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Andy Borowitz: What Do We Do Now? Thoughts for Voters

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2024 //
18

Andy Borowitz has words of wisdom for Democrats and Never Trumpers. Do not despair. Prepare. Big electoral wins breed hubris, overconfidence, overreach. Or, pride goeth before a fall.

He writes:

Maybe you’ve been asking yourself:

1. “How could Donald Trump have won 51 percent of the popular vote?”

2. “How hard is it to immigrate to New Zealand?” 

3. “What the actual f..k?”

Fair questions.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Could Tuesday’s election results have been any worse?

Well, what if, instead of 51 percent, the Republican nominee had won 59 percent? Or 61 percent? And what if he had won 49 states?

Those aren’t hypotheticals. Those were the results of the 1972 and 1984 landslides that reelected Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. 

With thumping victories like those, what could possibly go wrong for the winners?

If history’s any guide, some nasty surprises await Donald Trump.

In 1972, the Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, won just 37.5 percent of the vote, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia for a total of 17 Electoral College votes. He didn’t even win his home state, South Dakota. 

In 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale did carry his native Minnesota, but that was as good as it got for him. In the Electoral College, he fared even worse than McGovern, with a whopping 13 votes. 

In the aftermath of these thrashings, the Democratic Party lay in smoldering ruins, and Republicans looked like indestructible conquerors.

Now, some might argue that those GOP victories, though statistically more resounding than Trump’s, weren’t nearly as alarming, because he’s a criminal and wannabe autocrat. 

But Trump’s heinousness shouldn’t make us nostalgic for Nixon and Reagan. They were also criminals—albeit unindicted ones. And they were up to all manner of autocratic shit—until they got caught. 

The Watergate scandal was only one small part of the sprawling criminal enterprise that Nixon directed from the Oval Office in order to subvert democracy. For his part, Reagan’s contribution to the annals of presidential crime, Iran-Contra, broke myriad laws and violated Constitutional norms. 

The hubris engendered by both men’s landslides propelled them to reckless behavior in their second terms—behavior that came back to haunt them. Nixon was forced to resign the presidency; Reagan was lucky to escape impeachment. 

After the Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon from office, this bumper sticker helped Massachusetts voters brag that they handed him his only Electoral College loss in 1972.

Of course, Trump would be justified in believing that no matter how reckless he becomes, he’ll never pay a price. He’s already been impeached—twice—only to be acquitted by his Republican toadies in the Senate. And now that the right-wing supermajority of the Supreme Court has adorned him with an immunity idol, he’ll likely feel free to commit crimes that Nixon and Reagan could only dream of. Who’ll stop him from using his vast power to persecute his voluminous list of enemies?

Well, the enemy most likely to thwart Trump in his second term might be one who isn’t on his list: himself. The seeds of Trump’s downfall may reside in two promises he made to win this election: the mass deportation of immigrants and the elimination of inflation. 

Trump’s concept of a plan to deport 20 million immigrants is as destined for success as were two of his other brainchildren, Trump University and Trump Steaks. The US doesn’t have anything approaching the law-enforcement capacity to realize this xenophobic fever dream. 

And as for Trump’s war on inflation, the skyrocketing prices caused by his proposed tariffs will make Americans nostalgic for pandemic-era price-gouging on Charmin.

It’s possible that Trump’s 24/7 disinformation machine, led by Batman villains Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk, will prevent his MAGA followers from ever discovering that 20 million immigrants didn’t go anywhere. And it’s possible that if inflation spikes, he’ll find a scapegoat for that. (Nancy Pelosi? Dr. Fauci? Taylor Swift?) 

And, yes, it’s possible that Trump will somehow accomplish his goal of becoming America’s Kim Jong Un, and our democracy will go belly-up like the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. 

But I wouldn’t bet on it. I tend to agree with the British politician Enoch Powell (1912-1998), who observed that all political careers end in failure. I doubt that Trump, with his signature blend of inattention, impulsiveness, and incompetence, will avoid that fate.

And when the ketchup hits the fan, the MAGA movement may suddenly appear far more fragmented and fractious than it does this week. You can already see the cracks. Two towering ignoramuses like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert should be BFFs, but they despise each other—the only policy of theirs I agree with. 

If things really go south, expect MAGA Republicans to devour each other as hungrily as the worm who feasted on RFK Jr.’s brain—and that, my friends, will be worth binge-watching. I’m stocking up on popcorn now before Trumpflation makes it unaffordable. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene (L), wishing a space laser would strike Lauren Boebert (R). (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

One parting thought. Post-election, the mainstream media’s hyperbolic reassessment of Trump—apparently, he’s now a political genius in a league with Talleyrand and Metternich—has been nauseating. It’s also insanely short-sighted. Again, a look at the not-so-distant past is instructive.

