I don’t usually assault Night Owls readers with anything from the squatter in the Oval Office. Especially not on a Friday night when you’d probably prefer some James Ingram video or YouTubes of cavorting goats. But tonight I make an exception because W-T-F!
Once upon a time, after picking their jaws off the floor, Republican politicians would be first in line screaming some version of “If he likes the place so much, why doesn’t he move there?”
Geopolitics aside, I get this tingly sensation that something is seriously off-kilter here. On the other hand, Donald Trump is always the eternal pitchman. And Kim is again the flavor of the month in the run-up to the second summit between himself and Cadet Bone Spurs in Vietnam. So maybe this tweet is just simply being an especially grotesque example of Trump as marketeer. Then, too, I am extremely reluctant to speculate in a way that generates ridicule of anyone’s mental health. But if it’s not just Trump’s hyperbolic self-promotion at work, it’s impossible not to wonder if something’s gone wholly awry in this man’s head.
Until I remember that he’s always been this way on Twitter, and has merely ratcheted it up another embarrassing notch.
Onward to Trump Tower in Pyongyang. Advice to the capable Mr. Kim: Take no checks.
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QUOTATION
“Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.”
~~Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (2008)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2014—It's odd how managing the menfolk's sexytimes never turns into a movement:
You never seem to hear the conservative all-our-religion-is-belong-to-you outrage machine on this stuff.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services dispatched its Office of Inspector General to review Medicare payments for vacuum erection systems, less formally known as penis pumps.
Certainly, there may be individual wags out there who are miffed that their tax dollars are going for medical treatments to allow older people to have sex. There may be cranky folks who do not think that anyone should be getting Viagra for any reason, because if God wanted them to have an erection God would have taken care of that already.
But it's not a movement. You don't see a dozen conservative women all lined up in a row to testify to Congress that allowing men past childbearing age to have sex is an abomination unto their Lord, or nationwide hobby supply shops demanding that the entire national health care system be restructured to allow them to personally decide which of their male employees ought not to be receiving medical care for insufficient sexytimes. Their religion may dictate that nobody have sex unless they are married, and unless they are fertile, but there is no nationwide, Fox-News-covered movement afoot to demand that the appropriate health care remedies be given only to married and fertile people. You don't hear the Fox News talking heads going on about that.
It's only American women that get that treatment.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: ZOMG Bezos Enquirer Saud-owned Arabia Ronan Farrow! In other news: How did St. Jude’s find its way into the SOTU? How to explain a 10 year, 450% rise in guns found by TSA. Whitaker disarms that subpoena. Incoming Trump immigration hypocrisy.