Rick Kinnaird

Day 1134 What DWTS can teach us (or not)

Tuesday November 5, 2019

365 Days until the 2020 election and 450 days until the Inauguration

One year to go!

(Or not)

In one year either Trump will be re-elected or perhaps he will have been impeached and removed from office, but that’s not to say he couldn’t run again and win (and be impeached again?)

Let me get to the headline of this screed, then onto other stuff. Dancing With The Stars (DWTS) has as a contestant, Sean Spicer. For the last few weeks he has clearly been the worst dancer left, yet he survives. Not only does he survive, but he doesn’t even make it to the bottom two. The producers changed the rules this season to have the bottom two competitors be left and the judges pick whom they want to keep. This, I think, was to eliminate what has been called The Bristol Palin Effect, where that hapless girl kept being voted through time after time. However, it hasn’t worked out that Sean has been in the bottom two, much to the delight of some of my conservative friends, who think this somehow “shows them” (liberals?). Indeed, it does show me something. It shows me that a hapless guy can make it through if he’s associated with a particular party or administration. Congratulations, you’ve politicized a show that is supposed to be fun. You’re celebrating ineptness. That is a sign of our times.

What I like about DWTS is, not only watching the dancing and the growth of the individuals in their abilities, but it provides a beautiful social experiment writ small. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his famous study on the nature of prejudice and discrimination pointed out that one of the only ways that had been shown to reduce prejudice was to put people in jobs of equal status where they had to work together. Soldiers on the battlefield don’t really care what color your skin is when they are in a fire fight. People doing the same job learn to respect each other’s abilities, etc. One season Rick Perry and Ice Cube became friends. In what other universe would that happen? No, I like DWTS because it brings together people of different generations, and backgrounds; and that in turn let’s folks get to know and respect others. Maybe we need group DWTS classes all across the country?

When I lived in Bethesda, I lived in a community called Bannockburn. It was built on an old golf course. They kept the club house as a community center. We put on a spring show every year. Ninety minutes of singing songs that we changed the words made fun of politicians, and social situations. The best thing about it was how it mixed the generations. Kids learned Gilbert and Sullivan. Adults learned hip-hop. You never would have gotten to know these people otherwise. 

I think we need more DWTS and Spring Show events to bring the community together.

Okay. On to politics and crime. There’s been a big dump of the closed door testimony from witnesses that went before the Intelligence Committee in the House.Let me summarize hundreds of pages for you. Rudy Giuliani was hired by the Russian mob and Putin to corrupt the Ukraine, notably, their state owned natural gas company. This company was being run, after decades of corruption, by a by-the-book, clean-as-they-come fellow who had as his goal to stop importing Russian gas of which Ukraine had been dependent on for 93% of its gas. He was succeeding.  Rudy was being paid by Lev Parnas to the tune of half a million dollars. Old Lev worked for Dimitri Firnas, who is wanted in the U.S. on multiple corruption charges and is associated with the boss of bosses in the Russian mob, and Mr. Putin.

Aside from that Donald Trump wanted the Ukrainians to create dirt on Biden and for that ask Trump is getting impeached.

365 Days until the 2020 election and 450 days until the Inauguration

 

PS “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Wait, wait a second, isn’t that Giodrano “Perseus Turning Phineas and His Followers to Stone”?

Yeah, I thought so.

Day 1129  Are the ghouls coming out?

Thursday October 31, 2019

370 Days until the 2020 election and 455 days until the Inauguration

Happy Halloween! 

These are scary times. The president has blatantly committed crimes – in private and in public.

The Mueller Report outlined ten instances of behavior that met every point of the crime of Obstruction of Justice. 

The House is investigating the crime of asking a foreign government for help in besmirching the reputation of a potential political rival of the president and that government being threatened with the withholding of aid if they didn’t do it.

There are also the illegal contributions that the Trump campaign has

taken in.

There are the multiple instances of taking money from foreign governments and from domestic players. All in violation of the Constitution.

Those are just the crimes. It does not speak to the terrible decisions he and his administration have made. Withdrawing from Syria being the worst. But there’s the horrible treatment of immigrants, be it putting kids in cages or telling families of sick children they have to leave the country. (Isn’t it weird that Ken Cuccinelli, a staunch anti-abortionist pro-lifer is the person behind a policy that would kill children?) 

