Political Irony

I recently reported about the utter hypocrisy of the religious right. Here’s another blatant example:

First up is that we finally have an example of that voter fraud that Trump keeps whining about. And of course the perpetrator voted twice for (who else) Donald Trump. What’s also interesting is that this case (and two others, also both trying to benefit Trump) were caught almost immediately (showing that actual voter fraud is very difficult to get away with) and are reportedly the first cases of voter fraud found in Iowa in 12 years (showing that it is very rare).

But the big story is a new report by David Fahrenthold, who is quickly showing up most of the media by making it look easy to be a real investigative reporter. Fahrenthold’s new report looks into Donald Trump’s charitable giving, and finds that there virtually isn’t any there there. That’s right, Trump’s “foundation” is a sham.

Indeed, the largest donation ever made by the Trump “foundation” was $264,631 to fix a fountain outside one of Trump’s own hotels.

But my favorite example is when Donald Trump crashed a charity event unannounced. I just have to quote the whole story, it is so unbelievably outrageous:

In the fall of 1996, a charity called the Association to Benefit Children held a ribbon-cutting in Manhattan for a new nursery school serving children with AIDS. The bold-faced names took seats up front.

There was then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) and former mayor David Dinkins (D). TV stars Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, who were major donors. And there was a seat saved for Steven Fisher, a developer who had given generously to build the nursery.

Then, all of a sudden, there was Donald Trump.

“Nobody knew he was coming,” said Abigail Disney, another donor sitting on the dais. “There’s this kind of ruckus at the door, and I don’t know what was going on, and in comes Donald Trump. [He] just gets up on the podium and sits down.”

Trump was not a major donor. He was not a donor, period. He’d never given a dollar to the nursery or the Association to Benefit Children, according to Gretchen Buchenholz, the charity’s executive director then and now.

But now he was sitting in Fisher’s seat, next to Giuliani.

“Frank Gifford turned to me and said, ‘Why is he here?’ ” Buchenholz recalled recently. By then, the ceremony had begun. There was nothing to do.

“Just sing past it,” she recalled Gifford telling her.

So they warbled into the first song on the program, “This Little Light of Mine,” alongside Trump and a chorus of children — with a photographer snapping photos, and Trump looking for all the world like an honored donor to the cause.

Afterward, Disney and Buchenholz recalled, Trump left without offering an explanation. Or a donation. Fisher was stuck in the audience. The charity spent months trying to repair its relationship with him.

“I mean, what’s wrong with you, man?” Disney recalled thinking of Trump, when it was over.

I’m sure everyone heard the news that the FBI is once again looking into Hillary Clinton’s email problems. But the real question is, which news did you hear?

As Wired points out, most of the reporting on this has been misleading at best.

In one huge example, if you believed that the FBI was re-opening their investigation into Clinton’s email you could be excused, because even NBC News got that wrong. The FBI did NOT announce that they were reopening the investigation. NBC changed their story moments later, but on the internet, by then it was too late. Other, more right-wing news sources are still reporting misinformation.

Or you could believe that they found more missing emails. Nope. Or that the emails they found were from Clinton’s private server. No again. Or that the emails contain classified information. Wrong. Or even that the emails are related to the closed Clinton investigation. Negative.

And if you were listening to Donald Trump, you might believe that the FBI was admitting they were wrong when they cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing back in July. But (big surprise), Trump was misrepresenting reality.

In fact, depending on your agenda, you can make of this story almost anything you want:

Are you a Trump supporter looking for a smoking gun? Here you go. Or maybe you’re a different kind of Trump supporter, the kind who thinks this is a conspiracy to distract from the real issues coming out of Wikileaks? Hot-take reactions accept all kinds! Are you a Bernie Sanders-type who’s sick of hearing about her “damn emails?” Well, then you might view this as the FBI being overly cautious.

If you doubt any of this, just read the original (short three-paragraph) letter from James Comey.

My big question is, given that Comey isn’t really saying anything that significant and isn’t offering any details at all, why did he feel the need to reopen this can of worms just 11 days before the election? As Electoral-Vote points out, there is no good answer to this question:

Indeed, it’s difficult to conceive of an explanation here that doesn’t make Comey look at least a little bit bad. He’s Republican, and maybe he’s trying to help the Republican candidate? Or, maybe he’s smarting from the criticism he received when deciding not to prosecute, and is trying to throw a bone to Congressional Republicans? Or maybe he’s trying to prove that he does his job as he sees fit, and politics be damned? In any of these scenarios, he would be giving top priority to his own needs, or to his own image, or to his agency’s image.

And if Comey wasn’t aware that he was throwing a monkey wrench into the presidential election, then he is incompetent.

© Darrin Bell

High-powered lawyers like Lawrence Tribe are stepping up. Tribe and others have offered to defend — for free — anyone who has been threatened with a lawsuit by Donald Trump. This includes the women who have accused Trump of sexually assaulting them (and Trump has said he would sue after the election), but also includes reporters and others. He is even offering to defend the bar association, who was threatened with a lawsuit by Trump and as a result backed down from releasing a report on him.

Retired Supreme Court justice David Souter, back in 2012, reminds us of the biggest danger to democracy. His words are prescient given our current election.

This clip starts near the end of his talk, but the whole talk is very interesting.

Mother Jones came across something that (at least to me) not-so-neatly sums up Donald Trump. The occasion was the 2009 death of Jett Travolta, the 16-year-old son of John Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston, who died of a seizure while on vacation with his parents.

Trump decided to offer his condolences. His first mistake was publishing it on the website of Trump University (which, mercifully is now defunct in a flurry of fraud). His second mistake was publishing it just four days after the tragic death. But the biggest mistake is what Trump wrote. Here’s the first paragraph:

I have always respected people who were loyal and faithful — which brings to mind Kelly Preston. A long time ago, before I was married, I met Kelly Preston at a club and worked like hell to try and pick her up. She was beautiful, personable, and definitely had allure. At the time I had no idea she was married to John Travolta. In any event, my track record on this subject has always been outstanding, but Kelly wouldn’t give me the time of day. She was very nice, very elegant, but I didn’t have a chance with her, and that was that.

Yes, Donald Trump takes the occasion of the tragic death of a child and makes it into an opportunity to reminisce about how he once tried to pick up the dead child’s mother. And because he is Trump, he even throws in some bragging about his track record.

Even the humor website Cracked was gobsmacked. This is (part of) what they wrote:

Alright, do you see what you did there? Instead of telling Kelly you grieve for the loss of her little boy, you mentioned the time you tried to fuck her. This is what most ethicists would call “unspeakably shameful” and most psychiatrists would call “psychopathic.” When us regulars write our condolence letters, we tend to leave out stories about once trying super hard to fuck the mother of the recently departed.

Most people don’t need to be told this, but it’s actually almost never OK to brag about your powers of seduction in a letter about a dead kid. No matter how much you want people to know how much of that sweet poontang you get, the mother and father typically don’t want to hear about it four days after their son’s death.

Donald Trump may be the first major candidate to run for president who could start World War III completely unintentionally, just by saying something really stupid and insulting.