Hobbit versus Adventure: Trumpsters Nothing New

Reading an unexpectedly wonderful book about America at the turn of the nineteenth century, a time I have not had much interest in--until now--has been an eye opener and thrilling.

Ian Toll's "Six Frigates" is so exotic a sortie into a distant time and at the same time, like so many good histories, an examination of current times. 

Jefferson's Republican Party, which included fellow Virginian plantation society types like John Randolph, really was the "America First" constellation of Hobbits. These folks had inland plantations and they regarded land bound farmers as the very best sort of people, and could not understand or see much value in the coastal seafarers, who lusted for trade with far flung parts of the world, who exulted in intercourse with foreigners, with seeking adventure in the rest of the world.

Jefferson hoped for a time when the tax collector would be an anomaly, rarely seen. Those Tea Party folks took their yellow flag and anti tax rhetoric right from Jeffersonian founding fathers. That government is best which governs least. Leave me alone. Don't tread on me. I'm doing fine.

Of course, those Trumpland folks out there in the impoverished rural parts of Appalachia and the Midwest are not doing nearly so well as Jefferson was at Monticello, with his slaves and his plush debt sustained life. Today's Trumplings are festering, like those darklings in the 1935 cartoon, "The Sunshine Makers." 

Or, one can see it as the story of the happy Hobbit who is dragged reluctantly out of his paradise and out into the threatening, often ugly, violent world beyond.

Jefferson, of course, spent years in France and Europe and spoke French and his restless mind was forever seeking out books from abroad, but he returned to America determined to keep America isolated from France, England, Austria, Russia and China.

He led a party of men who did not care much about the depredations of the British fleet upon American merchant marine ships, as the Brits boarded the American sloops, kidnapped sailors for service in the British Navy, stole American goods bound for foreign ports.  They were unmoved when American merchant men in the Mediterranean were captured by the pirate princes of Tripoli and Northern Africa and when those pashas demanded extortion, tribute, and sold off the unlucky Americans into slavery.

Jefferson rejected an American navy as being too expensive, a burden which would require ongoing taxes and he hated the idea of taxes. He liked the idea of militias of farmers, who could be rallied to defend an invaded town, but then go back to the farm. His idea of coastal defenses were floating, flat bottomed boats which served as platforms for one or two cannon. Even coastal batteries struck him and his fellow Republicans as too expensive. A standing army and most especially a standing navy would result in endless war.

The problem for the Jefferson ideal was two fold:
1/ The world would not leave America alone; the Atlantic Ocean was vast, but sailing ships traversed it from England, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal in the thousands and quickly enough to bring the world to America's door with increasing frequency.
2/ A whole population of adventurous souls from Boston to new York to Philadelphia to Baltimore to Hampton Rhodes, Virginia wanted to engage the world, and got rich and happy doing it. If they were part of a real country, a United States of America, then they felt they had a claim on their brethren to stand with them in their grand adventure.

But Jefferson and his ilk wanted none of that deep blue ocean and its shipping lanes. Let the British or the French try to invade the American continent and the Americans would swallow them up, like a bear, but venture into the ocean and you could only expect the sharks and leviathans of the the blue water would eat you alive.

Jefferson had no interest in trade with China or Amsterdam or England. 
We could make all we wanted right here in America.

Obadiah Youngblood, Sunset Lake

Of course, he had benefited enormously from the slave trade which brought Africans to the plantations of the South. If New England's rocky soil meant that shipbuilding and whaling and world trade appealed to those seacoast folks, let them take their chances on the high seas, but don't ask the South and the farmer to protect them with a blue water navy.

So there we have it: America is all we need. Foreigners have nothing important to offer. We are fine staring at our own navels. Why launch explorations?  North Africa, Naples, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Vienna, Istanbul, Jerusalem have nothing to offer us.

Everywhere else is but a shithole.

Here's a link to "The Sunshine Makers."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3VNoJiSN1g

Expunge the Stain: Get These "Psychologists" in Jail

We should always be circumspect when we accuse people of dastardly crimes, knowing how little we can know, sitting out here in cyberspace and local towns.

