Crud Brothers
It’s a shame that Trump couldn’t find a place for Chris Christie in his administration. The guy would fit right in: he’s fat, ugly, and a supremely accomplished liar.
But Trump is a very loyal guy, as everyone knows, and he had to stick by son-in-law Jared Kushner’s blackball of Christie for putting his father in the slams when Christie was a U.S. Attorney. I mean Trump could really identify with that; the senior Kushner was a real estate flim-flam artist and bigtime slumlord, just like Trump’s father, Fred, except that Freddie managed to stay out of jail throughout a long and corrupt career.
Christie would have made a great Secretary of the Interior; look how he saved New Jersey beaches and parks from over-use by shutting them down over the crowded Fourth of July weekend. And why shouldn’t he reward himself for that environmental bullseye by getting in a little beach time himself, even if the beach was off-limits to the rest of New Jersey’s citizens?
But then the fake news press dummied up a picture of him on the beach and when he was asked if he got any sun, he answered that he didn’t. When the pic came out, his press people said that he didn’t get any sun because he was wearing a baseball hat. Damn, that answer would do credit to Kellyanne Conway. It must have been a big baseball hat to shade all that blubber.
Word is, too, that Trump was pissed at all the press Christie got for that outing. He told Stevie Bannon that that fat bastard horned in on all the pub Trump was getting for his WWE caper. So it’s probably good that Trump left Christie to twist in the New Jersey breezes. And don’t forget Christie is the only guy in politics with a lower approval rating than Trump’s: like 13% now, which makes Trump anemic numbers look like he’s landslide popular. Don’t forget, too, that Christie is a big Springsteen fan and The Boss ain’t got no use for The Donald, which is another reason Trump left Christie to stew in the soggy Jersey meadows.
(On a personal note, Fat Boy owes me money. He cut off the $600 or $700 I was getting every year on the Homestead Rebate program, and now he’s trying to extort $300 million from my provider Horizon, which will doubtless increase the cost of my supplemental health insurance.)
Backchannel stuff: Trump has gotten a note from Vlad Putin that he’ll give him one copy of the negatives when they meet up in Hamburg if Trump will continue the agreement.
And there’s a Trump-inspired movement afoot among the slack-jawed puppets known as the Republican Congress to add a rider to the bill that will authorize the Great Mexican Wall that the contractor will also have to put an addition to Mount Rushmore with Trump’s mug next to Washington’s. There will be a bonus for getting the stone hair just right.
Finally, all government limos will now be labeled “LIMOUSINE” in all caps on all the doors after the video of Trump coming off AF One, walking right up to his limo, then hanging a right and cruising off to God knows where until one of the Secret Service guys took him by the elbow and guided him back to the car the way you guide your granny when she forgets where the bathroom is. Those arteries do have way of hardening, even Presidential arteries, hopefully.
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Terror Capitalism
My friend and blog partner Steve Dock is one of the brightest and most thoughtful people I know. Several years ago, he coined the term “Terror Capitalism,” which he defines as “A deliberate and long-term strategic and tactical use of fear, intimidation, and ideology, as well as political, state, and economic power for the benefit of an elite group who own massive capital resources.”
With the advent of the Trump regime, the time of Terror Capitalism is fully upon us, no effort now to hide it behind corporate and government rhetoric, the gloves finally off, the naked power and evil inherent in this philosophy becoming clearer by the moment. Exhibit A is the so-called Republican health care bill fashioned in secret by the slimy Mitch McConnell and his soulless all-male band of accomplices. Even among his fellow Republicans, there has been enough repugnance -- or fear of voter reprisal – that he has delayed putting to a vote legislation that would blatantly reward the upper echelons of wealth while heartlessly leaving 22 million Americans without health care. Trump himself called it “mean, mean, mean.”
If passed, that bill would condemn untold Americans to a death that could have been prevented by adequate health care. That is Terror Capitalism, pure and simple. What is more terroristic than a death threat? When the government literally holds the power of life and death over its “citizens,” they become malleable serfs, true citizens no more. The state becomes supreme, its leaders tyrants.
Ebeneezer Scrooge before his Yule epiphany was a fervent Terror Capitalist . “There is no such thing as rich enough, only poor enough,” he snapped, before his ultimate take on the poor: “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.”
In Donald Trump’s festival of cruelty, the heart of the Republican health care bill beats with an echo of Scrooge’s call to decrease the poor. In the higher reaches of Terror Capitalism, there is no room for the useless poor. Wars kill off a fair share, but a bill like McConnell’s would add a significant death toll.
Sadly, Terror Capitalism is not new in America. It has a deep and vile – and organized -- history. The so-called “robber barons,” those prototypes of Terror Capitalism, called on the Pinkerton National Detective Agency –the Pinkertons or simply the Pinks – to enforce their authoritarian capitalism by infiltrating unions, supplying guards, keeping strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and recruiting goon squads to intimidate workers.
This unholy pairing resulted in such horrors as the Homestead steel strike in Pennsylvania in 1892, a private war in which seven Pinkertons and nine steel workers died before the strike was broken, while steel mill owner Andrew Carnegie languished in luxury in his native Scotland, leaving his second in command, Henry Frick, to oversee the bloody breaking of the strike. Ironically, Carnegie and Frick are better remembered as philanthropists and model citizens, when in fact they were heavy-handed and brutal proto-Terror Capitalists.
More recently, the private military company that started as Blackwater, now known as Academi, has received more than $1 billion in government contracts despite massacring civilians in Bagdad, and was reported in The Nation to have been bought by Monsanto, long invested in “the science of death” and dedicated to producing toxins like Agent Orange, PCBs, and pesticides, as well as genetically modified seeds with which it seeks to monopolize farming worldwide. Significantly, the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation bought 500,000 shares of Monsanto for $23 million at about the same time it acquired Academi nee Blackwater.
Thus companies with 90 percent of the world market share of proprietary computing technology and 90 percent of the global transgenic seed market and most global commercial seed co-own the world’s largest independent paramilitary organization.
Vladimir Lenin said that the purpose of terrorism is to create terror.
Be very afraid.
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God Saved The Queen
This is one of those times when I’m proud to have British blood. The reason is that in her annual Queens Speech, which outlines the government’s official plans for the next two years, including state visits, Prime Minister Theresa May made no mention of any visit by Donald Trump.
So Trump doesn’t get to ride in the gold-festooned carriage he was so set on putting his big ass into until he called the P.M. and told her he wasn’t coming to England until the British public welcomed him. Judging by the large-scale protests that erupted when he was invited during Theresa May’s visit here shortly after the inauguration, that will probably be never.
Q.E.: He has our prayers. And the world’s, if I am not mistaken.
He was supposed to go this summer, then in the fall, and now he’s on the back burner for at least two blessed years. To show how delighted the British were at a prospective Trump visit, House of Commons Speaker John Bercow made a speech in which he planned to bar Trump from speaking before Parliament because of “our opposition to racism and sexism.”
Right on, John!
Civic Duty has been fortunate enough to have a smuggled audio tape of a meeting between P.M. May and Queen Elizabeth shortly after Trump’s lame-ass phone call backing out for fear of a damaged ego.
Q.E.: Good afternoon, Madame Prime Minister, what is the subject of your most welcome visit?
T.M.: Your majesty, I wanted you to be the first to know of a telephone call I received from the American president a few short minutes ago. I hurried right over.
Q.E.: Please proceed. I am all ears, to use the American phrase.
T.M.: In short, he has postponed his state visit until he can be assured of a warm welcome from the British public.
Q.E.: Then we won’t have his presence this autumn?
T.M.: Not unless the public mood changes drastically.
Q.E.: That is highly doubtful – wouldn’t you agree?
T.M.: Whole-heartedly, to speak frankly. The man has done nothing to change the public mood. Since the time of the invitation, his actions have only increased the hostility towards him. Again to speak frankly, he is an embarrassment to his country and all it has stood for over the years.
Q.E.: So true. And if I may speakly frankly, as well, I am greatly relieved. I have cringed inwardly at the prospect of being civil to such a boor and a bully. I simply cannot understand the American fascination with a man who knows no boundaries to his boasting and lying.
T.M.: I think it has a great deal to do with both the American addiction to stupid television and the anger that the gap between the so-called one-percenters and the American public is so great as to be virtually unbridgeable. Of course, even in the short time of his presidency, he has done little to address this chasm and many of his appointments and actions have only added to the problem.
Q.E.: So true. How do you plan to react to this welcome news?
T.M.: It had occurred to me not to make any mention of such a visit during my annual Queens Speech.
Q.E.: Splendid. That will signal at least two years without him and I’m fairly certain that Mr. Trump will do nothing to change the feelings toward him here during that time.
T.M.: Agreed. And, of course, there is always the possibility that he won’t be president by then.
Q.E.: My thoughts, too. My hopes, actually – entre nous, of course.
T.M.: Mine, too, your majesty. Mr. Robert Mueller is a very tenacious investigator.
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Joe From Scranton
Joe Biden will be 78 in 2020. Is that too old to be president? I don’t think so. I’m 79 right now – 80 in December – and I’d be a better president now than Trump is. I’m in better shape, I’m not a criminal, and I give a fuck about America. Also, I’m not ugly and my hair is normal. I do wear baseball hats, but not with writing on them.
So Joe Biden would be cool in 2020 from what I can see.
A Biden story: I eat breakfast a lot in a place called Harry’s Corner across from the Ferris wheel on the Wildwood Boardwalk. My usual waiter is a dude named Jim who is 70 and smokes a lot of cigarettes, bless him. We both detest Trump and trade all the bad news we can about him.
Jim used to manage a roller skating rink in Delaware and Joe Biden would bring his family there a lot and he and Jim got to be friendly. The first time he came after being elected V.P., Jim called him “Mr. Vice President.”
Joe Biden pointed a finger at Jim and said, “Don’t ever call me that again. The name is Joe.”
Joe is from Scranton. I used to go there on business a lot and I always looked forward to it. Nice feeling to the town and the people were the biggest part of it.
I think if Joe Biden had run in 2016 he’d be president now. But I think he was smart enough to see that the party’s fickle heart was set on Hillary and that he’d just muddy the waters by jumping in. His son Beau’s death was the reason he gave for not running, and I guess we have to accept that.
Anyhow, I think if Joe Biden runs in 2020 and hopefully gets the nomination and faces off in debate against the clown that Trump ultimately is, Biden will eat his lunch and show the public what Trump looks like when faced with a real, authentic candidate with some balls instead of the Republican jerkoffs Trump pushed around in the debates in 2016.
Hillary Clinton’s debate persona was a bit above it all, sort of an “Oh, Donald” schoolmarm scolding a schoolyard bully. Trump might have lost those debates, but he didn’t lose any voters.
Joe Biden has been around all the political blocks and if Donald Trump wanted to get down and dirty, he would give as good as he got – probably better. Trump’s base would see once and for all that they’d been conned, that this is the way a real guy behaves. The contrast would always be there between a jive-ass little rich kid from Queens and a guy from Scranton who took the train to D.C. and served his country as a Senator and a vice president of such stature that Barack Obama choked up when he awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The two men were friends. Can you imagine Trump choking up over anything about White Mike Spence? And they could never be friends because Donald Trump is who he is.
Tell you what: if Joe Biden runs in 2020, I’m available as a running mate.
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Witch Hunting
First, a rhetorical question? Has life gotten better for any Americans since Donald Trump’s inauguration? (That’s excluding Trump family members and billionaire swampers.)
How come no rallies lately, or did that bizarre sycophant all-star cabinet meeting count as a rally, even though no one was wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball hat?
When’s the last time Trump was in Mar-A-Largo?
Bunker time, baby? Trump’s all lawyered up, and now his lawyer, Michael Cohen, has hired his own lawyer, Stephen Ryan, in preparation for his – Cohen’s – testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on September 5.
White Mike Pence has hired his own high dollar lawyer and at least is paying for it himself.
The invisible hand of Special Counsel Robert Mueller is stirring a lot of pots and he has made it known finally that Trump himself is being investigated in a “significant” manner for obstruction of justice. That is about as heavy duty as it gets.
And Trump’s shit is getting weaker by the minute. He has tweeted that this is “the single greatest witch hunt in history led by some bad and conflicted people.” Wow. What, though, are “bad and conflicted people?” Last I looked, Robert Mueller served 12 years as the spotless Director of the FBI but then again maybe he once yelled at his dog and then felt sorry for it, making him both bad and conflicted in Trumpian terms.
As to the greatest witch hunt, I guess Trump was absent the day they went over the Joe McCarthy era. It is sort of a simple-minded mantra, this constant prattle about a witch hunt. Even his dingus-faced sons are throwing it out there like it’s a magic term their father discovered and they are now flapping their slack parrot jaws in cheap imitation of daddy.
You can only play the same note so long before it falls on deaf ears or –worse – on irritated ears. The electorate is reacting to Trump’s incessant whines by these numbers, according to a very recent AP/NORC Center for Public Affairs poll: 35% approve of whatever he thinks he’s doing and a whopping 64% disapprove. By the time all this sinks into the sunset, Donald Trump is going to make Richard Nixon look like the Statue of Liberty.
Let’s look a little closer at witch hunts, shall we, in terms of results? Twenty people got executed up in old Mass., 19 by hanging. Fourteen were women. Hmm … seems they had no problem with hanging male witches – warlocks, for the record. Of course, the evidence was as flimsy as Donald Trump’s comb-over.
That’s going to be the difference here when the smoke clears. This so-called “witch hunt” is going to uncover solid evidence that our president actively sought to obstruct justice. Think about that. Justice is the cornerstone of our republic, and the man entrusted with the fortunes of the country sought to undermine its very underpinnings. That’s close to treason.
All these separate and ongoing witch hunts are going to lead to the slippery warlock known as Donald Trump and the noose will be braided and the gallows waiting.
Step right up, sucker.
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Snake Eyes
So flattered. Carmine “The Snake” Persico, long head of the Colombo crime family, sent a nice note saying he got many compliments from his associates and government officials he does business with about the Civic Duty column in which he was kind enough to provide mob nicknames for President Trump himself (”Donnie Two-Scoops”) and several cabinet officials.
Mr. Persico followed the note with a phone call in which he revealed with some pride that he has been retained by the Trump administration as a PAID CONSULTANT for Personal Presidential Protocol.
Civic Duty took the liberty of taping the conversation and what follows is an edited version because of space constraints.
CD: That’s great news, Carmine!
CP: Fuckin’ right. Nice to finally get some credit here – and some dough. Jesus, we been advisin’ Donnie’s family since back in the day with his old man. Always on the eye, though. Freddy was a cheap old fuck. This way Donnie just gets a government check cut for services rendered. No problem.
CD: Cool. Did they give you any assignments yet for – what’s it called? –Personal Presidential Protocol?
CP: Yeah. That. I just tell him how to act and all that. You see that cabinet meeting?
CD: Not really. Read a lot about it, though. They said it was strange. Bizarre.
CP: Bullshit. That was class, man. That was me. I told him what to do. Make these motherfuckers sit up and take notice.
CD: What do you mean?
CP: I mean first we was goin’ to make them all kneel and kiss his necktie, but then that Ivanka said that was too Catholic and being’s her and what’s-his-name? – Jarold? -- are Jews maybe we should just go around the room like those Pilgrims do and have everybody just say how much they worship him and he’s the greatest and they’re humble and all that?
CD: Pilgrims? You mean Quakers?
