Donald Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Trying to understand the appeal of Donald Trump, it struck me this is a story we've seen before--the appeal of the exuberant over the buttoned down mind, the appeal of the libidinal urge over restraint.  It's Prufrock vs Sweeney. Prufrock measured out his life in teaspoons and coffee cups. Sweeney was erect.


It's Robin Williams rebelling against the straight laced professors and administrators at the uptight prep school, urging his young students to "seize the day."


It's Tom Cruise in "Risky Business" getting into Princeton by dancing in his underpants and throwing wild parties while the grinds resent him.


So Donald plays Jack Nicholson's Randal McMurphy to Hillary's Nurse Ratched.

Randal,( or "Randy" for short,) is the guy who may be a little daffy, but he is so much fun to watch.  (And remember "randy" means "horny" or libidinous.) Guys can be into women, as long as they are funny, at least in show business, (unless they are Bill Cosby.) 
Italy had Carlos Berlosconi and Musolini, who bragged about their sexual exploits, with often unwilling women, but in more Puritanical America, we've always told ourselves we are different.  It depends, of course, on which America you are speaking of, however. In the down home, Here-Comes-Honey-Boo-Boo America, women say, "Oh, you just sock him in the mouth and move on." Boys will be boys.


Of course, as my musician son told me, even the most wild and free sounding musician, a Van Halen or Jimmy Hendrix "practiced with a metronome."  It was a striking image--what could be more disciplined, less uninhibited than a metronome, ticking insistently, side to side?

But music is about beat, rhythm and that means discipline.

We all understand there are areas in life which require people who have great discipline--you don't want a free swinger operating on your brain or sewing new arteries into your heart.

But we do tend to think the Hollywood story of Jack Black and his school of rock which only requires tightly wound little minds releasing all the energy and joy beneath.

Donald does radiate joy, in a perverse, dark sort of way.  That's why his salacious expostulations failed to shock his ardent fans--it was jut more of the joy, more of Donald being the free swinging Donald--"ain't no thing."

I heard a woman defending her support of the Donald by saying that Hillary attacked all those women who were victimized by Bill Clinton and so she was complicit, as guilty as Bill in the violation of those women. So now Jennifer Flowers is Hillary's fault!  She went on to say it was more important to have Donald Trump appointing Supreme Court justices who would reverse Roe v Wade than anything else. So, in the end, she rationalized what she did not like about the Donald by saying Hillary's worse when it comes to protecting women, and anyway, there are more important things.

We'll find out November 8th how many like her are out there.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Warren Buffett

When Donald Trump is confronted with an uncomfortable truth like the fact he has paid no federal income tax for 20 years, his reflex is to lie his way out of it--his first excuse was that if he had paid income tax the federal government would simply have squandered it, so he was simply too smart to pay his share.

When that started to sound like Leona Helmsley saying that only the little people pay taxes, which is to say only fools and weaklings pay taxes, Mr. Trump shifted to saying, well, as a billionaire, I'm only doing what other people in my class do, like Warren Buffett who claims even bigger deductions than I do, who rapes the system even more than I do. 

Turns out, that was untrue, and what makes it a lie is that Mr. Trump either knew it was untrue or was too unconcerned to verify it to take the time, which amounts to the same thing.

Turns out Mr. Buffett has paid over a million dollars in income tax for each of every year over the past decades. It is true, he pays at a rate of only 16%, but he pays.

Mr. Trump blandly waves off his income tax scam by claiming he already pays lots of different taxes already, and shouldn't be burdened with a trifling thing like the income tax.  After all he pays taxes at the gas pump, whenever he goes out to a restaurant, and sales taxes on all those expensive suits and ties.


Of course, we all pay those taxes right along with him; the difference is we also pay our income tax.


A lot of Trump supporters make too little income to actually pay taxes, so it may not bother them he doesn't pay any income tax.


One thing these debates do--they eventually illuminate some part of a man's character. We can not really know these people on stage, but we can know something about them.


What I can see in Trump is out there for anyone to see. If you don't see it, it's because you do not want to.

Dancing with the Devil: The Town Hall Debate

Only saw the last 50 minutes of the town hall debate, but I'd have to say, if there are still any undecided or potentially dissuade-able voters out there, it had to help Donald Trump.  Any time you allow a lunatic or a demagogue look like just another actor on the stage, he has already achieved something important.

Shakespeare knew this--"In speech, there is logic." By which he meant, just saying something makes it sound true, unless it is promptly slapped down. Parading across Shakespeare's stages were villains of every description, who the audience could see were deplorable, wicked, sometimes obviously, sometime subtly evil, and it was his genius to make the most nasty villain human, in some ways understandable, or at least recognizable. Ms. Clinton possesses by no such genius. 

To pick just one of hundreds of examples--when Donald Trump says Hillary wants to kill all the coal miners' jobs because she hates them and by the way, it's unnecessary because there is such a thing as clean coal. She can reply, "I am the coal miners' friend, not their enemy. And I'd love to embrace 'clean coal' if it were only a reality, but then again, I'd love to eat ice cream and cake and never get fat, but nobody has ever, and likely will, never figure out how to do that and we are no closer to clean coal than we are to body friendly calories. This is just another example of pie in the sky from Donald Trump. When he's not selling fantasy solutions he's dreaming up fantasy hobgoblins." 