In 1984, after Reagan romped to victory with 59 percent of the popular vote and 525 electoral votes, Reaganism was universally declared an unstoppable juggernaut. But only two years later, in the 1986 midterms, Democrats proved the pundits wrong: they regained control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 1980. Those majorities enabled them to slam the brakes on Ronnie’s right-wing agenda, block the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, and investigate Iran-Contra.

The lesson of the 1986 midterms is clear: the game’s far from over and there’s everything to play for. If we want to stem the tide of autocracy and kleptocracy, restore women’s rights and protect the most vulnerable, we don’t have the luxury of despair. The work starts now.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, History, Humor, Trump

Alexandra Petri: WaPo Humorist Endorses Kamala, as Her Publisher Refuses to

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2024 //
7

Alexandra Petri is the humorist for The Washington Post. In her column, she endorsed Kamala Harris. She called her column “It Has Fallen to Me, the Humor Columnist, to Endorse Kamala Harris for President.” This is why I didn’t cancel my subscription to The Washington Post. I want to see many ways the opinion writers devise to torture Jeff Bezos.

She wrote:

The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, also owns The Post.)

We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president.

It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told!
Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.

But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.

Let me tell you something. I am having a baby (It’s a boy!), and he is expected on Jan. 6, 2025 (It’s a … Proud Boy?). This is either slightly funny or not at all funny. This whole election, I have been lurching around, increasingly heavily pregnant, nauseated, unwieldy, full of the commingled hopes and terrors that come every time you are on the verge of introducing a new person to the world.

Well, that world will look very different, depending on the outcome of November’s election, and I care which world my kid gets born into. I also live here myself. And I happen to care about the people who are already here, in this world. Come to think of it, I have a lot of reasons for caring how the election goes. I think it should be obvious that this is not an election for sitting out.

The case for Donald Trump is “I erroneously think the economy used to be better? I know that he has made many ominous-sounding threats about mass deportations, going after his political enemies, shutting down the speech of those who disagree with him (especially media outlets), and that he wants to make things worse for almost every category of person — people with wombs, immigrants, transgender people, journalists, protesters, people of color — but … maybe he’ll forget.”

“But maybe he’ll forget” is not enough to hang a country on!

Embarrassingly enough, I like this country. But everything good about it has been the product of centuries of people who had no reason to hope for better but chose to believe that better things were possible, clawing their way uphill — protesting, marching, voting, and, yes, doing the work of journalism — to build this fragile thing called democracy. But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.

Trust is like that, too, as newspapers know.
I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so.

That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself!

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Humor, Media, Trump

Best Song of the Day!

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2024 //
36

Here is the true story of the dogs and cats!

Categories Elections, Humor, Trump

The Wisdom of Arne Duncan (Not)

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2024 //
76

I kind of miss Arne Duncan. I miss reading the goofy things he said when he was Secretary of Education. Miguel Cardona doesn’t say anything so I can’t see what he is thinking. I seem to recall running contests for Arne’s funniest line. Some people liked his claim that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans (because it wiped out the NOLA public schools and enabled “reformers” to turn NOLA into an all-charter district.) My favorite happened when he visited a second grade classroom in NYC and said that he wanted to be able to look into their eyes and know that they were college-bound. Others preferred his statement that parents didn’t like standardized testing because they didn’t want to know how far behind their kids are. There were so many great choices.

Just recently, Arne added a new one, when he was interviewed by Rick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute:

Hess: I’m curious if there’s a time or issue during your tenure as secretary where you wish you could’ve had a do-over?

Duncan: I think the teacher-evaluation issue was one that I had hoped we could make more progress on, but teachers just felt beaten up over it. We had the union leaders on board, but they couldn’t convince their members that this would help them and strengthen their profession.

Gosh! Teachers could not be convinced to support value-added evaluation. Could it have been because this tactic failed to achieve its goals but demoralized teachers? Because the American Association of Statisticians said that the approach was inherently flawed because home effects are far more powerful than teacher effects? Because research funded by the Gates Foundation discovered no academic gains when VAM was implemented but teacher demoralization and teacher exodus increased? Because VAM was successful nowhere?

Categories Cardona, Miguel, Duncan, Arne, Humor

Borowitz Report: Study Finds That People Exposed to JD Vance Lose All Interest in Procreating

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2024 //
13

Andy Borowitz is a humorist who wrote for The New Yorker for years. He now has his own blog. This is a recent entry:

MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—A study published by the University of Minnesota Medical School on Friday “strongly indicates” that people who are exposed to Sen. JD Vance lose all interest in activity that would lead to reproduction.