CP: Yeah. Them. And I told him to just sit there and nod at them and give them a little smile when they really went overboard. Like he knows what’s in their minds and hearts and this is no big surprise and it’s actually what he should be hearing from everybody. Real quiet shit like “The Godfather,” you know, when Brando was just sitting there at the wedding and they were all kissing his ass.
CD: That was impressive, I guess, I mean with the President. Nobody ever saw anything like that with all these grown men just telling him he was like some kind of king or religious leader.
CP: Yeah. Yeah. Look, I had my own personal consigliere write down what each one of ‘em was supposed to say and I even had some guys in the back of the room making sure they stuck to the script, you know?
CD: And then he was laying out his accomplishments.
CP: Yeah. Yeah. Where do you think he got that Roosevelt idea? That was me. See, I always end my meetings with a little pep talk. I told him just to wing it. Jesus, I didn’t think he was serious when he was sayin’ all the stuff he done and how nobody ever did so much before and then when I come up to him after and gave him the old okey-doke about what a good bullshitter he is he gave me a funny look and said, “What bullshit?”
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Wonder in Donaldland
George Washington is supposed to have said he couldn’t tell a lie in reference to chopping down a mythical cherry tree.
It would seem that our current president is totally stymied when it comes to telling the truth. It just can’t get past his teeth. They clamp down on the truth and force it back into his lungs where it dies of asphyxiation.
I surveyed as many newspapers – here and abroad – as I could stand after James Comey’s devastating testimony last week and the word “Liar” was so prominent in two-thirds of their headlines that I thought they were reviewing “Pinocchio.”
Can you imagine? Barack Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize and that class act is followed by a buffoon who is labeled a liar the world over by a man whose business it has been his whole career to catch out liars. The Director of the FBI is by definition an expert on liars of every hue and stripe. Trump was easy pickings.
This whole Trump outfit is chockablock with liars – clumsy, stupid liars, it would seem. Doubtless they take their cue from our Liar In Chief. Jeff Sessions, the guy who is our chief law enforcement officer as Attorney General, had to recuse himself from any involvement in the unfolding Russian scandal when it turns out he lied about his dealings with the Russians. James Comey hinted in his testimony that there is more to Sessions’ recusal than has been presented. Sessions jumped up and swore to clear his honor by testifying before the Senate committee. What honor?
Crazy Mike Flynn didn’t even last a month as National Security Advisor when he was caught up in a bunch of lies.
Now Trump is volunteering to testify in open forum about all those lies he said Comey told. Yeah, that will happen right around the time the Great wall of Mexico is finished.
Public, shameless lying in the face of all truth is the new norm in the Trump White House. And there is no Big Lie. It’s just lie after lie about everything from inauguration crowd sizes to the Mayor of London’s response to a national tragedy. Nothing is not fair game to this symphony of lies. It is a bottomless well of prevarication. An impenetrable veil.
This presidential tissue of lies both bolsters his so-called “base” in their blithe belief of Trump as messiah, and induces among many others of all political stripes a sort of borderline ennui, of being worn down by the sheer density and determination of Presidential lies. Of course, too, Trump’s lies are ironically the ties that bind much of the resistance against him, both organized and personal.
So for now we live with the lies and give Donald Trump sufficient rope and trust in the integrity of Robert Mueller.
Trump will mostly likely not be tried for treason, but in some very basic ways he has committed treason against the American spirit. Trump is one embodiment of what my partner Stephen Dock has termed “terror capitalism” and his basic disregard for the middle and working classes – if there are indeed any such classes remaining – is manifest in everything he legislates for and privately endorses. His only friends wear very expensive suits and know well the temples of Wall Street. His goal seems to be the ultimate corruption of whatever governmental bastions of tradition and honor might remain. Thank God he is as incompetent as he is, so the government just grinds and silently rolls on while its titular leader wanders deeper into the swamp from which few return.
Trump’s America is a nasty, disappointed, unsmiling has-been and a laughingstock among the slick foreigners who daily take advantage of American weakness and self-inflicted disadvantage. It’s a paranoid loner who trusts no one and never sleeps, like Trump himself. He has sold this country way short to itself.
We’ve been through worse, though, and both survived and thrived. America will take some passing notice of the inevitable downfall of this Trumpian aberration and go on about its business, strange and dark as that business can be.
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Impeachment Symphony
Some housekeeping first: I wonder if anyone under his pup tent told Donald Trump that Barack Obama was named the most popular person in the world for the seventh consecutive year? Doubt it … dead messengers and all that. Hope he found out, though, because it would go right up his bloated ass.
On a personal note, my father worked his way through Wharton undergrad at night during the depression as a male secretary during the day; he could type 120 words a minute on a manual machine. I’m proud of that because Trump went to Wharton undergrad, too, and the school disavowed Trump very early on in a scathing denunciation of all his sick and twisted values.
The Comey testimony was interesting and significant on several levels. First, Trump had his sleazy personal lawyer issue a statement calling the testimony a “victory” for Trump. When you are called a liar before the entire nation and your honor is repeatedly questioned, it takes a very irrational point of view to consider that anything but a moral condemnation, yet alone a victory. But claim it they did.
It was disappointing in the extreme, though, to hear James Comey demur when asked why he didn’t simply tell Donald Trump that he was totally out of line when he had several opportunities. It seems that political conscience doth make cowards of even a man entrusted with the nation’s vigilance and security. Comey’s excuses were weak and hazy, but that is the way of things in today’s political climate.
His minions tried to keep Trump busy enough so that he wouldn’t tweet-off during Comey’s testimony, but his vampire son Donald, Jr., he of the dead eyes and deader soul, pinch-hit with some lame tweets that sounded like first grade ya-ya-yas. His sons are thin-lipped, bloodless sycophants who take great pride in having their photos taken with the defenseless animals they delight in killing.
An impeachment to me is a great free-form political and ethical symphony, and perhaps history will look on the Comey testimony as the overture to the Trump impeachment.
Under the less than stellar questioning of the long-winded and in the case of John McCain, surreal, senators, Comey’s testimony produced the leitmotifs that could well build into the full symphony of impeachment.
He avoided certain questions as not apropos for a public forum, leading to the conclusion that in closed session more, probably of a classified nature, would be revealed. He hinted that there was more to the reclusion of Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions than has so far been revealed.
The notion of a White House taping system was broached, bringing to front of mind the downfall of our great paragon of Presidential Dishonor, Richard Millhaus Nixon.
Time and again, James Comey referenced Special Counsel Robert Mueller, calling him Director Mueller as a reminder of his former long and honorable career as FBI Director. To me, Mueller is both composer and conductor of the Impeachment Symphony to come. He will orchestrate as he investigates, letting the emerging melody of corruption and collusion take him where it will, slowly and meticulously building a panoply of inescapable and indictable malfeasance at the highest level.
And this great American Symphony of Justice will hopefully begin to cleanse and purge the nation of the vast and dark stain that has been cast by a man and his accomplices who put personal and political gain totally above the slightest considerations of patriotism and selflessness.
And there will be honor again in the land.
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Crud Brothers
It’s a shame that Trump couldn’t find a place for Chris Christie in his administration. The guy would fit right in: he’s fat, ugly, and a supremely accomplished liar.
But Trump is a very loyal guy, as everyone knows, and he had to stick by son-in-law Jared Kushner’s blackball of Christie for putting his father in the slams when Christie was a U.S. Attorney. I mean Trump could really identify with that; the senior Kushner was a real estate flim-flam artist and bigtime slumlord, just like Trump’s father, Fred, except that Freddie managed to stay out of jail throughout a long and corrupt career.
Christie would have made a great Secretary of the Interior; look how he saved New Jersey beaches and parks from over-use by shutting them down over the crowded Fourth of July weekend. And why shouldn’t he reward himself for that environmental bullseye by getting in a little beach time himself, even if the beach was off-limits to the rest of New Jersey’s citizens?
But then the fake news press dummied up a picture of him on the beach and when he was asked if he got any sun, he answered that he didn’t. When the pic came out, his press people said that he didn’t get any sun because he was wearing a baseball hat. Damn, that answer would do credit to Kellyanne Conway. It must have been a big baseball hat to shade all that blubber.
Word is, too, that Trump was pissed at all the press Christie got for that outing. He told Stevie Bannon that that fat bastard horned in on all the pub Trump was getting for his WWE caper. So it’s probably good that Trump left Christie to twist in the New Jersey breezes. And don’t forget Christie is the only guy in politics with a lower approval rating than Trump’s: like 13% now, which makes Trump anemic numbers look like he’s landslide popular. Don’t forget, too, that Christie is a big Springsteen fan and The Boss ain’t got no use for The Donald, which is another reason Trump left Christie to stew in the soggy Jersey meadows.
(On a personal note, Fat Boy owes me money. He cut off the $600 or $700 I was getting every year on the Homestead Rebate program, and now he’s trying to extort $300 million from my provider Horizon, which will doubtless increase the cost of my supplemental health insurance.)
Backchannel stuff: Trump has gotten a note from Vlad Putin that he’ll give him one copy of the negatives when they meet up in Hamburg if Trump will continue the agreement.
And there’s a Trump-inspired movement afoot among the slack-jawed puppets known as the Republican Congress to add a rider to the bill that will authorize the Great Mexican Wall that the contractor will also have to put an addition to Mount Rushmore with Trump’s mug next to Washington’s. There will be a bonus for getting the stone hair just right.
Finally, all government limos will now be labeled “LIMOUSINE” in all caps on all the doors after the video of Trump coming off AF One, walking right up to his limo, then hanging a right and cruising off to God knows where until one of the Secret Service guys took him by the elbow and guided him back to the car the way you guide your granny when she forgets where the bathroom is. Those arteries do have way of hardening, even Presidential arteries, hopefully.
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Terror Capitalism
My friend and blog partner Steve Dock is one of the brightest and most thoughtful people I know. Several years ago, he coined the term “Terror Capitalism,” which he defines as “A deliberate and long-term strategic and tactical use of fear, intimidation, and ideology, as well as political, state, and economic power for the benefit of an elite group who own massive capital resources.”
With the advent of the Trump regime, the time of Terror Capitalism is fully upon us, no effort now to hide it behind corporate and government rhetoric, the gloves finally off, the naked power and evil inherent in this philosophy becoming clearer by the moment. Exhibit A is the so-called Republican health care bill fashioned in secret by the slimy Mitch McConnell and his soulless all-male band of accomplices. Even among his fellow Republicans, there has been enough repugnance -- or fear of voter reprisal – that he has delayed putting to a vote legislation that would blatantly reward the upper echelons of wealth while heartlessly leaving 22 million Americans without health care. Trump himself called it “mean, mean, mean.”
If passed, that bill would condemn untold Americans to a death that could have been prevented by adequate health care. That is Terror Capitalism, pure and simple. What is more terroristic than a death threat? When the government literally holds the power of life and death over its “citizens,” they become malleable serfs, true citizens no more. The state becomes supreme, its leaders tyrants.
Ebeneezer Scrooge before his Yule epiphany was a fervent Terror Capitalist . “There is no such thing as rich enough, only poor enough,” he snapped, before his ultimate take on the poor: “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.”
In Donald Trump’s festival of cruelty, the heart of the Republican health care bill beats with an echo of Scrooge’s call to decrease the poor. In the higher reaches of Terror Capitalism, there is no room for the useless poor. Wars kill off a fair share, but a bill like McConnell’s would add a significant death toll.
Sadly, Terror Capitalism is not new in America. It has a deep and vile – and organized -- history. The so-called “robber barons,” those prototypes of Terror Capitalism, called on the Pinkerton National Detective Agency –the Pinkertons or simply the Pinks – to enforce their authoritarian capitalism by infiltrating unions, supplying guards, keeping strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and recruiting goon squads to intimidate workers.
This unholy pairing resulted in such horrors as the Homestead steel strike in Pennsylvania in 1892, a private war in which seven Pinkertons and nine steel workers died before the strike was broken, while steel mill owner Andrew Carnegie languished in luxury in his native Scotland, leaving his second in command, Henry Frick, to oversee the bloody breaking of the strike. Ironically, Carnegie and Frick are better remembered as philanthropists and model citizens, when in fact they were heavy-handed and brutal proto-Terror Capitalists.
More recently, the private military company that started as Blackwater, now known as Academi, has received more than $1 billion in government contracts despite massacring civilians in Bagdad, and was reported in The Nation to have been bought by Monsanto, long invested in “the science of death” and dedicated to producing toxins like Agent Orange, PCBs, and pesticides, as well as genetically modified seeds with which it seeks to monopolize farming worldwide. Significantly, the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation bought 500,000 shares of Monsanto for $23 million at about the same time it acquired Academi nee Blackwater.
Thus companies with 90 percent of the world market share of proprietary computing technology and 90 percent of the global transgenic seed market and most global commercial seed co-own the world’s largest independent paramilitary organization.
Vladimir Lenin said that the purpose of terrorism is to create terror.
Be very afraid.
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God Saved The Queen
This is one of those times when I’m proud to have British blood. The reason is that in her annual Queens Speech, which outlines the government’s official plans for the next two years, including state visits, Prime Minister Theresa May made no mention of any visit by Donald Trump.
So Trump doesn’t get to ride in the gold-festooned carriage he was so set on putting his big ass into until he called the P.M. and told her he wasn’t coming to England until the British public welcomed him. Judging by the large-scale protests that erupted when he was invited during Theresa May’s visit here shortly after the inauguration, that will probably be never.
Q.E.: He has our prayers. And the world’s, if I am not mistaken.
He was supposed to go this summer, then in the fall, and now he’s on the back burner for at least two blessed years. To show how delighted the British were at a prospective Trump visit, House of Commons Speaker John Bercow made a speech in which he planned to bar Trump from speaking before Parliament because of “our opposition to racism and sexism.”
Right on, John!
Civic Duty has been fortunate enough to have a smuggled audio tape of a meeting between P.M. May and Queen Elizabeth shortly after Trump’s lame-ass phone call backing out for fear of a damaged ego.
Q.E.: Good afternoon, Madame Prime Minister, what is the subject of your most welcome visit?
T.M.: Your majesty, I wanted you to be the first to know of a telephone call I received from the American president a few short minutes ago. I hurried right over.
Q.E.: Please proceed. I am all ears, to use the American phrase.
T.M.: In short, he has postponed his state visit until he can be assured of a warm welcome from the British public.
Q.E.: Then we won’t have his presence this autumn?
T.M.: Not unless the public mood changes drastically.
Q.E.: That is highly doubtful – wouldn’t you agree?
T.M.: Whole-heartedly, to speak frankly. The man has done nothing to change the public mood. Since the time of the invitation, his actions have only increased the hostility towards him. Again to speak frankly, he is an embarrassment to his country and all it has stood for over the years.
Q.E.: So true. And if I may speakly frankly, as well, I am greatly relieved. I have cringed inwardly at the prospect of being civil to such a boor and a bully. I simply cannot understand the American fascination with a man who knows no boundaries to his boasting and lying.
T.M.: I think it has a great deal to do with both the American addiction to stupid television and the anger that the gap between the so-called one-percenters and the American public is so great as to be virtually unbridgeable. Of course, even in the short time of his presidency, he has done little to address this chasm and many of his appointments and actions have only added to the problem.
Q.E.: So true. How do you plan to react to this welcome news?
T.M.: It had occurred to me not to make any mention of such a visit during my annual Queens Speech.
Q.E.: Splendid. That will signal at least two years without him and I’m fairly certain that Mr. Trump will do nothing to change the feelings toward him here during that time.
T.M.: Agreed. And, of course, there is always the possibility that he won’t be president by then.
