And we're expanding it to include Roy Moore, the people who still support him, and Joe Barton…
- Remember the scandalous Access Hollywood tape wherein Trump bragged about sexual assaults? At the time, he apologized for it. Now, he's trying to spread the suggestion that it's not real; that it's dubbed or it's someone else or something. Even the Trumpiest Trump supporter won't believe that though a few might find it handy to say they do. It's a lot easier than defending it, I guess. But it makes you wonder if Trump is anticipating legal proceedings against him for sexual misdeeds and somehow — God knows how — thinks it will help him to now not admit the recording is legit.
- Matt Yglesias explains why the math in the Senate Tax Bill just plain doesn't add up. And in this article, he points out that this bill is based on a lot of the same theories and predictions that were disastrous when attempted under the last Republican president.
- William Saletan reviews the evidence against Judge Roy Moore and finds it pretty solid. He also reviews the rebuttals from the Moore camp and finds them pretty feeble. I think we're about to see a lot of people who profess to be deeply moral respecters of old-fashioned family values in an evangelical sense go to the polls and vote for a child molester…and pretend it's okay because, you know, he denies it.
- Speaking of evangelicals, Thomas S. Kidd discusses who they are these days and why some who say they are aren't.
- Rod Dreher writes about Joe Barton, the latest in a series of "deeply moral" politicians who spent years scolding people for their immorality before being humiliated by some revelation about the deployment of his own genitalia. It's gotten so every time a Republican leader lectures us about our sex lives, we should just start wagering on what there is about his that he's hiding.
- Getting back to Trump: Daniel Larison says, "Arming Ukraine would be an extraordinarily foolish thing for Trump to do, and so it is probably what he will decide to do." Click on Larison's name to read more.
- Jonathan Chait wonders if Donald is intentionally sabotaging police departments everywhere. And Chait's right: Whenever Trump talks about "crime" or "law and order," he's using codewords to single out racial minorities.
- And finally for now: Matt Taibbi writes about Trump's battle with Sportsfather LaVar Ball. One of Ball's sons was among three basketball players arrested in China recently, then released via a diplomatic maneuver for which Trump is demanding a louder thank-you than he got from them. Trump vs. Ball is one of those cases where you'd rather not root for either guy but one is clearly worse than the other, if only because for the worse guy, it's just another chance to depict black athletes as spoiled and unworthy of this great nation of ours.
My favorite tweet of the last few days, by the way, came from Conan O'Brien who wrote, "Trump is already tweeting that Black Friday is the most ungrateful of all the Fridays." Good one.