Thoughts from the US
"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
"These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
"And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
"The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
"Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.
Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."
- Charles Pierce
@Hepworthclare Obviously The Spectator doesn’t understand the Law, but as u say Clare, Prince Harry achieved most that English Civil Law allows & he received a full admission & apology. He shd be congratulated. The Spectator is now part of the gutter press.
BREAKING: A Florida judge just ruled that Donald Trump’s excessive use of makeup qualifies him as a drag queen according to the rigid text of the state’s strict anti-drag law, and from now on official pictures of Trump are to be banned from all school social studies textbooks.
@AsdaServiceTeam in your Bexleyheath store today they offered two boxes of heroes for £5. At the checkout I was charged £9. The staff said it was an offer for reward card but I have that and used it. It was not clear that I needed to download a coupon . Can you help?
A colleague asked me on Friday why I’m not in a relationship. I responded with “because I’m old, fat, broken and fed up of narcissistic man babies. I shall die alone surrounded by cats unless Greg Davies proposes”. I suspect there’ll be no further small talk between us.
@Angronn1 @MitchBenn It didn't 'come out' it was all declared and therefore fully visible. As opposed to Johnson who constantly lied denied and obfuscated