Month: August 2016

No liberals are not to blame for Donald Trump


by digby

Now that it looks as though the Trump campaign really is in serious trouble, it’s time for the conservative movement thinkers to come up with some way to explain how this happened and try to put the pieces back together. They’re going to have to apportion blame for this debacle in a way that doesn’t blow up whatever is left of their party.

Naturally, their first instinct is to blame liberals. Yes, it’s preposterous but it’s nonetheless become something of a thing in right wing circles, the most common trope being that if only the left side of the dial wasn’t so darned “PC” about everything people on the right wouldn’t be drawn to someone who is so boorish and foul (aka racist and xenophobic.)  You see, if liberals would just speak and think like Trump voters there would be no need for Trump! Therefore, it’s their fault not the fault of the voters who chose him.

The latest broadside comes from a piece in The Daily Beast in which Nobel prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is taken to task for having cried wolf about Mitt Romney which made all those Trump voters no longer believe him when he warned them about Donald Trump. It no doubt comes as something of a surprise to the New York Times that Trump voters were once devotees of their paper until they checked into Paul Krugman’s critiques of Mitt Romney’s bad math and campaign trail exaggerations and decided he lacked credibility. It’s laughable, in fact.

Paul Krugman has always called it like he sees it going back to the early days of the Bush administration’s lies and omissions about Iraq. He wasn’t crying wolf then and he isn’t crying wolf now. If Trump is worse than Romney, as he absolutely is, it does not make Romney’s budget numbers add up in retrospect. And when Romney said of the 47% of the people who don’t pay federal income tax, “my job is not to care for those people, I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” to a bunch of wealthy donors he was using a dogwhistle about “dependency” that’s just as potent as Reagan’s “welfare queen” or Bush the First’s Willie Horton ad. That it was more subtle than Donald Trump’s blatant racism doesn’t make it less racist.

But Krugman isn’t the only liberal the right is blaming for the Trumpster fire. One of their more amusing rationalizations is the idea that Bill Clinton put him up to it. In keeping with the ever deeper dive into conspiracy mongering a rumor that Bill Clinton persuaded Trump to run (presumably so his wife would have a weak competitor) has been floating around the campaign since last year. Clinton appeared with Stephen Colbert some months back and confirmed that there’s been a phone call but denied they talked about anything pertaining to running for office.  In fairness, liberals have had a chuckle or two over this idea as well which Clinton ruefully acknowledged with his answer to Colbert: “yeah, I get credit for doing a lot of things I didn’t do like that.”

This isn’t a new thing by any means and it takes on many permutations. For instance, conservatives have blamed liberalism for every societal and cultural ill in America for decades. Newt Gingrich built his entire 90s revolution around it, even publishing a list of words including “deviant” and “sick” to describe it. And he had a very special way of holding liberals responsible for things that conservatives actually enabled.  For instance this comment after the massacre at Columbine:

I want to say to the elite of this country — the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton … of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.”

After the mass killing at Virginia Tech in 2007, Gingrich was asked if he stood by that comment in an interview with George Stephanopoulos. Of course he did:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But what does that have to do with liberalism? 

GINGRICH: Well, who has created a situation ethics, essentially, zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things…we don’t have any discussion about what’s happened to our culture because while we’re restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold, we say it’s impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech. 

Needless to say, Gingrich gets very angry when gun safety advocates suggest that curbing the proliferation of deadly weapons might be a way to reduce the 33,000 gun deaths per year because it’s wrong to politicize tragedy.

The irony of conservatives accusing liberals of being responsible for Donald Trump because they have allegedly cried wolf so often about Republican politicians is that this is actually true in reverse. The right has spent decades accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of every crime in the book from murder to treason and they continue to do it to this day.  And yet for all the books that have been written and the endless investigations, nothing ever seems to pan out. Bill Clinton had  a 73% approval rating the day after the Republicans in the House impeached him. Hillary Clinton appears to be on the cusp of becoming the first woman president in US History.

