Wednesday, August 16, 2017

'Consider your verdict!"

'Consider your verdict,' the King said to the jury.
'Not yet, not yet!' the Rabbit hastily interrupted. 'There's a great deal to come before that!'

It went all but unnoticed yesterday that the President of the United States, the man who administers the Justice Department of the United States, said this:

 Well, I think the driver of the car is a disgrace to himself, his family, and this country. And that is — you can call it terrorism. You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want. I would just call it as “the fastest one to come up with a good verdict.” That’s what I’d call it. Because there is a question: Is it murder? Is it terrorism? And then you get into legal semantics. The driver of the car is a murderer. And what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.

The "legal semantics" there don't turn on the question of whether the death of Heather Heyers was a crime of murder or of terrorism; the only legal issue the President was addressing was the presumption of innocence.  Because he pronounced the driver of the car guilty.  He called for a fair trial, and then we hang him.  He became a character from a Lewis Carroll novel.

And nobody noticed.

Today, the Washington Post said this:

“That car in Charlottesville did not kill or wound just the 20 bodies it struck. It damaged the nation. Mr. Trump not only failed to help the country heal; he made the wound wider and deeper.”

The post also said Trump's remarks in the press conference yesterday marked “great day for [former Ku Klux Klan leader] David Duke and racists everywhere.”

“The president of the United States all but declared that he has their backs.”

So what does Trump do today?


Not sure how Amazon not paying sales taxes is hurting jobs in America, but the more salient question is:  what did Amazon do to Trump?

Three guesses, first two don't count.

This is so far beyond "Nixonesque" you can't even see Nixon in the rear-view mirror anymore.

4 comments:

  1. I pay tax when I buy from Amazon. Where does the money go?

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  2. I'm guessing to the state.

    Amazon charges tax in my state, too, because they maintain facilities (warehouses) here. I'm pretty sure that's how they agreed to pay taxes in most states.

    What, you think Trump's information is accurate? No offense, but since when has that ever been true? ;-)

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  3. No, of course I don't trust Trump to tweet accurate information.

    In case you don't know, VP Pence said in reference to Trump's latest words on the "very fine people" among the neo-Nazi and white supremacist marchers, "I stand by the president, and I stand by those words."

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  4. Well, I always knew Pence was a racist.

    You made me re-read Trump's tweet, and I realized I was explaining it for him even in my post. He implies Amazon doesn't pay taxes, and that creates unfair competition with retailers. So I assumed he meant sales tax, because that was the old complaint.

    Like his constant reference to "inner cities," a phrase from the '70's. The man is stuck in a scratch in the record, doomed never to get out. The enormity of his childishness is so bad even business leaders don't want to associate with the Presidency.

    And like a petulant child, he lashes out as his "enemies." This is going to be a whole other Constitutional crisis at some point.

    ReplyDelete