First sentence of a great short story in search of an author.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said in a brief statement that “Mr. Trump and the campaign do not agree” that Clinton should be executed for treason.

A German politician has resigned her seat in the Bundestag because she lied – extensively – on her cv.

German publications “Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” (WAZ) and the “Neue Ruhr Zeitung” (NRZ) reported late on Tuesday that contrary to what her CV said, [Petra] Hinz had never acquired a higher education entrance qualification nor completed university studies in law. The lawyer for the Essen politician also confirmed that Hinz had never taken any legal exams.

In a statement published on the politician’s website, the 54-year-old’s attorney said that “in retrospect, Ms Hinz is unable to discern which reasons … compelled her at the time to lay the foundations for further inaccurate claims about her legal education and activities with the false indication about her high-school diploma.”

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UD thanks Chris.

A rock band is performing in Cleveland, and it drew some conventioneers to its show.

They booed when the band leader talked about gay rights and stuff.

“You can boo all you want, but I’m the motherfucking artist up here,” [the lead singer] told his audience…

[At one point the singer] asked [the crowd:] “Who here believes in science?”

So much booing.

With the revelation of plagiarism, Trump stands to lose the significant support he enjoyed from academics and journalists.

Ryan D. Enos
Political Scientist
Harvard

… “the life blood of this and almost all other nations,” UD always refers her readers to its explanatory urtext, The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is the great American novel in part because it captures better than any other literary work the entirely engineered, shabby dreamweaver thing that is the modern self-made – or rather made-self – American.

If you cry for poor James Gatz/Jay Gatsby at the end of that novel, dead in his pool, spare a tear for Melanija Knavs/Melania Knauss/Melania Trump/Melania whatever last name she takes after Trump divorces her… because it’s not really her fault that she read a plagiarized speech written for her (she’s not well-educated — like Gatsby, who advertises himself as “an Oxford man” but who had only a glancing acquaintance with that school, Melania claims to have graduated from college when she did not) instead of an original speech written for her. F. Scott Fitzgerald already gave us her shiny bogus world, which she had every reason to believe was shiny and bogus all the way down.

Is there a scammy, crime-tinted, er, aspect to that world? Has her husband, like Gatsby, been a little less than legit in his dealings? Well he didn’t graduate from Wharton for nothing and it’s a big bad dirty world out there, etc., etc. etc. but the main thing is that it all looks good and no one’s floating in a pool. Keep the aspidistra flying. Brazen it out.

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Yes of course there’s an ugly under the pretty. Slave Michelle provides the labor; Master Melania and her Manipulators exploit it. But after all “the Obamas don’t really belong in the White House, i.e., they didn’t legitimately achieve their current status.”

Not everybody, in other words, gets to play the Gatsby game – like say if you were really born in Kenya.

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Has damage been done to Trump’s campaign, as some observers suggest?

No. Trump’s followers are people who do not mind that their candidate correctly characterizes them as “the poorly educated.” Melania would have done damage had she attempted to disentangle, in the minds of her listeners, Slovenia, Slovakia, Slavonia, Slobodan Milošević, and Lower Slobbovia.

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UD thanks Dave.

The Washington Post introduces us to our very… unusual next first lady, who once composed part of a communist state, and who (at least Mr UD read it this way) used to smoke factory chimneys.

By all means share with me everything horrible that you know about Donald Trump. But don’t overdo it.

After many years during which he could have done a Mea Culpa, the guy who ghostwrote The Art of the Deal suddenly, on the very verge of the Republican convention, announces he’s all torn up about it.

He has launched his Remorse Tour with a New Yorker interview.

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The magazine refers to Tony Schwartz, in one of the article’s headlines, as Trump’s Boswell. The cutesy ironic reference means to flatter the magazine’s readers’ sense of themselves as highly educated and all, but really what’s the point? Does anyone think Trump was ever a wise kind literary genius for whom someone like Schwartz would act as a Boswell? Did Schwartz think that?

He must have thought something like that, since he describes himself (before remorse set in) as shocked and disappointed by Trump’s lack of a discernible inner life.

Really? And why did this guy, who describes himself as at one point in the distant past a legitimate writer, pen a book full of Trump-aggrandizing lies?

He knew that he would be making a Faustian bargain. A lifelong liberal, he was hardly an admirer of Trump’s ruthless and single-minded pursuit of profit. “It was one of a number of times in my life when I was divided between the Devil and the higher side,” he told me. He had grown up in a bourgeois, intellectual family in Manhattan, and had attended élite private schools, but he was not as wealthy as some of his classmates — and, unlike many of them, he had no trust fund. “I grew up privileged,” he said. “But my parents made it clear: ‘You’re on your own.’ ” Around the time Trump made his offer, Schwartz’s wife, Deborah Pines, became pregnant with their second daughter, and he worried that the family wouldn’t fit into their Manhattan apartment…

There are sob stories, and there are New Yorker sob stories. (And Atlantic sob stories.) How could he resist doing one of the scummiest things a writer could do? He was desperate. Although his parents paid for elite private schools, he was somehow “on your own.” While his classmates at these schools came from, let’s say, billionaire houses (like Trump’s), he came, let’s say, merely from millions.