The endless inane accusations over a quarter century have made a majority of the country tune it all out. Perhaps these folks should take their own advice and stop accusing Clinton of crimes she didn’t commit. It doesn’t seem to be working out for them.  It won’t work to blame liberals for Trump either. He’s their creature through and through. 


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Old times there are not forgotten
by Tom Sullivan

Cotton field in Mississippi (1898).

The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit may have overturned North Carolina’s 2013 omnibus voter suppression law. Judges may have ordered officials to reinstate a week of early voting which the court determined had been cut specifically to hamper voting by black voters. The court’s intent may have been to return to the status quo pre-VIVA. But that doesn’t mean Republicans in charge of the state’s 100 county boards of elections will take that lying down.

Ari Berman at The Nation writes:

Republicans in North Carolina are pulling out all the stops to suppress the state’s reliably Democratic black vote. After the Fourth Circuit court reinstated a week of early voting, GOP-controlled county elections boards are now trying to cut early-voting hours across the state. By virtue of holding the governor’s office, Republicans control a majority of votes on all county election boards and yesterday they voted to cut 238 hours of early voting in Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County, the largest in the state. “I’m not a big fan of early voting,” said GOP board chair Mary Potter Summa, brazenly disregarding the federal appeals court’s opinion. “The more [early voting] sites we have, the more opportunities exist for violations.”

Republicans are very cognizant of the fact that Barack Obama carried Mecklenburg County by 22 points in 2012 and that 70 percent of African-Americans used early voting in the county during the last presidential election versus 48 percent of white voters.

That’s not all:

Mecklenburg isn’t the only county where this is happening. Republicans in Watauga County, home to Appalachian State University, refused to approve a voting site on ASU’s campus, where 15,139 votes took advantage of 215 hours of early voting in 2012, and will have only one early-voting site for the county—in the “tiny office on the first floor of the County Courthouse,” writes local blogger Jerry Williamson.

On August 4, the state Board of Elections issued a set of options for how counties could comply with the court’s decision. The State Board’s memo said (bold in original) “we strongly encourage county boards of elections to be mindful of expected turnout and historical use of one-stop early voting in their respective counties. Statewide historical data indicates that roughly 56% of all voters this election will use one-stop early voting, which will reduce lengthy lines on Election Day.” County boards should meet, approve new Early Voting plans and submit them to the state office by the close of business this Friday August 19. Failure to act, however, triggers Option E:

E. If a county board does not take action to vote on a plan, all one-stop early voting will
take place only during regular business hours at the county board office and on the
last Saturday until 1 p.m. (November 5).

That is apparently what happened in Watauga. Buncombe County (Asheville), on the other hand, met last Thursday and approved a plan for 20 Early Voting sites, plus one Sunday of voting at eight. State Democratic officials in a conference call last week cautioned that other county boards might simply drag their feet and run out the clock this Friday. Hence Option E. We’ll see how many do.

After Guilford County (Greensboro) attempted to reduce its early voting plan from 22 sites to 12, strong community reaction reversed that decision. The plaintiffs in the original court case (NC-NAACP and League of Women Voters among them) cautioned the state that allowing such plans as Greensboro’s “not only opens up the counties, but also this Board (if it approves such plans), to liability under the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.” The plaintiffs also reminded the Board that in Anderson (2014) the court found that Watauga had attempted to discriminate against young voters in violation of the 26th Amendment and that in Morton, Lincoln County settled out of court and restored sites in Lincolnton, a town with a significant African-American population.

The letter warns North Carolina, “Future litigation along these lines will be unavoidable unless this Board acts, in accordance with its statutory authority, to reject early voting plans that do not consider the best interests of the voters in the county.”

But there’s the rub. In many counties across the South, being selective about whose best interests are served was always the plan.

Rick Perry: Gold star parents should shut up or expect to be vilified

by digby

… at least the one’s who attack Trump. TPM wrote up this interview with Rick Perry in which he proves once again that he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed:

…In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Perry charged Khan with striking “the first blow” by speaking at the convention.

