Deconstructing The Donald: I Don't Like Guys That Get Captured

Don't you just feel like you knew a kid like Donald Trump growing up? 
And didn't you know a John McCain?
I certainly knew a Hillary Clinton.

The uncanny thing about Trump is he manages to get under your fingernail like a splinter.  He snidely undermines the "hero" in John McCain, but that was not as off the cuff and random as it seemed at the time.

There is always that little sliver of truth stabbed into the nail bed. Trump did get at something concerning the political correctness of making anyone who ever wore our nation's uniform into a "hero," and what he was saying is that cheapens the word, "hero," which should contain an element of success, or at the very least, dying for a noble cause. 

McCain was a bit of a wild man, a bit of a screw up. From Annapolis to flight school, he was always on the verge of washing out for being too undisciplined. And when he was shot down, on his 23rd mission over Vietnam, it was probably a stupid mistake of flying too low, and even when he ejected, he didn't follow the proper procedure and wound up breaking both arms and a leg. 

On other hand, he did fly off and landed on an aircraft carrier 22 times and if you've never tried that, well, don't say anything about it until you've tried it. From friends who've done it, it never grows old and your heart reaches stratospheric rates every time.

Fortitude, daring, courage under fire may not be enough to qualify as hero, but those are not qualities to sniff at, especially if the guy doing the sniffing doesn't have a single one.

Billy Fricks, who wrestled one weight class above me on our high school team, who played linebacker on the football team was a John McCain type. He was bounced out of the big football game against our arch rival because he participated in a prank, trashing of their campus before the big game. He owned up to it and took his punishment like a man. He was more fun than a barrel of orangutans and nobody was more fearless.  Maybe you wouldn't vote for him for President, but if you needed someone to walk your sister home through a bad neighborhood after midnight, you knew you could count on Billy.

All dressed up like a real soldier. His daddy bought him that. 

There was always some Donnie John type who would say Billy was a loser because he lost a big wrestling match or got bounced from the big game, but that guy was never even in the game. 

He hadn't suffered through the two a day football practices in the August heat or the three hour meat grinder wrestling team practices, pulling himself up a rope thirty feet to the top of the field house ceiling.  He had heel spurs or something, so he couldn't take the field or the mat.  He was soft and hid behind skirts.  This was before there was a  Prince Joffrey of "Game of Thrones," the guy who is all fierce and deadly, as long as he has his mother's thugs behind him, but he caves as soon as a real threat his mother cannot contain confronts him.

Donnie Joffrey was the guy you'd punch in the gut when he said stuff like, "I don't admire the guy who gets taken prisoner,"  "Or Billy stunk up the place, that match." He didn't have the right. He couldn't carry Billy's shoes, that guy.

We had a heavy weight wrestler with a simian brow named  Mack Shuff,  who looked fearsome enough to scare the daylights out of a lowland gorilla. We used to get together in the big room at the girls' pot luck Friday nights, guys sprawling over the leather couches and chairs and the girls squeezing in where they could. There was, for some reason, a 12 foot  wooden cabin cruiser in that room, belonged to the father who owned the house. Nobody ever tried to sit in the boat.


Donny J would show up and start to say something and Mack would say, "I told you: You do not open your mouth. You just take up space you worthless, spineless turd." 
And the amazing thing is, Donny J would just sit there. He wouldn't leave. He'd just sit there, trying to look like he belonged in the company of the guys who had suffered together, like he was one of the band of brothers. 

Never landed on an aircraft carrier 

That's what Donnie John is. 
You just know he's going to run away when the boys come out to play. He just doesn't have the guts to be President. 

The nasty inner core of the Donald 

Hillary, of course, was the scold: the ambitious girl who knew she was more disciplined than her rivals and she played by the rules and would be furious if she lost because she had done everything right, so she expected to be rewarded, as promised.  But she was humorless. She couldn't see the cracks in the armor. She actually respected the adults who ruled our lives and thought they were mostly righteous, while the some of us laughed at them and thought they were basically idiots. Hillary never knew what Obama hit her with. She had done every thing she was told to do but he beat her with something outside the box.

