Other people's words, part...3? 4? Difficult to say.

As you know, sometimes--okay, I guess it's happened once or twice in the past--I like to quote Other People's Words from blog comments that would otherwise be lost to time (I mean, they still are, but, you know, slightly less so, I guess). I feel jealous for not having written them myself. I guess I could just go ahead and take credit for them, really--who would ever know?--but I'm just so darned scrupulous! This is a comment here, by Jordan Orlando:

What struck me in that thread [this tweet], especially, was this:

Trump says "we had Obamacare repealed and replaced," and the crowd cheers because they think he's listing an accomplishment, but then Trump finishes the sentence and says it didn't happen, because "we didn't get one Democrat vote."

Because, of course, it's the key to how this all works: Trump's supporters have no idea what's going on, what's real and what's not, or even what the point is supposed to be: they're like children at the dinner table, gauging the adults' conversation from the tonality since they don't know the words. And since they're sealed off from all real sources of information, it can't be fixed -- Trump can go get his nicotine fix of shouting all this nonsense about how great he is (the Trump movement is "the greatest in the history of this country; maybe of any country") and get his applause and his votes.

Seems dead right to me. I think there's a tendency to assume that, however awful we think magats and the republican party (but I repeat myself) are, there is, on some level, some rational reason for their views. Not a reason we would agree with or even think was minimally sane, but something that's not entirely disconnected to the world around them. NOPE. Sure, they are the way they are because of reasons that, at some point in time, could be comprehended, but not anymore. I dunno; maybe this is just a more long-winded way of saying they're part of a cult, which I've been doing for some time, but eh. I like the way this was phrased, so I'm reprinting it here.