Quote of the Day

Jay Caspian Kang in the New York Times Sunday Magazine --

Imagining yourself in a book club with Pete Buttigieg becomes this election’s having a beer with George W. Bush. If the news media has an “identitarianism” problem, it’s not so much that people bunker down into racial, gender or sexual groups, but that a whole class of journalists and thinkers never seems to be able to wander out past its own pool of references — all so admiring of the same things that some are blinded to the similar backgrounds of almost every other Democratic candidate for president.

Let's hope it's contagious

#السودان #سونا| عاد إلى البلاد مساء اليوم #المشير_عمر_البشير رئيس الجمهورية بعد زيارة للجمهورية العربية السورية استمرت يوما واحدا حيث كان في وداعه الرئيس السوري #بشار_الأسد وعدد من أعضاء حكومته.https://t.co/ThrQQi4d6s pic.twitter.com/xW8NKckRGq

— SUDAN News Agency (SUNA) 🇸🇩 (@SUNA_AGENCY) December 16, 2018

Sudan News Agency still has posted the December tweet featuring the jubilant visit of the now deposed Omar al-Bashir to his friend Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

The protests that brought down Omar al-Bashir began nearly as soon as his return from Damascus and still continue today.

The two dictators have a lot in common; most of all, they held on to power while bankrupting and partitioning their countries and committing large scale war crimes.

Omar al-Bashir never had the cachet with the anti-establishment left that Bashar al-Assad still has. But that insular cranky world is getting small, smaller than Julian Assange's now vacated flat. 

The Real Trump

In an admittedly desperate search for positives, there is one reassuring thing about the latest chaos at Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security: that last Trump weekend in Las Vegas and California, the weekend where he seemed to be in a perpetual rage -- that wasn't an act, that was genuine Trump. Because he clearly got back to Washington DC still in a rage and decided that he had to make a move.

This, incidentally, is why the perpetual pundit prospect that such and such an event will reveal "the true Trump" is futile. There's only one Trump, and you can see it all where he sees it all, on television.