Twitter and Facebook are full of false accusations, conspiracy theories and just because we see a Hollywood movie about the CIA torture conspiracy doesn't mean it happened just the movie says it did.

But when you know there is a 500 page report detailing the misdeeds, when you can read the parts of the report in the Congressional Record and now, on line,  and most especially, when you can see the two accused "psychologists" on the internet defending themselves as "soldiers doing what we were told to do" echoing the Nuremberg Nazis's defense: "I was just following orders," you may be forgiven for believing what you can so readily believe, given the clips of Dick Cheney saying we have to be ready to resort to torture to save American cities from dirty bombs. 

If these two "clinical psychologists," Jessen and Mitchell, are even half as bad as they look in "The Report," they belong in some maximum security prison splitting rocks for the next 30 years. And, reading more about this mess, Jose Rodriguez, the CIA director of torture should be right there with them. 

Once you listen to Dick Cheney, you have a very clear picture of his mindset and the thinking of all those who sailed with him. And this pair looks like more than willing accomplices. 

Here they are in video from the NYT on line report: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/us/cia-torture-lawsuit-settlement.html

Mad Dog knows he may be accused of being no better than that guy who drove in from Virginia to the Pizza pallor in Washington, DC because he read on line about Hillary Clinton running a pedophile ring out of that joint. 

But the fact is, Cheney was excusing torture in public, on TV; Clinton was not extolling pedophilia. 
And we can listen to these creeps excuse their behavior as if they are well meaning guys, who just provided others with training to waterboard,to  bury people alive in coffins, hang them by their thumbs. 
Just your average, good ol' clinical psychologists, being as helpful as they can be.
Just trying  to prevent a real life episode from "24." 
Jessen says he was told if he didn't torture the prisoners, a nuclear bomb was going to go off in the United States soon, although somehow, CIA officers, who were told the same thing, didn't believe it, and  were resigning in numbers over the torture.

And that phrase: "Enhanced Interrogation." 
Oh, there is an admission of guilt, plain and simple.
Whenever you see our government involved in something really nasty, you know how nasty when they come up with some benign sounding euphemism: Hanging someone up by their thumbs, drowning them on a water board, sealing them up inside a coffin suffused with cockroaches, is not "torture," but "enhanced interrogation." There you have the guilty conscience visible in the effort to call a viper a potentially toxic legless reptile.

The beasts who sold their "expertise" to the CIA, and who were rewarded generously for their depravity, can be seen even today, on the internet excusing their torture techniques with the same argument the Nazi Goering used: History is written by the winners; if we win we are hailed as heroes; if we lose we are war criminals.

In this case "we" i.e., the torturers, did not win or lose. But they are still at large.

But there is another history, and that is the Report Daniel Jones wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:US_Senate_Report_on_CIA_Detention_Interrogation_Program.pdf&page=4


These CIA creeps  were simply criminals who tortured people.
They join their overseers at the CIA and in the Bush White House, and are still at large.
The problem is, you cannot whisk them awake to Jerusalem or Nuremberg for trial. We'd have to do it here.
And right now we've got a guy in the White House who would greet them there with a pardon and a clothes line franchise. 

No Swift Boating for the Salty Frog

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” – George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

When John Kerry appeared at the Democratic National Convention, he saluted the audience and said, "John Kerry Reporting for Duty" and the Republicans went right after his super patriot, war hero thing with the infamous swift boat attack ads.

When Eddie Gallagher, the SEAL who was reported by half a dozen fellow SEALS as a war criminal who murdered innocent civilians and a prisoner, he was hailed as a tough guy hero by President Trump, pardoned, and embraced by all the tough guy Republicans, and from his guest suite at Mar a Lago announced his new line of clothes and booze, "Salty Frog."

Why are the Democrats incapable of capitalizing on this?
Why can only Republicans launch a marketing campaign to bring down an opponent?

These are the questions which send Mad Dog into a gloomy funk.

