"Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves."
~ Matthew 10:16
______________________________
hacking voter databases
Michael Cohen
Paul Manafort
U.S. Representative Duncan Hunter of California
U.S. Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma
too many "rallies"
not enough infrastructure projects and jobs
So. Many. Thoughts. ...
__________________________________
Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty on 8 counts; one commentator pointed out that Mr. Cohen's wife is involved in his business, and he is keen to protect his family from consequences and fall-out. It was said -- People who get involved with Donald Trump wind up with problems. It made me think of that part in
The Great Gatsby where where it says:
--------------------- [excerpt] ------------- I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made....
_______________________________________
The late great Aretha Franklin had a song, "Chain Of Fools" --
For five long years
I thought you were my man
But I found out
I'm just a link in your chain...
I thought of that because President Trump has a lawyer: Michael Cohen; Michael Cohen has a lawyer: Lanny Davis... Like, what is this, a "Chain Of Lawyers"?
Mr. Davis told the world today that his client Mr. Cohen "believes President Trump is a danger to the country."
___________________ With Watergate, it was a while before people could see that it went "all the way to the top."
Michael Cohen seems to have skipped that checker right across the board (tap - tap - TAP) when he was asked, Why did you do it? & he replied, Because Donald Trump told me to.
_____________________________
"Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further."
~ U.S. President Donald Trump, August 1, 2018
"One year of Watergate is enough."
~ U.S. President Richard Nixon, January 30, 1974
____________________________
(stop investigating!
stop reporting stuff!
Putin says he didn't do it!)
1973
--------------- [excerpt] -------------- On December 28, General Alexander Haig, the White House Chief of Staff, reached Katharine Graham by telephone in a Washington restaurant. He was calling from San Clemente to discuss two of the reporters' stories on the Post's front page that morning.
The first said that Operation Candor, the name given the campaign by the President to defend himself, had been shut down, and that two of the President's most trusted advisers, who had steadfastly maintained his innocence, were no longer convinced of it.
The second story said that the President's lawyers had been supplying attorneys for H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman with copies of documents and other evidence that the White House was submitting to the special prosecutor's office.
Haig characterized the stories as "scurrilous," accused the Post of "disservice" to the nation, and appealed to Mrs. Graham to stop publishing such accounts.
Haig himself, the reporters soon learned, had come to doubt the wisdom of the President's course. For more than six months he and Henry Kissinger had been urging the President to cut his ties with the three former aides who had been the closest to him and were now the primary targets of the special prosecutor's investigation -- Haldeman, Ehrlichman
and Colson.
Instead, the President had built his legal defense in concert with the three, and had continued to meet with them and talk with them on the telephone. During the summer of 1973, Kissinger had tried to persuade the President to disavow his former aides publicly and to accept a measure of responsibility for Watergate. The suggestion had been angrily rejected by Ron Ziegler.
"Contrition is bullshit," he had responded to the presidential speechwriter who brought him Kissinger's recommendation. ---------------------
[All The President's Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. 1974; Simon & Schuster.]
__________________________
I still think -- and I never hear anyone addressing this issue (maybe they're studiously trying to avoid it?) -- the main reason Donald Trump got elected is because our decision-making class (Congress, the White House, and Big Business, not necessarily in that order) made the choice to dump the entire cost of globalization on American blue collar workers.
A shared sacrifice by all Americans, across the economic, geographic, and social continuums, would surely have been less controversial, and less punitive to one group of people. Also it would have been a better "team-building" move for our society.
Instead our Decision-makers "stuck it to" the American workers and people are mad.
One way to put it would be, They sent the whole "bill," for Globalization, to the working people, figuring we would never call them on it and stand up for ourselves because we'd be too busy bickering amongst ourselves, which the Decision-Makers seem actively to encourage us to do. ("Obama! Racism! Feminism! Wwwaaaaaahhhh!")
The question is, Do we fall for it?
______________________________
A good thing for Pres. Trump to do would be stop having his noisy little parties or rallies or whatever he calls them, and use the time he saves from that to organize an infrastructure project and hire people to do the necessary jobs. Do what President Kennedy said: "Get this country moving again!"
JFK in South Dakota, 1962
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan: the "Rust Belt" -- "Opioid Alley" -- whatever they're calling it these days, the places where the jobs were taken from to give to other countries -- that's the place to start. Those are the people who put this president's votage (is that a word?) over the top in the 2016 election, and he needs to start the project there and then branch out.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment