This is the greatest Willy Wonka remake ever. pic.twitter.com/RmWSe5U4br
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) August 16, 2015
We take our parables where we can grope to find them. Roy Edroso, at Alicublog, spots dependable puke funnel Ross Doubthat edging towards a Hindenbergian acceptance of Trump. With his popularity among the lumpenproletariat, Ross fantasizes, The Donald could reform conservatism, just as Ross and his ideological allies have longingly imagined! Edroso, of course, is more cynical:
…[T]he “reformcons” Douthat endorses are more con than reform — a bunch of pencil-necked repackagers of Gilded Age philosophy, looking for jobs in the upcoming GOP Bureau of Bold New Boondoggles. I can appreciate, from a comedy perspective, blinkered and hubristic social policy wonks as well as much as the next fellow — but to see them holding up a broken chair and cracking a licorice whip against a charismatic buffoon bully-boy, and imagining that they’re the ones in control, strikes me as a formula for disaster.
Whatever one thinks of Trump, it's fun to watch so many pundits get voters wrong again and again. http://t.co/bhXP8ZwPRC
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) August 18, 2015
Or then again, maybe Trump’s the human Mirror of Erised. At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf sought input on why “Donald Trump supporters… believe that the billionaire real-estate developer will treat them any better than the career politicians they mistrust.” The result so overwhelmed him (“Many of the responses contained so many rationales that summing them up proved impossible”) that he put online no fewer than thirty different letters, each one similar only in their Erisian glee. Trump is an anarchist’s dream, a moderate compromiser, a “corrective to America’s cultural pathologies“, a successful leader, the anti-Obama. He is large, he contains multitudes!
And if all there is in this world is lulz, why not choose a trickster for your champion?
Relationship Status: Complicated pic.twitter.com/d4lBzaTpv3
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) August 21, 2015
Late Night Open Thread: The Blind Elephants & The DonaldPost + Comments (124)