The Report: Torture is US

When the photos of prisoners at the American prison called Abu Gharib hit the news, President George W. Bush looked into the camera, appearing distressed and said, "This is not who we are."

Of course, that is exactly who we were and still are, people who, like those monsters of the Gestapo in all those old movies who tortured people hideously.

"Not Who We Are"

The new movie, "The Report" is a blood boiler and you cannot watch it without thinking:  We have American war criminals who have never been punished and we should have an American version of the Nazi hunter, Simon Weisenthal, hunting them down.

Rodriguez: Torturer

It is an odd sensation, having just listened to hours of Michelle Obama reading her lovely book, with its endearing portrait of Barack Obama, to see how meekly he shrank from his duty, how his instinct to see the other side and to over think prevented him from doing what anyone with a more rudimentary  sense of basic morality would have done: condemned the torturers and pursued them relentlessly.
He did end the torture program within 3 days of taking office, but that only confirms he knew just how horrific it was.

Haslip: Torturer

Of course, this would mean throwing Dick Cheney, Kay Haslip, Brennan and a whole raft of CIA torture chamber "prison guards" into jail and having a Nuremberg trial.

Instead, President Obama reminded us we have to remember the climate of fear and the pressure to prevent another attack, possibly with a "dirty bomb" which prevailed and some of us remember the TV show "24" where the guy who has to save Washington, DC is always doing violent things.  "If you have to crush a child's testicles to prevent the destruction of a city, you have to do it," someone says in "The Report."
The problem with this defense of torture, of course, is that torture does not prevent the destruction of the city. The key defense is, "Well, it works. It's necessary."   The ends justify the means.
The fact is: It never did work. It was both unnecessary and counterproductive, and from the get go, it was always simply criminal and malevolent. Of course, there are always extreme examples of having to do harm for a greater good: The old problem of throwing the switch ahead of the runaway railroad locomotive which will kill a child but spare an entire train station full of people, or, for that matter, bombing cities to end a war and save all the lives which would be lost if the war continues.  

Brennan: Torturer Apologist

The problem is, of course, torturers, war criminals always justify their sadistic acts as "necessary." 

"We have to put on our big boy pants," Jose Rodriguez, a CIA official barks, justifying the torture chambers.

What Senator Diane Feinstein asks the main investigator, Daniel Jones, "If water boarding is so effective, why did they have to do it 183 times on the same prisoner?"

Daniel Jones

What Daniel Jones clearly demonstrates is that torture is completely ineffective, as the victim simply says whatever he thinks the torturer wants to hear. 

Jones, interviewed on WBUR, says after devoting 7 years of his life to the investigation of the CIA torture chambers,  two things really aggravate him:
1. The CIA claimed torture produced the information which led to Osama Bin Laden. The truth is OBL was caught by standard CIA traps started long before the torture program.  None of the information which caught him was obtained by torture. 
The CIA lied about that, later, to cover it's torture tracks, to argue, "Well, it works."

2. President Obama portrayed the torturers as "patriots," who simply over reacted in the fog of war.  Jones notes dozens of CIA employees resigned in protest over the torture, and they were the real patriots, not the sadists, who convinced themselves they were patriots and tough guys making tough choices.
Now we are faced with Trump pardoning the war criminal, Eddie Gallagher, the SEAL who murdered a prisoner, and we have to ask: Did Obama not do something similar with the CIA war criminals?

This movie will do little to convince people the federal government is anything but a swamp. But we have to remind ourselves:
The Senate did pursue the investigation; eventually, the truth is outing.
Of course, we can never know the "whole truth" but we can judge well enough, based on what we do know. We see clips of Cheney explaining that the world is a dangerous place and we might see Washington, DC  or New York City wiped out by a dirty bomb, (like that movie, "The Peacekeeper") and what he is saying is, we have to take "extraordinary means" to prevent this. You know he approved the torture program, from other evidence presented, and he prevented anyone telling the President about it, including Condoleeza Rice, who also knew about it. 

Cheney: Torturer 

It is also another reminder that Obama failed as a President in very significant ways:
1. He did not withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.
2. He did not prosecute anyone who was responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, as the Scandinavian countries did.
3.  He did not pursue war criminals, over the revelations of torture, including Cheney. He allowed the crime to go unpunished, which, in some ways makes him an accomplice. 

He was simply not tough enough. 

“I understand why it happened. I think it’s important, when we look back, to recall how afraid people were when the twin towers fell ...It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks had."

--Barack Obama

No, this is to excuse those sadistic, murderous people, who are always present in our police and military, and who are  itching to unleash their worst impulses, and who excuse their depredations, when they are caught,  with naive blather that bad things and injustices happen in war and we were at war. In fact, we were not at war, that "war" was a metaphor made up to excuse behavior which is forbidden even in war, and our government did what despotic, repugnant governments the world over had always done--it unleashed a reign of terror. Just because it was directed at relatively few people, out of sight by officials who appeared on TV does not mean it's any less hideous. 

Thomas Paine, Scalia and the Originalists

Three provisions of the Constitution refer to “the people” in a context other than “rights”—the famous preamble (“We the people”), §2 of Article I (providing that “the people” will choose members of the House), and the Tenth Amendment (providing that those powers not given the Federal Government remain with “the States” or “the people”). Those provisions arguably refer to “the people” acting collectively—but they deal with the exercise or reservation of powers, not rights. Nowhere else in the Constitution does a “right” attributed to “the people” refer to anything other than an individual right.⁶

What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention “the people,” the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset. As we said in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S. 259, 265 (1990) :

“ ‘[T]he people’ seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution… . [Its uses] sugges[t] that ‘the people’ protected by the Fourth Amendment , and by the First and Second Amendment s, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendment s, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.”

This contrasts markedly with the phrase “the militia” in the prefatory clause. As we will describe below, the “militia” in colonial America consisted of a subset of “the people”—those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to “keep and bear Arms” in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause’s description of the holder of that right as “the people.”

We start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.

--Antonin Scalia

Reading Thomas Paine is stunning, when you think this  guy was writing 250 years ago, addressing issues so basic we are still struggling with them today.

Of course, some of those issues have receded, as most of us have got past the idea that mankind needs a king and hereditary monarchies to rule them and that the rights of kings and aristocrats to have so much power and wealth is God given and rightful.

But the idea of the importance of "stability" and "continuity" persists and controls us in very practical and important ways. To pick only the most egregious and obvious example, our Supreme Court still labors under the weight of the ideal of "originalism" which is to say the Constitution constitutes an immutable law, handed down by sacred "founding fathers" who spoke with one voice and of one mind and gave us the law, which is the original truth, Biblical in its constancy and all the answers are contained in it, if only we are wise enough to read and follow it.

Of course, Antonin Scalia revealed in his contorted opinion in Heller v DC, the absurdity of such a position. It was clear the gun loving Scalia, a devout Catholic who needed an inviable text to justify his pronouncements, turned to the 2nd amendment, which is about as unambiguous as any sentence in the entire Constitution, and the only place in that document where the authors took pains to explain the reason why they grant a right: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Anyone reading this sentence who does not understand that "the people" here are specifically members of this "well regulated" militia, has got to be fooling himself. It is even more telling  the amendment's author was not content to simply leave it at "a militia" but deliberately put in "well regulated" with the clear meaning that these people bearing arms were under control of the state.

So how did Justice Scalia get over, under or around this clear barrier to a right to individual gun ownership, which is, obviously, where he was so determined to go?

The mental contortions and back flips Scalia performs are breath taking. If ever you want to see a man in the struggle to convince himself that black is white or that 2+2=5, this would be a good example to consider.

Consider Thomas Paine dis-articulating the argument that our current generation, in the 21st century, beset by assault rifles which can mow down 50 people within an instant, should be bound by any rule set down in at the end of the 18th century. 

