Postcards from post-America

As you know, LITD is strongly anti-Squirrel-Hair, but this is pathetic. Students at Emory University discovered the phrase "Trump 2016" scrawled in chalk in various places around campus, and took their traumatization to the highest level of the school's administrative bureaucracy:

The school’s president, James W. Wagner, was “called into the board room by students and listened at the head of the table while they described how the appearance of the chalkings made them feel,” the Emory Wheel reports. (In case you’re wondering, those feelings included “frustration,” “fear,” trauma, and copious tears.) 

“What do we have to do for you to listen to us?” the students asked Wagner, to which he responded, to his credit, “Good gracious! How on earth are you going to survive in the real world, you goofy participation-trophy loons?” 

Just kidding! Here is how the university president actually responded: “What actions should I take?” Wagner later followed up with a sympathetic campus-wide email, paired with a promise to review footage from security cameras in an attempt to find and punish the pro-Trump chalkers. Emory’s student government, meanwhile, has offered emergency counseling for traumatized students.

As we know, the pop-culture machinery of post-America would have us believe that Austin's annual SXSW conference / festival is the last word in hip, but this year, gun-related incidents involving hip-hop crowds are proving a real bring-down.

If you like your sociocultural observations unvarnished, this tidbit from the comment thread under the linked article may be your cup of tea:

It is always amusing when the smug leftist pukes get to meet the real deal people who actually live the culture they created. It is a hard world, and watching these restive animals slap around sissy leftists for fun gives me a type of prurient enjoyment I know must be sin. 

Old hands from the foreign-policy field are not too impressed with the team Squirrel-Hair has assembled to advise him in that area:

Donald Trump’s decision to release the names of five foreign-policy advisers on Monday may have been meant to dispel mounting anxiety over the GOP front-runner’s unfathomable worldview. If that was his intent, the move failed miserably. Far from assuaged, many in Washington’s foreign-policy crowd are now more apprehensive than ever about the people who have Trump’s ear. Most had never heard of any of the advisers, and what they have heard hasn’t exactly inspired confidence. Nearly all say that Trump’s move to surround himself with neophytes and fringe players suggests he doesn’t grasp how Washington’s network of decision-makers collaborate on important global decisions. Should he become president, most believe that lack of understanding would bode ill for America’s geopolitical future.  

And when you've lost the Morning Joe crowd . . . 

The panel on MSNBC’s Morning Joe hit President Obama hard on Thursday for his response to the terrorist bombings in Brussels, Belgium.

Obama, who was in Cuba at the time of the attack, devoted little time to talking about the attack when he spoke to reporters. After Obama left Cuba, he traveled to Argentina where he was seen doing the tango at a State Dinner.

“I was critical yesterday, I think of the optics of the baseball game. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have gone, I feel like it should have been handled differently, everything about it,” host Mika Brzezinski said.

“The advance person who let him do the tango, that person ought to be looking for work on somebody’s campaign very, very far away. That was a tremendous mistake,” said Richard Haas, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Guest co-host Nicolle Wallace was less kind to Obama.

“I think Michael Hayden offered the best explanation for it. These were not advance staff gaffes, I mean it’s so easy to blame the staff, that’s not who this was. This was Obama’s policy choice. His policy choice was to proceed with everything on his schedule and not to react to the threat of terrorism, and that is his prerogative,” Wallace said.

“It puts him vastly out of step with the entire American public, not just Republicans. You heard Democrats yesterday, increasingly uncomfortable with the choices he makes at a moment of crisis.”

And that's how it is on the land mass between Mexico and Canada.