Way down, big trouble, dead!
Today in Trump on Twitter.
Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016
Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!
My, that’s random. No, Mister President-Elect, I haven’t looked at Vanity Fair’s numbers. Why would I? Why do you ask? What does this have to do with your demanding new job as chief executive OF THE FUCKING COUNTRY? Why are you frotting your personal trivial resentments at journalists who dare to see you as you are when you should be 1) doing your job and 2) acting like a god damn grownup?
Twitter told me why he asked: Vanity Fair published a hilariously harsh review of a restaurant in the lobby of his poxy Tower, bashfully called the Trump Grill or sometimes Grille. (Don’t we all wish we could.) I suspect I’ll have to revisit that. The Times says Trump’s hatred of Graydon Carter goes back years.
He may be about to become the leader of the free world, but Mr. Trump still holds a grudge against Graydon Carter that started in the days of Spy magazine and that continues with the magazine Mr. Carter now edits, Vanity Fair.
He still holds a grudge against Carter and he still sees fit to air it in public even now. He’s still that infantile. He’s still that grotesquely thin-skinned and disinhibited and vindictive. That’s just the kind of person we want 1) running the country and 2) able to launch the nukes at any moment.
Thank you to Time Magazine and Financial Times for naming me "Person of the Year" – a great honor!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016
Thank you to Time Magazine and Financial Times for naming me “Person of the Year” – a great honor!
Ah, good boy, Donnie. That’s better. You’re trying to self-soothe, and yes, that’s much better than tweeting your angry spite to the world. It’s a pity you didn’t try the self-soothing before and instead of tweeting your angry spite to the world, but oh well. Maybe next time. It took you four minutes to think of it and type the words this time; maybe if you keep at it you’ll speed up enough to forestall the vindictive tweets by 2018 or so.
It took him an hour to think up the next one.
The media tries so hard to make my move to the White House, as it pertains to my business, so complex – when actually it isn't!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016
The media tries so hard to make my move to the White House, as it pertains to my business, so complex – when actually it isn’t!
No no. That’s not it. The issue is not how complex it is, the issue is the many many many conflicts of interest. Sure, the many many many makes it complex in a sense, but that’s not the issue. The issue is how your lust to make ever more money will pervert your actions as president. The issue is that your many for-profit companies in many countries will interfere with your ability to do your job for the benefit of all of us as opposed to doing it for the benefit of you and your close relatives.
If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016
If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?
That’s an easy one. It didn’t. You’re lying. As usual.
In point of fact, virtually everything in the tweet is misleading — including the spelling of “wait.”
It was originally spelled “waite” – which has since been corrected. (Perhaps there’s a flunky whose sole job is to retropolish the Master’s tweets.)
On Oct. 7, the Obama administration formally accused Russia of being behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, of stealing emails from Democrats including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, and of leaking them to the public through WikiLeaks and other outlets.
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the statement said.
The complaints were loud enough that Mrs. Clinton brought them up in the debates, eliciting Mr. Trump’s famous response, “No puppet … no puppet … you’re the puppet.”
But that’s ok, because Trump fans will believe his tweet, because that’s how this works.
Today’s fascist rally is in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Heil Trump!
It’s amusing that he thinks that Time’s “Person of the Year” is an honor. It’s just a recognition that that person (or sometimes, thing) caused the biggest stir that year. Hitler was “man of the year” once, and Stalin was, twice.
A 70 year old child walks into a bar. Bartender and patrons exclaim, “You look like you could do the job!” Bartender hands him his apron. The child puts it on and begins to defecate on the counter. They all proclaim: “Now that’s how you run a bar!”
And Kruschev. And Ayatollah Khomenni (“Ayatolla, don’t Khomenni closer”, as the Not the Nine o’Clock News parody song ran), so he’s in honourable company.
We knew this about him. This was all a matter of public record. Why do you think the people of NYC hate him so much? I grew up in that area and knew all about him. Now I live in the south. I tried to tell people, they didn’t want to hear it or wouldn’t believe me.
Noele, I tried to tell people, and it just made them want him to win that much more. Because they see him as being willing to say things bluntly that they want to say, and claim to be afraid to say (although if you sit down in the local cafe for any length of time, you will realize that they are not afraid to say these things, and say them very loudly, but the opposition is afraid to come out from under the table).
NZ had (another) big earthquake a few weeks ago as you’re probably aware. yesterday the new Prime Minister and the Minister responsible for earthquake recovery flew into one of the coastal settlements still cut off by landslides to talk to locals. One of them called them out on delays getting roads sorted out – using phrases such as ‘pissed off’. The Minister responsible replied in anger that they were doing what they could and that he was pissed off with being treated like that. A few other mild but unbecoming phrases for a Government Minister were used.
