Hillary Clinton’s Thursday afternoon foreign policy speech in San Diego was extremely satisfying for Fred Kaplan. “On each point, she contrasted his flimsy prejudices not only with her own experience and thought-out views but also with the long-standing, bipartisan traditions of American diplomacy,” Kaplan writes. “The all-but-inevitable Democratic nominee showed that she’s fit to be her own attack dog, mauling her ill-matched Republican foe to shreds without getting muddy in the process.”
After violence broke out at a California Trump rally on Thursday night, Isaac Chotiner interviewed Todd Gitlin, historian of the protest movements of the 1960s, about the effect such clashes might have on the dynamics of the presidential campaign.
“My thoughts ran back to an incident in San Jose in 1970 when Nixon was speaking from a rally and got up on his car and he flashed his V-sign with a big grin,” Gitlin told Chotiner. “Later, he said to one of his hangers-on, ‘They hate it when I do that.’ He was courting a venomous display of rage. I don’t think Trump was necessarily deliberately inciting this, but I think he properly regards these collisions as food for his wilder beasts, and he loves it.”
Why can’t #NeverTrump Republicans just fall in line behind Hillary? Jim Newell asks. Their strategy of nominating an underqualified conservative journalist instead is a joke. “Never Trump Republicans like Bill Kristol, and whoever else would rally behind French’s potential third-party candidacy, do not take the presidency as seriously as they claim to,” Newell writes. “If they did, they’d admit that they find Hillary Clinton to be a better choice than Donald Trump.”
Paul Simon has a new album and Carl Wilson likes it, reluctantly. “Simon has written loads of songs that make me flash like a strobe light or puddle like sweet custard,” Wilson writes, trying to parse his love-hate relationship with the singer. “But as I’ve been reminded by many moments on his impressive new album, Stranger to Stranger, others turn me sour and wary.”
For fun: Whee! Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping sure sounds like fun.
No sourness here,
Rebecca
