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Scorched-earth redux
If you’ve never heard of the Daily Banter, good for you. Here’s one of its latest headlines:
Trump Is Officially An Illegitimate President-Elect And The Democrats Have To Destroy Him
In a nutshell — or a nutcase — the hyper-hormonal screed asserts that Democrats need to take Republican scorched-earth policies to the next level to save our democratic republic.
Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, the manner of his election, or his adolescent tweeting, he has blunted the onslaught from many of his critics with the measured judgment of his cabinet picks and administrative appointments.
Aside from that, after eight years of partisan sniping, bullying, and obstructionism — from both sides of the aisle — what the country needs and wants is a spirit of cooperation from its lawmakers, not more posturing, bickering, and gridlock.
But here’s the question that really needs answering:
Why is a scandal sheet like the Daily Banter showing up at the top of my Google News feed?
Donald Trump has finally gone too far
Perhaps we can forgive the president-elect for his crassness, his coarseness, his ultra-nationalist rhetoric, his mockingly superior tone, and for dragging the electoral process deeper into the mud than anytime in the last century.
But now he has officially gone too far.
Donald Trump has committed the unpardonable sin of not telling the press where he went for dinner last Tuesday evening.
By doing so, reports the Washington Post, Mr. Trump has “dispensed with generations-old traditions and formalities,” adopting a “combative approach to press relations” in a way that shows “he clearly doesn’t respect the media.”
Gee, is this the same media that rallied all its collective forces to discredit Donald Trump as a candidate and convince the country that a humiliating electoral defeat to Hillary Clinton awaited him come November 8? Might that have something to do with his perceived lack of respect?
But that’s not even the real issue.
More significant is the sense of entitlement the media feels to invade the private lives of every public figure, and the selective metric they apply when they do so. They grudgingly accord scant airtime and column space to stories that don’t fit their ideological agenda, then cry foul when they’re denied access to the not-yet-president’s family meal and frame the perceived offense as a threat to national security.
If the election results taught us anything, it’s that the media has become so skewed in its reporting that it can’t even trust itself. Maybe if reporters learn that lesson they’ll find themselves more welcome beside the presidential dinner table.
Down with Democracy?
AMERICANS AGAINST HATRED AND BIGOTRY.
DUMP TRUMP.
NOT MY PRESIDENT.
[EXPLETIVE] UR WALL.
WE WON’T GIVE UP. WE WON’T GIVE IN.
UNITED WE’RE STRONGER (you have to love the irony).
These are just a few of the slogans that bedecked the nation-wide protests against Donald Trump’s electoral victory, i.e., against the American democratic system. Accompanying images included swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler.
Of course, protest is a fundamental part of our democracy, guaranteed by the First Amendment (which, incidentally, many Yale students petitioned to repeal). But protest is only productive when it advocates a viable solution to a problem. When protest is nothing more than collective whining, it easily turns into mob violence — indeed, as it did in several instances.
So what do the protesters actually want? To repeal the democratic process? To overthrow a legally elected chief executive? Public lynching?
If they want to advocate dismantling the electoral college, they might find support on both sides of the aisle… but only for the next election cycle. And they could make their point without vandalism, arson, or public obstruction.
On the other extreme, you have college students so traumatized by the election results they have requested exemptions from classwork and midterm exams. Such fragility does not bode well for the future leadership of the country.
It’s a pity we can’t conjure up an alternative reality portal; it would be amusing to get a glimpse of how the anti-Trump contingent would be reacting — had the election gone the other way — to disgruntled Trump supporters protesting the “rigged” election that stole victory from their candidate.
But one does have to acknowledge that sometimes the left is right. One protest sign manages to say it all:
How we move forward
Too many voters held their noses yesterday as they entered the polling booth to vote for the candidate they considered least toxic. A smaller number could only make peace with their conscience by voting for some unexceptional third-party candidate. Then there were those who couldn’t bring themselves to vote at all.
Will the country survive this winter of our discontent? Only time will tell. But the question that lingers in the aftermath of electoral acrimony is this: are we going to start this all over again in two more years?