Q.E.: My thoughts, too. My hopes, actually – entre nous, of course.
T.M.: Mine, too, your majesty. Mr. Robert Mueller is a very tenacious investigator.
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Joe From Scranton
Joe Biden will be 78 in 2020. Is that too old to be president? I don’t think so. I’m 79 right now – 80 in December – and I’d be a better president now than Trump is. I’m in better shape, I’m not a criminal, and I give a fuck about America. Also, I’m not ugly and my hair is normal. I do wear baseball hats, but not with writing on them.
So Joe Biden would be cool in 2020 from what I can see.
A Biden story: I eat breakfast a lot in a place called Harry’s Corner across from the Ferris wheel on the Wildwood Boardwalk. My usual waiter is a dude named Jim who is 70 and smokes a lot of cigarettes, bless him. We both detest Trump and trade all the bad news we can about him.
Jim used to manage a roller skating rink in Delaware and Joe Biden would bring his family there a lot and he and Jim got to be friendly. The first time he came after being elected V.P., Jim called him “Mr. Vice President.”
Joe Biden pointed a finger at Jim and said, “Don’t ever call me that again. The name is Joe.”
Joe is from Scranton. I used to go there on business a lot and I always looked forward to it. Nice feeling to the town and the people were the biggest part of it.
I think if Joe Biden had run in 2016 he’d be president now. But I think he was smart enough to see that the party’s fickle heart was set on Hillary and that he’d just muddy the waters by jumping in. His son Beau’s death was the reason he gave for not running, and I guess we have to accept that.
Anyhow, I think if Joe Biden runs in 2020 and hopefully gets the nomination and faces off in debate against the clown that Trump ultimately is, Biden will eat his lunch and show the public what Trump looks like when faced with a real, authentic candidate with some balls instead of the Republican jerkoffs Trump pushed around in the debates in 2016.
Hillary Clinton’s debate persona was a bit above it all, sort of an “Oh, Donald” schoolmarm scolding a schoolyard bully. Trump might have lost those debates, but he didn’t lose any voters.
Joe Biden has been around all the political blocks and if Donald Trump wanted to get down and dirty, he would give as good as he got – probably better. Trump’s base would see once and for all that they’d been conned, that this is the way a real guy behaves. The contrast would always be there between a jive-ass little rich kid from Queens and a guy from Scranton who took the train to D.C. and served his country as a Senator and a vice president of such stature that Barack Obama choked up when he awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The two men were friends. Can you imagine Trump choking up over anything about White Mike Spence? And they could never be friends because Donald Trump is who he is.
Tell you what: if Joe Biden runs in 2020, I’m available as a running mate.
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Witch Hunting
First, a rhetorical question? Has life gotten better for any Americans since Donald Trump’s inauguration? (That’s excluding Trump family members and billionaire swampers.)
How come no rallies lately, or did that bizarre sycophant all-star cabinet meeting count as a rally, even though no one was wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball hat?
When’s the last time Trump was in Mar-A-Largo?
Bunker time, baby? Trump’s all lawyered up, and now his lawyer, Michael Cohen, has hired his own lawyer, Stephen Ryan, in preparation for his – Cohen’s – testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on September 5.
White Mike Pence has hired his own high dollar lawyer and at least is paying for it himself.
The invisible hand of Special Counsel Robert Mueller is stirring a lot of pots and he has made it known finally that Trump himself is being investigated in a “significant” manner for obstruction of justice. That is about as heavy duty as it gets.
And Trump’s shit is getting weaker by the minute. He has tweeted that this is “the single greatest witch hunt in history led by some bad and conflicted people.” Wow. What, though, are “bad and conflicted people?” Last I looked, Robert Mueller served 12 years as the spotless Director of the FBI but then again maybe he once yelled at his dog and then felt sorry for it, making him both bad and conflicted in Trumpian terms.
As to the greatest witch hunt, I guess Trump was absent the day they went over the Joe McCarthy era. It is sort of a simple-minded mantra, this constant prattle about a witch hunt. Even his dingus-faced sons are throwing it out there like it’s a magic term their father discovered and they are now flapping their slack parrot jaws in cheap imitation of daddy.
You can only play the same note so long before it falls on deaf ears or –worse – on irritated ears. The electorate is reacting to Trump’s incessant whines by these numbers, according to a very recent AP/NORC Center for Public Affairs poll: 35% approve of whatever he thinks he’s doing and a whopping 64% disapprove. By the time all this sinks into the sunset, Donald Trump is going to make Richard Nixon look like the Statue of Liberty.
Let’s look a little closer at witch hunts, shall we, in terms of results? Twenty people got executed up in old Mass., 19 by hanging. Fourteen were women. Hmm … seems they had no problem with hanging male witches – warlocks, for the record. Of course, the evidence was as flimsy as Donald Trump’s comb-over.
That’s going to be the difference here when the smoke clears. This so-called “witch hunt” is going to uncover solid evidence that our president actively sought to obstruct justice. Think about that. Justice is the cornerstone of our republic, and the man entrusted with the fortunes of the country sought to undermine its very underpinnings. That’s close to treason.
All these separate and ongoing witch hunts are going to lead to the slippery warlock known as Donald Trump and the noose will be braided and the gallows waiting.
Step right up, sucker.
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Snake Eyes
So flattered. Carmine “The Snake” Persico, long head of the Colombo crime family, sent a nice note saying he got many compliments from his associates and government officials he does business with about the Civic Duty column in which he was kind enough to provide mob nicknames for President Trump himself (”Donnie Two-Scoops”) and several cabinet officials.
Mr. Persico followed the note with a phone call in which he revealed with some pride that he has been retained by the Trump administration as a PAID CONSULTANT for Personal Presidential Protocol.
Civic Duty took the liberty of taping the conversation and what follows is an edited version because of space constraints.
CD: That’s great news, Carmine!
CP: Fuckin’ right. Nice to finally get some credit here – and some dough. Jesus, we been advisin’ Donnie’s family since back in the day with his old man. Always on the eye, though. Freddy was a cheap old fuck. This way Donnie just gets a government check cut for services rendered. No problem.
CD: Cool. Did they give you any assignments yet for – what’s it called? –Personal Presidential Protocol?
CP: Yeah. That. I just tell him how to act and all that. You see that cabinet meeting?
CD: Not really. Read a lot about it, though. They said it was strange. Bizarre.
CP: Bullshit. That was class, man. That was me. I told him what to do. Make these motherfuckers sit up and take notice.
CD: What do you mean?
CP: I mean first we was goin’ to make them all kneel and kiss his necktie, but then that Ivanka said that was too Catholic and being’s her and what’s-his-name? – Jarold? -- are Jews maybe we should just go around the room like those Pilgrims do and have everybody just say how much they worship him and he’s the greatest and they’re humble and all that?
CD: Pilgrims? You mean Quakers?
CP: Yeah. Them. And I told him to just sit there and nod at them and give them a little smile when they really went overboard. Like he knows what’s in their minds and hearts and this is no big surprise and it’s actually what he should be hearing from everybody. Real quiet shit like “The Godfather,” you know, when Brando was just sitting there at the wedding and they were all kissing his ass.
CD: That was impressive, I guess, I mean with the President. Nobody ever saw anything like that with all these grown men just telling him he was like some kind of king or religious leader.
CP: Yeah. Yeah. Look, I had my own personal consigliere write down what each one of ‘em was supposed to say and I even had some guys in the back of the room making sure they stuck to the script, you know?
CD: And then he was laying out his accomplishments.
CP: Yeah. Yeah. Where do you think he got that Roosevelt idea? That was me. See, I always end my meetings with a little pep talk. I told him just to wing it. Jesus, I didn’t think he was serious when he was sayin’ all the stuff he done and how nobody ever did so much before and then when I come up to him after and gave him the old okey-doke about what a good bullshitter he is he gave me a funny look and said, “What bullshit?”
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Wonder in Donaldland
George Washington is supposed to have said he couldn’t tell a lie in reference to chopping down a mythical cherry tree.
It would seem that our current president is totally stymied when it comes to telling the truth. It just can’t get past his teeth. They clamp down on the truth and force it back into his lungs where it dies of asphyxiation.
I surveyed as many newspapers – here and abroad – as I could stand after James Comey’s devastating testimony last week and the word “Liar” was so prominent in two-thirds of their headlines that I thought they were reviewing “Pinocchio.”
Can you imagine? Barack Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize and that class act is followed by a buffoon who is labeled a liar the world over by a man whose business it has been his whole career to catch out liars. The Director of the FBI is by definition an expert on liars of every hue and stripe. Trump was easy pickings.
This whole Trump outfit is chockablock with liars – clumsy, stupid liars, it would seem. Doubtless they take their cue from our Liar In Chief. Jeff Sessions, the guy who is our chief law enforcement officer as Attorney General, had to recuse himself from any involvement in the unfolding Russian scandal when it turns out he lied about his dealings with the Russians. James Comey hinted in his testimony that there is more to Sessions’ recusal than has been presented. Sessions jumped up and swore to clear his honor by testifying before the Senate committee. What honor?
Crazy Mike Flynn didn’t even last a month as National Security Advisor when he was caught up in a bunch of lies.
Now Trump is volunteering to testify in open forum about all those lies he said Comey told. Yeah, that will happen right around the time the Great wall of Mexico is finished.
Public, shameless lying in the face of all truth is the new norm in the Trump White House. And there is no Big Lie. It’s just lie after lie about everything from inauguration crowd sizes to the Mayor of London’s response to a national tragedy. Nothing is not fair game to this symphony of lies. It is a bottomless well of prevarication. An impenetrable veil.
This presidential tissue of lies both bolsters his so-called “base” in their blithe belief of Trump as messiah, and induces among many others of all political stripes a sort of borderline ennui, of being worn down by the sheer density and determination of Presidential lies. Of course, too, Trump’s lies are ironically the ties that bind much of the resistance against him, both organized and personal.
So for now we live with the lies and give Donald Trump sufficient rope and trust in the integrity of Robert Mueller.
Trump will mostly likely not be tried for treason, but in some very basic ways he has committed treason against the American spirit. Trump is one embodiment of what my partner Stephen Dock has termed “terror capitalism” and his basic disregard for the middle and working classes – if there are indeed any such classes remaining – is manifest in everything he legislates for and privately endorses. His only friends wear very expensive suits and know well the temples of Wall Street. His goal seems to be the ultimate corruption of whatever governmental bastions of tradition and honor might remain. Thank God he is as incompetent as he is, so the government just grinds and silently rolls on while its titular leader wanders deeper into the swamp from which few return.
Trump’s America is a nasty, disappointed, unsmiling has-been and a laughingstock among the slick foreigners who daily take advantage of American weakness and self-inflicted disadvantage. It’s a paranoid loner who trusts no one and never sleeps, like Trump himself. He has sold this country way short to itself.
We’ve been through worse, though, and both survived and thrived. America will take some passing notice of the inevitable downfall of this Trumpian aberration and go on about its business, strange and dark as that business can be.
Crud Brothers
It’s a shame that Trump couldn’t find a place for Chris Christie in his administration. The guy would fit right in: he’s fat, ugly, and a supremely accomplished liar.
But Trump is a very loyal guy, as everyone knows, and he had to stick by son-in-law Jared Kushner’s blackball of Christie for putting his father in the slams when Christie was a U.S. Attorney. I mean Trump could really identify with that; the senior Kushner was a real estate flim-flam artist and bigtime slumlord, just like Trump’s father, Fred, except that Freddie managed to stay out of jail throughout a long and corrupt career.
Christie would have made a great Secretary of the Interior; look how he saved New Jersey beaches and parks from over-use by shutting them down over the crowded Fourth of July weekend. And why shouldn’t he reward himself for that environmental bullseye by getting in a little beach time himself, even if the beach was off-limits to the rest of New Jersey’s citizens?
But then the fake news press dummied up a picture of him on the beach and when he was asked if he got any sun, he answered that he didn’t. When the pic came out, his press people said that he didn’t get any sun because he was wearing a baseball hat. Damn, that answer would do credit to Kellyanne Conway. It must have been a big baseball hat to shade all that blubber.
Word is, too, that Trump was pissed at all the press Christie got for that outing. He told Stevie Bannon that that fat bastard horned in on all the pub Trump was getting for his WWE caper. So it’s probably good that Trump left Christie to twist in the New Jersey breezes. And don’t forget Christie is the only guy in politics with a lower approval rating than Trump’s: like 13% now, which makes Trump anemic numbers look like he’s landslide popular. Don’t forget, too, that Christie is a big Springsteen fan and The Boss ain’t got no use for The Donald, which is another reason Trump left Christie to stew in the soggy Jersey meadows.
(On a personal note, Fat Boy owes me money. He cut off the $600 or $700 I was getting every year on the Homestead Rebate program, and now he’s trying to extort $300 million from my provider Horizon, which will doubtless increase the cost of my supplemental health insurance.)
Backchannel stuff: Trump has gotten a note from Vlad Putin that he’ll give him one copy of the negatives when they meet up in Hamburg if Trump will continue the agreement.
And there’s a Trump-inspired movement afoot among the slack-jawed puppets known as the Republican Congress to add a rider to the bill that will authorize the Great Mexican Wall that the contractor will also have to put an addition to Mount Rushmore with Trump’s mug next to Washington’s. There will be a bonus for getting the stone hair just right.
Finally, all government limos will now be labeled “LIMOUSINE” in all caps on all the doors after the video of Trump coming off AF One, walking right up to his limo, then hanging a right and cruising off to God knows where until one of the Secret Service guys took him by the elbow and guided him back to the car the way you guide your granny when she forgets where the bathroom is. Those arteries do have way of hardening, even Presidential arteries, hopefully.
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Terror Capitalism
My friend and blog partner Steve Dock is one of the brightest and most thoughtful people I know. Several years ago, he coined the term “Terror Capitalism,” which he defines as “A deliberate and long-term strategic and tactical use of fear, intimidation, and ideology, as well as political, state, and economic power for the benefit of an elite group who own massive capital resources.”
With the advent of the Trump regime, the time of Terror Capitalism is fully upon us, no effort now to hide it behind corporate and government rhetoric, the gloves finally off, the naked power and evil inherent in this philosophy becoming clearer by the moment. Exhibit A is the so-called Republican health care bill fashioned in secret by the slimy Mitch McConnell and his soulless all-male band of accomplices. Even among his fellow Republicans, there has been enough repugnance -- or fear of voter reprisal – that he has delayed putting to a vote legislation that would blatantly reward the upper echelons of wealth while heartlessly leaving 22 million Americans without health care. Trump himself called it “mean, mean, mean.”
If passed, that bill would condemn untold Americans to a death that could have been prevented by adequate health care. That is Terror Capitalism, pure and simple. What is more terroristic than a death threat? When the government literally holds the power of life and death over its “citizens,” they become malleable serfs, true citizens no more. The state becomes supreme, its leaders tyrants.
In Donald Trump’s festival of cruelty, the heart of the Republican health care bill beats with an echo of Scrooge’s call to decrease the poor. In the higher reaches of Terror Capitalism, there is no room for the useless poor. Wars kill off a fair share, but a bill like McConnell’s would add a significant death toll.
Sadly, Terror Capitalism is not new in America. It has a deep and vile – and organized -- history. The so-called “robber barons,” those prototypes of Terror Capitalism, called on the Pinkerton National Detective Agency –the Pinkertons or simply the Pinks – to enforce their authoritarian capitalism by infiltrating unions, supplying guards, keeping strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and recruiting goon squads to intimidate workers.
