Month: February 2016

QOTD: Trumpf

by digby

“@ilduce2016: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” – @realDonaldTrump #MakeAmericaGreatAgain“

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 28, 2016

Yes, Gawker baited him into retweeting Mussolini.  And he eagerly took the bait.

Apparently Trump didn’t study any history after he finished his Classic Comics series on “medieval times.”

A rite of passage?

A man known as “The Donald”:

Mr. Trump attended the New York Military Academy after years of rowdy and rebellious behavior at Kew-Forest, a more traditional prep school in Queens. Mr. Trump once recalled giving a teacher at Kew-Forest a black eye “because I didn’t think he knew anything about music.”

A man known as “Il Duce”:

Born on July 29, 1883, Mussolini gained a reputation for bullying and fighting during his childhood. At age 10 he was expelled from a religious boarding school for stabbing a classmate in the hand, and another stabbing incident took place at his next school.

It doesn’t prove anything, of course. But still … 


This is sort of interesting too:

With Italy’s leading non-fascist politicians hopelessly divided and with the threat of violence in the air, on October 29 the king offered Mussolini the chance to form a coalition government. But although the premiership was now his, Il Duce—a master of propaganda who claimed the backing of 300,000 fascist militiamen when the real number was probably far lower—wanted to make a show of force. As a result, he joined armed supporters who flooded the streets of Rome the following day. Mussolini would later mythologize the March on Rome’s importance.

After becoming prime minister, Mussolini reduced the influence of the judiciary, muzzled a free press, arrested political opponents, continued condoning fascist squad violence and otherwise consolidated his hold on power. However, he continued working within the parliamentary system at least somewhat until January 1925, when he declared himself dictator of Italy. Following a series of assassination attempts in 1925 and 1926, Mussolini tightened his grip even further, banning opposition parties, kicking out over 100 members of parliament, reinstating the death penalty for political crimes, ramping up secret police activities and abolishing local elections.

I believe he also said that he was going to make the country great again …

@sarahkendzior @pdacosta @realDonaldTrump @ilduce2016 Maybe coincidence or maybe not. (via) https://t.co/88b7J7Prma pic.twitter.com/DfTHF831my

— Radovan Kavicky (@radovankavicky) February 28, 2016

Entitled to their own country
by Tom Sullivan

“That’s just not done,” people used to say of behaviors that violated genteel rules of polite society. It is not an expression you hear much anymore. “Polite society” is now as quaint as the notion that the United States abides by the international rule barring torture. Like the rule against Ghostbusters getting involved with possessed people, it’s more of a guideline than a rule.

“It’s okay if you’re a Republican” (IOKIYAR) is musty Internet shorthand for how one major party believes rules and norms apply only to certain people and not others. We are beyond that now. Far beyond it. It is a wonder anyone still uses the expression from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Nobody believes it anymore, even at the highest levels.

Writing for Salon, Harvard professor Bruce Hay gives his understanding of how the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia approached science. As a former Scalia clerk, Hay speaks from experience:

Antonin Scalia generally detested science. It threatened everything he believed in. He refused to join a recent Supreme Court opinion about DNA testing because it presented the details of textbook molecular biology as fact. He could not join because he did not know such things to be true, he said. (On the other hand, he knew all about the eighteenth century. History books were trustworthy; science books were not.) Scientists should be listened to only if they supported conservative causes, for example dubious studies purporting to demonstrate that same-sex parenting is harmful to children. Scientists were also good if they helped create technologies he liked, such as oil drills and deadly weapons.

Rules and norms can be confining, but they can also be empowering the way science defines physical reality, and Internet protocols and international standards make communication possible and business transactions predictable. But in politics, where once there was truth, now there is truthiness. Where once there were facts, now there are “true facts.” People who decry government “entitlements” behave as though they are entitled to their own facts, to their own president, their own government, and their own country. All others are illegitimate.

Nancy LeTourneau writes at Political Animal that Senate Republicans’ efforts to stonewall President Obama nominating Scalia’s replacement are consistent with their broader effort to, in Josh Marshall’s words, “delegitimize, degrade and denigrate his presidency and the man himself.” LeTourneau provides a short list of examples and writes:

Our democracy is not based on all of us agreeing with each other. The founders gave us a process for voicing those disagreements and doing the hard work of taking care of the country’s business in the midst of them. These unprecedented actions by the Republicans to undermine and delegitimize one of the three branches of our government place their side of the argument above those processes and thereby pose a threat to its very survival.