"There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the 'end of time,' or of commanding for ever how the world should be governed, or who should govern it: and therefore, all such clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies." [Italics added]

We have now a Supreme Court which is a peculiar amalgam of "originalists" like Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Alito and a justice who rejects precedent because he sees the history of the law in this country as being unjust (Thomas) and one who vacillates between dismissing precedent when it suits him and clinging to it when it doesn't (Roberts.)

Stare decisis has for this Court become stare plasticity.  Scalia ignored generation after generation of prior decisions which specifically denied the Constitution bestowed an individual right to gun ownership.

Whatever we have, we have a court of unelected men who are faced daily with cases which fall between the cracks of the structure nailed together by the framers and who do, some would say, must, make up the law as they go along.

Just consider the righteous baker case: A Colorado baker receives an order from two gay men to prepare a wedding cake for their ceremony. He is a fundamentalist Christian who says his religion forbids him from sanctifying such a sinful union, and he refuses. The Supreme Court looks at the way the lower courts have decided the case and they point to the disparaging remarks made by the courts about the baker's religion and they find that the courts have erred in disrespecting this man's religion.

The baker also emphasizes how he was mistreated by the angry gay couple, which is somehow relevant to the Supreme Court.

Now it is the righteous baker who is the victim, not the gay couple.

It is a problem for today's originalist justices to look for guidance from those gentlemen in powdered wigs and silk stockings who wrote the Constitution and said "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

One might say: "Ah, there it is. The lower courts violated the baker's right to not bake that cake by prohibiting his free exercise of religion."

But then you have to deal with all those folks whose free exercise of religion forbade them from allowing people of color in their motels, which forbade serving colored people at their lunch counters, which instructed them to pass laws forbidding inter racial marriage.  What do you do when religious belief directs people to violate other parts of the Constitution?

For that you need a Court willing to make decisions unencumbered by direction from the grave.


And as current opinion and belief change, so must our Court. 
One of the most important issues ignored in our discussion of who should lead the Democratic Party in 2020 has been the issue of packing the Court.

The Evangelicals and a whole far right sector elected Donald Trump in no small part because they wanted a Court which would reverse Roe v Wade. 

The Dems didn't see that coming and still are blind to it.

Trump the Archie Bunker Type Bigot

BOTH
Everyone's a little bit
Racist, sometimes.
Doesn't mean we go around committing
Hate crimes.
Look around and
You will find,
No one's really
Color-blind.
Maybe it's a fact
We all should face.
Everyone makes
Judgments...
Based on race.

PRINCETON
Not big judgments, like who to hire or who to buy a newspaper from --

KATE MONSTER
No!

PRINCETON
No, just little judgments like thinking that Mexican busboys
Should learn to speak goddamn English!

KATE MONSTER
Right!

BOTH
Everyone's a little
Bit racist -- today,
So, everyone's a little
Big racist -- okay!
Ethnic jokes might
Be uncouth,
But you laugh because
They're based on truth.
Don't take them as
Personal attacks.
Everyone enjoys them --
So relax!

"Avenue Q"

What is a racist?

For many today, especially those born after 1970, a racist is basically anyone obnoxious, anyone you don't like.

That song from "Avenue Q"rang true for the baby boomers, but their children had never seen the type of racism boomer parents had taught them to abjure. 

During the 60's college students, among others, endlessly discussed racism, from the George Wallace, in-your-face-proud-of-it racism, which was so obviously venomous it was easy to reject, to the more genteel and hypocritical sort, the suburban upper class racism of people who marched in Civil Rights marches but did not want their white daughters dating Black boys, to the you-don't-even-realize-how-racist-you-are stuff, which Blacks or white self righteous types threw in the face of their parents: Oh, you're against reparations--that's SO racist.

Then there was Archie Bunker, from Queens, NY, at whom we laughed because he was so real, so unlike the other caricatures  on TV and in the movies who we all saw as cartoon characters. Archie, everyone knew, existed out there. 

That show aired in the 1970's, after the tumult of the 60's, after the big Civil Rights Act sunk the legal basis for institutionalized racism, but today's youth have never seen more than youtube clips or single episodes.

