Category: politics

11 People Who Were Literally This Close to Becoming President

Mike Rothschild

American history is chock full of near-misses, twists of fate, lucky breaks, and obscure politicians who almost became leader of the free world. The vice presidency has been vacant 18 different times, sometimes for years at a time.

Every one of those vacancies represented a constitutional crisis that wasn’t dealt with until the passage of the 25th Amendment in 1967. There was no way to fill a vice presidential vacancy, and it’s not clear whether Congress has the authority to call off-year presidential elections. With no president or vice-president, the very legitimacy of our government could have been put to the test.

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Every Trump Tweet With a Parenthesis: An Analysis

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

This post continues into April.

President Trump’s use of Twitter is an endlessly fascinating and terrifying subject. He uses it to communicate with his friends on Fox News, to poke his rivals, to announce wild swings in policy, and to pump up the brand of President of the United States.

Another subject of fascination is the language he uses when he uses it. Trump’s tweets are full of seemingly random capitalized words, tortured run-on sentences, short admonitions that sound like they’re commands to a dog (“NO!” “BAD!” “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”), and pictures from his travails pretending to lead the free world.

One of my personal favorite Trump Twitter Quirks is his use of parentheses. According to grammarbook.com, parentheses should be used “to enclose information that clarifies or is used as an aside.”

Most Trump parentheses are asides with no real reason for existing. He also clarifies information that doesn’t really need to be clarified, re-stating or contradicting information he’s literally just given us. There seems to be no real methodology to their use.

Because I love Trump’s scattershot use of parentheses so much, I decided to go through all his tweets for 2018 so far and take a quick look at each one. Was it needed? Was it helpful? Did it even make sense? What was he attempting to communicate in his usage of it? Was there a hidden meaning we just didn’t grasp? Read on, dear reader:

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We Were Sitting Ducks For Russian Trolling

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

In the wake of the surprising indictments of 13 Russians involved in the coordinated trolling of the 2016 election, online arguments raged as to what impact it had on Donald Trump’s win.

But the already-fertile ground that the misinformation landed on was left mostly unexplored.

We know how Russia trolled us. But we still don’t really know why. And given the fairly low amount of effort they put into it, we don’t know why it worked.

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Adam Schiff Does Not Have a Sister

Mike Rothschild7 Comments

Congressman Adam Schiff (D- CA) does not have a sister.

Normally, this would be about as controversial a statement as “Tuesday comes after Monday.” It’s a settled fact, and shouldn’t be debated on internet forums.

But as we’ve learned over the years, just because something is a settled fact doesn’t mean it’s not going to be debated on internet forums. And Adam Schiff’s sister, despite not existing, has become the topic of the moment all over the Trump-supporting fever swamp of blogs, message boards, and social media.

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“The Memo” is a Prosperity Scam on Steroids

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

If you took Monday to sleep off a nasty flu bug, you could be forgiven for waking up Tuesday thinking you were either in a Central American banana republic or the Terran Empire of the Star Trek mirror universe.

In just one day, we learned that the Trump administration pushed out the number two man at the FBI, that Trump wouldn’t be implementing the Russia sanctions that passed Congress by a vote of 518-5, and that the House Intelligence committee voted to release the infamous Devin Nunes memo, the four page tome that’s supposedly going to blow the doors off the Obama/Hillary/FBI Deep State surveillance of Trump, and send all the evildoers to Gitmo.

Oh, and they also voted to block the release of a Democratic-written counter memo that calls the Nunes memo a load of bullshit.

All Hail the Emperor, indeed.

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