At Ten Miles Square, Peter Shane addresses the breakdown in norms directly:

What is happening is a dispute over norms – some call them “conventions” – which are the unwritten, but mutually accepted ways of doing business that allow parties and institutions in conflict to work together in spite of conflict. Thirteen years ago, I wrote a law review article decrying what I saw then as a dangerous corrosion in those institutional norms that had enabled frequently divided government to nonetheless achieve great things in the United States between the end of World War II and the late 1970s. Matters since then have grown much worse.

A president with 11 months to go in his term could reasonably expect, based on well-established norms, that the act of nominating a Supreme Court Justice will be viewed as a routine and wholly appropriate fulfillment of his duties. A president could reasonably expect the nominee to receive a hearing. Senate opposition on grounds of judicial philosophy rather than credentials might well be predictable also, but the legitimacy of a nomination and the expectation of a full hearing would seem to be unquestionable. The assertion by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) within hours of Scalia’s death that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President,” immediately threatens to explode these norms.

The funny thing about norms – especially someone else’s – is you rarely notice them until someone violates them. Like the rule that racial and ethnic minorities ought to know their place. Like the rule that only white men get to be president. Or the rule that Christians get to dominate religious minorities. Or that America was founded for white Europeans.

What is crazy about the current presidential campaign and its coverage in the news, is how pundits and pollsters keep treating it as though accepted norms still apply. As if the usual tools for making predictions still work. As if Congress is still run by rational actors. As if Trump voters will vote their rational best interests instead of just burning the place to the ground like Dresden rather than let THEM have it.

This is a very Vonnegut moment. America has come unstuck in time. At one moment, it is 2016. At another, Orwell’s 1984. The next, it is FDR’s 1934. Or 1862, before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Everybody thinks they get to have America their way. And, by God, they feel entitled to it.

Trump and Noonan, a match made in heaven

by digby

On the trail today Donald Trump praised Peggy Noonan’s latest column. He felt it really hit the nail on the head. It acknowledges that he’s the likely nominee and explains why that is: the country is divided between the “protected” and the “unprotected”. The protected are those who don’t fell their lives in in danger. The unprotected are those who hate immigrants:

The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and western Europe is immigration. It is THE issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump…

If you are an unprotected American — one with limited resources and negligible access to power — you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration — its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine — more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment — another word for the protected — nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.

Mr. Trump came from that.
[…]
What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.

You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement — charter schools, choice, etc. — because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

First, the idea that “Hollywood” is among the elite institutions that doesn’t protect the people from its pernicious effects is a little bit much when you’re talking about a Reality TV star named Donald Trump whose starring role is someone who ruthlessly fires people on television. I’m going to guess that his Hollywood celebrity is one of the things they like best about him. And yes, kindergarten teachers are destroying everything we hold dear, we know that. Both of those things are standard issue right wing orthodoxy, neither of which have anything at all to do with Trump.

Immigration though — yes she is correct about that. It’s the central promise of his campaign. Except, of course, that they haven’t actually taken much of anything from American workers and they aren’t a threat to anything except the notion that we should have crops rotting in our fields.

But these Trump fans do feel threatened by lies and fear-mongering from white wingnuts about crime, destruction of our “culture”, and the belief that immigrants are stealing government benefits from deserving Real Americans:

[Liberals] like this mass immigration of peasant cultures to America but it shows they really don’t care that much about the war on women.Normal people, whether that’s PC or not, recognize that we have in amazingly successful culture, thus we have a successful country. That’s why so many people want to come here but if we dump millions upon millions of people from backward cultures, as different from ours as possible, incredibly poor. Not only are you getting just a shocking war on women but — why do the democrats want it? — because post-1970 immigrants are voting 8 to 2 for the democrats and nothing Republicans do is going to change that. In addition, specifically with the Hispanic vote, which you mentioned, only Democrats and the RNC seem to think all brown people are are alike.

That’s Ann Coulter. Here’s the “protector” Trump:

When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.

It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably, probably, from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.

This is how he put it in his 2011 book called “Time to Get Tough”

“I actually have a theory that Mexico is sending their absolute worst, possibly including prisoners, in order for us to bear the cost, both financial and social. This would account for the fact that there is so much violence and crime.”

To the extent this feeling of being “unprotected” from immigrants is real, it’s about xenophobic bullshit peddled by cynical conservatives looking for a hook.