According to Dr. Davis Logsdon, who supervised the study, “Research subjects exposed to JD Vance became less likely to reproduce and more inclined to acquire a cat.”

Logsdon said the responses of study participants became “even more pronounced” when they were shown an image of Vance in drag.

In that situation, he said, the participants exhibited a range of behaviors from “recoiling in horror” to “attempting to flee.” 

“Taken as a whole, this research suggests that JD Vance might not be the best messenger for his own pro-reproduction stance,” the researcher said. “He could, however, be an effective promoter of abstinence.”

Categories Elections, Humor, Vance, J.D.

Ukraine: The Mouse That Roared?

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2024 //
61

The Mouse That Roared was a 1955 novel made into an uproarious comedy starring the great Peter Sellers in 1959. It is the story of a tiny pre-industrial nation—Grand Fenwick—whose economy has collapsed and whose leaders decide to invade the U.S. because the U.S. always rebuilds the economy of nations it defeats.

Grand Fenwick sends a fleet of 24 soldiers armed with longbows to New York City, and due to a series of miscommunications, accidentally conquers the U.S.

Something like that appears to be unfolding in the grinding war between Ukraine and Russia. After 30 months of absorbing withering attacks on its towns, cities, infrastructure, and people, Ukraine has invaded Russia.

Russia, of course, cries “unfair!” Only Russia can invade, not Ukraine. But invade they did, and the Ukrainians met little resistance.

Thinking like the writer of “The Mouse That Roared,” what if?

What if the Ukrainians pushed their way to Moscow (as the Wagner Group did last year)?

What if they took control of the Kremlin?

What if they captured Putin?

What if Zelensky became the president of Russia and launched a democratic revolution?

I know it’s fantastical, but what if?

Categories Humor, International

Is that JD Vance in Drag?

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2024 //
29

The Daily Beast wrote about a photograph of JD Vance that is circulating on the web. It apparently was taken while he was at Yale Law School. Thus far, he has not denied that it was he.

On Twitter, “Sofa Loren” is trending. That’s the name attached to the photos of JD in drag. And now he wants to criminalize drag queen performances.

Although Republicans have demonized drag queens in the past few years, guys dressing up in drag has a long history. Aside from Ivy League men’s colleges, where drag performances were not unusual and a source of great fun, there was a press event in NYC in 2000 when Rudy Giuliani dressed up in drag; he was accosted by his good friend Donald Trump, who kissed his “breasts.”

I don’t care if men want to dress up for drag shows, but I am disgusted when they hypocritically attack drag queens. As Tim Walz says, “Mind your own damn business.”

Categories Elections, Gender, Humor, Vance, J.D.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Keep Laughing. Authoritarians Can’t Tolerate Ridicule

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2024 //
15

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism, points out in a column for MSNBC that strongmen can laugh at others but they bear being laughed at. That’s why Governor Tim Walz’s reference to Trump and Vance as “weird” cut them down.

She wrote:

It’s the summer of weird Republicans. GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump repeatedly mentions Hannibal Lecter at his rallies, speaking about the fictional cannibal as though he were a real person. “He’s a lovely man. He’d love to have you for dinner,” must be one of the strangest things a candidate has said while trying to attract votes. Meanwhile, Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has made news with his bizarre opinions, including a 2021 remark that Americans with children should be able to vote more times in an election than their childless compatriots. Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate for president who met with Trump to discuss the possibility of dropping out of the race, admitted to dumping a bear carcass in Central Park a decade ago. (“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” he claimed.)

“These guys are just weird,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said last week on “Morning Joe.” That label has stuck ever since, to the right’s frustration and fury. Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has seized the messaging advantages of “weird,” and on Tuesday she even named Walz to the ticket.

When fringe beliefs become mainstream, it’s easy to accept a political environment where the surreal and the extreme are everyday affairs.

For scholars of authoritarianism, the success of “weird” is no surprise. That’s because humor has long been one of the most effective weapons of anti-authoritarian politics. Behind the facade of their omnipotence, most strongmen are brittle and insecure personalities. They don’t mind being called evil, but being ridiculed is a different matter.

When fringe beliefs become mainstream, it’s easy to accept a political environment where the surreal and the extreme are everyday affairs. That’s how we get to Fox News host Jesse Watters telling viewers that “scientists” believe that “when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.” The misogyny and transgender phobia that may have inspired this proclamation are no joke, but the opportunity for satire at the ridiculous statement should not be missed.

