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Donald Trump

Has the Trump Hit the Fan?: The Challenge of Being President in the Real World

August 8, 2019
by Peter Feinman

Trade wars are easy.
Insulting people is fun.
Dividing the country is good.

WE the People want our President to have the right stuff to go into the arena and emerge victoriously in the real world. How do we know if a person is capable of doing so? One way is to examine previous experiences. They may be suggestive of how a person will respond under pressure. Military experience may be a factor in such considerations but it is not a prerequisite. Such leadership challenges may take many forms and not necessarily military.

One test case comes from Ebola: a 2018 article in The Atlantic by Ed Yong entitled

“When the Next plague Hits: The epidemics of the early 21st century revealed a world unprepared even as the risk of pandemics continues to multiply. Much worse is coming. Is Donald Trump ready?”

This rather long title reviews the responses to various medical threats to human life which have occurred recently. It asks how well prepared we are to handle the next one. We do not know where it will originate. We do not know what it will be. We do know that sooner or later it will happen.

The author interviewed Anthony Fauci, Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAIAD) for the article. Fauci has directly interacted with every American President from Ronald Reagan through Barack Obama on the subject of epidemics. He has done so because in every one of those administrations there has been an epidemic issue which needed to be dealt with. Since as of the time of the article, there had been no such epidemic in the current administration, there had been no such opportunity for him to interact with the current President.

Naturally that raises the question of what would happen if there was a virus or epidemic of some kind that would “emerge to test Trump’s mettle.”  The author expresses some trepidation at this prospect given his lack of background in science or health and the absence of such expertise in the White House. The author does not mention the oft-voiced disdain for science expressed by numerous Trumpicans.

To attempt to answer the question of what would he do, Yong examined how The Donald responded to the Ebola epidemic of 2014. By coincidence, he updated his article with online post on The Atlantic website on August 3:

The Rank Hypocrisy of Trump’s Ebola Tweets

Five years ago, the doctor Kent Brantly was evacuated back to the U.S. after being infected with Ebola—against the wishes of the man who is now president.

Yong probably wrote this post in response to that president retweeting a tweet from Franklin Graham commemorating the anniversary of the return of Dr. Brantly. That retweet lead to the following tweet by Sam Stein.

Of all the Trump hypocrisy tweets, this one may be the most infuriating for me. In 2014, he was an absolute horror show when it came to the Ebola crisis: creating panic, advocating medically indefensible positions, demagoguing, etc… Now, he has the nerve to RT this???

The retweet infuriated Yong too. In his online post he referred to what actually had been said back in 2014:

Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days – now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent. KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE! (7:04 PM – 31 Jul 2014)

The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences! (6:22 PM – 1 Aug 2014)

The fact that we are taking the Ebola patients, while others from the area are fleeing to the United States, is absolutely CRAZY-Stupid pols (3:55 PM – 2 Aug 2014)

The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our “borders.” Act fast! (4:26 AM – 2 Aug 2014)

The hypocrisy shines through because if Obama had acted in accordance with these tweets, Brantley and others would have died. There would be no five-year anniversary to celebrate.

Here we go! I stated long ago that we should cancel all flights from West Africa. Now we have Ebola in U.S., AND IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE! (5:09 PM – 30 Sep 2014)

Looks like Obama will not stop the very potentially dangerous flights to and from West Africa. What the hell is wrong with this guy? (5:53 PM – 16 Oct 2014)

I am starting to think that there is something seriously wrong with President Obama’s mental health. Why won’t he stop the flights. Psycho! (1:23 AM – 16 Oct 2014)

At least he did not call these countries “Trumphole” countries as he later would.

In the article, Yong noted that the direct flights The Donald called for to be banned did not exist. He also cited the evidence that travel restrictions had not helped to control previous diseases like SARS or H1N1. But whereas Yong consulted health experts to write his article, THE VERY STABLE GENIUS has no such need. After all, his is the smartest person in the room.

As Yong tactfully wrote in his article:

His dislike of outsiders and disdain for diplomacy could lead him to spurn the cooperative, outward-facing strategies that work best to contain emergent pandemics.

Yong questioned whether our leader can provide the reliable information and unifying spirit that We the People most need. Instead we have an immature child attempting to function in an adult role without having the mental necessities to do so. The result is an impulsive reaction by an uniformed individual incapable of learning. Or as Yong put it:

Trump’s tendency to tweet rashly, delegitimize legitimate sources of information, and readily buy into conspiracy theories could be disastrous.

I submit that the Ebola crisis provides a test case for how the immature child posing as an adult would respond in a crisis. All the tricks of the trade that work so well for THE DONALD in the political professional wrestling arena would prove counterproductive if not outright dangerous if the seventh-grade-smart-aleck-dumb-aleck acted the same way in the real world in a real crisis.

For the first 2 ½ years, he was fortunate not to have an emergency. Yes, there was a hurricane in Puerto Rico. But he managed the greatest recovery effort in the history of the United States. Plus he had fun throwing rolls of paper towels at the needy. WHEE! Look at how much fun everyone is having! WHEE! What a great job I am doing!

There also was Charlottesville. How much more of a unifying leader could one be?

But perhaps his luck has run out. Perhaps his ability to fake it as an adult is reaching its breaking point. Perhaps from this point forward he will have to deal with real problems in the real world that are not going away, that he cannot ignore, and that he can dismiss in a tweet. Since his declaration of America’s Third Civil War on July 14 (July 14, 2019 = April 12, 1861 II: The Third Civil War Is Engaged), emotions have intensified, lines have been drawn, and people have been murdered.

So what is going on in the real world where adult leadership actually is required?

What does the Nobel Peace Prize winner have to show for his abusive love affair with Kim Jung-un?

What does he have to show for his anti-Obama actions in Iran have now that vessels have been seized and Iran is free to pursue nuclear weapons now since there is no treaty to bind it?

What does he have to show for his easy trade war with China so far? The fact that he thinks the Chinese are paying the tariffs proves how much money Fred Trump had to pay to get his son into Wharton. And if he took Introductory Economics there he never read Samuelson or understood him.

What does he have to show for his excessively intense use of the term “invasion” in his speeches, his rallies, his tweets, and his Facebook campaign posts? How many more people will take the advice of the good ol boy in the Panhandle who shouted out “Shoot them!” to the laughter of this President and the Trumpicans?

Our president has never even tried to be the leader of the country. When the adults in the room convinced him that situation required him to at least fake being the president of the country, he can read of a teleprompter. But no matter what polished words he recites, his true nature cannot remain under wraps for long. At the teleprompter, he evinces no sympathy, no empathy, no emotion, and no conviction. His low energy imitation of an adult leader is a far cry from the engaged seventh-grade-smart-aleck-dumb-aleck when he is in his element in the political professional wrestling arenas. He feeds off of that energy. In that setting, his real feelings emerge. He will never rise to the occasion because he will never grow up. What happens now that We the People and the world need the President of the United States to be a grown up?

Clorox, Moscow Mitch, and the Red Wave: Report from the Battlefield

August 5, 2019
by Peter Feinman
https://www.thecloroxcompany.com

Note: This blog originated prior to the massacre in El Paso.  After the July 14 declaration of war I wrote: That day will be remembered as a day of infamy where the long-brewing culture wars finally spilled forth into an open (solely political so far) combat. But I also wrote: THE DONALD asked the audience of deplorables [in the Panhandle] how to stop the illegal aliens from crossing into the country. “Shoot’m” exclaimed a good ol boy to the laughter of the Trumpicans. The stories in El Paso and Dayton are still unfolding and I still haven’t come to grips with them. Perhaps later.

CLOROX

During the Democratic Presidential debates, Senator Gillibrand drew laughter when she said she would disinfect the White House as her first task. I guess she will be ordering the jumbo sizes to be delivered by truck.

But she raises a point about what will happen once Individual #1 no longer is the President. As Robert Mueller reminded us in his testimony, the DOJ guidelines do not apply once a person ceases to be President. At that point he can be indicted.

How exactly would that work? Suppose the incoming and outgoing presidents are standing together at the inaugural. The incoming President takes the oath of office. The outgoing President is no longer President. Can he be arrested right then and there? If so, by whom? The FBI?

Or does that mean the process of indicting the former President can now begin? Where will be he during the interim? Sitting around waiting to be indicted?

For that matter, will he be at the inaugural? Assume for the moment that he eventually accepts the reality that he lost the election, a big assumption. Does it follow that he would then participate as the LOSER for all to see in the inaugural ceremony? Even if there were no legal issues involved, just on a personal basis is it really possible to imagine this individual standing there with his successor the way Obama had with him?

Here is what is easier to imagine. Assume he accepts that he will be removed from office by the rigged vote of the people and will be facing indictments once he returns to ordinary citizen status. What should he do? He would resign a day or two before the end of his term. Vice President Brown Nose would then become the President. His one major action would to be pardon his predecessor of all crimes.

While that action would clear him on the federal level, it would not work on the state level. New York for example, might be chomping at the bit just waiting to serve him with subpoenas. Indict him, or both. Could he be extradited to New York? Where could he hide to avoid extradition? The Russian Embassy? Would it become a Russian citizen? Would he become a Russian diplomat?

In short, the transfer process will be a lot more complicated than simply disinfecting the Oval Office. There are legal, logistical, and contingency considerations. While I have seen a great many legal experts on various talk shows and read a great many legal analyses about the current situation, I have not seen or heard any discussion about exactly how the legal process would work once Individual #1 is no longer protected by DOJ guidelines. Shouldn’t someone being working on how that might really happen?

THE RED WAVE   

“This is biblical proportion. Nothing like this has ever been seen.” (Rory Doyle for The New York Times, 7/31/19).  

Prior to the 2018 elections, the President of the United States predicted a red wave. As it turned out he was exactly right. He generated a red wave of biblical proportions that swept away 40 Republicans from Congress. It is not unusual in a hostile takeover of an organization, for the incoming chief executive to cleanse the company of holdovers loyal to the previous administration. If you did not feel the love for the new boss, then you were not needed or welcome.

This red wave cleansing process helped transform the Republican Party into the Trumpican Party. Many Republicans had anticipated what would happen and had abandoned ship. As we begin to prepare for the next round of elections, we are witnessing the emergence of a similar process. The few Republicans left see that they have no place in the Trumpican Party. They are not in denial about the polls. They understand the reality of the political situation. They can see what is coming once a new census is taken and new congressional districts are redrawn. They know that being in the minority in the House of Representatives means being powerless. Politically they have nothing to look forward to even if the Republican Party still functioned at the national level and had not become the Trumpican Party.

In addition there is the person toil. Duped-by-Russia Hannity is paid millions to be an apologist. He gets to do so from a studio where there are no people screaming in his face about the latest transgression committed by our immature child president.  He does not have to answer a crowd of constituents upset over the latest criminal, bigoted, stupid tweet or action by the narcissistic racist in chief. For some people like John Radcliffe it is easy to be a loyalist. For others like Justin Amash, enough is enough. For the remaining Republicans in Congress, the constant need to be an apologist for a person who cannot tell the truth is not what they signed up for. As the culture wars intensifies and more people are murdered in acts of racist terrorism, it will become harder and harder for Republicans who may actually admire Lincoln to be loyal to the Trumpican president who pours oil on the fires of hate and relishes exploiting a divided country.

MOSCOW MITCH   

https://www.poll-vaulter.com/tag/moscow-mitch/

We are a story-telling species. Branding someone with a catchy tagline works. It certainly did in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Here we see how being a seventh-grade-smart-aleck-dumb-aleck really paid off. Insulting people is what he does. Demeaning people is what he does. What could be more natural for a seventh-grade-smart-aleck-dumb-aleck than to blurt out some mean and nasty nickname for another student…and to enjoy it even more if it makes the student cry?

Now Trumpican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is on the receiving end of one such insult. He does not like being called “Moscow Mitch.” It did not take very long for that nickname to get under his skin. Regardless of the merits of the sobriquet, there should be no doubting its effectiveness.

So where are the Democratic terms of insult? In the 1992 there were two competing branding terms: Slick Willie and “It’s the economy stupid.” Regardless of your preference, we know that they work with voters. The last Democratic president had “Yes, we can.” The last Democratic candidate had no slogan that resonated. No counterpart to “Crooked Hillary.” Here we are four years after that escalator descent and Democrats still have no slogan around which to rally its voters and no nickname with which to castigate its opponent. How pathetic.

Even with 20+ candidates, the Democrats have generated no wow factor. They do not need be mud wrestlers all the time but they should learn from the example of Moscow Mitch. The fact that they have no nickname for Putin’s Pence speaks volumes as to the shortcoming of the Democrats. Bonespur Boy provides a wealth of examples for Democrats to work with. If you cannot think of a pejorative nickname for Swamp Builder, you should not be in politics. If you are unable to go into the arena against Little Donnee Wanee, then perhaps you lack the right stuff to be commander in chief. The Democrats need to get in touch with their inner seventh-grade-smart-aleck-dumb aleck and stop acting as if the campaign is a high school or college debate.

The Unpresidential Library: The Adolescent Room

July 30, 2019
by Peter Feinman

The Unpresidential Library will differ from the normal presidential libraries. Traditionally, the facility extols the achievements of its namesake. If there are artifacts and exhibits from the childhood or adolescence of the President, they are to show how those time periods contributed to the adult the person eventually became. There is no precedent for a president who remained an adolescent all his life. What was a phase for other people remained the lifelong condition for this president. The Unpresidential Library will reflect this lack of development.

The media have done an excellent job counting the number of times this president has trumped – over 10,000 and counting! Those trumps will become part of the Unpresidential Library but they are not the focus of this blog. Instead I wish to focus on what the media know happens yet do not track the same way they do when he does not tell the truth. I am referring to his behavior as a 7th grade smart-aleck-dumb-aleck. There is no running tally of the hissy fit tweets he has sent. Nor has there been a count of the verbal expressions typical of an immature adolescent. These examples need to be tallied and catalogued so they can be displayed in the Unpresidential Library.

In recent days his juvenile behavior has ratcheted up. One may realistically anticipate such behavior will increase between now and Election Day. His declaration of war on July 14 to divide America and to exploit that division for his own ends guarantees intensified expression of behavior that normally would not be tolerated in a teenager.   Let’s consider a few recent examples of such behavior.

AFGHANISTAN

To begin with, there is the senseless declaration by our immature child president that he could win the war in Afghanistan in a week or ten days. Fortunately for the people there, he has refrained from doing so because he does not want to kill 10 million people. Suppose there were only 9 million people there…would that be under his threshold? So just as God was prepared to wipe Sodom off the face of the earth, so the President of the United States was prepared to do the same in Afghanistan. Thanks to Abraham we have some idea of the cutoff level for utter destruction by the deity. However we are left in the dark in the no-adult-supervision White House as to what his limit is. North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran can rest easy knowing their populations exceed the 10 million people cutoff but who knows if the juvenile will change his mind tomorrow and suddenly consider over 10 million deaths acceptable.

And how would he do it anyway? Are there actual plans on how to effectuate this action? Or is he bringing to bear the same lack of management skills he brought to the border? Inquiring minds want to know.

This thoughtless remark devoid of intelligence is an expression of the adolescent playing grownup. He knows there are these adult toys to play with, he just does not know how they really work. What is the nuclear triad? The simplemindedness of the comment attests the immaturity of the speaker.  He truly does not know what he is talking about but it is fun for him to trash talk anyway. He enjoys being able to say he could wipe a country off the map if he wanted to. And isn’t he a wonderful person for refraining from doing what he could do because too many people would be killed if he did. Such is the conscience of the adolescent in chief.

IRAN   

On July 22, 2019, Little Donee Wanee tweeted:

The Report of Iran capturing CIA spies is totally false. Zero truth. Just more lies and propaganda (like their shot down drone) put out by a Religious Regime that is Badly Failing and has no idea what to do. Their Economy is dead, and will get much worse. Iran is a total mess!   

This comment has not received a lot of attention.  Iran like Cuba, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela, will pay the price levied by American sanctions. But what is overlooked is how the adolescent in chief established a new hierarchy: there is DEAD and then there is WORSE THAN DEAD. Exactly what is worse than dead was not explained. Just as he provided no details as to how he would wipe Afghanistan from the face of the earth in ten days, so he did not explain what exactly is worse than death.  Here again we are witness to the simplemindedness of the immature child mind that has fun spouting these nonsense words as he plays at being an adult. Think of the adolescents playing rank out games after school.

You’re dead.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Well you’re worse than dead.

Ouch and double ouch. I have been insulted by the master rank out artist, the king of the playground. There is nothing left for me to do but to slouch away in defeat.