This unholy pairing resulted in such horrors as the Homestead steel strike in Pennsylvania in 1892, a private war in which seven Pinkertons and nine steel workers died before the strike was broken, while steel mill owner Andrew Carnegie languished in luxury in his native Scotland, leaving his second in command, Henry Frick, to oversee the bloody breaking of the strike. Ironically, Carnegie and Frick are better remembered as philanthropists and model citizens, when in fact they were heavy-handed and brutal proto-Terror Capitalists.
More recently, the private military company that started as Blackwater, now known as Academi, has received more than $1 billion in government contracts despite massacring civilians in Bagdad, and was reported in The Nation to have been bought by Monsanto, long invested in “the science of death” and dedicated to producing toxins like Agent Orange, PCBs, and pesticides, as well as genetically modified seeds with which it seeks to monopolize farming worldwide. Significantly, the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation bought 500,000 shares of Monsanto for $23 million at about the same time it acquired Academi nee Blackwater.
Thus companies with 90 percent of the world market share of proprietary computing technology and 90 percent of the global transgenic seed market and most global commercial seed co-own the world’s largest independent paramilitary organization.
This is Terror Capitalism writ very large indeed for those who can read it. These and other multinational corporations are Donald Trump’s true masters when all his word-farts have cleared away.
Vladimir Lenin said that the purpose of terrorism is to create terror.
Be very afraid.
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God Saved The Queen
This is one of those times when I’m proud to have British blood. The reason is that in her annual Queens Speech, which outlines the government’s official plans for the next two years, including state visits, Prime Minister Theresa May made no mention of any visit by Donald Trump.
So Trump doesn’t get to ride in the gold-festooned carriage he was so set on putting his big ass into until he called the P.M. and told her he wasn’t coming to England until the British public welcomed him. Judging by the large-scale protests that erupted when he was invited during Theresa May’s visit here shortly after the inauguration, that will probably be never.
Q.E.: He has our prayers. And the world’s, if I am not mistaken.
He was supposed to go this summer, then in the fall, and now he’s on the back burner for at least two blessed years. To show how delighted the British were at a prospective Trump visit, House of Commons Speaker John Bercow made a speech in which he planned to bar Trump from speaking before Parliament because of “our opposition to racism and sexism.”
Right on, John!
Civic Duty has been fortunate enough to have a smuggled audio tape of a meeting between P.M. May and Queen Elizabeth shortly after Trump’s lame-ass phone call backing out for fear of a damaged ego.
Q.E.: Good afternoon, Madame Prime Minister, what is the subject of your most welcome visit?
T.M.: Your majesty, I wanted you to be the first to know of a telephone call I received from the American president a few short minutes ago. I hurried right over.
Q.E.: Please proceed. I am all ears, to use the American phrase.
T.M.: In short, he has postponed his state visit until he can be assured of a warm welcome from the British public.
Q.E.: Then we won’t have his presence this autumn?
T.M.: Not unless the public mood changes drastically.
Q.E.: That is highly doubtful – wouldn’t you agree?
T.M.: Whole-heartedly, to speak frankly. The man has done nothing to change the public mood. Since the time of the invitation, his actions have only increased the hostility towards him. Again to speak frankly, he is an embarrassment to his country and all it has stood for over the years.
Q.E.: So true. And if I may speakly frankly, as well, I am greatly relieved. I have cringed inwardly at the prospect of being civil to such a boor and a bully. I simply cannot understand the American fascination with a man who knows no boundaries to his boasting and lying.
T.M.: I think it has a great deal to do with both the American addiction to stupid television and the anger that the gap between the so-called one-percenters and the American public is so great as to be virtually unbridgeable. Of course, even in the short time of his presidency, he has done little to address this chasm and many of his appointments and actions have only added to the problem.
Q.E.: So true. How do you plan to react to this welcome news?
T.M.: It had occurred to me not to make any mention of such a visit during my annual Queens Speech.
Q.E.: Splendid. That will signal at least two years without him and I’m fairly certain that Mr. Trump will do nothing to change the feelings toward him here during that time.
T.M.: Agreed. And, of course, there is always the possibility that he won’t be president by then.
Q.E.: My thoughts, too. My hopes, actually – entre nous, of course.
T.M.: Mine, too, your majesty. Mr. Robert Mueller is a very tenacious investigator.
Q.E.: He has our prayers. And the world’s, if I am not mistaken.
He was supposed to go this summer, then in the fall, and now he’s on the back burner for at least two blessed years. To show how delighted the British were at a prospective Trump visit, House of Commons Speaker John Bercow made a speech in which he planned to bar Trump from speaking before Parliament because of “our opposition to racism and sexism.”
Right on, John!
Civic Duty has been fortunate enough to have a smuggled audio tape of a meeting between P.M. May and Queen Elizabeth shortly after Trump’s lame-ass phone call backing out for fear of a damaged ego.
Q.E.: Good afternoon, Madame Prime Minister, what is the subject of your most welcome visit?
T.M.: Your majesty, I wanted you to be the first to know of a telephone call I received from the American president a few short minutes ago. I hurried right over.
Q.E.: Please proceed. I am all ears, to use the American phrase.
T.M.: In short, he has postponed his state visit until he can be assured of a warm welcome from the British public.
Q.E.: Then we won’t have his presence this autumn?
T.M.: Not unless the public mood changes drastically.
Q.E.: That is highly doubtful – wouldn’t you agree?
T.M.: Whole-heartedly, to speak frankly. The man has done nothing to change the public mood. Since the time of the invitation, his actions have only increased the hostility towards him. Again to speak frankly, he is an embarrassment to his country and all it has stood for over the years.
Q.E.: So true. And if I may speakly frankly, as well, I am greatly relieved. I have cringed inwardly at the prospect of being civil to such a boor and a bully. I simply cannot understand the American fascination with a man who knows no boundaries to his boasting and lying.
T.M.: I think it has a great deal to do with both the American addiction to stupid television and the anger that the gap between the so-called one-percenters and the American public is so great as to be virtually unbridgeable. Of course, even in the short time of his presidency, he has done little to address this chasm and many of his appointments and actions have only added to the problem.
Q.E.: So true. How do you plan to react to this welcome news?
T.M.: It had occurred to me not to make any mention of such a visit during my annual Queens Speech.
Q.E.: Splendid. That will signal at least two years without him and I’m fairly certain that Mr. Trump will do nothing to change the feelings toward him here during that time.
T.M.: Agreed. And, of course, there is always the possibility that he won’t be president by then.
Q.E.: My thoughts, too. My hopes, actually – entre nous, of course.
T.M.: Mine, too, your majesty. Mr. Robert Mueller is a very tenacious investigator.
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Joe From Scranton
Joe Biden will be 78 in 2020. Is that too old to be president? I don’t think so. I’m 79 right now – 80 in December – and I’d be a better president now than Trump is. I’m in better shape, I’m not a criminal, and I give a fuck about America. Also, I’m not ugly and my hair is normal. I do wear baseball hats, but not with writing on them.
So Joe Biden would be cool in 2020 from what I can see.
A Biden story: I eat breakfast a lot in a place called Harry’s Corner across from the Ferris wheel on the Wildwood Boardwalk. My usual waiter is a dude named Jim who is 70 and smokes a lot of cigarettes, bless him. We both detest Trump and trade all the bad news we can about him.
Jim used to manage a roller skating rink in Delaware and Joe Biden would bring his family there a lot and he and Jim got to be friendly. The first time he came after being elected V.P., Jim called him “Mr. Vice President.”
Joe Biden pointed a finger at Jim and said, “Don’t ever call me that again. The name is Joe.”
Joe is from Scranton. I used to go there on business a lot and I always looked forward to it. Nice feeling to the town and the people were the biggest part of it.
I think if Joe Biden had run in 2016 he’d be president now. But I think he was smart enough to see that the party’s fickle heart was set on Hillary and that he’d just muddy the waters by jumping in. His son Beau’s death was the reason he gave for not running, and I guess we have to accept that.
Anyhow, I think if Joe Biden runs in 2020 and hopefully gets the nomination and faces off in debate against the clown that Trump ultimately is, Biden will eat his lunch and show the public what Trump looks like when faced with a real, authentic candidate with some balls instead of the Republican jerkoffs Trump pushed around in the debates in 2016.
Hillary Clinton’s debate persona was a bit above it all, sort of an “Oh, Donald” schoolmarm scolding a schoolyard bully. Trump might have lost those debates, but he didn’t lose any voters.
Joe Biden has been around all the political blocks and if Donald Trump wanted to get down and dirty, he would give as good as he got – probably better. Trump’s base would see once and for all that they’d been conned, that this is the way a real guy behaves. The contrast would always be there between a jive-ass little rich kid from Queens and a guy from Scranton who took the train to D.C. and served his country as a Senator and a vice president of such stature that Barack Obama choked up when he awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The two men were friends. Can you imagine Trump choking up over anything about White Mike Spence? And they could never be friends because Donald Trump is who he is.
Tell you what: if Joe Biden runs in 2020, I’m available as a running mate.
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Witch Hunting
First, a rhetorical question? Has life gotten better for any Americans since Donald Trump’s inauguration? (That’s excluding Trump family members and billionaire swampers.)
How come no rallies lately, or did that bizarre sycophant all-star cabinet meeting count as a rally, even though no one was wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball hat?
When’s the last time Trump was in Mar-A-Largo?
Bunker time, baby? Trump’s all lawyered up, and now his lawyer, Michael Cohen, has hired his own lawyer, Stephen Ryan, in preparation for his – Cohen’s – testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on September 5.
White Mike Pence has hired his own high dollar lawyer and at least is paying for it himself.
The gloves are pretty much off and these dudes are reacting by heading for the best legal shelter they can find. The legal drawbridges are being raised.
The invisible hand of Special Counsel Robert Mueller is stirring a lot of pots and he has made it known finally that Trump himself is being investigated in a “significant” manner for obstruction of justice. That is about as heavy duty as it gets.
And Trump’s shit is getting weaker by the minute. He has tweeted that this is “the single greatest witch hunt in history led by some bad and conflicted people.” Wow. What, though, are “bad and conflicted people?” Last I looked, Robert Mueller served 12 years as the spotless Director of the FBI but then again maybe he once yelled at his dog and then felt sorry for it, making him both bad and conflicted in Trumpian terms.
As to the greatest witch hunt, I guess Trump was absent the day they went over the Joe McCarthy era. It is sort of a simple-minded mantra, this constant prattle about a witch hunt. Even his dingus-faced sons are throwing it out there like it’s a magic term their father discovered and they are now flapping their slack parrot jaws in cheap imitation of daddy.
You can only play the same note so long before it falls on deaf ears or –worse – on irritated ears. The electorate is reacting to Trump’s incessant whines by these numbers, according to a very recent AP/NORC Center for Public Affairs poll: 35% approve of whatever he thinks he’s doing and a whopping 64% disapprove. By the time all this sinks into the sunset, Donald Trump is going to make Richard Nixon look like the Statue of Liberty.
Let’s look a little closer at witch hunts, shall we, in terms of results? Twenty people got executed up in old Mass., 19 by hanging. Fourteen were women. Hmm … seems they had no problem with hanging male witches – warlocks, for the record. Of course, the evidence was as flimsy as Donald Trump’s comb-over.
That’s going to be the difference here when the smoke clears. This so-called “witch hunt” is going to uncover solid evidence that our president actively sought to obstruct justice. Think about that. Justice is the cornerstone of our republic, and the man entrusted with the fortunes of the country sought to undermine its very underpinnings. That’s close to treason.
All these separate and ongoing witch hunts are going to lead to the slippery warlock known as Donald Trump and the noose will be braided and the gallows waiting.
Step right up, sucker.
________________________________________________________________________
Snake Eyes
So flattered. Carmine “The Snake” Persico, long head of the Colombo crime family, sent a nice note saying he got many compliments from his associates and government officials he does business with about the Civic Duty column in which he was kind enough to provide mob nicknames for President Trump himself (”Donnie Two-Scoops”) and several cabinet officials.
Mr. Persico followed the note with a phone call in which he revealed with some pride that he has been retained by the Trump administration as a PAID CONSULTANT for Personal Presidential Protocol.
Civic Duty took the liberty of taping the conversation and what follows is an edited version because of space constraints.
CD: That’s great news, Carmine!
CP: Fuckin’ right. Nice to finally get some credit here – and some dough. Jesus, we been advisin’ Donnie’s family since back in the day with his old man. Always on the eye, though. Freddy was a cheap old fuck. This way Donnie just gets a government check cut for services rendered. No problem.
CD: Cool. Did they give you any assignments yet for – what’s it called? –Personal Presidential Protocol?
CP: Yeah. That. I just tell him how to act and all that. You see that cabinet meeting?
CD: Not really. Read a lot about it, though. They said it was strange. Bizarre.
CP: Bullshit. That was class, man. That was me. I told him what to do. Make these motherfuckers sit up and take notice.
CD: What do you mean?
CP: I mean first we was goin’ to make them all kneel and kiss his necktie, but then that Ivanka said that was too Catholic and being’s her and what’s-his-name? – Jarold? -- are Jews maybe we should just go around the room like those Pilgrims do and have everybody just say how much they worship him and he’s the greatest and they’re humble and all that?
CD: Pilgrims? You mean Quakers?
CP: Yeah. Them. And I told him to just sit there and nod at them and give them a little smile when they really went overboard. Like he knows what’s in their minds and hearts and this is no big surprise and it’s actually what he should be hearing from everybody. Real quiet shit like “The Godfather,” you know, when Brando was just sitting there at the wedding and they were all kissing his ass.
CD: That was impressive, I guess, I mean with the President. Nobody ever saw anything like that with all these grown men just telling him he was like some kind of king or religious leader.
CP: Yeah. Yeah. Look, I had my own personal consigliere write down what each one of ‘em was supposed to say and I even had some guys in the back of the room making sure they stuck to the script, you know?
CD: And then he was laying out his accomplishments.
CP: Yeah. Yeah. Where do you think he got that Roosevelt idea? That was me. See, I always end my meetings with a little pep talk. I told him just to wing it. Jesus, I didn’t think he was serious when he was sayin’ all the stuff he done and how nobody ever did so much before and then when I come up to him after and gave him the old okey-doke about what a good bullshitter he is he gave me a funny look and said, “What bullshit?”
________________________________________________________________________
So flattered. Carmine “The Snake” Persico, long head of the Colombo crime family, sent a nice note saying he got many compliments from his associates and government officials he does business with about the Civic Duty column in which he was kind enough to provide mob nicknames for President Trump himself (”Donnie Two-Scoops”) and several cabinet officials.
Mr. Persico followed the note with a phone call in which he revealed with some pride that he has been retained by the Trump administration as a PAID CONSULTANT for Personal Presidential Protocol.
Civic Duty took the liberty of taping the conversation and what follows is an edited version because of space constraints.
CD: That’s great news, Carmine!
CP: Fuckin’ right. Nice to finally get some credit here – and some dough. Jesus, we been advisin’ Donnie’s family since back in the day with his old man. Always on the eye, though. Freddy was a cheap old fuck. This way Donnie just gets a government check cut for services rendered. No problem.
CD: Cool. Did they give you any assignments yet for – what’s it called? –Personal Presidential Protocol?
CP: Yeah. That. I just tell him how to act and all that. You see that cabinet meeting?
CD: Not really. Read a lot about it, though. They said it was strange. Bizarre.
