The very things that Allah has prohibited

Aug 2nd, 2016 5:57 pm | By

IS explains why they’re so loathsome in an article. They make a list.

One is because you’re kuffar.

We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah – whether you realize it or not – by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices.

Oh, more than that – I hate him, and I say he doesn’t exist and never has. I hate the fictional character, and I don’t for a second think he has ever existed. I blaspheme against him all the time. I also don’t for a second think he’s a “he.”

We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted, a matter that doesn’t concern you because you Christian disbelief and paganism 32 separate between religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the legislators you vote into power.

And I hate you right back for the same reason in reverse. Allah has prohibited the wrong things and permitted even worse things – like the things you shits do. That’s the nub of the matter all right, and you have it dead wrong. It’s a human job to decide what humans need and don’t need. What a putative god wants is beside the point for human beings.

They’re not what you’d call profound thinkers.

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Strong women don’t

Aug 2nd, 2016 3:41 pm | By

The male Trumps are of course very clued-in and wise about sexual harassment. Like Eric Trump for example:

In an interview with “CBS This Morning,” the son of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump seemed to think that women allowed sexual harassment to occur.

Eric Trump was responding to a comment his father made in a USA Today piece, in which he said that his daughter Ivanka would either find a different career or job if she was harassed in the workplace.

“I think what he’s saying is, Ivanka is a strong, powerful woman, she wouldn’t allow herself to be objected to it,” the younger Trump said. “And by the way, you should take it up with Human Resources, and I think she would as a strong person, at the same time, I don’t think she would allow herself to be subjected to that. I think that’s a point he was making, and I think he did so well.”

Yeah. Good point. Strong Trump women don’t take any shit, while the rest of us just sit there limply and let it happen. It’s totally voluntary, sexual harassment is, so if it happens to you, it’s your fault for being so weak and stupid.

Even the women of Fox aren’t buying it.

Well she just says that because she’s got blood coming out of her whatever.

Only Losers get sexually harassed, am I right?

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“We need a strong leader who will stand up for America”

Aug 2nd, 2016 2:32 pm | By

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is speaking at a Mike Pence event today.

Arpaio, a longtime supporter of Trump, spoke on his behalf at the convention.

“I have spent 55 years in law enforcement,” Arpaio told delegates and attendees. “Fifty-five years, I’ve always regarded my work [and] missions critical, but my most important mission has just begun: to help elect Donald Trump president of the United States. The stakes are high. We need a strong leader who will stand up for America and put the interests of her citizens first.”

Not including the ones who have the misfortune to be in the Maricopa County prison system, of course. Arpaio doesn’t want A Strong Leader (a führer) to put their interests first, or anywhere.

The New Yorker on Arpaio in 2009:

The biggest part of the sheriff’s job is running the jails, and Arpaio saw that there was political gold to be spun there. The voters had declined to finance new jail construction, and so, in 1993, Arpaio, vowing that no troublemakers would be released on his watch because of overcrowding, procured a consignment of Army-surplus tents and had them set up, surrounded by barbed wire, in an industrial area in southwest Phoenix. “I put them up next to the dump, the dog pound, the waste-disposal plant,” he told me. Phoenix is an open-air blast furnace for much of the year. Temperatures inside the tents hit a hundred and thirty-five degrees. Still, the tents were a hit with the public, or at least with the conservative majority that voted. Arpaio put up more tents, until Tent City jail held twenty-five hundred inmates, and he stuck a neon “vacancy” sign on a tall guard tower. It was visible for miles.

His popularity grew. What could he do next? Arpaio ordered small, heavily publicized deprivations. He banned cigarettes from his jails. Skin magazines. Movies. Coffee. Hot lunches. Salt and pepper—Arpaio estimated that he saved taxpayers thirty thousand dollars a year by removing salt and pepper. Meals were cut to two a day, and Arpaio got the cost down, he says, to thirty cents per meal. “It costs more to feed the dogs than it does the inmates,” he told me. Jail, Arpaio likes to say, is not a spa—it’s punishment. He wants inmates whose keenest wish is never to get locked up again. He limits their television, he told me, to the Weather Channel, C-span, and, just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed them Newt Gingrich speeches. “They hated him,” he said cheerfully. Why the Weather Channel, a British reporter once asked. “So these morons will know how hot it’s going to be while they are working on my chain gangs.”

