Even as a composite? Might it not be fake, but accurate? Performative authenticity?

Oh... MY... GOD...

So Chuck Schumer has spent his entire career telling a story about a Long Island couple...

The only thing is... THEY DONT EXIST!!!! THEY ARENT REAL pic.twitter.com/dgmWLKvqwC

— kevin smith (@kevin_smith45) August 12, 2025

It's hard to think of other examples of a politician creating characters with actual names to spice up the rhetoric. I thought of John Edwards's little girl without a coat — "a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm" — but she didn't have a name. There was the name Julia, in Barack Obama's "Life of Julia," but she wasn't presented as a real person, just a cartoon everywoman.

"[T]here are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful... overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity."

"This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies; and culture and education for their minds; and freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity. But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

Said Martin Luther King Jr., in the late 1960s, in a speech title "The Other America."

John Edwards also had a "Two Americas" speech when he was a presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008.

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Two Americas" this morning to escape from reading — in the NYT — "The Looming Contest Between Two Presidents and Two Americas/The general election matchup that seems likely between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump is about fundamentally disparate visions of the nation."

I don't know how much of this sort of thing we can stand:

"A governor, not governing during a crisis; and sunning his belly on vacation instead. @GovRonDeSantis is the Nero of Ted Cruzes."

Tweeted Joy Reid, quoted in "Ron DeSantis accompanied wife to cancer treatment while critics claimed he was 'missing'/DeSantis announced his wife's breast cancer diagnosis in October" (Fox News).

Let this be a lesson to everyone: You don't know what other people's troubles are, and maybe some of those troubles you don't know about aren't even a secret and could have been known by you.

This gets my "empathy" tag.

ADDED: Why don't links to Fox News work? Can anyone tell me the solution? If not, I will stop linking to Fox News.

ALSO: On the anti-empathy side, we need to remember that a politician might use his wife's illness — and specifically breast cancer — as a cover for behavior that really is unseemly. 

I don't know about Ron DeSantis, but I remember John Edwards. He used his suffering wife as a political prop and, behind the scenes, carried on an affair. 

"John Edwards' betrayed wife 'tore off bra,'" the BBC reported, as Edwards was on trial in 2012 for using campaign donations to hide his pregnant girlfriend: