No comments on Presty the DJ for July 30
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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice profiles Facebook Friend Kevin Hermening, a hostage of Iran in 1980 and 1981:
At his presidential campaign launch this month, Walker introduced Hermening — a former Iranian hostage — by name, offering the former U.S. Marine a nod and a salute.
The second-term Republican governor cited Hermening when opposing the nuclear deal with Iran. Walker said Hermening had taught him that Iran “is not a place we should be doing business with.”
Walker also has made mention of Hermening on Twitter and in an opinion piece for Breitbart.com.
“As foreign policy emerges as a leading issue in the 2016 election, Walker plans to keep featuring Hermening in the campaign — a role Hermening gladly accepts,” said an Associated Pressarticle from last week.
But Hermening, who admits he is no expert on the Middle East, has espoused some extreme foreign policy views in the past — ones he continues to defend.
He expressed these points in an inflammatory opinion piece for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in September 2001, just weeks after the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
There, Hermening called for the deportation of all illegal immigrants, especially those with a Middle Eastern background and anyone who reacted “with glee” to the coordinated attacks by 19 al-Qaida terrorists. He also urged wiping out the capitals of seven heavily Muslim countries — if they didn’t support American efforts to kill Osama bin Laden.
“Every military response must be considered, including the use of nuclear warheads,” Hermening wrote in the column.
Reached last week, Hermening said he had been expecting to be asked about the provocative opinion piece after Walker began using him in campaign speeches.
Hermening emphasized that the op-ed piece was written during an extremely emotional period in America.
But he then went on to defend most of the column, saying it had to be read in context. He even suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton would agree with parts of it.
“I’m not sure I would have a different view today in 2015,” Hermening said. He added later, “I don’t have a problem with anybody raising (the op-ed piece).”
But he did distance himself from one line in the column. Specifically, he recommended in the article that America suspend the civil rights of terror suspects, including — bizarrely — “representatives of Israel’s Mossad intelligence forces.”
He said this must have been an incomplete thought.
“I have never believed that Israel was involved in the 9/11 attacks,” Hermening said last week by email. “I DO believe that Mossad is more skilled at gleaning information during interrogations than our own intelligence agencies.”
A Walker campaign spokeswoman stood by Hermening when asked about the views expressed in his opinion piece.
AshLee Strong, press secretary for Walker, emphasized that Hermening was one of 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days more than three decades ago by militant Iranian students. He was a 20-year-old Marine sergeant stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran at the time.
“Mr. Hermening has bravely served our country, and any attacks on this service are shameful,” Strong said.
She did not respond to particulars of Hermening’s foreign policy positions.
Ibrahim Hooper, the national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, denounced Hermening’s views as “utter nonsense” and “extremist.”
“That feeds into two right-wing veins here — anti-immigrant and Islamophobia,” Hooper said. “It’s like a perfect storm there.”
Hooper asked how undocumented immigrants would be tracked down and would Hermening have favored a two-track deportation system, one for Muslims and one for non-Muslims.
As for nuking the capitals of various Middle Eastern and northern African countries, Hooper said no reasonable person was advocating such views. He said it was disturbing that Walker is being advised by someone who pushed this proposal.
“It’s the kind of nonsense that substitutes for reasoned policy advice,” Hooper said.
In the 2001 article, Hermening outlined a four-point plan that he described as “the only acceptable and appropriate responses” to the attacks.
First, he called for the “immediate and unequivocal deportation of every illegal alien and immigrant.” He said this effort should “focus on removing those of Middle Eastern descent, and especially those who reacted with glee at the horror of Sept. 11 (if you don’t have permission to be here, get the hell out!).”
In addition, Hermening said he favored a “prompt and massive military response that includes the destruction of the capitals of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Yemen.” The only way out, he said, would be if these countries “agree unequivocally to support our efforts to kill Osama bin Laden.”
“After the annihilation of each country’s capitals, we can make them the same kind of financial offer we made to the leaders of Japan and Germany after World War II,” Hermening continued.
“Cooperate with us in the establishment of democratic governments, and we will assist you in every possible way. Don’t cooperate, and your people will perpetually suffer — that ought to be our unspoken message.”
Last week, Hermening pointed out that he was writing from a particular point of view.
“I don’t speak as a foreign policy expert,” Hermening said in a phone interview. “I speak as somebody concerned about the security of the American people — meaning my family at the time at least.”
