Okay, Donald Trump hasn’t been entirely silent. “Trump proposes a law that’s existed for 20 years”, snickers USA Today with well-earned glee, reporting on our president’s proposed crackdown on free-loading legal immigrants, who, naturally, aren’t free loading at all. Then there’s his epic links “faux pas”—running his golf cart onto a green because he’s too damn fat to waddle the extra five yards to get his ball.1 But otherwise, the Donald, not to mention the whole damn White House, has been pretty damn silent, compared to the outrage a minute pace of the Comey days, only a few short weeks ago. It’s almost as if Donald Trump decided that no news is good news.
Congressional Republicans, on the other hand, have been busy, notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has released what is in many ways the most disgraceful piece of legislation ever to grace the halls of Congress, the “Better Care Reconciliation Act”. I don’t know what McConnell’s “game” is, other than that it’s gamy. I don’t know whether McConnell wants this to fail so that he can get going on tax “reform”, whether he wants this to pass the Senate and die in House-Senate conference, or whether he actually wants it to be enacted into law, but I also wonder if he even cares. It seems to me that he would be quite content to pass this piece of shit, that would deny health care to tens of millions while passing out huge tax cuts to billionaires, just so that he could say that the Republican Party kept its promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Of course, one could draft a coherent and honest conservative “answer” to Obamacare, instead of an incoherent and dishonest one, but that would require “thought”. And Republicans are so tired of thinking.
Afterwords
Words! So much more pleasant than Republicans! “Pusillanimity”, and its near cousins “pusillanimous”, “pusillanimously”, and “pusillanimousness”, comes from the Latin pusillanimis, meaning “having little spirit”, intended as a translation for the Greek oligopsychos (“small souled”), intended as the opposite of magnanimis (“having great spirit”), translating megalopsychos (“great souled”), which Aristotle called the highest virtue, devoting part of his Nicomachean Ethics to the discussion of the “great souled” man. (“Magnanimous”, pretty much meaning “generous in spirit”, doesn’t quite catch the “glory” that Aristotle intends.)
Shifting gears a little, it’s “interesting” that Microsoft, in its “My Feed”—at least the version that they feed me—refers to Trump’s “epic faux pas” in their head. You may remember some years back when a prospective film title for the “latest” James Bond—“License Revoked”—was itself revoked when tests showed that lots of people didn’t know what “revoked” meant. Is “faux pas” in commoner usage than “revoked”? Huh?
UPDATE
Unsurprisingly, Le Donald hasn’t been entirely silent. His most recent comments are picked apart from differing perspectives by Jennifer Jacobs, Justin Sink, and Margaret Talev at Bloomsberg and Bob Bauer at Lawfare.
- Yeah, but it’s his fucking course! And he’s the fucking president! So go fuck yourself, pussy! ↩︎
