Quote of the Day posts

“Biden said that the year's events had dismantled a myth deeply embedded in his consciousness. For years, he'd been telling a parable about the morning of Obama's Inauguration: 'I called my two sons and my daughter up, and I said, ”Guys, don't tell me things can't change.“' Hunching forward in his seat, he told me that Trump had made a mockery of that parable. 'I'm embarrassed to say, I thought you could defeat hate. You can't. It only hides. It crawls under the rocks, and, when given oxygen by any person in authority, it comes roaring back out. And what I realized is, the words of a President, even a lousy President, matter. They can take you to war, they can bring peace, they can make the market rise, they can make it fall. But they can also give hate oxygen.'”

--from Evan Osnos' piece, “Can Biden's Center Hold?,” in The New Yorker. Thanks to Adam for alerting me to it. 

The simple truth is Donald Trump failed to protect America. So now, he’s trying to scare America.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 31, 2020

“The main theme of the convention seemed to be: telling lies in front of flags. Because it was four days of a full-throated denial of objective reality.”

-- John Oliver, on last week's Republican National Convention

From the column “Trump's Favorite Four-Letter Word” by Brian Stelter in The New York Times. 

Donald Trump has shouted “hoax” hundreds of times, about everything from climate change to Supreme Court rulings to impeachment. At this point, his copious claims about hoaxes add up to a hoax. And through the history of his use of this single word, we can see how he has fooled his biggest fans but failed to persuade almost everyone else.

During his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump didn't rely on the word “hoax.” He didn't even say “fake news.” He called the news media “sick” and biased, but he didn't seriously start to deny its legitimacy until January 2017, when he was confronted by evidence that the Russian government aided his election. That's when he truly needed the news to be fake.

Looking back, Mr. Trump's exploitation of the term “fake news” to smear journalists was the single most consequential thing he did during the transition period. He built the scaffolding for his supporters to reject any and all information that wasn't Trump-approved. ...

In the first year of his presidency, Mr. Trump cried “Hoax!” 18 times; in 2018, 63 times; and in 2019, a whopping 345 times...

The scaffolding line is killer. I assume the article is an excerpt from Stelter's book, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” which I might have to read even though I'm sick of anything Trumpian. But the book also condemns Fox, which will be around, fucking things up, after Trump is gone. With no Fox, no Trump. It's all about Fox. We're the henhouse. 

Read to the end of Stelter's column. 

!!! Trump is told that QAnon believes he's saving the world from a secret satanic cult of cannibals and pedophiles. He says, “Well, I haven't heard that. But uh, is that supposed to be a bad thing? Or a good thing? If I can help save the world from problems...”

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) August 19, 2020

When 2 died of Ebola they said Obama should resign.

When 4 died in Benghazi they said Hillary should go to jail.

When 162,000 died from the Trump Virus, they said put him on Mount Rushmore.

— Chip Franklin (@chipfranklin) August 9, 2020

“I spent decades working to elect Republicans, including Mr. Romney and four other presidential candidates, and I am here to bear reluctant witness that Mr. Trump didn't hijack the Republican Party. He is the logical conclusion of what the party became over the past 50 or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race-baiting, self-deception and anger that now dominate it. Hold Donald Trump up to a mirror and that bulging, scowling orange face is today's Republican Party.”

--GOP political consultant Stuart Stevens in The New York Times

“You know who's at fault? Donald Trump. Because so many other nations have addressed [the Covid pandemic] properly. And this president, for the first six weeks, refused to acknowledge that this was even a serious thing. ... He has not done the things you need to do.”

— Al Franken on MSNBC today. My favorite part is this dig: “You don't see too many people brag about passing a dementia test.”

“[John] Lewis was too good a man to be praised by Mitch McConnell.”

— Jelani Cobb, “The Essential and Enduring Strength of John Lewis,” The New Yorker

“Donald Trump bears very little in common with any actual woman I know. But, oddly, he has a lot in common with the basest, most unfair stereotypes of femininity. He is ruled by feelings rather than facts. He is fickle, gossipy and easily grossed out. He uses florid language, like ‘beautiful’ and ‘perfect,’ and says he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un ‘fell in love.’ He deals with adversity like a Mean Girl with a burn book, via insults and freeze-outs. For any Neanderthal who has ever feared electing a female president because what if she's too cranky when she's on her period — congratulations. For approximately 1,300 days, you have had a menstruating man in the Oval Office.”

— Monica Hesse, “The weird masculinity of Donald Trump,” Washington Post

We are in the midst of the one of the top 5 crises in America history, and the president of the united states has been watching TV and whining about what he sees for more than an hour. pic.twitter.com/QHWRVW9PKD

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) June 22, 2020

“We were following the news from China very closely. So we started our preparations long before the first case tested positive here in Iceland. And it was very clear from the beginning that this was something that should be led by experts—by scientific and medical experts.”

— Iceland's Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir in Elizabeth Kolbert's must-read article, “How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus,” on the New Yorker site. The article is an indictment of the Trump administration without once mentioning Trump or his administration. And yes, Iceland is a distant island nation, which helps with this crisis, with a population of only 300,000, which also helps with this crisis. But they were aggressive in contact tracing and their citizens didn't fight common-sense measures. In early April, they were getting 100 confirmed cases a day. By May, that was down to nine ... for the entire month. In the U.S., we‘re still seeing 20,000 cases a day. I fear that number will rise with summer, boredom, protests, and businesses reopenings. 

Iceland’s confirmed daily cases, per Johns Hopkins: 99 on April 2, nine for the entire month of May.