Asked if he still favored singling out illegal immigrants of Middle Eastern descent for deportation, he said:
“If people were training to fly airplanes into the Freedom Center in downtown New York and people reacted with glee and celebration — I’m talking about folks who are here beyond their visas — I think anybody who’s picked up without their visas having being extended ought to be looked at. They’re certainly not legally in the country anymore.”
Hermening went on to say that he was not talking in 2001 about the current policy debates over Hispanic immigrants.
Rather, he said he was responding to the Sept. 11 attacks, even if he said back then that the U.S. should deport “every illegal alien.”
“We’re talking in a totally different context now, you and I are,” said Hermening, a 55-year-old investment adviser, financial planner and onetime candidate for office who grew up in Oak Creek and now lives in Mosinee, just south of Wausau.
As for destroying the capitals of the seven heavily Muslim countries, Hermening pointed out that the U.S. subsequently bombed at least two of them — Kabul in Afghanistan and Baghdad in Iraq.
“So eventually that was accomplished,” Hermening said. America, however, did not totally destroy either city and did not use nuclear weapons. His list also didn’t include Saudi Arabia, even though 15 of the hijackers were from that country.
But does Hermening still think destroying these seven capitals would have been an appropriate response to Sept. 11?
Yes, he does.
“Obviously, I’m not the only one,” he said. “Hillary Clinton agreed. Hillary Clinton maybe wasn’t as expansive as I was because I included more countries. … But on Afghanistan and Iraq, the president of the United States, and the majority of the U.S. Senate and Congress also agree.”
Some have suggested, Hermening said, that he can’t get past his experience as a hostage in Iran. He said he doesn’t see it that way.
“Iran is a part of my life — it isn’t my life,” he said. “It helped make who I am today. It’s given me this view: You need to be trusting of your international partners, defending your global allies and standing tall and tough against countries that are adversarial to you.”
Yeah, that’s really radical, “standing tall and tough against countries that are adversarial to you.” Except to the Surrender Caucus, including Barack Obama, who are fine with kowtowing to Iraq, Russia, China and this country’s other enemies.
Bice conveniently fails to remember American attitudes both during the 444-day Iran hostage crisis and immediately after 9/11. There were Americans who believed our country should have obliterated Teheran, even at the cost of the hostages’ lives. There were Americans who believed our country should have obliterated any Middle Eastern country that was assisting the terrorists, even at the cost of innocent Middle Eastern lives.
Given Iran’s lack of compliance with previous treaties, Hermening makes a much better argument against the surrender — I mean, treaty — with Iran than any of the treaty’s supporters.
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The number one album today in 1973 …
… was the number one selling rock box set until 1986, and remains the best selling four-album set of all time.
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One need not revisit the mountains of purple prose that greeted Obama’s ascent to the White House (or his descent, given the Olympian esteem in which many held him). We all remember it well enough. He was a redeemer, a healer, the prophet who vowed to close the partisan divide behind him, like the waters of the Red Sea, after he delivered us to a new promised land.
In 2004, he emerged from the political wilderness to proclaim at the Democratic convention:
The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too: We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states.
While the government was never actually much interested in libraries in the first place, it does seem quite interested in how people worship that awesome God these days. From forcing nuns to pay for birth control to suggesting at the Supreme Court that churches might lose their tax-exempt status if they refuse to officiate gay weddings, the Obama administration seems keen on imposing its vision on everyone.
Perhaps this attitude toward Americans whom the president once described as bitter clingers explains why pollsters say we’re now more polarized than ever.
Of course, listening to Obama and his defenders, the polarization is all one-sided. The president’s opponents are dogmatic ideologues and racists — even the ones who voted for him in 2008 and then came to their senses in 2012. That strikes me as delusional nonsense, a transparent and pathetic attempt to put all of the blame for the president’s failure to fulfill his mission on others.
Still, it doesn’t explain why the president’s own side is so angry at America itself.
There’s a revealing tendency in most liberal and left-wing histories of the United States of America. When something bad happens, there tend to be only two possible villains: conservatives or America itself (or a combination of the two). During the McCarthy period, evil conservatives whipped up paranoia and fear. But the Red Scare of 1919, overseen by Woodrow Wilson’s progressive attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, was a blot on America’s soul. When FDR interned Japanese Americans, it was an example of America’s sins. When FDR’s party ruthlessly enforced Jim Crow in this country, racism was a stain on America. After the Democrats lost the South, and the South in turn became less racist, the stain was moved to the Republican party. Liberalism is never to blame.
