(08-27-2018, 09:14 PM)TheNomad Wrote: I'm urged to speak! I do not usually go into partisanism and I still do not think this comment IS partisan.
HOW can a man that evaded Vietnam who then doubted the heroism and made fun the capture IN that war of a Senator -- how could such a person EVER have become president? I'm shocked and horrified. I continue to be.
When the GIs were the most powerful generation of adults, military service (or at least some simulation of such) was a near-prerequisite for holding a responsible position in business, media, elective office, or academia. Those who have gone through it and not be scarred have learned that words do not mean as much as results, that excuses are admissions of failure, that hardship builds character as even learning doesn't, that one must transcend personal tragedy and loss, and, above all else, that war is never a triviality. Think of their predecessors in the Civic role that we know about, Jefferson's Republican and Grant's Gilded generations. War veterans knew how dangerous and destructive war could be. That might not be a huge difference between War Hero JFK and draft-dodger Bill Clinton, but it was certainly a difference between War hero JFK and draft-dodger Donald Trump.
Yet John McCain came close to the Presidency in 2000, and might have had it not been for the 'black baby' pseudo-scandal (the child was not black, and was not the result of a tryst by John McCain), but it was something that the slimy Karl Rove (whose name I have frequently twisted into "Karl Rogue") offered in the South Carolina primary as red meat to racists. Had Karl Rogue -- excuse me, Karl Rove -- not done so, would John McCain have become President, and would he have been a better President than Dubya? Probably, I think he would have used the available intelligence to preempt the 9-11 attack with raids on the Bad Guys before they had a chance to strike. I also think he would have never promoted the real-estate bubble that eventually imploded. Our politics and economic life would be different, Obama or not. He got burned in the Keating 5 scandal of the 1980s and would have not been burned a second time.
He would have had troubles as President because of the time, but quite possibly America would be more ready for Obama -- and would have given Obama more of a political chance. Maybe Obama would be the Gray Champion instead of at most a partial portent of what follows Donald Trump. As an ex-President McCain would have been in a position in which to tell the ruthless and reckless in his Party to shut up about the birther nonsense. So maybe because he would not sign off on predatory lending we would not have what passed as a boom, and we would have had to resort to investments in plant and equipment to solve our problems. Maybe he would not have gotten the dubious stimulus of wars in southwest Asia (Iraq and Afghanistan). He would not, as Dubya to a lesser extent and Trump to a major extent, have seen Vladimir Putin as a trustworthy partner. He knew that as a KGB man, Putin would have to prove his desirability as a partner through actions instead of promises.
But I also presume that he would be a two-term President as Dubya was in reality. A one-term President? Then maybe we get a weak one-term Democrat as President and then Bush. Jeb Bush. Alternative history is interesting, but it is ultimately futile.
Quote:EDIT: I meant above if unclear, the current president actually insulted McCain for "getting captured" -- John McCain suffered massive torture and was returned alive, then became a prominent Senator. He didn't impregnate women while attached assets paid their silence. Or whatever. While I'm in this edit, it brings me to remembering the documentary "Born Rich". You probably will not be able to find it anywhere unless you are a pirate (I'm shocked it is actually on youtube now!). The president's daughter gives a really nice anecdote which revealed a wonderful insight into her dad. The documentary is like from turn of the century I think. No one knew. It's a documentary about rich kids.
She said: "My dad was doing bankruptcy, and there was this man kind of sitting against the wall outside my dad's building, I think he was homeless, and my dad pointed to that man and said ''that guy has Eight Million Dollars more than I do right now'."
https://youtu.be/Y5h8Sncv3Pk
For a person like this to ever be a national figure anywhere is like a festering boil. For him to be OUR national figure is even worse.
I can never and will never measure up to Donald Trump in assets. But outmatching him in basic decency? Even I can do that -- and I have Asperger's syndrome which implies that I must simulate empathy and human decency even if such does not come naturally. But this said, we all become what we do. As it is with being a competent pianist, one practices with the E-major scale so that one transforms oneself from being a pianist with difficulty with music with four sharps in a major scale to being one with proficiency in music in the key of E major.
I could never be a good soldier as John McCain was because Asperger's would probably make me 4-F because it makes me too rigid in thought to turn on a dime as must a soldier. This said, I would know war from perhaps All Quiet on the Western Front, book and movie. War is an unmitigated disaster for anyone killed or crippled in it -- or consigned to a a prison in which the KGB serves as consultants on how to attack the weaknesses of POWs.
For all my troubles, I do not see myself as 'lesser' than someone with eight million dollars (inflation-adjusted or otherwise) who makes his money in a sordid or disreputable manner, whether it is in business deals that hurt customers after making wild promises of the deal greatly improving the lives of those customers or enticing young and vulnerable people into doing porno (the suicide rate among people in the pornography business is more obscene than any images possible).
I have plenty of respect for some recent immigrant from Vietnam who gets his family to set up a restaurant or car-repair place that depends upon offering good food or good vehicle maintenance at modest costs in the interstices of a bureaucratic-capitalist economy than I do someone who makes easy money through crony capitalism.
Quote:HOWEVER,
The S&H texts IMO teach us to look for signals in MOOD SHIFT. I sense a looming public mood shift...... a mood that was present with utter disbelief at the political process which allowed the current president to occupy that office..... but may finally be ready to go to outright WAR with this man and everything he is in the very near future.
Since I have never ranted about this before, I should indulge.
It is my firm belief that the "Mafioso" element present in America in the early 20th century (but which existed throughout America's history in many forms) is now culminating in the current president and all attached to him. The current president is as something which crawled from the sewer but demands a crown. He disgusts me as hardly anything does. I cannot look at his face nor listen to his voice for any reason.
I believe if the man himself were not so utterly repulsive, I could at least stretch my imagination to understand why others may back him. However, I am unable to do that. There was an article recently headlined something "NOW THEY STAB IN THE FRONT". The story was about how the current administration has brought such a violent fervor to the office that all those involved no longer plot secretly to screw each other over (or anyone) they do it right to the person's face. The article said "it is more personal that way".
We have now reached a point not just of disagreement and strong opposing beliefs............ it is no longer about trying to bring down your enemy............. it is about killing your enemy, shitting on their grave and desecrating their memory for all time (if they can).
This filth can and will stop. I am only seriously hoping and meditating on ALL who read this that we can get through it and pass to the other side alive.
Ready Player One: "People just stopped trying to fix problems and just started trying to outlive them." <---- I will not be that person.
For decades, the mobster was the model of the success that came at a destructive price for anyone who responds as is predictable to what Mario Puzo put it, "I made him an offer that he couldn't refuse". It was a raw deal, but somehow it worked. In debt for gambling? Be a drug courier or induce your daughter into pornography or prostitution -- or embezzle from your employer.
Like you, I cannot stand to listen to him. He reminds me of people that I have dealt with -- extreme narcissists who border on sociopathy -- that I have usually avoided. His shtick reminds me of the late comedian Don Rickles, whose comedy routine I could listen to only for a short time and could excuse because he deflated egos in Hollywood and Washington who needed to be cut down to size if those people were to recover some humanity. Trump applies his offensive barbs to people who do not deserve such. I would never dream of insulting someone who had endured the nastiness of the "Hanoi Hilton" or who had lost a son in a war by trivializing the horror. There are sacred decencies, and even those who must act to seem normal know what those are. It is part of the stage act that we all play.
The deficiencies of this President will demonstrate what is necessary for the next President, lest the Crisis of 2020 go as badly for us as perhaps the Crisis of 1940 went for Germany and Japan. Consider this: one scenario that I imagine is that America goes so bad that the Crisis of 2020 inverts the Good Guys and Bad Guys of World War II. (I have contemplated writing a novel, alternative history, in which such happened... a KKK-dominated America faces a non-Nazi Germany and a Japan that becomes a pluralistic democracy with Japanese characteristics.
In such an inverted world, an iconic image analogous to this appears in mass consciousness, but the mountain is Mauna Loa instead of Mount Suribachi, and the flag is the Rising Sun. Hawaii is an attractive place for Japanese and American tourists-- but for the last seventy years, Americans have needed a passport to visit Hawaii, and Japanese tourists haven't. The music of German celebrations is that of the great German composer Gustav Mahler, (because he was Jewish his music was banned in Nazi Germany... but in this inverted world,
this fits a militarized society (even if it has the pretext of a Crisis-era war) that has no tolerance for religious bigotry. Mahler -- too Jewish for Nazi Germany, and too German for the Allies, would fit an anti-fascist Germany and be a supreme insult of the Klan. A bunch of people with the titles of Imperial Wizard and Grand Dragon who survive the war are tried for war crimes and crimes against Humanity and die dangling at the ends of ropes.
As the line of the Christmas carol penned during the American Civil War says, "The Wrong shall fail/the Right prevail". Evil is usually a losing proposition due to its cruelty and destructiveness. Or from the same time -- as the story goes, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was asked if God was on his side. He replied, "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."
Were I a religious person, I would conclude that God was on the side of FDR and Sir Winston Churchill, finding slavery, plunder, and religious persecutions abominations to His Will.
OK -- the Klan is not the problem now. We endure fascism in its baby steps today much as the Italians did in 1922 or 1923. But Italian fascism, however milder than the monstrosities that emerged in Germany and Japan, morphed into a nightmare so bad that the Italian people largely saw the Allies as liberators.
The Wrong shall fail/the Right prevail...
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.