Back when Jackie Mason was funny — yes, there was such a time — he had a line about Richard Nixon during the time of Watergate. He said, "I get up every morning and check to see if my furniture is still there." There really was this ongoing sense of, "What's he going to do to us next?"
I now wake up, reach for my iPhone and check to see what news headline awaits: What's Trump done this morning while I was asleep? This morning, there was no headline and I gave out with a sigh of relief you may have heard, wherever you are. I do not enjoy living in interesting times, especially when what makes the interesting is a question like "What is the President of the United States going to do today to protect his support from racists?"
One of my pet peeves, mentioned many times before on this blog, is people who make what is to me a silly, deceptive analogy. It's when anyone in politics makes any kind of concession or compromise and they liken that to Neville Chamberlain trying to appease Hitler by giving up chunks of Czechoslovakia. It's usually ridiculous because not every enemy is Hitler and not every compromise is surrender. Most problems in this world are not settled by killing the other guy.
I'm surprised no one's compared Trump to Chamberlain lately though. He sure wants to appease those boys with the tiki torches in Charlottesville.
Last night, Stephen Colbert had Anthony Scaramucci on his show for a kind of exit interview. Colbert was a bit too aggressive in his questioning, occasionally talking over his guest, but he did wring some interesting responses out of "The Mooch"…
Colbert: Are there elements of white supremacy in the White House?
Scaramucci: No. But I don't like the tolerance of it.
I wish Colbert had then asked, "Is it tolerated because some of them agree with it or do they just want those votes?" I assume Scaramucci would have said, "The latter," then Colbert could have asked, "So Donald Trump — this man you say is so compassionate and so media-savvy — is tolerating white supremacist views in his White House because he doesn't want to lose the support of racists?" I wonder what the response to that would have been.