Alas, as everybody anticipated, the effort to get pupils back in school is turning out to be a disaster. Joe Biden put his foot in his mouth again as we all expected but I suspect it will make no difference to the election. I don't think I have ever seen a time when people's opinions were so completely set in stone this early.
Since I seem to have gotten myself in the business of making predictions, I will make another one. I anticipate that when early voting begins, apparently here in North Carolina before anywhere else, the response will be overwhelming. Even if it takes the post office two weeks to deliver the absentee ballots they will be in well before the election. My sense is that there are tens of millions, perhaps scores of millions, of voters who are so eager to vote that they will cast their votes the instant it becomes possible. Oh, there will be endless efforts at voter suppression and some of them will be successful but I doubt that the election will be anything like close enough for those efforts to make a real difference. I hope to God I am right about this.
A small correction of something I got wrong. I should have described the Jonathan Swan interview as giving us early signs of dementia, not signs of early onset dementia which is something different. But even I did not anticipate the comical mispronunciation of Yosemite and Thailand.
Doubt not that the new head of the Post Office, one of Trump's largest campaign contributors, will do everything he can to compromise the election, at least as much as plausible deniability allows.... As for, "Thigh-land"---C'mon Prof., given our suspicion about what most pre-occupies our President's mind, the blunder was entirely predictable.
ReplyDeleteI worry about the Post Office too, with Trump's henchman in charge. Mail will be delayed; mail will be lost.
ReplyDeleteThe pronunciations of Yosemite and Thailand strike me as more a manifestation of his ignorance than of any kind of dementia. He's the guy who didn't know that Britain had nuclear weapons, didn't know that Finland was not part of Russia, didn't know what was so special about Pearl Harbor.
Far be for me to defend Biden, but his statement stressed a commonality of interests among Black voter with the qualifier “with some notable exceptions.” There was no attack from the Dems on Trump’s “Yo Semite” fiasco which would seem to be a more revealing instance of ignorance.
ReplyDeleteTrump probably never took enough interest in Yosemite to have learned its proper pronunciation. The Thailand blunder, on the other hand, surprised me. Surely Trump has many associates who regularly make trips to that country to partake of its notorious underage sex market. But I guess as an east coaster, Trump has more familiarity with places like Jeffrey Epstein’s island or the Dominican Republic (a favorite “vacation” spot of Rush Limbaugh’s).
ReplyDeleteBiden's comment was basically correct, though it was a stupid and unnecessary thing to actually say out loud.
ReplyDeleteAnd what's wrong with vacationing in the DR? A lot of Russian tourists go there, so there's another point of intrigue to get worked up about.
Some of Trump's words are mispronounced on purpose to "identify" with his ignorant base, who likely mispronounce many words as a means of making fun of those who say them correctly.
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