(Bart gives a book report in front of his class.)
Bart: Well, as Mrs. Krabappel already mentioned, the name of the book that I read was Treasure Island. It's about these pirates, (Looks at the illustrated cover of the book.) pirates with patches over their eyes, (Looks at cover.) and shiny gold teeth, (Looks at cover.) and green birds on their shoulders. Did I mention this book was written (Looks at cover.) by a guy named Robert Louis Stevenson? (Looks at cover.) And published by the good people at McGraw-Hill. So, in conclusion, on the Simpson scale of one to ten--ten being the highest, one being the lowest and five being average--I give this book a nine. (Clears throat) Any questions?
What I always loved about that scene is that when she asks for the name of the pirate and he runs through some in his head, it does include the right answer (such is the cultural influence of Treasure Island) but he gets unlucky in the one he picks.
That's Trump his entire life, Trump expects to charm everyone and skate through conversations with zero situational awareness. Trump's interview after his first 100 days is a great example of this. John Dickerson relays a metaphor from W, that "the reason the Oval Office is round, is that there are no corners to hide in." Trump gets completely lost in the intellectual powerhouse that was George W Bush and immediately begins to describe the physical features of the room. Dickerson explains to Trump that we intention was everything comes back to the president and Trump shrugs everything off. It's only comparable to if you'd stripped every redeemable quality from Michael Scott.
Dickerson basically says, "it's not true, why would you say something that you know isn't true?"
And Trump does the I can raise my hand at the waste motion, says goodbye and sits down at his desk...to stare at one sheet of paper. Then acts surprised Dickerson hasn't left. It's so comically over the top
God fucking dammit that is the thickest thing I've ever seen. He''s the only person alive that doesn't need to be lying down for a George Bush quote to go over their head. How the world didn't blow up in those four years I do not know.
Trump gets completely lost in the intellectual powerhouse that was George W Bush
If there is a single person who exemplifies the dumbass hick in the smug imagination, it is former President George W. Bush. He's got the accent. He can't talk right. He seems stupefied by simple concepts, and his politics are all gee-whiz Texas ignorance. He is the ur-hick. He is the enemy.
He got all the way to White House, and he's still being taken for a ride by the scheming rightwing oligarchs around him — just like those poor rubes in Kansas. If only George knew Dick Cheney wasn't acting in his own best interests!
It is worth considering that Bush is the son of a president, a patrician born in Connecticut and educated at Andover and Harvard and Yale.
It is worth considering that he does not come from a family known for producing poor minds.
It is worth considering that beginning with his 1994 gubernatorial debate against Ann Richards, and at every juncture thereafter, opponents have been defeated after days of media outlets openly speculating whether George was up to the mental challenge of a one-on-one debate.
"Throughout his short political career," ABC's Katy Textor wrote on the eve of the 2000 debates against Al Gore, "Bush has benefited from low expectations of his debating abilities. The fact that he skipped no less than three GOP primary debates, and the fact that he was reluctant to agree to the Commission on Presidential Debates proposal, has done little to contradict the impression of a candidate uncomfortable with this unavoidable fact of campaign life."
"Done little to contradict." ....
On November 6, 2000, during his final pre-election stump speech, Bush explained his history of political triumph thusly: "They misunderesimated me."
What an idiot. American liberals made fun of him for that one for years.
It is worth considering that he didn't misspeak.
He did, however, deliberately cultivate the confusion. He understood the smug style. He wagered that many liberals, eager to see their opponents as intellectually deficient, would buy into the act and thereby miss the more pernicious fact of his moral deficits.
He wagered correctly. Smug liberals said George was too stupid to get elected, too stupid to get reelected, too stupid to pass laws or appoint judges or weather a political fight. Liberals misunderestimated George W. Bush all eight years of his presidency.
George W. Bush is not a dumbass hick. In eight years, all the sick Daily Show burns in the world did not appreciably undermine his agenda.
