DJT & QAnon: a QTie
BTW, why QAnon and not, say, XAnon? Because it looks mysterious enough – and cute enough – even when mirrored or reversed? Nona Q, Susie Q‘s lost sibling – or grandma. Karen Bennhold reports from Berlin for The New York…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Tag Donald Trump
Putin’s useless playbook
Jonathan Chait writes in New York Magazine: Most American politicians, Republican or Democrat, would take Putin’s perspective on handling hostile demonstrations as a cautionary tale. This is how Putin would respond to protests used to be, self-evidently, an indictment. Trump…
“At the appropriate time, I will get involved, yes.”
Excerpts from a piece in the Wall Street Journal published on Thursday: Administration and industry officials see diplomatic action as necessary to get Russia and Saudi Arabia to back down from flooding the markets with supply… The U.S. would ask…
Whatever slows it down
OK, if you insist that COVID-19 is just like the flu, I could agree if you dropped “just.” It’s like the flu, sort of – but much deadlier and, in all likelihood, more contagious. I’ve seen the COVID-19 mortality rate…
News from Baghdad
I’ve been deeply disappointed by President Trump’s reluctance to take on certain dictators. Unfortunately, the senior Iranian murderer killed in Baghdad by the US air force was not personally a dictator. However, he soldiered for the turbaned junta so his…
For cursing the genius of our President
The latest comment from Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary: I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President. I wish she’d added “stable” but the comment is immeasurably amusing…
“Apologizing to the dictator”: disappointing if true
I wrote this two and a half years ago: If President Trump is truly an aging Narcissus, few things would please him more than toppling a powerful leader whom he, Trump, has previously considered close to a peer… If the…
“A genuine reserve of rage and fixation with particular policies”
James Butler on the LRB blog (June 12), comparing Boris Johnson and Donald Trump: …whereas Trump has a genuine reserve of rage and fixation with particular policies, Johnson’s desire for power is unimpeded by such attachments. I take this for…
GEOTUS
In a letter to the London Review of Books, Maxwell Young argues: While ‘godly’ is an adjective few would apply to Trump himself, Vice President Mike Pence and other Trump appointees demonstrate the continuing potency of religion as a political…
They are usually wrong
To quote from a June 2016 post on this blog: Trump, it turns out, has consistently argued since at least 1990 that the terms of trade between the United States and its allies unfairly favor the latter because the US…
Old rights and new statutes
Since 1967, the UK parliament has abolished or curtailed a number of ancient privileges available to criminal defendants in England and Wales. Double jeopardy is no longer prohibited; unanimous verdicts are not required; the right to remain silent has been…
“More aggressive than anything pursued by Obama… Bush, or Clinton”
Corey Robin writes on his blog: …close watchers of Russia and the US have pointed out all the multiple ways in which the US is currently pursuing a very anti-Russia foreign policy, more aggressive than anything pursued by Obama (especially…