CP: Bullshit. That was class, man. That was me. I told him what to do. Make these motherfuckers sit up and take notice.
CD: What do you mean?
CP: I mean first we was goin’ to make them all kneel and kiss his necktie, but then that Ivanka said that was too Catholic and being’s her and what’s-his-name? – Jarold? -- are Jews maybe we should just go around the room like those Pilgrims do and have everybody just say how much they worship him and he’s the greatest and they’re humble and all that?
CD: Pilgrims? You mean Quakers?
CP: Yeah. Them. And I told him to just sit there and nod at them and give them a little smile when they really went overboard. Like he knows what’s in their minds and hearts and this is no big surprise and it’s actually what he should be hearing from everybody. Real quiet shit like “The Godfather,” you know, when Brando was just sitting there at the wedding and they were all kissing his ass.
CD: That was impressive, I guess, I mean with the President. Nobody ever saw anything like that with all these grown men just telling him he was like some kind of king or religious leader.
CP: Yeah. Yeah. Look, I had my own personal consigliere write down what each one of ‘em was supposed to say and I even had some guys in the back of the room making sure they stuck to the script, you know?
CD: And then he was laying out his accomplishments.
CP: Yeah. Yeah. Where do you think he got that Roosevelt idea? That was me. See, I always end my meetings with a little pep talk. I told him just to wing it. Jesus, I didn’t think he was serious when he was sayin’ all the stuff he done and how nobody ever did so much before and then when I come up to him after and gave him the old okey-doke about what a good bullshitter he is he gave me a funny look and said, “What bullshit?”
Man, when you got a guy who believes his own bullshit, it really makes the job easy. Hey, wouldn’t it be great to have a made guy in the White House?
________________________________________________________________________
Wonder in Donaldland
George Washington is supposed to have said he couldn’t tell a lie in reference to chopping down a mythical cherry tree.
It would seem that our current president is totally stymied when it comes to telling the truth. It just can’t get past his teeth. They clamp down on the truth and force it back into his lungs where it dies of asphyxiation.
I surveyed as many newspapers – here and abroad – as I could stand after James Comey’s devastating testimony last week and the word “Liar” was so prominent in two-thirds of their headlines that I thought they were reviewing “Pinocchio.”
Can you imagine? Barack Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize and that class act is followed by a buffoon who is labeled a liar the world over by a man whose business it has been his whole career to catch out liars. The Director of the FBI is by definition an expert on liars of every hue and stripe. Trump was easy pickings.
This whole Trump outfit is chockablock with liars – clumsy, stupid liars, it would seem. Doubtless they take their cue from our Liar In Chief. Jeff Sessions, the guy who is our chief law enforcement officer as Attorney General, had to recuse himself from any involvement in the unfolding Russian scandal when it turns out he lied about his dealings with the Russians. James Comey hinted in his testimony that there is more to Sessions’ recusal than has been presented. Sessions jumped up and swore to clear his honor by testifying before the Senate committee. What honor?
Crazy Mike Flynn didn’t even last a month as National Security Advisor when he was caught up in a bunch of lies.
Now Trump is volunteering to testify in open forum about all those lies he said Comey told. Yeah, that will happen right around the time the Great wall of Mexico is finished.
Public, shameless lying in the face of all truth is the new norm in the Trump White House. And there is no Big Lie. It’s just lie after lie about everything from inauguration crowd sizes to the Mayor of London’s response to a national tragedy. Nothing is not fair game to this symphony of lies. It is a bottomless well of prevarication. An impenetrable veil.
This presidential tissue of lies both bolsters his so-called “base” in their blithe belief of Trump as messiah, and induces among many others of all political stripes a sort of borderline ennui, of being worn down by the sheer density and determination of Presidential lies. Of course, too, Trump’s lies are ironically the ties that bind much of the resistance against him, both organized and personal.
So for now we live with the lies and give Donald Trump sufficient rope and trust in the integrity of Robert Mueller.
Trump will mostly likely not be tried for treason, but in some very basic ways he has committed treason against the American spirit. Trump is one embodiment of what my partner Stephen Dock has termed “terror capitalism” and his basic disregard for the middle and working classes – if there are indeed any such classes remaining – is manifest in everything he legislates for and privately endorses. His only friends wear very expensive suits and know well the temples of Wall Street. His goal seems to be the ultimate corruption of whatever governmental bastions of tradition and honor might remain. Thank God he is as incompetent as he is, so the government just grinds and silently rolls on while its titular leader wanders deeper into the swamp from which few return.
Trump’s America is a nasty, disappointed, unsmiling has-been and a laughingstock among the slick foreigners who daily take advantage of American weakness and self-inflicted disadvantage. It’s a paranoid loner who trusts no one and never sleeps, like Trump himself. He has sold this country way short to itself.
We’ve been through worse, though, and both survived and thrived. America will take some passing notice of the inevitable downfall of this Trumpian aberration and go on about its business, strange and dark as that business can be.
________________________________________________________________________
Impeachment Symphony
Some housekeeping first: I wonder if anyone under his pup tent told Donald Trump that Barack Obama was named the most popular person in the world for the seventh consecutive year? Doubt it … dead messengers and all that. Hope he found out, though, because it would go right up his bloated ass.
On a personal note, my father worked his way through Wharton undergrad at night during the depression as a male secretary during the day; he could type 120 words a minute on a manual machine. I’m proud of that because Trump went to Wharton undergrad, too, and the school disavowed Trump very early on in a scathing denunciation of all his sick and twisted values.
The Comey testimony was interesting and significant on several levels. First, Trump had his sleazy personal lawyer issue a statement calling the testimony a “victory” for Trump. When you are called a liar before the entire nation and your honor is repeatedly questioned, it takes a very irrational point of view to consider that anything but a moral condemnation, yet alone a victory. But claim it they did.
It was disappointing in the extreme, though, to hear James Comey demur when asked why he didn’t simply tell Donald Trump that he was totally out of line when he had several opportunities. It seems that political conscience doth make cowards of even a man entrusted with the nation’s vigilance and security. Comey’s excuses were weak and hazy, but that is the way of things in today’s political climate.
His minions tried to keep Trump busy enough so that he wouldn’t tweet-off during Comey’s testimony, but his vampire son Donald, Jr., he of the dead eyes and deader soul, pinch-hit with some lame tweets that sounded like first grade ya-ya-yas. His sons are thin-lipped, bloodless sycophants who take great pride in having their photos taken with the defenseless animals they delight in killing.
An impeachment to me is a great free-form political and ethical symphony, and perhaps history will look on the Comey testimony as the overture to the Trump impeachment.
Under the less than stellar questioning of the long-winded and in the case of John McCain, surreal, senators, Comey’s testimony produced the leitmotifs that could well build into the full symphony of impeachment.
He avoided certain questions as not apropos for a public forum, leading to the conclusion that in closed session more, probably of a classified nature, would be revealed. He hinted that there was more to the reclusion of Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions than has so far been revealed.
The notion of a White House taping system was broached, bringing to front of mind the downfall of our great paragon of Presidential Dishonor, Richard Millhaus Nixon.
Time and again, James Comey referenced Special Counsel Robert Mueller, calling him Director Mueller as a reminder of his former long and honorable career as FBI Director. To me, Mueller is both composer and conductor of the Impeachment Symphony to come. He will orchestrate as he investigates, letting the emerging melody of corruption and collusion take him where it will, slowly and meticulously building a panoply of inescapable and indictable malfeasance at the highest level.
And this great American Symphony of Justice will hopefully begin to cleanse and purge the nation of the vast and dark stain that has been cast by a man and his accomplices who put personal and political gain totally above the slightest considerations of patriotism and selflessness.
And there will be honor again in the land.
Heads Up
This is killing me, it is all so perfectly, splendidly, fittingly absurd.
A self-proclaimed D-list comedian, who has displayed her stunning lack of any discernible talent for ten New Year’s Eves – she has to have rehearsed to be that bad – gets some photographer and puppet-masters or something to dummy up a goofy-looking drippage that is supposed to be Donald Trump’s severed head and holds it up for whatever parts of the world wants to look at it and – SHA-FUCKING-ZAM!! – we have an international crisis.
Everybody who can get near a mic is bitching and moaning about how this is beyond the pale and over the top and too too distasteful for words. Never mind people getting blown up and shot and starving slow bad deaths all over the world. Kathy Whatchamcallit has held up a bloody Trump head and the nation is in more shock than if 28 zillion people lose their health care. Dang, does this nation have its priorities lined up one-two-six or what? This is some serious shit, right?
Then the poor maligned headless Prez jumps on Twitter and moans about how his son Barron is upset about this travesty. Uh, Mr. President, wasn’t there somebody – maybe Melania? – around to make sure he doesn’t have to see horrible stuff like that? Oh, she was at a fitting. Cool. Home Alone in Trump Towers.
Of course the Trump sons, good jackals that they are, pick up the spoor and add their outrageous dos centavos. Family honor is obviously at stake here. Donald Trump’s severed head could never look that weird – well, maybe the hair. His severed head would be much more presidential. Ask Kellyanne or Spicey. Not Stevie B., though – he’s into severed heads.
Then old Kathy and some slam-bang go-for-the-throat lawyer lady hold some kind of press deal with everybody panting and shoving mics everywhere and she gets all red in the face and squinty and shaky and accuses the Trump family of bullying her – of all things – and says they should apologize. That would be like a zebra apologizing for having stripes. Hey, girlfriend, bullies tend to bully. Then she says there’s a lot of misogyny there, too. Wow. This woman is a marvel of consciousness – except when it comes to flashing replica president’s heads.
Somehow this reminds me of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” but he was able to get away with it and even got it made into some kind of artistic icon. I guess the difference was in intent, although I don’t know what kind of intent would be behind Christ’s head in a jar of piss. I don’t really know what Kath’s intent was either, although she was jabbering on about Megyn Kelly and blood and outdoing the outdoer or something, which I assume was Trump.
Well, at least one good thing has come of this whole deal – no more New Year’s with Kathy and Coop. He should really be relieved, but maybe not because he never seemed to be as embarrassed as he should have been to spend three hours with this talentless nitwit.
Salome had John the Baptist’s head served up on a silver platter. That’s A-list. Kathy used a paper bag or something for Trump’s head. D-list.
So sad.
So sad.
_________________________________________________________________________
Parker looked down at Scott Fitzgerald in his coffin and offered her eulogy:
“The poor son of a bitch.”
______________________________________________________________________
I used to
see Trump at the fights in Atlantic City at his monument to bad taste, the
Trump Taj Mahal.
Our president, one of the most eloquent orators ever to grace the White House, has
found time from his numerous
presidential engagements like hosting his Soviet allies and keeping the
nation twitter-apprised of the various witch hunts afoot in the land, to speak
at the commencements of two of the nation’s most prestigious and illustrious
institutions of higher learning: the United States Coast Guard Academy at New
London, Connecticut, and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, the
nation’s pre-eminent Christian college, boasting 15,000 students just waiting to get out there and
preach their Lord’s word to every white ear in America.
With Donald
Trump as president, this is not America.
Well, the
facts seem to be speaking for themselves, despite the recent time-out and
distraction of 59 Tomahawk missiles that had even people who should know better
creaming their pinstriped jeans.
There was a
big-ass cruise ship docked nearby. It looked bigger than the Queen Mary to me,
and was actually a Disney property with mouse ears on the smoke stacks.
Of course
these low-ball poll figures are all fake news because they don’t glorify what
is turning out to be the most calamitous first 100 days in Presidential
history. The litany of lies, exposures, and failed legislation is enough to
make even the most hardened political observers blink in disbelief.
Back to
Trump and golf. You have to question that handicap and those club titles in
view of a story told by the Hall of Fame boxer and current boxing promoter,
Oscar De La Hoya. He was in a foursome with Trump and Trump’s first four tee
shots went water/out-of-bounds/water/bushes. Hmm. Then – lo and behold – Trump finds his first
tee shot smack in the middle of the fairway.
The Crack-Up
Parker looked down at Scott Fitzgerald in his coffin and offered her eulogy:
“The poor son of a bitch.”
Shortly
after, in 1945, Edmund Wilson collected Fitzgerald’s final Esquire essays into a book called The Crack-Up. The term has passed into common usage. We all pretty
much know what it means, although now the preferred term is “losing it.”
Francis
Scott Fitzgerald’s crack-up in all its sadness and tragedy still maintained the
man’s inherent grace. He was that rare and now almost vanished person, a
gentleman, even in his twisting downward spiral. Jesus, he wrote about his own
crack-up, wrote with depth and awareness and humor and irony even as the waters
closed over him. Now we call it “a class act.”
Guess who’s
eminent crack-up is going to be totally classless, like the sordid life that
has proceeded and produced it? Donald Trump will go down ugly and brutal, which
is only apropos.
It is
already beginning. The kitchen is too small and the heat is too high. “Covfefe”
might be for Trump what “Rosebud” was for Charles Foster Kane.
I can’t
believe they let him stagger around Europe and the Middle East like “a drunken
tourist,” as an aide put it. And Trump doesn ‘t even drink. Maybe he should
take it up.
He was
“fatigued,” they said, from reading too much on AF One on the way over. TV and
Diet Cokes, more like it. Lay’s Potato Chips. Two scoops of ice cream. Extra
sauce. The dude is 70 years old and has the life habits of a pimply teenager.
You know how
they show those pictures of how the presidents age over time? That’s over
years. Trump is barely out of the gate and he’s looking totally raggedy
already. Puffy, baggy eyes, skin like a cottonmouth, and he’s getting porky and
moving with the grace of an aged anteater.
Our esteemed
leader cannot take the pressure that is just beginning. Truly serious pressure
from truly serious people. These aren’t caddies on his Scottish golf courses or
hat-in-hand general contractors at one of his ticky-tacky building sites.
These are
vetted, experienced Beltway veterans who
have been around every block and know
every alley and back door where frauds like Trump and his gang will look
for refuge. There isn’t any. These people have time and resources and they will
use them in their own way and the pressure will be unrelenting. These dogs
hunt.
Trump will
be finally, inescapably treed and he might snarl and tweet and offer up
sacrifices, but in the end – one way or another – he will crack up. He Iacks
the courage and moral fiber to withstand anything he cannot control. He is a
sniveling, inveterate coward -- a
lowlife punk -- and it will be there for all to see and then they will come for
him.
And they
will find him, like Nixon, wandering the ghostly halls of the mansion he has
disgraced with his every breath, the distant dawn offering no reprieve. He will
be alone in his crack-up as he has been alone in his life, trusting no one,
loving no one, his shell now stripped for all the world to see the emptiness
beneath it.
And recoil.
The Pope & The Dope
I used to
see Trump at the fights in Atlantic City at his monument to bad taste, the
Trump Taj Mahal.
Back then he
was just a cultural curiosity, this crazy-haired phony from New York who seemed
to think he shit vanilla ice cream (two scoops). He’d prance in surrounded by
stupid-looking aides and bodyguards and some heads would turn, but that was
about it. I’d slink through the ringside crowd from the press row to get near
him and see what this asshole was all about.
The best I
could figure out up close was that he had an attention span of about 30 seconds
– and I’m giving him about a 10-second break.
Then how in
God’s name did he survive a 29-minute audience with Pope Francis? They must
have put some kind of electric joy buzzer up his baggy suit sleeves and jazzed
him every couple minutes to keep his attention somewhere in the room.
From what I
read, the Pope didn’t give him the glad hand right off the bat , probably
because Trump had called him “disgraceful” during his hatefest of a campaign
and because Trump had just signed a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis and
the Pope is on record calling arms dealers “merchants of death.”
