"Race in America is often presented in two buckets: White and non-White. This is an update to the buckets..."

"... that existed for much of American history — White and Black — reflecting how the end of immigration restrictions in the 1960s allowed more Asian and Hispanic and Middle Eastern and you-name-it people to come to the U.S. But there are still two buckets, buckets into which people with mixed racial backgrounds jump (or are dropped) depending on circumstance."

Explains Philip Bump, in "The useful political lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s college application/America’s understanding of race and ethnicity is still woefully simplistic" (WaPo).

ADDED: By the way, I loathe the increasingly common use of the word "bucket" to mean "category." I'm one of those people — perhaps you are too — who see the concrete image in a metaphor. But maybe Bump wants to evoke disgust at the idea of human beings in buckets. His use of "jump" and "dropped" suggests that he does want us to visualize people disrespected and abused. 

Let's read a WaPo columnist who hasn't quit in disgust after Jeff Bezos announced he was taking the opinion pages in a right-wing direction..

Here's Bezos's ballsy statement (on X).

Who has quit? You can read "Jeff Bezos' revamp of 'Washington Post' opinions leads editor to quit" (NPR).

I'm most interested in who is staying, and how they might be changing. In that light, I'm reading this, from Philip Bump, published this morning: "The shift in the politics of young voters isn’t quite what it seems/The idea that MAGA-enthused bros swung the young male vote doesn’t really capture what happened."

That's a free-access link and it's very heavy on poll data. I won't attempt to summarize that other than to quote Bump's bottom line: "The problem for Democrats, then, was probably fewer White dudes listening to Joe Rogan than it was Black and Hispanic voters not voting like their parents."

Bezos should hire some good word editors, because that sentence is miswritten, probably by someone bamboozled by the "less"/"fewer" distinction. I think it needs to be something more like: "The problem for Democrats, then, was probably less about White dudes listening to Joe Rogan and more about Black and Hispanic voters not voting like their parents." 

I'm not saying I've turned that into a well-written sentence, only that I've made it comprehensible (and I hope it means what Bump meant to say).

"In MAGA world, the alleged pet-eating is already a matter of fact..."

"... and Republican elected officials, including Vance, are hurrying to join the clout rush, the scramble to get attention and likes and followers by treating it as a serious issue."

Writes Phillip Bump, in "The right-wing bubble says Trump will save your cat from immigrants/False claims and baseless ones are politically useful, so they rocket to the social media accounts of prominent right-wing people" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Did you notice it yesterday? "Seemingly out of the blue Monday morning, supporters of former president Donald Trump began posting myriad AI-generated images depicting the Republican presidential nominee as a savior. Not of the American Dream or of Christianity, mind you, the normal targets of such praise. Instead, Trump was shown protecting ducks and kitty cats."

Yeah, I was wondering what this — forwarded to me yesterday — was all about:

"If you are supporting Kennedy in part because you don’t like Harris or Trump, perhaps you will be compelled by Trump’s promise to include Kennedy in his Cabinet..."

"... or give him some government position where he can do whatever it is he thinks needs to be done. Or maybe you’ll just make a sound of frustration and write the whole thing off. That’s one of the challenges of being the outsider candidate: Moving to the inside isn’t necessarily what your supporters want to see. Perhaps the most important point of consideration here, again, is that there simply aren’t that many Kennedy supporters....  At the end of the day, it would still be a good move for Kennedy. How good a move it might be for Trump remains to be seen."

Writes Philip Bump, in "What happens if Kennedy endorses Trump? The independent candidate doesn’t have much support — and it’s not clear how much of it would transfer" (WaPo).

Bump says, "How good a move it might be for Trump remains to be seen," and that probably means...

We can't tell if it's a good move or not.

It's a bad move, but Bump doesn't want to help Trump avoid alliance with RFK.

It's a good move, but Bump doesn't want to help Trump see the advantage in closing the deal.

Bump sincerely can't tell, but I can: It's a good move.

Bump sincerely can't tell, but I can: It's a bad move.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"[I]n the hours after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we saw J.D. Vance come out with... the most strongly worded of anyone seeking to be his VP."

