The [not so] Distinguished Gentleman.

As we move into day four of trump's battle with Gold Star families, I believe that the following essay should be read by all.

"The greatest media challenge of the long presidential campaign has been how exactly to talk about Donald Trump. Charlatan or candidate? He Is preposterous, and yet people were watching him in numbers never before experienced in the cable news world, and he led the pack of Republicans from the first debate onward. If this wasn’t legitimacy, or at least a kind of legitimacy, what was?

Television, in its enthusiasm for ratings and a new political story, focused more on the Trump excitement than his bona fides. Even if he was criticized, or held to account on various issues, the sheer amount of his coverage, and the sense of awe and exuberance in it, seemed to neutralize the doubts, or make them less important. Print spent most of its energy covering the television coverage of Trump — he was pure phenomenon. And social media belonged to Trump — his voice ruled.
If there was a media bias, it was that eventually he would lose, although, from the media view, hopefully not too soon. Hence, the issues of who he really was — his mendacity, corruption, vulgarity and lack of knowledge, to name just the tip of his unsuitability for the presidency — did not have to be addressed because he was ever on his way to a crash and burn appointment.
Now, suddenly, with appropriate panic, the media has to walk back the dog.

Even the hope that, come the general election, he would “pivot” to some more subdued and sensible version of himself was jaw-droppingly dashed at the Republican convention. He’s more extreme, more unpredictable, more authoritarian, more Trump than anyone ever seemed to imagine he could be. Of the 20,000 media people at the convention in Cleveland, judging by the ad hoc focus groups that formed throughout the week, all of us were shaken. None of us had ever seen a convention like this, or a candidate — now on the precipice of actually winning the presidency.

But how to express our incredulity?

On television, the back-channel talk into the earpieces of guests, anchors, reporters and contributors was all about the weirdness of the event, the absurdity and even horror of it. But the coverage itself, the horse-race commentary, and the panels of political experts, and the interviews with “insiders,” and the reports from the floor echoed all conventions past. The world was ending and television was covering it with its usual mixture of buoyancy, repetition, dispassion and sense of grand quadrennial spectacle.

Television formats themselves gave Trump the advantage of business as usual.
Print, though, after a year of running behind the story, with puzzlement being its main point of view, seemed overnight to come to attention and find its voice.

The New York Times' coverage of the Trump acceptance speech was a deconstruction of Trump's factual transgressions, doubletalk insinuations, twilight-in-America narrative and lowest-appeal dog whistles. This was, for the Times, quite as skeptical a treatment of a national political figure as perhaps since its coverage of Nixon at the height of Watergate.

The Washington Post took this moment at the beginning of the general election campaign — rather than the traditional end — to formally, and with prejudice, you might say, disendorse Trump and his campaign as an historic threat to the nation.

Nicholas Kristof in the Times, after a year of ineffective press complaints about Trump’s race baiting, got down to work and traced a clear line of old-fashioned bigotry through Trump’s very public history. His sins were not just rhetorical, but personal —  systematically violating equal protection laws. (Say this for Trump, he hides in plain sight.)

Tony Schwartz, the journalist who actually wrote The Art of the Deal, the book that in many ways created the Trump myth, and who has been largely silent about the experience, suddenly spoke up in a long interview in The New Yorker, telling an extraordinary tale of spin, fabrications, reality distortions and sociopath-like behavior.

In a mind-boggling exhumation, Franklin Foer, in Slate — with a follow-up by political blogger Josh Marshall — unearthed Trump’s deep connection to Russian interests and reliance on Russian money, the background to Trump’s heretofore seemingly inexplicable praise and appreciation of Vladimir Putin. Bad enough if it were just one strongman to another, but it is in fact, in Foer’s analysis, debtor to lender. It’s the Russians who have been propping up a bankrupt Trump. It’s a never-before-even-imagined issue in American foreign policy: What if the president’s personal business interests — his and his family’s fortune —  depend on the good will of a foreign power? And suddenly, this seemed realer still in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee by Russian-connected intelligence agencies and the leak of its embarrassing emails.

As everyone has known, but largely failed to deliver on, there are many more shocking narratives to be written about Trump. The bankruptcy of the Trump Shuttle before it made its first payment on its debt, the peculiar financing of Mar-a-Lago, the baroqueness of Trump’s personal life, now being conveniently ignored by his evangelical supporters, among them.

But, not only may print have waited too long to find its voice, it may also be too late for print to matter. In the past, in a conventional world, print led the media discussion. Television took its cues from national newspapers and news magazines. If anything, television now takes its cues from social media, the form of media most dominated by Trump himself.

Television, as it created Trump, yet could break him and help decide this campaign. The question is, in the short time remaining, does it have the wherewithal, the form, the language, the backbone — with yet no real help from Hillary Clinton, struggling to find her own voice — to express what is in front of its face?" [Source]

Personally, I think of the movie Distinguished Gentleman when I think of Mr trump. The parallels are  kind of scary. Truly a case of life imitating art.

Well, except for one thing: Thomas Jefferson Johnson was smarter, and he certainly had a lot more class.

*Pic from Wikipedia.

Malaysian Air again.

"When you think is peace and safety:
A sudden destruction.
Collective security for surety, ye-ah" ~Bob Marley~


I hear you brother Bob. It's crazy out here. Those poor souls on that Malaysia Airlines jet could not have thought that such an unspeakable tragedy could have hit that carrier twice in such a short span of time. And yet....




Anyway, it's looking more and more like those Russian backed separatists are to blame for this surface to air missile blowing that jet out of the sky in the Eastern Ukraine.




Mr. Putin and the boys might have some explaining to do. (Apparently there is audio of one of those separatists saying to one of their Russian handlers that they f****d up.) Not that this would bother the aforementioned Mr. Putin. The man, quite frankly, is insane.




There should be a black box (if the rebels haven't stolen it already) so unlike the case of that other tragic Malaysian flight, we should have some closure.




Finally, folks know that I chase racism with the best of them, but sometimes there are false alarms, and we should know how to recognize them when they manifest themselves.




Take for instance this case in Iowa:

"A star high school athlete in rural Marshalltown, Iowa has been suspended for three football games this fall because he posted a social media image of himself enthusiastically festooned from head to toe in white clothing during school spirit week. In the photo, he made the letter “W” with his hands — which in this case stands for white.

The student is Blair Van Staalduine, reports Des Moines NBC affiliate WHO-TV.The student’s parents say the the principal of Marshalltown High School called Van Staalduine a racist after concluding that his hand signal was a white pride symbol.

The parents have now responded to the suspension and the charge that their son is a racist by threatening to sue.

“We were appalled,” his mother, Cathy Van Staalduine, tol WHO-TV. “We were appalled and so was he. Absolutely. Because the furthest thing from Blair is being racist.”

The school colors at Marshalltown High appear to be red, white and blue. Van Staalduine wore white because school officials had asked members of his class to wear white during school spirit week festivities.

“The actual school chose the colors that each grade would be wearing,” Cathy Van Staalduine explained. “Juniors wore white. So Blair, of course, being active in the school, dressed from head to toe in white.”


She noted emphatically that the “W” sign was for the color her son was assigned.


“Blair says if they were wearing orange, they would have done an ‘O,’” she said.
The mad mother said she talked to the principal, and he managed to call her a racist to her face.

The Marshalltown High School principal is Aiddy Phomvisay, according to the Marshalltown Senior High School website.

The Van Staalduine family is now demanding that the principal quash the suspension and issue a public apology. Otherwise, they say, they will file a lawsuit to protect their son’s good name.

As for the actual image showing her son making a “W” sign, Cathy Van Staalduine said she is holding it close to the vest in the event that this incident actually ends up in court." [Source]

Looking...looking...looking....nope, no sign of the big R here. We need to move along.


The poor kid could have been a George W Bush fan for all we know.








 






  

Passing on the Taliban.

When the frat boy was in power I was so much angrier. I was always fighting with my ideological enemies because with the war raging in Iraq and American deaths mounting every day, the stakes were so much higher.

Now here we are in the age of Obama and I have mellowed. But that could change. What will change it is if his O ness makes the same mistake the president before him did and try to nation build again in the name of fighting the "war on terror".

First, I agree that right after 911 if we were going to go anywhere it should have been to Afghanistan and not Iraq. It is where Osama bin Laden (OBL) launched his terror network and where he found a safe haven while the Taliban was in control. But in my humble opinion, OBL is probably now on his sixth or seventh virgin and will never be heard from again. The frat boy missed his chance to display his head on the evening news and the guy probably died in his sleep.