Arpaio wasn’t kidding about chain gangs. Foreign television reporters couldn’t get enough footage of his inmates shuffling through the desert. New ideas for the humiliation of people in custody—whom the Sheriff calls, with persuasive disgust, “criminals,” although most are actually awaiting trial, not convicted of any crime—kept occurring to him. He put his inmates in black-and-white striped uniforms. The shock value of these retro prisoner outfits was powerful and complex. There was comedy, nostalgia, dehumanization, even a whiff of something annihilationist. He created female chain gangs, “the first in the history of the world,” and, eventually, juvenile chain gangs. The chain gangs’ tasks include burying the indigent at the county cemetery, but mainly they serve as spectacles in Arpaio’s theatre of cruelty. “I put them out there on the main streets,” he told me. “So everybody sees them out there cleaning up trash, and parents say to their kids, ‘Look, that’s where you’re going if you’re not good.’”

Naturally he likes Trump.

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Crackle

Aug 2nd, 2016 2:12 pm | By

The Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010, via NASA.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BImyS6OBxXG/

 

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Trophies

Aug 2nd, 2016 2:01 pm | By

Two of Trump’s sons have paid big bucks to slaughter charismatic megafauna in Africa.

Animal rights activists are revolted by a series of trophy photos that have emerged showing Eric and Donald Trump Jr. posing with a dead elephant, kudu, civet cat and waterbuck while on a big game safari in Zimbabwe last year. In one photo, Donald Jr. proudly holds a dead elephant tail in one hand and a knife in the other.

“Look at me! I made this animal dead because I have a big gun! Animals are losers, they don’t have guns.”

The big game safari was organized through a company called Hunting Legends. The Daily Mail reports that there are trophy fees for the deer-like animal they shot, called the Kudu. The Trumps reportedly paid at least $2,795.00 and another $1,997.00 for the Waterbuck they were pictured with, but Don Jr. says on Twitter, “the money from hunting fees preserves animals and habitat.”

Of course they could always just donate the money to animal habitat preservation and skip the part where they kill the animals.

Or, even, they could just skip the part where they kill an elephant.

Updating to add:

Via Samantha Bee:

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You don’t like abuse? Here’s more abuse

Aug 2nd, 2016 10:45 am | By

More on the endless loop of misogynist abuse of women who campaign against misogynist abuse:

Melanie Jeffs and Lydia Rye led research into hate crime in Nottingham which resulted in the city’s police becoming the first in the country to recognise street harassment as a hate crime earlier this month.

Both have since been subjected to personal threats, claims they were “not attractive enough” to talk about street harassment and posts telling them to “get cancer” at the rate of up to 100 messages a day.

One commenter told the pair he wanted all women to feel like “the retarded gutter trash that they are”, after a BBC reporter had sexual obscenities hurled at her while reporting on sexism on Nottingham’s streets.

Another loop.

Rye, the head of Nottingham Citizens which is the city’s branch of Citizens UK, [is] shocked at the lengths people went to to attack her online.

“I was stunned people went to the effort of finding me on twitter and even going via the Citizens UK website comment box to point out that I really wasn’t attractive enough to speak on this issue so I should just shut up.”

One user, apparently from America, posted on the Citizens UK Facebook page that if he ever visited England he would “make sure every woman I see there is treated like shit”.

He allegedly wrote: “I will make them cry for even looking at me. I will make them run away with no regard to their feelings. I will purposely make them hate every day this law remains in effect… If this ever becomes law in America, I will make every woman, not just the ones who want this law feel like the retarded gutter trash that they are. There will be no peace.”

Why “allegedly”? The user isn’t named, so why “allegedly”?

Jeffs and Rye were involved in the ‘No Place For Hate’ report, the largest piece of peer-led research into hate crime ever carried out in Britain. It was commissioned by Nottingham Citizens and backed by three MPs, and found that 38% of women reporting a hate crime explicitly linked this to their gender.

Police followed its recommendation and recorded misogyny as a new category of hate crime this year, alongside abuse directed at people because of their religion, disability or sexual orientation. Nottingham Citizens is calling on other forces around the UK to do the same.

It’s funny to think it’s a “new” category. It’s a very god damn old category, is what it is – but the powers don’t like to recognize it, because it’s so very pervasive and commonplace. There’s irony for you.

Both agree the abuse was a ‘power play’ reaction from men who do not like women who speak out or challenge them.

“Some men expect women to maintain their position in society as subordintate and public spaces, whether in real life or online, as men’s space,” said Jeffs. “When women speak up and try to threaten that, of course there is a comeback.

“No one in power willingly gives up that power – and we have to remember that men still have that sort of power in our society. And of course the fact that I don’t look ‘feminine’ or try to attract male attention is also threatening and disruptive to the status quo – hence why this is what they focused on.”

“I think trolling is seen as sport, and there’s a whole group of men in particular who see this as a game and a power play,” said Rye.

“It feels like there’s a belief that we’re not equal or perhaps even fully human to them so it’s legitimate for them to treat us this way. Plus its online so its easier to hide who you are which is why I think its often threatening sexual violence rather than the broader – but still unwelcome – sexual comments you might get whilst out and about.”

It’s self-feeding and self-perpetuating. They have contempt for women, so they broadcast their contempt, which feeds and nourishes their contempt. It keeps growing and growing, like something in a horror movie.

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Loving the juxtaposition

Aug 2nd, 2016 9:27 am | By

The circle of abuse. There’s no escape, because if you try to do anything about abuse, the abuse intensifies. The abusers are busy demonstrating that to Melanie Jeffs in Nottingham.

A woman who helped launch a police campaign to record misogyny as a hate crime has received hundreds of abusive messages.

Melanie Jeffs said one person “threatened to put a machete” through the back of her head.

Nottinghamshire Police has received 22 reports and made two arrests since recording misogynistic hate crimes.

They included verbal abuse, threats of violence, assault and unwanted physical contact.

Ms Jeffs, centre manager at Nottingham Women’s Centre, said she was “stunned” by the volume of tweets and messages posted on Twitter and Facebook.

I hope she paused to appreciate the irony though. She says misogynist abuse is a hate crime, so the misogynist abusers ramp up the misogynist abuse. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.

She said: “They ranged from the ridiculous to some that were quite aggressive.

“One person said I should get cancer, I had somebody threatening to find me and tie me up and lots of comments about my appearance.

“There is one that I’m having discussions with the police about, but most of them I just brushed off.”

She said “people think it’s completely acceptable to target women in this way”.

They do. A truly astonishing number of people think that.

Ah look, she did pause to appreciate the irony.

Twitter

(Notice how very far from ugly she is. She’s not the slightest bit ugly; the difference between the photos is that she’s not self-consciously performing Hawt, and she hasn’t dressed and shaped her hair with a view to being that which is currently deemed Hawt. Merely not performing Hawt doesn’t make a person ugly.)

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Has no one told Johnny Walnuts that Donald Trump IS the Republican Party’s official nominee?

Aug 1st, 2016 4:31 pm | By

(No, it’s not going to be all Trump all the time from now on. But…clear and present danger, and all that.)

Jim Wright says what I say – McCain doesn’t get to say Trump doesn’t represent the Republican Party, because he obviously and absolutely does.

John McCain said this morning Donald Trump does not “represent the views of our Republican Party, its officers, or candidates.”

Donald Trump doesn’t NOT represent the views of our Republican Party.

Its Officers.

Or its CANDIDATES.

Has no one told Johnny Walnuts that Donald Trump IS the Republican Party’s official nominee for President of the United States and in point of fact DOES represent the Republican Party, its Officers, its members, and all its Candidates (of which he is chief among them)? By DEFINITION.

