Listening to Donald the Trump

You can't make this up.

Vox recently ran an article on the Donald's "speaking style."
They started with this, and it would behoove all of us to not lose sight of this and all those similar statements which preceded and followed, when Mr. Trump begins to reign himself in as November approaches:

Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! —

 but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged —

 but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right — who would have thought?), 

but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us

This is the real Donald. Not so much a racist (those are his admirers), not so much a misogynist, not so much a nasty, nasty, but, as Ms. Maud has suggested, simply Donald Demented.  He is just Being There.  And his fans hear what they want to hear. But we children, we see the naked truth. 

Bring Back Those Factory Jobs: Robots Rule!

This morning I heard Donald Trump telling workers he was going to bring back their manufacturing jobs.  Unemployed rust belt workers from Pennsylvania to Michigan, who know it wasn't their fault they lost their jobs to China or wherever are now lining up to vote for Mr. Trump. 

Of course, those jobs are now done in China by robots and if they were ever brought back to the USA, it would be robots employed in those factories here.

Later, in the same broadcast, I heard a factory owner in New Hampshire complain about "government regulations" as the reason he was thinking about leaving New Hampshire, but when he was asked specifically which regulations he found onerous, he could only say it was the Environmental Services Administration and some labor regulations he found objectionable. His factory "uses a lot of chemicals" and he has to jump through all sorts of unreasonable hoops related to those.  He also complained that there is "a loud sucking sound" coming from Massachusetts drawing workers away from his factory in New Hampshire with higher wages and he can't find New Hampshire workers with the right skills.

I know this personally, as I was lured from working in New Hampshire to Massachusetts with a 14% raise, after the added income tax (5.1% in Massachusetts and 0% in New Hampshire.)  The salary wasn't the main factor, but it made the decision easier. All my friends in New Hampshire rolled their eyes, "Oh, now you're paying state income tax!" Yes, I told them and after paying that tax, I'm still making significantly more money--enough to buy a new car every year.

As Andrew Hacker has observed, when company owners complain about the lack of skilled workers, it's almost never the case there are no American workers with those skills; the problem is the workers with those skills refuse to work for low wages, and go elsewhere.

So what this New Hampshire factory owner was complaining about was he was unable to despoil the environment and unable to exploit laborers. 

As the economist Alan Stieglist has noted, the trouble with international trade agreements is they are negotiated by  government officials with a business background, who intend to return to the private sector, and these agreements are all about benefiting the bottom line of international companies, not about benefiting the workers or the environment.  A really good trade agreement would force Chinese factory owners to pay their employees a living wage and not despoil the environment in China; China exports its pollution across the Pacific. 

So, vote for the Donald and American companies will return to American shores, just the way Boeing has stayed in the USA by moving to South Carolina where it can exploit desperate workers with low wages.

How Donald Trump Will Win: Sweet Tea

Reading about Andrew Jackson, the last President who ran against the entrenched power elites in Washington, as a man of the people, while owing 300 slaves, running a plantation for profit and speculating in land, a portal to victory for Donald Trump emerged. 

Of course, as any fan of West Wing will know, events can intervene to throw Mr. Trump an advantage--another 9/11 magnitude attack at the first game of the World Series, or a series of attacks in high profile, scary succession which make a tough guy, damn the civil rights, let's protect the people look better. 

But even absent such "good luck" for Mr. Trump, he can simply enter the debates and pivot hard toward amiability and wave away all those "metaphors" about the wall with Mexico and the religion test for admission to the USA and say:


" Look, as my supporters have understood, and as the effete media has completely missed, all I'm saying is we have to open our eyes to reality, and try to do some common sense things to protect ourselves.  
Police in big cities concentrate their patrols and attention to high crime areas. We say we are in a "war" against ISIS and terrorism, but wars end and this "war" is not really a war at all. It's an eternal struggle, in which every successful, prosperous nation has to engage because our success and our wealth makes us the envy of the world, a target, a prize ship in  seas thick with pirates. 

How do we do that? Do will vilify Muslims? No, we embrace them. We embrace people with the family of Captain Khan and we celebrate them. But as Captain Khan's father himself admits, the Muslim American community has a special role to play in protecting their countrymen now, just as Black communities once had to lead the healing after the struggles of the Civil Rights era. 

If we learned anything from the experience of Japanese Americans during World War II, we learned it's to our great advantage to draw on our diversity and use the language skills, the knowledge of culture to understand those who wish to harm us.

I agree with Secretary Clinton about one thing:  Our greatest strength is, in fact, our diversity.  That  means it's absurd to think every Muslim American is loyal to ISIS. No. In fact our Muslim American countrymen have the most to lose if ISIS succeeds.   Can you imagine all those women Muslim doctors having to give up their practices because ISIS institutes Sharia law?

It's a lot like our Jewish American countrymen:  Love for Israel, a desire to protect Israel, doesn't mean they love America any less.  Every man has many threads from which his character is woven, and the whole cloth is the strength of each person, not the individual threads.

When I said I liked the guys who did not get captured, I was not saying John McCain was a coward or a fool.  The fact is, as we all know, as all my supporters understood, John McCain showed more fortitude in captivity than any of us are ever called upon to show. 
And John's been a good Senator. I'm big enough to admit that. He's been a good Senator. He's just not what I would call a "war hero," because that's just being politically correct and I'm sick and tired of people telling lies and spinning fantasies when in fact the truth is different.  See, being a hero has to do with being a success, with winning, not losing, not getting shot down, with shooting other warriors down.

I was talking about the neglect of the idea of success.  All my life I've pursued success, winning. A hero wins. A great competitor may be admirable in many ways, but he is not a hero, unless he wins. That is what the Democrats don't understand. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, they are all about process. As long as we follow the rules, as long as we follow the process, that's the important thing, not the outcome.

Well, I disagree.  If we stick to the rules of the treaty and that means closing every steel mill in Pennsylvania, every coal mine in Kentucky, every automobile plant in Michigan, every paper mill in Maine, every furniture factory in North Carolina, well that's just fine with the Democrats, but that's not fine with me. I think as President, my job is winning these jobs for Americans, and if that means re negotiating treaties, changing the rules, then I'll do it. 

Look, this has been a long campaign, but I have been trying to do something new and different and change is never easy. The fact is, these are troubling times. But we've come through worse times.  Nobody is trying to dissolve the union, or enslave our fellow citizens. The threats we face can be met, with determination and smarts.  But we have to be tough and not afraid to speak the truth. "

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.