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In the category of: This was predictable.
Trump slams media amid blame game for package bombs
The finger-pointing comes as authorities are investigating more suspicious packages sent to Joe Biden and Robert De Niro.
“A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,” Trump tweeted on Thursday. “It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday morning, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders forcefully pushed back against the idea that Trump deserves any blame.
“The president is certainly not responsible for sending suspicious packages, any more than Bernie Sanders was for a supporter shooting up a baseball practice,” the press secretary said referencing last year’s congressional baseball practice attack. The gunman was reportedly a Bernie Sanders supporter.
In the category of: One for the win column.
Ethiopia Has Its First Female President, And She’s Pretty Badass
Sahle-Work Zewde’s historic appointment comes after an unprecedented push to achieve gender balance within Ethiopia’s government.
Ethiopia’s parliament has voted in its first female president, and even though the position is considered a ceremonial one, people are excited about it.
Sahle-Work Zewde, who becomes the only woman head of state in Africa, currently serves as the under-secretary-general of the UN (the third-highest rank at the UN). She’s also the special representative to the secretary general of the African Union, and in June topped off her CV by becoming the head of the UN Office to the African Union.
In the category of: A pretty serious question.
Is it too late for peace to prevail in American politics?
As of this writing, we don’t know who sent the bombs, nor why they did so. Maybe it’s some crazed criminal who wants attention, like John Hinckley Jr. But for the moment, this sure looks like a political act: The threat those pipe bombs represents comes at what feels like a cultural tipping point, when passions are high and the potential for political violence is as conspicuous as the bad old days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Blood has already been spilled in this political environment: Heather Heyer was killed last year while protesting a white supremacist rally, and GOP Rep. Steve Scalise (La.) was grievously injured when a gunman opened fire on the Republican congressional baseball team.
If the awful, irreversible moment finally arrives — and as my colleague Ryan Cooper notes, the threat appears to be coming mostly from the right — we won’t be able to say we didn’t see it coming.
How can we stop this spiral?
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