…

You’ll note, McCain STILL endorses Trump for President.

What I’m saying here, not so subtly, is that John McCain is a sterling example of why down-ticket voting in the coming election is even more important than voting for the President. This raging loony old man and those like him in the Senate and the House are the entire problem. And they know it. THEY KNOW IT. McCain daily rages against Trump’s lunacy but supports him ANYWAY and it doesn’t take any great clairvoyance to extrapolate Senator McCain’s rubber stamp support for President Trump’s mad demands once he’s in office.

I couldn’t agree more.

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He comes back with a certain bravado

Aug 1st, 2016 4:00 pm | By

Fareed Zakaria called Trump a bullshit artist on CNN this morning.

Zakaria pointed to the pattern that has emerged in Trump’s efforts to defend or clarify his controversial statements.

“Every time it is demonstrated that Donald Trump is plainly ignorant about some basic public policy issue, some well-known fact, he comes back with a certain bravado and tries to explain it away with a tweet or a statement,” Zakaria said.

“Bravado” is a very sweet way of putting it. Psychopathic shamelessness is how I would put it.

“It’s entertaining,” Zakaria said of Trump’s shtick, “if the guy is trying to sell you a condo or a car. But for the president of the United States, it’s deeply worrying.”

It was deeply worrying in Bush Junior, and it’s that squared in Trump.

At the end of the post there’s a note:

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.

Yep.

If you watch the video you will see: Zakaria does call him a bullshit artist.

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And the government will no longer be the government

Aug 1st, 2016 3:19 pm | By

Also they’re coup-plotting.

At a Monday campaign event in Columbus, Ohio, Donald Trump teed up for a potential challenge to the integrity of the fall general election, an escalation of his rhetoric about the “rigged” primary system.

“I’m afraid the election’s gonna be rigged, I have to be honest,” Trump told the crowd.

While Trump has often questioned the integrity of the primary contests in both parties, his newest remarks seemed to begin laying groundwork for him to contest the Nov. 8 election results.

“Contest” it as in inciting a coup to overturn it. That’s the logic of what he’s saying, whether he realizes it or not.

It was a line of attack that longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone pushed on a podcast with Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos that was posted online Friday. Stone suggested voter fraud is “widespread” and said if Hillary Clinton wins a state like Florida after polls show Trump in the lead, the election would be “illegitimate.”

“If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government,” Stone said. He also promised a “bloodbath” if the Democrats attempt to “steal” the election.

“And the government will no longer be the government.”

These people are terrifying.

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Albatross

Aug 1st, 2016 12:58 pm | By

John McCain isn’t happy with Trump’s attacks on Khizr and Ghazala Khan.

Mr McCain, a war veteran and the party’s 2008 presidential nominee, thanked the Khan family for immigrating to America, adding “we’re a better country because of you.”

“I cannot emphasize enough how deeply I disagree with Mr. Trump’s statement,” Mr McCain said in a statement.

“I hope Americans understand that the remarks do not represent the views of our Republican Party, its officers, or candidates.”

Ah  no. Sorry but that claim is dead in the water. You can’t say that when the guy who made the remarks is the Republican candidate for president. You’re stuck with them, because you’re stuck with him.

Mr Trump took to Twitter on Monday to criticise the Khans for appearing on television, adding that the story was not about Khizr Khan, but rather “radical Islamic terrorism” and the US.

Mr Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski also defended his former boss, saying Captain Khan would still be alive if the billionaire was president “because he would’ve never engaged in a war that didn’t directly benefit this country”.

He’s yours, Republicans.

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An aura of crude strength and machismo

Aug 1st, 2016 12:22 pm | By

Robert Kagan on Trump back in May:

We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies—his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others”—Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees—whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.

And what is that? That is fascism. An aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of democratic culture, playing on feelings of resentment and disdain intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger, attacking “others” and threatening them with violence: that is fascism.

As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France—that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.

This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Fuhrer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how.

He wrote that before the Convention, before Trump got up and screamed that he alone can fix it.

