One result of Donald Trump boorishness is how much his coarseness has brought out into the open those ugly aspects of the nation’s psyche that had formerly been hidden. Thanks to Trump, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, and xenophobes have felt emboldened to strut their stuff in public.
Now his calling a sports figure who kneeled in protest during the national anthem a ‘son of a bitch’ has opened the door to prominent people calling him names in return. There was Kim Jong-un calling him a ‘deranged dotard’. Then came LeBron James with his now famous tweet that referred to him as ‘U bum’. Now we have another athlete calling him an ‘asshole’, a label that Seth Meyers has endorsed. The floodgates are now open.
If there is one thing I appreciate about Trump it’s that his crassness and venality are making other politicians stop pretending that they, too, are anything but. All the fake passive-aggressive bullshit doesn’t hold up when you’re dealing with a mudballer like Trump -- you can see that he made Cruz and Clinton and Ryan et al’s carefully constructed plastic masks slip, just a little. They had to let them slip because they’re also crass, lying, egomaniacs and they immediately had to sink to Trump’s level or the worst thing in their world -- loss of power -- would happen to them. In other words, Trump’s utter lack of principles is dragging off the pretence that the others have principles; I’ve always known that, I’m just glad to see the lies exposed a bit. Politically, he has also done a fantastic job of revealing that everyone in Washington is a slimy partisan hack -- because when they had to deal with him, the slimiest hack of all, they immediately doffed their disguises and got right down in the slimy partisan with him.
They had? Were they better concealed for domestic audiences or something?
Our esteemed host apparently has Marcus Ranum well-conditioned to obey at the drop of a post title.
Woof!
#3 Pierce
Personally I look forward to Marcus’s posts. Prof Singham deserves to have an intelligent, eloquent reply first up. Sets the bar high enough to dissuade me from writing a knee-jerk banal comment myself (no sarcasm intended, this is a real possibility).