The August 2019 US Politics Thread is dumb (stupid}

The bedbugs are a feature, not bugs

TRUMP BEDBUGS

heh – Brett Stephens complained about a student who called him a bedbug.

a professor but yes

whoops yeah

is bedbug a slur of some kind?

Brettbug Stephens “leaving” Twitter and the Andy Ngo/ PP video surfacing and his getting canned by fucking Quillette have been a couple of bright spots in an otherwise bleak summer of very online politics

is bedbug a slur of some kind?

It is in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys. See also "crazy as a ____."

"Bugfuck", the defence claimed, was a word Ellison used to describe people he admired. he even used it on himself. At other times (the attorney said) Ellison had happily described himself as "crazy as a bedbug".

Brett Stephens is not known for his sense of humor.

the professor had a thread making fun of the rhetorical style of loads of NYT writers, riffing on an apparent infestation of the physical newsroom with real actual bedbugs. he did not burst out of a cupboard and yell “you’re a bedbug!” at triggered snowflake Bret Stephens.

link? this is the only tweet I'm aware of:

The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens. https://t.co/k4qo6QzIBW

— davekarpf (@davekarpf) August 26, 2019

that's the one

oh dammit I guess that was someone else. I hope Stephens CC’d that person’s employer on a complaint email too.

it’s a good thread:

I think you mean there's an insect-tinged problem in the NYT newsroom https://t.co/tQwF7RD7FH

— Lindsey Barrett (@LAM_Barrett) August 26, 2019

meanwhile the president has started on Puerto Rico

Wow! Yet another big storm heading to Puerto Rico. Will it ever end? Congress approved 92 Billion Dollars for Puerto Rico last year, an all time record of its kind for “anywhere.”

Wow! Our president is a piece of shit!

Like I'm pretty sure that statement alone would be enough to get a sociopathy diagnosis from a reputable mental health professional.

one sign of strong leadership in a dangerous situation is to ignore the "people" factor and concentrate entirely on how much it will cost (doing so disingenuously, of course). it's good to let people know that you're thinking of them more as a line item on a balance sheet, so they won't get hurt as badly and won't need as much help

i didn't make it clear, sorry. this is his dumb tweet:

Wow! Yet another big storm heading to Puerto Rico. Will it ever end? Congress approved 92 Billion Dollars for Puerto Rico last year, an all time record of its kind for “anywhere.”

nuking the hurricane doesn't seem so dumb now, does it

really starting to get the impression that the president does not like having to spend government money on brown people

I'm sure if he shouts at it enough the storm will change its mind and just go away. And if not there are always lots of nucular bombs to throw at it. Whatever it takes to not have to acknowledge that a bunch of brown people on an island...I dunno, somewhere are actually his constituents.

ha, xxpost

Yet another big storm heading to Puerto Rico. Will it ever end? Is there anything, say in the area of climate change, that the US could do to possibly mitigate... whoops, hold on, another oil company check incoming.... Where were we?

*sounds of deafening helicopter blades overwhelm the discussion*

What if we built giant coal-powered fans (not to be used for wind power!) to blow the hurricanes out of the Caribbean and over to Europe?

not so fast - that could kill birds, and as you know, the conservative movement has very strong views about any wind-based machinery that could be threatening to birds while providing electricity

oh wait, i'm sorry. "not to be used for wind power" *checks manual*, yes that is fine, and any birds killed would be collateral damage, nbd

I'm coming around to the idea of building a wall except that it goes all the way around the perimeter of the country and it's heavily-padded and it's there to protect the rest of the world from the lunatics inhabiting our landmass.

I think there should be a giant wall built around Trump and his people that gradually gets smaller until they all are essentially sharing a girdle.

Peppered with complaints at a Minnesota event from farmers fed up with Trump's trade war, Agriculture Sec'y Sonny Perdue made a joke.

"What do you call two farmers in a basement?" Perdue asked. "A whine cellar." Boos ricocheted around the room, NYT says. https://t.co/KXjiQ5T2DX

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 27, 2019

Classic Sonny!

wowwwww

Cool, cool, that arrogant overstep of decency and common sense is precisely what I'd like to see more of from Trump and his officials, particularly whenever speaking before increasingly-angry crowds.

It is hard to believe the Doral infomercial was a real public statement by a sitting president. It’s not only unconstitutional and bad form, it’s a fucking two-bit infomercial.

Surely there’s a low grade skit in which world leaders propose policies on a variety of issues and each trump presentation is a terrible donfomercial for shit steaks, ties, wine, hotels, and golf resorts.

a streaming service I would subscribe to immediately would be real-time footage of Dan Quayle's face reading trump tweets

Didn't he make the same or similar joke a couple of weeks ago?

Oh, maybe the Times is incorporating that story from a few weeks ago into this one.

I am seeing red over that PR tweet.

There's callous and there's "have a heart attack and die, now!"

We all have to take a deep breath and think about how this will affect the federal budget. That’s what is important right now

is putting "anywhere" in quotes supposed to be some kind of mockery of the fact that PR is a part of the United States? I mean, there's something going on there, I just can't always precisely diagnose his sociopathy.

I'd say that there's at least like a 40% that he still hasn't been told (or, more likely, still hasn't listened and processed the fact) that PR is part of the US. And I'm pretty sure I'm not even joking because I'm openly weeping as I type.

He doesn't consider it part of the country until he wins their electoral votes and/or puts a hotel there.

farmers can boo all they want, they're still voting Trump in 2020

Trump 2020: Make Repeatedly Punching Yourself in the Face Great Again!

Surprised he hasn't announced a deal with Denmark to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland.

I'm seeing a lot of "is Trump really blaming PR for the hurricanes" sorta takes right now and the answer is no, he's not saying it's their fault, he's saying they aren't worth the money, which is far worse

Yeah, that's a misreading, for sure. He isn't blaming PR, he's blaming the storm. I think that he thinks it's alive, possibly also that it's magical? Kinda just reading between the lines. He definitely thinks it possesses some kind of sentience and that its decision to wreak havoc is ridiculous.