Anyhow,
what-all do you think they talked about during their meeting? Maybe the Pope
explained why Melania had to cool her glam heels while the men got down. She
was probably used to it by then because the Saudis aren’t big on women and the
Italians are big on pinching their
asses. Hey, maybe when she slapped Donald’s hand away she was just practicing
warding off the Italian romeos.
What got me
was the gifts the two most powerful men in the world exchanged after the
mystery 29 minutes. Trump gave Francis a box
of Martin Luther King’s books. I don’t think he got them from Jeff
Session’s library. Or ever saw them before. Or ever had them read to him. Trump giving a Pope books by M.L. King is
like the Grand Wizard of the Klan giving a copy of The Gettysburg Address to
Coretta King.
Francis gave
Trump a bunch of his encyclicals. One of them was about saving the environment,
and I don’t think it mentioned the idea
that global warming is a product of Chinese misinformation, which is one of the
cornerstones of Donald Trump’s environmental philosophy.
Trump was
all thank-you and promised the Pope that he would certainly read them. Sure,
just as soon as he finishes the audio version of Mein Kampf as read by Alex Baldwin.
Mark Twain
started the ball rolling with a book called The
Innocents Abroad about how the Americans of his day went trooping through
Europe, sowing ill will left and right and not knowing or caring because, after
all, they were Americans and all these Europeans were just foreigners.
Then in 1958
Eugene Burdick and William Lederer hit it bigtime with their novel The Ugly American which has passed into
common usage and was trotted out ad
nauseam to describe Trump on his trip.
Now I hear
there’s a Trump biography in the works to be called The Very Ugly American with Weird Hair.
But the true
Trump kicker to his visit with Pope Francis was this twitter in which he
compares the Pope favorably with the one person he truly loves above all
humanity. Here it is: “The new Pope is a humble man, very much like me, which
probably explains why I like him so much.”
I hope the
Pope said amass for this fool after he read it.
_________________________________________________________________________
Silver-Tongued Devil
Our president, one of the most eloquent orators ever to grace the White House, has
found time from his numerous
presidential engagements like hosting his Soviet allies and keeping the
nation twitter-apprised of the various witch hunts afoot in the land, to speak
at the commencements of two of the nation’s most prestigious and illustrious
institutions of higher learning: the United States Coast Guard Academy at New
London, Connecticut, and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, the
nation’s pre-eminent Christian college, boasting 15,000 students just waiting to get out there and
preach their Lord’s word to every white ear in America.
President
Trump graciously addressed the graduating Coasties, who didn’t seem to harbor any evident resentment of the
fact that their commander in chief has submitted a budget that will cut Coast
Guard funding by $1.3 billion. This despite the fact that the CG interdicted
6,396 illegal immigrants last year in President Trump’s never-ending battle
against the rapists and assorted fiends bent on entering and destroying
America.
Indeed, the
graduating Coast Guard class warmly applauded many of President Trump’s remarks
centered mainly on how he has triumphed over every obstacle ever created by man
and is doing a supernaturally tremendous job as president. He also wished them
good luck somewhere in his address.
Cynics among
the lying press hazarded the opinion that the chief reason for President
Trump’s warm reception was that the graduating class was constantly videoed
during his remarks and the videos were reviewed by White House and Coast Guard
officials and any graduates found not fully cheering their leader’s words would
find their first assignments in garden spots like Antarctica and Nome, Alaska,
aboard out-dated icebreakers.
At Liberty
U., Donald Trump was rewarded for his stirring address by being granted an
honorary doctorate in something or other. The honor was bestowed by Liberty
president Jerry Falwell, Jr., son of school founder and noted anti-Semite and
racist Jerry Falwell, who was doubtless smiling down from the right hand of
God, having relegated Jesus Christ to
the left hand. When the senior Falwell passed to his reward in 2007, the noted
late atheist Christopher Hitchens remarked that “if he had been given an enema,
he could have been buried in a matchbox.”
President
Trump told the breathless young Christians that a deep and abiding faith has
been at the heart of his truly sensational, brilliant, incredible career as the
greatest real estate developer since Cheops built his pyramids, as well as his
unbelievable presidency, already acclaimed throughout the universe and beyond
as a true miracle that makes the loaves and fishes look like a Happy Meal and
the parting of the Red Sea like a kid playing in a bathtub.
Pausing to
push aside an eye bag and wipe a tear brought on by his own eloquence and deep
faith, President Trump concluded with this rejoinder to the astounded young
faithful: “Just remember: God is all about winning, so don’t be afraid to make
any deal you have to. God is the Ultimate Deal. He told me that himself. Trust
me.”
Anybody got
a matchbox?
________________________________________________________________________
A Simple Fact
With Donald
Trump as president, this is not America.
All else
right now proceeds from that simple statement.
America is a
country of fairness and truth and light. It is not a country of bias and lies
and darkness, which Donald Trump and his malign forces would have it become in
their craven image.
America has
shed its blood in the terrible carnage of wars both foreign and domestic –
among them a Civil War of family slaughter that brought us finally to the
threshold of our professed destiny as a true democracy.
And though
we have wavered and backslid in becoming truly one indivisible nation, that
resplendent goal was forever before us, sometimes dim and often bright and
shining, but always there. Even those among
our leaders who faltered and erred paid in their hearts more than lip
service to this idea of America. There was belief, however skewed and corrupted.
And now
comes a destroyer of America, who believes in nothing , who knows the price of
everything and the value of nothing, as Oscar Wilde defined a cynic. But Donald
Trump is beyond cynical. Even the cynic at some level is capable of an epiphany, of a realization that there are eternal verities
and virtues far beyond one man’s selfish and self-centered vanities and
desires.
This is not
America. America cannot be led by a truly hollow man, to use the poet’s telling
phrase. America cannot be led by a man who in terrible and true fact is
incapable of leading, but can only
threaten and boast and bully to get his
way no matter the consequences to a people he took a solemn oath to serve and
respect. His is the way of a stupid child, brutal and cruel in his
tantrum-strewn selfishness.
There is no
laughter, there is no sharing. There is only the whiny preoccupation with
immediate, heedless gratification, terrifying in its recklessness.
This is not America. It is a sociopathic sickness
whose rancid breath has bred contagion and blindness in a once thoughtful
populace whose moral compass has been smashed by the same forces that bred this
blind monster: by a media who sees celebrity and wealth as virtues in and of
themselves, by a corporate greed that puts dividends above any civic
responsibility, by a political system so caught up in its own perpetuation that it puts party above country, by an
educational system that puts no value on
independent thought, by religions that are mainly loud hypocrisy. It goes on,
this catalog of what is not America.
And yet what
is America is not so easily destroyed. The rise of these agents of darkness has
re-kindled in the American soul a yearning for the brighter path we have lost,
and there is rising in the land an energy and a will to recover what has been
lost that will eventually – hopefully sooner than later – in its power and majesty
move even the most reluctant among our so-called leaders to reverse this
historic catastrophe in the making.
And restore
America.
________________________________________________________________________
Let’s Hear it for L.A.
Lala Land no
more – at least not vis a vis Donald Trump – the City of the Angels lived up to
its name last Friday when Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution calling
for a congressional investigation into whether
the co-called president has committed any impeachable offenses.
The
resolution centers around the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution – what
Trump calls that “archaic” document – which prohibits the president from
profiting from dealing with foreign governments without the assent of congress.
“This is
about conflicts of interest,” according to the singularly named Zephyr
Teachout, a lawyer on the case. “Diplomats and agents of foreign governments are
staying in Trump hotels. That’s money from foreign governments going into our
president’s pockets while he is making decisions that effect those countries.”
While L.A.’s
heart is in the right place, I wouldn’t look for the congress to bestir
themselves to look into impeachment for a little thing like conflict of
interest because that is the backbone of the Trump administration and they might
get tweeted on. Ivanka and Jared, the Fred and Ginger of conflict dancing, have
waltzed their businesses to China and beyond while sitting on the right hand of
Donald the First. To these snakes, a conflict only comes when you can’t make a
fast, funky buck on the down-low. It’s a whores’ paradise down there by the
Potomac, folks. Now more so than ever – and it’s only a little over a hundred
days into this grab-fest.
Presidential
lunacy might be a better avenue to impeachment. I was in Philly recently and
had a wonderful dinner at Victor Café in South Philly, that 100-year-old
landmark where the servers are also professional opera singers and let loose
with an aria every twenty minutes or so.
One of my
dinner companions was a physician and another holds a Ph.D. in psychology. They
both think it’s obvious to any trained professional that Trump is nuts enough
to be impeached. “Dangerous” was how they both characterized him.
They both
agreed, too, that the “Goldwater Rule,” wherein a shrink can’t give an opinion
on somebody that he or she hasn’t interviewed, is bunk. To them, you judge
someone on their actions, not what they say on the couch. And to anyone with
any clarity of vision, this dude ain’t wrapped too tight. But – and there’s
always a but – the “Goldwater Rule” is based in great part on the fact that shrinks,
like most medical people, live in constant fear of lawsuits. And Donald Trump
is the Babe Ruth of litigation (forgive me, Bambino.) Nonetheless, more than
800 mental health professionals agree that our President is not sane enough to
be our president. Too bad they aren’t the congress.
Then there
is the old classic definition of an insane person as one who keeps repeating an
action and expecting different results. Well, when you keep swearing that you
had the biggest inauguration on record and the facts show otherwise, but you
keep repeating it, what does that say? Or that you didn’t lose the popular vote
by three million because they were all illegal voters and again the facts show
otherwise, but you keep repeating your lie, well, you tell me.
Of course,
there is the Big Lie, too, compliments of that great humanitarian, Josef
Goebbels, who posited that if you just keep lying about something long enough
it becomes the truth in the public mind. So far, that hasn’t worked for Trump –
except of course for his based-out base, who never met a Trump lie they didn’t
fanatically believe. Hitler and his Big Lie gang were all certifiable, too.
Plus, I
don’t think any sane person would go around with that crazy hairdo, which could
be committed on its own.
So here’s to
you, Los Angeles, may your City Council resolution be the first of many around
the country as the craziness keeps coming from Pennsylvania Avenue. Even with
this congress of mainly blue-suited assholes, there has to come a point where
enough is simply enough.
I know –
Pence is in the bullpen, but first thing first.
________________________________________________________________________
An Immodest Proposal
Dang! Trump
beat me to the punch.
I was going
to write a column where the payoff would be that he should invite Kim Jong Un
to the White House and after they finished complimenting each other on their
haircuts, Trump could take the fat little “smart cookie” on a tour around D.C.
(the good parts) and then whisk him down to Mar-A-Lago for some chocolate cake.
That, of course, should disabuse Un (is that what you call him?) of any notions
of nuking Seattle.
But the old
Trumpster got there first in real life, saying he’d be “honored” to have Un as
a house guest “under the right circumstances.”
Well, how
about these circumstances? Trump also wants to invite that sage of the
Philippines, the noted homicidal maniac Rodrigo Duterte, over for a play date,
so why not kill two birds (so to speak) and have them both together for a threesome
that would rank right up there with Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta?
Can you see
the photo op now? Jeez, Trump could get himself a cape like FDR and Duterte
could sport a fancy-ass cane like Churchill, and Un wouldn’t even have to
change because his standard uniform is pretty much like Stalin’s.
They could
start out by bad-mouthing Obama, with Duterte teaching his two new best friends
how to call Obama a “son of a bitch” in the Philippine Tagalog dialect, which
he did a while back when he first started his campaign of killing off dope
dealers and even dope users and Obama had the temerity to criticize this
necessary house-cleaning. They’d all probably get a chuckle out of Un’s trying
to wrap his tongue around those slippery “son of a bitch” syllables, but then
he could teach them the Korean version. Knee-slappers all around.
Naturally,
Trump would compliment Duterte on his lethal anti-drug campaign, but then Un
might pipe up that while Duterte’s people are doing their killing in pretty
mudane fashion, mostly just shooting
them with handguns, he reminds Trump and Duterte that he actually had
one of his regenerate generals executed with a field artillery piece. They both
raise their eyebrows and nod in appreciation of Un’s creativity. Trump even
gives him one of his famous thumbs up.
Then Duterte
gets real serious and reminds his fellow national leaders that they shouldn’t
be playing around with the idea of using what he calls their nuclear “toys” and
Un forgets himself and says that Trump started it by all this talk about how
North Korea shouldn’t have nuclear stuff
anyhow and Trump says well you shouldn’t because you’re not a real world power
like everybody else in the Nuclear Club and Un says yeah what about Israel and Trump says they don’t have any
just ask them and that cracks Duterte up and sort of breaks the developing
tension and Trump and Un fist bump.
Then Trump
says look how about this: you could be like Israel and have them and everybody
will agree you don’t just for the record but you have to promise not to use
them unless out of the blue someone attacks you which I don’t think is going to
happen because if you don’t have any nukes why would they even bother? I mean
you’ll have to admit nobody really wants North Korea except you, so what do you say -- do you see my
logic?
I guess,
says Un. Any chances of some chocolate cake?
________________________________________________________________________
The Word and the Truth
I am
re-reading The Seven Mountains of Thomas
Merton, Michael Mott’s magnificent biography of the Trappist
monk/poet/hermit/autobiographer/activist.
I have read
a great deal of Merton – not all, of course, because there is so much, but
whenever I take up Merton again it is like revisiting an old friend.
Merton felt
great fear for the future during his final years in the turbulent late sixties.
I can’t help but wonder how he would react to the shameful and terrifying
situation America finds itself in today: a shaken, wobbly democracy presided
over by an evil incipient despot who has unleashed the dark forces that have
always simmered and stewed beneath the purple mountains and majesties we have naively thought to be our natural
heritage.
That is of
course a pessimistic statement of our situation, but Thomas Merton in his day
was on constant guard against and struggled with that same kind of personal pessimism.
His reaction was a far deeper and more reasoned and nuanced answering than I am
certainly capable of, but we do share the fact of reacting with words.
It must be
remembered that it was the power of the words of Donald J. Trump – as
simplistic and hate-mongering as they were – that led us to this critical pass
in our history.
So it is
entirely fitting that much of the resistance to this cankerous demagogue should
be with words, mine and others. As this column’s title signifies, it is a civic
duty in the deepest sense.
I am sure
that is how Merton would react and I can only wish there were more voices like
his to raise a hue and cry in these blighted times. Yet there are at least two
that I know of and look forward to hearing on a regular basis on Facebook,
which can be a valuable tool for communication when not overrun with cute
pictures of cats and recipes for various pasta dishes.
The patrician-sounding
Lucian Truscott IV is a West Point graduate with a long and honorable career as
a progressive journalist who is relentless in his pursuit and revealing of the
frauds and shysters who make up a great deal of both our political establishment
and the substrata of so-called “talking heads” and “gurus”who feast on their
carrion leavings.
Truscott
actually makes me cheer “Yeahhh” out loud when he gets after these creeps. His
well-reasoned and well-documented anger steams off my computer screen and he
rises heroic in my eyes like that angry steam. I can only cheer him on and wait
eagerly for the next round in his endless bout with the forces of negativity
and arrogance. He speaks in plain
language and swears with the practiced voice of a drill sergeant and vows he
won’t rest until every last scoundrel is
turned out. May his energies never abate
nor his eyes lose their clarity of focus. Dig him on FB, folks. Cheer with me.