Archie is perfectly capable of making exceptions of certain Black people. He knows his Black neighbor, cunningly named George "Jefferson" and while you cannot say he likes the man, Bunker accepts the fact they are neighbors and they have to co exist and at times he actually accepts a point and gains a certain respect for Jefferson's intelligence. In fact, George Jefferson, the son of share croppers, is an energetic entrepreneur, who is making more money than Bunker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHy6QCQW6Nw

Trump is an Archie Bunker.  He will embrace Black people on stage and use them, and claim to be their friends in one pitch, and then he turns around in the next breath and says we need more immigrants from Norway, not from those "shit hole" countries, which are Hispanic or Black.

And the fact is, for Trump, it's not really that these undesirable immigrants are Brown or Black; the thing he loathes about people from "shit hole" countries is they are poor. They are dirty and violent and an "infestation" of vermin. It's pretty much the same image all those blue blooded Brahmins of the 1920's peddled: Those horrible people were just so DIRTY. 

Clean White vs Dirty Brown

The worst crime for Trump is not being Black or Hispanic; it's being poor, and not just poor, but destitute. 
Destitute, wretched, powerless--Trump recoils from all that. 

Once it was the Italians and the Slavs

He really is the classic school yard bully. You remember that kid: He never picked on a strong Black kid or a tough Hispanic or a big Jew--he went after a timid, flaccid white kid with glasses, a nerd. He'd beat up that kid. 

Once it was the Chinese

It doesn't take four years in psychiatric residency to figure out what that Trump bully type is assailing. His fear of being seen to be as helpless or weak or "such a loser" as that wretch is so glaring. 

Once it was the Irish: NINA

And the crowds who cheer him on share that same antipathy for the same reason. These are the losers, who want to pound on the nerd to make themselves feel better. 

When you belittle Trump, and his basket of deplorables, you stoke those fears.

Amy's reaction to Yang

Clearly, you are not supposed to see some things on TV but during the debate, when Yang managed to bring the house down with some truly funny or adroit responses to some questions the camera angles captured Amy Klobuchar's reactions. 

When asked about what to do for children with disabilities,  he said you have to realize that there is a difference between economic worth and human worth. Commenting on the issue over which donors candidates should pursue, rich or humble, he said this is all about going after people with disposable income, but poor people never enter the discussion because they don't have any. 

And when asked a surprise question about Obama's comment that we'd all be better off if we had more women presidents and senators, Yang remarked he thought that was true because if you put a group of all men in a room without women around, within one hour they all  begin acting like morons--and the camera happened to catch Klobuchar grimacing: Written across her face was the thought, "I'm supposed to be the funny one up here, the one with the best lines, and he's stealing my spotlight."

Ms. Klobuchar clearly, visibly gets irate when she is upstaged.

The candidates are getting better. 

But:

Elizabeth Warren still cannot answer the question put directly to her: she keeps going back to her stump speech as if the audience isn't quite bright enough and she is still teaching a special ed class and if she just keeps repeating we'll finally get it. 

But she was asked why it had to be Medicare for all or nothing and she didn't answer; she just kept extolling Medicare for all, even though the question was, well, what if you don't  have a Congress willing to do that?  

And when asked why she insisted on paying for the college education of the millionaire's son she simply repeated we needed to end all student debt and make state colleges free. She didn't answer that "means testing" question.

Bernie actually answered this for her, saying Americans hate filling out forms and having to prove you are poor enough to qualify for free tuition would be nasty and cumbersome, and some years you may be too rich and some years, if you lost your job, poor enough. He could have noted the great universities of Europe (e.g. the Sorbonne) are free---of course they don't have to support big football programs. 

The debate process is helping, is beginning to reveal more and more about people we think we know, but who we do not know. 

One of the things about Yang and Styer is as good as they look now, on the stage, we all know, on some level, we really do not know them well enough. 

I can almost now understand why some women do not want to sleep with a guy on the first date--they just don't know enough about him, and they might like him for one night but then, after a second date, realize he's a Trump Republican and they just wish they'd never invested the time or effort in such a loser.