Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich Wednesday, Feb 1 2017 

Politics , , , , , , , , victorgold 5:50 pm

 

Two weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, this much we know: If Trump were to issue an executive order suspending the first 10 amendments to the Constitution . . .

  1. Paul Ryan would issue a statement saying he was “deeply troubled” by the order but would withhold judgment until he had a chance to study it in full.
  2. Mitch McConnell would issue a statement expressing “concern” over the order’s effect on the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.
  3. John McCain and Lindsay Graham would issue a statement expressing “outrage” over the order and their intention to hold hearings on it as soon as they finished hearings on three other executive orders they were outraged about.
  4. Reince Priebus would issue a statement blaming CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post for reporting news of the order.
  5. Kellyanne Conway would issue a statement saying the election is over, Trump won, and the President’s critics ought to “shut up” and “get with the program.”
  6. Charles Krauthammer would write a column deploring the order, blaming it on Barack Obama for having set a precedent by issuing executive orders.
  7. Marco Rubio would make a speech saying while Trump’s order suspending the first 10 amendments was OK, “He’d better not mess with the Bill of Rights.”

 

Sound bite to remember

Once to every man and nation

Comes the moment to decide

In the strife of truth with falsehood,

For the good or evil side.

–James Russell Lowell

 

Twittering Abe Lincoln Friday, Jan 20 2017 

History and Politics , , , victorgold 7:30 pm

Selected tweets from our 16th President (1860-64)

November 1860:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Election won, BIGTIME! Whipped Steve Douglas, two other losers. Second win over Lyin’ Steve though Illinois Senate vote in ’58 was stolen

*                                  *                                  *

in rigged election. What a phony!

January 1861:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Southern clown Jeff Davis claiming my election not legitimate. OUTRAGEOUS! Looks like war. But

*                                  *                                  *

best way to stop spread of slavery is build a wall across Mason-Dixon Line and make rebels pay for it!

November 1862:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
McClellan turns out to be low-energy general. Told him, “You’re fired.” Probably will run against me in ’64 but he’s all talk, talk, talk, no action.

February 1863:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Stanton-Seward arguing again. Should never have hired team of rivals. Totally embarrassing.

November 1863:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Speech in Pennsylvania. Town called Gettysburg. Lousy staff work. Would draw bigger crowd in Philadelphia.

January 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Hired new general. Grant. Said to drink a lot but captured Vicksburg, wherever that is.

September 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Sherman marching through Georgia. He and Drunkie Grant claiming credit for winning war. RIDICULOUS! If I’d taken command myself

*                                  *                                  *

it would have been over two years sooner!

November 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Re-elected! HUGE win! Staff now talking about my legacy. Suggest face on five dollar bill and naming White House bedroom after me.

*                                  *                                  *

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Better idea. Face on Thousand Dollar bill, adding two floors and renaming building LINCOLN TOWER!

 

Sound Bite to Remember 

After a century and a half in business, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey will close down in May. They obviously decided they couldn’t compete with what’s going on in Washington the next four years.

–VG

 

PAGING JOE McCARTHY Tuesday, Dec 20 2016 

Ethics and History and Movies and Politics , , , victorgold 6:30 pm

Official GuidePost of the Alt-Center (2017-2021)

 

At last count, Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin over Donald Trump was upward of 2.8 million votes. It would have been twice that number except for the millions of votes stolen by Russian hackers in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that would have made Clinton president-elect instead of Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian Candidate.

The second sentence of the above paragraph is untrue, the spurious kind of “fact” we’d be getting from Trump’s early morning tweets if the outcome on November 8 had been reversed. However, anyone who wants to pass it on through the internet is free to do so. There’s no point leaving the field of social media fabrication open to Michael Flynn’s pizza-porn crackpots.

Flynn, as you know, is the retired Army general picked by Trump to be his national security adviser. Among the general’s credentials for the job: He was the honored guest, seated next to Putin himself, at a Kremlin gala sponsored by the Russian propaganda channel RT, which Flynn gratuitously compared to CNN (much like George Patton’s 1945 equivalence of the Nazi party with the Democrats and Republicans, which got Patton removed as commander of the Third Army).

Leonid Brezhnev, Putin’s Communist boss when he served as a spymaster in the KGB, has to be chortling in his grave at the prospect of a White House national security advisor who takes luxury junkets to Moscow paid for by the Kremlin. And now, if the autocrat in Trump Tower has his way, we can look forward to a Secretary of State so much in bed with the Russian dictator he’s been bemedalled as a member of the Russian Order of Friendship.

And what exactly are Rex Tillerson’s diplomatic credentials? As CEO of ExxonMobil he’s spent the better part of recent years wheeler-dealing across the globe not on behalf of American interests but those of his multinational corporation. Not that the country’s interests and ExxonMobil’s coincide. But when they diverge – as when the State Department imposed sanctions on Russia after its takeover of Crimea – Tillerson earned his Order of Friendship medal by lobbying Congress and the State Department to lift those sanctions.

So we’ve come to this. Who would have thought, in the dim, distant days of the Cold War when Joe McCarthy was warning about Communist agents in the State Department, that it wouldn’t be a liberal Democrat but a Republican president who’d open the White House doors to a Russian dictator trained by the KGB?

And what would Tailgunner Joe be saying on the Senate floor at this point? I can see him railing about General Flynn’s dining with Putin (“a disgrace to the uniform”) and Rex Tillerson’s ties to Russian oligarchs (“an enemy within”). And on hearing the latest poll that shows no fewer than four out of 10 Republicans now have a “favorable” view of the Russian dictator, labeling them (as he did the Democrats at the GOP convention in 1952) “the party of treason.”

