TGIF Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Friday, April 12, 2024
·
80 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
The headline of the day- : Vietnamese billionaire sentenced to death for $44bn fraud
Part of the House’s legislative agenda for Monday:
Don’t believe me? Check the link.
@drj: I think I need to write my retiring gop congress critter a note today.
I read the NYTimes’ David French fairly often. He works the religious beat for the OpEd page and I find him to be a straight shooter and willing to take on the best arguments of those he disagree with, rather than the usual charade of picking the most stupid ones and beating the hell out of them. (That’s not aimed at religion in particular, as it is the norm for pundits anytime, anywhere.) He’s thoroughly anti-abortion, and today he calls out his erstwhile allies (no subscription needed). A few excerpts:
Although I don’t agree with the idea that a fertilized egg is as much of a human as a walking, talking person, and challenge the very idea that there could be a secular reason for such a belief, I nonetheless appreciate that he, unlike most, is consistent in his own religious beliefs and that he is willing to examine his old beliefs about his co-religionists honestly, and show his work while doing so.
@drj: My favorite amendment from Rep. Castor (FL-D) came on the “Hands of our Appliances” act. To wit:
@MarkedMan:
A consistent pro-life/forced birth position must* indeed rely on belief in the existence of the human soul, i.e., that a person can be fully human even in the absence of a physical brain (either pre-birth or post-death).
(Thus, incest or rape exceptions do not make any sense whatsoever.)
Of course, the problem is that the Establishment Clause prevents even the sincere forced birthers from being honest about their true motivations.
* I never heard a convincing argument otherwise.
@drj:
Really? The HOOHA Act?
@MarkedMan:
As true today as it ever was. Not to be flippant, but he must live a rather sheltered life for it to take 55 years to figure that out.
Lara Trump’s RNC robocall falsely claims ‘massive fraud’ in 2020 election
She’s not entirely wrong. trump was in it and he’s not exactly small, so….
@MarkedMan:
French will doubtless be relieved to know that everyone assumes Trump is lying, and that he would sign a national ban in a heartbeat.
Florida can’t ban teacher from asking students to use her preferred pronouns, judge rules
I applaud his quoting Walt Whitman, kind of turns the screw a little deeper.
@drj:
Recalls the Brexiteer Conservatives moaning on about “EU regulations mean vacuum cleaners won’t work and hair dryers aren’t hot enough and bulbs are too dim”
Always happy to find other countries have idiots, also.
TBF, your idiots are ahead on points on this: I don’t think the House of Commons has wasted a day on this sort of nonsense, yet.
@drj:
This may be accurate in terms of assessing the pro-life movement’s underlying motives, as most pro-lifers are religious, but it’s rarely stated outright, and there have been occasional atheists (like the late Nat Hentoff) adopting the position. It’s not necessarily due to conscious dishonesty. I think they get caught up in the philosophical simplicity of their position and confuse it with truth. At bottom it’s reflective of something broader on the cultural right, which is a failure to grasp the fact that nature is a continuum. What’s most notable about the mantra that “life begins at conception” is the implicit assumption that life must begin at any specific point. It’s the old Paradox of the Heap: if you’re forming a heap out of sand, there’s no exact point at which the heap becomes a heap, but that doesn’t imply that a grain of sand is a heap.
@Kylopod:
That is a very good point. Some people just can’t deal with uncertainty and prefer to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
@drj:
The crazy thing is, medieval Christians were fully aware that the idea of the “soul inherent from conception” was nuts.
Ensoulment was defined, theologically and legally, to occur at “quickening”, which was (usually) taken to be around 18 weeks after conception.
This was originally a theological question, but had legal implications as well: termination of pregnancy before then was abortion; after that point (might) be infanticide.
Very different legal penalties applied.
Abortion was in many jurisdictions against canon law, but not a criminal or civil offence, and could not be prosecuted in secular courts.
Medieval Catholics may have been believers; but they weren’t irrational.
Unlike contemporary Catholic/Evangelical hard-liners.
@MarkedMan: I was pretty disgusted when the Times hired French, since they already had one sex-obsessed religious freak in Ross Douthat and a bunch of appalling dull and intentionally ignorant righties ranging from David Brooks to Pamela Paul.
