At last, we know what it takes to bump RussiaGate off of MSDNC for a few hours: three deadly hurricanes and a mass shooting with nearly 600 victims. Trump took advantage of this lull in his prime-time persecution to publicly scold the distressed people of Puerto Rico for their alleged profligacy and indolence, before turning his consolatory ministrations toward the bloodbath in Las Vegas. The theologian-in-chief advised the appalled national audience that this was an act of “pure” and “unspeakable evil”—unspeakable, one presumes, because to name the evil would require him to confront the specific evil at work in real terms, define the conditions which hatched it and punish the institutions that profit from its existence. Better politically to keep the “evil” abstract and eschatological. More

Delegates to the recent Labour Party conference in the English seaside town of Brighton seemed not to notice a video playing in the main entrance.  The world’s third biggest arms manufacturer, BAe Systems, supplier to Saudi Arabia, was promoting its guns, bombs, missiles, naval ships and fighter aircraft.  

It seemed a perfidious symbol of a party in which millions of Britons now invest their political hopes. Once the preserve of Tony Blair, it is now led by Jeremy Corbyn, whose career has been very different and is rare in British establishment politics. More

Every night, or close to it, the evening new brims with stories of the latest preposterous Trump outrage: the charge that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton; the claim that Obama  wiretapped Trump Tower; the gross and sexist personal assault on MSNBC talk show hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough; the idiotic criticism of a retail firm for discontinuing his daughter’s perfume brand; the wacky if supremely dangerous war of words with Kim Jong-Un; the horrifying cover Trump gave to murderous, neo-Nazi Confederate statue-defenders in Charlottesville, Virginia; the praise and advance-pardon of the fascist country sheriff Joe Arpaio;  the vicious assault on Anthem-protesting Black NFL players (“sons of bitches” in the president’s words); the idiotic attack on the Mayor of San Juan after he golfed through Hurricane Maria’s devastating landfall in Puerto Rico; the absurd statement the Puerto Rico didn’t experience a “real catastrophe like Katrina.”  Stay tuned:  the orange-tinted presidential freak show never ends. More