There is the ongoing debt. Something Trump said he’d eliminate, but in fact has made much much worse.

There is the disastrous China trade policy. Something that has caused farmers to go bankrupt, stifled manufacturing here, inflicted higher prices on the American consumer and cost our country hundreds of thousands of jobs.

There is the doing the bidding of Putin. Trump’s fawning behavior. His secret meetings with Putin. 

There is his revealing of classified information to us, and to the Russians.

His desertion of our allies.

His belittling of NATO.

But maybe it’s like Sean Spicer on Dancing With The Stars? Maybe, it’s a “so what?” attitude by those who support him. Does it matter that Sean is terrible? Or Trump? Maybe not, because he’s really showing them! Whoever them is. My conservative friend thinks this is great because of the way she said “liberals howled” when he was selected. Furthermore, she played the victim card, they support him because of the way he and his family were treated when they went out to a restaurant. What is fascinatingly sad about this is that the idea of the show is to pick the best dancer. At least that is my assumption, maybe not, maybe it’s something else. She readily admits he’s not the best dancer. But the support by conservatives is I guess because people didn’t like his being selected and because he got yelled at in a restaurant. Do they feel the same way about Hillary and how she was treated? No. 

The idea of talent and ability is being swept aside for what? For an “We’ll show them” attitude? Where does that end up? How does that benefit anyone? How does Sean feel when he sees people more talented than himself sent home? What if he wins it all? What does that say about us as a society?

370 Days until the 2020 election and 455 days until the Inauguration

PS Welcome to Belize (flashback March 2018)

Day 1128 This is Our America – Today

Wednesday October 30, 2019

371 Days until the 2017 election and 456 days until the Inauguration

Sean Spicer is on Dancing With The Stars. He has been described by one of the judges as “a brick with arms and legs attached.” Yet, he survives well past his time to be eliminated. This has been termed “The Sarah Palin Effect,” where that poor girl kept being voted through by a fervent crowd of supporters. It had little to do with her abilities and something, oddly, to do with a “we’ll show you” attitude. “Whom” exactly “they” were trying to show is a mystery, but there was a certain smug desire to do so.

It’s an “evidence to the contrary” attitude, and this kind of attitude permeates our society and our life now. We can speculate as to why or how it happened, but it has and there seems to be no pulling back from the abyss. 

Life imitates art, it is said, and art reflects life. So to, do our movies, one of which is The Joker, a very dark take on our life and society, but it may be the best reflection of where we are today.

How many times have I heard “You can’t make this up”? Or “If you showed up in Hollywood with this as a script they’d throw you out of the place!”?

Yet, to semi-quote Pogo, “Here we are.”

Evidence? You want evidence? Okay, here ya go. Picture this:

A scriptwriter walks into the office of a Hollywood mogul and pitches this as a boffo idea for a movie, “A low level criminal who has been involved in various pump and dump stock swindle companies and is connected to the Russian mob is trying to help his Russian bosses corrupt a Ukrainian gas company. At the same time, he has infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government and has befriended America’s Mayor in this effort. They get caught, red-handed, and guess what? The right wing conservative media and the Republican members of Congress come to his defense!”

At this point don’t you think he’d be thrown out of he office? Maybe they the Hollywood mogul staff toy with him a bit. They ask him to describe this guy.

“Oh well, he’s kind of a round faced nebbish. He has a pretty good looking blonde hanging off his arm when he goes to court. Who is she you ask? We don’t really know. Maybe a wife or “one of the girls from the club.” What club? Mafia Rave. It’s a bikini clad blue laser club he or his buddy Igor owns. Igor? Yeah, that’s right. Igor. The two of them get caught trying to flee the country to go see their Russian mob money man in Vienna, who is fighting extradition to the U.S, and is directly linked to Putin. Lev, that’s the low level criminal I was talking about, has a business called ‘Fraud Guaranteed.’ It’s out of that account that he pays the former Mayor of New York City $500K.”

“What? You think that’s too crazy? Wait, I haven’t gotten to the good part. This guy is being brought up on charges in the U.S. He really has little visible means of legit support, but somehow he has managed to make large illicit donations to various Republican organizations. He even went to Papa Bush’s funeral! He got a Congressman to write a letter to the State Department to get rid of an ambassador. The president said this woman was terrible. Later, the president said he didn’t know her. That’s inconsistent? Yeah, that’s the point. The president is this guy who was a reality host on TV, who parlayed that into being president and now is cluelessly destroying our government and our standing in the world.

“What do you mean that’s ridiculous. Listen, in this movie the right wing semi-nazi of Hungary comes to visit him and tells him that the authoritarian head of Turkey wants to wipe our allies in the Middle East off the face of the map and the president says okay, thus giving Syria to the brutal regime of Assad, the Russians, Turkey, Iran, and ISIS. 

“Too far fetched? Really?

“Could never happen you say? Can I finish?

“Okay, see the president is being impeached. What for? Oh, he tried to shake down the head of Ukraine to give him dirt on his political rival. He threatened Ukraine with the withholding of aid to that country. What kind of aid? Anti-tank missiles. Why did they need them? To stop the Russians from invading the rest of their country. What did the president do? He told the head of Ukraine to work something out with Putin. Why are you laughing?

“Turns out the president of the U.S. did withhold the aid from Ukraine because he wanted dirt on his political rival and because the Russians and the far-right conspiracy folks were pushing this narrative that the Democrats had hidden a server in the Ukraine. Why? Oh, because that way the Russians could say they didn’t interfere with the 2016 U.S. election it was the Ukrainians. 

“Why are you crying? Oh, tears of joy. Too funny you say? Okay, well here’s where it gets serious. Yeah, serious. See there’s this impeachment inquiry going on. Why an impeachment you ask? Well, the president is a narcissistic fool and thinks that if you commit a crime in the open it’s not a crime. Actually, he’s a sociopath and doesn’t really see anything as a crime. He has no empathy, doesn’t understand it, and he does everything for himself, and maybe his kids. In reality, he uses his kids to further his own interests. Yeah, his kids work in The White House. Yes, it’s nepotism, What’s your point? He also kept his businesses. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’ you ask? No unconstitutional. But accepting money from a foreign government would be illegal, Did he do that? Of course. He also got our military to stop over at an airport near one of his resorts to gas up and have the crew spend the night at the resort.

“You don’t think this is going to fly? Wait, how about the Vice-President, when he’s not gutting women’s reproductive rights, does things like fly to Ireland where he commutes to meetings everyday by flying across that country to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Why? The pres has a resort in Ireland. So what if it’s on the wrong side of the country?

“Is there more you ask? You bet.

“The House is holding an impeachment inquiry and they call upon a military man with a twenty year record of service, who sits on the National Security staff. He’s an expert on Ukraine, born there. His job is to help correct the record when translators misspell things or don’t know the term used. He’s doing his job one day when the president has a phone call with the president of Ukraine. He’s concerned when he hears the president try to get the president of Ukraine to agree to go on national TV to say they, the Ukrainian government, will investigate the U.S. president’s political rival and if they don’t they wont get the military aid they need to stop the Russians. Our president suggests the Ukrainian president ‘work something out’ with Putin.

“Yeah, crazy huh? This military guy says that he raised concerns about this call and an earlier one. He also noted that some of his corrections didn’t make it into the final transcript. Why? Which ones? The ones that would have made the president look bad.

“But here’s where it gets serious. The right wing press, desperate to keep this president propped up, suggests that the military guy is a spy. Why? He speaks Ukrainian! Well, he’s an expert on Ukraine. They don’t care. They smear him.

“Too much? No one will believe it. Yeah, I know. But …

“Get out and come back until I have a more realistic plot? Okay. You want the working title? Sure 

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

371 Days until the 2017 election and 456 days until the Inauguration

PS Recent Kremlin press release

Day 1127 Boo! 

Tuesday October 29, 2019

372 Days until the 2017 election and 457 days until the Inauguration

Before I get started let me give a shout out to the opening segment of Rachel’s show last night. It was the kind of segment that would drive a “conservative” Fox News person crazy. She stated facts. She backed up the facts with evidence. OMG! 

In that segment she told us that Trump has appointed to a prestigious national education board a fellow who has had two companies that are diploma mills and who also writes books about the Illuminati. He also has a fellow as his top advisor on China with no experience on China. This has no stopped this fellow from writing several books with China in the title. Books that talk about the global threat of China and how to fight back. It is his thinking that has formed the core of the China trade war. A trade war that has cost us more in subsidies to farmers than the money Obama used to bailout the economy from the last disastrous Republican economic screw up. 

And then she laid out the case, via headline after headline, against Donald Trump and the reason for impeachment.

A buddy of mine made the comment on facebook the other day that he is surprised that Democrats are labelled as “tax and spend,” while it is Republicans that always spend more and spend it in wasteful ways. It is common economic knowledge that spending on the military is one of the worst places to put money if you want to help an economy (a place Republicans love to sink tons and tons of cash) while social programs are one of the best places to help an economy (a place Democrats like to spend money.)

But, as Arlo Gutherie reminds us, “that’s not what I came here to talk about”*

*Thanksgiving is near and Arlo’s “Alice’s Restaurant” takes place on Thanksgiving and I have above quoted a line from that song.

What I came here to talk about was Donald Trump being booed at the World Series game the other night and the chanting of the fans in National Stadium yelling, “Lock Him Up!”

Joe Scarborough on his show Morning Joe gave his opinion that he thought it was not what we should be doing. Some folks criticized him. Therein lies the great debate.

On the one hand we want to talk about the dignity of the office of the president and on the other some want to let the current resident of The White House know what we think of him.

Many have been asking, “When did we become so polarized?”

While some politicians try to run on the idea of “reaching across the aisle,” many take a scorched Earth policy, a “my way or the highway” attitude. When did this all start? And, who is to blame?

As I thought about this, I thought about Newt Gingrich and his ascension to Speaker of the House. How he pushed a “take no prisoners” scorched earth policy. In or around that same time Grover Norquist was pushing his “no new taxes” sign up and in fact he seemed to wanted no taxes – period.  I have watched the rise of the Evangelical movement into a political force. It has a “only Christ” approach to things and this includes the anti-abortion (or should I called it “death to women”?) movement.

None of those things are about compromise, or trying to reach consensus and agreement. Either you support their point of view or you are considered an enemy. Plain and simple.

Underlying all this is a potent force of people trying to grab as much money and power as they can. They will us anyone and any cause to do so. I am not telling anything new here. I’m just stating what is already known.

But we can go back further, to Tip O’Neil, the Democratic Speaker of the House when Reagan was President. Reagan had some nutty economic ideas and O’Neal tried to work with him. Reagan broke the back of the striking Air Traffic Controllers strike and thus started the long decline of the labor movement in this country and the middle class along with it. Tip pointed out that even back instate politics in Massachusetts his Republican fellow politicians wouldn’t vote for anything he proposed. Not because it wasn’t a good idea, and not because they didn’t like him (they liked him), but because he was a Democrat. You can’t reach across the aisle with those sorts of folks and that kind of attitude. Remember, all the attempts Obama did? Health care, asking for a declaration on Syria? Didn’t matter. The answer was no.

The last time various factions tried to work together was during the time of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Yes, they had their differences, but they talked to the other side. Nixon did a lot of good for this country, in the legislation he got passed. That is the last time I can recall a Republican president actually helping the middle class and America in general. 

But bear in mind, since WWII, no matter what – Republicans always outspend Democrats.

As to the booing, which is what I really wanted to talk about. Is it a good idea? Or should we be “better than that” as Elijah Cummings might say? 

I would say if this were normal times, and we can debate what that means, then no we shouldn’t boo, out of respect for the office. But these are not normal times. 

There has only been one time that I can recall that this president has had to confront the reality of the real world. That was when the U.N. laughed in his face.

Now, he has had a second time. When he got booed by thousands of regular folk at a baseball game. And then he got to hear the chant he began but given a sarcastic twist. How else is he going to hear reality? He has surrounded himself with sycophants and incompetents. They aren’t going to tell him.

Let him hear the people roar. (I’m sure he’ll try to excuse it as a stadium full of socialist Democrats.)

I want to see justice done. No deals. No pardons. No letting him off the hook. 

372 Days until the 2017 election and 457 days until the Inauguration

PS Sean Spicer – looking good!