.

He is who he is.

This fragile narcissist, who is a sort of bottomless pit of
emotional need and affirmation, is easily injured by even the
slightest confrontation.

He is a man who has said of himself, “I have no friends, as
far as I’m concerned,” as he joked that it would be easy to
get big money out of politics. But that claim is worrisome,
a thing that only a bully would say.

Yes, he can work a crowd, work a screen and work a Twitter
account. He can channel anger, hatred and bigotry and give it
a voice and face and standing. He can make bombast feel like
bravado. He can lower discourse and raise the rabble.

He has the gifts of a grifter. . .

Trump thinks of himself as a great man — that is the premise of
his entire sales pitch, that America has faltered and can only
be made great again by the Midas touch of his tiny hands — but if
current trends continue and he suffers a staggering loss on
Election Day, his ego will be forever injured as he is assigned
to history not as a great man but as a great disaster, a
cautionary tale of what comes of a party that picks a
con man as its frontman. . .

There is something rotten at the core of this man that no length
of script or turn of phrase can ameliorate.
====

9:26 AM
jimf said...

And more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/opinion/the-water-next-time.html
-------------
The Water Next Time
Paul Krugman
AUG. 22, 2016

A disaster area is no place for political theater. The governor
of flood-ravaged Louisiana asked President Obama to postpone
a personal visit while relief efforts were still underway. . .
He made the same request to Donald Trump, declaring, reasonably,
that while aid would be welcome, a visit for the sake of a
photo op would not.

Sure enough, the G.O.P. candidate flew in, shook some hands,
signed some autographs, and was filmed taking boxes of Play-Doh
out of a truck. If he wrote a check, neither his campaign nor
anyone else has mentioned it. . .

But boorish, self-centered behavior is the least of it.
By far the bigger issue is that even as Mr. Trump made a
ham-handed (and cheapskate) effort to exploit Louisiana’s
latest disaster for political gain, he continued to stake
out a policy position that will make such disasters increasingly
frequent. . .

Remember when climate deniers used to point to a temporary
cooling after an unusually warm year in 1998 as “proof” that
global warming had stopped? It was always a foolish,
dishonest argument, but in any case we’ve now blown right
through all past records.

And one consequence of a warmer planet is more evaporation,
more moisture in the air, and hence more disastrous floods.
As always, you can’t say that climate change caused any
particular disaster. What you can say is that warming makes
extreme weather events more likely, so that, for example,
what used to be 500-year floods are now happening on an
almost routine basis. . .

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that when it comes to
climate change, as with so many issues, Mr. Trump has gone deep
down the rabbit hole, asserting not just that global warming
is a hoax, but that it’s a hoax concocted by the Chinese to
make America less competitive.

The thing is, he’s not alone in going down that rabbit hole. . .

[W]hen it comes to denial of climate change and the deployment
of bizarre conspiracy theories to explain away the evidence,
Mr. Trump is squarely in the Republican mainstream. He may
be talking nonsense, but anyone his party was likely to
nominate would have been talking pretty much the same nonsense.

It’s interesting to ask why climate denial has become not just
acceptable but essentially required within the G.O.P. Yes,
the fossil-fuel sector is a big donor to the party. But the
vehemence of the hostility to climate science seems disproportionate
even so. . . What’s happening, I suspect, is that climate denial
has become a sort of badge of right-wing identity. . .

In any case, this election is likely to be decisive for the climate,
one way or another. . .
====

9:36 AM

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