Monthly Archives: August 2023

Open Thread for Monday, August 7, 2023

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Kind of slim pickings today, but I’ll go with what I’ve got…

  1. Waterslide of Doom — This is my way of noting that I was at the beach all last week. My daughter urged me to drive by and see the scariest waterslide in the world, which is pictured above. No, it’s not operational — they’re in the midst of tearing it down — but it’s still pretty scary just to look at. Mind you, I find them all a little scary; I don’t love heights. But not Napoleon — he loves them! I offer the clipping at the bottom of this thread in honor of his biopic that’s about to come out.
  2. DeSantis Bluntly Acknowledges Trump’s 2020 Defeat: ‘Of Course He Lost’ — This is worth noting because of the horrible, sad fact that it is news for one of his GOP opponents to state this simple, obvious fact so clearly. This is how far the party has fallen nationally.
  3. Once the outsider, Trump looks an establishment’s pick — That headline is a little hard to follow, but it’s not actually in a newspaper. It’s the hed on a promotional email I got from the Post and Courier, which pulled my attention to this story. This is about how far the party has fallen here in our state.
  4. Donald Trump gloats about USA’s Women’s World Cup elimination — What? Another one about The Creature? No, it’s just something I saw that made me think, two of the saddest things about our country are our exaggeration of the importance of sports, and the fact that politics in America is now about signaling your membership in a tribe. So those two things had to come together, right? How pathetic that people now divide themselves into mutually exclusive cliques by whether they worship or despise a soccer team…
  5. Uninformative headline of the day — You’ll note that after years of polite silence, I recently started complaining about the new sort of headline that refuses to tell you the most essential information contained in the story — which is what headlines are supposed to do. (Why? To make you click.) Today’s winner is, “Here’s when a copperhead in SC is more likely to bite you, new research shows.” You may excuse this because maybe the info it touts is complicated, but it isn’t. It’s in the lede: “The hotter it gets, the more likely a copperhead or other venomous snake is likely to bite you, new research shows.” This is today’s winner in this category because what you are being denied is information that might, at least theoretically, save your life.

Today’s Earworm — OK, I don’t actually have one today, but I had one several days back, and didn’t post an Open Thread that day. It was “Son of a Preacher Man.” That was stuck for some time. Here’s a video of Dusty singing it on Ed Sullivan, in case you want to hear it in addition to reading about it. Now, a confession: I had to look it up to remember who sang it. I blame that on the fact that it sounds way more like a Bobbie Gentry song.

Can you prove Trump understands ANYTHING?

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I’m on vacation, but I still follow what’s going on, and for the last couple of days I’ve been worrying about something. Both Bryan and Phillip touched on it yesterday. They said,

OK, they may not have touched on it directly, but they got me going with the worrying again, and here’s what I’m concerned about…

Well, if I’m reading these accounts correctly, the case is built on him UNDERSTANDING he lost the election. So he was lying when he said he had won it, making his efforts to overthrow the results — and incite the crowd to disrupt the process — an act of intentional criminality.

That worries me. Because I’m not sure you can demonstrate he understands ANYTHING…

With him, it gets back to the questions I’ve been asking about this guy since 2016. When he does the things he does and says the things he says, is he demonstrating that he is:

Evil? In other words, when he says something wildly untrue and acts upon it, does he actually know the facts, and is pretending not to?

Stupid? Does he say and do these things because he is so amazingly dumb that he doesn’t know any better?

Crazy? Is his brain damaged or does he have the wrong chemicals flowing through it, and that causes him to do and say things that are inexplicable and inexcusable to a sane person?

Of course, the more I think about it, the more I realize that these are neat, separate categories only in our own imaginations. They can overlap and bleed over into each other.

But that’s not my point. My point is, is this indictment, about something of supreme importance to this nation, based on a shaky foundation? Can a prosecutor satisfactorily prove that this idiot whack job was actually lying when he kept telling gullible people that he truly believed the election had been stolen from him, and them?

I’m not sure any of this can stick if they can’t prove that. Maybe they don’t have to. Maybe I’m being kind of dense myself. I hope so. Tell me that, and convince me.

So far, the things I’ve read — this, for instance, or this — feed my worry.

Because if this case can’t be presented so that it results in such a convincing “guilty” verdict that even his loyal supporters understand and accept it, this country is never going to be able to move on from the trauma of the last few years.

And that would put the continued existence of the United States at serious risk…