"Yeah. And it has some factual problems. Here's what he said. He said: "Today [the attempted assassination] is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.' We should say there's no evidence that that's true. We don't know the motivations of the shooter. We don't know that he consumed any of that rhetoric or that Vance is even characterizing it correctly.... I think Vance in a lot of ways, kind of embodies the id of Trump and that instinct to fight. And even though these sort of manufactured statements from the campaign are calling for unity and calling for peace, what Trump really wants... is someone who is going to keep fighting, you know, factual or not."

Said Michael C. Bender on yesterday's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "Trump Picks His Running Mate and Political Heir."

AND: This morning, I'm seeing "'They' didn’t shoot Donald Trump/Despite the lack of any clear motive, the actions of Thomas Crooks have been attributed to the Democratic Party at large," by Philip Bump (in WaPo). It's funny to use the passive voice — "actions... have been attributed" — exactly when you are complaining about the amorphous "They." Once again, I think of the Saul Steinberg image:

Find that image in Saul Steinberg's "The Inspector."

Bump writes: "There is no evidence that Crooks shot at Trump because he had been influenced by anti-Trump political rhetoric, and there is no evidence that Crooks was literally or figuratively part of a collective effort to sideline or kill the former president.... There’s no known connection between the known shooter and the broad, nebulous galaxy of opponents Trump and his allies envision.... So Crooks and his actions become abstract. They did it or they facilitated it or they caused it. And, for the purposes of political rhetoric, that will have to suffice."

The classic Trump monologue about sharks and batteries.

Maybe you're noticing "Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish/What the former president’s shark tirade says about American politics and media" and "Trump Rants About Sharks, and Everyone Just Pretends It’s Normal/Par for the course. Trump is Trump. But imagine the response if Joe Biden had said it." Both at The Atlantic. 

And then there was "Cognitive Decline? Trump Short-Circuits During Bonkers Rant/The former president glitched during a tirade about sharks and batteries" at The New Republic.

Is anyone "pretending" that's "normal"? No, I think people who like Trump feel as though they're listening to a stand-up comic. A highly gifted one, not a normal one. It's not "par for the course." It's a birdie. An eagle.

Trump's sharks-and-batteries monologue is a classic. Here... use it in your next audition:

Were dull sheep cowed?

I'm reading  in "A Federalist Society co-chair promotes a stolen-election theory/Cherry-picking vote numbers and ignoring history make it easier to elevate baseless claims of election theft" by Philip Bump (in WaPo).

He's talking about "The Left's Attack on the Secret Ballot and on Same Day Voting/Mail in voting over a period of weeks with drop boxes eliminates the secret ballot, and the need for everyone to vote on the same day, with the same headlines in mind, and not over the period of a month" by Steven Calabresi (at Reason).

Bump carps:

"I am concerned about the possibility that political objectives motivated the vigor of the prosecution of the J6 defendants, their long sentences, and their harsh treatment."

Said RFK Jr., quoted in "RFK Jr. has repeatedly dismissed severity of the Jan. 6 attack: 'What's the worst thing that could happen?'/The independent presidential candidate's campaign distanced itself from its own fundraising email Thursday that called the Jan. 6 rioters 'activists'" (NBC News).

He added that if elected president he will "appoint a special counsel — an individual respected by all sides — to investigate whether prosecutorial discretion was abused for political ends in this case."

ADDED: Here's how the WaPo columnist Philip Bump writes about it: "RFK Jr. clarifies that his view of Jan. 6 is the conspiratorial one."

"Grassley... falls into a familiar, misleading pattern, conflating the credibility of the informant with the credibility about the allegations."

"I trust my wife, but if she tells me that our 6-year-old claims to have seen a dragon on the roof, I don’t suddenly believe that there was a dragon on the roof...."

Writes Philip Bump in "Trump wanted Ukraine to impugn Biden. D.C. Republicans finally delivered. Why did Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) choose now to release the unverified allegation against Biden that he’s possessed all along?" (WaPo). 

So... they're doing this in the New Yorker crossword.

That's today's puzzle. Clue: "What kind of white nonsense..." Answer: "The Caucasity!"

It's good wordplay — a twist on "the audacity!" — but not anything I'd seen before, and the clue suggests this is a phrase in ordinary speech these days rather than a new joke. 