But to my constant surprise, French has turned out to be the thing that I always say I want on the Times’ opinion pages, and that is an honest, thoughtful conservative. Not that I generally agree with him — except on issues related to Trump — but his arguments are always well-reasoned, consistent, and remarkably self-aware.
And I agree with you entirely about today’s column.
Continuing.
Q: How many Earthers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Two. One to screw it in, and one to report it to the Night Watch.
@MarkedMan:
David French might be the exception to the rule of his people. When he was hired by the Times, someone linked to a piece where he wrote about forbidding his wife to have male friends while he was in Iraq. No judgement, but being in some trad relationship where men have rightful power over women is a recipe for disaster. Any normal person can perceive this in the same way they can perceive how crazy it is to believe there’s something inherently sacred about a just-fertilized egg in an ovary. French seems like a thoughtful and decent person to me. But he’s also just lucky.
The real rule for rightwing Christianity are the Rod Drehers. There’s nothing in that guy’s life which would not have been solved by having a cottage in Provincetown, owning a weird antique store, and having sex with a bunch of bearish guys. Instead, he’s insane, and it’s largely because he was rewarded by a system to the point of a near-insanity, at which point he crossed over and he kinda was discarded.
@drj: HOOHAA????
Who are these people? And why are you voting them into elective office?
@drj:
If one buys into the premise that abortion is murder, then no exceptions make moral sense. Not even to save the life of the mother, much less their health.
Consider, what medical procedure requires murdering someone to save the patient?
@MarkedMan: I just read French’s column, and it is refreshingly honest. Especially as he recognizes that it really was about control after all, maybe not at an individual level, but as their “Christian” culture controlling the rest of us. But I feel he’s still being a bit disingenuous. He speaks of a “separate human life”, but what defines a human “life”? Every now and again an anti-choice advocate slips and admits they mean it has a soul. They’re doing their best to remove separation of church and state, but right now speaking of souls makes it too explicitly religious. And he fails to note that protestant sects tended to define “life”, i.e. implanting of a soul, as occurring at birth. Some of them rewrote their theology to the Catholic belief “life” begins at conception to accommodate their new anti-choice activism.
It was entertainingly easy for them to slip from “every life is precious” to “we didn’t mean IVF”.
Human life begins before conception.
The eggs in the body of a human female are human and they are alive and the sperm in the body of a human male are human and are alive.
Humans do not have souls. That is something that the church invented to control people.
“Obey me. Or your soul will burn in Hell!”
@wr: I hear you. I first came to this site so many years ago to challenge myself with well argued positions on the Iraq/Afghanistan wars that differed from my own. Unlike you, though, I am glad the Times hired Douthat. He is a well spoken advocate for positions I consider misguided or wrong but are very common, both in the general populace and also people who have power. I read the news to understand the world, and a great deal of the world’s people do not think like I do.
@Kathy: Completely lost. What is an Earther in this context? And why the Night Watch?
@Modulo Myself:
Anyone heard anything about him lately? I used to check in occasionally but, well, he really does seem to be insane at this point.
“Trump_and_dementia”
“Also_this“
@Kathy:
The engineer in me, and the reason I annoy the hell out of family and friends sometimes, immediately started thinking about exceptions. All I got is “conjoined twins”.
@gVOR10:
I don’t think French is disengenous here. He has stated previously that his reason for believing this has to do with religion. He also wants to believe that there are non-religious reasons to believe it is so. He doesn’t enumerate them here, but that’s okay because every column does not need to be about every thing
@MarkedMan: It’s a Babylon 5 reference from after the show jumped the shark.
@MarkedMan:
In Babylon 5, Earthers are the human citizens of the Earth Alliance. The Night Watch is the Thought Police corps of part-time informants.
@MarkedMan:
Arguably so. I see it more as a case where both twins will die, but with surgical intervention it’s likely one can be saved. Against my view, depending on how they are conjoined, surgery may involve outright killing one twin.
