As long as I created confusion over this, here’s what I meant: Obama no longer gives a fuck. I assume you don’t give fucks when you simply have none left to give. It’s a supply-side phenomenon, which I think squares with most our personal experience. And when I thought of Obama’s sometimes Achilles’ heel of extreme accommodation of his adversaries, often getting little or nothing in return, it occurred to me that President Obama had been overdrawing his fucks account for sometime. Let’s call it deficit spending in fucks. And now, he has none left. I noted that he may have private reserve for extreme or personal need. But basically he is out of fucks to give.
You have probably seen by now the remarks Donald Trump made today not only belittling John McCain’s status as a war hero but mocking him for having been captured by the North Vietnamese. McCain “is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said to Frank Luntz, who was moderating at the event in Ames, Iowa.
You should watch the whole exchange because it actually manages to be more sneering and caustic than it comes across in print, and it’s pretty terrible in print (video here).
But Trump wasn’t finished there.
The “fucks” at the bottom of Josh’s post about Obama having no fucks left to give are not typos or a hack.
Responding to Rick Perlstein’s piece on the rise of Trump coinciding with the final surrender of the Confederate flag, Paul Krugman remarks on the self-reinforcing nature of the Silent Majority myth:
So why shouldn’t they rally around The Donald? The elite considers him ridiculous, but the base has been told again and again that the elite is corrupt and anti-American. The base has also been told again and again that it represents the true views of everyone except Those People. So why shouldn’t they go with someone who is their kind of guy, in style as well as substance?
The Silent Majority myth is for me the most cognitively dissonant part of the self-mythology that conservative white America is under constant siege: Forces with vastly superior numbers don’t typically find themselves surrounded and under siege.
I’m a fan of Glenn Thrush. For me, he is in Politico but not of it. But I think he gets this take on Obama, coming off his fractious and steely Iran deal press conference, simply wrong. The image is of a president frantically trying to cram as much legacy as he can into the final quarter of his presidency. No Drama Obama has been replaced by a man who is testy and impatient. As often happens late in a president’s term, many key advisors – the ones most able to rein in his more unlovely tendencies – have gone on to their post-presidential lives. That, I think, is a fair characterization of Thrush’s article. It’s not at all what I see.
As one symbol falls, another takes its place. Rick Perlstein on the rise of the Trump Republican party.
The inside story of the crony court that deep-sixed the Scott Walker “John Doe” investigation.
Click here for our ongoing coverage of the shootings at military installations in Chattanooga that have left five people dead, including the alleged gunman. The U.S. Attorney is calling it “an act of domestic terrorism.”
In the big picture, Rick Perry’s blistering criticism of Donald Trump today as “a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense” reveals the deep fault lines within the Republican Party that the 2016 presidential election is going to put enormous strain on. In the small picture, Perry really, really needs to qualify as one of the 10 candidates in the first GOP primary debate next month.