Sound bite to remember (by those gullible “anti-globalists” who voted for Putin’s poodle):

“There are no nations. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and ATT and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.”

–from the motion picture “Network,” Arthur Jensen’s (played by Ned Beatty) corrective lecture to Howard Beale (Peter Finch)

 

 

 

ONE-LINER DEFINITION Wednesday, Sep 28 2016 

Politics , victorgold 10:28 am

Rudy Giuliani: Donald Trump without the charm.

 

CORRECTION: MUNICH REVISITED Thursday, Aug 4 2016 

History and Politics , victorgold 1:18 pm

My most recent post spoke of the similarity between Donald Trump and a 20th-century Munich beer hall Fuehrer. It now appears that a more appropriate Munich parallel would be a 19th-century model, Mad Ludwig of Bavaria.

Sound bite to remember

“I always voted at my party’s call
And never thought of thinking for myself at all.”

— Gilbert and Sullivan

 

TRUMP OF THE WILL: Is the Republican Nominee the Man in the Munich Beer Hall?  Friday, Jul 29 2016 

Ethics and History and Literature and Politics , , , , , , , victorgold 12:31 pm

 

            “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

                        –George Santayana

I quote this hackneyed aphorism only to tear it down. The problem, I would tell Santayana if we were to hash things out over a Starbucks coffee, is that the past never repeats itself in recognizable form.

True, if a little man in a brown shirt were today denouncing Jews in a Munich beer hall and we didn’t do something about it, we’d get what we deserved. But history, though its underlying DNA may be the same, arrives in different forms. Not only that, it loves to confound the pundits.

Consider how literary pundits over the years, from Sinclair Lewis to Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey, foresaw the decline and fall of American democracy.

Lewis, in his novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” projected the rise of an American dictator, Berzelius Windrip, a rural populist patterned after Louisiana’s Huey Long. Knebel and Bailey, in “Seven Days in May,” foresaw the coming American dictator as a military hero, a strongman in uniform like General Douglas MacArthur.

But who, other than a Mel Brooks-style satirist, until six months ago would ever have sketched a scenario featuring as a would-be American dictator a Manhattan real estate-casino hustler — anything but a rural populist — whose military record consists of draft deferments equal to those of Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney?

Only in America. But not the 20th century America of Huey Long and Douglas MacArthur. No, the Twitter-brained, selfie-loving America of Donald Trump.

Yet, wait. Before we determine whether Vladimir Putin’s preferred presidential candidate is a bizarre reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, let’s check whether he passes the first test of Munich beer hall animadversion: Is Trump anti-Jewish? (I use the term anti-Jewish to be specific, since his anti-Semitism — Arabs being Semites — is well established.)

At first take the answer would seem to be, “Of course not. His son-in-law is Jewish and his daughter’s a convert.” But then we come to the puzzling business of his refusal to fully repudiate the backing of neo-Nazi supporters like David Duke and his furious defense of an anti-Clinton tweet featuring a Star of David backed by dollar bills.

So what’s the answer? For my part I call on a story once told by Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs who, while running for governor, was “defended” by Governor Earl Long, after being accused of having been a Communist during his college days.

“Hale can’t be a Communist,” Long told a crowd in north Louisiana. “He’s not only a Catholic but a close friend of the archbishop.” Long said this, as Boggs pointed out, knowing that his audience of hard-shell Baptists would sooner vote for a Communist than “a close friend” of a Catholic archbishop.

“So I called Long the next morning,” as Boggs told the story, “and said I didn’t appreciate his injecting religion into the campaign. He said, ‘Hale, you know I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body.’ And I said, ‘I know you don’t, Governor, but you know that other people do, and you know how to use it.’”

Jewish son-in-law? Convert daughter? Donald Trump obviously doesn’t have a prejudiced bone in his body. But he knows that other people do, and ….

Sound bite to remember

“God has a special providence for fools, drunks and the United States of America.”

–Otto von Bismarck, proclaiming what was true in 1870 and, we may hope, in November 2016

 

 

Sweet Smell of Defeat Sunday, Jun 19 2016 

Politics , , , victorgold 3:10 pm

When last heard from Republican House Leader Eric Cantor was being ignominiously routed by a virtual unknown in his 2014 primary race for reelection. Unsurprisingly, given his record as a Wall Street yo-yo, he has moved on to bigger and better things with Moelis & Company, an investment firm at which his annual salary is $400,000, with stock options adding up to a $3.4 million payout.

All of which was revealed in a June 16 feature on Cantor in the Washington Post Style section, one paragraph of which, standing alone, reveals the Washington mindset that led to his defeat.

The telltale paragraph:

“Cantor earned $193,400 as majority leader; his wife, a lawyer and investment banker, was the real moneymaker. One of the reasons he took the Moelis job, he says, was because it was his turn to support the family. ‘Life is about balance. For 14 years, she had been basically the breadwinner,’ he says. ‘I felt that I needed to do this for her.’”

Let’s see now: He made $193,400 a year as a congressman but his wife was “the breadwinner.” Where do the Cantors buy their bread — at Tiffany’s? It was his turn “to support the family.” Right. How, after all, can an American family in this day and age hope to subsist on an income just short of $200,000 a year?

Any wonder why a Marxist demagogue like Bernie Sanders and a Foxist demagogue like Donald Trump have gone far this year with the message that our national leaders have fallen out of touch with workaday Americans?

Sound Bite to Remember

“There once was a very poor family. The mother was poor, the father was poor,  the children were poor, the maid was poor, and the butler was poor.”

Frank Mankiewicz, circa 1950, presciently anticipating the plight of families like the struggling Cantors. 

 

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