It takes a lot to get NZer’s worked up about politics, so this really just raised a few eyebrows, but the interesting thing was this morning hearing a phone interview with one of the local farmers who was present. He stuck up for his neighbour BUT also stuck up for the Minister, saying that it was great to hear a politician behaving like a real person (or words to that effect). In his view the important outcome was that both sides go their frustrations off their chests. The lack of progress on the admittedly huge job of rebuilding a safe road became defocused. The fact that local contractors sitting idle are not being engaged to work from the ‘trapped’ side wasn’t pursued.
I recount this anecdote because it aligns with the fact that even quite moderate and apparently sensible people seem to value silly, irrelevant and inappropriate behaviour from people who should be doing better, over doing their jobs properly and appropriately at the expense of controlling their knee jerk responses.
In short many people value the animal part of our brain over over the (potential of the) sapiens sapiens part of our brain.
I don’t know what we do about that.
Rob, that fits with a story from my home. The mayor sent a letter to the EPA in a fit of pique, literally using the phrase WTF (rather juvenile, if you ask me) and telling them he would arrest them if they showed up to test our water.
That was about three or four years ago. The paper just recently ran a tribute to our now-outgoing mayor, and that was mentioned as one of the wonderful things he’d done! So we drink water known to be problematic, because the EPA backed down, and everyone congratulates the mayor because he took on those so-and-so coastal elites who seem to think we should be required to serve clean water to our citizens.
I don’t see a lot to the idea that people are supporting him in spite of his juvenile, irrational behavior, but because of it…they want a mayor who “sticks it to” the experts, because “we know more than” those folks who only went to school to learn all this stuff…heck, we drink the water every day, so we know better than they do what’s in it, right?
Rob.
Regardless of the minister’s, behavior, does the NZ government have the resources to repair the earthquake damage quickly? The voters might be hoping for the impossible.
Yeah RJW, we’re running a budget surplus (!) so they tell us. We have diggers and trucks and road cones and everything here!! :-)
Seriously though, the problem is not so much the road itself, or even clearing the huge piles of rock from the coastal highway. The real issue is stabilising the bluffs and slopes above the roads so that more slips don’t occur during aftershocks or heavy rain. The locals just need limited fair weather access to be restored to hold them through the major rebuild that is required.
NZ. Every landscape here looks beautiful because the planet is doing its best to wrinkle it up, blow it up, tear it down or some combination of those. A geologists dream.
Wasn’t it Graydon Carter who came up with the term “short-fingered vulgarian”? Isn’t he the one to whom Trump regularly sends pictures of himself with the fingers circled to “prove” the size of his . .. digits?
Rob,
The conservatives have made budget surpluses into some kind of fetish, as if that’s all that matters in an economy.
NZ certainly pays a big price for all that awesome scenery in the South Island, it’s both the gift and curse of the Australian plate.
Too true RJW. Good to know we can blame Australia [shakes fist]!
RJW, I ‘d say it was neither gift nor curse. It’s more the price humans pay for their arrogance in thinking they can build theiir homes on active volcanoes, major faultlines or on flood plains, and not suffer for it.
@ ^
To be fair, an appreciation of plate tectonics is only about a hundred years old.
Acolyte of Sagan,
I’d agree with Silentbob on this, people had no understanding whatsoever. Earthquakes just occurred without explanation, apart from supernatural ones. If European colonists were told by indigenous people that a particular region was subject to earthquakes they probably wouldn’t have taken any notice.
Vanity Fair’s Twitter response to Trump is epic:
https://twitter.com/VanityFair/status/809435977877979137
Silentbob & RJW, I appreciate your points but now we DO know about tectonics, volcanoes and the rest and we’re still chucking up towns, cities, and nuclear fucking power stations on them!
Acolyte of Sagan,
Yes, the Fukushima disaster is the prime example. The degree of incompetence and wilful blindness to the dangers is just amazing.
In the same mode, we in Nebraska have had plenty of news about the earthquakes occurring in Oklahoma because of injection wells, but last summer, on the day after a particularly bad run of Oklahoma earthquakes that made the national news, Nebraska decided to put through a bill permitting a Colorado company to create injection wells in western Nebraska.
At the time Los Angeles was being built up, we knew about thermal inversions, and that letting a city in that area get large would create significant air quality problems, but don’t ever tell city founders not to let their city get too large! Air quality, schmair quality. Who needs to breathe when you’ve got movies, sun, money, and women?
iknklast,
It’s the old game of transferring the costs of ‘externalities to production’ aka, ‘private profits public losses’.