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“That’s a witch that needs to be arrested and put to death”

Aug 1st, 2016 11:40 am | By

Another rung on the fascism ladder:

An official adviser to the Trump campaign has escalated the attacks on Khizr Khan, the gold star father who was critical of Trump at the Democratic convention, baselessly accusing him of being a “Muslim Brotherhood agent.”

The adviser, Al Baldasaro, tweeted a link to an article from Shoebat.com, a fringe anti-Islam conspiracy website. The article also suggests (without any evidence) that Humayun Khan, who was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze, was a jihadist who joined the military to kill Americans.

…

The piece, written by Theodore and Walid Shoebat, is less of an article and more of a fever dream of conspiracies strung together.

Tell us more about Theodore Shoebat.

In recent days, Theodore Shoebat has also called on the government to execute gay people for sodomy and Hillary Clinton for witchcraft. He also said women who have abortions should be lined up and shot by firing squad.

SAY WHAT???

Let’s look at that last link, to a piece at Right Wing Watch.

Shoebat had particular praise for Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals judge Steven Colloton for issuing a decision in 2014 upholding the constitutionality of the death penalty, which Shoebat again said should be applied to gays … as well as to witches like Hillary Clinton.

“We need judges who uphold the death penalty for evildoers,” he said. “We need judges who would uphold the death penalty for those, not just murderers, obviously murderers deserve death, I think most people would agree with that. But you also have other people who deserve the death penalty, not necessarily murderers; people who are involved in witchcraft, who promote witchcraft. Witchcraft is very, very dangerous, very demonic and look how much destruction it has caused in the United States. Look at Hillary Clinton. That’s a witch that needs to be arrested and put to death. Most definitely. As the scriptures says, I believe in Leviticus, ‘Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.'”

“Homosexuals also need to be put to death,” Shoebat continued, “because it is evil, it is demonic and it is against human nature.”

So to sum up, Baldasaro is an official adviser to the Trump campaign and Baldasaro considers Theodore Shoebat a trustworthy source.

Down, down, down we go.

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Scholars and social butterflies

Aug 1st, 2016 10:36 am | By

Again. Clothes, advertising, children. This time it’s Gap UK.

Thanks, Gap UK.

(Also, note the spelling on the boy’s shirt.)

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This monstrous clown

Jul 31st, 2016 7:02 pm | By

Historians speak out on Trump.

[David] McCullough and Ken Burns, the filmmaker and author, have assembled a group of distinguished American historians to speak about the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, in videos being posted to a Facebook page, Historians on Donald Trump.

It is a diverse, honored group — including, among others, Robert A. Caro, Ron Chernow, David Levering Lewis, William E. Leuchtenburg, Vicki Lynn Ruiz — that speaks with alarm about Mr. Trump’s candidacy and his place in the march of American history.

I plan to work my way through that whole page.

Mr. McCullough, raised in a Republican home and now aligned with no party, said the prospect of a Trump presidency so distressed him that he felt he could not remain publicly detached. “When you think of how far we have come, and at what cost, and with what faith, to just turn it all over to this monstrous clown with a monstrous ego, with no experience, never served his country in any way — it’s just crazy,” he said. “We can’t stand by and let it happen. The Republican Party shouldn’t stand by and let it happen.”

He goes on to say that he’s an independent and has admired plenty of Republicans and this isn’t a party thing. I second that. If Trump were a Democrat I would loathe him just as much and even more (on account of how I want Dems to be better than that).

In the 1920s, fear of immigrants fueled the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and exclusionary laws aimed at European Catholics and Asians, said Ms. Ruiz, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and past president of the American Historical Association. Also, about one-third of the Mexican population in this country was pushed out, more than half of them United States citizens by birth, she said.

“Playing with hate has had tragic consequences throughout our history,” she said.

And other histories too. It’s never benign. Let’s not do it.

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He doesn’t think we should be against the NFL

Jul 31st, 2016 6:22 pm | By

Trump is going to find that one drawback to being a major party candidate is that news organizations will report that he’s telling whoppers. He told whoppers about how the NFL wrote to him to complain about the debates, which the NFL says it never.

