Tag Archives: Trump

Donnie, Go Put Your Name on the Yes Board

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Polewali My mother, a first-grade teacher her entire career, implemented the greatest inspiration/discouragement tool  I’ve ever seen in education: The Yes and No Board.

It was a simple chalkboard, divided in two, with the words YES on one side, NO on the other. If a child was especially good, the youngster got his or her name emblazoned under YES. Miscreants and the mischievous went under NO.

The board was clever enough, but here was the coup de grace: Mom had the children write their own names on the board, an act of public pride or  penance. Either way, it was effective: Children beamed like stars to write their name on the YES board, wept like widows at the other fate (though they always had a chance to redeem themselves with good behavior and an eraser).

Washington needs a YES and NO board.

God knows I would have Trump get as used to the NO board as Bart Simpson. From his ever-growing flock to his ever-growing need for one, Trump’s deification in the Republican base has put his ego on steroids. And his love of despots may become our fate of living under one.

But homie deserves to write his name on the YES board for his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this week.

I say this grudgingly. I say this with the taste of crow on my breath. I was prepared for him to tweet the nuclear code after the meeting.

Instead, we got a hugfest. A disingenuous, duplicitous  globular hugfest among egomaniacs. But would we have wanted any other message coming from the confab? Perhaps them angry waddling away from each other? Trading translated barbs?

But it’s inescapable, the reticence of CNN and MSNBC to give the president credit for the meeting. And they do raise valid points: Kim played Trump like a fiddle, earning praise from the leader of the free world. The de-nuclearization process takes a decade at minimum. The letter Kim and Trump penned was, at best, vaguely optimistic.  Trump’s decision to end war games in South Korea was capricious at best, an outright lie at worst.

All of which might be true. To which I say: Who cares? Who gives a shit if a nation the size of Pennsylvania wants to parade Kim’s photos with world leaders, establishing him as a peer? Who cares if the letter wasn’t specific? Did we really expect either of those pudgy lunatics to emerge with a well thought-out plan of disarmament?

The problem appears two-fold: The major outlets’ reluctance to praise anything Trumpian, lest they invoke a boycott or, worse, a decline in ratings; and a misread of the Singapore sit-down altogether.

The first is understandable. Trump invites skepticism in anything he says or does, largely because he says or does nothing. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me 17 straight months and, well, I’ve got that coming.

It’s the second media complaint that confuses me. We keep casting Kim as a dictator of a hermit nation, which would be impossible to deny. But I was a cop reporter for 15 years, and I know a hostage stand-off when I see one. And this was a hostage stand-off.

In this case, the hostages were 60 short-, medium- and long-range missiles, including those of the inter ballistic persuasion.  What is Trump going to come out and say? “Dumbo’s gotta get rid of em?” Have you ever seen a cop, trying to negotiate the release of hostages, go on the local TV news and say “That guy is a real nut job. I sure hope he doesn’t kill everybody.” You say what needs to be said til nutso puts down the gun. Isn’t that the hope for both men?

Perhaps Kim will pick it up again and fire away. Perhaps de-arming never happens. Perhaps this was all just a ruse to hack Trump’s iPhone after he left it in the toilet, which he surely did at least once.

But again, who cares? So far, there are no bodies. In any hostage stand-off, you want a lack of corpses, a dearth of gunfire and both sides talking and smiling, even if it cloaks consternation. What’s the alternative?

 

Muffing the Punt

 

Donald Trump is to football what, well, Donald Trump is: out of his depth.

He put that on display this week when he un-invited the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles to the White House, a once-annual tradition for champions in professional football, basketball and baseball.

In depositions from NFL owners obtained by the Wall Street Journal last week, as part of a grievance case filed by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones testified the president told him in regard to the issue: “You can’t win this one.”

“This is a very winning, strong issue for me,” Jones recalled Trump saying. “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.” Like a Super Bowl-winning coach, I suppose.

But is this the hoist he expects? Certainly, Trump has managed to turn the national anthem into a political atom-splitter. While kneeling for the anthem is actually a  protest of police conduct, the administration has Frankensteined it into a protest of patriotism.

