The locker rooms of America strike back
The repeated defense by Donald Trump and his surrogates that the recording of his disgusting comments about women was simply ‘locker room talk’ has caused offense to athletes who spend a lot of time in actual locker rooms, and they have reacted angrily to what they see as a blanket slur on all of them, as can be seen here and here. Maybe Trump has his own locker room where he only hangs out with Rudy Giuliani, Roger Ailes, and Newt Gingrich. I can well believe that those four talk like that in private because they all seem to be what we used to call ‘dirty old men’ and ‘lechers’, people who become completely unhinged in the presence of women.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows
John Legend makes a point that also struck me about some of the Republicans who have criticized Trump’s comments because of the fact that they have wives and daughters. In a series of Tweets, he says:
You don’t have to have daughters or granddaughters to find Trump’s comments repugnant. It’s an odd, unnecessary qualifier.
I didn’t just figure out that I shouldn’t talk or behave like that when Luna was born.
These guys dated, studied or worked with women and girls their entire lives. Fatherhood isn’t their first encounter with opposite sex
But if this was the final straw for you, you have a very high tolerance for straws.
One sees this with those anti-gay politicians who change their views when they discover they have a gay child.
Similarly you shouldn’t have to have women/gays/Jews/Muslims/African Americans/Hispanics/refugees as members of your family to realize that sexism, misogyny, homophobia, bigotry, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, anti-Muslim, and racist sentiments are wrong.
God keeps tormenting Ted Cruz
Meanwhile, the pathetic Ted Cruz is annoyed that the Trump tapes were not released sooner, early in the Republican primaries, when they could have helped him instead of Hillary Clinton, and saved him from the series of humiliations that he has suffered. Face it Ted: God hates you and loves Hillary.
They love him! They really love him!
As expected, Trump’s fans loved his performance, actually exchanging high fives while watching the debate in a Pennsylvania bar.
Elected Republicans don’t love him that much
Paul Ryan tells party members today that he cannot defend Trump anymore and that Republicans seeking elected office should go it alone without Trump.
We should keep this kind of riff-raff out of the country
All six American Nobel Prize winners this year are immigrants. Under a Trump administration, the immigration authorities who allowed these people in would be fired and the ‘extreme vetting’ policy that he would impose would ensure that such a thing never happens again.
An answer to a question no one has asked
What happened to Billy Bush, the ‘locker room’ buddy of the infamous Trump recording? He has been suspended indefinitely by NBC.
John Oliver spoke about the recording and Bush’s creepy role.
Poor Ted Cruz, he jumped on the Trump band wagon just as the wheels came off.
Lucky Billy Bush, he will be available for the vice president slot when Pence resigns (or is fired by Trump.)
Imagine the campaign slogan:
TRUMP/BUSH Make America Grope Again!
Back in the day women in the work force or in various public positions expected to deal with various levels of sexual harassment. Even recently we had that dentist excusing harassment of assistant because she was too pretty or something along those lines. What are we seeing here, that even conservatives are having trouble supporting Trump (yet at the same time, there is a proportion of the public that wants to see Trump supported, at least within his party)?
Paul Ryan will not start supporting women’s autonomy in all things, he is still anti-choice.
Is the difference that Trump bragged about harassing a married woman who clearly objected? He had the misfortune of encountering a ‘perfect’ victim, one who did all the ‘right’ things in the conservative instruction book for women?
I really hope we have reached (or are fast reaching) the point where sexual assault is seen as toxic behavior under all circumstances towards anyone, but I am not that optimistic that this is the case.
Regarding ‘locker room talk’, it seems to me that what Trump and Bush engaged in might more accurately be described as ‘frat-boy behaviour’. At least, it seems to fit better with what I know about such people.
Re: Ted Cruz
saved him from the series of humiliations that he has suffered
He has chosen those humiliations. He asked for them. He’s just made some really really dumb moves. Sucks being him.
Whatever else Trump can be blamed for, one thing we can thank him for is destroying any chance Cruz ever had of becoming President. Humiliation piles on humiliation for that man, and I’d be more scared of a Cruz presidency than of a Trump one -- the GOP would have been solidly behind Cruz, for one thing. Thank goodness Trump has eviscerated him, even while (apparently) self-destructing himself.
A random thought:
In Neil Gaiman’s book “Don’t Panic -- A Guide to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, Douglas Adams talks about watching the presidential debates. In that instance he was watching Reagan debate. It appeared to him that the strategy of the people preparing Reagan for the debate was to equip him with a minimum number of facts, and the maximum number of ways of guiding the conversation around to those facts, plus some techniques to obfuscate when confused. It occurred to him (Adams) that that was exactly how you programmed a computer to appear to be taking part in a conversation, and it amused him to contemplate writing what we would now call a chatbot which would pretend to be Reagan, and another that would pretend to be Thatcher or whoever, and you could get them talking to one another. Then he had the idea to do one that would pretend to be God, then that become one for the Christian version, one for the Muslim version and so on, with the eventual aim of getting software burned in the Bible belt, which he felt was a right of passage every new medium should go through.
Adams made these observations around the time he was collaborating with Infocom on the HHGG game, and he probably underestimated the difficulty of writing a program to convincingly simulate the responses of a debating presidential candidate.
In 2016, though, technology has advanced and… it didn’t need to. I haven’t written a line of code for over 20 years, and I think I could program a Commodore 64 to do a convincing simulation of Trump. Partly because I could skip that whole “equip him with a minimum number of facts”, and partly because I wouldn’t have to bother making sure his responses made sense or were in any way connected to the question.
You don’t have to have daughters or granddaughters to find Trump’s comments repugnant. It’s an odd, unnecessary qualifier.
This. About a million times. I don’t know very many African Americans well, and I do not have any Mexican or Muslim friends (perhaps I should get out more). Still, even I could immediately recognize that Trump was a disgusting POS when he started talking about them the way he did.
This is all about ‘othering.’ As long as Trump was attacking people that the GOP hated and would never want to be like, they were fine with him: ‘These other people aren’t like us, so it is OK to treat them like crap.’ It was only when he started acting like this toward people they could relate to that they finally caught on. If that’s what it took for the GOP to see Trump for who he truly is, they are even more clueless than I thought.