White's not right
If you thought there was a war on Christmas before, it's nothing compared to the trashing the left has laid on Melania Trump for her part in the decoration of the White House for Christmas.
The first lady received numerous compliments for her snow- and white-themed interior scenes, but haters have to hate so the decor also received a number of mean-spirited remarks. Trump's white, calf-length dress, shown in photos shot by photographers invited to the mansion for the occasion, only seemed to make things worse.
Comments ranged from "satanic" to "horror show" to "creepy." Vox and The Daily Beast termed it "The Nightmare Before Christmas," and the New Yorker called her look "Wicked Queen." Indeed, the New Yorker said she'd transformed from "fairy-tale prisoner to wicked queen."
Twitter haters evoked the "Halloween" movies, "a production of Macbeth," a "Suspiria" remake, "Pan's Labyrinth," "It," or Stranger Things" and a sequel to "Black Swan."
It's one thing to criticize an elected president for his policies, but heaping scorn on the first lady and other members of the family (see below) - who are not making policy as former first lady Michelle Obama did by creating an expensive and wasteful school lunch program - is reprehensible.
That the best you've got?
Trump Derangement Syndrome also was alive and well at Newsweek last week when it claimed Ivanka Trump "plagiarize[d] one of her own speeches."
Say what?
Indeed, the formerly respected news magazine criticized the daughter of President Donald Trump for reusing lines from some of her previous speeches. However, plagiarism, as writer Chris Riotta certainly knows, requires the use by one person of the words or ideas of someone else.
"Several lines the 36-year-old delivered Tuesday had been directly pulled from her poorly attended November 2 speech in Tokyo, where she attended the World Assembly for Women alongside Japanese President Shinzo Abe," he said.
What Trump did is hardly unorthodox. Public figures who speak a lot often reuse speeches or parts of speeches before different audiences.
Riotta acknowledged such in the midst of his snark, but, in the continuing media need to drag down everything Trump, said her words proved she had nothing "else to say about women's empowerment" and "show[s] where the first daughter's focus lies in the White House."
Cry, the beloved college
College is hard, but for some of today's grievance-seeking, shadow-wary, micro-aggression-charging students it's even harder.
So the University of California, Berkeley student newspaper has created something just for them - an interactive map of crying experiences. That's right, the newspaper is offering students an opportunity to record the places on campus where they've shed tears.
"If you're comfortable," of course, the newspaper adds. "Also include why you were crying, whether you were happy or sad."
As of last week, the map had some 360 submissions. They included an admitted instance of drug use, leaving the poster "mentally unable to study for my midterm that week," "editing is hard," and suffering an "existential crisis about where I fit in the world and this intense political culture we are currently in ... right before ... midterms."
No post mentioned being triggered by a Trump appearance on television, a sign announcing a conservative speaker or the inability for an intersex student to find an accommodating restroom, but there's still time.
Lib catfight
MSNBC host Joy Reid and Jane Sanders, the wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., got into a Twitter catfight last week when the former was attempting to make a point, amid the current climate of sexual abuse claims, about the lack of "credible national authority figures."
Oh, "one could argue that Barack Obama is" a national authority figure, she considered, "but even he can't reach a percentage of the population that had become hardcore ethnonationalist. Certainly the current president isn't one."
A Twitter follower suggested Sanders, but Reid, a Clinton supporter in 2016, wasn't having any of it.
"Um ... I get that he has a hardcore following," she tweeted, "but his own attitudes toward women, from his weird early writings to his physical dismissal of women in his presence (including his own wife) make that an incredibly dubious prospect."
In the rabbit-eared Washington, D.C., milieu, though, word gets around. Not appreciating the slap, Jane Sanders tweeted back.
"I didn't answer your biased reporting about Bernie during the last 2 years," she wrote. "But don't ever use me to demean my husband. I am very happy & very proud to be Bernie's wife. Your perception couldn't be more wrong. Have you ever talked with him? You've never spoken w/me."
There was no word if Reid had another response, but it did appear "The View" had two replacement candidates if any of their various left-wing panelists flew the coop.