Trump is/was like this except instead of laughing I just felt angry, embarrassed, horrified, depressed and a myriad of other terrible emotions while the moron continued make what seemed like a bad movie a dark reality.
Everytime I think humanity can't be that stupid, someone posts another thing Trump did that is so real and so stupid... I lose a little more hope we may actually survive the next 100 years.
Trump is like those e-mail scams that have intentional spelling errors and leaps of logic to funnel out people that are too smart to fall for it.
People who believe in anything he says are literally the dumbest of the dumb, or so delusional that they bend over backwards to justify every word out of his mouth.
Except none of the mistakes were intentional, and none of the leaps done ironically. He is just as much a bumbling moron as those who sing his praises.
I used to think things would get worse until some serious shit went down and then people would get their act together. Like WWII. Sure, that was terrible but humanity made giant leaps forward technologically after that, quality of life improved, nations moved together, a lot of the political extremism actually died down. I thought we "need" a global tragedy. It would suck but turn out good in the end.
Then covid happened and I finally lost all faith in humanity.
Yes. This cult that got into our mainstream... well the republican'ts and the covid seem like deadly viruses. Both attacking people, killing people, and these two viruses seem to feed off each other.
Everytime I think humanity can't be that stupid, someone posts another thing Trump did that is so real and so stupid
The list really was bottomless. You could do a "mind-bogglingly stupid thing Trump said"-a-day calendar, with just the really good ones, no duds, and still have plenty left over.
I mean, jesus christ - the sharpie on a hurricane map to settle a feud with the national weather service? four seasons total landscaping? the list just goes on and on.
He looks like he's strolling through an art gallery but has no grasp of what makes the art compelling and doesn't want to attract attention to this so he stops to pretend to appreciate it.
Even in my most unprepared moments I would have had better sense than to suggest, to the entire nation, that a possible solution to the looming public health crisis is to inject bleach or insert U.V disinfectant lamps into your body.
On the contrary. Maybe he managed 'bleach' in the time he was staring at the sign, but if he could read in a normal speed he wouldn't have had to confabulate something about what the light symbol.might mean.
We call this word vomit. When a student has no clue what they are doing so they write down a stream of consciousness answer if any and all material they can remember, in hopes that the teacher will see key phrases and a long answer and think “this kid gets it” and give them full credit
I legitimately think it's that he looked at that and thought he was smarter than everyone and had just realized you could combine those things INSIDE of you to cure covid.
After press conference he whispers to himself: “still got it Donny, still got it. They didn’t even see you comin with that. Keepin it stable, stable genius.”
Donald Trump has divulged details of a cognitive test he "aced" -- including a five-word memory challenge he said proved he had the "mental stamina" to lead the U.S.
"Person. Woman. Man Camera. TV," the U.S. president recited [...]
In the article linked from that article.
The Canadian doctor behind the cognitive test Donald Trump recently took says the U.S. president's results are "normal performance," adding that the assessment is not an intelligence or an IQ test.
It's just weird how disconnected he is from reality sometimes.
The whole question I had around that was; what would make your physician choose to give you a cognition test? The answer is; a reasonable suspicion that you are showing signs of cognitive decline, i.e. dementia. So: he was bragging that "my doctor thought I might have dementia, but he gave me a test and I showed that my brain is broadly functional".
There's some implications he may have had a "series of mini strokes" which would have led to such a test. He claimed that he hadn't had a "series of mini strokes" when no one said he did (a journalist did theorise he had a stroke, but not as specific as a series of mini strokes). So yeah, pretty blatant that one.
I’m surprised he didn’t brag about the size of his strokes.
The biggest strokes you’ve ever seen. Doctors tell me all the time they’ve never seen such big strokes and - hillary. She can’t handle big strokes like that. That’s a shame, China sent us this virus.
There's evidence that even a mild case of covid can cause permanent mental decline. He wasn't doing too great before he got covid, but I'm sure getting covid up to the point he had to get supplemental oxygen didn't help.
It's like that Eugene Mirman story where when he was a kid he remembers his parents getting a letter from the school saying "Eugene does not appear to have a learning disability." Which oddly enough is one of the most sure indicators that you do in fact appear to have a learning disability.
Ehh, they had a lady follow me around for a week in grade school because they thought I was slow. It was a whole thing. At the end of it they ended up putting me in middle-school reading and math classes, turned out I was just really bored with the work they gave us. My mom gave me the letter they got when I was older.
Thankfully many schools now actually test for this starting in kindergarten or first grade and move kids into advanced classes to keep them challenged. Bored, unchallenged kids get in trouble, so finding them as early as possible and keeping them engaged helps everybody win.
Right. My mom failed this test by missing one word during the doctor’s evaluation when I petitioned to become her guardian. I actually wasn’t sure the doctor would deem her to be incapacitated, because although she has a LOT of physical and speech limitations, she can still follow a conversation and remembers facts about her life. It was eye opening when the doctor asked her to say the months backwards from December to January … she slowly got to September, got confused, went from September to December, then said “did I do it?”
The five word memory test makes me think of my husband doing a craft with my daughter the other night where she periodically had to remember a pattern sequence of different fabric squares - floral, birds, polka dot, blue and purple. She remembered the sequence after 5-10 minutes each time. We were so impressed!
I have a very visual imagination, and for exercises like this, I picture a calendar in my mind, like the typical one that shows the months in a 3x4 fashion. Then I just read it.
Or when you gotta recite the letters backwards, I imagine all of them in sequence, in a row, and then I just "scroll back" while reciting them.
Gotta play to your mind's strengths! Find out what is it, and it'll be much easier.
I don’t doubt that he got a perfect score on it. What’s really telling though, is that he thought it was something to brag about. Meaning that he struggled and had to put some serious effort into it, and thought it would be similarly hard for everyone else
Im not sure that disconnected, the media was calling for him to be tested in this way to prove he wasnt mentally able to run the US. Him passing was a rebuke to that notion, like it or not
It was really bizarre watching this live. Those videos are all still up there on YouTube for everybody to witness again...
In one of his Covid press releases he brought in a Taiwanese reporter a couple of times just to really hit home that the virus was from China. And of course Trump made sure to ask him where he was from.
It was real bizarre. Exactly as you said like a sitcom character.
I honestly cannot believe that this wasn’t the end for him, people watched the idiot stare at this sign, attempt to will the tiny gears of his mind into action and smuggly waddle up to that podium to suggest, as if it were the most obvious and simple thing in the world, that we inject bleach and just general light into our veins and everything will be hunky dory.
Aside from the actual lunacy of this suggestion did he think that for months every medical professional on the planet had been tirelessly working and searching for an effective treatment, in that process also drafting public safety measures to buy themselves more time to find an effective treatment yet it took big brains over here to look at this 3 point general precaution sign, that they fucking made ! To realise that we could just apply the same healthcare to our bodies as we do to furniture!
Absolutely fuck me, people still went on to not only vote for him but to risk their lives storming their own government buildings for him ! Some of them are still upholding his name !
Surely your brains exist only as a fine soup if none of that sounds like actual, unfiltered insanity right !?
Everyone says that, and it's part of it. But more to the point it's a cultural issue. These people loathe learning and education. You can't teach the unwilling.
Honestly I credit Trump with all the wisdom I gained about humanity in the last 6 years. I always thought there is a limit to stupidity but not to hate. And kind of ascribed all the shit that happened/happens in the world to hate but not to idiocy. Until Trump showed up. And it’s really eye opening how stupid significant number of people can be. It’s really hard to get impressed by how dumb people can be now, cause they won’t be dumber the the morons who support this turd.