And speaking of honesty @gVOR10:, there’s apparently a little tempest in an intellectual teapot going on. Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman have a new book out, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. Scott Lemieux at LGM notes the conflict and links to Schaller and Waldman’s defense at New Republic. I’m not going to take time to dig into the details of the criticism, but apparently it’s mostly that Schaller and Waldman find racism and xenophobia to be root causes of rural rage and other writers on the subject find this disrespectful to rural people and their legitimate grievances. (Schaller and Waldman make a clear distinction between “rural” and “rural white”. They note that nonwhites are 24% of the rural population and somehow they don’t seem to share the supposedly “rural” grievances.) Having watched NYT and others, particularly NYT’s unending Cletus safaris, bend over backwards to avoid mentioning the obvious racism, I tend to think Schaller and Waldman have the better of the argument. (NYT is also reluctant to dig very deeply into the causes of their legitimate grievances.)
@just nutha:
I’d say the show jumped the shark with the premiere of the 5th season, long after the local Night Watch was set up in the station.
Just curious if anyone else thinks Trump might not show up on Monday for his trial? He seems to be intent on pushing judges to the breaking point and I can’t see the judge locking him up for one missed day. It would be a typical Trump dominance play.
@MarkedMan: I don’t think Trump needs to be there. He needs only the opportunity to be there.
If that is so, I was a mass murderer by the age of sixteen.
@MarkedMan: Hungary was the last I’ve heard of him.
@Mister Bluster:
Except the egg and sperm cells are odd: they incapable of reproduction by division unless fused, as they lack a complete genome.
Thus though alive, they are not genomically identical either to the parent organism or to any viable offspring.
(Unless you want to get into the world of social insects, which is really fascinatingly different.)
@gVOR10:
From what I’ve read, that’s not the issue. The issue is that Schaller and Waldman have fundamentally misinterpreted their data. The majority of criticisms I have read are coming from the analysts and scholars that Waldman and Schaller cite. For instance, they cite a 2018 Pew Research Center survey of 2,000 rural residents to show that rural white Americans believe they are fundamentally disadvantaged compared to POC, that women have an equal or better playing field than men, and that abortions should be banned entirely. The actual findings of the study? “the majorities of rural Americans believe that ‘white people benefit from advantages in society that black people do not have,’ that ‘there are still significant obstacles that make it harder for women to get ahead than men,’ that there are many ‘situations in which abortion should be allowed,’ and that a majority reject the idea that a ‘non-white majority country would be bad for America.’
Study says one thing, the book authors claim it says the complete opposite.
If a conservative book used a bunch of studies to show that blue america was filled with lazy people of color who just mooch off the system, and the studies showed the complete opposite, they would be castigated without end here. But hey, since the subject are ‘cletuses’ they should just have the leeway to make shit up eh?
If that’s their defense then they are ignoring the actual criticism. The issue isn’t’ that they conflated rural and white rural, the issue is that it’s not a 24% rural minority who holds generally positive views, its a majority.
The biggest issue, in my mind, is that to arrive at their results they simply redefine very urban or suburban areas as “rural” to fit their narrative. Despite prevailing views here that there’s this read urban area of the country where MAGAS live and nice peaceful blue cities where all the liberals live, the reality is that there are a metric shit ton of MAGATs in cities and suburbs (because that’s where people live) and a bunch of liberals in rural areas. The difference between a deep red area and a bright blue area is a 10-15% vote shift, that’s it.
The authors are very concerned about the 5 million potential rural insurrectionists and not at all concerned about the 16 million potential urban and suburban insurrectionists. When studies they themselves cite warn of the threat emanating out of suburbs and cities, the authors just claim that those studies were all about rural people, despite the studies carefully and diligently defining the areas at hand as urban or suburban.
This is important. If you are worried about the threat reactionary conservatives represent–and you should be!–then you need to be clear eyed about where the threat is emanating. If you live in a suburban or urban area, the threat is emanating from your neighbors. This book conveniently places the blame on a fairly small geographic minority and gives readers permission to ignore where the danger actually lies. Willfully misinterpreting data, or just ignoring inconvenient studies, to place the blame on a minority, one that your audience may not encounter much in their daily lives, is a bad move. It is bad when conservatives do it with POC and “crime” and its bad when these authors do it to ‘cletuses’ out in the sticks.
ETA: Take the 633 most rural US counties and count up all the MAGA votes from those places. You would have less votes for Trump than what came out of Los Angeles in 2020.
But those fascists were probably all from the ‘rural’ areas of Los Angeles, not the good safe urban/suburban areas.