Now Stephan
Salisbury is a tad different. By day, he is a mild-mannered reporter for the Inquirer. On Facebook, he is a fucking maniac with his CSI: American Carnage. In giant blocks
of dense copy, he goes off on surreal imaginary rambles into the very minds and
dialogs of Trump and his crazed band of fascists. Nothing is too racist or
sexist or elitist for Salisbury to take it beyond the boundaries of decency and
civility, yet there is in even his wildest peregrinations the unmistakable ring of truth and verisimilitude. Yes, these people in their
heart of hearts are this incorrigible and totally corrupt, politically,
legally, and, above all, morally. It is Swiftian in pinstripes. Stephan
Salisbury is the crazed fly on the Oval Office wall. Dig him. And fear him.
Fear all my
brothers and sisters of the word, Trump. And fear all my brothers and sisters
who wield the sword of the editorial cartoon.
Because we’re
coming for you, every day, count on it.
_________________________________________________________________________
Daddy’s – and Momma’s -- Girls
No way Trump
gets re-elected – providing he makes it to the end of this ongoing disaster of
a first term, and I used the term “term” loosely. More and more Americans don’t trust him or believe him or even like
him, according to those pesky, never-ending polls.
Of course,
there might not be any election or even any world as we know it now that he’s
discovered how much America likes things that go boom. Sick pups like Brian “Undisgraceable”
Willams and Geraldo “Look At Me” Rivera went into raptures over Trump’s trigger-pulling and most of the rest of the
media and the Trump Base – well-named, at that , given their never-ending
baseness – jumped high in the air to snap the dog-biscuits of missiles and
bombs from those pudgy little hands.
But just for
the sake of something to write about that hasn’t been written to death about
this dangerous sociopath, let’s say he staggers to the end of a first term and
the world is still with us and his handlers tell him no way can he get
re-elected or even re-nominated. The Republicans got slaughtered in the
mid-terms and now it’s every pol for himself. He’s lucky he wasn’t impeached,
they tell him.
So he fires
all these traitors and the next set of “advisers” tells him the same thing.
Whoa. Maybe they’re right. But – just to be sure – he fires them and brings in
guys (no women allowed here) who have never ever said “no” to him and – lo and
behold – they say “no” to him.
He has never
heard of Dylan Thomas, of course, but he is not going gentle into any good
nights or days or even dawns or dusks.
Well, okay,
if he can’t be president again, he has just the person for the job –
Ivanka. Look, Melania never did come
down from New York and Ivanka did a terrific job as the actual first lady and
all these liberals and progressives have been bitching for a long time about
having a woman president (just not Hillary). And this way the job can stay in
the family.
His people
tell him that Ivanka has already said she wasn’t interested because politics
are too tough. Yeah he says but she’s one tough cookie and those fucking polls
say that she’s the most popular one in the whole administration. Let’s ask her
again.
Well says
Ivanka a lot has changed and the rag trade isn’t what it used to be so, yeah,
I’ll give it a shot. Jared says he’ll babysit. Gosh, he’d make a great
Secretary of State, though, come to think of it. The kids like running around
in the White House, too. We could probably get by with a couple of nannies –
those illegal ones come real cheap.
Great, says
Trump, start the machinery. I can be President Emeritus this way. (He doesn’t
notice Ivanka giving him a Lady Macbeth look.)
So word gets
out and up in New York the Clintons get really serious about Chelsea as
president. (They’ve actually been regular serious since the day after Hillary
got beat.) Chelsea’s been ordering a lot of pants suits to get ready and her
parents have amassed about 2.5 trillion dollars to help her on the way, as
doting parents will. Her husband – whatchamacallit – will tag along with the
kids at a safe distance.
Chelsea makes
her announcement on Sesame Street and as a bonus Big Bird takes off his head
and damn if it ain’t ol’ Slick Willie
himself. Everybody says it’s great TV. The next morning Hillary and Chelsea go
on Kelly Ripa’s show and dang if Kelly ain’t wearing a pants suit.
So the
battle lines are drawn between these two former very close friends.
A Women’s Wear Daily headline over pics of
Ivanka in a dress and Chelsea in a pants suit says: “Who’s Best Dressed for
Success?”
Michelle
Obama?
________________________________________________________________________
Trump Troika
Probably the
most lasting troika in history is: father, son, and holy ghost (amen).
Well, down
in D.C. they’ve now got: father, son-in-law, and holy daughter (God help us).
Basically,
this country is being run by three real estate developers, one of whom is also
a women’s clothing hustler. Does that not sound like a recipe for a somewhat
less than successful government?
Well, the
facts seem to be speaking for themselves, despite the recent time-out and
distraction of 59 Tomahawk missiles that had even people who should know better
creaming their pinstriped jeans.
Ivanka
Trump/Kushner and hubby Jared Kushner are now firmly in the co-pilots’ twin
seats as Daddy Donald careens his presidential jet wildly through the American
and international political skies.
Steve Bannon
is being quietly – for now – excommunicated and Kellyanne Conway is no more
than an echo in this chamber of horrors. The makeshift cabinet guys are back in
the business class with seatbelts firmly fastened listening to Pilot Don’s
instructions over the intercom – that is, whenever he remembers that they’re
there. And so what if the instructions don’t make much sense.
Now Ivanka
and Jared are admittedly beautiful and smart kids, but to my knowledge a tad
more than good looks and smarts are needed in dangerous times like these. Try
experience in governance – or in diplomacy – or in foreign policy. Well, maybe
they’re supersonic learners. But while they scale the learning curve, who knows
into what shark-infested waters Captain Don will steer the ship of state?
Consensus among the cognoscenti is that he’s been overmatched every day of his
reign and that depending on these two pretty chuckleheads for advice and direction
is like asking the ball boys at the Super Bowl for a game plan.
A recent Esquire article had a friend of
Ivanka/Jared’s saying what they crave is power-power-power. They’ve got
everything else. Now they’ve got that – in spades. Word is that it was Ivanka
who put in the clincher about firing off the Tommies. Great. What if she
decides she doesn’t like the way that Little Fat Boy in North Korea is behaving
or Jared covets some property in, say, Syria. Daddy seems to be all ears when
it comes to these guys. He don’t need no stinking career Washington plutocrats
whispering in those same ears. All in the family is his preferred style. There
is mutual trust there. So far.
Jared is the
Super Boy of the current administration with so many jobs and responsibilities
that he makes a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest look comatose. And
being’s he and Ivanka are Orthodox Jews, there’s a whole day of the week that
they don’t even make or take phone calls – or so they say.
There’s an
old saying about fake it ‘til you make it, but I’m not sure that applies here.
You can’t fake the stuff these two are supposed to be doing. There are real
world reactions to the advice they’re
giving Trump.
I loved that picture of Jared schlepping around
Iraq with a flak vest with his name on it over his blue blazer. Were the
military guys around him afraid that a crazed KP was going to hurl a potato
peeler at him?
Really
________________________________________________________________________
Sunset
I recently came
back from a glorious week in Key West. My third evening
there, I had a wonderful dinner at Louie’s Back Yard over by
Southernmost Point, and took a long stroll on Duvall Street to see the sunset
at Mallory Square.
There was a
big-ass cruise ship docked nearby. It looked bigger than the Queen Mary to me,
and was actually a Disney property with mouse ears on the smoke stacks.
I was lucky
enough to find an empty bench and settled down to wait for the sun’s
spectacular fall behind Christmas Tree
Island. This event is usually
accompanied by oh’s and ah’s from the tourist hordes and general applause and
whistling.
With a few
minutes to go, a guy asked if he could share the bench. He looked to be in his
mid-thirties and in good shape. He had close-cropped hair and a military bearing.
“Sure,” I
said, and he sat at the other end and let out a long, tired sigh, then
stretched.
In more or
less companionable silence, we watched the sunset show, especially spectacular
this particular evening. We remained on the bench, enjoying the fading
afterglow.
We chatted a
bit about where we were from and where we were staying, normal vacation
conversation. As Americans will, he asked me what my profession was and after I
told him, I asked, “And you?”
“Good
question. I’m not really sure right now,” he said with a slight frown. “Look,
I’ll probably never see you again, so I’m going to tell you some stuff that
I’ve only told my wife. She’s back in D.C. with our two kids. I came down here
just to get away and think things through. We spent our honeymoon here and I
have good memories. She actually thought it would be a good idea, the way
things are.”
“How are
they?”
“Up in the
air, I guess. It’s my job. I’m a Secret Service Agent, actually, and I took
some vacation time. I’m on the
Presidential detail. That’s the whole thing. I love my wife and kids deeply –
they’re the world to me. And right now I don’t think I could take a bullet for
this guy and risk leaving them by themselves in his fucked up world.”
“Jesus,” was
all I could say.
“Yeah. I
know. Jesus. With Obama, no problem. He was worth it. With this guy … I mean
I’m around him a lot and I see the way he really is. He’s just not worth the
risk to my family. Yeah, he’s a lowlife, but a lot of them are. It’s just that
he simply doesn’t care … no way he cares. It’s like he doesn’t see anything but
himself and what he wants and now he has all these weird, fucked up rich guys
or crazy guys around him and I hear them
talking and it sounds like they’re talking normal but the stuff they’re saying
is so off the wall – even to me and I’m not especially political – that I just
don’t think I want to be around it any more. I don’t know what I would do if
somebody made a move on him and that’s not the way I’m supposed to be. You
know?”
“Yeah … I
guess … not really though.”
“Yeah … it’s
like there’s no honor now. I used to actually be honored to protect the
president. Not now. It’s all gone. At least with me. It’s all ugly … these
people … what they’re doing. It’s not just politics either … it’s worse. I hear
them and it’s like they want to get even somehow. And they talk about it in
these normal voices. I guess that’s what gets
me. It’s not normal. It’s just so ugly. I think it’s evil and I never
thought that way before. I never thought like that. I do all the time now. And
it’s not good for me or my family … or even the country because what if
somebody does make a move. I don’t know … I don’t.”
“Jeez … I
don’t know what to tell you.”
“I know. I’m
sorry to bother you like this, but … .”
“How do the other
agents feel?” I asked.
“I
don’t really know. I think everybody’s
afraid. There’s a lot of fear. We don’t really talk about it. Some of the guys
call him ‘Hair’ and make jokes about him. That’s even stopping. We had a couple
guys request transfers and one guy even resigned. The supervisors tell us to
just do our jobs. I think they’re afraid, too. It’s just not healthy.”
“What do you
think you’ll do?” I asked.
“I got to
get out. I’ve decided. I don’t know … talking to you helped some, weird as that
is. I can’t be part of this. I can’t live like this. Anyhow, thanks for listening. I’m going back
and pack now. I’m going home tomorrow.”
“Good luck.”
“Yeah,
thanks. I just hope I don’t need it.”
______________________________________________________________________
How Low Can He Go?
You have to
admit our President is a pace-setter. His poll numbers hit historic lows twice last week, a record, even though I
was hoping for a hat trick.
Of course
these low-ball poll figures are all fake news because they don’t glorify what
is turning out to be the most calamitous first 100 days in Presidential
history. The litany of lies, exposures, and failed legislation is enough to
make even the most hardened political observers blink in disbelief.
This Trump
reign so far is a monument to misgoverning.
The dude he sends out there to lie to the press wears two different
shoes, his flag pin is upside down, and he has spinach in his lying teeth. And
that’s just the way he looks. What comes out of his flannel mouth would be
unbelievable in a more rational setting, but this West Wing could well be the
west wing of a cozy little hell like Bedlam, the noted British retreat for the
dangerously unbalanced.
Donald Trump
might not be clinically psychotic – “might” being the operative word – but he
is a mosaic of irrational fixations. I think his mania to overturn all Barack
Obama’s legislation and legacy stems from a deep-seeded and unacknowledged
belief that on the best day of his life Donald Trump will never be the man and
president that Obama is and was. He competes with his predecessor on every
level from the size of his inauguration to the size of his defense budget. And
constant and transparent lying in the service of this psychic battle.
is what we
are seeing as a result. The political wrappings are just that – wrappings.
Donald Trump has no real political sense; he sees it as deal-making, but not in
the shrewd, canny way of an LBJ or even the stealthy, paranoid style of Dick
Nixon. Those guys were born politicians. Donald Trump is a born boss and bully.
“Do it because I say so” has been his career mantra, and he is finding out that
in the labyrinthine, leaking stretches of the D.C. swamp, that style just doesn’t get it done.
America has
become a violent and xenophobic enterprise. We have more guns, murders, and prisoners
than any nation in history and there seems to be no abating of this national
bloodlust in sight. War has become our preferred state, created and nurtured by
a ruling caste that preaches peace and prosperity even as it enriches itself
and impoverishes its citizens with no regard for any posterity but its
own. And Trump is it slovenly handmaiden,
stoking, stroking, and releasing all that is dark in the American soul.
Behind the
posturing and strutting of his campaign and presidency, there is a call to
violence and recklessness that appeals to the unfortunately significant portion
of the American people who see violence as a valid response to any differences
or challenges. His henchman and so-called advisor, Steve Bannon, is the high
priest of this cult of chaos and mayhem, a true madman.
And yet those ever-shrinking poll numbers are there, a crumbling of whatever misguided faith this charlatan had instilled, a hopeful reflection of an increasingly tough-minded citizenry who demands that promises be kept, that truths be told, and who is coming to the painful realization that American greatness is not a commodity to be bartered by a cheap huckster.
________________________________________________________________________
Someone
whose acumen I respect has labeled these two courtesans as “rich white trash.”
Not bad, actually. The neighbors in their toney Kalorama D.C. neighborhood
(where the Obamas and Rex Tillerson also live) are complaining about hoggy
parking and overflowing trash (!) Christ, even the Beverly Hillbillies picked
up after themselves.
And yet those ever-shrinking poll numbers are there, a crumbling of whatever misguided faith this charlatan had instilled, a hopeful reflection of an increasingly tough-minded citizenry who demands that promises be kept, that truths be told, and who is coming to the painful realization that American greatness is not a commodity to be bartered by a cheap huckster.
________________________________________________________________________
Gee, What A Peach of a Pair
While Donald
Trump’s official cabinet would make a locomotive take a dirt road, his two
closest advisors – first daughter Ivanka Trump and her over-portfolioed,
under-qualified husband, Jared Kuchner – are the dirt road.
These two high-end
parasites have as much business and experience in affairs of state as they do
in common humanity: none. They are pretty, petty, reflexive, generic grifters
whose entire lives have been monuments to all the ignorance and tone-deafness
real money can buy. Of course they are a perfect fit for where they are – at
the end of a surreal golden rainbow built and overseen by a raving sociopath
whose only concern is his ego and brand, which are one. America is merely a
brand extension in his beady slits of eyes and any greatness to come will be
only accidental and coincidental – collateral benefits, as it were.
Someone
whose acumen I respect has labeled these two courtesans as “rich white trash.”
Not bad, actually. The neighbors in their toney Kalorama D.C. neighborhood
(where the Obamas and Rex Tillerson also live) are complaining about hoggy
parking and overflowing trash (!) Christ, even the Beverly Hillbillies picked
up after themselves.
Ivanka, in
her best tone-deafness, honey-chirped, “We love the neighborhood and our family
has received an incredibly gracious welcome from our neighbors.” She forgot to
mention that they ran out of sugar from all the gracious neighbors borrowing
cups when they were able to find parking spaces among the four-vehicle motorcade
that takes Ivanka on her governmental and parental comings and goings.
Now that she
has her own West Wing office, maybe the nabe will get a little more peace and
quiet, and one of her aides de trump can look into the trash pick-up schedules
in Kalorama.