“In a campaign, if you’re going to go out and think that you can take a shot at somebody and not have incoming coming back at you, shame on you,” Perry said.

He cited Khan’s remarks as a justification for the fiery response from Trump and his supporters, saying that Khan “politically used his time on that stage to go after Donald Trump” and therefore should not get a “free ride” in response.

“Because he had a son that was lost in this war against terror,” Perry asked, “that gives him a free ride to say whatever he would like against a candidate that he is not for? That is not proper. That is not correct.

I guess Perry didn’t bother to watch the RNC because there was a lady there who personally blamed Hillary Clinton for the death of her son and said “Hillary for Prison, she deserves to be in stripes!” — for something that eight different investigations have shown she did not do.

And the Democrats and Clinton didn’t “hit back.” They did nothing in return except extend their condolences for her loss.  You can bet that if she had been on the other side the likes of Trump and Perry would have ripped her to shreds.

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The grossest thing you will read today

by digby

These people are totally shameless. How dare they:

After Biles’ historic performance, TheBlaze’s Matt Walsh used her family history as an adopted child and her subsequent success as evidence that abortion was “a devastating tragedy” perpetrated by Planned Parenthood disproportionately against black women.

According to Walsh, “if Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry had their way, she would have never made it to the podium … seen the light of day … [and] wouldn’t even have a name, let alone Olympic gold medals.” He argued that Biles’ success was in opposition to the efforts of Planned Parenthood to target “single black women” and predominately operate clinics in economically disadvantaged communities. Walsh further lauded Biles’ adoptive parents and said without their intervention Biles “would be one of the untold million … decomposing in a medical waste dumpster behind an inner city abortion clinic.”

This is from a post by Media Matters. You can find the link to the original piece of garbage there as well as a lengthy history of this bilious set of lies and a refutation of the facts.

This is a hideous and disgusting slam against Planned Parenthood and African American women that has no basis in reality. The higher abortion rates for poor women of all races, including African Americans, is a reflection of the fact that imbeciles like this man insist on denying proper health care and shaming as a perverse way of making women magically not get pregnant.

It is sickening to see them use the athletic achievement of Simone Biles and the lovely story of her family and juxtapose it with vile propaganda to make their dishonest political point. What awful awful people they are.

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You can believe me or you can believe the lying videotape

by digby

Trump’s take on foreign affairs: Then… and now. https://t.co/MM8I9W4Erk

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) August 16, 2016

The clip starts by showing Trump claiming he opposed the Iraq War.

“I was an opponent of the Iraq War from the beginning,” Trump said in the clip from a Monday rally in Youngstown, Ohio.

That’s followed by a clip from “The Howard Stern Show” on Sept. 11, 2002, when Trump was asked if he supported the invasion.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he replied at the time. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

The video also contrasts Trump’s views on the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq.

“I have been just as clear as saying what a catastrophic mistake Hillary Clinton and President Obama made with the reckless way in which they pulled out,” he said during Monday’s rally.

But in a March 16, 2007, interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Trump said, “How do they get out? They get out, that’s how they get out. Declare victory and leave.”

Trump is also shown having two minds on the American military intervention in Libya.

“Libya was stable,” he said Monday. “President Obama and Hillary Clinton should never have attempted to build a democracy in Libya.”

But that’s contrasted with a clip of Trump in the past arguing for removing Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi from power.

“Gadhafi, in Libya, is killing thousands of people,” Trump said in a clip from Feb. 28, 2011, video. “Nobody knows how bad it is. We should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very quick and easy.”

His voters believe him no matter what the evidence shows. They think the tape’s been doctored or that it’s taken out of context.  And that’s if they even see this. Most of them live in their little wingnut bubble where this never even comes up.
In their silo, Trump is winning, the polls are skewed and anything he says that doesn’t quite fit with what they want to think about him is either no big deal or it’s a lie propagated by the liberal media.

These people are not going to sober up if Trump loses. And some of them are going to be very angry Second Amendment voters.

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Isis’s useful idiots

by digby

This NY Times op-ed by Michael Wahid Hanna of N.Y.U.’s School of Law and Daniel Benaim, a former Middle East adviser in the Obama administration is a worthwhile read. The US is becoming more like the Middle East in one important respect: conspiracy theorizing.

Enter Donald J. Trump. Last week, Mr. Trump repeatedly claimed that President Obama is “the founder of ISIS.” Even when a sympathetic conservative radio host offered Mr. Trump a chance to backtrack from his ridiculous claim and instead blame the Obama administration’s policies for the Islamic State’s rise, the Republican candidate doubled down: “No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do.” (The next day, Mr. Trump belatedly took to Twitter to plead sarcasm.)
[…]
When this homegrown American conspiracy theorizing intersects with its Middle Eastern cousin, the results can be damaging and dangerous to America’s standing and interests. In 2012, for instance, former Representative Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, told an interviewer, “it appears that there has been a deep penetration in the halls of our United States government by the Muslim Brotherhood.” Without offering any credible evidence, Mrs. Bachmann and other House colleagues called for the Justice Department to investigate.

This unfounded allegation found a second life in Egypt, where the government and much of the population came to resent the United States’ response to the overthrow of a Muslim Brotherhood president. Egyptian news outlets showed clips of Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, on the House floor alleging United States support for the Muslim Brotherhood to malign the United States as the sinister hidden hand behind Egypt’s turmoil. To this day, such accusations damage United States-Egypt relations, providing fuel for the prosecution of Egyptians who have worked with the United States and complicating cooperation on counterterrorism and counter-radicalization.

Of course, no region has a monopoly on conspiracy theories. But their ubiquity in the Middle East is undeniable. Americans who travel frequently to the region know well the dread when confronted by otherwise worldly individuals who question whether the Central Intelligence Agency created Al Qaeda or perpetrated the Sept. 11 attacks.
[…]
Just this weekend, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly endorsed Mr. Trump’s remarks: “This is an American presidential candidate. This was spoken on behalf of the Republican Party. He has data and documents.” (Apparently, the “sarcasm” was lost on Mr. Nasrallah, whose group backs the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.)

Everything the United States does in the Middle East — from diplomatic negotiations to humanitarian aid to military and intelligence cooperation — is made more difficult when would-be partners and their publics suspect the worst.
[…]
Not long ago, when America’s overseas enemies and critics wanted to mislead their publics to believe that the American government was in cahoots with terrorists like the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, they had to look to the United States’ political fringe for confirmation of their own conspiracy theories. Now, thanks to Mr. Trump, America’s enemies can simply run the videotape of a major party’s nominee for president.

The article does not overlook America’s actions in the region contributing to these conspiracy theories. Sometimes there really are conspiracies. But that doesn’t change the fact that playing into this propensity for believing conspiracies is not a dangerous game or one which helps anyone, including the people of the middle east. These Republican bozos need to keep their mouths shut.

And Americans need to keep a lid on this nonsense at home too.

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QOTD: The Prez

by digby

So true. The major threat at this point is complacency:

“What I do want to emphasize is needing a sense of urgency and finishing the job of getting her elected,” Obama said at a private residence. “And you notice I haven’t said much about her opponent. Frankly, I’m tired of talking about her opponent. I don’t have to make the case against her opponent because every time he talks he makes the case against his own candidacy.”

Obama made note of the “unpredictable election season,” pointing to “anxieties and concerns that the American people have” as well as “the changing nature of the media and voting patterns.”

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty out there,” the president added. “And if we are not running scared until the day after the election, we are going to be making a grave mistake.”

If Democrats do not “do their jobs,” Obama warned, “then it’s still possible for her to lose.”

