Trump’s ‘Crazy Sh*t’ Keeps Piling Up
Plus: Donald Trump vs. the Ten Commandments
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BILL LUEDERS: Trump’s ‘Crazy Shit’ Keeps Piling Up
“President Biden himself personally instructed some of his top campaign aides to be even more aggressive in highlighting some of President Trump’s more inflammatory and wild comments. We’re told that the thrust of the president’s direction was to significantly ramp up the campaign’s efforts to highlight the crazy shit that Trump says in public.”
—CNN reporter MJ Lee, live on the air and without a bleep, February 20, 2024
TO: Joe Biden
FROM: Concerned citizen
DATE: Now!
SUBJECT: Missed opportunitiesYOU DON’T KNOW ME, Mr. President, but there’s something very important I must tell you. I heard on CNN a while back that you instructed your campaign staff to ramp up its efforts to highlight the “crazy shit” that your opponent, Donald Trump, is wont to say. It’s a great suggestion, but I am afraid your team is letting you down. That’s because a whole heck of a lot of crazy shit seems to be falling through the cracks and just sort of piling up. And stinking.
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I WAS MISERABLE DURING America’s final year in Afghanistan. We were losing the war. The Taliban was playing the United States like a fiddle at the negotiating table in Doha. There was a strong sense of impending catastrophe. It was demoralizing.
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MONA CHAREN: Donald Trump vs. the Ten Commandments
THE GOVERNOR OF LOUISIANA just signed a law that will require all public classrooms in the state—from kindergarten to universities—to post the Ten Commandments. As there are differing versions among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, the Louisiana legislature took the trouble to spell out the exact wording that the displays (“on a poster or framed document at least 11 inches by 14 inches . . . in easily readable font”) must employ. They chose a (more or less) Protestant one.
….
This Ten Commandments law is a chin-scratcher, though. Don’t get me wrong—I’m a big fan of the Decalogue. But I thought the MAGA view was that, at a time like this, with liberals and progressives about to destroy the USA, we can’t afford the luxury of morality. Isn’t that what evangelicals who’ve embraced Trump and all his works tell themselves?
BILL RYAN: Barbara Comyns’s Conversational Conformity
BARBARA COMYNS (1907–1992) BEGINS CHAPTER NINE of her second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950), with her heroine, Sophia Fairclough, the narrator and ostensible author of the book, writing: “This book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine.” And it’s true: In my NYRB Classics edition of the novel, chapter nine begins on page 41. None of the Comyns novels I’ve read (all but two) could be described as long, and most are downright short. The longest of her books that I’ve read, A Touch of Mistletoe (1967), maxes out at 213 pages. In Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, Sophia goes on to say her book might be longer if she wrote dialogue in the regular way, with each reply beginning a new line. She doesn’t spend much time on dialogue; her books read like someone is talking to the reader. Comyns’s style was unique without presenting any hardships for the reader. In a strange way, her sometimes very bleak fiction can feel almost inviting. She wrote each book—regardless of whether the story being told was one of clear-eyed realism or a kind of fantastical darkness (or a mix of both)—as if it were casually, but artfully, being told to someone sitting nearby. Not quite conversational in style, but with a kind of “and then this happened” flippancy with which stories taken from real life are often told.
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