Well, thanks for coming. That’s all for today.
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Okay, perhaps a little commentary, though I think Wilkinson’s pen drop pretty much says it.
There’s some argument to be made that these aren’t Trump’s lawyers but Manafort’s, but that seems like a distinction without a difference.
As Dear Leader said, Manafort is being treated like Al Capone: You can’t prove his connection to more outrageous crimes, so instead you try to prove that he cheated on his taxes, and, either way, you get a major public enemy out of circulation.
Not sure that last part is the point he meant to make, but, then again, he makes a lot of points …
Wilkinson is right: It takes a lot of damn nerve for anyone in the Trump camp to attack somebody on the premise that infidelity and dishonesty undermine your credibility.
But, as noted before, you can fool some of the people all of the time, while, though the anecdote is almost certainly mythical, it’s worth citing the woman who allegedly said to Adlai Stevenson “Governor, you have the vote of every thinking person!” to which he responded, “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”
Myth or not, it’s truer than most of the things Dear Leader has actually said, and if you need a link to that, you haven’t been paying attention.
And then there’s the current xkcd, which speaks to the nation’s failure to secure its election apparatus.
I’m well on record as not caring a lot about personal security. If I have (or had) an FBI file back in the day, it was most likely a single sheet listing more interesting files in which I was briefly mentioned.
But I rely on the principle — espoused by me then and by Edward Snowden since — that the more data they gather, the less they are able to analyze and focus on any of it.
So gather away!
However, when it comes to intrusions on election security, our vulnerability to hacking scares the living bejesus out of me, because it’s pretty clear where you need only to meddle a bit to throw things off.
I feel like a bystander, since New Hampshire has paper ballots, but we still have to live with the results in places that don’t, and it’s not comforting that the rightwing mythmakers who contend that busloads of people came here to vote illegally are largely the same who just voted down additional funding to protect the sanctity of our ballots.
And, on a side note, I’m glad the Republican seems to have eaked out a waffer-theen victory in that Ohio special election.
It was a district that normally provides double-digit GOP margins and, had his opponent won, it would have given people permission to stay home in November, just as predictions of a Clinton victory did in 2016.
Though it also provides a pretty good hint as to where some careful hacking might be worth undertaking.
And then there’s this
Kevin Siers offers this commentary on GOP Congressional Candidate Mark Harris, who, in his days as a preacher, published a sermon on Ephesians 5:22 in which he said
“Well, what’s the message to the wives? Well, God instructs all Christian wives to submit to their husbands.
“You see wives, please hear me this morning. The message is not from your husband to submit, the message is from the Lord. You’re not to ever submit, ma’am, because your husband demands it, but you do it because the Lord ordained it. Now, ladies, you can rebel against that command, but just please understand you’re not rebelling against your husband.”
I won’t argue over how a Greek Jew viewed the status of women 2,000 years ago, given that neither side of Paul’s two cultures would have empowered them.
I will argue, however, that if you eat shellfish or pork, wear clothing made of mixed fibers or have a tattoo, you needn’t feel that the state of your soul requires you to follow Paul’s views on the interactions of husbands and wives.
My rant today, however, is in defense of the Cave People and other hunter/gatherers, who are seriously misrepresented and slandered in the common cartoon depiction of cavemen dragging off helpless women.
The hunter/gatherer societies I’m familiar with are at least matrilinear if not matriarchal.
It makes sense — since men go off to stab mastodons or members of rival tribes and may not come back — to keep the family aligned with the mother’s side.
And while few Native American nations are as strictly matriarchal as the Iroquois, you don’t get a lot done in any of them if you clash with the women.
Many tribes kidnapped people in order to replace dead members of their own community, but that was an equal-opportunity proposition, not a matter of taking a club to go find a wife.
And, if you did carry home a replacement wife from outside the community, you needed the consent of your womenfolk to make it official.
Which is to say, all this crap about submitting to your husband is a symptom of civilization, not of primitivism.
I don’t believe in the Noble Savage, but, then again, I don’t think they were nearly as backwards as some modern folks.
So, if you must choose, vote for the caveman, not the pig.
Juxtaposition of the Day
When you can get Bob Gorrell and Lalo Alcaraz in a juxtaposition, you’ve really accomplished something, but here we are.
However, here’s the critical difference: Both cartoonists note that Trump is doing a poor job of covering his tracks, that he is condemning himself in his own tweets.
But notice that Alcaraz, the progressive, simply observes that Trump brags of things Nixon denied, while it’s the conservative, Gorrell, who suggests that his lack of discretion is going to get him in trouble.
Great Moments in Desperation
Less than a month before he resigned. But it was a long time ago, and maybe you had to be there.
I sure hope not.
Know how you can tell if Donald Trump is lying on social media?
His thumbs are moving.