.@AnnCoulter‘s new book– “Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole”– is a great read. Good job!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2015

QOTD: Thomas Schaller

by digby

From his book The Stronghold: How Republicans Captured Congress but Surrendered the White House, published in January of 2015

No politician stood more squarely at the intersection of these two political developments—the rise of the tea party and the fall of immigration reform—than Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. He was a darling of the tea party movement in 2010 and, following Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, emerged as the great Latino hope for taking back the White House in 2016 and converting Latino voters to the Republican cause for a generation. Young, handsome, with a beautiful family and a compelling personal story, Rubio represents the largest swing state in presidential politics; in him, many Republicans saw—some still see—a one-man GOP revival.

But in the Republican cosmos, stars that yesterday shone brightly often fade quickly. In the two-plus years between his 2010 election and the 2013 immigration reform fight, Marco Rubio learned the consequences of tea party betrayal. As a Latino and a presidential aspirant, he knew he had to come out in favor of a comprehensive immigration policy that included some path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants with clean records—what conservatives call “amnesty” for “illegals.” The legislation could include tougher border standards and increased funding for enforcement, but any hope Rubio might have of building a general election coalition to win the White House would have to include a citizenship component. Polls showed that Rubio or Jeb Bush—or even Paul Ryan—could capture at least 40 percent of the Latino vote if they backed a version of immigration reform with a path-to-citizenship provision.

As a Gang of Eight senator tasked with constructing a filibuster-proof bipartisan majority behind immigration reform, Rubio put himself out front on the issue. By summer 2013, he was paying the price. Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation proclaimed that Rubio did “not read his own bill,” specifically the provisions related to costs and enforcement. In a widely discussed essay in National Review in which they called for the bill to be killed, conservative commentators Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol specifically lambasted Rubio for claiming he didn’t want to have to come back in a decade to pass another bill when, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the enforcement provisions conservatives found insufficient would require exactly that. Right-wing talking heads Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck were less diplomatic, dismissing Rubio as the “Dr. Kevorkian of the Republican Party” and a “piece of garbage,” respectively. Attendees at an anti-immigration reform tea party rally held up signs calling him “Obama’s idiot.” Another proclaimed that “Rubio Lies, Americans Die.”

Marco Rubio’s journey from hero to apostate typifies the Republicans’ dilemma. A talented, young, handsome conservative from the biggest swing state in the country who could draw Latino voters back to the GOP, Rubio might have been the Republicans’ answer to Barack Obama: a politician with the star power to transform the party. He’s no RINO, and may yet be the Republicans’ 2016 presidential or vice presidential nominee. But for defying the tea party, Rubio will first need to do penance or see his—and perhaps his party’s—presidential hopes dashed.

Beyond Rubio’s political fate lies the larger point. With the rise of the tea party and with the vexing issue of immigration, the Republican Party faced a choice between the recovery and retrenchment paths, and each time chose retrenchment. Why? Don’t rational political parties make choices that best further their electoral goals? Usually, but not always. When a party sets its course down a particular path, it often closes off options or preempts alternatives that seem patently beneficial in the abstract but are conditionally less preferable than doing the opposite, or doing nothing at all. That is the nature of path dependency: it alters the cost-benefit analysis of future decisions. The Republican Party’s rising congressional fortunes have led the party quite rationally down a path that has made retrenchment more attractive and recovery less so.

As is so often true, Schaller got it right.

And now they have Trump.

.

Trump the moderate

by digby

I’m hearing disturbing rumblings coming from people who should know better saying that Trump is a socially moderate populist who might be able to shake things up in Washington in a way that wouldn’t be so bad. He’ll put tariffs on Chinese goods! He said something nice about Planned Parenthood! He once said he was for single payer health care! Why he’s practically Bernie Sanders.

Not really. If anyone is deluding themselves that his “moderate” position that we should only outlaw abortion but let Planned Parenthood do pap smears is the reason his followers like him they need to reassess.  There is no doubt that he’s appealing to a lot of people and he probably hasn’t hit his ceiling yet. But it’s in spite of his populist-liberalish apostasies not because of them.

Last night in Oklahoma, he was confronted by a cheeky protester who was wearing a t-shirt that said “endorsed by the KKK” (which is true!) He stalked around the stage like the wrestling villain he has played in the WWE, and then walked over to him and stared then flicked his wrist as if her were Emperor Caligula instructing security to take him out. The audience roared, and chanted USA, USA, USA!

