I was out last night with Amanda and some of her cousins and their significant others on a brew pub crawl in northeast Minneapolis. We walked from joint to joint, which probably had the happy effect of keeping me from over-serving myself. It also put us out in the street with other revelers, where we could hear bits of drunken hilarity being shouted out in the night. "Grab her by the pussy!" someone shouted near Central and Broadway, before the sun had even set.
Ah, that Trump! Even if the modern Republican party survives 2016, the campaign is likely advancing other smaller but still worthy ends, such as sparing us for a few years from having to hear about how Hollywood and the Democrats are "coarsening the culture."
Like some other Democrats, such as Amanda, I'm a little puzzled by the bipartisan outcry. It doesn't seem like what Trump said eleven years ago was any worse than a lot of things he's said in the past several months, while campaigning for the presidency. For example, he said that a federal judge, born in Indiana, was on account of his Mexican heritage unqualified to hear the case against Trump "University." Paul Ryan, the Republican highest up our political food chain, said this opinion qualified as "the textbook definition of racism," but that apparently was not enough to cause him to withdraw his support of Trump. Maybe that's a bad example, because Ryan still hasn't withdrawn his support of Trump, though he did "disinvite" him to a Republican "unity rally" in Wisconsin yesterday.
Wasn't it kind of weird the way in which Team Trump decided to address the crisis?--I mean, by having him record a video in which he apologized, sort of. The likely explanation is that the people who know him best understand he can't be trusted even to read a prepared statement in real time. They needed a chance to have several takes, and edits, in order to elide, to the degree possible, the candidate's scowls, sneers, and manifest insincerity of manner. Maybe not, however. If the goal was to seem sincere and decent, the words themselves, which of course were prepared beforehand, should have been different. (To appear decent and sincere, there is no substitute for actually being decent and sincere.) The marriage of incompetence and repugnance is probably the best explanation for everything emanating from the Trump campaign.
Speaking of words: I haven't seen anyone mention Trump's somewhat odd locutions while talking dirty. (Probably I am just spending too much time in bars to know that it's been the subject of acute analysis on cable tv.) His first "apology" described the chit-chat as "locker-room banter," which is something I know about. I've heard a lot of swaggery talk about things sexual but the phrase "grabbed her by the pussy" was not in the linguistic repertoire of any of my teammates. I don't think it's even possible . . . unless . . . but I'm not going there. And what of "moved on her like a bitch"? I at first thought that in this novel expression the phrase "like a bitch" served to convey the concept of intensity, so that the meaning is something like "I hit on her very aggressively." It's also possible, however, that "bitch" applies to the object of the advance: he hit on her in the manner that you hit on a bitch (because she is one), as opposed to the manner in which you hit on a non-bitch.
I'm ignoring my own advice about how to account for Trump. In the movie Fargo, the way in which the William Macy character doesn't even know how to swear--"What the Christ?" he says, when things go wrong--shows what a loser he is. Ditto for Trump.
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