Here's a poll that could go either way, so there's no reason for Trumpkins on Twitter to try to hijack it for their own ends. After seeing a story earlier today about Betsy DeVos's gleeful endorsement of states' rights to discriminate against children, I thought about her and her brother, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, and which one is more, for lack of a better word, deplorable.
First I asked a rhetorical question on Twitter:
Who has more fun, Betsy DeVos happily endorsing discrimination, or her brother Erik Prince when he's killing people? https://t.co/uaM38NKs7w
— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) May 25, 2017
But then I decided to throw the question out to the Twitterverse for a final determination. As I said, I wouldn't be surprised to see this go either way.
Quick Twitter Poll:
Which sibling is more hateful, [Anti]Education Secretary Betsy DeVos or her mercenary brother Erik 'Blackwater' Prince?
— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) May 25, 2017
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:
Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!
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.
This week the grizzled elderly sage of spaghetti westerns Clint Eastwood told us that we Americans (especially young Americans and liberal Americans) were too politically correct. I'm inclined to agree to a degree; it's time to call idiots by their name and declare war on idiocy.
It's been obvious for quite a while that any Republican or independent conservative who was able to string a series of grammatically-correct sentences together to form a coherent paragraph was going to reject the candidacy of Donald Trump.
In January, the National Review dedicated an entire "Against Trump" issue to the candidate they described in their lead editorial as "a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones." In June, television's most prominent intellectual conservative commentator, George Will, officially left the GOP saying "This is not my party." He asked for Republicans to defeat Trump and "grit their teeth" through the Clinton presidency and wait for 2020 (Trump's response has been to describe Will with two of the favorite words from his extremely-limited vocabulary: 'Dummy!' and 'Boring!'). The New York Times' most prominent right-of-center voice has been appalled all year by Trumpism, and David Brooks' column today is no exception, telling Trump's Republican enablers that it's time to get off the fence about their support for him: "There comes a time when neutrality and laying low become dishonorable. If you’re not in revolt, you’re in cahoots. When this period and your name are mentioned, decades hence, your grandkids will look away in shame."
Yesterday news broke about the most obvious revolt of intelligent Republicans against their party's choice for president. The Harvard Republican Club, the oldest group of college Republicans, will not endorse the GOP nominee for the first time in their 128-year-long history. Their statement is worth reading in full, but almost any random paragraph from it contains more common sense than you'll see in hours of commentary from the cable-news experts.
Donald Trump, despite spending more than a year on the campaign trail, has either refused or been unable to educate himself on issues that matter most to Americans like us. He speaks only in platitudes, about greatness, success, and winning. Time and time again, Trump has demonstrated his complete lack of knowledge on critical matters, meandering from position to position over the course of the election. When confronted about these frequent reversals, Trump lies in a manner more brazen and shameless than anything politics has ever seen.
Donald Trump is a threat to the survival of the Republic. His authoritarian tendencies and flirtations with fascism are unparalleled in the history of our democracy. He hopes to divide us by race, by class, and by religion, instilling enough fear and anxiety to propel himself to the White House. He is looking to to pit neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, American against American. We will not stand for this vitriolic rhetoric that is poisoning our country and our children.
This wasn't just a statement by a single person at the top of the organization. According to the Harvard Crimson article about the decision, 10% of the members support Trump, 10% were undecided, and 80% indicated they would not support him. Let that sink in; that's 80% of the nation's oldest group of college Republicans refusing to support the Republican candidate for president.
So who are the idiots who are supporting Trumpism? The New York Times showed us that this week as well (using language in the following video that the Times would never allow as Fit To Print in the pages of the paper):
After all, look at me, I graduated with honors from a major university as a history major, elected to Phi Beta Kappa and the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta, and I was twisted into a fucking liberal! If that doesn't prove that studying history is evil, I don't know what does.
If the legislature doesn't act, kids in
Tulsa might be seen wearing these.
If only the Oklahoma state legislature had been there to straighten out nefarious educators in the 60s and 70s and save me from all those pointy-headed teachers and professors in Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey, who conspired with national teachers' unions (and maybe the Communist Party) to twist my young mind against the beauties of unquestioning patriotism and myths about our founding as God's Beacon of American Exceptionalism, and taught me to "think" (as if that were a good thing).
"...It was a terribly drawn suit, an incompetently drawn suit and they did it very quickly. ... Maybe this is a mini-IRS. Maybe we need to get the Tea Party after these people because this could maybe be a mini-IRS."
Translation: Waah Waah Waah. The Lightweight Attorney General of New York under orders from our Kenyan President Obama is going after me and my phony baloney "University" just like the IRS under Obama's marching orders harassed those poor non-political Tea Party groups, so now those non-political Tea Party groups should come to my aid. Waah Waah Waah.
In a logical world Donald Trump's fraudulent "Trump University" scam would be just one more reason for his disqualification for any type of public office, but there's still a good chance that we'll see him as the game-show-host clown in the 2016 GOP Clown Circus (and of course if he can't make it, the game-show-host clown-in-waiting Chuck Woolery will be happy to fill in that spot on the debate stage).
It would be interesting to know which came first for most of the respondents, their knowledge about religions or their atheism/agnosticism, but as reported around the web today, atheists and agnostics are more knowledgeable about the world's religions than those who practice one of those religions. Click here for more details from today's LA Times.
A collection of ten of the questions from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life are posted at CNN.com. TBL had no trouble getting 10 of 10 correct, but it does seem like they must have chosen the 10 easiest questions (or I am very advanced on the atheistic scale). Take it yourself by clicking here.
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