In an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Trump complained that two of the debates are up against NFL games, and claimed that the organization sent him a letter calling the schedule “ridiculous.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I don’t like. It’s against two NFL games,” Trump said. “I got a letter from the NFL saying, ‘This is ridiculous. Why are the debates against—’ ‘cause the NFL doesn’t wanna go against the debates. ‘Cause the debates are gonna be pretty massive, from what I understand, OK? And I don’t think we should be against the NFL.”

But the NFL says Nope. Nope we didn’t. Nope we didn’t write a letter to Trump. Nope.

 

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He’s not worried about it

Jul 31st, 2016 5:12 pm | By

Hey, did you know that women actually don’t want to climb the ladder, they’d rather be happy? Did you know women have more sense than those silly men with their higher salaries, and prefer to go around in a circle rather than up? It’s true: the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi said so.

The chairman of advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi has been put on leave for saying the debate on gender bias in the industry is “all over”.

British-born Kevin Roberts told Business Insider he did not think the lack of women in leadership roles “is a problem” in the advertising industry.

The reason it’s not a problem is because women like it. They like it, I tell you!

In the interview, published on Friday, Mr Roberts said the “debate is all over” about gender diversity in the advertising industry.

…

He goes on to say that rather than holding ambitions to progress into the higher echelons of management, many women – and men – simply want to be happy and “do great work”.

He adds: “…they are going: ‘Actually guys, you’re missing the point, you don’t understand: I’m way happier than you.’ Their ambition is not a vertical ambition, it’s this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy.

“So they say: ‘We are not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by’. I don’t think [the lack of women in leadership roles] is a problem.

“I’m just not worried about it because they are very happy, they’re very successful, and doing great work. I can’t talk about sexual discrimination because we’ve never had that problem, thank goodness.”

Yay, problem solved! In fact problem never even was a problem, at least not at Saatchi and Saatchi.

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He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right?

Jul 31st, 2016 5:03 pm | By

Trump goes on tv, attempts to talk to grownups, fails dismally.

Donald Trump said Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t make a military move into Ukraine — even though Putin already has done just that, seizing the country’s Crimean Peninsula.

“He’s not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want,” Trump said in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week.”

“Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?” Stephanopoulos responded, in a reference to Crimea, which Putin took from Ukraine in early 2014.

At this point I see Basil Fawlty in my mind’s eye, backpedalling furiously. “Oh well he’s there – but – “

Trump said: “OK — well, he’s there in a certain way. But I’m not there. You have Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of NATO and all of this. In the meantime, he’s going away. He takes Crimea.”

Stephanopoulos interjected to note that Trump has suggested he could recognize Russia’s claim on Crimea over Ukraine’s — and Trump didn’t back away from that possibility in the interview.

“I’m going to take a look at it,” he said. “But you know, the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were. And you have to look at that, also … just so you understand, that was done under Obama’s administration.”

He has no idea what they’re talking about, does he. It could be Paraguay or Mongolia or Zimbabwe and he wouldn’t know the difference.

The Clinton campaign responded later Sunday, with senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan saying: “What is he talking about? Russia is already in Ukraine. Does he not know that? What else doesn’t he know?”

“Today, (Trump) gamely repeated Putin’s argument that Russia was justified in seizing the sovereign territory of another country by force. This is scary stuff,” Sullivan said in a statement. “But it shouldn’t surprise us. This comes on the heels of his tacit invitation to the Russians to invade our NATO allies in Eastern Europe.”

We’re doomed.

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Boko Haram triggers famine in Borno state

Jul 31st, 2016 1:31 pm | By

Meanwhile Boko Haram, as always.

Suspected Islamist Boko Haram militants have ambushed a UN humanitarian aid convoy in north-eastern Nigeria which had a military escort, officials say.

The military said three civilians, including UN staff, and two soldiers were wounded in the attack.

It has prompted the UN to temporarily suspend aid deliveries in Borno state, where more than two million people have been displaced by the insurgency.

The UN says thousands of children are severely malnourished in the region.

