Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running as the Republican nominee for US Senate in that state, praised President Donald Trump with a joke on Wednesday that appeared to kid on the square about him changing the name of the Pacific Ocean — much as he tried to change Lake Ontario’s name to Lake America and the Gulf of Mexico’s name to the Gulf of America.
“Have you all ever heard that this is the most important election of your lifetime?” Paxton said. “Anybody ever heard that? Well, you know what? I have been thinking about that, that, you know, why do we always say that? And you know what? I want you to think about this. The Continental Divide in the United States: if a drop of rain falls one inch or more on the right side, on the east side, it ends up in the Atlantic Ocean. If it falls one inch on the other side or more, it ends up in the Pacific Ocean…”
He then quipped, “…unless we’ve renamed it. I think that’s possible.”
After that joke, Paxton said, “This election, we’re not talking about red versus blue, we’re not talking about a moderate Democrat. We’re talking about the constitutional republic, freedom, the Bill of Rights. We are talking about capitalism. On the other side, we are talking about communism, socialism, the government controlling it. That’s why these elections are really mattering, and they matter, unfortunately, right here in Texas. So speaking of James Talarico.”
In addition to disappointing far right commentators like podcaster Joe Rogan, experts have explained how Trump’s insulting posture toward Canada has not only failed to intimidate them, but actually galvanized them.
Speaking with AlterNet in September, Dr. Richard D. Wolff — professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst – explained why.
“I am not surprised that our government is surprised,” Wolff told AlterNet. “Our government is busy strong-arming people around the world in every way that it can, militarily, economically, politically, and discovering time after time to their amazement, if you take them seriously, that the folks are going to resist. And that’s what’s going to happen.”
Rogan argued that Trump made that decision to distract from his failures with the war in Iran War.
“The real reason Trump made the move, Rogan said, is to ‘distract you from the fact that we’re in a war that we can’t win in Iran,'” Rogan argued. “Rogan went on to assert that the renaming ‘doesn’t make any sense’ otherwise. ‘Like, who cares? It’s Lake Ontario. It’s a good name. We’ve had that name forever.'”