Pro-Trump pundits look at his outbursts and spasmodic actions and imbue them with meaning that simply isn’t there.
In Ancient Rome, a haruspex — a type of priest — would carefully study the entrails of sacrificial animals in order to divine the intent of the gods, the course of events, or even who might win the big game this weekend between the Gladiators and the Lions.
.. These men — and they were all men, damn the patriarchy — were extremely smart, but their intelligence was reflected entirely in their explanations. The entrails had no magical properties.
A rooster spleen will not tell you whether you should destroy Carthage, never mind whether you will survive the attempt. The V-formation of geese has no bearing whatsoever on whether you should or will stab Caesar. The genius of it all lay in the sales job.
.. I am coming around to the position that the vast bulk of punditry in defense of Donald Trump is little different from hepatoscopy, chiromancy, tasseography, and other “sciences” that imbue essentially random phenomena with deep and prophetic significance
.. John Boehner was hounded out of office by tea-party types for even considering cutting far better debt-ceiling deals with Barack Obama.
.. See if you can follow the logic. Paul Ryan, a lifelong Republican and the most conservative speaker of the House in living memory, took the fiscal hawks’ position, going back to the Ted Cruz government-shutdown circus of 2013. Donald Trump, until recently a life-long Democrat and New York liberal, embraced the opening offer from the leaders of the Democratic party, Chuck and Nancy. And Dobbs’s instantaneous conclusion? Paul Ryan, who over-performed Donald Trump in the 2016 election by 12 points, is the “RINO.” Does anyone doubt that if the policy positions were rearranged and Ryan had insisted on a short-term deal, Dobbs would be castigating that position?
.. To this day, no one can explain to me how Trump is playing so far above everyone else — nth level chess! — and yet has the worst poll numbers in history and can’t get anything done. The thought that he’s in way over his head is just too terrible to contemplate, and so we get all of these ornate — and sometimes quite clever — explanations about how Trump has outfoxed everyone yet again.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/451215/trump-debt-ceiling-daca-pivot-rachel-maddow-woodrow-wilson-dishonesty?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=170908_G-File&utm_term=GFile