Emphasis added. Boko Haram wants thousands of children to starve to death.

Doubtless thousands of adults are also malnourished and in danger of starving to death.

Earlier this month the UN’s children agency warned that tens of thousands of children would die if treatment did not reach them soon.

So Boko Haram’s response is to make the UN suspend aid deliveries. No more food aid for the starving people of Borno.

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Vichy Republicans

Jul 31st, 2016 12:26 pm | By

Nick Cohen calls the Trump-supporting Republicans – which is most of them – collaborators.

Anglo-Saxon democracies, which were never invaded in the 20th century, have produced a rich series of alternative histories of resistance. When the Nazis win the Second World War, audiences can flatter themselves that they would never have collaborated with Robert Harris’s Fatherland or Amazon’s Man in the High Castle.

No one is more prone to imagining how well they would have behaved in conflicts that they never experienced than American conservatives. The cult of Churchill in the US would embarrass even his most devoted British admirers.

Do they? That’s bizarre. I do the opposite – I always suspect I would be cowardly and selfish. I don’t dare imagine myself behaving well, because I’m not the least bit confident I would have. It’s the same with the Milgram experiment – I always imagine myself being cowed by the insistence of the guy in the lab coat and my shame at messing up his nice experiment.

Anyway – Trump is a fascist, or as close to one as we need in order to know he must not be elected president of the US.

I don’t throw the word “fascism” around, but can we at least accept that Trump follows theFührerprinzip? He has no colleagues, only followers. He is a racist. Not a closet racist, or a dog-whistle racist, but a racist so unabashed that the Klan endorses him. Above all, he has the swaggering dictator’s determination to bawl opponents into silence with screams of “loser”, “dummy”, “fraud”, “puppet,” “biased”, “disgusting”, “liar” and “kook”. As with the web trolls Trump so resembles, it is never the point and always the person. Female news presenters have to explain that they are not asking him difficult questions because they have “blood coming out of whatever” or surrender to him, as Megan Kelly of Fox News did to her shame. Latinos have to explain why they are not rapists and murderers or shut up and give up. Muslims have to explain that they are not terrorists or they lose the right to a hearing. At every stage, the argument is shifted on to the troll’s terrain of ethnic and religious loyalty tests. Except here the troll could become the world’s most powerful man.

It’s still hard to believe we’re even arguing about this. The man is a brawler, a street-fighter, that loud drunk at the bar, that out of control asshole on the bus. He’s sexist racist xenophobic and foul-tempered. There is not one good thing you can say about him.

Conservatives boasted too that they knew that the old-fashioned virtues of good character mattered as much as a man or woman’s ideology. By this reckoning, Trump’s bragging, vainglory, dark fury and towering vanity should disqualify him from the presidency regardless of his politics.

What I’m saying. He’s terrible. If he were an ardent lefty but had all those qualities I would say he’s terrible. (There certainly are ardent lefties like that, and they are terrible.)

Yet McCain and Ryan, those enemies of appeasement, have folded and endorsed Trump. Rubio, that piercing judge of his character, has decided that, after all, Trump’s finger should be on the button. Presidents Bush père et fils are bravely abstaining. Bobby Jindal, who described Trump as a “narcissist and egomaniacal madman”, wants him in the White House. Nearly all the Republican names you remember follow suit. The Dick Cheneys, Rand Pauls and Condoleezza Rices are backing Trump or refusing to commit. Confronted with a dictatorial menace in their own time and their own country they lack the courage to risk the unpopularity that Churchillian dissent would bring.

Even when Trump followed his years of promoting the interests of a dictator of a hostile foreign power by urging Vladimir Putin to hack Clinton’s emails, they held steady in their cowardice. The Republicans, the party of red-baiters and Cold Warriors, is now in the pocket of a Kremlin “useful idiot” and the best its national security conservatives can manage are embarrassed mutters.

…

My friend and comrade, the American journalist Jamie Kirchick, coined the phrase “Vichy Republicans” to describe its leaders.

They might as well be singing “Maréchal, nous voilà !”

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