One thing you can say for her: She's tough to the core. Anyone who watched her take apart those mendacious, smarmy Republicans of the House Oversight Committee during their tag team attempts to bring her down during the Benghazi hearings saw her steel. She's got more guts in her little finger than Donnie John has in his John Thomas.

I can't say I'd be wild for any of these types to be President. Personally, I'd be happy for Barack Obama to stay on, but that would be cruel and unusual punishment for  Mr. Obama and his family. 

It's come down to the arrogant wimp and the mother superior.  

I'm okay with the woman. I'm with her. 

But someday, I'd like to read her memoirs, after she finishes her second term,  and discover she had a torrid affair with General Petraeus or maybe Al Franken. 

Hillary Does the Donnie Dimwit

If Hillary could just get the Donnie John rap down, it might go something like this:

Oh, those Russian hackers are just wasted on vodka tonight, with all their celebrating. Donald is singing their song. Donald is their  puppet master for all that hacking now.  Just send all those hacked emails right to the GOP. This is gonna make Watergate look like a Tea Party.  Well, that was probably the start of the Tea Party, now that I think about it.

Speaking of "T" that's the first letter of "taxes" and Donald is the master of disaster when it comes to taxes. You know, he's going to kill the "death tax." You know what that is?  That's the tax that only 1 out of every thousand tax payers may ever have to pay because it's all about taxing estates over $11 million.  If you've got that much money, then you ought to vote for Donnie John, because he is going to be your savior.

Did you know the Donald invented the income tax?  Oh, sure we have something called the "income tax' going back to 1916, but he invented the modern income tax. Now don't get all literal on me now. You know what I mean. (Wink.)  It was Donald who brought the income tax to life, just when it was about to breath it's last gasp. He's a regular Dr. Frankenstein, bringing the monster to life. 

 It was down to its last gasps, but now he's gonna sell it to all the lumpen proletariat with the three tax brackets, like that's some major gift. 

In fact, it doesn't matter whether you have 3 or 20 brackets, what matters in the end, is how much tax you have to pay, and that comes down to deductions and what counts as income. And for the Donald, taxes only apply to the little people, that is, the losers on salaries. The hedge fund guys and the trust fund babies and the guys getting stock options, well none of that is "ordinary income," so they don't even have to worry about income taxes 'cause that's not really income to Donald.

Donald wants to take your jobs away and give them to those people in China who make his Trump ties and then he's coming after your guns. Oh we got trouble. We got trouble. We got trouble right here in America and that's spelled with "T" and can't you see, we got Trouble?

Did you know Donald wasn't even born in America?  Well, maybe technically--don't go all literal on me--but he was conceived in Germany and we are looking into his birth certificate and it's not at all clear to me his mother actually ever made it to Queens before Donald slithered into the world.  I heard he was actually born in Hitler's bunker.  We have been looking into it and you wouldn't believe what we are finding. You just wouldn't believe it!

And Libya and Benghazi, oh, he was behind all that.  He was there. Just try to get him to account for where he was when all that went down.  I saw video of Donnie John on the roof tops across the street from that Benghazi compound, dancing and shouting "You've got the right to keep and bear arms" to all those terrorists.

And air pollution, Oh Donald. He is buying air pollution from China, where he makes all those Trump things and bringing it over here to America, where he's selling it to West Virginia and Kentucky.  Oh, he's for coal all right because he's making a bundle on global warming.  It's much, much cheaper to heat his casinos in the winter, and  the warmer it gets those hot summer,  well, where else can you beat the heat but in air conditioned casinos?Oh, he's all over global warming like a cheap suit, I gotta tell you. 

