Friday, October 13, 2017

Only interested in culture wars

Man, haven't the wingnut blogs gone into ecstatic overdrive about Weinstein.   It's given them (what they think) is valid cover to avoid talking about Trump's economic nonsense/BS from the Hannity interview (see previous post), his weirdly personal and vindictive take on aid to Puerto Rico (what is his problem with that place?), and the obvious fact that it is an open secret in Washington that large numbers of Republicans think Trump is nuts and unstable and needs constant "minding" by people who aren't impulsive and as wilfully ignorant as the current leader of the free world. 

It is, of course, just a sign of the sickness in Right wing politics that point scoring is more important than sensible policy or the very worrying situation of internal warfare within the Right.  

Anyway, I liked this Slate bit about Trump's stupid statement on Hannity:
I sometimes wonder if it’s worth cataloging the vapid things Trump says about the economy. On the one hand, he’s the president. It should matter if he thinks the national debt goes down when the stock market goes up, even in a vague, philosophical sort of way (and to be clear, it does not). On the other hand, anybody reading a center-left website like Slate.com knows that America’s guy in the Oval Office is terminally uninterested in fact or data, except insofar as a number paints his presidency in flattering terms. Remember how the unemployment rate was a fiction, until it wasn’t anymore? This is a man who can only view history and current events as fragments of light endlessly refracted through the prism of his ego. He draws logical connections where none apparently exist, living according to an almost premodern perspective that by merely mouthing an idea, however inarticulate, he makes it real. Maybe this is his power—maybe he really is the übermensch, breaking the chains of our middle-class morality, including the idea that what we say should have some grounding in the world around us, hoisting our politics into the realm of pure myth. 

Or maybe this was just word salad, a confused and careless man following his own babble to its own nonsense conclusion, “in a sense.” Thus sprach POTUS.
 Where is cult follower Kates's explanation of what Trump meant?

Update:  there have been a few article around like this one lately, pointing out that this doesn't actually make sense:


The article notes:
While it’s unclear what media Trump is consuming if he hasn’t seen wall-to-wall, practically deafening coverage of stock-market gains, he is correct that we are in the midst of a historic, if inexplicable, rally, and that unemployment is at a multi-year low. Unfortunately, he either doesn’t understand or is powerless to stop himself from seeking adulation for the very things that experts say point to an economy that doesn’t need a giant, deficit-funded stimulus in the form of big, yuge tax cuts. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Maya MacGuineas told NPR, “If we have a tax cut right now at a time when the economy doesn’t need stimulus and our debt is at near record levels, that will do a lot of damage for the economy and it will be a huge missed opportunity.”

1 comment:

not trampis said...

outstanding stupidity. Tillerson was right!