“And when I say ‘do our jobs,’ what I mean is we are going to have to continue to be engaged,” Obama said. “We are going to continue to have to write checks. We are going to continue to have to make phone calls, and rally people behind her candidacy. We are still going to have to fight what has been an unrelenting negative campaign against her that has made a dent in the opinion of people even who are inclined to vote for her.”

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“Where do you go to have any sense of the truth?”

by digby

Like Tom below, I wrote about the right wing media chickens coming home to roost today for Salon:



Back in the early 2000s right wing talk radio was a juggernaut that influenced American politics so thoroughly that all mainstream GOP leaders genuflected to their power. Rush Limbaugh was, of course, the king, a man so powerful that he was given substantial credit for the Gingrich Revolution in 1994 with the freshman Republican class going so far as to award him an honorary membership in their caucus. There was a time not long ago when the entire Bush family got on the horn to wish Rush a happy birthday on the air.

When Limbaugh got into trouble for saying something crude or outrageous, such as saying the Abu Ghraib torturers were just “blowing off steam,” the whole conservative establishment would jump to his defense:

Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.
— Kate O’Beirne, National Review.

There were other conservative radio personalities before him but he was the one who turned the genre into a multi-billion dollar business and a partisan commercial enterprise. After 9/11 the format exploded with new voices both nationally and locally. Combined with the ascendance of Fox News, Drudge and total Republican control of he government, right wing media completely dominated the political landscape.

This phenomenon had a number of bedrock assumptions but the first, and most important, was the notion that the mainstream media suffered from a liberal bias so extreme that it was completely untrustworthy. Now this idea had not originated with the modern right wing media. It had been an article of faith among conservatives since the 1960s when the right began to rebel against the civil rights movement and the Vietnam and Watergate coverage. It later became a more cynical “playing the refs” exercise in which their constant accusations of liberal bias kept reporters and editors constantly on the defensive and ended up tilting much of the coverage their way.  It was a very savvy move. The scandal mongering of the 1990s and the reporting of the election in 2000 were perfect results of that successful campaign.

One of the more interesting intellectual arguments under girding this liberal media obsession was the conservative fixation with moral and cultural relativism perhaps best illustrated by Lynn Cheney and her book “Telling the Truth” in which she excoriated the left for abandoning objective reality. This line of thinking insisted that mainstream Democrats like Al Gore (Al Gore!) were Foucaultian postmodernists.

After 9/11, however, this thesis was finally exposed as being laughably absurd when President Bush and Mrs Cheney’s husband masterfully manipulated the so-called liberal media into cheerleading for an illegal war based upon phony intelligence. There was even a famous quote from a Bush official to reporter Ron Suskind which perfectly characterized the prevailing right wing ethos of the period. He said that reporters like Suskind lived in the “reality based community” which was made up of people who believe “solutions emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality.” He and his cohorts on the right, however, were not constrained by such restrictions: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Lynn Cheney never said a word. But many on the left did, proudly taking up the mantle of the “reality based community” and making the case that the right’s years long crusade against the so-called liberal media was creating a form of epistemological relativism of its own, some of which was manifesting itself in very dangerous ways.

The right’s great noise machine just kept chugging along, however. And the rise of social media turned it into an even louder megaphone that simultaneously blocked out any competing information. It was this environment that has made it possible for Donald Trump to emerge. We know he is a twitter and Instagram addict and uses all social media more casually and more intimately than any presidential candidate in history.  But less known is the fact that in preparation for his run, Trump hired people to listen to talk radio and give him detailed reports on the zeitgeist. That’s where he got his immigration policy and many others which often sound like non-sequitors like “get rid of common core.” And it’s no mystery where Trump got his increasingly unhinged rap about the press either, is it?