BALTIMORE 

The Baltimore display is an ongoing one with great staying power. Combined with race, the putdown of the city can endure for a considerable amount of time. It may even become a staple of the 2020 presidential election. It is difficult to underestimate how much fun the adolescent in chief is having in these demeaning words. For a 7th grade smart-aleck-dumb-aleck this is heaven. And there is no teacher who can send him to the principal’s office, no principal who can send him to the school superintendent, and no superintendent who can expel him. After all, he is the President.

The Baltimore Sun has shown the proper way to respond to the juvenile diatribe of the bigot in chief.

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

You cannot debate ideas with a child. You cannot debate government programs with a child. You cannot debate issues with a child. While the newspaper did not sink to his level of name-calling, it did identify the true nature of the immature child. This is a lesson to be learned by Democratic presidential candidates who should always refer to him in these terms.  And who can forget his heroic action at Ground Zero?

One obvious fact has escaped his notice in his incessant juvenile carrying on about Baltimore. The state of Maryland has a Republican governor, a popular Republican governor. He is not a Trumpican. Here we may observe the distinction between the Republicans and the Trumpicans. A Republican can win office in the state of Maryland. In 2016, the Democratic presidential candidate won over 60% of the vote compared to 33% for the Republican. In 2018, Larry Hogan, the Republican incumbent, won over 55% of the vote, even better than the 51% he won in 2014.  If the juvenile president was not having so much fun insulting Baltimore and blacks, he might wonder how a Republican was able to do it. He might wonder if he could flip the state as he had Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. He might wonder if there was anything to be learned from Hogan’s success in a Democratic state that might help him win re-election. But his adolescent mind does not function on that level so he cannot learn from Hogan nor does he want to.

POLLS

Speaking of being in electoral denial, how about those presidential poll results? A month ago the polls showed the incumbent losing to a slew of Democrats. No matter who the Democratic nominee was, the incumbent was stuck at the 41-42% level. Naturally those polls were fake news. Now here we are a month later and guess what? The results still have him at the 41% level again and these polls are by his own network. What’s more, the Sleepy Creepy fellow is wiping his ass in Ohio. That cannot be right, therefore it is not right, therefore I do not need to do anything.

For the Democrats, this is great news. As long as the child continues to play make believe and think he is ahead in Ohio, the more he will not even try to change the figures. Why waste any time in state you have locked up?

Now imagine being a pollster in the campaign, an actual professional pollster who lives in the real world. Just as the proposed Trumpican director of intelligence will tell the commander in chief only what he wants to hear until it is too late, so the campaign pollsters are required to provide only good polls as Fox is supposed to do. Suppose these fake news results continue week after week, month after month, how long can the immature child live in his pretend world?

So far the real world has been very kind to the adolescent in chief. Almost all his problems are of his own doing. What happens if he starts having external problems in the real world that he cannot successfully pretend do not exist?  What happens if all the polls are fake news even on Fox and from his own pollsters? What happens if he needs to act as an adult in the real world? Whatever does happen, the Unpresidential Library will exhibit the story of the adolescent who became Commander in Chief in the real world and only had childish ideas of what to do.      

 

Battle Report from America’s Third Civil War: Trumpicans versus Democrats Since July 14, 2019

July 23, 2019
by Peter Feinman
007 Teaching the Field of Dreams American the Facts of Life about a Knife at a Gun Fight (https://www.youtube.com)

Note: From Thursday to Sunday, I attended the annual conference of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) held in Cambridge, MA. One of the most popular sessions at the conference was “Going Public: History and Humanities beyond the Academy.” The subject was how to introduce history into the reporting of the news. The attendees were eager to bring their expertise on the past into the discussions in and about the present.

What has happened since the President of the United States formally launched America’s third civil war on July 14, 2019? Like the first two civil wars, this one was a long time coming. But there is a difference. When the American Revolution began, no one knew Saratoga was to occur. Similarly when the Civil War began, no one knew about Gettysburg. This time around everyone is anticipating the 2020 elections. So let us see what has been going on during the first ten days of official hostilities between the Democrats and the Trumpicans.

TRUMPICANS

For the Trumpicans the actions since the commencement of the engagement have been unified and consistent. What we are observing it is completion of the trumpification of the Republican Party. It is being transformed at the lower levels to be the expression of the 7th grade smart-aleck-dumb-aleck whose behavior dominates the party.

Consider this exchange.

Tom Rooney, former five-time Congressional representative from Florida said:

To devolve into childish name-calling usually doesn’t win the argument. I think we can do better.

When the National Republican Congressional Committee referred to Little Max Rose, the five feet six inches Democratic incumbent from New York, Rooney reacted to this juvenile disparagement of the Purple Heart recipient:

Maybe there’s a better conservative argument to counter his support of this legislation than calling him “little.” At least that would be my advice to my 13 year-old.

Exactly, 13 is the age level at which the Trumpican Party operates because that is the age at which its leader functions (Tom Hanks versus Our Immature Child-President).

Former representative Rooney represents the past, the Republican Party which no longer exists. By contrast, the National Republican Congressional Committee represents the Trumpican Party, what the former Republican Party has become. It has adopted the Trumpican playbook lock, stock, and barrel. It will be non-stop taunts, name-calling, and demeaning words for weeks and months to come. It is juvenile. It is childish. It is immature. It is the party of Donald Trump. The weapon he unleashed on July 14 is in the process of becoming the norm throughout the party at all levels.

Now consider the historians of the future. They will be studying the language of the Republican Party. They will as they have been doing for decades examine the language of the first Republican president. They will note that although Abraham Lincoln did not receive much formal schooling, he mastered the language of the Bible and Shakespeare. He incorporated those rhythms and vocabulary into his own speeches. He produced masterpieces which have been carved in stone and have been memorized and recited until this very day.

Then there is the language of last Republican president before he created the Trumpican Party. It is simpleminded, coarse, and crude. It does not soar, it demeans. It does not uplift, it degrades. It does not inspire, it hates. It is the language of the playground bully. It is the language of war unleashed on July 14 and now spreading throughout the party to all levels.

DEMOCRATS

The Democrats offer a much different approach. They employ a different strategy. On one level is legalistic. It is the language of subpoenas and lawsuits. All every dignified and refined exciting no one. Perhaps the language of the slow and plodding turtle will end up being the winning strategy but it is hard to imagine it. Instead it just drags on and on while people have moved on. Still hope springs eternal and maybe the performance of the extraordinarily dry and somber Mueller will provide the spark the Democrats so desperately want and need. In the meantime, since July 14, while the Trumpicans have been energized, vocal, and invigorated in their racism, the Democrats barely register on the Richter scale. They may be woke but will they ever wake up?

They are also inept. Consider the census question. Obviously the Trumpican ploy was to diminish the Democratic vote. Trumpicans have no expectations of ever winning the national popular vote but that does not mean they cannot win the presidency anyway. In response, Democrats took the high road befitting their moral superiority. And, yes, it worked in the Supreme Court. But they lost as well. They gave the Trumpicans an issue they can and will use right to Election Day. The Trumpican leader was quick to pounce.

Are you a citizen of the United States of America? “Oh, gee. I’m sorry. I just can’t answer that question.”

There used to be a time when you could proudly declare: “I am a citizen of the United States.” Now, they’re trying to erase the very existence of a very important word and a very important thing, citizenship.

I’m proud to be a citizen. You’re proud to be a citizen. The only people who are not proud to be citizens are the ones who are fighting us all the way about the word citizen.

Did the Democrats really win this battle? Given all the publicity, how many people are now scared to be counted in the Census anyway? How easy will it be for Trumpicans to ridicule the Democrats for their position on the citizenship question?

Suppose instead of taking the moral high road and being legalistic, the Democrats had taken the low road and fought politically. Suppose the Democrats had gone to the world’s greatest dealmaker and said, “We have a deal for you. We will support the citizenship question in the Census if in return:

1. You eliminate gerrymandering in the following states (and name them)
2. You have sufficient voting locations in the following districts (and name them)
3. You have sufficient voting machines in the following voting locations (and name them).

Let’s make a deal.”

But that’s not the Democratic style. They are too busy morally superior. They are tactically inept.

Not convinced? Now consider the split-screen images of the Liar in-chief explaining how he responded to the chant of “Send her back.” On one side of the screen, one hears him defend himself with trump after trump and not a word of truth; on the other side, the clock ticks off 13 seconds and every trump he told is exposed. One can see this vivid portrayal of his dishonesty on the Fake News networks but what about on Fox? Remember, Trumpicans like the Chinese get their news only from the government approved propaganda network. Here Democrats had an easy way to expose the dishonesty and stupidity of the Very Stable Genius. So where was the Democratic commercial on Fox showing the falsity of his words with the tagline: “Donald Trump. He never tells the truth except by accident? How come you don’t care?”

There is a saying about not bringing a knife to a gun fight, but in the Democrats case, they are not even showing up. If Nancy Pelosi thinks

This coming election, it is really an election that the fate of this country is riding on. This presidency is an existential threat to our democracy and our country as we know it.

Then fight like it. Democrats used to. Consider this exchange.

“If we want to talk about inciting violence, where is the interview when [Democratic presidential front-runner] Hillary Clinton and [President] Barack Obama when they’re talking about ‘bringing a gun to a knife fight?’” Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson asked host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “The Lead.”

“Obama invoked the phrase ‘bringing a knife to a gun fight’ during his 2008 presidential campaign against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), that year’s Republican nominee.

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he said of countering GOP attacks against him during a fundraiser in Philadelphia in June 2008.  “Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl.  I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

It’s not only the Republican Party which has changed; so has the Democratic Party.

Now it is Mueller time and the next round of Democratic presidential debates. Let’s see if the Democrats can do any better or if Trumpicans continue to wipe the floor with them.

July 14, 2019 = April 12, 1861 II: The Third Civil War Is Engaged

July 17, 2019
by Peter Feinman
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Donald Trump (Getty Images)

On April 12, 1861, South Carolina opened fire on the US garrison of Fort Sumter. The Civil War had begun. It would rage for years and hundreds of thousands of people would die. It wreaked havoc on the land especially in the South where most of the battles were fought. Most importantly, it would be remembered. In the North, many new peoples arrived subsequent to the war who had had no direct blood connection to it. By contrast, in the South, it remained predominantly Confederate and the blood connection endured.

The war itself was a long time coming. Perhaps the hostility had its roots four score and seven years earlier when a disparate group of diverse colonies first attempted to create a united political entity. Over the years and decades to follow, that unity was sorely tested. There would be compromises and political confrontations galore. The Union held but there were limits as to how long two houses could remain linked before they separated. After April 12, 1861, the question no longer was an academic one. The battle was engaged and it continues to be fought to this very day.

Move over Bastille Day, July 14 now marks the beginning of another war.  The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, has been joined by July 14, 2019, the day an American President launched a tweet heard throughout the country if not the world. That day will be remembered as a day of infamy where the long-brewing culture wars finally spilled forth into an open (solely political so far) combat.

Back on October 9, 2018, I incorrectly predicted the onset of America’s third civil war (America’s Third Civil War: Kava-Noes versus Kava-Yeses). At that time I wrote the following about the war:

It may be said to have begun in the 1960s. At that time, baby boomer males could be drafted into a war they did not want to fight and baby boomer females could have babies they did not want to have.

It may be said to have begun on August 17, 1992, when Pat Buchanan delivered his “Culture War” speech to the Republican National Convention.

It may be said to have begun in 2008 with Sarah Palin’s rally cry “to take back the country.”

Regardless of the preliminaries, history may well record that with the contentious and close vote on October 6, 2018, of 50-48 between Kava-Yeses and Kava-Noes the battle was fully engaged. There is no turning back now. When Charles Blow writes an op-ed in the New York Times that “Liberals, This Is War,” he fails to recognize that for conservatives it has been war for decades and appointing a fifth Republican legislator to the Supreme Court is a long overdue victory.

[W] we have a president who feasts on divisiveness. There will be no “come let us reason together” in this administration. Far from it. Instead he will stoke the flames of hatred and rejoice in the dividing of America. Never have We the People had a president who is so antagonistic to the very idea of We the People. Never have We the People had a president who is so willing, eager, and ready to campaign on behalf of hatred. Never have We the People had a president who is so antagonistic to the very goal of e pluribus unum, a motto that has been abandoned by both national political parties and mocked by our president. But there should not be any surprise that our president promotes the division of the country. What else would you expect from Putin’s poodle?

I was nine months premature. Part of the reason for the change in circumstances is that we now are in a presidential election cycle where polls show the incumbent losing. If he was coasting  to another electoral landslide because of the world’s greatest economy and the greatest economy in the history of the United States, there would have been no need to play the both race card and the alien/ foreigner card. If he was an adult and had any self-control, there would have no need to play these cards either. He simply could have watched the Democrats tear themselves apart and feasted on the divided remains. But he is not an adult and he has no self-control. So as the 7th grade smart-aleck-dumb-aleck he simply blurted exactly what he knew was not supposed to be said in polite company. He said these words of hate precisely because he knew what the reaction would be both among the Democrats and the Trumpicans. He is back in the good graces of the alt-right, exactly where he wants to be.

The war will not be fought the same way as the Civil War was. There will be no armed conflicts between huge armies firing huge amounts of explosives at each other with many casualties and deaths…as least I do not think it will. At least for now, it is clear how the initial engagements of the war will be fought beside on Twitter, social media, and cable TV.

The Trumpicans will deploy two forces at its command and hold a third force in abeyance. One is ICE which was supposed launch wide scale roundups of illegal aliens the same day as the tweet that launched the war. Although that did not happen, one can expect this commander in-chief to more actively commit his forces to action in the future. Bonespur Boy missed the Vietnam War and now he is going to demonstrate that he has the faculties to command his forces against the alien foe that threatens the land.

Second, he will and already has deployed forces along the southern border. As to the situation there, he commented:

Many of these illegal aliens are living far better now than where they came from, and in far safer conditions.

This comment is eerily similar to the claim made by Confederates to this very day about the slaves from Africa. We are doing those people a favor even in slavery or prison camps or prison by providing a better way of life than they knew in their homeland.

It is worthwhile comparing the experiences of Abraham Lincoln, the first president of the Republican Party, with Donald Trump, the last nominee of the Republican Party before it became the Trumpican Party. When young Mr. Lincoln traveled down the Mississippi to New Orleans, he was sickened by what he saw at the slave auction there. By contrast, the young THE DONALD learned from his KKK father about “those” people and was fully ready to call for the execution of the Central Park Five. A Lincoln might be distraught watching a family torn asunder; now it is just another day at the office for current president.

Third, let us not forget the private militias. At the Panhandle political professional wrestling arena, THE DONALD asked the audience of deplorables how to stop the illegal aliens from crossing into the country. “Shoot’m” exclaimed a good ol boy to the laughter of the Trumpicans. How difficult would it be to raise a private militia in the Panhandle if asked for? How difficult is it to imagine after the 2020 elections, the loser calling for the militias to rally in the nation’s capital to protect him from the politically-correct-elitist-socialist-Deep-State removing him from office?

So what will the Democrats do in the current Civil War?

One action will be to counter the ICE raids. People were out if not in force, then at least to some extent, on Sunday, July 14, in opposition to ICE. Over time, one can expect the number of people involved to multiply. Over time, once can expect such confrontations to escalate in intensity. Over time, one can expect such confrontations to result in deaths. Next year marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Although the federal commission for the 250th anniversary is focusing on a Philadelphia extravaganza in 2026, events in the present may provide a more visceral connection to the events that led up to the July 4, 1776 (The American Revolution 250th: A Time to Heal or a Time to Divide?).

The second way the Democrats will respond will be legally. This means lawsuits, Congressional resolutions denouncing the racist President, subpoenas, and, yes, impeachment. The first vote has been tallied. There will be more to come.

True being a racist bigot deliberately seeking to permanently divide the country is not obstruction or collusion. No matter how sleazy and corrupt his cabinet, no matter how incompetent the President, no matter racist he is, these conditions were not part of the Mueller report. Whether or not the deliberate effort to permanently divide the country is a high crime and impeachable offense is another matter.

In any event, the battle is now engaged. The Rubicon has been crossed. The genii has been let out of the bottle. The die has been cast. There is no turning back now.

It will intensify culminating in Election Day 2020. There will be casualties. There may be another government shutdown. There will be an ongoing mostly non-physical warfare fought in Congress, in the Courts, and sometimes in the streets.  There are two major differences between this civil war and the preceding two. The first had George Washington and the second had Abraham Lincoln. This time around there is no national leader seeking to hold the country together. Combatants, to your corners. Death to We the People!

 

HEALTH CARE PROBLEM SOLVED

Just in case you forgot, July 16 was the due date for the new healthcare plan.  Here is what I wrote on June 19 (Iran Does Not Watch Fox: The Real World and the 2020 Elections):

There are a few simple tests to monitor his grasp of the real world, his willingness to operate it, and his success if he tries. We don’t need to wait to see how he deploys his campaign resources to know if he is operating based on real polls or his fake polls. We’ll know in a month because of health care.

