“Please stop smiling,” I politely asked Barack Obama as I passed him in Boston’s airport.
It wasn’t just any smile. It was that infectious, magical grin that helped him deflate the Clinton machine and win the White House as a novice senator, a smile full of charm and promise that we didn’t see all that often after 2008.
.. As TMZ put it Friday, when it published pictures of Obama grinning and golfing at St. Andrews in Scotland: “Barack Obama’s not just on vacation — he’s on the most EPIC vacay, and it’s starting to feel like he’s rubbing it in your face.”
.. It looks like the three happiest guys in a jangled, coarsened, belligerent, riven country are Barack Obama, George W. Bush and John Boehner.
.. At a recent Texas Rangers game, there was W., playfully photobombing a Fox Sports reporter doing her standup. And at an energy conference in Houston Wednesday, “Drunk-on-Life” Boehner, as Vanity Fair dubs him, gushed, “I wake up every day, drink my morning coffee and say, ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.’”
.. Trump thinks the way to represent America is with a caricature of strength, without understanding it comes across as weakness and boorishness. Even with the weightiest job in the world, he can’t seem to mature beyond the schoolyard bully. Where are you, Melania, anti-bullying spokeswoman and Donald-hand-slapper?
.. Things have gotten into such dangerous territory with verbal and physical violence that in Montana Greg Gianforte body-slammed a reporter hours before winning a House seat, and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, watched as his security goons roughed up protesters in front of the Turkish Embassy during his recent visit here. And that brings us to Trump’s strange love of dictators.
.. “every time something like Montana happens, Republicans adjust their standards and put an emphasis on team loyalty. They normalize and accept previously unacceptable behavior.”
.. never before have allies had pre-emptive plans on how to counteract an American president’s handshake. Trump’s are more like dominance tests than greetings. First Justin Trudeau in Washington and then Emmanuel Macron in Brussels prepared to out-grip him on his patented “I’ll-rip-your-shoulder-out-and-show-you-who’s-boss” handshake.
.. Donald Trump is not a tough guy. He’s a faux tough guy. That is not even in the American tradition. All of our famously tough icons, on screen and in life, were able to exude strength without using brute force. And they did it while standing up for people, not smacking them down.
Anything Goes in Our New Bro Age
According to the Old God of the Jewish and Christian Faith, what GOP candidate Greg Gianforte did the night before the special election was inexcusable.
.. But in the Bro Age, when one of your Bros does something wrong and oh-so-Broey — particularly if there’s proof that it happened so you can’t blame it on anonymous sources — the first thing you must do is defend your Bro’s actions. After Gianforte’s body slam, Twitter was full of people, even those of the blue checkmark variety, talking about how the Jacobs guy deserved it. I even caught Rob O’Neill on Fox saying that Jacobs was a “snowflake” and that the assault was “kinda funny” and that this was just “Montana Justice.”
.. Oh, and it was Gianforte who literally freaked out in a fight-or-flight panic when asked a question about a frick’n CBO score! But Ben Jacobs is the snowflake?
- .. for an entire day, countless people defended the assault because they
- didn’t like Jacobs, or
- they wanted to win an open House seat, or
- they wanted to play yet another round of whatabboutism, or
- help Donald Trump in some way or — in the case of the alt-right —
- because any attack on a Jew is defined as a good start.
let me ask the people who spent the day defending Gianforte: How do you feel now that he won? Is it all you hoped it would be? Oh, and how did you feel when he apologized? Did you regret all that Montana justice and he-had-it-coming talk? I mean, you probably didn’t really believe that stuff anyway. You just let people believe you did because the cause was so important. Or maybe you’re mad that Gianforte apologized after spending all that time arguing he did nothing wrong? Probably not — because one of the Orb’s first commandments is “Thou Shalt Not Care about Anyone’s Hypocrisy but the Enemy’s.”
.. What did you have to give up? Just any claim to the moral high ground and any credibility when it comes to condemning political violence down the line.
That’s okay, because in the Bro Age, all of the creativity is in how to leap over, skate around, or dive under objective standards of right and wrong. “Hold my beer while I abandon my principles ..
Montana’s Charles Sumner Moment
One hundred and sixty-one years ago, in retaliation for a blistering speech against slavery, Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a gold-tipped cane on the Senate floor until he was unconscious. The unapologetic Brooks (“Every lick went where I intended”) audaciously resigned his seat, and then was promptly re-elected in the subsequent special election, proving his constituents had his back.
Northerners were appalled, but Southern newspapers leapt to Brooks’ defense. The Richmond Whig hailed the caning as “a most glorious deed”; the Examiner said Sumner “ought to have nine-and-thirty [lashes] every morning.” The shocking attack, and the South’s fulsome embrace of it, became a rallying point for the abolitionist movement and fueled the rise of the nascent Republican Party.
Conservative radio host Glenn Beck has long warned that a polarized America would eventually suffer another violent and divisive “Charles Sumner moment.” Last June he said, “Mark my words. It will be someone like Ted Cruz or Louie Gohmert that gets the cane to the head. It will be a self-righteous progressive that will beat a liberty person almost to death.”
.. And he earned the approbation of President Donald Trump, who interrupted his trip to Italy to hail the “great victory in Montana.”
.. America’s already destabilizing political polarization has only gotten worse since November.
.. Gianforte’s solid win makes Trump’s election seem like less of a fluke. Trump encouraged beatings of protesters and was caught on tape bragging about groping women. .. But maybe we should be contemplating the awful possibility that perhaps he won because of it.
.. Gianforte didn’t win in spite of his violent outburst. He channeled a rage against the media that Trump routinely stokes. “You’re lucky someone doesn’t pop one of you” one Gianforte voter told a CNN reporter on Election Day. A caller to Rush Limbaugh’s show from Billings insisted, “If every Republican candidate in the country picked up a reporter and threw him to the ground, it would increase my chances exponentially of voting for them.”
.. It’s about time that people started sticking up for our side. If enough of this happens, those reporters are gonna learn to back off a little bit.” Keep in mind that the question the Guardian’s exceedingly polite Ben Jacobs asked was about Gianforte’s reaction to a CBO report.
.. The largely college-educated scribes are treated, fairly or not, as representatives of a cultural elite that sneers at working-class whites who lack bachelors degrees.
.. Those who thought some economic populism and down-home folksiness would bridge the cultural divide got a rude awakening on Thursday night.
.. Republicans still yoked him to coastal liberalism.
- After a report that Quist had once performed at a nudist colony, one super PAC ad snarked, “He’s not interested in Montana values. He’s more interested in Hollywood values.”
- He was also hit hard for not always paying his taxes, which Quist futilely tried to explain was a result of financial troubles following a botched surgery. But even that was treated as evidence of his ties to national Democrats: “Can you trust Quist and Pelosi with your money?” charged another super PAC ad.
Shields and Brooks on Trump’s first trip, press bashing in Montana
Brooks: Under Trump, character doesn’t matter. We are nice to Saudi Arabia and mean to Germany and France. Values don’t matter.
Mark Shields: The budget is mean-spirited and dishonest
Brooks: Food Stamps have risen because more people are poor.
It also hurts the young and helps the old.
Shields: Medicaid is being cut by one half. Foodstamps cut by one quarter.
here is not a single house member who regrets voting against it.
Trump set the tone by singling out the press. Joe ___ said “You lie” and then raised $1,000.000
Brooks: In bodyslamming a reporter, at least he apologized. That’s a step up from what we’ve seen.