CSotD: Healthy skepticism
Skip to comments
Disclaimer: I didn't watch the speech.
I made an effort to listen to it on the radio but dozed off and on throughout it and the analysis that followed, so about all I really came away with was that, as David Rowe's cartoon suggests, he stayed on script.
And then this morning, as I checked the news, I saw that, indeed, he wore a blue striped tie, which Rowe also got right and which is the tip-off to how many cartoonists drew their gags before the event.
I saw some cartoons about the speech in which, if you look closely, you'll see that he is wearing his red tie, and which, if you read closely, you'll see are based on his character and not on his text.
Fake haberdashery! Sad.
Reminds me of the time in French class that I expounded most wisely on a scene in "Candide" which the professor then informed me was not in the bowdlerized French edition we were supposed to be translating.
That story applies to Trump as well as to sloppy cartoonists, because everything I said about the scene was true, and I said it in French, so the only problem was that the point of the exercise was to read the book in French which obviously I hadn't done.
And that brings us to "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” at which point M. le professeur interrupts to say, "If you have taken the assignment seriously, you would have known that from the beginning."
Which in turn brings us to this Steve Benson cartoon which explains how the President of the United States managed to avoid knowing that healthcare is complicated.
The role of the professor in this case is played by this past week's episode of On the Media, in which CNN's Brian Stelter explains with examples how Trump gets nearly all his information from watching Fox News.
Stelter quotes stories from Hannity or Fox & Friends, giving the time they were broadcast, and then quotes Presidential tweets that followed within minutes, using the very same statistics and phrasing. And falsehoods. And oversimplifications.
Which is funny except for that whole "leader of the world's greatest superpower" thing.
And, while the publisher of my class's approved text of "Candide" only wanted to spare innocent young college sophomores from the degrading spectacle of amorous monkeys biting the bare buttocks of beautiful young women, Fox News has a less genteel philosophy behind its selective editing.
I learned my lesson, and perhaps when Dear Leader sees the response to what I understand was a cogent, intelligent and well-scripted speech, he'll also learn to do his own homework without cribbing.
Not that I think he actually wrote the speech, either.
Someone once said of a cheerfully vacillating Canadian premier, "If you want to know what he thinks, find out who he talked to last."
In Trump's case, changing who he talked to last might not improve things.
If he stops taking all his information from Fox and relies, instead, on his own staff and on the GOP leadership, he may stop sounding like a fool, but I'm not sure he'll come up with a coherent healthcare strategy.
As many have pointed out, nearly eight years of attempting to overturn Obamacare should have resulted in some sort of plan to replace it and apparently hasn't.
Well, it's complicated. Tom Tomorrow provides a handy crib so you don't have to read through the entire text of the Republican proposal.
Which, as far as I know, doesn't actually exist anyway.
What I have seen of Trump's incomplete proposal seems, as this article suggests, to conflict with the actual heartlessness of the GOP's incomplete proposal, perhaps because he doesn't have the financial motivation or the blind faith in political dogma to actually let people die in the streets.
That is, he doesn't appear to need political contributions, and he may babble about whatever O'Reilly and Hannity and the morning Fox crew have said, but he only offers them as applause lines, not as statements of his actual beliefs.
Those who think lower middleclass working people can simply pony up for effective health insurance without assistance are deeply into an alternative reality that is going to hurt people in the real world. Not a joke, just a fact.
Meanwhile, having Trump stay on script and avoid stupid remarks might actually make him harder to oppose, because it would indeed plunge us into the complicated nuts-and-bolts of healthcare, where — even if everyone is dealing from the top of a deck of 52 unmarked cards — there are no easy answers.
Though I'd like to see where Obamacare is working and where it is not working and overlay that map with one showing where the "Let them eat cake" gang most firmly dug in its heels.
In any case, as Jen Sorensen suggests, the conversation on the street isn't going terribly well.
Perhaps because the parts we most need to talk about were not included in everybody's copy of the assigned text.
Now here's your moment of transitory hope
Comments 1
Comments are closed.