The petition, which gained more than fifty thousand signatures, turned out to be something of a Dada joke: an attempt, on the part of a gun-control enthusiast, to force gun fetishists to confront the logic, or illogic, of their own position. If guns bring order, why not bring them to a Cleveland delegate floor fight?
.. What Trump oddly does is X-ray the Republican id, pure and raw, without the quavers that they have learned to execute in order to get down the street without being stopped. Being a Republican candidate is like being a professional wrestler. You’re supposed to be maximally crazy, but you’re supposed to pretend to pay attention to the referee who is, sort of, there to enforce fair play. You’re supposed to hit your opponent over the head with a chair, but you’re supposed to pretend to hide the chair you are about to hit him with from the view of the referee. Trump is willing to be maximally crazy, when it comes to the more extreme positions of the G.O.P., but he can’t remember, or perhaps never learned, the minimally sane-sounding speech acts that the referees want you first to attach to the craziness.
.. The actual position of the Republican Party since the Bush Administration, for example, has been to violate Reagan-era treaties, reject the Geneva Conventions, and torture people—but you’re not supposed to say you favor torturing people. You’re supposed to say that you are opposed to torture, but what you’re in favor of isn’t really torture and anyway you would only do it when you had to and anyway they tortured us first. (Terrorism equals torture, so they started it.)
.. It’s the same with abortion and big government. The actual position of the Republican platform, where abortion equals murder, would demand the creation of a government bureaucracy, a full-time pregnancy police, with cops who spend all of their hours tracking pregnant women to those now-illegal clinics and district attorneys who specialize in prosecuting doctors and can, of course, only do so by intimidating women to get them to testify—you cannot have a law making something a serious crime and not have the police pursue it.
.. What’s useful about these little Dada exercises is that they end by doing the great and distinctly conservative work of revealing the actual beliefs of the people who are taking part in politics.
.. We know that even the most passionate believers in forced birth don’t actually believe that abortion is really like murder, and have no real desire to treat it as such; they just want to do all they can to make abortion once again difficult, dangerous, and heavily stigmatized. They are for torture, but they are ashamed of it, too, and would rather it were done far away and in secret.
Donald Trump Is a Punch Line for Obama, Who Is Getting More Jokes Ready
Indeed, the day in April 2011 that Mr. Obama walked into the White House briefing room to directly address Mr. Trump’s allegations, Mr. Trump flew to New Hampshire in his signature plane to test the waters of a presidential run. Days later, Mr. Obama made Mr. Trump the object of a string of humiliating jokes at a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, saying that Mr. Obama’s release of his birth certificate would allow Mr. Trump to “get back to focusing on the issues that matter like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
Mr. Trump soon left the dinner, evidently bruised. It was a moment that White House aides recall with relish.
“Trump is at his very nature an insecure carnival barker, so the best way to unmask him is to show everyone that it’s all a circus,” Mr. Pfeiffer wrote.
.. “To date, Obama is the only public figure who is able to put Trump in his place without rolling around in the mud with him,” Mr. Pfeiffer said.
.. Mr. Obama has vowed to campaign vigorously for the eventual Democratic nominee, whom Mr. Obama has told Democratic donors will soon be Hillary Clinton.
Syria’s White Rose
At the end of Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo,” there is a sharp exchange. Andrea Sarti, a student of the astronomer, says, “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” To which Galileo shoots back: “No, Andrea. Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
.. “We don’t have the necessity today to resist in Germany because this is a free country,” Wolffsohn said. “Resistance is the readiness to incur lethal personal risk.”
.. R.B.S.S. will not stop its efforts to spread word of the crimes of ISIS. To record is to resist evil; to forget is to permit its spread. As Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born.”
Wolffsohn drew a parallel between Alhamza’s resistance to ISIS and that of the White Rose group to the Third Reich. Formed in 1942 by Munich University students and their professor, the White Rose, in the face of certain death, distributed leaflets denouncing Nazism. The first read:
“Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes — crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure — reach the light of day?”
.. “The White Rose knew from the very beginning that they would lose but that their loss was necessary to show that humanity and human dignity cannot be wiped out completely. It’s the same with the Raqqa group.”
Trump As Republican Apocalypse
I am fond of the word “apocalypse,” which in common usage means “the end of the world,” but etymologically means “an unmasking.”
.. Taking a stand against Trump is all well and good. But I’d have been more impressed by an honest effort to come clean: Yes, we’re the establishment; yes, we’ve made some massive mistakes and need to change course; but Trump is not the answer.
Instead, we’re left with the same old denial of responsibility.
Until that changes, the Republican establishment will remain vulnerable to the anti-establishment furies it unleashed so many years ago and has never ceased to encourage.
.. It really is hard to overstate the degree to which people on the Right’s leadership class think of themselves as outsiders.
.. like Fidel Castro playing the eternal revolutionary