It really is white supremacy, in my view, which is — as advised yesterday by WaPo's Philip Bump — not to be too "rigid" about the meaning of "white supremacy." Bump, you will remember, argued that "white supremacy" could be understood to include promotion of the "structures of power that largely benefit Whites." So, if you like just about anything the way it is, you may be a white supremacist.

I had thought that The New Yorker would refrain from using racial taunts in its crossword! Why did it seem okay? Answer: White supremacy. You don't understand my point? To quote Philip Bump, "This confusion... stems from overly rigid understanding[] of... 'white supremacist.'"

ADDED: Here's a Yahoo article from 2020: "The 'caucasity': How a viral TikTok video is laying bare cultural appropriation through slang."

"Why non-White people might advocate white supremacy."

Philip Bump feels called to explain (at WaPo) after a man named Mauricio Garcia killed 8 people in a shopping mall in Texas. There's reason to think that Garcia held white supremacist/neo-Nazi beliefs because he wore a patch with the letters "RWDS," which, we are told, stands for "Right Wing Death Squad."

Maybe the letters don't really mean that or maybe Garcia didn't know the meaning, and maybe Garcia was white, but the point of Bump's column is to assume, based on the name, that Garcia was non-white and that he wore the patch because he was a white supremacist and then to try to explain why.

He knows you are, but what is he?

"Look, when there’s no need for your rhetoric not to be lazy, you land on lazy rhetoric. If you can carry the day — at least with those who you’re most worried about convincing — with little effort or logical consistency, why bother putting in the effort or assembling that consistency? If your target audience hasn’t even heard the nuances that undercut your point, why bother rebutting those nuances?"

Writes Philip Bump in "The impressively weak effort to ‘whatabout’ Biden’s classified documents" (WaPo).

"Ye claimed that he’d rather his kids learn about Hanukkah than Kwanzaa since 'at least it would come with some financial engineering.'"

"His assertion that 'professional actors' had been 'placed into my house to sexualize my kids.' He said he trusted Latinos more than 'certain other businessmen' — a vague descriptor he used to 'be safe.' Ye also told Carlson that he had 'visions that God gives me, just over and over, on community building and how to build these free energy, kinetic, fully kinetic energy communities.' Both in the snippets Vice obtained and what made it on the air, Carlson mostly nodded along with Ye’s commentary. There is no obvious effort to question Ye’s assertions or to express uncertainty about moving forward with the interview at all. What emerges from the fuller context provided by the Vice segments, really, is that Carlson wasn’t really interested in interviewing Ye or presenting his views to his audience. Instead, it’s that Carlson wanted to present a very specific version of Ye to his viewers, a Ye that mirrored Carlson’s rhetoric on race and politics and didn’t go much further...."

From "The Kanye West Tucker Carlson didn’t want his audience to see" by Philip Bump (WaPo). 

Fox News showed an edited version of the interview, and Vox has made some unused material available.

Bump makes assumptions about Carlson: he "wasn’t really interested in interviewing Ye" and "wanted to present a very specific version of Ye." Bump wants to present a very specific version of Carlson. 

"In your editorial 'The Election for Pennsylvania’s High Court' (Oct. 25), you state the fact that a court wrongly said mail-in ballots could be counted after Election Day. 'This didn’t matter,' you add..."

"'... because Mr. Biden won the state by 80,555, but the country is lucky the election wasn’t closer. If the election had hung on a few thousand Pennsylvanians, the next President might have been picked by the U.S. Supreme Court.' Well actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out. Here are just a few examples of how determinative the voter fraud in Pennsylvania was...." 

So begins Trump's letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal — which you can read in full with no pay wall. The letter is responding to the editorial, "The Election for Pennsylvania’s High Court/The court that roiled the 2020 campaign will get a new Justice on Nov. 2" (which is blocked by a paywall). 

Trump's letter consists almost entirely of a list of factual allegations, very specific numerical assertions (e.g., "39,911 people... were added to voter rolls while under 17 years of age").

One reaction to Trump's letter is to criticize the Wall Street Journal for publishing the letter without verifying all of the assertions. But verifying the assertions is an immense task, and the assertions are newsworthy as assertions. Given that the Journal had itself made an assertion — that the counting of the late mail-in ballots didn't matter — it needed to acknowledge that Trump (and millions of Americans) believe that it did matter and readers deserved to see why they think that.

