There are many nonsensical aspects of Trump’s candidacy, with his healthcare plan close to the top of the list. Since 2016, Trump and his party have had eight years to figure out how to “eliminate Obamacare and replace it with something better, ” a promise they made before and during the former president’s term in office.
If the Republican voters are happy that the United States is the only developed country on Earth without universal healthcare, that, while being cruel and idiotic, is something we’ll have to live with.
But how do you go onstage and tell the American people that now, as we move into 2025, that, although you don’t have a plan per se, you have a “concept for a plan?”
Are illegal aliens from Haiti eating our pets? Are our schools performing sex-change operations on our kids (with or without our consent)?
Approximately half of U.S. voters simply don’t care that their preferred presidential candidate has no concern about lying in front of millions of debate viewers.
Until very recently in U.S. history, it would have been lethal to a presidential re-election campaign to have 91% of the candidate’s former cabinet refuse to support him. But now the thinking of Trump’s support base is: “What a bunch of woke pansies. Who cares what these girly admirals and four-star generals say about the man God sent to Make America Great Again?”
After the 2020 election, I went back and forth with several of you over the results. Some of you insisted that Trump really won, and would be inaugurated. I explained that the problem was you were listening to Trump and fringe right-wing media, and I asked you to consider — when Biden was inaugurated — that maybe your information sources were garbage.
But Biden was inaugurated, and you continued to rely on garbage sources. Some of you still believe Trump won.
Recently, Trump has made admissions that he did lose. People close to him have said he knows he lost. This triggered right-wing nationalist and Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes, who went on a rant.
Thanks, Nick, you bastard. This is a statement that may have had more value had you made it long ago.
Having said that, the rank and file Trump supporter doesn’t read Rapier’s work, and it certainly doesn’t follow 2GreenEnergy, so this post has limited effect on U.S. politics.
Nonetheless, it’s a shame that:
1) There are hundreds of people rotting in federal prisons all around the country whose central crime was trusting Trump and believing his lies.
2) Trump, a convicted felon still under multiple criminal indictments, remains a solid candidate to win re-election in November.
A reader asks: Re: the phrase “where we’re at”. Is it grammatically incorrect and should be “where we are”? And did I get the period and question mark right?
The phrases “where we’re at, where it’s at,” etc. are all incorrect in formal English. But personally, I think people make a bigger deal out of this than they should, especially given that this whole construction arose in the 1960, especially in song lyrics, some of which remain immensely popular today, e.g., Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone, an excerpt from which is:
You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat Ain’t it hard when you discovered that He really wasn’t where it’s at After he took from you everything he could steal
I can imagine sitting with a cold martini watching a fantastic sunset and telling my friends, “Ya know? This is really where it’s at” — knowing that they all would understand that I would not write like that in a business proposal.
To answer your other question, most pieces of punctuation, i,e., commas, question marks, and periods, come before quotation marks, where colons and semicolons come after. Thus, the following are correct:
“Vote your conscience,” I told him.
“Do you really mean it?”
“Absolutely.”
Here’s a “rule of thumb”: don’t eat before bed.
He told me not to call him “Shirley”; he said he’d punch me if I did.
A reader asks: In today’s fast paced world, the idea is to get to the point (as quickly) as possible. Is it wrong to cut words out of a sentence as long as the message is clear and understood?
I see this as an impossibility, i.e., both to cut out words and to preserve lucidity. I see things every day that are written so poorly that I can’t understand what the author is trying to express. Yes, we live in a fast-paced world, but this kind of stuff slows us all down.
In addition, bad grammar communicates to the reader/listener that you’re uneducated. If that’s not a problem for you, go for it, but it’s not a statement I would deliberately make about myself.
Followers of social media may have noticed a significant backlash against the trend towards electrifying our energy and transportation sectors. Perhaps this is part of some disinformation campaign created and implemented by Big Oil; I have no proof that this is the case, but it isin line with other similar PR campaigns from their past.
In any case, for at least half a century, political conservatives have been trying to make the case that EVs simply move the noxious emissions associated with transportation from the tailpipe to the power generation plant, essentially replacing petroleum with coal. See graphic below.
The people who have studied this subject honestly and objectively have consistently found that claim is largely untrue, if only due to the technology that removes the greenhouse gases, heavy metals, and radioactive isotope at the power plant. But at this point, however that argument is becoming increasingly difficult to accept, even on the part of people who are, for whatever reason, desperate to do so, because coal is disappearing.
In his State of the Union address this month, President Joe Biden boasted that the nation reported a historically low murder rate in 2023 and violent crime had plummeted to one of the lowest levels in 50 years.
For some Americans, however, the perception of crime is clashing with the statistics.
“I don’t believe it, plain and simple. I don’t believe it because we’re experiencing different results,” Auriol Sonia Morris — a South Carolina education, finance and legal consultant who describes herself as a Black conservative Republican and a supporter of former President Donald Trump — told ABC News.
This sure rings true to me. I know quite a few Trump supporters, and one thing they have in common is the belief that nothing good happens under a Democratic administration.
In most cases, and this issue with crime statistics is a great example, this overall mode of viewing the world is extremely clunky, because it involves the belief that huge classes of people, in this case, the FBI, are lying.
Perhaps even tougher to support is the notion that the stats surrounding COVID-19 are falsified. To believe this, you have to accept that the doctors who went through a decade of medical training and seem to do a pretty good job with our illnesses and other diseases have become completely dishonest, almost overnight, and are now deliberately lying about their patients’ causes of death.
An old friend of mine believes in the “plandemic,” the notion that the COVID epidemic is planned and orchestrated by the U.S. government. Of course, he faces an even more difficult challenge, i.e., the fact that there are more than 200 countries on Earth, and each one of which have their own responses to the disease. Is he suggesting that the governments of Uruguay, Romania, and Nepal are all colluding with our CDC? Or that they are implementing their own independent conspiracies to murder their citizens?
If this seems hard for you to accept, perhaps it’s because somehow, through all the disinformation floating around you every minute of every day, you have miraculously retained the ability to think. Well done.