I think we are seeing something similar in real time. Every day we hear more and more about “white supremacy” — a shmoo of a concept that does the bidding of those who wield it with an alacrity and elasticity that defies logic or reason. Outside a few feverish chat rooms where losers peck out their frustrations on spit-soaked keyboards, there is no white-supremacist agenda in America, but that doesn’t stop the drumbeat. Rather, the drumbeat intensifies, setting the pace as in the bowels of a Roman galley ship, as everyone pulls the oars faster and faster in search of imagined monsters beyond the horizon. It inspires social-justice warriors to dig up long-dead Confederates who thought they could hide from us in the grave.
At the recent Netroots Nation conference, activists strived to make parody impossible. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley had to apologize like a deviationist Communist apparatchik for saying that “all lives matter” instead of that “black lives matter.”
Filmmaker and poet Jess X Chen, meanwhile, was cheered for telling the audience to take heed: “I think that the honeybees are trying to warn us.” Yes, the bees. They are warning us of the oppression of “yellow, black, and brown working-class communities who hold up the spine of America.” Colony-collapse disorder is a real problem, to be sure, but I doubt most apologists agree that it demonstrates “white supremacy over people of color” and that “Western civilization” itself is “unsustainable.”
Barack Obama is not the least bit responsible for the plight of the bees. But he does deserve his fair share of blame for the insanity around us. He once defined sin as being “out of alignment with my values,” and it seems his followers agree. America has not bent to his will as much as he had hoped, and that, it seems, is her greatest sin.
Part of this is the logical result of our zero-sum politics — one side wins, therefore the other side loses.
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We begin with our National Anthem, which officially became our National Anthem today in 1931:
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The Wall Street Journal interviews the targets of the John Doe witch hunt:
The John Doe investigation of Wisconsin conservatives collapsed last week with a powerful decision from the Wisconsin Supreme Court that called state prosecutors’ theory of campaign-finance law “unconstitutional” and “unsupported in either reason or law.” But the legal exoneration shouldn’t pass without noting the hardship the secret probe imposed on its targets and on political debate in Wisconsin.
For the past few days, I’ve been talking to the targets of the task force of Milwaukee [County] Democratic prosecutors, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board and Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz. Their experiences, on the record here for the first time, reveal the nasty political sweep of an investigation that invaded privacy with surveillance of email accounts, raided homes with armed law enforcement, and swarmed individuals with subpoenas demanding tens of thousands of documents while insisting on secrecy.
One target did speak up in public in real time— Eric O’Keefe, who went on the record in limited ways with me not long after he was subpoenaed in October 2013 as part of the prosecutors’ investigation of conservative speech during the Wisconsin recall elections. The director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth knew that violating the gag order put him at personal risk, but he told me then that he had to fight because it was an assault on basic constitutional freedoms and “we have done nothing illegal.” A Journal editorial exposed the extent and dubious legal basis of the Doe investigation for the first time.
As the legal challenges went on in state and federal court, Mr. O’Keefe’s disclosures to us made him a bull’s-eye for prosecutors and local media. “I did not want to see the inside of a jail cell,” Mr. O’Keefe says, but “I didn’t want to shirk my duty to confront tyrannical behavior.”
In a Jan. 24, 2014, filing with John Doe Judge Gregory Peterson, Special Prosecutor Schmitz wrote that “the Wisconsin Club for Growth (hereafter WiCFG), acting through Eric O’Keefe, has demonstrated contempt for the John Doe process, secrecy order, and Wisconsin legal system.” The filing added that Mr. O’Keefe had “disclosed the existence of his subpoena and the fact that search warrants were executed,” and included footnotes to our editorials as evidence.
Now the 60-year-old Mr. O’Keefe is willing to provide more details about his decision. He says he talked it over with his children, and he and his wife, Leslie, discussed “how she should operate if I was arrested for contempt of court.” The maximum penalty in Wisconsin is a $10,000 fine and one year in jail. “She asked if she could bail me out of jail. My position was ‘no.’”
The prosecutors were especially interested in Mr. O’Keefe’s correspondence with R.J. Johnson and Deborah Jordahl, political consultants who had worked with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Mr. Johnson was on a plane when the raids happened, and his 16-year-old son woke up at home to find six law-enforcement agents with guns and a warrant. “He was told he couldn’t move, that he couldn’t call a lawyer, that he couldn’t call his parents. He was a minor and he was isolated by law enforcement,” Mr. Johnson says.
