Showing posts with label Foreign Policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foreign Policy. Show all posts

Friday, December 02, 2016

Is it time to see Donald Trump's school records (as well as his tax returns)?

As a quick reminder, back in 2012 when Donald Trump's racist call for Obama's birth certificate lost traction, he started his racist call for Obama's school records (because, of course, a black man could not possibly get into Columbia and Harvard Law without unfair affirmative governmental action).


Now it's becoming clear that we probably need to see the new PEOTUS's school transcripts before he takes office on January 20th. Specifically, there are so many questions about whether he has ever taken and passed a single class in history or civics. His latest blunder tonight was speaking directly with the President of Taiwan, possibly by accident, reversing 40 years of foreign policy and conceivably antagonizing China before he has even moved into the White House.

Just three days ago, he showed a complete lack of knowledge on a couple of pretty simple constitutional points, flag burning (constitutionally-protected 1st Amendment speech) and revoking citizenship (not a legal punishment), in one quick tweet triggered by his heavy diet of watching Fox News:

His love of Old Glory doesn't mean that he has any greater knowledge about its simple history either, of course. He famously didn't know what the thirteen stripes symbolized in 2008. That fact, if I remember correctly, is probably covered in second-grade textbooks.


This list could easily include hundreds of similar items spread out over every week of this year's campaign. We probably do need to see Donald Trump's complete school records (and his tax returns) before January 20.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

The Trumpism of the Day

The quote of the day from the improbable GOP frontrunner came during an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program yesterday. When asked to name his foreign policy advisors, Trump answered:
“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things."
Hearing that, one can't help but wonder where that very good brain gets its data. Unfortunately, I think we already know. As with the people who support him, he admitted on CNN back on August 19th that he learns much of what he knows about the world from watching TV (which, until his highly-publicized romantic breakup with Megyn Kelly, meant an almost exclusive diet of Fox News' paranoid world view):

Finding this screen grab from last summer made me realize that we can all learn a lot from watching television; Mr. Trump seems to have gained some weight on the campaign trail. Hasn't he learned yet that all seasoned politicians are experienced bulimics who vomit out their endless trail of obligatory campaign meals and required ethnic snacks?

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Update at 3:30pm EDT
The foreign-policy-expert/candidate now also gets bonus bogus information from unverified internet postings as well as his television!

via GIPHY


Friday, August 15, 2014

John 'n' Hillary

Seeing eye to eye on foreign policy.


Mother Jones has a quiz online today asking you to decide whether a foreign policy quotation came out of the mouth of John McCain or Hillary Clinton.


I have to admit my complete failure to tell the two apart, scoring an impressively mediocre 5 of 10 correct (but that's the point, isn't it?).

Friday, November 18, 2011

say the secret word and the duck will drop from the rafters and give you the gop nomination!

Wouldn't it be great to see one of the many upcoming GOP debates hosted by Groucho Marx in You Bet Your Life format? The clowns on stage would finally be treated in the manner they deserve, with wisecracks rather than unearned respect.

The Marx Brothers came to mind while I was thinking of Herman Cain's videotaped brain freeze last week when asked a simple question about Libya, and the deeper hole he is digging every time he's asked another foreign policy question. I wondered if any interviewer was going to ask him a question about a fictional nation to see if he might simply make things up to avoid another uncomfortable silence. I tweeted a couple of hours ago that I would ask him about the hostilities between Freedonia and Sylvania, the war declared by Groucho's Rufus T. Firefly in the Brothers' 1933 classic, Duck Soup.
Little did I know that Spy magazine already pulled this trick in 1993. The writers asked incoming members of Congress about the ethnic cleansing taking place in Freedonia, and 20 of our new Representatives responded with opinions or expressions of concern about the imaginary atrocities in the imaginary kingdom.
The idea of making people look silly with questions about Firefly's fictional Freedonia wasn't new with Spy either. Thirty years earlier, Candid Camera's Woody Allen asked victims what they thought of Freedonia's bid for independence. I wish I could find a video with which to end this post...

I couldn't find that video, but basic film literacy should require Americans, whether politicians or not, to know the source of the Freedonian references (if only to avoid tricky questions from comedy shows and magazines), so I'll end with this clip from the original source: