Tag Archives: America

Anybody Who Still Admires Trump

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There has been a lot of discussion lately about Trump’s supporters. One of the points frequently made is that we should try to understand their admiration for Trump from their perspective. We shouldn’t assume we know best.

Okay, I’ve tried to do that. This is the conclusion I’ve reached: 

Anybody who still admires Trump at this point is either an idiot, an ignoramus or a dupe.

In fact, I’ll share this further observation:

Anybody who thinks Hillary Clinton is the corrupt, untrustworthy candidate in this race is either an idiot, an ignoramus or a dupe.

Consider, for example, this article from The Washington Post: “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?”

And this one from Salon that explains why so many people are wrongly convinced that Clinton is corrupt: “Press, lies and Hillary’s campaign: Years of smears have created a fictional version of Clinton. They’re also a disservice to voters”. Its subtitle is “Many Americans think Clinton is a congenital liar — that’s because of the right and the media, not her”.

Finally, here is well-known journalist James Fallows of The Atlantic showing how recent news coverage of the campaign was especially dangerous and misleading. The article’s title is “How the Media Undermine American Democracy”.

Fallows has been writing almost daily about this moment in history under the heading “The Daily Trump: Filling a Time Capsule”. His editors explain why:  

People will look back on this era in our history to see what was known about Donald Trump while Americans were deciding whether to choose him as president. Here’s a running chronicle from James Fallows on the evidence available to voters as they make their choice, and of how Trump has broken the norms that applied to previous major-party candidates.

This is Fallows’s first entry from back in May, in which he shows how Trump jumped to a conclusion about a missing plane. This is his most recent entry, which discusses Trump’s continuing refusal to release his tax returns. 

It’s great to know there are journalists who are doing a good job covering the presidential campaign. Despite the fact that you have to look for them, there’s no excuse at this point for being a political ignoramus or a dupe, whatever your perspective is. 

And one more thought: I should have said that you could still admire Trump at this point if you’re a thug. Obviously, one thug can appreciate another thug who’s getting away with thuggery.

Five Minutes of Trump Debating Trump

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It would be great if this video were watched as many times as “Gagnam Style”. Only 2 billion views to go.

Of course, when someone says “he tells it like it is”, what they mean is “he tells it like I think it is”.

Hillary Does a Press Conference

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Hillary Clinton has been criticized for not doing a press conference this year. She’s pointed out that she’s done 300 or so interviews with members of the press since January, and of course there were those “debates” during which she responded to questions from the moderators, but she hasn’t stood in front of a crowd of reporters throwing random questions at her one after the other.

So  it must have been a relief to Trump and her other critics when she stood in front of a crowd of reporters throwing random questions at her this week. It happened after she gave a brief address to the joint convention of the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists yesterday.

But one might say it was really a question and answer session. And it didn’t involve the entire White House press corps. But it sure looked and sounded like a press conference. 

The first question is at 16:00 in the video below. Clinton’s detailed answer lasts 4 minutes and 40 seconds and shows yet again why she might be a great President. This being a press conference, of course, the next question has to do with emails.

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Steve Fraser

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Part 1 is entitled “Class Warfare: The Long 19th Century”. In the author’s words:

We should … conceive of a long nineteenth century lasting from post-revolutionary days through to the Great Depression of the 1930s… The epoch that encompassed the transformation of a sliver of coastal villages, small farms, slave plantations and a few port cities into a transcontinental commercial, agricultural and industrial preeminnce was a wrenching one. For those generations that lived through it, it often called forth … recurring waves of resistance to the inexorable, a stubborn, multifarious insistence that the march of Progress was too spendthrift in human lives, that there were alternatives [22-23].

Fraser tells the history of those transitional years by describing political movements, the growth of organized labor and the writings of various intellectuals. It’s a very interesting story that culminates in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the coming of World War 2.

Part 2 is called “Desire and Fear in the Second Gilded Age”. Fraser tries to explain why there has been such little resistance, organized or otherwise, to increasing inequality, stagnant wages and boring, regimented work. He delves into the history again, but also tries to give psychological or sociological explanations. What I took away from this part of the book is that people are distracted by consumer products and mass entertainment; there has been a constant campaign to glorify “the successful” among us; it’s difficult for most of us to imagine an alternative (since the transition to a modern industrial nation happened so long ago); and organized labor has been beaten into submission. The powers that be are highly organized and have a lot of money to spend on maintaining the status quo. Workers aren’t organized at all and many are just trying to get by, plus nobody wants to lose their job to cheap foreign competition by making trouble.