And student debt!  Well, Donald invented student debt. Just ask all those kids who went into hock trying to pay for success courses at Trump You! 

But that's nothing compared to the wall. He's been buying up futures and options on concrete companies since last April.  That wall along Mexico, oh that is going to be YOOOOUGGE!  He's making enough on concrete futures just talking about that wall. He doesn't even have to build it. All he has to do is talk about it.  His Trump Enterprises is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, but all you have to do is TALK about that wall  and concrete futures go through the roof because of that wall, that's going to bail him out entirely.

That's why he's running. He doesn't even want to be President. He just wants to get solvent and that wall is his ticket right there. 

Donnie Dimwit may not be the sharpest blade when it comes to actually running a business, but he can create demand like nobody else, and that wall across Mexico is the biggest con of all time and he's selling it. 

You can believe it, because I heard it from some very intelligent and reliable people, whose names I can't name because I can't recall them, but they are very intelligent people, some of them from the Wharton School of Business.  

Did I mention his wife is an enabler?  

The Founder of ISIS: Oh, Deniability

Donnie Dimwit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjlorYteUsA

Finally, Mad Dog has  got it. 
Mad Dog has now learned how to listen to Donnie John.  

"ISIS is honoring Obama. He is the founder of ISIS."

What that means is: "Say, what?"

Then you have to listen for him to explain this bombshell, in the most reasonable of tones.

And he does:  President Obama made mistakes in the Middle East, that led to the fall of despotic regimes, creating a vacuum, which allowed ISIS to emerge to fill that vacuum.

Oh. 

Mad Dog gets it. President Obama's fault for not pushing all those buttons at his disposal which, presto, would have solved the problems of Shiite vs Sunni, of fundamentalist Islamists, of the Arab Spring, and put in place wonderful, thriving democracies where once there was only Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Bashar Assad. 

This is actually something lots of right wing blowhards have been trying to sell: The badness in North Africa, the Middle East, all around the world, stems from an inadequate American response to events there, allowing strong men to be toppled and anarchy to ensue. An old trope, just spun a new way, the typical Donald reductio ad absurdum. 

NOW, it makes sense. 

Of course, if the story is: The Donald says Obama made mistakes and ISIS filled the void, no story. That's old news. But if the headline is: Donnie John says Obama and Hillary co founded ISIS, now THAT'S a story!  And the dimwits at Fox, CNBC, NPR all fall for it every time. Whatever happened to Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite? 


What makes more sense, is Donnie John knows, lazy as the news networks are, the only thing which they'll carry is the clip of the bottom line wowzer: Trump says Obama is founder of ISIS. And Crooked Hillary, too! 

Donnie John Explicates

Thus does NPR, MSNBC, and all the other outlets do the Donald's work for him, free publicity. Who needs to pay for advertising? 

This morning, Mad Dog heard Donnie John's voice 14 separate times on my ride into work and he  heard Hillary Clinton's voice exactly zero, which, truth be told, may not be a great loss, but the standard procedure was: Give The Donald speaking his piece and then have the reporter speak for Hillary, "And Hillary Clinton responded Donald Trump doesn't have the temperament to be President."

Temperament. Now there's a word most of Mr. Trump's supporters do not understand and have never taken the time to look up but they know vaguely it means she's smart talking.

Why not just say, "This just goes to show the lights are not on upstairs in Mr. Trump's head. He's just a little too stupid to be President. And he has had some competition as the Dunce,  recently--just remember George W. Bush. Do we really want another 4 years of a dimwit in the White House?"  

Donald the Dunce. Doesn't have the panache of "Crooked Hillary." 
We need to work on that.  Donald Dimwit is Mad Dog's  current favorite, but he's open to suggestion. 

Donnie J and the Second Amendment Blow Out

If ever Democrats played into the Donald's hands, it has to be this flap over his remark that "the 2nd amendment people may be able to do something," about Hillary nominating gun unfriendly judges to the Supreme Court,  which Vice Presidential candidate Kane immediately claimed was an incitement to violence, a call for gun lovers to shoot Hillary. 

Oh, plueeze, Tim:  Get a life. 

As if to prove Donnie John's claims the Democrats are all about political correctness, semantic games and not to be taken seriously because all they care about is scoring points on ridiculous hysterical hyperbole, the Democrats and some in the media, have tried to inflate one of the few relatively innocent remarks coming from Donnie John into something threatening and inappropriate, thus confirming what Trump supporter's already think they know about the Democrats and the "liberal media." 

This morning on NPR they went over his statements playing clips of each sentence, and then having an analyst tell you what he meant or might have meant and in the end they bemoaned how the Donald manages to control the news cycle every day, after they thrust the controls into his hands.

He, quite correctly, laughed it off, saying this was just another example of the liberal media trying to portray him as dangerous and out of control when in fact, he had simply remarked that the NRA, with all its political clout might be able to reign in Hillary, but he never suggested anyone shoot her, which, of course, he had not. 

People have been talking about the Donald undermining his own campaign but he is losing no ground in that department to the Democrats.

Susan Collins: Clarity in a Storm

Susan Collins is a Republican.  She is one of the few non T party Republicans left un purged in the Senate, which is not to say she votes like a Democrat. She wants to undo Obamacare and she would vote down any Supreme Court nominee presented by President Obama.  If I had my druthers, a Democrat, any Democrat would be sitting in her seat.

But her op ed in the Washington Post was an actually bone fide exercise in conscience, as she detailed all the reasons she could not vote for Donald Trump:  1/ his denigration of the parents of Captain Khan, including the suggestion the mother could not speak because Muslims do not allow women to speak  2/ His taunting and denigration of a handicapped reporter  3/ His attacks on Meghan Kelly, the Fox News reporter, who, he suggested must have been made emotionally unstable by her menstrual cycle, as women are wont to be 4/ His insistence no Hispanic could render an unbiased and fair opinion on his legal case, despite the fact the judge of Mexican heritage was born and raised in Indiana, thus maintaining you are what your ancestors were and nothing more.   

She continued down a list of other offenses, although she did not mention his promise to build a wall along the Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it and she did not mention his assertion we should ban all Muslims from crossing the borders of the United States, which he then tried to walk back as all people from countries vexed by terrorism, wink, wink, which are, of course the Muslim countries. Well, those and France, England and the United States.

Even omitting mention of these points, her op ed is persuasive, if you read op ed's. If you read the Post, which excludes nearly all Trump supporters, who, for the most part, like Mr. Trump himself, stopped reading years ago, well stopped reading anything more than Tweets. More than 140 characters and their eyes glaze over.

So, Senator Collins had a moment of moral clarity.

Remember, she's not up for re election this time.  

Her Republican buddy, Kelly Ayotte is up for re election.  What have we heard from Senator Ayotte. Well, I'm supporting him but not endorsing him.  I voted against it before I voted for it.  I'm a Republican, but not one of those Republicans. 

The fact is, electing Hillary Clinton will not be enough.  We have to defeat every Republican we can, clean house, clean Senate. As Bernie noted, it's not enough to defeat Trump; the Tea Party has to be cleaned out like baby rattle snakes.

Then, maybe once we've hit reset, the Republican party can rebirth as a worthy opposition. 

The Damage Pundits do: Russia is Beating US in Syria

Remember Afghanistan? You know, that graveyard of empires where the Russians fought for years, only to be ignominiously defeated and forced to withdraw, having squandered blood and treasure for nothing but the everlasting enmity of those left behind. It became a failed state, a breeding ground for terrorists and festers still as President Obama has still, for reasons known only to God and the Oval Office still not managed to extricate the US.

Now, we have Syria and a front page, above the fold New York Times article in which a pundit from the Woodrow Wilson Center says, "Russia has won the proxy war."  The article goes on to describe how the good guys, the men fighting the nasty regime of Bashar Al Assad, were making progress using anti tank missiles against Assad's forces, but when the Russians committed airplanes and bombs, the managed to turn the tide in Assad's favor. Now the Russians have "won."

You can just imagine the glee in the eyes of Donnie John, reading this. Oh, we are going to hear about this now.

Weak America. Always losing. But when I'm President, we'll be winning.

Does any of this Syria story sound at all familiar?  American CIA rocket propelled grenades are sent to all those heroic mujaheddin fighters in Afghanistan, who hump around the dusty, mountains, using the terrain and their knowledge of local geography and culture  to neutralize the technological advantages of a super power? Remember that? And one of those good guys fighting the Russians was a cool cat named Osama Bin Laden.  Remember him? 

If you have a really long memory, there was that quagmire in a place called Vietnam, where American technological advantages were thwarted by little guys in black pajamas carrying AK47 rifles and living on rice and rat meat until that inevitable day when the Americans got tired of slogging through rice paddies and went home. 

Local politics the Americans could never understand + fanatical opponents = defeat and withdrawal (aka "Peace with honor.) Remember that formula? 

And what happened after our "defeat?"  Exactly nothing.  Well, not exactly nothing. The world communist conspiracy collapsed, and Vietnam became capitalistic and we now send American tourists over there. 

Imagine that. All this winning, from a "defeat."

So now the pundits from the New York Times and the Woodrow Wilson Institute tell us the bad guys (Assad's regime + the Russians) are winning and America is losing again.  They could not be writing Donnie John a better script if they tried. And some of them are trying. Makes the pundits feel important. They get invited to talk on TV. And they get salaries at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, at the Heritage Foundation and other places where effete conservatives can pedal their wares. 

And what would "winning" look like in that cesspool of Syrian radical Islamic maelstrom?   If the "good guys" won and Assad was strung up by his ankles in Damascus and the Russians sent packing, what then?  Libya?  Iraq?  

Thing is, in that part of the world, dealing with Sunnis and Shiites--I can never keep all the factions straight--what does victory look like? 

Some people think they know.  Robert Duval famously said, in "Apocalypse Now" sniffing the gasoline smell, "Smell that? Napalm! It smells like...Victory!"

Moishe Dyan, a former Israeli general was asked how little Israel, surrounded and vastly outnumbered by Arab states managed to survive and prevail.  "Well, look at who we are fighting," He laughed. "They shoot three bullets at each other before they fire one at us." So it is with ISIS and Saudi Arabia and Iran and Syria today. 

Astonishingly,  in 1974 when Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, there were over 1,400 bombings by revolutionary (terrorist)  groups in the United States that year.  We have ten or twelve terrorist shootings and Donnie John says the whole country from Peoria to Portland is about to collapse. 

Once was a time we fought an enemy who was easy to understand. He wrote his beliefs down in a book, "Mein Kampf" and he planted flags in Paris and Prague and Vienna and Oslo and Amsterdam. And we could organize an army and kill his uniformed soldiers and roll across the Rhine in our tanks and plant our flag and say, "There, you are beaten."  Then we laid a Marshall plan on his country, hanged his henchmen, put our preferred enlightened leaders in place and ultimately, we got a woman Prime Minister in his place who, in 2016,  opened her arms to Syrian refugees and other undesirables and that is what winning looks like when you are fighting a people from a culture which is very much like your own. 

But this mess in Syria--as Bernie said, it's a quagmire within a quagmire. 

Pundits told us Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States. Pundits told us he had weapons of mass destruction in big tanks of nerve gas ready to be loaded on missiles and launched locally and delivered, eventually to our own shores. One guy, in a Navy admiral's uniform, came my hospital and showed us a power point with pictures of the nerve gas barrels. Right there in Baghdad. The CIA had the photos! Pundits! They knew!