@Joe: I believe for a criminal trial he has to be there. From NBC
@Mister Bluster:
Every cell in our body is alive, and if cloning humans is ever possible, every cell in our body has the potential to grow into a full human being just as a fertilized egg does.
These cells are all alive, and are all human cells. Same with Henrietta Lacks’ cancer cells.
But just because something is human and alive doesn’t automatically make it a person. The pro-lifers are equating the moral, philosophical, and legal question on how to define a person with the scientific question on how to define what’s alive and human.
Speaking as atheist, he misses the mark then. If he can’t come up with nonreligious reasons for his position on abortion than he is just trying to force his religious edicts on everybody. While some “Christians” are perfectly OK with that, the constitution is not.
@Neil Hudelson: Neil, thank you so much for this. You highlight something very important – how scapegoating distracts from the actual problem, which means solutions are blocked because they address the wrong thing.
I have never found city folk to be either more or less moral than their rural brethren. Just different in their focus and concerns. I have not found city folk to be less or more racist than their rural brethren – it’s just that the rural ones sometimes can be more open about it.
@Neil Hudelson: As I said, I don’t care to dig into what I characterized as a tempest in a teapot. These are blog comments, not master’s theses. Schaller and Waldman address the criticism you repeat in the linked article. Judge yourself whether the defense is compelling or not. But it seems moderately obvious that there are racist roots to this “rural rage” (which Republicans have gleefully exploited) and that NYT et al are very reluctant to deal honestly with either the racism or the legitimate grievances.
@Jay L Gischer:
I have always found the casual, euphemistic racism of the surburbs and cities to be more horrifying than the more open racism I encounter in my hometown. I was getting some minor work done while I was in French Lick (yes the actual name) and the mechanic–my former classmate, and one who had a Confederate Flag hung proudly on his shop wall–was telling me about how a black customer had come into his shop last month. For context, when I was growing up my county was 100% white, except for a brief period when there was one (1) African American family for a few years. Now it’s about 95% white. Point is, if you live your whole life in that town you might not ever encounter someone who isn’t white. Anyway, he was telling me proudly how “he didn’t have any problems with them or anything” while he repaired their car and that it turns out his nephew is in class with their son. All while that confederate flag hung above his head, and Morgan Waller played on the radio.
Contra when I first moved to a suburb from Indianapolis, a gentleman at the farmers market told me how I’d love it there Carmel. “You walk down the street and you just feel safer. You look around and you realize you aren’t in danger.”
“I never felt in danger when walking in Indy either.”
“You know what I mean. It just…you just don’t see people that make you feel unsafe.”
I’d much rather have the confederate flag-toting mechanic who is delighted to discover his preconceptions were faulty than the suburbanite with an NPR sticker who crosses the street when he sees a black person on the same sidewalk.
@MarkedMan: @OzarkHillbilly: A book I once read reported that many people from a Catholic background who were educated in Catholic schools wind up believing the life-begins-at-conception doctrine, but they perceive it as a simple scientific fact, not a religious belief.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I don’t disagree, but also don’t think this is in any way unusual or inherently bad. Politics are about people and groups being able to enforce norms on societies without resorting to war. I have no religious axe to grind, but I definitely want to enforce my views on environmental remediation on the general public. I also would like to see my views on requiring public services such as cake bakers to serve all of the public if they are going to serve any of it. And I’ll vote and campaign for people who will legislate those things.
A friend recommended to Paul Campos at LGM a video to “get a better understanding of the mental world inhabited by Trumpist intellectuals “. It’s a brief speech by one Thomas Klingenstein, chairman of the board of the Claremont Institute and major Republican donor. His money and the Claremont Institute make him one of the most influential figures in the Republican Party. I’ll let his speech speak for itself, but highly recommend it as indeed providing understanding of their world.
@Neil Hudelson: I’ve heard of French Lick because I’ve heard of Larry Bird. I would not have otherwise.
@MarkedMan: I’ve stopped paying attention to the daily suck all the air out by suck all the air out of this soaper. They’re either going to convict him or something or (more likely) not.
I’ll check back for “the sentence was too severe/lenient” (again, more likely) phase of the drama.
@Kylopod:..
Thank you for the biology lesson.
I do not make that claim.
@Jay L Gischer: I was trying to remember why I was familiar with French Lick but couldn’t. Thanks!
