By Beau Elliot
Apparently, we’d all better rush out and build bunkers now, because America is under attack.
That’s the state of our universe, at least according to Donald Trumpahontas, who would know because he’s … well, because he’s … well, because he used to own a lot of casinos and, well, let’s not go into that. Because he’s, well … he’s rich and talks a lot, so he must know something.
Um, yeah. If you laid all the Trumpisms end-to-end, you could walk to the Moon. Of course, once you got there, you’d have a lot of trouble breathing, but details, details.
Which raises the question: How many Trumpisms could a Trump spout if a Trumpism could spout Trumps? Or something like that.
Nobody knows just yet how many Trumpisms. Well, obviously. We’re not sure anyone but mathematicians can know, but then, those guys have lots of Mercedes-Benz-type formulae, and they can count really, really high. You don’t want to know how high. Your best drugs won’t get you that high. (Maybe your connection should be a mathematician. Good luck on that, by the way.)
Meanwhile, the Republicans held a coronation last week, and it featured Trump trotting out his wife, Melania Trump, to speak in fond terms about him. No Trumpisms. Well, except that she quite apparently plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech in 2008 at the Democratic Convention. As Turnitin reported, there was a 1 in 1 trillion chance “that a 16-word phrase in one speech would coincidentally match a phrase of the same length in another speech.”
Maybe that was more Trumpisms.
Some would claim that a speech in a public space is therefore in the public domain, but according to Elura Nanos, a copyright lawyer, “Artists, authors, speakers, and songwriters always own an automatic copyright in the works they create.” The copyright lasts, Nanos goes on to say, until the artists’ or speakers’ deaths, then extends for another 70 years after that death for the artists’ and speakers’ estates.
Meanwhile, back at the bunker (are you comfortable yet?), America is under attack. Well, except that “gun homicides in the U.S. from 2002 to 2014 that occurred in a terrorist attack is 1 in 3,400,” FiveThirtyEight reports. FiveThirtyEight also writes that “in the rest of the world, at least one of every 40 people shot to death died in a terrorist attack.”
Trump, at the convention, also said, “The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50 percent compared to this point last year.”
The Washington Post reports Trump is flat-out wrong: “The number of law-enforcement officers killed on the job has increased 8 percent compared to this point in 2015.”
Maybe Trump could use some of his reported great wealth to hire a mathematician or two to help him with percentages. Or, if he wanted to save some money, a couple of middle-school students from Iowa City.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are holding their own convention, and it is nice, orderly, and calm.
Well, of course not. These are Democrats we’re talking about. We should always remember the words of the great American philosopher Will Rogers: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
Or as I like to say, only occasionally and with apologies to Otto von Bismarck, Politics is the art of the possible, not the science of what is right.