Two Thoughts on Several Scoundrels
A backward look at Jack the Jerk Goldsmith and His Enabler
Thought I—Is Jack Goldsmith trying to re-elect Donald Trump? I think so!
If Jack Goldsmith were to write an article, “Why I Think Donald Trump Should Be Re-Elected President of the United States”, well, it would be disgusting, but it would be honest. But Jack doesn’t want to stab Dame Democracy in the chest; he wants to stab Her in the back. And so he writes ridiculous “articles” like “Jack Smith Owes Us an Explanation”, which I ridiculed here. And the New York Times lets him do it! Go figure!
Thought II—Is the New York Times trying to re-elect Donald Trump? Margaret Sullivan wonders, and so do I!
Over at Maragaret Sullivan’s American Crisis, Maggie has what I would call a “pregnant” post, with the misleadingly mild head, “About those New York Times headlines,” giving us a tale of two heads, one reading “In interviews, Kamala Harris continues to bob and weave”, and the other “In remarks about migrants, Donald Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics,” which has currently been reworded as“Trump’s Remarks on Migrants Illustrate His Obsession With Genes”, bearing the subhead “In discussing migrants and genes, the former president used language that reflected his decades-long belief that bloodlines determine a person’s capacity for success or violence.”
As Sullivan remarks, it’s difficult to exaggerate the condescending snicker of the first and the outright dishonesty of the second. As the first piece acknowledges,
Politicians, and presidents in particular, have long treated the ability to bob and weave through uncomfortable questions while remaining on message as a skill to be mastered, like the precise footing required of a carpenter navigating a high-pitched roof.
So, okay, when Kamala goes off on a tangent in a vain attempt to square the circle,1 it’s okay to ding her. But the disconnect between the Trump headline and the text—once you read nine or ten paragraphs down, is more than extreme. As it turns out, Donald Trump was not merely descanting on the wonders of the double helix!
Mr. Trump, in contrast [to his habit of praising his supporters’ genes], has a pattern of using dehumanizing language to describe undocumented immigrants. He has repeatedly referred to immigrants who commit crimes as “animals.” At a rally in Ohio in March, he was even more explicit. “I don’t know if you call them people,” he said of immigrants accused of crimes. “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.”
His remarks on Monday in some ways echoed his repeated assertion last year that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase criticized by many for evoking the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in the United States.
So why isn’t the headline “Trump calls immigrants who commit crimes ‘animals’ and ‘not human’”? Would that be, you know, a lot shorter? And, you know, a lot more accurate?
You have to wonder if both Goldsmith and the Times see Trump as a likely winner come November and want to be out of harm’s way when the whip comes down. In fact, Jack’s probably looking for a job!
You can’t “square” a circle—construct a square with a side equal to “π” using only the standard tools of Euclidian geometry—because those tools only allow the construction of “algebraic” numbers, and π is not algebraic.