Trump stock is now down well over 50% from its start. And from Forbes, today:
I hope a lot of small MAGA investors jumped all the way in on this stock. The rich guys will be fine, there’s no getting at them, but I get genuine pleasure from contemplating MAGA assholes losing their retirement savings. Moral hazard. Pour décourager les autres.
@Michael Reynolds:
It’s below $30 a share now.
Trump claims today that the stock market is conspiring against him. I am not joking.
@Kathy:
Hey hey hey, never have I ever called the Night Watch on anyone.
Had them called on ME a time or 20, but hey…
@CSK:
Is there a correlation between narcissism and paranoia?
I’m surprised he’s not blaming the deep state, Joe Buden, or Nancy Haley.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
I hope the Borg joke tomorrow does better.
@Kathy:
Trump seems to think that the vermin deep state globalists are in league with the stock market to persecute him.
@wr: Wait — David French and David Brooks are different people?
Ohhhhhhhhh…
@Kathy:
Kathy, I was responding playfully. Unfortunately, my {snark} emoji button is AWOL this am. I’d do the Leslie Nielsen line…but I’m trying to be a better person today.
Cracker can attest that my humor vacillates between infantile, juvenile, and obscure at random intervals.
By my pretty floral bonnet, I can hardly wait for the Borg-a-thon session tomorrow. Bring it on!
@Flat Earth Luddite:
I know I just couldn’t think of anything witty to say in return.
But don’t build up expectations. It’s only a Borg light bulb joke.
@Mister Bluster:
The concept of a soul predates Christianity and, in that conception, has nothing to do with control or punishment. 3
Today I received a contract to sign from a Florida attorney. In it were
A incorrect email address
Incorrect financial details
And a unannounced change of terms in an agreement
Did this attorney think I would sign this piece of junk without reading it?
My opinion of Florida lawyers due to when Dear Wife and I were in foreclosure is very low. Unprepared attorneys, sloppy attorneys, half ignorant ones, were more common than ones who knew what they were doing. I had a court reporter for a hearing but opposing counsel had the judge sign a blatantly incorrect order.
I could rant some more but I have better things to do. Like a strat-o-matic replay of a 1962 baseball game or me wetting my cat.
Another slight rant. We have somebody running for the County Commission district and they are sending out mail- what a waste of money – and emails and we’re over 4 months from primary day. He isn’t an incumbent either.
To top things off, you have the option of unsubscribing from these emails and I opted to. I had to confirm my email address then with the word optional next to it, was asked why I was unsubscribing.
I clicked the done button without saying why I was unsubscribing. Guess what? I was told to click one of the reason boxes. What buffoon doesn’t know the meaning of optional.
One last rant. I subscribed to The New Republic and get emails from the magazine. The email has the description about some juicy article they have.
Only one problem. 9 times out of 10 the email doesn’t contain a link to that article. Again more morons.
I think I’m out of rants now.
One last little rant. A sign was put up by our condo’s elevator. It asked residents not to feed the feral cats.
The poster ended with – There have been complaints and dead rats
Is there really a imbecile who prefer a live rat to a live cat?
@Bill Jempty:
Lol, I have a rant about incompetent attorneys. She is me. The practice management software I use lets me efile and having things sent right to the process server for service. Just a couple of easy clicks and everything is on its way. I was rushing and forgot to check the box that said “Sheriff service.” In every county in IL you can go straight to a special process server. Every County except Cook. WOMP WOMP. In Cook you have to pay the Sheriff to drive past the service target and mark “Unable to serve” on the form before you can go to court and get permission to hire a special process server.
I knew it was too easy when I got service a week after filing. The $100 I cost myself is bad. The phone call I have to make next is worse.
In other news, I’d really like to understand why the English* and The Atlantic despise trans people so much.
Joke I came across yesterday, “me subtly asking if a feminist intellectual is a terf: is she… you know… a friend of the British.”
* specifically the English. I suspect the majority of the Scots are about 6 months away from firing Joanne into the sun. Seriously, she’s about a month and a half away from Xitting at Elon “The Jew is using the Black as muscle against you, and you are left there helpless. Well, What are you gonna do about it whitey? Just sit there? Of course not.”
