Political Irony

Things you should read:

Bernie Sanders live-tweeted during Trump’s acceptance speech at the RNC. A few samples:

Those who voted for me will not support Trump who has made bigotry and divisiveness the cornerstone of his campaign.

Trump’s big economic plans: Give trillions in tax breaks to millionaires, refuse to raise the federal minimum wage.

Trump is wrong. The real cause of instability in the Middle East was the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq. By the way, where is President Bush?

What a hypocrite! If Trump wants to “fix” trade he can start by making his products in the US, not low-wage countries abroad.

Trump: “I alone can fix this.”
Is this guy running for president or dictator?

Hillary Clinton also live-tweeted Trump’s speech, and with a sense of humor even.

Electoral Vote has a short and to-the-point summary of the acceptance speech, titled “Trump Swings and Misses“.

If you want a summary of the whole convention, even Politico calls it “Trump’s four dysfunctional days in Cleveland“, and giggles that after Trump’s speech the loudspeakers played “You can’t always get what you want” by the Rolling Stones.

Speaking of fear, gloom and doom, Ezra Klein says “Donald Trump’s nomination is the first time American politics has left me truly afraid“. And then he clearly and succinctly explains why. It is useless to summarize something that is already the perfect length, so go read it.

UPDATE: Fortune points out the 8 ton elephant on the convention floor — the fact that during the entire convention (including the day supposedly about the economy), Republicans never once mentioned Governor Sam Brownback and his conservative revolution in Kansas (the state that is home to the Koch brothers). Why? Because Kansas is an utter mess, with their economy in a shambles. And yet the Republicans are still promoting the trickle-down economics that are such a disaster in Kansas.

As an added ironic twist, when the roll-call vote happened — which is when each state extolls their own virtues — the most prominent thing from the Kansas delegation was the Kansas City Royals baseball team, with the delegation wearing Royals T-shirts. As some of you may know, the Royals (as is Kansas City itself) is actually in the neighboring state of Missouri.

Jon Stewart can’t help himself, and takes over Stephen Colbert’s desk at the Late Show for a delicious rant:

God I miss him.

Tony Award winning actress Laura Benanti is brilliant as Melania Trump on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show:

But plagiarism isn’t the only scandal around the potential first lady. According to CBS news, Melania Trump’s bio on the RNC website lies when it says that she graduated from college. As does her website. And Snopes looked into it, and couldn’t find any evidence that she had ever received any degree.

But wait, there’s more! The Trump campaign finally came up with someone to blame for the plagiarism. It only took them three days, which is suspicious enough. They claim that Melania Trump enlisted help writing her speech from a Trump employee who is not connected with the campaign. According to their story, Melania read that person some passages over the phone that she liked, including lines from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech at the DNC, but that she only meant them as examples. Of course, when Melania saw those quotes in the final speech, didn’t she even notice?

But the bigger problem is that if this story is true, then it reveals criminal activity. It is a federal crime for corporations to contribute cash, products, or services to political campaigns, but the Trump campaign seems completely unconcerned about the law. So why am I not surprised?

© Steve Breen

The Republican National Convention has been hacked by security researchers. This despite the fact that the GOP keeps hammering Hillary Clinton about the insecurity of her private email server.

How did they do it? In this case, it was amazingly simple. They simply set up some WiFi access points. You know the same thing that most of us have done when we set up wireless access for our homes. For fun, they gave those access points names like “Google Starbucks”, “Trump free Wifi”, and even “Hillary Free Wifi”.

Of course, more than 1,200 people attending the convention connected to those WiFi access points. But the bad part is that of those who connected, 68% of them did so with no security in place, leaving their personal information completely exposed. So it would be trivial for anyone to access their “online bank accounts, emails, dating and messaging apps, even ‘Pokemon Go’.” Those people didn’t use encryption, or virtual private networks, or any of the common techniques of protecting your data when connecting to a public shared WiFi network.

Meanwhile, the convention itself is fending off hacking attacks from Asia and Russia. Indeed, the GOP convention was described as “a bulls-eye for hackers”. But no amount of security deployed by the GOP can protect someone who connects to a network that is not under their control. And without any security on their device, they are totally exposed.

The ghostwriter of (i.e., the person who actually wrote) “The Art of the Deal” can’t take it anymore and speaks out on Donald Trump, saying that Trump is not just a sociopath, but is “The Sociopath”. Tony Schwartz spent 18 months following Trump around an listening in on Trump’s office phone conversations. And the prospect of Trump becoming president terrifies him: “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

Other things he says about Trump: “He has no attention span.” Trump is “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” It is “impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then …” Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.”

Schwartz also says about Trump, “Lying is second nature to him.” “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” Schwartz also says about Trump’s lying “He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Most of all, Trump lies about his deals, but he lies about almost everything: “Trump describes his father as having been born in New Jersey to Swedish parents; in fact, he was born in the Bronx to German parents.”

Trump claims to be “a warm family man with endless admirers” but according to Schwartz “Trump spent very little time with his family and had no close friends.” Trump describes himself as a self-made man, and even derides wealthy heirs as members of “the Lucky Sperm Club”. But the truth is that “Trump’s father was instrumental in his son’s rise, financially and politically.” Fred Trump had to co-sign many of Trump’s contracts, and when Trump couldn’t make payments on some loans, his father bailed him out.

In summary, Schwartz says “Trump stands for many of the things I abhor: his willingness to run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic obsessions, the absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.”

UPDATE: Of course, after this was published in the New Yorker, Donald Trump had his lawyers send a cease-and-desist letter to Schwartz. Schwartz responds by saying “I fully expected him to attack me, because that is what he does, so I can’t say I am surprised. But I’m much more worried about his becoming president than I am about anything he might try to do to me.”

You have undoubtably heard about this, but it is interesting to hear it side-by-side:

List of items prohibited from being brought into the convention perimeter: tennis balls, sound equipment, umbrellas with metal tips, padlocks and bicycle locks, sleeping bags, gas masks, ornaments, tents, coolers, lasers, canned goods, light bulbs, aerosol cans, ropes longer than 6 feet, non-plastic containers, ice chests, mattresses, BB guns, paintball guns, and water pistols.

Allowed: AR-15 assault rifles. Well, except you can’t bring them into the convention hall itself, because the Secret Service but their foot down.

UPDATE: Paul Manafort first tried to deny that there was any plagiarism scandal at all, and then repeatedly tried to blame the scandal on Hillary Clinton!

UPDATE 2: Republicans are arguing that Melania Trump is not guilty of plagiarism, but that she was just using common themes. But the company whose software is used by most universities to detect plagiarism ran her speech through their program and declared that the chances that she did not plagiarize parts of it are “1 in 1 trillion” (translation: effectively a mathematical impossibility). In addition, a number of former presidential speechwriters and communication aides for both parties said that given the scrutiny that is applied to convention speeches, this kind of plagiarism is unheard of and is a sign of deep problems in Trump’s campaign.

UPDATE 3: There was one difference between Melania Trump’s speech Monday night and Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention in 2008. Trump wore a dress made by a foreign designer while Obama (both in 2008 and in 2012) wore a dress from an American designer. Trump is not alone — both Ann Romney and Cindy McCain wore outfits from foreign designers. Which is only interesting because Trump and the Republicans claim to always put America first.