Or words to that effect. 

And to not have a better response to the "deplorables" question is beyond comprehension? Why not simply say, "When a man says all Muslims hate us, that is deplorable. When a crowd cheers that then every last member of that crowd who cheered is equally deplorable. I still believe that. It's not just the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who is deplorable, it's every other person in a white sheet."

Why Ms. Clinton fails to prepare that sort of answer effectively is an imponderable. If she loses to Mr. Trump, one can only say, well there is only one person to blame.

Fresh Pages for Hillary's Notebooks

Not that Hillary Clinton needs my help disemboweling Donald Joffrey, but at the town hall format, she may need some help with the John Q. Citizens they will dredge up.

So, here's my two cents:

Q: Ms. Clinton: How can you say you will put Main Street before Wall Street when you gave speeches to Goldman Sacks for $250,000 a pop and you still refuse to release the transcripts?

A: There's really two questions here: How could I be venal enough to give speeches for $250,000 a pop and why am I unwilling to release those transcripts?

The answer to the first is I needed the money. When we left the White House, we were broke. The way you cash in on fame is to give high priced speeches.  That doesn't mean you have to get into bed with anyone, but if they want to pay you for showing up so they can get your photo for their brag wall and they want to pay you that much, who among you would not jump at the chance? Does it look like they were paying me for votes or for access? Well, for votes, no. Nobody in all of Mr. Trump's opposition research regiments has ever been able to find a case of me voting for Wall Street and against Main Street, because I never have and never will. Sure, I took their money, if they are that eager to give it.

As far as releasing the transcripts, sure it makes it look like I've got something to hide, and frankly, I'm afraid if you sent Mr. Trump's troops through those speeches they could do a snip and clip job, a sound bite which would sound bad, out of context, just the way Republicans have always done with selective editing.
 When President Obama expressed sympathy for the sorry lot of people in the rust belt who had lost their jobs when American factory owners closed shop and moved overseas, leaving workers unemployed and communities collapsing he said, "What do they have left but their religion and their guns?" And that was made to sound like President Obama held them, their religion and their love of guns in contempt.  But, of course, while he despaired about their love of guns, he was not contemptuous of their religion.  But he was made to sound arrogant and condescending.  

Well, I don't want that happening, in other ways, with my transcripts. Oh, what a feeding frenzy.

Q: Ms. Clinton: What about those emails. Why did you have your people destroy phones and computers with hammers? 
A: Because I wanted those emails destroyed. Not because there was anything incriminating or embarrassing in them but because they had information about the thinking of people I worked with, and my thinking, I did not want to share with Vladimir Putin, among others, and as it turns out, maybe that was not a bad idea, given the Russian state sponsored hackers. 
But let me ask you: What is the worst thing you can imagine might have been contained in those emails? What deep, dark secret could I possibly be trying to hide in those emails? 

Q: You could have revealed state secrets, compromised our national security.
A: Well, that is within the realm of possibility; trouble is, there was no such security breach. The FBI looked for one, but none of those mundane, boring emails had anything juicy or important in them.

Q: Why, after 30 years in public life with you serving as a U.S. Senator and Secretary of State is the country in such a terrible state? Why should we want more of the same?

A:  You should want more progress, is what you should want. You should look at where we were when the Republicans left office in 2009, how we fell off the precipice which trickle down economics and T party politics brought us to, and how we have recovered, slowly, too slowly for sure, but steadily ever since. Crime rates are down. Gas prices are down. Al Qaeda is emasculated. True ISIS has sprung up, but we're on them now. 
The sad truth is, we are never going to get manufacturing jobs back to Kodak, or the steel mills or some of the manufacturing plants. Those jobs were lost, not because of trade deals but because of robots and lots of other forces, including globalization and those particular jobs are never coming back. If you are making film when the world goes digital it's not the fault of government or the Secretary of State that your company goes belly up. 
 There will be new jobs, better jobs for more people.  But we can't just wish this into being. We have to have government helping business. 

The government created the internet, and it can build infrastructure if we give it half a chance. But the truth is no one government official whether she is a US Senator or a Secretary of State can single handedly govern.  A Senator, a Secretary of State, even a President, has to work with other people. She can't just issue orders from on high the way a CEO of a drug company can do.  She can't just haul in the Speaker of the House and say, "You're fired!"

I can't take sole credit for programs insuring kids, or for routing Bin Laden, but I was part of the effort. 
 And I paid my income taxes to the federal government because that, for me, was an act of patriotism.

Patriotism cannot be patriotism with sacrifice and risk. Singing the Star Spangle Banner at the ball game is fine fun, but it's not patriotism. Fighting for your country is patriotism.  Paying your fair share of taxes is patriotism. Patriotism costs you. All the other stuff is just bluster. 

Trump: Only The Little People Pay Taxes

The Donald's reply to why he paid no federal income taxes was two pronged:
1. He was too smart to pay taxes
2. If he had paid taxes people like Hillary Clinton would have squandered them.