And today, for the first time, some conservatives in the #NeverTrump camp are seeing where their decades long attacks on the mainstream media and the “reality based community” have led. Right wing radio talk show host Charlie Sykes from Wisconsin gave an interview lamenting the situation with reporter Oliver Darcy who put up an excerpt on twitter. Sykes also appeared on MSNBC’s All In last night where he said this:

Over the years conservative talk show hosts, and I’m certainly one of them, we’ve done a remarkable job of challenging and attacking the mainstream media. But perhaps what we did was also the destroy any sense of a standard. Where do you go to have any sense of the truth? You have Donald Trump come along and the man says things that are demonstrably untrue on a daily basis. My experience has been look, we live in an era when every drunk at the end of the bar has a twitter account and maybe has a blog and when you try to point out “this is not true, this is a lie” and then you cite the Washington Post or the New York Times, their response is “oh that’s the mainstream media.” So we’ve done such a good job of discrediting them that there’s almost no place to go to be able to fact check. 

Welcome to the reality based community.

The right is in disarray, to say the least, and that includes their media. Fox News is in crisis with the Roger Ailes scandal. Conservative radio is losing listeners. It would be nice to think that this fever has broken and we can get back to a point where people can at least agree on a certain set of facts even if we have disagreements about how to proceed from there. But it’s a long road back.

And social media is not going to be helpful. The next phase I’m afraid is rampant conspiracy theories on all sides of the political spectrum. Indeed, all we have to do is look at the Trump campaign for a preview of where that’s headed too. But the great Right Wing Wurlitzer is finally sputtering out. The damage it’s left in its wake is incalculable.

Mr Magoosolini made a mistake

by digby

Ooops.

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The best minds of his generation destroyed by radio
by Tom Sullivan

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali (1931).

Starving hysterical naked, etc. Madness has tightened its grip. Like the the Black Death carried by rats infecting town after town, it spread, until not even the priests and nobles are un-touched. They are carriers.

Raw Story this morning might as well be the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for the multivarious disorders of right-thinking people.

In his last week on The Nightly Show, Larry Wilmore pointed to Donald Trump “spokesgoblin” Katrina Pierson for claiming President Obama invaded Afghanistan. Elsewhere on the page, a story chronicles her claim that reporters “literally beat” Trump supporters for supporting his policies.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani told a Youngstown, Ohio Trump rally on Monday, “Under those 8 years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the US. They all started when Clinton and Obama came into office.” Somebody get the net.

But more revealing is the report on a tweet by Business Insider’s Oliver Darcy. In an interview for an upcoming piece, conservative radio host Charlie Sykes told Insider that years of right-wing talk radio have essentially destroyed the truth function of facts. Whereas liberals used to be accused by the right of relativism, decades of conservative talk radio attacks on the press (and science) have slowly dissolved objective reality. Sykes says,

We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers. There’s nobody. Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that. ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bullshit.’

That’s basically what I said about the fallout from the Reformation during the Bundy militia standoff in Oregon. Any self-anointed preacher with a flashy suit, an expensive coif, a sonorous voice, and a black, Morocco-bound, gilt-edged, King James red-letter edition can now define Christianity any way he pleases. Who is to say otherwise? And after decades of anti-government, anti-book-learning propaganda, any gun-toting yahoo with a creatively annotated pocket U.S. Constitution believes he can decide for himself what is and isn’t the law. Objective reality is melting like one of Dali’s clocks. To speak out against the madness, as Crosby, Stills & Nash once sang, is for Sykes to reveal oneself as not yet body-snatched, not one of the pod people.

Sykes continues,

When this is all over, we have to go back. There’s got to be a reckoning on all this. We’ve created this monster,” he warned. “Look, I’m a conservative talk show host. All conservative talk show hosts have basically established their brand as being contrasted with the mainstream media. So we have spent 20 years demonizing the liberal mainstream media. And by the way, a lot has been justifiable. There is real bias. But, at a certain point you wake up and you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there.

In old movies, the townspeople take up torches and pitchforks against the monster. In what passes for reality today, the townspeople are the monsters. Where have you gone, Rod Serling?

Interviewed @SykesCharlie recently for story on conservative media I'm working on. Worth reading what he had to say pic.twitter.com/cqsVOabG7Q— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 14, 2016