Tuesday open thread: Compare and contrast
Well. Yesterday was interesting. And I'm not discussing my water heater problems. (NOT a euphemism.)
A new tranche of documents surrounding Jeffrey Epstein were released. We turn to the New York Post for the titillating bits:
A Jeffrey Epstein accuser once claimed former President Donald Trump allegedly had “sexual relations” with one of her unnamed friends at the late pedophile’s New York home “on regular occasions,” according to another trove of court documents unsealed Monday.
Sarah Ransome, in a string of emails in 2016, also claimed that she had copies of tapes Epstein had made of some of his high-profile friends — including Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and British business magnate Richard Branson — allegedly having sex with an unnamed woman.
“She confided in me about her casual ‘friendship’ with Donald. Mr. Trump definitely seemed to have a thing for her and she told me how he kept going on about how he liked her ‘pert nipples,’” Ransome wrote about her friend in one email, made public when the latest batch of newly unsealed documents dropped.
I will give you a moment to clean up the emesis I'm sure was caused by that quote. Done? OK.
Do these tapes exist? Perhaps. My doubts are quite large, since if the tapes did exist certainly they would have been released by now.
But the fact of the matter is that there is only one candidate for the presidency around whom this aura of sleaze and decay adheres, and that's Donald J. Trump. We've had randy presidents before—JFK, anyone?—but Trump takes the cake. His soul and sexual morality are both disgusting cesspits. He is the exact opposite of what we should look for in a leader. And yet millions see him as God's anointed. The disconnect is so glaring that it's hard, if not impossible, to explain. Except it's not; he hates whom they hate, and that's enough.
Meanwhile, what was President Joe Biden doing yesterday? This:
The contrast couldn't be more stark. While Trump was mired in yet another of his scandals—and with anyone else just one of these outbreaks would have caused his political demise—Pres. Biden was laying out what was at stake this coming November. An Irish Catholic went into the heart of Black Protestant Christianity and preached a sermon about what America means, and how it has to be fought for. And so many of his fellow Americans don't see him as a man of faith and morals. This fact shows the poverty of much of American so-called "Christianity", and that Christ's message is very much ignored by the modern-day Sadducees.
I know which side I'm on. And it's not on the side of a disgusting pervert who raped multiple women. I believe a good majority of our fellow-citizens will agree.
This is your open thread.