Sadly, we just might. Back in January, David Gelertner proposed in the Weekly Standard that the problem with the political left is that liberalism has become their new religion. For most people, religion is not a rational but an emotional commitment that emerges from some amorphous inner voice or feeling. And when people cannot defend their religious beliefs intellectually, they lash out with disproportionate ferocity at anyone who challenges those beliefs. Mr. Gelertner argues that the irrational dogmatism of many liberals bears less resemblance to political discourse and more to the religious fervor of blind faith.
He’s right, of course. But he’s wrong when he contends that this is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the left.
Tony Soprano Redux
A good friend of mine, who is usually more clear-headed, sent me a slimy little video asserting that character doesn’t matter, since both FDR and Winston Churchill smoked and drank while Adolf Hitler was a teetotaler and a vegetarian. His point was that Donald Trump’s crude, impulsive, petty, and narcissistic behavior has no bearing on his fitness for office.
While it is true that people are complicated, and that no one is completely virtuous or completely lacking in virtue, the indulgence in moral relativism is particularly galling when it comes from the right, after so many years of denouncing it as the Kool-Aid of choice among the left.
But the blurring of lines has been going on for a long time. It particularly hit its stride about ten years ago with the success of the Sopranos, which prompted an op-ed that I revisit here.
Psychoanalyst Glen Gabbard, author of The Psychology of The Sopranos: Love, Death, Desire and Betrayal in America’s Favorite Gangster Family, has an interesting take on the phenomenon of Tony Soprano.
The success of The Sopranos, it seems, depends not on Tony Soprano the mobster, but on Tony Soprano the psychoanalysis patient. Whereas in daily life, Tony is a crook, a thug, and a murderer, on the couch Tony is a regular guy, with the same hopes, dreams, problems, and anxieties as the rest of us.
Dr. Gabbard explains that people love to root for Tony the regular guy to prevail over Tony the violent criminal; they want more than anything to be able to find a noble everyman at the heart of the worst of the worst and the lowest of the low.
Simply stated, viewers don’t want to believe that anyone is really evil.
This is a remarkable turnabout from the early 80s when everyone’s favorite television creep was J.R. Ewing on Dallas. Back when “Who shot J.R.?” was on everybody’s lips, it wasn’t because we wanted to see the would-be assassin brought up on charges — we wanted to see him handed the key to the city. We didn’t want to understand J.R. — we wanted to hate him. We loved to hate him.
J.R. never killed anybody, never even beat anyone up, yet we cheered from our couches when he got what was coming to him and hoped desperately that his every nasty scheme would fail. If so, why do viewers in record numbers forgive everything for Tony Soprano, the Godfather who terrorizes and murders for fun and profit, just because he worries about his marriage and his children? C’mon, even J.R. loved his daddy.
Perhaps there’s no better barometer for the moral pressure of society than our relationship with television’s most popular characters. When we cheer for the good guys and boo the bad guys, isn’t it because of our desire to see that justice is done?
But when we sympathize with a violent criminal, when we identify with him because he cares about his kids just as we do, isn’t it a sign of abandoning the commitment to differentiate between right and wrong?
The job of making moral decisions, of balancing right and wrong in complex circumstances, is no simple business. But instead of challenging us to recognize that Tony is a villain in spite of his human side, The Sopranos (and, more generally, the entertainment industry) manipulates us into identifying with Tony’s humanity so that we overlook his wickedness.
Based on Dr. Gabbard’s assessment, it seems that we yearn to deny that genuine evil walks this earth. Indeed, it may be admirable to look for the good in all people and give our neighbor the benefit of the doubt, but not to the exclusion of recognizing that sometimes there is no doubt, that what little good remains in some people has been hopelessly buried under a mountain of evil. The Hitlers, Stalins, and Ahmadinejads of the world may love their children and may have had troubled youths, but evil remains evil whether we choose to look it in the face or to bury our heads in the sand.
Too often, it seems, we avoid looking evil in the face at any cost. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that a growing element in our society blames the United States for Pearl Harbor, blames Israel for Palestinian suicide bombers, blames all of Western Civilization for September 11. But making excuses for evil does not make evil go away.
It just keeps coming back, each time bolder and more brazen than before.
