Trump's Card

[MsD]

Michael Moore just Tweeted that the Boy Scout thing was "straight out of Triumph of the Will", and it's hard to disagree.

[Satchmo Distel]

Trump is not the full loaf. I'm not sure he has any limits, and that is a scary thing. Nixon and Reagan were corrupt, GWB a puppet of Cheney, but you could see there were boundaries in which their mendacity operated. Trump could do anything.

[WOM]

They each had an actual, old-fashioned sense of shame. Some feeling of 'this is beneath me/wrong/embarrassing". Trump seems to have none at all.

[E10 Rifle]

The thing is, in his brutal unpredictability, Trump's blown the door open for all manner of dangerous hard-right nutcases who've been lurking for years. So his downfall is not going to save us, because there's now much more scope for a serious bastard to replace him.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

that boy scout speech is something else. He's basically hitler crossed with Grandpa simpson. That story about some cunt called levitt is a story shaped by a rotting brain.

[Ginger Yellow]

From that article:

2) He said “hell”:

America can be so quaint sometimes.

[ursus arctos]

Levitt is one of the patron saints of white flight

He built the first massive cookie-cutter suburb on Long Island (Levittown), thus allowing working class whites to flee neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and Queens via the roads built by Robert Moses.

[Ginger Yellow]

I was wondering if that was where Levittown came from. Famously Bill O'Reilly's manor.

[Amor de Cosmos]

There were/are actually three Levittowns. In terms of contemporary post-war urban planning they're an interesting contrast with the first wave of UK new towns (Stevanage, Crawley, Harlow) and Canadian single industry towns (Kitimat.)

[ursus arctos]

There were four with the name (Long Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico; the New Jersey one has been renamed). Levitt also built similar developments in Maryland that didn't use the name.

He refused to sell any of the homes to black people until forced to by the courts.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Yes. The immediate post-war ones (NY, PA, NJ) are the significant ones from a historical perspective, for both social and logistical reasons. The others came some years later, and are more typical/conventional housing developments.

Decent overview on Levitt and Levittowns.

[Hot Pepsi]

A nice compilation of Trump's topics and comments when addressing a field full of Boy Scouts yesterday.

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2...oy-scouts.html

I saw the first President George Bush talk at the Jamboree when I was a Scout and it was still held at Fort AP Hill in Virginia. I can't recall what he said. Actually, I couldn't see him. There was a giant scaffold of press cameras blocking our view.

I'm ambivalent about the Scouts. I had a mostly great experience with it and the troops I know of here seem sound, but it has been largely taken over by the right wing. Fortunately, its corporate sponsors have pushed back on that at the national level - hence the recent long-awaited shift in policy on LGBT people - but the rank and file are disproportionately - though certainly not all - Trump types. I think the years of homophobia did a lot of damage by repelling so many non-fundamentalist parents from signing their kids up.

And, of course, Trump's bullshit naturally plays well with boys 12-14, who are most of the kids who go to the Jamboree (Boy Scouts can be up to 18, but most kids quit around 13-15 and the ones that don't are less inclined to go to stuff like the Jamboree, though I went when I was 17 because that's just when it came around).

[Flynnie]

I've been thinking Trump has dementia for a while. He was always a self-aggrandizing piece of shit, but the incoherent babble when he talks off the cuff is legitimately troubling. This is Reagan 2nd term stuff.

[MsD]

"Merry Christmas!!"

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/25/po...ech/index.html

[Tubby Isaacs]

Trump complains about the EU being protectionist.

[Satchmo Distel]

He thought the scouts were his voters and actually praised them for voting in November.

It's like he didn't know where he was and just went into rally mode, which is the only public speaking he knows how to do. Or did someone put the wrong speech on the idiot screen?

[WOM]

I was watching a documentary last night about guns in the US, and there was a clip of Obama speaking at a memorial for some shooting victims. Virginia Tech maybe? And the contrast between their styles - Obama's and Trump's - was just so pronounced I'd almost forgotten what an intelligent President sounds like; empathetic, reassuring, thoughtful, etc. I can't imagine what Trump would have said at that same event. It'd be about him, of course, but obviously with no connection to the actual audience or the event itself.

[ursus arctos]

A set of our cousins lived in the original Levittown for a few years in the early 60s.

By that time, the strict uniformity had been softened by 15 years of renovations, but it still creeped me out.

WOM, I had the same experience listening to a long interview with your PM yesterday.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Subpoena for Manafort from the Senate Judiciary Committee. To appear, in public, tmrw.

[ursus arctos]

They want to force him to take the Fifth

[Amor de Cosmos]

that boy scout speech is something else. He's basically hitler crossed with Grandpa simpson.

I had him pinned as Homer Simpson crossed with Mussolini. I can picture Trump trying to legislate super-sized cupholders in US automobiles.

I haven't watched or listened to the boy scout speech, nor anything he's said for the past month or so. It's always semi-coherent, self-aggrandizing bullshit that'll get wall to wall coverage anyway so there's no need to put myself through the pain. His physical mannerisms alone make me angry so why subject myself to them. The saving grace, so far, is that he still hasn't managed to actually do anything, as the most powerful elected official in the world, except kick up a bunch of dust. It doesn't mean he won't of course and more importantly, as was mentioned over-page, he's breaking conventions that someone more skillfully evil can exploit later. But right now I'm doing my best to tune him out to save my sanity.

[Amor de Cosmos]

A set of our cousins lived in the original Levittown for a few years in the early 60s.

By that time, the strict uniformity had been softened by 15 years of renovations, but it still creeped me out.

I can imagine. In fairness however, invented communities almost always have something of that quality.

[ursus arctos]

That's true, though there was little artifice about Levittown.

The strict uniformity and absence of individualisation were seen as big selling points,

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Surely there was room for slightly different decoration schemes. I mean I've heard that there were was A green one and a pink one, and a blue one and a yellow one.

[Amor de Cosmos]

The strict uniformity and absence of individualisation were seen as big selling points,

Indeed, though growing up in Stevenage presented similar uniformity for significantly longer. This was largely because homes were rented, not purchased, from the — unelected — Development Corporation. No changes were allowed to either the interior or exterior. Front doors, for example, alternated between dull blue, dull green, and dull brown.