@Beth:
A customer once required, among hundreds of other things, sugar in 50 kilo sacks. But the price was to be per kilo, and the amounts indicated kilos as well. Somehow we 1) used the price of a sack, and 2) failed to notice our proposal was sky high.
We lost.
@Beth:
Are the people of Scotland so mad at the Sun they would do that?
@Bill Jempty: Your story is interesting. I DON’T* subscribe to TNR but started to receive newsletters from them again at the start of the new year. I have not experienced the problem you describe; whenever I click on an article title or header, I’m directed to the article in question–but only for the first three times each month. After that, I’m advised to resubscribe or to log on at the website to read further articles. (Of course, I can’t log on as I’m not a subscriber, but you seem to indicate that logging on wouldn’t be a problem. Maybe you should try that. 😉 )
*As in “no longer subscribe”
ETA: “Is there really a imbecile who prefer a live rat to a live cat?”
I wouldn’t think so, but I suspect that there might be people who object to finding dead rats on doorsteps and driveways. (And if I were being cynical, I’d suggest that some of them might well be named “Jempty,” but I’m trying to be a better person these days, so I’ll refrain.)
@CSK: Rather he believes the Rubes can be sold on the idea, which is a reasonable bet on his part although a long-shot one, but given ohe hasn’t many choices and given even initial buy-in into that was an excercise in gullibility (or sharp-dealing bet on timing to fleece the Rubes).
@Kathy:
I’m glad I caught my mistake early enough in the process that it’s only an inconvenience and cost to me. It shouldn’t really affect the client. But, no one likes to hear their attorney say “well, I made a mistake.” Really anything after that is going to be ignored.
@Kathy:
Brava! Brava! lol
My research group has been having some interesting discussions recently. They’ve been in the context of our specific work, but have me thinking more broadly about public discourse.
Robert Nozick refers to normative sociology as the study of what the causes of problems ought to be. I’d extend it beyond “causes” to include interpretations and solutions — though, of course, these are all interrelated.
Anyway, our group has been discussing, among other things, how selective we are in taking a normative sociological stance vs. an “objective” positivist stance. This pertains to the questions we ask (or don’t ask) of our science, as well as the interpretations we make of our data. It also pertains to decisions about research methods and designs, but that’s more inside baseball stuff.
One way we’ve been pushing on our intuitions is to ask questions like:
“What if x is true?” “What if not x is true?”
“How would we interpret (+)coefficient?” “How would we interpret (-)coefficient?”
“What types of questions determine when and how our narrative, ahem interpretation, changes in these instances?”
I’ve got a great gig with a great group.
@Lounsbury:
Who knows what Trump actually believes, other than whatever he thinks will benefit him. He did claim today, on Truth Social, that the stock market was conspiring against him.
I take him literally.
@Bill Jempty:
@Bill Jempty:
@Bill Jempty:
@Bill Jempty:
I don’t think I’ve been this invested in a new series since Downton Abbey.
@DK:
😀
@Beth:
Well, at least you didn’t malpractice, eh?
Two other thoughts about your awful bad icky day.
1. “Remember what happened to the last man who walked on water?”**
2. We used to tell baby lawyers and paralegals that if they hadn’t met Denny Crane (or his first cousins Niles & Fraser Crane) in the first year of practice, they needed to lock themselves in the bathroom, stare at their reflection, and say in their best William Shatner voice, I’m Denny Crane!”
** Grandma used to say this to the parents when I was getting chastised for, say, getting a B instead of the expected A+ or something similar.
@DK:
Don’t give me any ideas for new rants. I could easily start up on what I think of the new Hawaii-Five 0 or Picard. I stopped watching the former when the helicopter picked up a armored car with a giant magnet. That was worse than when the guy hid in the secret underground that had a rug over it. How did the rug get over it if the guy is downstairs? I find magic/sci-fi tg fiction more logical*!
Did I just rant again?
*- With apologies to Kathy
@CSK: But not seriously.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I think he’s a serious threat.
@CSK: I’m not sure Trump’s a serious threat, but the appearance that the GQP wants to set him as the model for the future of the party may be a threat. Trump’s a buffoon; various representatives, Senators, and governors deciding to be Trump 2.0 make me relieved to be old and in marginal health.
ETA: But I’m still pretty sure I don’t smoke and drink enough.