Then he came back to the podium and talked about the good old days:

In the good old days, law enforcement acted a lot quicker than this. In the good old days they’d rip him out of that seat so fast … But today, everybody’s politically correct. This country is going to hell with being politically correct. Going to hell. 

You know, it is a shame when you think … when you see things like that …we had somebody the other day, punching, swinging, people want to take it nice and easy, they don’t want to do anything. They want to take them out, when he’s walking out he’s waving to everybody, smiling, the place is booing. In all fairness I love the police, I think they’re the greatest. But they’re afraid to move. They want to keep their jobs, they don’t want to lose their pensions and I understand. We are really becoming a frightened country and I think it’s very sad. Remember what I said. 

You know during the debate, the last one, we were asked a question about waterboarding and they asked Senator Ted Cruz ,and he didn’t want to get involved with the question, he was sort of a basket case. He didn’t want to get involved with it, didn’t want to talk about it,and then they looked at me because he didn’t know exactly… and I didn’t even blame him. But then they looked over at me … oh we have another one folks, … two people, two people. (boos) 

So they talked about water boarding. We have in the middle east people who cut off your head. We have people who are cutting of heads of Christians and lots of others. Right? We have people that are drowning other people in cages. They’re drowning them in heavy steel cages.  And what do we do? They’re asking Ted about waterboard. And he doesn’t want to .. and then they come to me. “What do you think about waterboarding? ” meaning “isn’t it terrible?”  I said, “I think it’s just fine, I think it’s just fine.” [Huge roar from the crowd] And frankly, if you want to go a step above or two or three steps above that’s ok too, and I said that. 

And you know, I didn’t vet that with the political experts, I just said it. Got a standing ovation. 

Our country is starving for doing the right thing.  

Note how his mind works. In the good old days the police could crack some heads. Now they’re too scared because of political correctness. We’ve becoming a frightened country afraid to “do the right thing”  — like torture people.

He flows very smoothly from police “taking care” of protesters to waterboarding in one long stream of consciousness rant. What do you suppose that means? And what do you suppose it means that his audience cheers wildly for it?

This is what they love about him, don’t kid yourself. They don’t know from “deals” with Mexico, they just thing they’ve been screwed and they think this guy will kick some foreigners’ asses, inside this country and out. (And his paeans to police indicate that they wouldn’t mind if he kicked some darker hued American asses either.)  He’s articulating their rage at all those people — and promising to act on it.

When has Trump said he’d go after Wall Street? He promises to get rid of all environmental laws the way the hated Chinese do. (They come up with the idea and then start digging the next day! No environmental impact statements!) This is a guy who said that wages were going to have to go down. (He’s since said he wants them to go up, but his first utterances are usually the real ones …)  On who’s behalf is he arguing? Workers? Citizens? No, I’m going to guess it’s corporations and business.

You can watch the passage starting at about 58:30 in this video:

As ye sow so shall ye reap, fellas

by digby

This story in the NY Times delves into the developing panic inside the Republican party over the impending nomination of Donald Trump. The “establishment” was apparently uninterested in efforts to stop him early, for a variety of reasons, mostly because they were stupid.

There was one effort led by a strategist who has been very upset by the Trump phenomenon and worried that he would be a disaster for the party, Alex Castellanos:

Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump. In a confidential memo, the strategists laid out the mission of a group they called “ProtectUS.”

“We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips,” they wrote in the previously unreported memo. Mr. Castellanos even produced ads portraying Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency, according to people who saw them and who, along with many of those interviewed, insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The two strategists, who declined to comment, proposed to attack Mr. Trump in New Hampshire over his business failures and past liberal positions, and emphasized the extreme urgency of their project. A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.”

No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.

He’s been very agitated about what has happened to his party, wondering where they have gone wrong.

He’s the guy who made this ad:

Primarily Al Jazeera
by Tom Sullivan

Al Jazeera America Digital takes a bow.

South Carolina Democrats hold their primary today. There were neither Bernie nor Hillary campaigners hanging around my Greenville, SC hotel like Ted Cruz supporters last week. It seems Clinton spent more of her time doing small-town, retail politics in downstate, rural areas where she has connections going back years. Sanders campaigned more via arena and college events and phone banks. There will be more to say after the hand-clapping and the shouting are over.

Al Jazeera America is going away soon and will be missed. Tony Karon posted a “valedictory note” about the service yesterday. A sample:

The core principle driving the journalism that distinguished Al Jazeera America online as a unique voice in a cluttered news landscape was the simple — yet radical — proposition that no single human life is worth less than any other.