Plus no trust fund!

Yes, he was able to live in Manhattan… but would his girls have to share a bedroom?

Given the success of their first outing, Trump approached Schwartz about a second writing project.

Feeling deeply alienated, [Schwartz said no, and] instead wrote a book called “What Really Matters,” about the search for meaning in life. After working with Trump, Schwartz writes, he felt a “gnawing emptiness” and became a “seeker,” longing to “be connected to something timeless and essential, more real.”

There’s so much bullshit here that at this point it’s tipping over into something good about Trump – an encounter with him is guaranteed to launch you on your journey of Awakening.

Tony Schwartz cashed in on Trump once; he’s cashing in again, enabled by a media culture that’ll use anything.

“There’s this idea, primarily coming from alumni and boosters, that you can put enough money into a team and turn it into a powerhouse success story,” Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College, said. “But that becomes more and more unrealistic with each passing year. It’s a fool’s errand, but people are crazy about football, so they keep trying.”

The trend, Zimbalist said, is predominantly located in the southern United States, where the “culture is very football dominant.”

… In its first season as an FBS team, Georgia State won zero games. The following year, it won one. Last season, the team won six of its 13 games… [A]verage attendance plummeted from the previous season’s 15,000 to 10,000.

… “I think we’re right where we should be from a competitive standpoint,” [said Georgia State’s AD].

… “It’s almost impossible to make this leap [to big-time football],” Zimbalist said. “It’s not rational to think otherwise. But if rationality was all that was at play here, this would have stopped a long time ago.”

… “[In the South, there’s the feeling that] if you don’t have a football team, then you’re somehow not a real campus, [said Mark Nagel, a sports management professor at the University of South Carolina,] and you are not on par with other schools. That emotion takes control.”

[M]any of the usual suspects just cannot bring themselves to join this year’s [Republican National Convention] — either out of principle, self-preservation, or an overwhelming sense of nausea.

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‘Saturday the children were playing ducks and drakes and, like them, I wanted to throw a stone into the sea. Just at that moment I stopped, dropped the stone and left. Probably I looked somewhat foolish or absent-minded, because the children laughed behind my back. So much for external things. What has happened inside of me has not left any clear traces. I saw something which disgusted me, but I no longer know whether it was the sea or stone…

… I wanted to vomit. And since that time, the Nausea has not left me, it holds me…

… I was nowhere, I was floating. I was not surprised, I knew it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross, absurd being. You couldn’t even wonder where all that sprang from, or how it was that a world came into existence, rather than nothingness. It didn’t make sense, the World was everywhere, in front, behind. There had been nothing before it. Nothing. There had never been a moment in which it could not have existed. That was what worried me: of course there was no reason for this flowing larva to exist. But it was impossible for it … not to exist. It was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the midst of the World, eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was only an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in this immensity: this nothingness had not come before existence, it was an existence like any other and appeared after many others. I shouted “filth! what rotten filth!”‘

‘I work for United Airlines, and I’ll take your fantasies about killing powerful women up up up and away.’

… Backed Out.

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But – good news! They’re still going to be able to keep it in the family: The attorney who put Ivanka’s husband’s father in jail will be speaking.

John McCain’s Republican challenger in Arizona, a woman named Kelli Ward, has long believed in a federal plot to poison Americans with the chemical trails some aircraft leave in the air.

Yet Ward’s keen sense of the endurance of certain visual effects fails to extend to the traces old attack ads leave in the mediasphere. Maybe Ward thought Mitt Romney’s 2008 attack ads against McCain had vanished into the Celestial Contrail and become fair game… Whatever her motives, her campaign simply, er, repurposed them…?

Kelli Ward, one of U.S. Sen. John McCain’s three Republican primary challengers, may have found a way to overcome her campaign-funding struggles: just tack her name at the end of an old Mitt Romney attack ad against McCain from the 2008 presidential race.

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Stealing and signing with your own name is a gesture quintessentially postmodern, an instance of Appropriation Art, in which artists like Sherrie Levine re-photograph canonical early twentieth century photographs and sign them with their own name. But just as Sherrie had to deal with a bit of copyright static, so Kelli is in receipt of legal correspondence from a Romney rep. Something about “blatant infringement” of “protected work”…?

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“How could anyone do anything so dumb?” asked Mr UD this morning when I told him about it. “Didn’t she know she’d be caught?”

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Without wanting to get too conspiratorial (in this UD defers to Ward and her man Donald Trump), UD will point out that if you reshuffle the letters in KELLI WARD you get (roughly)

LIKED RAWLS.

I.e., Ward is a secret John Rawls lover. John Rawls! The famous left-liberal political philosopher! Could Ward’s inner struggle between right and left account for her otherwise unaccountable behavior?

Extremely good writers can take what you know, re-charge it, and scare you.

Cleveland, today.

Germany, 1979 and 1990.