“You’ll see that in a month when we introduce it. We’re going to have a plan. That’s subject to winning the House, Senate, and presidency, which hopefully we’ll win all three. We’ll have phenomenal health care.”

So claims the very stable genius who is the smartest person in the room and the only one who can solve America’s problems. … Now we have the target as surely as they did for William Miller on October 22, 1844 with the Great Disappointment. We know the date. July 16.

 Did it happen? Are you disappointed?

Will the Democrats Learn from the British Ambassador and Duped-by-Russia Hannity? Probably Not

July 14, 2019
by Peter Feinman

How do you handle an immature child? For a parent coping with an immature and biological child, the task is a daunting one. One must be on constant alert. It is a time-consuming task. One never knows when the immature child will erupt. One never knows when the immature child will cross a line that is not supposed to be crossed. One never knows when the immature child will wreak havoc.

The challenge is even greater when that immature child is in the body of an adult. Think of a high school or college reunion. Somewhere in the crowd there will be that one person who never outgrew college, who never out grew high school, who never outgrew junior high school. He (or sometimes, she) will still act as the 7th grade smart-aleck-dumb-aleck he was back when he was 13. He may have an adult job, be a spouse and a parent, and normally behave like an adult, but there are those moments, especially when the group dynamic kicks in, when he will be the same immature child he was back when he was 13….and now there is no one to send him to the principal’s office…until he actually breaks the law.

Fred Trump knew he had a problem with Little Donnee Wanee. When the immature child was 13, the father placed him a military school in the vain hope that he would grow up. It did not work. Then he spent good money after bad in the vain attempt that the immature child would succeed as an adult businessperson. That was the equivalent of $413 million down the drain. Instead Little Donnee Wanee became the biggest financial loser in American history.

Still, give credit where credit is due. He was always able to con someone into thinking he was really an adult. He created the character of The Donald to act in political professional wrestling arenas and in phony-baloney reality shows and he convinced many people that The Donald was a real person and not just a disguise.

However, there came a time when he had to function in the real world, in the world of adults, in the world that does not watch Fox. And there he had a problem. Pretty much every with whom he had to work on an adult level quickly realized that Little Donnee Wanee was not an adult, he was an immature child.

In this regard, he was no Tom Hanks (Tom Hanks versus Our Immature Child-President). When 13-year old Tom Hanks became big, he was a level-headed kid. He could read a book. He could explain algebra to an even younger child. He could converse with adults on some topics without coming across as a simple-minded child repeating the few words he knew in an almost airhead manner.

But what was the job Tom Hanks had when he was big? His job was to play like a child which he still was and then to report his insights to adults. He was not put in charge of anything. He did not have an administrative job. He did not have an executive job. If he had been placed in such a position, the scam of adulthood would have been exposed. He would have been revealed as a child posing as an adult.

Something similar happened with the world’s worst manager. The same person who bankrupted an airline, who bankrupted a casino, who bankrupted a hotel, now became the person in the office where the buck stops. His management skills have been on display after a hurricane in Puerto Rico (is that in America?) and on the border. He is just as incapable as President as he was in business. However, in business he realized that he could make money branding himself while outsourcing all the building to others. That option does not exist for the President.  As we now commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landing on the moon, we should realize that if Little Donnee Wanee had been president then we never would have gotten there.

Sometimes the adults in the room tried to contain him as president. They would ignore his directives, remove documents from his desk, and pray that no one took him seriously. Sometimes because he is an immature child with limited attention span those efforts succeeded. Sometimes they did not.

From time to time, various reports would emerge that documented his immaturity, his ignorance, his ineptness. Books would be written about him. Anonymous articles would be published. Baby Donnee Wanee blimps would be flown.

Most recently British Ambassador Kim Darroch was exposed as having told the truth about our immature child president. He wrote the ineptitude and incompetence of the chaotic administration. The administration of Little Donnee Wanee would always be dysfunctional, unpredictable, faction-ridden, clumsy and inept.

The temper tantrums would never cease. There would always be another hissy-fit tweet. Perhaps if Britain had deployed its air forces more effectively George Washington would have been defeated and there never would have been a United States. If we had remained a British colony just a little longer until granted independence, there would have been no need for Canada to burn the White House.

The immature child responded to this exposure exactly as one would expect him to: by proving it true.  The same may be said for his reaction to the pre-publication excerpts from Paul Ryan’s new book. The same may be anticipated for every book to be written about him save for those from one of the Flying Monkeys sworn to take a bullet on behalf of the Wicked Witch of the White House.

In so doing, Little Donnee Wanee also has made it clear what ticks him off the most. When he is exposed as being an immature child trying to pass for an adult he goes ballistic. He erupts. Every time. He fixates on the charges. It consumes him. No matter where in the world he is or what he is doing, if someone challenges him on being the 5 “I” president (an inept, incompetent, immature, illegitimate, idiot), he will drop everything to unleash a hissy-fit tweet.

HELLO Democrats! Are you listening? Are you paying attention? He has broadcast what unnerves him the most. He has shown what gets under his skin. He has shown what rattles him. He hates it when people disparage and make fun of him for being an immature child trying to pass for an adult. It is his Achilles’ heel.

Meanwhile, here we are four years after he descended on the staircase and Democrats still do not have a nickname for him. How is it possible that after years of Little Donnee Wanee assigning insulting nicknames to people, the Democrats do not have a standard slew of names for Bonepsur Boy, for Swamp Builder, for the World’s Worst Manager, for America’s Biggest Financial Loser Ever, for Longtime Democrat and Clinton Supporter, for Our Immature Child President?

The Democrats need to go to the Duped-by-Russian Hannity School of Professional Political Wrestling. Put aside for the moment the individual policies he supports or actions he recommends. Focus instead on the techniques he uses to communicate those policies and actions. Recognize his skill in delivering his message. Observe his methods. Note his success. Remember, Duped-by-Russia Hannity convinced his viewers on the basis on absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Seth Rich was the murdered leaker of DNC emails in 2016. It was “the single biggest fraud, lies, perpetrated on the American people by the media and the Democrats in our history” until, of course, the Deep State conspiracy which is about to be exposed and the real colluders and obstructionists are about to reap their just punishment.

WAKE UP AND LEARN FROM THE MASTER!

Duped-by-Russia Hannity
(NICHOLAS KAMM)

Duped-by-Russia Hannity employs several tried and true techniques in the delivery of his message. He is relentlessly on message. He is persistent. He is rigorously repetitive. Sometimes it is hard to tell what day, week, month, or year it is from his monologue since he persistently uses the same words and phrases. If you had a dollar for every time he referred to the “angry Democrats” on Mueller’s team you could retire. Democratic paid for Steele dossier. Unverified Steel dossier. FISA abuses. CORRUPT. CORRUPT. CORRUPT. The biggest corruption scandal in American history. And the guilty ones are panicking now because it is all about to be exposed. Wait till the Flying Monkeys in Congress get through with life-long Republican and decorated-Marine Mueller. It is the Deep State that really is on trial now.

Need-less-to-say, the Democrats have nobody comparable to Duped-by-Russia Hannity. There is no cable host who even comes close to matching him. Lawrence O’Donnell tries but he is no Duped-by-Russia Hannity. And by the time Rachel Maddow has finished one of her essays, Duped-by-Russia Hannity has unleashed a string of assaults that if you missed them then you can tune in tomorrow because he will repeat them. And why Chris Cuomo thinks he is obligated to provide equal time to people who already have a propaganda network is a mystery.

The British Ambassador has exposed the Achilles’ heel of Little Donnee Wanee.

Duped-by-Russia Hannity has developed the weapon to be deployed in such a situation.

The Democrats have been shown what the vulnerability is. The Democrats have been shown how to wield the weapon for the kill. The only question is will the Democrats ever seize the moment. I say, “no.” It will remain a party of no imagination, no metaphors, no story to tell, and no message to thrust again and again into the weak spot of its immature narcissistic foe.

Civics and the Citizenship Test in the Time of Trump

July 11, 2019
by Peter Feinman
www.heraldextra.com, June 11, 2016

Naturalized Americans unlike native Americans are obligated to demonstrate mastery of civics. To do so applicants take an exam covering American history, government, and ideals. It is a multiple choice question exam. This means that as with the SAT, it is possible for the tester to measure the results on the questions: which questions do applicants tend to get right and which ones do they answer incorrectly. Presumably the results enable the testers to better formulate questions for the next round of tests.