Whether it was Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, teenage African-Americans killed in their prime; Syrian refugee child Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach; Palestinian baby Ali Dawabshe, who died in the flames of his firebombed home in a village under Israeli occupation; Nicaraguan peasant farmer Carlos Wilson Bilis contemplating the destruction of his livelihood by an epic canal project; or LeeAnne Walters raising the alarm over the poisoned water pouring from the taps in Flint, Michigan, their stories deserved to be told. Their names needed to be known and their voices heard. Their plight, like those of so many hundreds featured in our coverage, revealed the human impact of decisions made — or evaded — in the corridors of power.

And when ordinary people stood up and took action to transform their fates, we paid attention. Whether it was Priestess Bearstop and her struggle to steer clear of Minneapolis gang life or Pamela Dominguez and her Dreamer compañeros fighting for the dignity of citizenship or St. Louis fast-food worker Olivia Roffle organizing for a living wage or Mexican student Salvador Castro Fernandez and his friends searching for justice for their 43 Ayotzinapa classmates who went missing during a protest, we believed our readers needed to hear their voices.

The reporters who told those stories did us all a service, one that is increasingly difficult to sustain in the digital environment. The Internet was supposed to set us free (and in some ways has), but food and rent are not. Making any kind of living writing online is at best problematic. I haven’t quit my day job. (Read that however you want.) Campaign staffers, too, know the way of the Ramen.

Best farewell cake of all time A photo posted by atossaaraxia (@atossaaraxia) on Feb 26, 2016 at 10:56am PST

Speaking of that “cluttered news landscape,” the trolls could not resist taking a jab at Al Jazeera on its way out the door.

Al Jazeera America is going out with a bang with this masterful trolling from @ProfJeffJarvis https://t.co/vZLefz0a1u

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 25, 2016

So it goes.

Friday night soother

by digby

I love this:

It might be impossible for any one person to adopt every pet in need of a good home, but these kids are doing the next best thing — by bringing shy shelter dogs out of their shells.

An innovative new idea, called the Shelter Buddies Reading Program, is already making a huge difference for animals at the Humane Society of Missouri.

The idea is simple: train kids to read to dogs as a way of readying them for forever homes, all while instilling a greater sense of empathy in the youngsters, too.

“We wanted to help our shy and fearful dog without forcing physical interaction with them to see the positive effect that could have on them,” program director Jo Klepacki told The Dodo. “We launched the program last Christmas, but now we offer it once a month.”

Kids age 6 to 15 can sign up for the program online, after which they are trained how to read a dog’s body language to tell if they are stressed out or anxious. Those pets, say Klepacki, are the ones most in need of special attention.

The young volunteers are then encouraged to sit in front of a shy dog’s kennel with a book and read to them — a simple gesture that can go a long way.

“Ideally that shy and fearful dog will approach and show interest. If so, the kids reenforce that behavior by tossing them a treat,” said Klepacki. “What this is also doing is to bring the animals to the front in case potential adopters come through. They are more likely to get adopted if they are approaching and interacting, rather than hiding in the back or cowering”

The more timid dogs aren’t the only ones benefiting from the program. High-energy dogs, too, have shown improvements from being read to.

“Hearing a child reading can really calm those animals,” Klepacki said. “It is incredible, the response we’ve seen in these dogs.”

“It’s encouraging children to develop empathy with animals. It’s a peaceful, quiet exercise. They’re seeing fearfulness in these animals, and seeing the positive affect they can have,” said Klepacki. “It encourages them to look at things from an animals perspective. That helps them better connect with animals and people in their lives.”

.

Has Beck gone too far?

by digby

No, of course not.  It’s impossible.  But you have to admit this is kind of funny:

After revealing that he is getting word that “stations want to cancel the show because they believe that Donald Trump is going to be the next president,” Beck vowed that he was not going to stop attacking Trump because the GOP presidential front runner is simply too dangerous, something he learned when he encountered Trump supporters at the Nevada caucuses. 

“The Trump supporters, they’re Brownshirts,” Beck said. “I’ve never witnessed anything like I saw today, it was just, it was grotesque and sad that Americans … It’s like these people are treating people like Obama supporters treated us, just the worst of the worst Obama supporters. It was like walking into Ferguson or walking into Baltimore. There’s no reason, there’s no common decency, there’s nothing. It’s just bizarre.”

Hmmm. I don’t remember him “walking into Ferguson and Baltimore” but I think we all understand the allusion, don’t we?  Oh lord ….

h/t to LGF