Skip to main content

The Big Whiff

By



Looks like it was a big whiff at the UN for Donald Trump on Monday.  His speech was remarkably bland by his standards.  A bit disappointing since his aides indicated Trump would have some strong words to say to the general assembly.  Basically, he just talked, which is something he admonished the UN for in a December 2016 tweet.  So, was this stage fright, or did the president just get lost in his own words?

Of course, he was quick to condemn North Korea and Iran, but there wasn't much fire or fury in his comments.  Seems he has pretty much accepted there isn't much he can do about Pyongyang, when there is little will on the part of China and Russia to back sanctions.  Putin chose not to attend, preferring to watch the fireworks show along the Baltic border instead.  President Xi similarly skipped the assembly, having decided enough was said in a telephone conversation and there was no more to add.  This doesn't say much for Trump's ability to unite nations against North Korea.

Trump once again lends the impression of being irrelevant on an international stage.  No one seems to even care what he has to say anymore, preferring instead to talk with Mattis or Tillerson or Jared Kushner, since talking directly with Trump can be a very frustrating experience.  The main reason being that Trump seems so badly informed on any subject that you usually spend the entire time explaining matters to him as you would a child.

For his part, Trump doesn't seem to care.  This whole White House thing has become such an incredible drag that he is just counting down the days to when he can be on one of his golf courses in New Jersey or Florida or Virginia.  He makes appearances for appearance sake.  There's no fire in him at all.  Alex Jones thinks the president is being "covertly drugged."

All could be he has been put on some kind of medication, as he was flying off the rails at most public events.  There are still moments when the medication appears to be wearing off.  He just can't stop posting GIFs of him bashing his opponents.  He couldn't resist sharing a GIF of him whacking Hillary with a golf ball that came at 5:45 am.

It's hard to say what is going on in that perverted mind of his, but Hillary took a stab at it, referring to a time Trump questioned how long it took her to go to the bathroom.  Like most Americans, Trump seems to pick over trivial matters, imagining some foul and pestilent odor lurking there, yet shrugs off far more serious matters because he simply doesn't understand them.  This is what you get from a man who has almost no intellectual curiosity, except when it comes to women's hygiene practices.

The UN must be a huge mystery for him.   It is doubtful he has made much effort to familiarize himself with its goals.  He has left it up to Nikki Haley, the so-called velvet hammer, to "revamp" the UN, although no one seems to know what that entails.  Having survived James Bolton, I'm sure the UN figures it will survive Nikki Haley.

One can only hope that Trump's aides remember to give him meds before addressing the general assembly as a whole today.

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