Of course, like the guy from the Woodrow Wilson institute, like Donnie John and Ted Cruz (who would make the desert sands glow) and all the other tough guy war hawks who never had a bullet fired at them in anger, they all know Russia is winning and we are losing. 

Just let's all vote for Donald. He don't need no pundits. We'll all be winning so much we'll get bored and we'll forget what losing feels like. 

My Inner Donnie John: Learning to Love the Donald

The moment I realized I loved Donnie John was when he ordered that screaming baby out of the room.  

Actually, when I youtubed it, it was a disappointment. I had heard he got annoyed and threw the baby out. But when you watch it on youtube (link below), he was actually very funny and gracious about it. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az6wof3iyIw


I had heard he was all snarly and angry, which is what I want to be when a mother brings a baby to an inappropriate adult setting.  I have mothers bring babies to their appointments and the kid is screaming bloody murder and I can barely get a word in edgewise and the mother is always cooing and smiling as if I'm suppose to enjoy this because, well, it's a baby and you are supposed to love babies. 

I do not love babies. Leave your baby with some responsible adult if you want to come see me and have an adult discussion about a serious adult topic. 

And women who come to a meeting about how we can oppose the rise of some neo-Fascist and they are knitting. Leave the knitting at home, Mother Earth. We can see from the Birkenstocks and the tie dyed shirt and the knit skirt you are a wonderful person. Don't pile it on.

But back to Donnie John. I loved it when he went after that great war hero, John McCain, who, after all got shot down, no disgrace there, and who behaved with great courage as a prisoner of war, but does that make him a hero?  

I thought part of "hero" has something to do with  success. You might admire a man's fortitude, but does that make him a hero?

Is every soldier, sailor and marine a hero? What if his service was peeling potatoes in the mess in Saigon for a year?  You will say, well, he did more to serve his country than I did, comfortably back in college, not in uniform at all. But I suspect many Vets do not feel like heroes for what they did.  I am told many hate that phrase, "Thank you for your service."  They are thinking, "Yeah, well, it was the best job I could get, more money in it than working at McDonald's. That's why I went."

We cheapen certain words: Hero, brilliant, patriot.  Plueeeze. 

Politically Incorrect

Of course these things--the baby thing, the "I like the guys who didn't get taken prisoner" and the don't thank me for my service; I did it for the money, are politically incorrect. And when Donnie John disparages that whole expected mode of behavior I do feel like standing up and pumping my fist. Finally! Somebody said it.  It's the same reason we laugh at the comedian who says what you are thinking but not allowed to admit to thinking. 

I watched an old video of Hillary chastising Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign for having said the folks who cling to their guns and their religion have nothing else and they will never vote for him. He was caught on tape and would never have said that in public, because it was true but politically inexpedient. So Hillary says, "People don't need a President to disrespect them," trying to may hay of political incorrectness. You know Hillary probably felt the same way about those rednecks but now she was pillorying Obama for saying it.

Actually, if you listen to that whole tape, Obama sounds much more sympathetic to these folks and starts off by saying how they've lost jobs and income over the years as factories have closed, as American captains of industry have abandoned them and that's why they cling to what's left.  But Hillary gets all sanctimonious, trying to score points. 

Here's the youtube link for the Obama remarks, which proved to be eerily prescient. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTxXUufI3jA

Donnie John doesn't try to score points with the empathetic crowd. 

Of course, you judge a man by the enemies he chooses:  Donnie John vilifies Muslims, all Muslims just as Hitler vilified all Jews and Marie Le Pen vilifies all Arabs. 

Finding the Positive in the Dark Side

You got to remember, Mussolini made the trains run on time.  There are things to can like about the most repugnant men. 

Maybe Donnie John should join Don Rickles, Bill Maher, W. C. Fields,  Louis C. K.  and other professional misanthropes.  But I do wish Hillary Clinton had a little more of them in her.

Too bad George Carlin is dead. I'd vote for him any day.