Skip to main content

Are You Not Entertained?

By



We've reached the 100-day mark of the Trump administration and there really isn't much to say about it.  He hoped to hold the spending bill hostage over his wall but has backed down on that threat as he doesn't even have enough Republican backing.  No one really wants this wall, but Trump continues to insist it will get built.

That pretty much sums up his presidency to this point.  Sound and fury signifying nothing.  His attempt to get his first major bill through Congress similarly ended up getting yanked, as there wasn't enough support for it either.  However, Republican leaders seem to think they have come up with a compromise solution that essentially scales back the current Affordable Care Act.

Trump's signature travel ban remains in limbo.  Jefferson Beauregard Sessions seems more upset that a Hawaiian federal judge could block it than he does the legitimacy of such a bill.  Thank god this guy never ended up on a federal court!

The missile strikes and the Mother of all Bombs are distant memories.  The situation in Syria remains the same.  The Taliban inflicted more damage using conventional means in Afghanistan.

Ivanka tried her best to present her father as a "champion for women" at a G20 conference but that didn't go over very well.  I suppose this comes with her new role as one of her father's top advisers.  I wonder if she will try to defend the latest juicy tidbit on her father's relationship with his third wife.

One of the big knocks against Hillary during the campaign was that she would perpetuate the Clinton legacy in the White House by giving her husband a big role and quite possibly her daughter as well.  Yet, Ivanka and her husband Jared both have assumed prominent roles in the Trump White House.  She hasn't made any effort to distance herself from her product line, securing Chinese trademarks while President Xi was at Mar-a-Lago.  The Trump brand is thriving.  Nepotism knows no bounds in this administration.

His Trumpness has confirmed all our worst fears, yet his base loves him.  A recent poll shows that 96 per cent of his supporters would vote for him again, compared to only 85 per cent for Hillary.  This led Trump to boast he would beat Hillary all over again.  This seems out of step with his historically low approval rating.

Americans are accepting Trump whether they like him or not.  Listen to this CNN panel guffaw at Trump's "joke" at Nikki Haley's expense.  It's like watching The Apprentice every night.  Suspense was raised over whether Trump would give Steve Bannon the boot, only to disappoint his national audience by letting Steve off with a warning.

 Michael Moore is already conceding Trump a second term but with one caveat.  He will be impeached during this time.  It seems a bit early to be making such bold predictions, but His Trumpness has a way of doing that.  As his SNL doppelganger would say, "are you not entertained?"


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more