Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Donald Trump Junior Is Choking On His Skittles.

The infamous Trump Junior Skittles Tweet. 
You have to admire Donald Trump Jr, the son of the Republican presidential candidate.

I don't know if admire is the right word exactly, but it certainly is an accomplishment to make so many mistakes in one little Tweet.

As you might have heard, the Tweet from Trump Junior heard around the world this week showed a bowl of Skittles with a caption that said: "If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem."

OK, let's list all that went wrong here:

1. The Skittles metaphor Junior used seems to have originated a guy named Julius Streicher back in the late 1930s. He was a dedicated Nazi who was hanged for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg back in 1946, says The Intercept.

Streicher wrote a children's book that compared poisonous mushrooms to Jews. In his awful book, a mother tells her son, "Just a single poisonous mushroom can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire (nation.)"

Yeah, lovely.

2. The guy who took the photo of the bowl of Skittles in Junior's Tweet is David Kittos of Guilford, Britain. Kittos was himself a refugee, having been forced to flee Cyprus in 1974, says the BBC.

Kittos uploaded the Skittles bowl photo to Flickr in 2010, and that's where the Trumpsters apparently found it. Kittos made it abundantly clear he did not give the Trumps or anyone else permission to use the Skittles photo, and he vehemently opposes using the photo the way it was used.

"In 1974, when I was six years old, I was a refugee from the Turkish occupation of Cyprus so I would never approve the use of this image against refugees," Kittos told the BBC

Kittos is highly pessimistic that Trumps will take the photo down, or that he will be paid for his troubles. Kitto's pessimistic is certainly realistic, let me tell ya.

3. The timing of the Skittles Tweet suggests Junior was reacting to that idiot who set off the bomb in Chelsea, Manhattan last weekend, injuring 29 people.

The moron bomber was not a Syrian refugee but a naturalized American citizen born in Afghanistan. So this particular incident had noting to do with Syrian refugees.

4. Candy companies tend to be pretty friendly outfits. So if you get candy manufacturer mad at you, you're doing pretty badly.

Mars, the parent company of Skittles, felt the need to spell out the obvious to Junior in this terse statement on Twitter: "Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. It's an inappropriate analogy. We respectfully refrain from further comment as that could be misinterpreted as marketing." 

A classy corporate response to a decidedly unclassy Trump Junior remark.

5. Junior doesn't understand how the First Amendment works. On the top of his Twitter feed Wednesday morning, he has this pinned Tweet from March: "Liberals love the first amendment until you say something they don't agree with."

No, nobody is saying that Junior can't discuss Skittles. But just as he has the First Amendment right to be stupid with Skittles and refugees, we have the First Amendment right to say Junior is stupid with his Skittles and refugees.

6. As is often the case, Stephen Colbert had the last word last night. He noted Junior brought up Skittles, not M&M's.

Colbert said: "Of course the Trump family prefers Skittles because there are no brown ones."

Ouch!

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