Trump lies: a taste of next week’s column, and my discussion with Charles Adler tonight
Your perspective on the Republican National Convention depends on your politics, of course.
If you are in any way progressive, it was a five-alarm dumpster fire, a bonfire of insanities, a crazy conflagration of fear and loathing. It made Fight Club and Dr. Strangelove seem like newsreel footage.
If you are a Trump-style conservative, however, none of that matters in the slightest. To you, and those like you, the liberal media establishment are slime, and they lie all the time.
What the reviled MSM (mainstream media) say doesn’t matter a whit to you, the Trump Troopers. To you, the only relevant truth is the one that validates your world view.
Take, for example, the now-infamous plagiarized speech. Melania Trump stole Michelle Obama’s words and thought several million people wouldn’t notice. When some did, she and her husband blamed a secretary no one had ever heard of before, and whom many believed did not even exist. Dishonesty used to excise dishonesty. Lie upon lie.
Plaigiasm-gate stomped all over the GOP’s narratives (pro-unity, pro-security, anti-Hillary) on Days Two and Three of their convention. It was a clown show, with CNN giddily dissecting every minute.
But the Trump Troopers? They didn’t care.
To them, anything emanating from the MSM is a lie. To them, anything that upsets the pointy-headed intelligentsia is actually welcome. To them, the only media that matters is found at the furthest reaches of the Right, recycling dark conspiracy theories about Benghazi, Whitewater and email servers, over and over.
And, to them, the truth is just a theory. It’s relative.
If someone mocked your wife’s looks and said your father is a murderer, would you endorse him?
No sane person would. But the Trump Troops aren’t sane. They think Ted Cruz should put Donald Trump before his own family, I guess.
Some of this latest GOP contretemps flared up on my Twitter feed, with a Canadian (!) Trumpster defending the bilious, barf-inducing billionaire. My response:
You'd call a five-alarm dumpster fire an occasion to get warm, if Trump had lit it. https://t.co/9p3pavssGY
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) July 21, 2016
“Liar” doesn’t quite cut it anymore. I’d call Trump “Lucifer,” but Ben Carson got there first
Last night’s CBC story, which (after several hours) I figured out how to embed:
The precise moment where I say Donald Trump is a liar liar pants on fire
At Daisy, we’re not above exploiting GOP tragedy for commercial gain
We do speech writing.
We can make you sound as good as @FLOTUS, not exactly like her. #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuoteshttps://t.co/xXCpgNv9km
— Daisy Group (@DaisyGrp) July 19, 2016
Pithy reaction to first night of the cross burning
EVERYONE IS WHITE #RNCinCLE
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) July 18, 2016
Trump’s Boswell speaks
Just did an interview on CITY-TV with my friend Cristina Howorun about the state of U.S. politics, generally – and Donald Trump, specifically. I recommended she read this incredible essay. You should too.
Against Me! 333! Shape shift with me!
Finally!
Queer
I am still uncomfortable with that word.
I know that many gays and lesbians use it all the time – essentially to take back the word, and strip of its formerly-negative connotation – but I’m not there yet. It still strikes me as a profound insult, a put-down designed to place a person outside the mainstream. So too the “N” word (which has been embraced by rappers, with relish, for three decades, and which I still cannot even say aloud).
“Retard” and “gimp” and “gyp,” meanwhile, have gone in the opposite direction on the popular lexicon, moving from popular use to being seen (appropriately) as cruel and/or discriminatory.
Language moves around, all the time. What was once off-limits can become less so, and vice-versa. But, on queer, I’m a hold out. It still hits like an affront.
So, between shovelling pea gravel and lifting paving stones with Son two yesterday afternoon, I run across this essay in the New York Times Magazine. Here’s a snippet worth considering
Anyway, I remain unconvinced – I feel queer about it, you might say. What do you think, O Wise Readers?