From Under the Cone of Silence

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Four days ago, I lowered the Cone of Silence, thereby tuning out all the news and commentary that keeps me relatively well-informed about current events. I wanted to watch the Democratic National Convention with no help from anybody else, unfiltered and undiscussed by anyone on TV or the internet. That’s meant no New York Times, no New York Magazine, no Guardian, no Daily Kos, no VOX, no Sky News, not even any Yahoo News for four whole days.

Finding gavel-to-gavel coverage of the convention online was easy (the convention has a website). Resisting the urge to read about it has been hard. In fact, despite my best efforts, one piece of news slipped under or through the Cone.

I learned that the Republican candidate for President of the United States said the Russians should try to find a bunch of Hillary Clinton’s emails and share them with the world. (Later, he apparently said he wasn’t joking.) That made me wonder. If the emails were uninteresting, hacking them would merely be a crime and an enormous campaign dirty trick. But if they did indeed contain sensitive national secrets, that would be a crime, a dirty trick and a breach of national security. Maybe Trump should have kept his mouth shut?

Anyway, I have a couple thoughts I want to share.

Remember two weeks ago when Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she was very worried about a Trump presidency? She later apologized for speaking out, since Supreme Court Justices are expected to keep their opinions about politics to themselves (although it’s fine for them to help elect a Republican President, vacate campaign finance laws and rule that the Voting Rights Act is obsolete, all while voting along party lines). 

Then, today, I saw that a retired Marine Corp general, John Allen, who commanded our forces in Afghanistan, will speak at the convention. Presumably, he will explain why he believes Clinton would be a much better Commander-in-Chief than you know who.

In reading a little about Gen. Allen, however, I saw some criticism at the Marine Corps Times site:

One expert on civil-military relations fears that by endorsing Clinton, Allen could give the appearance that he is speaking for current senior military leaders.

“A man of his prominence and his rank can be interpreted to speak for the whole military community, retired and active duty,” said Richard Kohn, who teaches military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kohn said he does not believe any retired military officer should ever endorse political candidates.

“They are in effect declaring themselves partisans and leaving the non-partisanship of the military profession and that’s a different thing,” he said.

We should note that a retired Army general spoke in favor of the Republican nominee last week, but putting that aside, it strikes me that anyone criticizing Gen. Allen, and anyone who criticized Justice Ginsburg, in fact even Justice Ginsburg herself, have all missed the point.

Rules help us make our way through life in an orderly fashion. Ethical rules, professional rules, grammatical rules, rules of thumb, the rules we call “the law”, they all help us deal with the situations we confront as we go about our business. Should I take that loaf of bread without paying? If he won’t look you in the eye, he’s probably lying. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. “Couldn’t” is okay, but “can’t” isn’t.

As we all know, however, extraordinary things do happen. We sometimes face situations where the standard rules aren’t good enough. Can you think of such a situation today? Let me put it this way: Trump is so utterly unqualified to be President, he would be so dangerous if he became Commander-in-Chief, that no rules, laws, standards or common practices should stop anyone at all from saying so. 

Despite the fact that he won a major political party’s nomination, it would be entirely appropriate if the whole Supreme Court (all eight of them) and the senior officers who make up the Joint Chiefs of Staff (all seven of them) went on national television and pointed out the obvious fact: Nobody should vote for this guy! Wake up, you people!

I don’t mean to say that none of the rules apply in this situation. We should still have a presidential election on November 8th. The FBI shouldn’t put Trump in a cell. He shouldn’t be given a one-way ticket to Mars. But, seriously, we all need to do what we can to stop him from becoming President. We need to do it for ourselves as Americans but also for the rest of the world. (There are even rules in our favor: Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.)

Before I go, there was one other thing I wanted to mention. Maybe you’ve seen a movie called “Seven Days in May”. It was based on a novel about an attempted military coup in the United States. The idea was that the President wanted to sign a treaty with the Russians, but most of our military really hated it. So Burt Lancaster and a bunch of other high-ranking officers tried to take over the government. I won’t tell you how it ended, but we were lucky to have Kirk Douglas on our side.

Now consider if somebody like the general who led the conspiracy in Seven Days in May decided to leave the Army and run for President. As played by Burt Lancaster, Gen. James Mattoon Scott was a very handsome, very intelligent, very experienced, very skilled officer. If anyone was looking for a Man on a White Horse to save America in its darkest hour, he’d be a prime candidate.

So here’s my question: If millions of Americans are willing to elect an unpredictable ignoramus and reality TV con man like Trump, how would our fellow citizens react to a candidate who favored equally misguided policies, but who could speak intelligently and had a distinguished record of service to America?

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not worry about that question. We have enough trouble already.