Month: June 2018

Opinion | Inside the coming campaign to block Trump’s Supreme Court pick

I really don’t understand the Democratic messaging problem here. Every Democrat from dog catcher to Senate Minority leader only needs to remember three words: “Merrick Fucking Garland.” Repeat any time a microphone is near. He is the only acceptible nominee for this or any seat on the court until he is seated. Period. The fucking end. Anything else is window dressing and a needless and message-diluting distraction. After Garland is ensconced, we can start to talk about the legitimacy of any Trump nominee for any position, assuming the Orange Man isn’t already in jail by then.

There should be at least 1 million people surrounding the Capitol right now with one simple demand: Garland is seated or no one leaves this building. These are the messages that the modern GOP can and will understand.

Opinion | Inside the coming campaign to block Trump’s Supreme Court pick

Whether or not you think public shaming should be happening, it’s important to understand why it’s happening. It’s less a result of a breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy. Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering that will further entrench minority rule.

All over the country, Republican members of Congress have consistently refused to so much as meet with many of the scared, furious citizens they ostensibly represent. A great many of these citizens are working tirelessly to take at least one house of Congress in the midterms — which will require substantially more than 50 percent of total votes, given structural Republican advantages — so that the country’s anti-Trump majority will have some voice in the federal government.

Michelle Goldberg somehwat inexplicably unleashing a torrent of pure truth in the struggling Times of New York.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

David Foster Wallace