Showing posts with label Hillary Clinton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hillary Clinton. Show all posts

Sunday, March 3, 2019

The Empty Soul of Donald Trump

I have always hated Donald Trump.

I hated him when he was a self-styled New York City businessman preening for any camera within sight. I hated him when he was a reality TV star, reveling in the sadism his mantle on The Apprentice afforded him.

And I hate him as President of the United States of America.

This is because the most contemptible example of humanity is the person who loves to dish out abuse but can't take it themselves. While they gleefully smear reputations, engage in rumor-mongering and relish the opportunity to pile-on, they erupt in self-righteous indignation whenever the snark and the humiliation is directed at them.

And while this dynamic has reached epidemic proportions in 2019 America, one figure towers above all in the wholeheartedness of his embrace: our president.

Even beyond the taxing demands of issuing a non-stop barrage of childish nicknames for anyone who doesn't worship at the altar of Donald, the Trump-whore is perpetually on guard for slights and insults; accusations that every word falling from his tiny, pursed mouth isn't necessarily the soul of truth.

Or suggestions that in the manifold obligations of his office, Donald might be, um, bereft.

When he isn't puffing out his chest and extolling his great and innumerable accomplishments, the Trump-whore is belittling and accusing. That's it. That's all he has. Two speeds. Two dimensions.

Which, I hasten to point out, is one less than you and I and just one removed from Scooby Doo.

After a recent sketch on Saturday Night Live (which, like all satire worthy of the name, contained more than a grain of truth), Donald again took to Twitter and issued another puerile attack, suggesting that anyone with the temerity to mock a giant like himself ought to be investigated.

He went on to suggest that the show's less-than-flattering portrayal of him was “one-sided” and that it was potentially illegal.

As a radicalized socialist, I'll admit it was one-sided. It was the complete opposite of Donald's appearance last night at CPAC, where he pleaded with the nation to take an objective look at our media and consume it responsibly.

Where he urged his base to move on from the manufactured scandal of Hillary Clinton's e-mails, put aside its knee-jerk hatred of immigrants and consider—if only for a moment—how a pending real estate deal in Moscow might have compromised his campaign's integrity.

But the night's high point occurred when the Trump-whore revealed previously-unknown depths of honesty. He fell to one knee and like a sinner prostrated before the cross, admitted it was possible more people may have attended Barack Obama's inauguration than his own.

Sniff.

Instead of sober reflection on his failed summit with political despot Kim Jong un or laying out a plan to consolidate the nation's strengths and how best to shore-up its weaknesses, the Trump-whore whined and complained about the same things he's been whining and complaining about for more than two years now.

A one-trick pony running the only course he knows.

It was a pitiable, one-hundred twenty-minute howl from the forlorn wilderness of Donald's empty soul. The lashing-out of a petulant bully who doesn't understand why everyone doesn't do what he tells us to do and believe what he tells us to believe.

Why can't we take him at face value, they way he does Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un? What is wrong with us? Why can't we see Donald the way he sees himself?

If there has been a sadder figure ever to occupy elected office, I'd like to see them. But even as a recipient of what is often termed the world's best health care, I don't think I'll live that long. 
 

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Trying to Understand

Okay. 

So Ivanka Trump did the same thing her father's number-one political enemy did. She used a personal, unsecured e-Mail account to conduct state business.

Naturally, this begs a question.

When the Trump-whore's zombies chant “Lock her up!” at his next validation rally, are they referring to Hillary or Ivanka?

Just asking.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Wait. Who Won?

I'm angry, too.

As angry as the factory workers in Ohio or Wisconsin or Michigan who have been reduced to cashiering at Jerry's Food Mart. Yours aren't the only lives which resemble a wool sweater after a turn in the dryer.

The difference between us is that I know where to have a hissy fit—and where not to. And that you don't ever have a hissy fit in a voting booth. Despite our rampant cynicism, elections are far too important to reduce to reality TV-styled entertainment.

Granted, there is a great deal wrong with the United States of America. For instance, there are far too many people struggling in the nation called the wealthiest in human history. 

But that isn't an accident. It's on purpose.

I want you, dear Trump supporter, to tell me what side Republicans took. Did Republicans fight that or enable it? Please tell me why you believe a self-absorbed, narcissistic billionaire like Donald Trump has the slightest interest in you and what remains of your life.

Donald Trump is a businessman. He represents the privileged class which exported your job to Mexico and China and Pakistan and then got a Republican-sponsored tax break for doing so.

What do you have to offer Donald Trump? Your rusted-out Corolla? Your socks? Your employee discount? You voted yesterday. This is today. He got your vote. That is the extent of his interest in you, bro.

You see, our first ADHD president gets bored quickly. Once, he wanted money. He got that. Then he wanted celebrity. He got that. Now, in the immortal words of Huey Lewis & the News, he wants a new drug: power.

And thanks to the peculiarities of the electoral college, he has that.

Donald Trump got that by pushing your buttons. He's the driver who cut you off not once, but three times on the way to work. And by the time you got there, you were so angry you couldn't think straight. Sound familiar?

Granted, Hillary Clinton wasn't an inspiring alternative.

The Democratic National Committee, in their preening obsession to nominate not only the first African-American president but the first female one as well, kicked the better candidate in this race to the curb. Despite the polls which showed he could not only compete head to head with Trump more effectively, but beat him.

And that's on the Dems, one-hundred percent.

But you voted for Trump. Not the DNC. And now we have him.

I know thinking is largely discouraged in twenty-first century America because it takes so long and robs us of our social media time. But have you ever questioned exactly how immigrants 'take' our jobs?

This is the phrase repeated ad infinitum by Donald Trump and other conservatives, and yet as so many of the posts on this blog bear out, I have been unsuccessful in my attempts to 'take' anyone's job. Ditto the immigrants (illegal or not) Trump loves to disparage.

That's because jobs aren't taken—they're given. And immigrants were given their jobs. Given their jobs by businessmen engorged by the promise of larger and fatter profits. 

Let's be very, very clear about something—businessmen respect and are loyal to just one thing: money. Profit is their morality. Expanding markets and boosting shareholder value two of their Ten Commandments. 

Money doesn't have borders. Money doesn't have morals. There is no right or wrong, with the possible exception of profit and loss.

It is the nature of the beast.

Despite this, we believe that businessmen in government are a good idea. And wealthy, celebrity businessmen are an even better idea.

Businessmen know how to tell people what to do and when it should be on their desk. Businessmen know how to issue edicts. Businessmen know how to dispense ultimatums. Businessmen know how to point their gaudy, ring-encrusted fingers and sneer “you're fired!”

But a government with three well-defined branches doesn't work that way—at least not yet.

Spotting business opportunities and making money does not a great president make. It makes a successful businessman. If you even need the refresher, the ability to lead is not measured in dollars.

Case in point: Illinois has its own billionaire president. He has succeeded mostly in deepening the already-massive rift between Democrats and Republicans and is about two-dozen zip codes removed from a clue of how to mend it.

Worse, he probably doesn't care.

As wealthy businessmen do, he will attempt to buy control, not earn it. He will spend and spend until he has a Republican majority, the better to enact his toxic agenda until Illinois is a living facsimile of feudalism. 

That is Donald Trump's business plan for the United States.

And you voted for him.

To all you angry, pissed-off male Trumpers, tell me how you justify to your daughters voting for a man who advocates grabbing women by their pus, er, crotches?

And if you're a female Trumper, you have just earned a one-way ticket to the feminist-hell of the nineteenth-century and no longer have a say in political conversations.

Tell me how you explain the actions of the Seattle Seahawks fan who repeatedly screamed at Kathryn Smith, the NFL's first female assistant coach “Hey waitress! Get me a Pepsi!”

You know who he voted for, right?

Let me hazard a guess: that treatment is okay for female Democrats, but if someone were to say that to your wife (I'm probably being generous here) or your daughter, you'd run them over with your F-150.

Can you say schizophrenia? How about mental illness?

All I can say is you voted for him. 

I don't know whether to laugh at or pity you.

You actually believe Donald Trump knows more about ISIS than our military? You've taken to heart his claim that Trump can end the gun violence in Chicago in a week? That he's going to build a wall along our southern border and hand Mexico the bill? 

If so, I'm guessing you're composing your annual letter to Santa right about now.

I laugh that you actually believe Trump is going to make America great again, a pathetic slogan steeped in dewy-eyed nostalgia. It reflects the sad notion that the nineteen-fifties were the apex of human civilization.

Good luck with that. 

And by the way, can we return corporate tax rates to what they were in the nineteen-fifties, too?

I laugh at the farmer on the NBC network news who arrived at the conclusion he wants big government out of his life. Um, does that include agricultural subsidies and price supports, too?

I didn't think so.

Finally, I laugh at Trump himself. Still think it's rigged, Donnie? Still think the so-called liberal media and the political establishment are out to get you? Even after a billion-dollars' worth of free publicity and a perfectly-timed political bombshell?

Naturally, the Clinton majority have questions. Will Donald Trump be good for the country? For me? 

This is akin to asking if Wal-Mart is good for America. 

Wal-Mart is good for Wal-Mart. And rest assured, Donald Trump will be good for Donald Trump. He will use the office as his personal ATM, just like his BFF Vladimir Putin. 

To paraphrase Annette Bening in 1990's The Grifters “Donald Trump is so crooked he could eat soup with a corkscrew.”

Worse, he has lifted the lid of decorum off the United States, and it's mighty hard to see it ever going back on.

And you voted for him.

Myself? I'm just waiting for the 'Don't Blame Me—I Voted for Hillary' bumper stickers.

That and the 2018 mid-terms.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Suffering from the DTs

Life is stressful.

Galavant isn't returning for a third season. I can't write about my favorite baseball team for fear of jinxing them. Wells-Fargo (the robber-bank) is still in business. And I have to wear long polyester pants and a polyester shirt in 89 degree heat as I digest the news that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are taking a ring off it.

If that isn't enough—and it is—Donald Trump continues his battle with Tourette's in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Sigh.

Can I confess something to you? I have the DTs.

Historically, DT Is shorthand for delirium tremens, a condition brought about by the sudden absence of alcohol in the human body after an extended period of abuse. In 2016, it refers to exposure to presidential candidate Donald Trump.

On the rare occasion when Mr. Fact-free does take his medicine and announces that Barrack Obama was born in the United States after all, the media goes ape shit. 

If only Barrack and Hillary had responded to their requests for comment with “Donald who?” or “So?”

Alas, they took the media as seriously as an Edward Albee (R.I.P.) play.

Is it too late to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize? The 2016 deadline has long since passed, but 2017's Nobel slate is as empty as Donald's yawning maw. For those of you congenitally immune to irony, you can submit Donald's name here:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee
Henrik Ibsen Gate 51
Oslo, Norway 0255

Who knows, maybe it will all be better in November. The team that cannot be named will be champions, the president-elect won't have a y chromosome and Brad and Angie will have reconsidered.

In the meantime, anyone got a drink?

Friday, June 10, 2016

I'd Rather Die Than...

What an election. Passions continue to roil out of all proportion to the difference either of the two nominated candidates would attempt to make in our lives.

On the Democratic side, we have the polished, corporate-approved candidate Hillary Clinton, who is sure not to upset the apple cart. Granted, her campaign swung left, but only because Bernie Sanders was nipping at her heels.

However bitter and cynical my posts make me appear, there is absolutely no way I could ever vote for her opponent and continue to sleep at night. Hillary's staff is likely aware of this, which is reason to wonder how far left she will continue to lean freed of Sanders' influence.

On the Republican side, we have Donald Trump, the reality TV star and billionaire real estate developer. Donald is in love with two things: power and Donald Trump.

His calculations led him to the Republican party, where he has proven all that is required to be that party's nominee is to be the most obnoxious drunk in the bar. Pushing white America's buttons is a time-tested strategy that a sizeable segment of the population will fall for over and over again.

With a platform as devoid of ideas as reality TV is of Proust, his campaign is an agonizing exercise whose sole success is peeling the scabs from America's wounds. I have never been darker nor more cynical than when I say Donald Trump would be the perfect President for twenty-first century America.

In a full-body embrace of the neutral-to-nuclear dynamic, we are collectively shrugging our shoulders at these two when we aren't slinging the verbal equivalent of rotten produce at them. No presidential election has ever featured two more widely-despised (or apathy-inducing) candidates.

Which is why the following was such a breath of fresh air. It is the obituary of a Virginia woman who passed in the middle of last month.

Enjoy.

Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016 at the age of 68.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Looking for the Next Best Thing

So it begins again. Hillary Clinton has announced another run for president. I wish her well. 

I admire her persistence. Knowing the torrent of abuse she will face not only from her opponent but from the party backing him leads me to question if not her sanity, the forces driving her to attempt this.

After her husband's participation in the wholesale transfer of our nation's economy to the venal ghouls of Wall Street and the putrid souls manning our corporate banks, I can't quite call myself a fan.

But when the alternatives are named Bush, Cruz, Huckabee, Paul and Rubio, I don't have to be. Anyone for nominating the Warren Zevon number mentioned above as the campaign's official song?

She is saying and doing all the right things; making an effort to touch base with what remains of the middle class and ditching the approach that assumed the nomination was hers in 2008.

But without a viable Democratic challenger, you wonder how long she will feel the need to pay lip service to these things.

Still, it would be awfully fun to rub Republican noses in it and watch them struggle with the twin realities of A.) a female president and B.) one named Hillary Clinton.

Their expressions of contempt for Obama would be rendered mere dress rehearsals next to the howling derision they hold for anything named Clinton.

Here's hoping a multitude of GOP strokes and coronary episodes are the happy result.