But I can't help but notice how Donald Trump is driving the Republicans crazier. I saw the headline on my news feed today that Scott Walker proposes a border wall---with Canada. I had to click on it to make sure it wasn't Borowitz or the Onion. It isn't.
Trump is as close to crazy as an apparently functional human can be, and not even in a complicated way. He only knows two judgments: fabulous or terrible, and all he does is state this without much more than a shred of factual evidence, if that. Trump is bullshit and he's always been bullshit. When I was editor of Washington Newsworks in 1976 he was a young developer who came to town with a proposal for a convention center. Our reporter on this story (who later went on to report and edit for the New York Times) thought he was bullshit then. So that's 40 years of bullshit. Good way to become a billionaire (if he actually is.) That may make it smell sweeter for some. But it doesn't alter what it is.
But right now he's being taken seriously in a political sense, and Chiat's latest column on this is interesting in that he feels sure Trump is going to wind up running as an independent or third party candidate. And as Chiat wrote in a previous column, he's going to lose because he is crazy. (While as Rolling Stone says, he may no longer be funny, he's crazy like a dictator.) An independent candidacy will also doom the Republican candidate. The problems he is causing other Republican candidates are analysed here.
While we're hanging out at the New York Magazine site, the top rated post for about a week now is an interview with film director Quentin Tarantino. It's wide-ranging and culturally interesting, and contains a political note about President Obama. You supported Obama. How do you think he's done? the interviewer asks. The fashionable thing is to express disappointment if not disillusionment. But that's not what Tarantino does:
"I think he’s fantastic. He’s my favorite president, hands down, of my lifetime. He’s been awesome this past year. Especially the rapid, one-after-another-after-another-after-another aspect of it. It’s almost like take no prisoners. His he-doesn’t-give-a-shit attitude has just been so cool. Everyone always talks about these lame-duck presidents. I’ve never seen anybody end with this kind of ending. All the people who supported him along the way that questioned this or that and the other? All of their questions are being answered now."
The Washington Post has a nice summary of the President's just concluded vacation, from which he's returned (he says) recharged and feisty. Tomorrow it's Alaska and ramping up the visibility of the climate crisis. 100 days to save the world.
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