The first criticism I read was "The 14 things you need to know about Trump’s letter in the Wall Street Journal" by Philip Bump in The Washington Post. From the headline, you might think you're going to get a point-by-point fact check, but that's not what this is. Bump's list begins with the assertion that "The Wall Street Journal should not have published it without assessing the claims and demonstrating where they were wrong, misleading or unimportant."

That's not a fact "you need to know," just an opinion about journalistic professionalism. Is there a general rule in journalism — a rule Bump's newspaper follows — that you don't publish accusations before you've independently checked them? If so, I see that rule broken every day. Maybe there's the idea that Trump's challenge to the 2020 election is a special case, because we need to be committed to the legitimacy of the current government and because there's too much discord and a decent newspaper shouldn't be roiling people up on this subject. 

But it seems to me the WSJ is merely saying here's Trump's letter, and that is rock-solid factually true. This is what our former President is saying. That's worth knowing, and it's not the WSJ keeping the issue alive. The WSJ tried to close it down in its too-neat assertion in the the Oct. 25 editorial. Once it did that, it was a matter of fairness to allow Trump to say, no, I don't think the court's decision didn't matter, and to allow him to back up his opinions with his version of the facts.

Bump's second "thing you need to know" is: "The Journal would have been better served had it explained why it chose to run the letter without contextualizing it, since that might have at least offered some clarity on the otherwise inexplicable decision, but it didn’t." 

Eh. I was able to work out the reason pretty easily. It's not the normal practice to load down letters to the editor with explanations. The letters respond to something that the newspaper published, and it's for readers to judge the value of the letter. 

Now that Trump's letter is published, it's time to do the point-by-point fact checking.

"South Dakota did not do any mandates. We trusted our people, gave them all the information and told them that personal responsibility was the best answer."

Tweeted South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, roughly quoting her recent CPAC speech and quoted in a Philip Bump WaPo column with the aggressive headline "Kristi Noem leans into her people-can-choose-to-die-if-they-want-to 2024 messaging."

Here's the text of the column that might support the headline: 

What’s fascinating about this argument is that it’s actually immune to a seemingly challenging response — um, but a lot of people died — using a straightforward rhetorical trick: pinning those deaths on the personal choices of the dead.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean people chose to die! People individually assessed risk and chose which precautions to take, but they were hoping not to die, I think we can presume. A lot of people died — it's true — but does Bump know how the deaths correlated to the choices people made? 

For example, I almost never wore a mask because I didn't like mask-wearing, but what I did instead was avoid going places where I was close enough to other people to need a mask. I kept my distance. That was an individual choice, and I won't say that's why I never got Covid (or never had any condition that caused me to get tested for Covid). I don't know!

Bump acknowledges that Noem's position is "a natural extension of a conservative small-government philosophy: If people want to put themselves at risk from the virus, who are we to stop them?" It's not that people want risk. It's that people are balancing risk against freedom. The question is just whether to let people do their own balancing. Noem's "leaning" is just the conventional conservative preference for individual choice. Bump leans in the conventional progressive direction, allocating more choices to government. 

You probably know which way you lean, so it's an old topic, perhaps too dull to write a column about. To disguise the dullness, they cobbled together the adjective "people-can-choose-to-die-if-they-want-to."

The same Donald Trump pudding.

In "The Trump media era ends not with a wow but a whisper" (WaPo), Philip Bump observes that Trump was on TV yesterday, but probably almost nobody watched:

"You probably missed it, because it was Donald Trump offering the same pudding of rhetoric we’ve heard so often to an anchor on the far-right network Newsmax."

Did you probably miss it because it was the same pudding? Or did you probably miss it because it was on a pretty obscure news channel and you didn't notice it was on because all the big burly news sources and social media sites have joined forces to freeze Trump out? What was on those big channels yesterday? I'll bet it was their own brand of a pudding of rhetoric that we've heard so often. Or are they serving up meat? Theirs is the real news commentary. Trump's is the pudding. And you're not getting any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

***

If you want to publish a comment, you need to email it to me — here. I'll use your first name only, unless you say you want no name or some other form of name.

Why is "No. She" trending on Twitter?