Now what we have in Afghanistan is a mess of a problem. And unfortunately his O ness won't get around to it until health care passes.- Or doesn't pass depending on the politricksters in Washington and how they are reading the polls- Instead of committing our troops there when the man we wanted was still alive, the frat boy was giving billions of dollars to the Pakistani,dictator, Musharraf. (Who should be right up there with Valerio Viccei as one of the greatest thieves of all time.) All those billions to fight terror and helps us catch OBL and he was building his military to fight my cricket loving friends in India the whole time. Nice.

Can't say I really blame him, though. Who wants to fight the Afghans? Here in A-merry-ca baseball is our national past time. In Afghanistan it's fighting wars. Just ask the Russians how that little campaign over there worked out for them. Those cats over there have been fighting wars for centuries, it's all they know, so why we would try to nation build in a country like that is beyond me. Talk about getting medieval, they are medieval.

Let's throw in the fact that we are supporting a guy that was probably not even fairly elected and we have a real hypocrisy problem on our hands. But field, if we don't support Hamid Karzai who else are we going to support ? the Taliban? How about none of the above?

The death toll is starting to mount in Afghanistan, and American generals are asking for either more troops or a total withdrawal. The wingnuts and chicken hawks are still saying that we can't "cut and run", that we will look like cowards to the rest of the world. I disagree. American could nuke that entire region with just just a head nod from the chosen one. No one questions our military might. And only a fool would. But the Afghan fighters and Taliban are digging in, and they have been down this road before. Of course, we have too, and it took us years and thousands of lives to get out of places like Vietnam and Iraq. In the case of Iraq, we are still there. Nation building and fighting a war are two entirely different things. We should be nation building our own damn country and fighting the urban terrorist there before we go half way around the world to a bunch of religious fanatics. (Hell we have enough fanatics here that we should be worried about. One of them is on the radio every damn day screaming about the government plot to take over our lives.)

Let's just hope that his O ness sticks to his original script, or even better, scrap the script and get his troops the hell out of there. What we can't have happen is him following the wingnuts and the crowd calling for more troops. We have seen that script before, too, and unfortunately we all know what the final chapter will look like.

What's in a name?

Someone sent me an e-mail about what I am about to post, (thanks Genevieve) and I honestly thought it was a joke. How could it not be?

They say "truth is stranger than fiction", and that old adage plays itself out more and more every day. Now I am left to wonder: did the Russians know? Is this some kind of a sick joke?

Oh, before I go any further, let me tell you exactly what I am talking about: Here is a quote from BBC news:

"Russia's energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (£1.53bn) deal with Nigeria's state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture. The new firm, to be called Nigaz, is set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Nigeria.

Analysts say the move could further strengthen Russia's role in supplying natural gas to Europe.

The agreement comes during a four-day African tour by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
As well as forming Nigaz, Russia is keen on developing a trans-African pipeline to transport Nigerian gas to Europe. This could further reinforce Gazprom's already-strong influence over Europe's energy supplies..."

You can't make this shit up. And just what the hell were the Nigerians thinking? They couldn't have negotiated another name? Yes Mr. Medvedev, we appreciate the opportunity to do business with your country, but about that name. Oh field, stop being so sensitive, the Africans probably don't even consider that a slur, it's not like the company is called Quashie Inc. or something. Haven't you ever heard of a coincidence? Just because the word might offend you A-merry-can blacks, doesn't mean that it's a bad word to the rest of the world. I could see if it was in South Africa and called Munt Inc. for crying out loud, then maybe you would have a legitimate beef.

Yes, but consider: What if say a South African company wanted to do business with the Chinese government and decided to incorporate their company as Chink Inc.? Would that be cool? I think not. Or, how about a Japanese company calling itself Doujin Inc. when doing business with an African American owned company? Or, an American company called Gook Inc. in Vietnam? See where I am going with this? Just because the folks in the particular country doesn't take offense, doesn't mean that it is not in poor taste, and it sure as hell doesn't mean that the Russians didn't know what the term meant. I can see them now, laughing their asses off over a couple of fine bottles of Vodka.....wait, that was a stereotype on my part. Bad field Negro! Ha ha ha, Boris, do you believe those Africans? We actually got away with naming the company Nigaz!!! Ha ha ha. They will do anything for money those Africans. Ha ha ha.

But take heart people, apparently some folks in Nigeria aren't so amused, and I can't say that I blame them. Hey, maybe they can get the name changed to Russki or something. I kid I kid.