Haha ! Very good point ! I think hate and idiocy are symbiotic, dumb people are easily frustrated because they don’t understand the world around them, without the ability to understand the things that frustrate them they lack the ability to fix the problem and that frustration becomes a deep hatred, it’s so much easier to scapegoat one particular group or issue as the enemy than it is to understand that there are multiple different issues that have coalesced to form a bigger problem. I do hope we reach a point at which we start to pride education above wealth but I fear so long as world governments are filled with egotists that use the system for personal benefit we’re going to be stuck in this cycle until the world around us is beyond saving.
And then after claiming the sunlight and bleach thing he looked at the female dr and said “but we’re looking into that right?” She had a look of shock on her face like wtf!
And beyond that realising that despite all of your hard work and sacrifice there will always be some rich idiot who stands above you through no work of his own.
Education is a factor for sure. But there are also legitimately a lot of people in the “flyover” states that are seeing their standard of living decline and that it is being ignored by the “coastal elite”, and just want to burn the whole fucking place down.
They're still denying that he ever said anybody should try injecting people with cleaning supplies. You can link to the video and they'll find some way to explain how that isn't what he meant. Instead of just accepting that the simplest explanation is that he's a complete moron.
I cringed everytime he said China virus, especially reading it in official white house correspondence. I would think to myself and say grow TF up and call it what it is. Trump s the first president to make me feel like I could've done a better job than him.
He certainly changes the discourse on who is qualified to be president. Up until his election, it was common to point to this or that president as "unqualified" because of their supposed limited relevant work experience.
Now, it's hard to imagine anyone less qualified (or capable) than Trump. Rando off the street could have done just as well, and probably better, assuming that they too didn't have a serious personality disorder.
You still see it on Reddit as well, people saying: "why is it bad he called it that, it came from China!"
As if the way the President talks doesn't affect people's behaviours. His "China virus" thing caused hundreds of Asian Americans to be harassed by nutcases because he gave them permission.
DeSantis is doing the same with the Lambda variant as well, pretending that the only reason it's in the country is due to illegal immigration.
That reminds me of a comedy act by Bill Burr, he was saying something about how Bush made him feel like he could be president too. “He’s like the guy who they grabbed from a backyard BBQ, and put em in a suit... like the first guy from my math class that actually did something with his life.”
Objective fact: It was a completely inaccurate claim as to the origin of the illness, that caused a sharp increase of hate-crimes against Spanish people and made non-Spanish people less likely to follow lifesaving protocol if they believed they did not know any Spanish people.
My feelings: if something’s name causes more hate crimes and more contagious illness deaths, then the name is bad.
Remember, everyone knew exactly who he was, and the Republican Party selected him because he’s a narcissistic sociopath. He appealed to a great swath of the GOp base because they share those traits, and they were essentially voting for someone who exactly like themselves. Which is a perfectly narcissistic thing to do.
I mean, even later seasons he was still a bit of an asshole. He slept with Pam's mom, then dumped her at her birthday party where he found out her age. He has good moments, but he's still kinda awful.
Yeah he for real had a handful of genuinely good moments but it's clear to me his motivations were almost always selfish. He wanted the staff to like him but never critically thought about how to accomplish it. He made jokes that nobody was laughing at, threw parties nobody wanted, was casually sexist and racist, actively hurt the staff every time his incompetence was noticed by the higher ups. Scott's tots is arguably the most extreme version of this, but I would argue the vast majority of his actions are motivated in the same way without such glaringly bad consequences. I genuinely don't understand how anyone likes that character. He's not some lovable goof, he's a selfish attention seeker.
There were maybe half a dozen times his heart appeared to be in the right place, like buying pam's painting. Doesn't remotely make up for what a bad person he is.
I don't sleep well normally, but I recognize I slept WORSE during the last 2 years of his administration.
Edit: I would wake up and immediate check the news to see what's changed for the worse while I slept lol
Now I just do what I did prior, where I wake up and shower, then just chill for a minute before starting my day. On my days off, I immediate go downstairs and either do a chore or turn on a game.
Objectively, I sleep better than 2019/2020 especially.