The Talmud warns us to distance ourselves from a bad neighbor and not to associate with a wicked friend. Even if he loves his kids. Even if his name is Tony Soprano. Perhaps, especially if his name is Tony Soprano.
Originally published in 2007 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jewish World Review, and Aish.com.
Look in the Mirror, Mr. President
“The Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president.”
Such is the gospel according to Barack Obama, who went on to defend his verdict by citing “the repeated denunciations of his statements by leading Republicans.”
He’s right, of course. But his critique might carry more weight if it were not a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.
(OMG, did I just write that?)
Before his very public embrace and endorsement of Hillary Clinton at the Democratic convention, Mr. Obama might have taken a look at the recent incendiary assessment of Ms. Clinton by NYT columnist Maureen Dowd, who’s about as far to the left as one can get without falling off the edge of the earth.
Here are a few choice quotes:
[The Clintons’] vast carelessness drags down everyone around them…
In a mere 11 days, arrogant, selfish actions by the Clintons contaminated three of the purest brands in Washington…
Hillary willfully put herself above the rules — again — and a president, campaign and party are all left twisting themselves into pretzels defending her.
The Clintons work hard but don’t play by the rules. Imagine them in the White House with the benefit of low expectations.
If even the most ardent defenders of liberal ideology give Ms. Clinton a failing grade in character, surely that must call into question her credibility as an aspirant for the country’s highest office.
So answer us this, President Obama: how can you, with a straight face and in all earnest, chide Republicans for not rejecting an unfit candidate when you so brazenly refuse to do so yourself?
Nothing left to say, nothing right to say
I’m going to make a greater effort to stay away from politics in general and Donald Trump in particular (although I’ve made that resolution before without much success). I’ve been baffled by the responses I’ve gotten from Trump supporters accusing me of dishonesty and spreading a message of hate.
It’s hard to imagine how individuals who claim sensitivity to lying and hate-mongering are able to overlook such an abundance of both in their own candidate’s rhetoric. But I’ve already addressed the proliferation of such double-standards and willful ignorance elsewhere.
So here is my parting shot (for now), excerpted from an article by the always-insightful Jonathan Rosenblum:
IF DONALD TRUMP SPEAKS to voters tired of being ignored and condescended to, he is nevertheless a disastrous representative of them. Nothing in his life until now has shown an iota of concern with those who now salute him, and he has not offered one serious policy prescription that would address their economic insecurities. All he offers is his boastful self-promotion and a call for the power to make America great again. However different in style he is to the polished and fluent Barack Obama, he offers the same promise of being some sort of miracle worker. (Remember when Obama pronounced his nomination as the day the oceans cease to rise.)
Trump is not the antidote to thought-stifling political correctness, as his supporters seem to think. Vulgarity and the lack of basic human decency are not the opposite of political correctness.
[Trump] has betrayed no understanding of the American system of checks and balances or three co-equal branches of government. Recently, he boasted that he would gut First Amendment protections of the press to make it easier for him to sue, in the manner of Turkey’s Erdogan, reporters and papers that get under his tissue-thin skin.
ONE OF THE WISEST OF THE FOUNDERS, Benjamin Franklin predicted, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” And, as David French argues, “Trump is running not for president of a constitutional republic but to be the strongman of a failing state.”
One by one, many at first inclined to hold their noses and vote for Trump (and there is an argument for doing so) have determined that they cannot, for he will further lower the standards of an already debased culture. For some it was his casual dismissal of the courage of John McCain during six years of torture in North Vietnamese captivity, which left McCain permanently disabled.
For Andrew McCarthy, the lead government prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing, it is Trump’s boast that he will order American troops to become war criminals and target the wives and children of ISIS fighters. For Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, it is the impossibility of explaining to his young children why someone would mock the physical disability of a crippled reporter. For the religious conservative David French, it is his pledge to keep funding Planned Parenthood to the tune of millions of dollars, so that it can continue killing hundreds of thousands of babies a year.
These thoughtful conservatives are shocked that Trump’s supporters rather than being appalled by his cruelty and malice are attracted by it. They see him as the artifact of a society from which the civic vitality catalogued by de Tocqueville has been lost and replaced by vitriol and demagoguery.
“Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people,” wrote John Adams. “It is wholly inadequate for the governance of any other.” (Hat tip again to David French.) If so, America is grave danger on the evidence of this election season.
Hat tip: Sylvia Poe
Grump on Trump
I will not vote for Donald Trump,
I do not like him on the stump;
I will not make myself a chump
I will not vote for Donald Trump.
I do not like him in debate
I do not like his words of hate;
I do not like this fake Machiavelli
I’d sooner vote for Megyn Kelly.
I will not vote for one so crude
No matter whom he can delude;
I will not vote for one so crass
To deepen our country’s moral morass.
I don’t care if he’s tough and rich
He’ll drive the country into a ditch;
I don’t care if he’ll build a wall
Since mayhem will engulf us all.
I won’t support him against Bernie,
Not against Bert, not against Ernie;
Not even if you pillory me
Not even against Hillary, see?
There must be someone to prevent us
From choosing this sorcerer’s apprentice;
I’ll give my vote to some third party
Even if it’s led by Moriarty.
I don’t care how his groupies swoon
Even as each day he changes tune;
I don’t care what he’ll promise to do
Since not a word he says is true.
I will not vote for Donald Trump
To make America a toxic dump;
Not even with a stomach pump
Will I give my vote to Donald Trump.
2016: The Last Year of the Weimar Republic
In this new era of surrealism, it’s ironic that we can find prophetic wisdom in as unlikely a source as Hollywood scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin. In his 1995 masterpiece The American President, we find this exchange between President Andrew Shepherd and his domestic policy advisor, Lewis Rothschild:
Lewis Rothschild: People want leadership, Mr. President. And in the absence of genuine leadership they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership; they’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water they’ll drink the sand.
President Shepherd: Lewis, people don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty; they drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.
The truth is that both are right. Deprive people of authentic leadership for long enough and they will certainly lose the ability to tell the difference between reality and illusion.
When we reflect upon the contrast between the elegant ideals set forth by revolutionary leaders two and a half centuries ago and the cartoonish ranting of the avenger seeking coronation today, there is ample reason for anxiety that has nothing to do with Nazi genocide.
Donald Trump: Obama 2.0
A magic rests on the lips of the king;
Let his mouth not betray him in judgment.
~Proverbs 16:10
However improbable it seemed at the start, it’s not hard to understand the initial popularity of Donald Trump. In an age of mealy-mouth, equivocating, do-nothing, business-as-usual, avaricious politicians, many found it refreshing to have a larger-than-life presence who seemed to speak his mind and didn’t pander to popular opinion. But by now the flirtation should have revealed itself for what it is — a cheap one-night stand with no basis for a solid relationship.
Donald Trump represents everything that is wrong with this country: arrogance, self-promotion, pettiness, bellicosity, irresponsibility, bigotry and, despite his hugely successful self-branding, dishonesty and insincerity. In truth, Donald Trump is exactly the opposite of the persona that originally made him so appealing; on closer inspection, he reveals himself to be nothing less than a fun-house reflection of Barack Obama.
Like Mr. Obama, Donald Trump believes in nothing but himself; each man genuinely believes he is the smartest person in the world, and each reacts with seething contempt toward anyone who questions or disagrees with him. Armed with the conviction that comes from infallibility, each will say whatever he has to say, without a flicker of shame, to advance his own personal agenda.
Mr. Trump had only good things to say about Hillary Clinton in his 2012 interview with Greta Van Susteren, but last July he told Meet the Press that Ms. Clinton was “the worst Secretary of State in history.” In 1999 he said, “I love universal health coverage,” but now he chastises the Republican congress for not putting an end to Obamacare. In 1999 he was “very pro-choice,” but now he’s anti-abortion. Apparently, this qualifies him to be president. in 2014, the Washington Post awarded President Obama for having told 3 of the 12 biggest political lies of the year. In 2013, it was 3 out of 10 — an average good enough for an MLB All-Star.
The issues are not the issue; brazen disregard for the truth is. Much more disturbing is the persistent popularity of Mr. Trump based on the illusion that “he tells it like it is.
Yonason Goldson 