When I speak with my mom, life-long conservative Republican as she is, we try to keep the conversation light. Yes, after all the banter about the goings on in the family, we eventually turn to politics, but it never gets ugly.
The one thing that concerns me most about her position in support of Trump is that she shares her political sensibilities with the people shown here. Doesn’t that sound a bit unlovely for an extremely well-read Bryn Mawr graduate?
In any case, we can all hope that the worst of all this will be behind us on November 3rd.
Pictured here is a smallish rally in Tallahassee, capital city of Florida, on the opening day of “Black Voices for Trump.”
Yet there’s something curious about this photo, isn’t there?
It appears that Trump has a 14% approval rating among black voters, which is far higher than I would have guessed. If someone referred to those who oppress my race as “fine people,” I would be quite adamant that he not be re-elected President of the United States.
Though promoting racial hatred is not a laughing matter, I have to admit that this did make me smile.
Maybe there are people who fit Trump’s claim out in the suburbs of Buzzard’s Breath, Arkansas, but Ms. McLaughlin’s response speaks to a greater truth: most Americans hate his guts.
The polls say there are undecided voters, but I sure don’t know any.
My father piloted 29 successful bombing missions over Germany, knocking out Nazi oil refineries from 1942 until his plane was shot down in late 1944, and he and his men spent the last six months of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp. He died in 2010, long before anyone thought it could be remotely possibly that the president of the United States would openly promote the supremacy of the “master race.”
In conversations with my mother, we often ponder how Dad would regard Trump and today’s national zeitgeist. She points out that he was a conservative, which is true, but we both acknowledge that he was a man of honor and fairness. I think he would join our nation’s top military in pointing out that there is not a single true American value that Trump reflects.
ExxonMobil wants you on board, campaigning to reduce the regulations that keep them from boosting earnings by torching the environment.
As if that weren’t a sufficient insult to your intelligence on its own, they think you’re so stupid that you don’t know that driving up Exxon’s profits doesn’t do a goddamn thing for you financially.
It seems to me that IR = k(PD) / E, or, in English, a state’s COVID-19 infection rate is positively correlated to its population density, and inversely correlated to its population’s education level.
What’s ExxonMobil’s motive for offering you to “test your knowledge about the oil and gas industry?” Is it:
a) Providing Americans the opportunity to educate themselves on the breadth of the industry. This includes the value it provides to society, weighed fairly and objectively against its negatives: its subsidies; dependence on protection from the U.S. military; oil spills; contribution to climate change, ocean acidification and loss of biodiversity; aggressive litigation against damage claimants; lobbying to move acts of civil disobedience from misdemeanors to felonies; the eco-devastation associated with drilling; the fouling of pristine wildernesses; methane leakages; and lung damage?
or
b) Misleading Americans into believing that the industry is clean and sustainable, and that it’s operated to make life better and more convenient for everyone?
If you said a), you have what it takes to be loyal, jingoistic fool.
My wife made this prediction when the U.S. Senate failed to convict and remove Trump after he was impeached: “Now that he’s seen that he can commit major felonies in broad daylight with no repercussions–crimes that would have resulted in a life prison sentence had he been anybody else–he will feel empowered to ratchet up the crime spree with no limits whatsoever.”
She nailed it.
Here, to further his own political career, Trump has placed thousands, probably millions of people’s lives in jeopardy.
And that’s just this week. Let’s wait to see what happens next.
Most people would be deeply ashamed to refer to all confident and powerful women with the same “nasty” adjective.
Yet it’s this trait, i.e., shamelessness, that has made Trump who he is.
Astonishingly, about 40% of American voters find this characteristic quite attractive. “He tells it like it is,” they say.
This is the United States in the year 2020. If you were looking for an intellectual and moral hell, and found America’s heartland, you couldn’t tell the difference.
This, of course, is a reference to the fact that this wooden blend of religious fanaticism, racism, and complete ignorance on a broad range of important domestic and international matters–will soon be debating Kamala Harris, one of the most intelligent, learned, and powerfully articulate people on Earth.
It is going to look like a hungry wolverine and a little bunny rabbit.