Consider the wording from the bone-spurs-in-chief: “The Philadelphia Eagles Football Team was invited to the White House. Unfortunately, only a small number of players decided to come, and we canceled the event. Staying in the Locker Room for the playing of our National Anthem is as disrespectful to our country as kneeling. Sorry!”

To Trump’s credit, he spelled ‘canceled’ correctly (though I would pay money to learn his capitalization code: Locker Room?). And his followers, as fervent as holy rollers, will amen the ‘I dumped him, he didn’t dump me’ stratagem.

But, as with all Trump’s words, a few need parsing and correcting. First, not a single Eagle took a knee or stood in the lOCKER rOOM for the anthem last year. Zero.

Also, Pennsylvania was a critical swing state for Trump, who beat Clinton by about 44,000 votes in ’16. Clearly, the state was split over Hillary’s viability.

One thing Pennsylvanians are not split on, however, are the Eagles. They love ’em the way Trump loves bronzer. When the city won the Super Bowl, its first, Eagles fans nearly burned down the city in victorious fervor. They tipped over police cars. They punched patrol horses. They broke off and carried traffic signs, for some reason.

And you’re going to un-invite them to their first White House recognition?

This deserves the math refresher. You won PA by 44,000 votes. Lincoln Financial Field, which hosts the Eagles, holds 69,176 spectators. And you want to piss off that many people?

Even Jerry Jones would think twice. And he’s Republican.

 

 

America’s Irritable Vowel Syndrome

 

There are two questions that continue to ember in the wake of Roseanne Barr’s sudden disappearance from prime time TV.

One is the speed of her firing. Within hours of  her tweet describing a black woman as a cross between the Muslim brotherhood and Planet of the Apes, ABC ruled she was done. Gone.

We have seen this warp-drive character melt before. Surely there is an island where people like Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey and others must be gathered to commiserate their fates sans trials. It might even be an entertaining Survivor-esque show.

But don’t expect networks to line up for a bidding war. The assumption of guilt on matters of conduct is that latest byproduct of the steroid issue facing the U.S. economy, which has become so powerful on the Darwinian scale it has surpassed politics. That the U.S. government does not believe in global warming would be more ominous if U.S. businesses agreed. But they don’t.  Donald Trump may not believe in the benefits of solar power. But Apple does. Which do you think will have a greater impact on your life?

Same with social diplomacy. American businesses have decided that it’s not affordable to offend customers. So they have contorted themselves into the least-offensive costume possible, one made of Nerf as to prevent bruising. Jemele Hill was suspended and later left ESPN for tweeting that Trump was a white supremacist. Laura Ingraham was forced to take a week’s vacation and issue an apology for a tweet offending a Parkland high school student. Alec Baldwin issued an apology and deleted his Twitter account after he publicly eviscerated a flight attendant who asked him to turn off his Words with Friends game for takeoff.

The upside is that an economy can’t afford to see race — unless that race is Mint Green. The downside is finding any nuance in that hue. For all the Sturm and Drang that followed Roseanne‘s cancellation — including a valid argument of the double standard afforded Samantha Bee  — not a single major network swooped in to pick up the series. Including Fox, the most vocal critic of the cancellation. Perhaps morality extends only as far as a purse string.

Secondly, why does Twitter seemingly exist solely within the confines of complaint? You never hear of a sage tweet sent by a public personality. Or a pearl of wisdom tweeted from a politician. Instead, anger trends. Perhaps that, too, simply reflects a nation that has so much wealth but still feels swindled. Despite its P.R.-guided mission statement to give voice to the masses, Twitter is like any other media: driven by celebrity.

Which makes the recent phenomenon so befuddling. The very people taking the most heat for dumbass tweets are the people who already have a platform. The internet’s societal explosion in 2008 made the prima facie case that Americans, as a people, are dying to be heard.

And it turns out tweeting celebrities are people, too. Petty, aggravated, attention-starved people.