"If he is gay, I wish he'd been open about it all along, but what can he do now?"

"We're talking about a 57-year-old man who's promoted traditional sexual morality, not a younger man, like Pete Buttigieg, who is married and ostensibly monogamous."

That's the last paragraph of a post I wrote on September 12th, one of only 2 posts I've written during the 2023 presidential campaign that had the "Tim Scott" tag.

The other one was a September 28th post, published the morning after a GOP debate that I said I only watched for 3 minutes: "A moderator asked an absurdly long question about the auto strike, and then Tim Scott started talking and acted as though we were dumb to take something stupid he'd said literally. And I was gone."

And that's my answer to a question asked by rcocean in last night's open thread: "No post on Senator Tim Scott dropping out?"

What a terrible candidate! I was going to avert my eyes, but you asked. 

"Thanks Althouse. You read the liberal/left crap, so I don't have to...."

Commented rcocean, after I posted a massive block of links to articles about the Trump/CNN town hall. 

Maybe rcocean was referring to things I do elsewhere — I blog mainstream news every day — but I didn't read any of that analysis of the town hall. I watched the town hall myself, and I stayed tuned for some of the CNN panel discussion afterwards, but I was getting nothing out of it — it seemed like pro forma outrage — and turned in for the night, slept until time for the sunrise run, and, finally approaching the blog at 6:30 a.m., wrote that post to distance myself from the yammer about the town hall

I don't subject myself to an ordeal of reviewing liberal media. I follow my own interests, which, you can see, had to do with a song I'd heard on my run/walk and some feathers strewn on the trail before I posted that block of links, which I called "an image of outrage," about the town hall. It was a snapshot of something seen only from a distance.

What's striking to me now, writing this post, is what's not in those headlines: There was no one terrible thing Trump said that everyone's talking about.

There's just generic stuff about how Trump is awful. It's hard even to think of an answer to the question: What would you use if you had to choose one thing from the town hall to attack Trump?

"It’s the people rising up in revolt in San Francisco and saying it’s unacceptable to abandon your responsibility to educate our children."

Said Siva Raj, a San Francisco parent a leader of the recall effort, quoted in "In Landslide, San Francisco Forces Out 3 Board of Education Members/The recall, which galvanized Asian Americans, was a victory for parents angered by the district’s priorities during the pandemic" (NYT).

The recall was a victory for parents who were angered that the district spent time deciding whether to rename a third of its schools last year instead of focusing on reopening them. It also appeared to be a demonstration of Asian American electoral power, a galvanizing moment for Chinese voters in particular who turned out in unusually large numbers for the election.

"Chinese voters"? I guess they mean Chinese-American voters. Yikes. What's in their style guide?!

In echoes of debates in other cities, many Chinese voters were incensed...

 They really must mean to say "Chinese voters." Isn't that an embarrassment?

What Melania did was "like showing up to a meeting of African-American cotton farmers in a Confederate uniform."

What did she do? She wore a white pith helmet in Africa. The quote is from Matthew Carotenuto, a coordinator of African Studies at St. Lawrence University, who added "Historical context matters." That is, some people associate pith helmets with the colonial era in Africa. The quote appears in "Melania Trump Raises Eyebrows in Africa With Another White Hat" (NYT). The NYT says a few nice things, deep in the article:

Mrs. Trump has seemed at ease... She has posed for photos with babies and children, often murmuring the same things at each stop — “Beautiful!” and “Hi, guys!” — while holding their hands or waving at the cameras.... On Friday, she looked happy as she visited a red clay feeding pen for orphaned elephants at the Nairobi National Park. She administered them formula in oversized baby bottles, patted the animals on their heads and inspected their floppy ears.

We're told she wore a white shirt and that the shirt did not get dirty as she fed the baby elephants.

Why does the headline say "Another White Hat"? I think it's because there was a lot of talk last April about a white hat she wore in France. See "Melania Trump, White Hat/The first lady’s choice of headgear made quite a statement on the second day of the French state visit" (NYT). The NYT fashion critic struggled to find meaning:

In the iconography of the Western, the good guys wore white hats... It’s possible Mrs. Trump is not aware of this.... Except she has something of a history of using white suits to send what seem like fairly pointed messages; see her decision to wear white — associated with women’s rights in the form of the suffragist movement, as well as Hillary Clinton — to her husband’s first State of the Union address, which happened to be her first high-profile appearance with him after the Stormy Daniels scandal broke.... 

Whatever. We know Melania's most famous fashion message: "I really don’t care. Do U?"



AND: In getting pushed around by a baby elephant, compare Ava Gardner (in "Mogambo," suggested by commenter rcocean):

Trump tweets video of himself wrestling with CNN.

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

Wow. He really is doubling down and apparently not worried about the recent accusation that his statements about journalists are going to lead to violence against journalists.

As a metaphor, there's a bit of a fakeness muddle. Fakeness 1: CNN is — in the Trump rhetoric — fake news. Fakeness 2: that kind of wrestling is fake. So Trump has himself fake-fighting fake news. Might be kind of like writing a sentence with a double negative.

Anyway, a President showing us video of himself physically brutalizing the news media... that's something we've never seen, and if the question is whether that's presidential, we know Trump's answer is it's modern-day presidential.

Meanwhile, Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison calls for censorship: Twitter should kick Trump out. Twitter does have the power to pull the plug, but what are the consequences?

What happens to Twitter after it shows itself looking plainly political? There's always another social media platform. It wasn't that long ago when Twitter didn't exist. There's nothing that special about Twitter other than that it has a lot of users. They could have them today and lose them tomorrow. Trump has 33 million followers. Anywhere he goes, he will be followed, leveraging Twitter's competition.

As for the censors like Ellison, why do they not worry about how they will be seen? Why don't they worry about the demands for equal treatment? Ellison said: "I personally think that Twitter should treat him like any other social media harasser and snatch his account." Turn that around. If Trump's account is snatched, then everyone else whose account was equally "bullying" toward anybody would have to get their account snatched. That would be a lot of snatches.

In last night's post about Trump's tweeting, the commenter rcocean wrote that he was "surprised Althouse isn't pulling out her 'Civility Bullshit' tag." I see the point. This is squarely within what I use that tag to mean, which is that calls for civility are always bullshit. That is, I have observed again and again that when somebody issues what purports to be a lofty call to civility, they're bullshitting. They don't really mean it. They just want someone who's not on their side to disarm, tone it down, and recede into boring innocuousness. If their side were coming on strong, scoring hits, they'd be exulting and proud of their effective rhetoric.