It must be remembered where Donald is coming from: The New York class of business people who believe paying taxes is for chumps, and of course, this was given it's clearest and fullest expression by Leona Helmsley, who famously said, "Only the little people pay taxes."

But, in Mr. Trump's defense, he is definitely not a racist, because he built a really beautiful--you wouldn't believe how beautiful (and I don't)--country club in Florida, and it admits Black people, if they are rich enough.

So there.

No surprises this debate. The Donald was Donald, for all the world to see and Hillary Clinton was, Hillary--smart, controlled, on topic.

Afterwards, Mark Shields kept insisting she has to open up, to be warmer, to reveal herself, but as Gwen Ifill asked, "Why doesn't anybody ever ask Donald Trump to be more of a good egg?"

Because men can be men and that makes them strong.
Women have to be warm, nurturing, non threatening.

Personally, I wish Ms. Clinton had a better answer to his attack on her stamina. "You pride yourself on an animal faculty..." you know the rest.

Oh, well.

King of the Illiterate

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an editorial supporting Hillary Clinton for President. 
Today, it ran an editorial itemizing why Donald Trump should not be President. 

I'm not sure who those people are out there who are so isolated from political discourse in this nation they have not made up their minds about Donald Trump. 

I sincerely hope anyone who hasn't made up his or her mind by now will not vote on November 8, because anyone who still cannot see through Mr. Trump has no business voting. You really have to wonder about the mind of a person who cannot see  through Mr. Trump. 

It's just not that difficult.

This morning, on NPR they interviewed a Trump supporter in Georgia, an auto mechanic who was proud his wife was a stay at home mother because that is the way you produce good children. Okay, so far. But then he mentioned he took down the Confederate flag because his kids' friends were "made uncomfortable by it," although he still has a full length portrait of Robert E. Lee hanging above his mantel in his living room and and he has joined a militia because if Hillary Clinton is elected, he foresees a civil war between patriots who will defend the Constitution (presumably the 2nd Amendment) and those of the power elites who want to destroy it.

So he is in that basket of deplorables. A 20th century head of state exhorted his people: Do not be guided by thinking. Think with your heart: It will never lead you wrong. 

But can there be enough of these predictable deplorables to elect a President in a country of 300,000,000 people?

There are people who get their news and entertainment from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News--we always knew that.

Cokie Roberts told a story about interviewing people after the Ronald Reagan/ Jimmy Carter debate. Ronald Reagan came across as funny, benign, congenial and that was enough to convince them that he would be a good alternative to Jimmy Carter, who had worn out his welcome.

My great fear is that Donald Trump can pull off the same trick. 

The man who exhorted people to think with their hearts did it.  He took off his brown shirt and Swastika arm band and dressed up in a respectable, conventional suit and walked with Hindenberg and looked safe for a day. Then he reverted to form. 

People see what they want to see. 

Ms. Clinton vs The Great White Wail: Debate Run Up

As Jeb Bush et al discovered, it's not easy debating D.J. Trump. Most people enter debates thinking about making points which, when fact checked or analyzed by the chattering legions of post debate on camera faces, hold up.

Mr. Trump operates in an alternative universe--the solar system of the grade school play ground in which you answer your antagonist by braying, "Oh, you're so ugly."

Actually, even at the upper strata of intellect, this technique has been applied with effect:  Drunk at a dinner party, Winston Churchill was upbraided by a society doyen, in her diamond necklace and silk dress, looking down her nose at him, she intoned in her best upper class scandalized accent, "Sir, you are drunk!"
To which Churchill responded.  "Madame, you are correct. I am drunk. But in the the morning, I shall be sober and you shall still be ugly."

For the Donald, at the low end of the intellectual spectrum it was enough to simply deride Marco Rubio as being small of stature, or Jeb Bush as being "low energy." 

He'll look down at the diminutive Hillary Clinton and tell her she is short and fat, tired, worn out, menopausal and harboring some un named illness which disqualifies her.

Ms. Clinton, who has studied the preparation notebook for the debate and is ready to do her best court room analytics will have problems responding.

One hopes she is working not on the details contained in that 500 page notebook, but on counter punches to the jibes.

"Mr. Trump you pride yourself on an animal faculty, in which the chimpanzee is your equal and the jackass infinitely your superior."  (My favorite.)

"Mr. Trump, you mistake physical size for largeness of spirit: If ever there was a person who proved the two are not always connected, it must be you."

"Mr. Trump you mistake libido for valor.  You may excel at the former but you have shown no evidence of the latter." 

"Mr. Trump, I would rather be the wife of Bill Clinton than any of your--how many?--wives."

"Mr. Trump, you mistake a loud voice for a clear head."

"Mr. Trump, on what planet do you spend the majority of your time?"

"Mr. Trump in what alternative universe are you living--in which a wall can prevent illegal immigration and in which every Muslim is an enemy by virtue of their faith?"

"Mr. Trump you vilify Muslims and Hispanics as dangerous enemies not because of what they have done, but because of where they come from."

And all like that.

But what are the chances?