On July 4, 2019, the New York Times printed the article “Citizenship Test to Beat All Citizenship Tests: Thousands of Immigrants Pass a Difficult Rite to Take the Oath of Allegiance. Could You Do the Same?” It identified the ten questions most likely to be answered incorrectly from a 2011 study. This blog will address two questions and do so based on the present.

#2. Which of these is something Benjamin Franklin is known for?

A. He was the first person to sign the Constitution
B. He discovered electricity
C. He was the nation’s first postmaster general
D. He was the nation’s second president

The officially correct answer is “C.” Yes Franklin was our first postmaster general. How many people who are not students of American history or who do not live along a mile marker on the Boston Post Road as I do know this? What is Franklin best known for? Answer: Flying a kite…in a storm…that was hit by lightning…which was electric. True, that does not mean he discovered electricity. What he did discover was the lighting was electric and could be “encouraged” to strike a metal object thrust up to the heavens, hence the lighting rod. The real problem with this question is in its wording and not in the ignorance of the applicants. It needs to be revised.

The second question to be addressed poses other problems that are quite current not only today but as I am typing this blog.

#4. Which statement correctly describes the “rule of Law”?

A. The law is what the president says it is
B. The people who enforce the laws do not have to follow the law
C. No one is above the law
D. Judges can rewrite laws they disagree with

Again the officially correct answer is “C.” I imagine even as you were reading the choices you were chuckling or gasping at the options. Was one supposed to answer based on the real world or “on paper”?  Judges are routinely criticized by people on all sides for rewriting or concocting laws to fit their preferences. Congress routinely exempts itself from the laws it passes to apply to We the People. As for choice “A”, think of what is going on right now.

This article appeared on page 12 on the left side of the printed paper. On page 13 on the right side of the paper, the above-the-fold article was “After Navy SEAL’s Acquittal, Fears That War Crimes Will Go Unreported.” The article was about the acquittal of Edward Gallagher in a court martial for war crimes committed in Iraq in 2017. The charges included stabbing a wounded captive to death and shooting unarmed civilians. Gallagher was convicted and demoted on the charge of posing for inappropriate photos with the captive corpse.

What did this ruling mean for the answering of the question?

The SEALs who reported these actions chose option “C”, no one is above the law.

The President of the United States personally intervened in the case to have the accused released from pretrial detention. After the verdicts were announced, he tweeted congratulations and said “Glad I could help!”

Gallagher himself then appeared on “Fox and Friends,” no surprise there, and said:

To future Navy SEALs, loyalty is a trait that seems to be lost, and I would say bring that back. You are part of a brotherhood. You are there to watch your brother’s back, he’s there to watch your back ⸺ you just stay loyal.

By contrast, the SEALs who reported the actions felt otherwise.

Maybe I was naïve to think that justice would be served.

Based on option “C”, loyalty to the law and the Constitution trumps loyalty to the band of brothers. Here we have a live example of “A Few Good Men” where Jack Nicholson triumphs and Tom Cruise is defeated with the applause of the President of the United States. So why should an immigrant seeking to be naturalized answer “C” on the exam when obviously it is incorrect.

Want more? Turning to page 21 of the very same issue of paper on July 4, there was an article “’Bridge Scandal Posing a Threat to Legal Lanes.” According to the article legal experts were surprised by a Supreme Court decision that potentially would weaken the ability to prosecute politicians for political malfeasance. What was once considered to be illegal is increasingly regarded as normal political behavior. Actions like shutting lanes on the George Washington Bridge as retribution against a mayor who did not support the governor was just politics regardless of the disruption to the people. Given this view that what is political is not illegal, the recent gerrymandering verdict should be no surprise. Of course, since the rule of law no longer applies to politics, all political parties and politicians can now claim their double “O” license to politic without considering the rule of law.

Still think option “C” is the correct one? Let’s turn to the citizenship question and the census. That article was on page 14 of the same day, beginning as the lead article on the front page. Before turning to it, I would like to remind you of what I first wrote on September 7, 2018, about the Supreme Court and the President about his leaving the White House after 2020 elections if he loses.

There may be a preview of the 2020 crisis with his tax returns. Individual #1 will not voluntarily release his tax returns. It does not matter how the Democrats submit their requisition, he will not honor it. If his court rules in his favor, then the issue ends there. If the Supreme Court also has a traitor and the ruling is against Individual #1 he will not honor it. Instead he will claim Executive Privilege and that the Court has no authority over him. What will the Supreme Court do then? Or to update Andrew Jackson: “John Roberts has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

I repeated it on May 6, 2019, following Michael Cohen’s testimony that Individual #1 would not voluntarily vacate the White House.

The article on July 4 reported the surprise of the Justice Department officials on the census case. They were “blindsided” by the comments that an effort was underway to put the citizenship question back in the census despite the Supreme Court ruling. Claims that the President had acceded to the ruling were tweeted as “fake news.”

The next step was the attempted removal from the case of these government lawyers who had defended the census question inclusion. The reporting referred to this action as “unprecedented” and again used the term “blindsided” to refer to how the lawyers learned about the shift in decision from acceptance to defiance. The removal appears to have occurred because the lawyers chose option “C” while the Attorney General and President chose option “A|”: the law is what the president says it is. According to the article these lawyers regarded themselves as professional or apolitical who like school debaters can vociferously advocate for whatever side they are assigned in the competition. What they cannot do is reverse themselves from what they had just argued or defend statements that they know not to be true. Therefore, as a matter of principle they declined to pursue the case after the Supreme Court ruling. The search for replacements was underway as was the issue of whether or not the judge would even allow the change in the lawyers midstream for no satisfactory reason.

Then after exhausting all options to defy or circumvent the Supreme Court, the battle ended. There actually does seem to be a line he will not cross.

In the meantime, Nancy Peolosi has threatened a vote in the House to subpoena the relevant documents. They would demonstrate that the true purpose of the census citizen question was to depress the population count in Democratic districts and thereby undermine the redistricting process. Obviously such a subpoena would be defied. Then the Department of Justice would decline to prosecute the people who had defied the court order to comply with the subpoena.

Still think option “C” “No one is above the law” is the correct answer? In your dreams. Not in this reality.

PS Since July 4 there has been Jeffrey Epstein, Alexander Acosta, and Donald Trump. Option “C” is the only wrong answer.

Deplorables Cheer Submissiveness of Putin’s Pence: Can Democrats Take Advantage of It?

June 30, 2019
by Peter Feinman
"Square Go" - a 13-year old boy turns to a professional wrestling fantasy to compensate (Photo: Mihaela Budlovic)

Who is your hero? Recently the New York Times surveyed 21 Democratic presidential candidates about their hero. The winner was Republican and Mount Rushmore President Abraham Lincoln with 5 votes. Tied for second with two votes each with Democrats John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King was another Republican and Mount Rushmore President, Teddy Roosevelt. Combined the Republican presidents garnered 7 of 21 votes or one-third of the Democratic total.

No survey was taken of the Republican Party since it no longer exists at the national level. In the Trumpican Party which replaced it, neither Lincoln nor Roosevelt are admired.  In the Trumpican Party the founder rules. Since the present Trumpican president has had the greatest two and one-half years of any American president ever and should be president for 16 years as one other president was, the choice was obvious.

Trumpicans bring a different set of values to their attitudes towards and expectations of the President. Trumpicans do not care that their lord and savior is submissive to Putin. They do not care that he cannot tell the truth.  They do not care that he squandered a $413 million inheritance. They do not care that he is the biggest financial loser in American history. They do not care that he was a failure as a manager of an airline, a casino, and a hotel. They do not care about his tax returns. They do not care about Mueller’s testimony. They do not care that he is an adulterer and perhaps a rapist. They do not care that he is a stupid ignorant moron. They do not care that he is devoid of sympathy and empathy. They do not care that he is a narcissist. They do not care that he is dedicated to helping to the rich get richer. Therefore any attempt to connect with or sway Trumpicans based on any of these considerations is a waste of time. What then do they care about?

Consider what Individual #1 said during the big Republican Presidential debate on August 6, 2015 (at 9:18 ET in case you are curious):

I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.

The following month he repeated the call to arms against the politically correct this time in South Carolina:

I’m so tired of this politically correct crap.