Strongmen have their own sadistic sense of humor, which is amply displayed in the awful authoritarian spectacles staged by their governments. The Nazis enjoyed making Communists who entered Dachau concentration camp in 1933, like Hans Beimler, wear signs that said “A hearty welcome!” But they cannot take a joke when they are the targets. That’s why they have to surround themselves with sycophants and lackeys, and their enablers know their prestige must be policed. When a man brought his pet rabbit named Mussolini to a bar in fascist Italy, thinking others would enjoy seeing him order it around, he was quickly arrested and served a year in confinement.

Chilean graphic artist Guillo Bastías discovered the price of puncturing the leader’s personality cult with humor when the magazine Apsi published his caricature of dictator Augusto Pinochet as Louis XIVin 1987. The regime sent the magazine’s editors to jail for “extremism”: That’s how threatening humor can be as a truth-telling vehicle, in this case about how Pinochet saw the scope of his power.

Satire shifts our perception of things and people, helping us to see them in a new light that is often unflattering to them. And it reminds us that what we are living through is out of the ordinary. As Bastías told me in 2018, he wanted to reassure Chileans suffering under the dictatorship that there were people who were “refusing to accept the disinformation and lies … refusing to accept the abnormal as normal.”

And so we are back to “weird” as a strategy of disruption, and how thankful we can be that our democratic rights afford us freedom of speech to level such critiques at the powerful without fear of detention or worse. That is how artist Robin Bell was able to stage his projections on the front of Trump International Hotel, like a May 2017 work that read “Pay Trump Bribes Here.” While Bell worked in very different circumstances than Guillo, he, too, saw his work as a way of reminding people that “what we are experiencing is not normal.”

Humor can have a crucial role in the work of mobilization and civic education to keep those democratic rights. “Laughtivism,” as Serbian democracy activist Srdja Popovic has called it, views humor as more effective than anger in highly polarized situations. When we laugh together, fear and distrust lessen, which is the opposite of what authoritarians want. That, too, is why such leaders can’t take a joke. 

Categories Elections, Humor, Trump, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim

Andy Borowitz: Trump Questions When Walz Turned White

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2024 //
16

Andy Borowitz is a great humorist. He posted this on his blog today:

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

PHILADELPHIA (The Borowitz Report)—Responding to Vice President Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, Donald J. Trump claimed that the Minnesota governor  “was never white before.”

“I saw him on television many, many times, and, quite frankly, he was never white,” Trump said. “Then, he suddenly became white.”

Hinting that “there’s something going on,” Trump said that Walz’s “last-minute decision to become white” was “something that should be looked into.”

Asked what Walz was before he became white, Trump responded, “I think Walz is some kind of a dance. So what is he, white or a dance? I respect either one, but he obviously doesn’t

Categories Elections, Humor

Simone Biles: “I Love My ‘Black Job’”

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
8

Simone Biles posted a tweet mocking Trump’s claim that immigrants are taking away “Black jobs.” This story was published by the New York Daily News.

Gymnast Simone Biles dinged former President Trump on Friday by tweeting “I love my Black job” after her latest Olympic gold medal win.

Taking a victory lap after her winning performance at the Paris Games, Biles trolled Trump for his controversial claims that undocumented immigrants are taking so-called “Black jobs” from Americans.

The world champion was amplifying a post by singer/songwriter Ricky Davila that praised Biles as the greatest of all time.

“Iconic photo of the GOAT mastering her black job and collecting gold medals,” Davila tweeted.

Biles won the all-around gold medal on Thursday, her second of the Paris Games. It raised her career haul to nine gold medals, and she could add even more honors with three more finals looming in coming days.

The wins amount to a remarkable comeback after Biles withdrew from the last Olympics to focus on her mental health.

Her tweet amounts to a rebuke of Trump who has refused to back down from controversial remarks about “Black jobs” at his recent debate with President Biden.

Trump doubled down on the comment Wednesday during a forum with reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists in which he also falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently “became Black.”

“A Black job is anybody that has a job,” Trump said at the NABJ event, drawing derisive groans from the crowd.

The spat with Trump isn’t the first tangle between Biles and his right-wing supporters.

Biles’ 2021 decision to withdraw from competition sparked an unusual backlash from Trump’s MAGA allies who suggested she should suck it up and compete regardless of her health concerns.

One of them was Trump’s vice presidential running mate JD Vance, who denounced Americans for supporting Biles’ difficult decision at the time.

“I think it reflects pretty poorly on our … society that we try to praise people, not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments,” said Vance, who was launching an ultimately successful run for U.S. Senate.

Democrats seized on the remarks this week to take shots at Vance, who has stumbled badly in his debut on the national stage with comments deriding Americans who don’t have children.

“The audacity of JD Vance to go after the GOAT @Simone_Biles as if he isn’t the most unpopular V.P. pick in decades,” tweeted Aida Ross, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee.

Categories Elections, Humor, Trump
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