It's definitely less stressful now. He was absolutely amazing for his capability to always hit a new low, ethically, morally, intellectually. Every time you thought he'd done or said the most reprehensible or idiotic thing possible, he always found a new way to be even worse.
He was amazing in that way, but personally I'd rather not be amazed in this way every day.
It was shameful. We've had bad presidents, immoral presidents, corrupt presidents, and not-particularly-bright presidents. We've never had one that was the worst of all of these by several magnitudes. And the fact that half of our country is too tribalistic to just be like "yeah whoops, we fucked up, this guy sucks. Dems can have the presidency for four years. We'll be back"...not even that, but that they dug in and worship the fool...
Those four years, along with this pandemic, have fundamentally altered the way I look at our country now. Things are so much worse than I had thought.
At the very end, between the election and the actual inauguration, I woke up every morning expecting him to have dropped a bomb or provoked an attack on us in the middle of the night.
I sleep a lot better. But not as good as I did pre-2016. There’s this thin layer of existential dread that permeates everything. He almost won and he might win again. And even if he doesn’t the people who voted for him are all still here.
I'm so angry sometimes with all the dumpster fire that is so much of the people and systems that run America, let alone the rest of the majority of the world, I just need to step back and find some amusement in literally anything, see a little humanity, charity, and giving for a bit, or I feel like I'm just gonna give up on everyone.
Wait.... Is this real? I thing it's a shop.... Like the content of the poster is changed. This can't be real..... How could it take so long for it to come out?
His entire presidency is so bizarrely depressing/hilarious, it’s hard to believe half of the country still thinks he’s a competent leader. Home of the brave, land of the intellectually inept.
It's even funnier watching people bend over backwards to somehow explain what he says and the level of mental gymnastics it takes to accomplish that. Oh would you look at that they're here right now!
Ah yeah, I remember watching people on /r/Conservative twist themselves into knots to explain how he really was a genius pointing out perfectly valid means of combatting the disease.
People put in so much effort to defend a moron saying moronic things. Kind of a sad way to spend your time really.
Edit: oh heck, some of these folks are showing up in this thread and making the same stupid arguments that his idiotic off the cuff remarks were actually valid and not just the uninformed ramblings of moron pretending to have something worth saying.
It's amazing the amount of effort people will put in to defend a man who cares nothing for them and would toss them under a bus for the tiniest advantage for himself. He is seriously not worth all the gaslighting effort.
Well he actually has been a sitcom character, and gameshow host... Has in home alone 2... Just never government... But has schemed to make millions off loopholes and etc etc... Sound like someone you want as president right ...
Like how did this even happen, like literally... I don't think my faith in politics will ever recover...
All these press conferences were. You clearly saw that he was not at all prepared and just tried to wing it, but as he didn't want to share the spot light, he wanted to dictate the narrative.
I live in switzerland, and even here it was basically a daily thing that newspapers told something like "look at what Trump NOW did!".
Thats why i don't get why some people say Biden is too old, we saw Trump doing dumb shit for four years, but sometimes fucking up a sentence is somehow worse? Trump changed topic 5 times without taking a breath!
My favorite was when he said the border wall with Mexico would be transparent, and explained that this would allow you to see drug smugglers throwing large sacks of drugs over the wall and avoid getting hit by them. Which several people pointed out was almost certainly a result of someone on his staff saying the wall construction process needed to be "transparent," which he took very literally.
IKR? I mean the whole year was full of crazy characters doing weird shit. Like LeBron paying millions so that thousands of felons could vote. What a year!
Edit: You people are such hypocrites. Constantly pointing your little fingers at this and that. Making fun of people. Bullying people. All while conveniently overlooking absolutely disgusting behavior.
If this was on a sitcom people would think it was too stupid to be funny. Sad part is although we may laugh at this most of it was so serious it wasn’t funny
5k
u/russellzerotohero 16d ago
This is actually so funny it’s hard to believe it’s real. He’s like a sitcom character