True, he was the not the first to raise the flag against the threat of the Politically Correct. President George H.W. Bush lambasted the politically correct culture in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan in 1991:

The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off limits, certain expression off limits, even certain gestures off limits. What began as a crusade for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship … Throughout history, attempts to micromanage casual conversation have only incited distrust. They have invited people to look for an insult in every word, gesture, action. And in their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behavior crush diversity in the name of diversity.

Flash forwarded 25 years and that “laudable” desire has become an assault on America by university-based elitist zealots ready, willing, eager, and able to dispatch the Thought Police on anyone who does not speak the correct terms, think the correct ideas, and act the correct way. Trumpicans care when condescending arrogant self-righteous elitists tell them how to speak, how to think, and how to act. Trumpicans want a leader who will fight for them against the Politically Correct. That desire trumps all other considerations.

As an example of how far removed from reality the analysis of the impact of the politically correct in American politics is consider this obviously incorrect article from August 11, 2016 on the presidential election by Peter Weber, senior editor The Week. Its title is

Donald Trump is losing his war on political correctness

The details of the article are irrelevant given the election results, the situation today, and that he did not lose the war. If anything the battle lines now are even more sharply drawn. We are back to the trench warfare of the War to End all Wars. Far from losing the battle against the politically correct as the article suggests, he can claim total victory within the former Republican Party. It has been transformed into the Trumpican Party where heroes and Mount Rushmore Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt have no home. The party of “malice towards none” is dead. The party of “the last best hope of earth” is dead. The party of “speak softly and carry a big stick” is dead. Republicans don’t battle for the Lord, Trumpicans battle for THE DONALD.

Consider this current battlefront in Minnesota. The headline in the New York Times was “Resettled Refugees Unsettle a Mostly White City: Anti-Muslim Backlash Against Influx of Somalis” (printed June 21, 2019). As one participant in the battle said:

If we start changing our way of life to accommodate where they came from, guess what happens to our country? If our country becomes like Somalia, there is nowhere for us to go.

Now imagine the impact if the Trumpican Party starts playing Black Hawk Down on the Fox channels there as a campaign tactic.

The New York Times reporter interviewed people on the ground there and summarized the results as follows:

[M]any repeatedly outlined more fundamental fears, including the belief that an influx of people who were nonwhite and non-Christian posed a cultural threat.

            Several of the group’s members and their allies said their stand against immigration was a small part of a broader national conflict, in which the rising tide of a multicultural, multiracial Democratic Party must be opposed.

See how successful the Politically Correct have been in delivering the message that the multicultural multiracial people are not real Americans, they are hyphens. Native-born white Americans understand that the message of the Politically Correct is an attack on them. These people “’see themselves in a fight for survival’” where the problem is discrimination against white Americans. After all isn’t that what elitists and colleges teach: from Columbus to the present, all problems today are due to the heterosexual white man.

Now suppose you are a Democrat and have had it with these deplorables. You are not going to back down before these bigoted racist troglodytes. Instead you counterattack with “WHITE PRIVILEGE, “REPARATIONS,” and DOWN WITH COLUMBUS DAY, UP WITH INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S DAY. And even when you do not say that, Fox will every day all day claim that you did. Not just in Minnesota but throughout the nation. Plus if you have a private health insurer you are going to lose it and we are going to end up like Venezuela. How is that for a winning political strategy!

Let us put aside for the moment the issue of whether school busing helped desegregate or segregate schools. Let us ignore how elitist white people countered by sending their children to private schools or by living in wealthy white communities. Let us ignore how elitist white people exploited vulnerable children by removing them from their own neighborhoods to bus them into communities that did not want them. Instead, keep in mind that while the Democratic presidential debate continues, the nation’s #1 7th grade smart-aleck-dumb-aleck is watching and waiting to unleash his brutally cruel vicious junior high school tantrums to save his deplorables from the Politically Correct.

So who is your hero today? For Trumpicans the answer is easy: their lord and savior, the very stable genius, the smartest person in the room at the morgue or in a nursery school class with no teacher. For Democrats the answer is all over the place and may remain so for a while. The loser is We the People. The losers are the American people who love their country, who are proud to be American, and who believe in America’s role in human history. We have no candidate and neither party cares about us. As we approach the celebration of the birth of our country, we should think about what it means that none of the Mount Rushmore Presidents could even be nominated today yet alone elected.

Iran Does Not Watch Fox: The Real World and the 2020 Elections

June 19, 2019
by Peter Feinman
Wile e Coyote running off a cliff

There is a longstanding cartoon routine of someone running off a cliff. The figure may be human or an animal and it is almost always male. The figure runs straight off a cliff and then appears to be running on air. The laws of gravity are suspended and the figure remains aloft, legs churning. Finally comes the moment of truth. He realizes his predicament and looks down. There below him, far, far below him, is the hard ground. Suddenly reality takes over. The result is SPLAT! Actually, since the fall does not kill him, it’s not too real.

So far that moment of truth has not yet arrived for the current cartoon character running on air. He has managed to maintain his illusions for far longer than I would have anticipated. There has been no Cuban Missile Crisis. No 9/11. And his hurricane failure occurred in Puerto Rico and not Louisiana. Thanks to John McCain and a few others he was not able to strip Trumpicans of their healthcare otherwise the Trump really would have hit the fan.  Is it really possible to sustain his delusions for an entire four-year term?

Take Kellyanne Conway. She is an easy figure to ridicule. Even her husband constantly belittles her judgment (which makes you wonder since they still apparently are together if she does not secretly share his views and feeds him information). At the public level, she imprinted the new president right from the start of his administration as someone living in an alternate reality. At the time, the fuss over the crowd size might have seem a minor diversion. Who knew such distortion was standard operating procedure later exemplified by the Huckabee Huckster?

Then Conway had a little moment of truth. She was charged with violation of the Hatch Act, in fact, repeated violations of the Hatch Act. The Office of Special Council recommended termination. She responded with the same cavalier dismissal of the rule of law as the Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General had before her.

Blah, blah blah. If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work. Let me know when the jail sentence starts.

Answer: it starts when there is a Democratic president and the rule of law returns to the White House.

But once upon a time, Conway did live in real world. She made her living as a political operative. You cannot succeed as a political consultant if you require your client to live in an alternate reality. Sooner or later there is an election. If your political advice is based solely on wishful thinking or a desire to please the client, you will not last long as a bogus prognosticator with little understanding of the real world.

We just witnessed an example of an alternate reality trumping the real world. The activity was poll results produced by real pollsters who operate in the real world. That does not mean their polls were correct. It does mean that based on the professional standards of the field the polls taken were reflective of the real political world at the time they were taken. They did not bode well for the client. You would have to be dumb beyond belief not to know that response would be “You’re fired.”

The results are worth noting. The polls show a slew of Democratic candidates who would win a national election based on the popular vote. The polls range from a high of 57% for Joe Biden to in the 40s% for a variety of figures. One key to interpreting the meaning the polls is the relative constancy of the vote for the incumbent. He consistently polled at 41-42% of the vote.  These numbers put him 5-6% below the 2016 vote and suggest that no matter who the Democratic candidate is, that is the best he will do. The range for the Democratic candidates probably reflects how well known these candidates are. My prediction would be that as they become better known, the undecided in the polls will swing Democratic and the 50s to 41/42% will become the norm…unless more revelations from the investigations drive them even lower or events in the real world expose him as a con artist even to Trumpicans.

Naturally, these poll results were unacceptable. Therefore they are wrong. Therefore they are fake polls. He is not losing bigtime in Wisconsin, Michigan, Virginia, Maine, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. He Is not losing by significant amounts in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and North Carolina. He is not just losing slightly in Ohio. He is not just barely holding on in Texas. Instead he is winning everywhere. Bigtime.

There is another red wave coming to match the predicted one in 2016.

Well, the polls I see we’re doing great in Pennsylvania. We’re doing really good in North Carolina. Florida, I’m winning by a lot. Ohio, I’m winning by a lot. I just left Iowa. We’re winning that by a lot. And every poll that we have, I’m winning by ⸺ we’re doing well.

You can bank on it! There is no need for the world’s worst manager who lost more money than any American in American history to spend any money in the states where he is winning by so much. In the no-adult-supervision White House, he is free to deploy the campaign resources where they are most needed like in Oregon, New Mexico, and Minnesota. Why squander his money on states that he already has locked up? Better to expand the base and flip even more states than he did in 2016.