Ivanka is
quietly, almost unknowingly fearsome. The
New York Times Book Review for the first time ever last July 4 published a
short story (front page) by the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie entitled “The
Arrangements” modeled on Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in which Adichie
looked inside the mind and sensibilities
of Melania Trump on the day of a dinner for her parents’ fiftieth
anniversary. This was before Trump was elected and the story has stayed with
me. In it, Melania’s inner voice says “ … Ivanka whom Donald showed off like a
glowing modern toy that he did not know how to operate” and “ … Ivanka’s
polished voice, that fulsome surface that shielded cold metal.”
Ivanka
Trump’s angel face radiates with the inner light of total entitlement, as
witnessed by the covetous glances she reflexively cast at Justin Trudeau, the
hunky Canadian prime minister.
And when
someone calls what she perceives as bullshit on her or her dear Daddy, she’s gone,
baby, gone. She’s the first person ever to walk out on a Cosmo interview, if you can believe that. She didn’t like where the
questions were going. Oh.
Her
much-heralded feminism goes only as far as the deluded white middle class women
who voted for Daddy and are snapping up her la-de-da fashions, conflict of
interest be hanged.
When Planned
Parenthood was threatened by her father’s deranged budget, that organization
remarked on Ivanka’s “deafening silence.”
She is so
dirt road.
And her
prince consort, the good Jared Kushner, Trump’s go-to guy even above the
malevolent Steve Bannon before any decisions are made, is a fart in a windstorm
when the smoke he is blowing clears. Orthodox Jews must be looking at the bylaws
for this dude. The late Chris Christie put his old man Charlie in the slammer
for all kinds of fraud – and Jared put the skids to fat boy at his earliest
chance. You gotta like him for that.
That same
jailbird old man bought him entrance to Harvard and NYU and the good Jared made
one big Manhattan deal as a real estate guy and bailed. But Daddy Donald keeps
piling the responsibilities on this pretty boy; the latest is the White House
Office of American Innovation. Jeez – where do they get these names? Did anyone
think it would be the WH Office of Japanese innovation? But they got to get
that keyword in there lest we forget all the Greatness that will be coming down
the old Trump pike.
These
innovators are going to be a SWAT team of business types that will get the
government on a sound business footing. Didn’t I hear something about a Great
Recession at the hands of American Business?
Well, if that
goes South, Ivanka (she always gets top billing) and Jared will just round up
the sprouts and hit the Aspen slopes like they did during the abortive health
care debacle. They might be rich white trash, but there’s nothing wrong with
their timing.
_________________________________________________________________________
Right now,
after getting Trumpcare defeated, Trump is walking back his campaign crowing
about how he was going to repeal Obamacare his first day in office. Now the way
Trump walks something back is simply to lie. He’s straight up saying he never
said that and the delighted media is showing videos and quoting speeches of him
actually saying that, but Trump ain’t walking nothing back by doing something
as out of character as telling the truth. His style is to stick to his lies
until his last breath and to make sure everybody in his employ goes along with
that strategy, which worked well enough to get him into office – and says a
great deal disturbing about the American electorate.
_________________________________________________________________________
Walking Backwards
Politicians
are so afraid of sounding like normal people and thus not being able to keep us
in the dark about what they’re actually up to, that they use a strange and
made-up language for their public utterances.
It’s sort of
like the language you see cop spokespeople using when they have to give
television interviews. Nobody talks like that in real life. There must be some
kind of school where they send these people to learn how to talk like that.
Probably called “The New School for Obfuscation.”
Kellyanne
Conway, naturally, is the reigning Doyenne of Doubletalk, her “alternative
facts” becoming an instant classic.
My favorite
so far is when the newspeople, who are supposed to be clear speakers, writers,
talkers, and thinkers, say that so-and-so is “walking back” a prior statement.
The
immediate image I get is of some sleek-ass politico taking a statement by the
hand and walking it back into anonymity. In reality, it is a fancy sleight of
language by which a lie is not called a lie. If you walk your lie back it
becomes not a lie. They never mention what it becomes – hopefully forgotten, I
guess.
For
newspeople to coin and then use this phrase instead of pointing out the
original lie is to me aiding and abetting the lying politician and goes against
their truth-telling duties and obligations. It is not “fake news” per se, but it sure is it’s first cousin. I think it’s a
tacit admission by the press that, well, everybody lies all the time, so we’ll
give them this little get- out- of- jail- free phrase. Fuck that.
Right now,
after getting Trumpcare defeated, Trump is walking back his campaign crowing
about how he was going to repeal Obamacare his first day in office. Now the way
Trump walks something back is simply to lie. He’s straight up saying he never
said that and the delighted media is showing videos and quoting speeches of him
actually saying that, but Trump ain’t walking nothing back by doing something
as out of character as telling the truth. His style is to stick to his lies
until his last breath and to make sure everybody in his employ goes along with
that strategy, which worked well enough to get him into office – and says a
great deal disturbing about the American electorate.
His and King
of the Cowards Paul Ryan’s draconian health plan was as big a monstrosity as
Trump’s presidency is turning out to be and even the rotten carcass that is the
U.S. House of Representatives couldn’t stomach it enough to give it birthing
breath. They walked it back right up Trump’s fat ass.
And it’s
beginning to look like Trump himself might get walked back. There are
committees and investigative agencies looking into everything Trump from
Russian contacts to where he gets his hair done. As they turn up more and more,
the acrid odor of impeachment becomes more than a faint whiff. And when it
finally dawns on the Republicans that this bleary-eyed, congenitally lying
albatross they have around their party’s neck is going to take down their ship
of state with all hands, watch the rats desert that leaky vessel. Then the fun
begins.
________________________________________________________________________
The President Cheats At Golf
According to
Golf Digest, Donald Trump will be the
16th of the last 19 presidents to play golf and is the best golfer,
with a 2.8 handicap and 19 club championships.
Before him,
Jack Kennedy was the best, the magazine says. That’s probably the only time
Trump and Kennedy will ever be mentioned in the same breath – unless Dallas
repeats itself, of course.
To veer off
course – golf course, that is – and to pursue the sentence before this a little
further, I’ve heard several Trump supporters say that they are positive that he
will be assassinated. It didn’t seem to bother them a lot either; it was like
this would just be an extension of the entertainment value they see as the
chief highlight of his candidacy and presidency to date. They are part of a
constituency that sees today’s politics as pop culture, which would be harmless
enough if those same “politics” as being practiced by Trump weren’t so
dangerous to America and the rest of the world.
Back to
Trump and golf. You have to question that handicap and those club titles in
view of a story told by the Hall of Fame boxer and current boxing promoter,
Oscar De La Hoya. He was in a foursome with Trump and Trump’s first four tee
shots went water/out-of-bounds/water/bushes. Hmm. Then – lo and behold – Trump finds his first
tee shot smack in the middle of the fairway.
“I guess it
was his course, so it was his rules,” De La Hoya said. “It shows something
about his character. Golf is a gentleman’s sport. You don’t lie about your
score, you don’t lie about moving your ball. It goes to show what we’re dealing
with.”
Indeed,
Oscar. Even Tricky Dick Nixon was never accused of cheating at golf. Or Bill
Clinton, who lied to the whole country and his wife on national television.
But, hey,
Trump seems the most comfortable liar in the history of prevarication. His lies
are legion and increasing with each tweet. He is such an accomplished and
champion liar because he has done such a masterful – pathological? – job of
convincing himself that he telling nothing but the whole truth and nothing but
the truth all the time. And he has a crew around him backing him up at every
lie and a Congress full of Republican cowards who put party above truth and
country every day of the year. Plus enabling supporters who don’t really care –
for a variety of reasons – that the President of the United States is lying in
his teeth on a regular and endless basis. What more could a liar ask for?
Maybe another
champion liar, like Lance Armstrong, who once dated his daughter, Ivanka, for a
caddy.
Fore!
________________________________________________________________________
Yet now,
Suze tells me, the U is being defaced and scarred by lowlife anti-Semitic posters
and drawings throughout the sprawling campus. Swastikas bloom, too, like dark
flowers of blind hate and unreasoning stupidity. There have been seven
anti-Semitic incidents since December. My heart falters as I remember our walk
on that blue, sunny afternoon. Even more so, given that Suze is Jewish.
________________________________________________________________________
Total Blame
My ex-wife
Suze lives in Minneapolis, a bright, clean, progressive city with a decidedly
liberal bent.
Last time I
visited, we walked from her river-side condo over the pedestrian bridge that
spans the Mississippi to the campus of the University of Minnesota, where she
is enrolled in several courses.
The “U,” as
it is known, was alive with clear-eyed, friendly, intelligent young people,
going about their lives in an atmosphere that to me was conducive to all that
is good about American education. These would be fine, proud citizens,
contributing to a bright and shining future.
Yet now,
Suze tells me, the U is being defaced and scarred by lowlife anti-Semitic posters
and drawings throughout the sprawling campus. Swastikas bloom, too, like dark
flowers of blind hate and unreasoning stupidity. There have been seven
anti-Semitic incidents since December. My heart falters as I remember our walk
on that blue, sunny afternoon. Even more so, given that Suze is Jewish.
The university’s
administration has assembled a rapid response squad to clean off these hate
messages as quickly as possible, and that, too, seizes my heart – the very fact
that it is necessary.
In
Philadelphia, Suze’s home town and my adopted one, more than 100 headstones were
recently overturned in the Jewish Mt. Carmel Cemetery, and the same thing
happened in a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis. Abhorrent.
One person
does not overturn that many headstones. It takes a group effort of blind
anti-Semitism and organized fascism.
To their
ever-lasting credit, the Philadelphia electricians union’s president, John
“Johnny Doc” Dougherty, has pledged his members to the heart-breaking task of righting the
headstones. Bless his Irish heart
Also, there have been more than 100 cowardly bomb threats phoned to Jewish community centers around the country.
Also, there have been more than 100 cowardly bomb threats phoned to Jewish community centers around the country.
The unavoidable
conclusion is that these acts are the sole responsibility of the President of
the United States of America. His is the total blame.
His
mealy-mouthed condemnation of these vile acts does little or nothing to
contradict the fact that his reckless and dark rhetoric throughout the campaign
and into his presidency has unleashed the worst of the American soul, the evil
and brutal night that brooks no daylight.
His
appointment of blind, arrogant monsters like Steve Bannon to influential and
high profile administration posts signals to the underbelly of our nation that
there is no accountability now for what heretofore has been low and unacceptable.
Jeff Sessions – an admitted liar under oath -- as the top law enforcement agent
of the nation is a disgraceful joke, given this Lilliputian’s record on race
and equality.
And, beyond
belief, our president’s daughter and son-in-law are Orthodox Jews – an
unbelievable irony that means nothing in these times of Trump-fueled hate and
bigotry.
He must be
stopped.
________________________________________________________________________
President Trump also has the White House swept daily for bugs and also sprayed with DDT, just in case.
Then
Session’s boss in the White House says he has complete confidence in the dude.
________________________________________________________________________
Not Just Wire-Tapping
A Civic Duty has intercepted a whole covey of tweets from our esteemed president.
It turns out that ex-president Barack Obama did more than tap his successor’s Trump Tower phones during the recent presidential campaign. Witness some of the intercepted tweets:
- “Obama behind Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations.
- "Had something to do with Muhammad Ali’s death, too. Truth is out!”
- “Obama slipping extra-long neckties into my closet. Big suits, too. Fashion fascist!”
- “Obama rigged Oscar fiasco in case Denzel didn’t win. So racist!”
- “Obama keeps filling Washington swamp every time I drain it. Obstructionist!”
- “Obama had Jewish cemeteries defiled to make anti-Semites look bad. Anti-anti-Semitic! Thought so.”
- “Obama behind Deflate-Gate to embarrass my Patriot pals Brady, Belichick, and Kraft. Super Bowl miracle was payback. Go Pats!”
- “Obama actually born in Moscow. Why he drinks Black Russians. Have proof – 100 proof!”
- “Obama tapped his own phones. Got his lines crossed – as usual!”
- “Obama behind Brinks job. Needed campaign funds. So criminal!”
- “Obamas took toilet paper holders when they left White House. Have paper trail!”
- “Obama says global warming a reality. Delusional!”
- “Obama over-tipped on Hawaiian vacations. I never tip at Lago a Mar! Save taxpayers money bigtime!”
- “Obama not first black president. It was Calvin Coolidge. Called him “Silent Cal” ‘cause he wouldn’t talk about it. Have evidence!”
- “Obama high-fived Muslims after 9-11. Have videos!”
- “Obama curses like buddy Rahm Emanuel. Chicago thing. Have audios!”
- “Obama in secret contact with Putin for years. Still is. Use carrier pigeons. Then eat them. Ugh!”
- “Obama says KKK racist. No way. Ask Sessions.”
- “Obama was rapper when young. Called himself Bad Barry. So typical!”
President Trump also has the White House swept daily for bugs and also sprayed with DDT, just in case.
_________________________________________________________________________
Here We Go Again
Let me get
this straight: this guy Jeff Sessions, the United States Attorney General, the
chief law enforcement officer in the whole country, lied to a Senate committee
during his confirmation hearing about meeting with the Russian ambassador –
twice – during last year’s presidential campaign.
Then, when
the scum-ridden Washington Post
caught him up, he goes, “Oh, that. Now that you mention it, I did meet with him
a couple times, but it was no big deal. I don’t really remember what we talked
about because you know I talk to a lot of people, but I’m sure it wasn’t about
the campaign. Notes? Not that I remember.”
Then
Session’s boss in the White House says he has complete confidence in the dude.
Then
Sessions goes on television and says he’s recusing himself from any
investigations into the campaign vis a vis Russia because his staff gave him
their “candid and honest opinion” that he should do so. You’d think the
Attorney General might have figured that out for himself.
A couple
things come to mind: first, Jeff Sessions would steal a hot stove. Second: Jeff
Sessions would steal a roomful of hot stoves.
Also that
Donald Trump isn’t very good at HR. Mike Flynn was thick with the Russkies during
the transition – a definite no-no -- and resigned after 24 days as Trump’s
National Security Adviser after lying to everybody in sight. Turns out Trump
knew about the whole deal a few weeks before that but he’s very loyal to his
employees and let Mike slide for a while.
And then
when Trump was looking around for Flynn’s replacement, guys were bailing left
and right, pleading all kinds of excuses to stay out of a zero sum job. Plus,
about half of the slots in Trump’s administration are unfilled as we go to
press. No one ever said he got to be a billionaire by his HR skills. You really
don’t need any when you know everything there is to know about everything out
there in the business world.
This job is
a little different, as he’s finding out every day when something else goes
haywire or another big leak or two or three or four come cascading out of a
jury-rigged administration that is running scared and vindictive. And Trump
knows who’s behind it all: Barack Obama, the Anti-Christ of his paranoid
nightmares.
Now this
thing with Session’s recusing himself from any investigations into the campaign
and Russian involvement: This is really strange and weird – and probably
improbable given the nature of all things Trumpian.
Sessions is
supposed to be running the show and yet he’s going to the bench for the Super
Bowl of investigations. Yeah. Isn’t he going to read the papers or watch TV? Do
you think his glorious staff is going to keep mum around him? Do you think he’s
really going to recuse himself? He can’t. No way. Things just don’t work that way.
One good
thing about all this is that it’s taken the fake bloom off Trump’s phony State
of the Union performance. All those blue skies lasted all of two days.
A parting
note: Trump’s people passed on the ethics course that is de rigueur for incoming administrations.
Wonder why?
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