Well, you can hardly blame the man, can you? The Donald’s current reign of t/error is a lot less palatable than the centuries-old horror that reduced Europe’s population by a solid 25% back in the fourteenth century.
But after you get past Georgie’s first paragraph, his current think piece becomes less a history lesson than an exercise in bullshit, as Mr. Bow-Tie serves up a heaping farrago of cherry-picked data points intended to “prove” that rich folks are hard working and over taxed, while the poor are lazy, undeserving schmucks, a sort of variations on a theme by Mitt Romney, as it were.
Meanwhile, over at the Times, Ross Dothat turns in more of a balanced thumbsucker, with the portentous title “Who Are We?”. Ross starts off his piece by administering a well-deserved beatdown to the favorite meme of former presidential dude Barack Obama, who, when defending an indefensible policy (like, say, the invasion of a peaceful and unoffending country like Libya), would announce that, yes, we could stand aside and do “nothing”, but “that’s not who we are.”
So who are we? asks Ross, According to the last election, it’s 48% the cast of Glee1 and 46% king-seekin’ xenophobes. Can we do better? Ross hopes so, and so do I, but it would be nice if Ross would condescend to do a little of the spadework himself.
- Since I never got around to seeing Glee, which, should, of course, have been entitled Gay!, I don’t know if the cast included a trans-sexual Iranian with a disability, but if it didn’t that was surely forgivable. Or not. ↩︎