Keep in mind that the national polls in 2016 did a good job; it was at the state level where the discrepancies occurred. If the real polls remain consistent throughout the campaign, there will come a time when Trumpicans in the Senate and House will have a moment of truth. They already saw the red wave in 2016 wipe out dozens of colleagues at the federal level. They saw Democratic advances at the state level. They may realize that gerrymandering is being contained and the post-2020 census prospects are dismal.  It is possible that at some point the survival mechanism will kick in and these politicians who know real polls from fake polls will want to avoid another red wave like 2016. There is no way to know when or even if such a moment of truth will occur but it could happen next year when the truth of the 2020 elections becomes clearer.

The rest of the world is already ahead of the Trumpicans. They learned that THE DONALD is merely a character in the professional wrestling arena and not a real person. They know when Bonespur Boy is forced to go into the arena in the real world that he will back down.

“If we were to believe everything Trump has said for the past three years, there would have been war with China, North Korea and Mexico,” said Joseph Fahim, an Egyptian film critic. “The guy’s a joke, he’s not serious. We don’t know if these threats are something to believe in, or just another of his many stunts.”

Unfortunately, the immature child commands a great deal of institutional power as President of the United States. Who knows what he might do if forced to confront the real world. Deport millions to prove to Trumpicans that he is fighting for them? Imagine if he actually had the organizational and managerial skills to do it.

There are a few simple tests to monitor his grasp of the real world, his willingness to operate it, and his success if he tries. We don’t need to wait to see how he deploys his campaign resources to know if he is operating based on real polls or his fake polls. We’ll know in a month because of health care.

“You’ll see that in a month when we introduce it. We’re going to have a plan. That’s subject to winning the House, Senate, and presidency, which hopefully we’ll win all three. We’ll have phenomenal health care.” 

 So claims the very stable genius who is the smartest person in the room and the only one who can solve America’s problems. Remember how he produced the evidence from Hawaii on Obama SOON SOON. Remember how he sued all the women who have accused him of harassment as soon as the election was over. Now we have the target as surely as they did for William Miller on October 22, 1844 with the Great Disappointment. We know the date. July 16. We know the action. Bull-Trump Care. We know the red wave is coming. Don’t believe the fake polls, He doesn’t. SPLAT.

BREAKING NEWS The New York Times Has Previewed the Trial of Individual #1 in New York

May 24, 2019
by Peter Feinman
Who's Your Daddy? (Image courtesy gettyimages.com)

In a stunning development New York Times reporter Jan Ransom on May 10 (page A19, print edition), previewed the trial of Individual #1 in New York. Her reporting enables us to see the future before it happens. The following excerpts from her article have been slightly modified (less than you would think!). They help us to understand what will happen when Individual #1 finally leaves the White House.

Individual #1, the fake American self-made man who swindled his way into Manhattan’s elite party circles, was sentenced on Thursday to four to 12 years in prison for bilking banks, lawyers, and people out of hundreds of millions dollars.

The sentencing capped a case of a grifter who spun his tale with brazen flair. He lived in fancy hotels and apartments, dined in expensive restaurants and lured investors in phony foundations, universities, and businesses without a penny to his name that he had earned on his own.

“I am stunned by the depth of the defendant’s deception,” Justice Diane Kiesel said in handing down the sentence in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. She added that Individual #1 from the wrong side of the river was blinded by the glitter and glamour of Manhattan.

His lawyer called the sentence “draconian,” arguing that his client was not a violent or career criminal. During the trial he said Individual #1 was an enterprising, business-minded person eager to make it in the big city. People believed what they wanted about Individual #1. He was enabled by a system.

But the judge said Individual #1 showed no remorse for his actions throughout the trail, and seemed more concerned about his hair and which actor would play him in an upcoming Netflix series about the case.

A juror who had visited the courtroom to watch the sentencing and asked to remain anonymous, said she had been annoyed by Individual #1’s apparent self-centeredness. His concern about his hair led to a two-hour delay in the trial one day.

“He was interested in everything that big money could buy,” Justice Kisesel said. “But he didn’t have the big money. All he had was a big scam. He forged financial statements, inflated the values of assets, created a fake accountant and a phony financial advisor.

This reporting makes it clear why Individual #1 prefers to avoid being tried in New York City. He knows it would not be good for him especially in the last decades of his life. It also highlights the one figure of authority since his father died whom Individual #1 fears: the courts.

Recent events suggest we are getting closer and closer to a moment of truth. Putting aside the silliness of thinking of Individual #1 as an adult, let’s consider the behavior of the immature child President as the world closes in on him. Typically the child does what he wants based on his narcissistic impulses until such time as he no longer can.

Suppose the Republican weenies had insisted that all candidates had to disclose their taxes before being allowed to participate in a Republican Party presidential debate…think how different things would be today. But the Republican Party establishment cowered before the bluster of Individual #1 and did nothing. That was the moment when the 7th grade smart-aleck-dumb-aleck learned he would never to be sent to the principal’s office. He could intimidate the people in adult positions who lacked the intestinal fortitude to act as adults. And so it has been ever since.

Yes, there were some adults in the White House who tried to contain him but they are all gone. Congress tried to control him but he shut them down and then used executive orders to circumvent it. The subpoenas or contempt citations from Congress mean nothing to him.

However he does understand the power of the courts. He has paid fines, closed a college and a foundation, and tried to use the courts to his own advantage throughout his life. He recognizes that the courts can hold him accountable to adult standards. The courts are the only ones who can act as Fred Trump did in trying to control the immature child. The father sent him to military school in the vain hope that the son would man up. That effort failed. Now Individual #1 is starting to recognize that the courts have a power he cannot control or deny.

So what would an immature child do when a parent finally seriously lays down the law and is that what Individual #1 is doing? First. he would have a temper tantrum. Done. Then he would hold his breath until the adult caved. Done. No more governing with Congress! I will keep crying and whining and having a hissy fit until I get what I want. Still the adults this time cannot be put off that easily. The subpoenas keep coming. The judgments keep coming. The exposure of his life keeps happening. He can’t shut down the governing forever. The courts will continue to lay down the law. At some point the immature child will realize that he cannot avoid the adult world forever. Then what?

The scariest scenario of all is that Individual #1 will not comply with the Courts either. In White House Down, Olympus Has Fallen, and Murder at 1600, the President is still on the side of the Constitution. In Seven Days in May, the position of the President is more suspect. If the courts attempt to be the father figure of authority the immature child has not had since his actual father died, will h comply? How do you know?

Of course, those of you reading this blog are thinking that never could happen here in the real world: Of course he will comply with Supreme Court rulings against him. But how many times have you thought that in the past few years that something could never happen only to learn that not only could in happen, it could become common, routine, the new norm? Most likely he would then comply but I would not hold my breath. Then what?

The time for contingency planning is now.

P.S. The immature child’s behavior as he is being called to task by the courts is a reminder of a Star Trek episode that predicted the current situation decades ago: The Squire of Gothos (1967). Here are some lines that resonate today.

1. Spock slaps the face of the immature child with enormous power

Mr. Spock: I object to you. I object to intellect without discipline; I object to power without constructive purpose.

Trelane: Oh, Mr. Spock, you do have one saving grace after all: you’re ill-mannered! The Human half of you, no doubt?

2. The parents of the immature child with enormous power return to restore order and take the child home.

Trelane’s Father: Trelane! Stop that nonsense at once!

3. Kirk classifies the immature child for the record.

Mr. Spock: Captain.

Captain James T. Kirk: Mr. Spock. Still thinking about Trelane, is that it?

Mr. Spock: For the record, Captain, how do we describe him? Pure mentality? A force of intellect? Embodied energy? Super-being? He must be classified, sir.

Captain James T. Kirk: [thinks a moment] God of War, Mr. Spock.

Mr. Spock: Well, I hardly find that fitting.

Captain James T. Kirk: Then a small boy. And a very naughty one at that.

Mr. Spock: It WILL make a strange entry in the library banks.

Captain James T. Kirk: But then he was a very strange small boy.

Keep in mind that the description below from a Star Trek fan site was not written about our immature child president.

The Squire of Gothos when mommy and daddy show up [Fan site caption]
[T]he pivotal moment comes when Trelane’s parents show up and put a stop to all of his “games”… Immediately, Trelane’s speech patterns change, going from superior and jovial scoundrel to a cranky little boy whose mommy and daddy are telling him it’s time to put his toys away and take a nap. Despite all of his blusterings and exhilaration of the hunt, Trelane protests that he’s just playing around, makes excuses, and even whines that he never gets to have any fun….[T]his call[s] to mind images of a young child being told it’s bedtime right in the middle of playing with its toys.

Sometimes you have to wonder if the cable talk shows will ever get it right.