Because Trump tweeted this:

BUT DIDN’T SHE CALL HIM A RACIST??? DIDN’T SHE SAY HE WAS INCOMPETENT???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2020

To read some of the ripostes beginning with "No. She," go here. For example:

No, she did not. https://t.co/tgl9LvCFqL https://t.co/URSa4vzQJD

— Philip Bump (@pbump) August 20, 2020

& No she actually didn’t...at all...but I know facts never matter to the qult..at all...ya know who is a racist though?: pic.twitter.com/iYXq88wwo2

— Boo (@Boo64558345) August 20, 2020

"garbage food served by a garbage president. this is not funny, its just pathetic"/"A junk food feast from a junk president. How fitting is that? Talk about a nothing burger."

Highly rated comments on the WaPo article "President Trump’s extravagant, $3,000, 300-sandwich celebration of Clemson University" (by Philip Bump).

Here's Trump talking about the food — which he paid for himself because of the shutdown — just before the champion football team comes in.

Here’s a video I shot of President Trump showing off his 300 hamburgers. pic.twitter.com/P06S6I5w07

— Hunter Walker (@hunterw) January 14, 2019

ADDED: The Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence declares, "It was awesome... We had McDonalds and everything. It was good!"

Another fan asked Lawrence how many times he plans on returning to the White House -- to which he replied, "Hopefully, a few more!"

When is a claim not a claim?

I'm reading "Trump’s claim that he prevented air-traffic deaths is his most questionable yet" by Philip Bump at the Washington Post (and similar attacks on Trump elsewhere).

But what Trump tweeted was:

Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news - it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!

Those are 2 separate sentences. They do create the impression that they have something to do with each other, but he's only claiming that he's been "very strict on Commercial Aviation." (Don't get me started on the capitalization.) He never says because of my strictness there have been zero deaths. If you see a claim, you made an inference.

Yeah, he made you do that, but you are so tiresome, looking for ways to get excited about Trump. Well, you did help him make an otherwise boring set of facts viral. Now, we're all seeing that he's "very strict" and there are "zero deaths." That's something to feel good about... unless you just really need to feel bad about something.

Look at that headline again: Trump claimed that he prevented air-traffic deaths. No, he did not make that claim! If you want to trash him for getting anything wrong, don't get things wrong!

There is a problematic claim in Trump's tweet, that 2017 is "the best and safest year on record." Assuming the Bump column is correctly stating this, no one has "died in the crash of an American commercial flight" since February 2009. And yet Trump didn't say 2017 had the lowest number of deaths from crashes of American commercial flights. He said it was "the best and safest year." "Safest" would encompass death where the plane did not crash and nonfatal injuries from crashes and other occurrences. And "best" might refer all sorts of things.

So there's some issue there, but the issue raised in the headline — that Trump claimed that he prevented air-traffic deaths —  is... "More fake news from the lamestream media." (I put that in quotes because it's actually the last sentence of Bump's column.)

But really, what's the point of dinging him for that first sentence when the news looks like this?

Salacious! Like a spy novel!

1. From Hillary Clinton's book "What Happened" (page 364):

[A] lot of Russian officials seem to have had unfortunate accidents since the election. On Election Day itself, an officer in the New York consulate was found dead. The first explanation was that he fell off a roof. Then the Russians said he had a heart attack. On December 26, a former KGB agent thought to have helped compile the salacious Trump dossier was found dead in his car in Moscow. On February 20, the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations died suddenly, also from a heart attack. Russian authorities have also arrested a cybersecurity expert and two intelligence officials who worked on cyber operations and accused them of spying for the United States. All I can say is that working for Putin must be a stressful job.

If all this sounds unbelievable, I know how you feel. It’s like something out of one of the spy novels my husband stays up all night reading....

2. In today's Washington Post, Philip Bump writes that  "There are three reasons the 'Trump dossier' has been elevated as one of the central points of consideration in the public investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign":

The first is that it involves the characters and language of a John Le Carré novel: a former British intelligence officer communing with shadowy Muscovites identified only by letters and detailing secret meetings in exotic places, hidden payments and illegal agreements to seize the American presidency.

The second is that the political stakes are high....

The third reason people have paid so much attention to it is the unproven assertion — generally described as “salacious” — that Trump was party to a particular event in a Moscow hotel room....