“My first reaction was incomprehension. We were baffled. We had no idea what this was about or that this is what they do over campaign finance issues. … It wasn’t until much later that we even began to understand that it was connected to the first Doe [investigation].”
Mr. Johnson now knows that prosecutors had been tracking him since 2011 during the first John Doe probe, which began as an investigation of money stolen from a veterans group when Mr. Walker was still the Milwaukee county executive. In 2011, Mr. Johnson was called in for an interview connected to the investigation, though he was officially not a target at the time.
John Doe Judge Neal Nettesheim compelled Mr. Johnson’s attorney to disclose what emails they had reviewed together and told him that attorney–client privilege didn’t apply. “When we sat down for our interview, I was told my attorney couldn’t speak, couldn’t object. I was asked how does my business operate, who are my contacts, how do I make money, what are my percentages, who are my clients? If I didn’t answer I would be in contempt.”
At the end of that conversation, Milwaukee [County] Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf asked a question, Mr. Johnson recalls: “‘Is there any reason at the end of the campaign you deleted all of your emails?’ So I knew then I had been tracked all the way through, that they had been reading my emails. … They knew what they were looking for all along, but I didn’t know anything again until they showed up at my door.”
Once news of the subpoenas was leaked to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a favorite venue for prosecutors, his business was in the cross hairs. While many of his longtime contacts were supportive, Mr. Johnson says, some business calls went unreturned, and he had to pass up an opportunity in another state because he could have been a liability for the clients. “Even if they hadn’t heard about the Doe” investigation, he says, “it would have been unethical for me to bring them in blind. So I had to turn down business on that account.”
His business partner, Deborah Jordahl, says that while her own home was being searched and her children were roused in the dark by law enforcement, prosecutors were searching her office without her knowledge. “Earlier this year I learned … David Budde, the lead investigator for Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, was searching our office in Madison. My partner and I were never notified of the search of our office,” Ms. Jordahl says, “and the prosecutors never provided us with a copy of the warrant or an inventory of what was taken.” (Mr. Budde did not respond to a request for comment.)
Meantime, she says, “my business partner and I had to figure out how to function without our equipment or records, and without the ability to disclose our situation to anyone. … You live under a cloud of suspicion.”
Ms. Jordahl says prosecutors have deliberately misled the media about their involvement with the raids and how the search warrants were executed while denying her the right to call her attorney. “[Milwaukee District Attorney John] Chisholm denied any direct involvement in the raids through his attorney but his investigators led the searches at each site,” Ms. Jordahl says, adding that Special Prosecutor Schmitz “lied when he said we were not told we could not call a lawyer.”
The subpoenas that hit Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce demanded so much information that the group hired a forensics team to copy it from computers. “They had absolutely unlimited resources,” says the group’s president, Kurt Bauer, of the prosecutors, “and I think part of the goal all along was to chill our fundraising and keep us off the airwaves. So the money and time we had to spend defending ourselves was money and time that we couldn’t spend toward issue advocacy.”
He adds: “I’ve been in or around politics for two decades and I would have thought this happens in other countries but not the U.S., and not in Wisconsin. In this country, we don’t leverage the justice system to punish our political opponents.”
In all, the prosecutors’ pursuit of their mistaken legal theory of campaign coordination included more than two dozen subpoenas. It also used subpoenas of Internet search providers and raids on the homes of Ms. Jordahl, Mr. Johnson, former Walker aide Kelly Rindfleisch and former Walker Chief of Staff Keith Gilkes, who now runs a super PAC supporting Mr. Walker’s presidential campaign.
‘They were spying on people who were making it tough for them to retain their hold on state government,” Mr. O’Keefe says. “People often ask, ‘What were they investigating?’ That’s the wrong question. It wasn’t the what, it was the who.”
And the “who” happened to be political allies of Scott Walker, who was a political opponent of Messrs. Chisholm and Landgraf. While this story has a happy ending, it still required years of legal expense to fight back and expose the prosecutorial abuses. The targets have been vindicated, but a reckoning for prosecutors and the abusive John Doe machinery is still in order.
Unfortunately, an example of collateral damage from Chisholm’s investigation has been silenced. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:
Former aldermanic candidate Michael Lutz died early Sunday morning of an apparent suicide, according to the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Lutz, 44, a former Milwaukee police officer, suffered an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound “while in the presence of Menomonee Falls tactical officers after a brief tactical situation,” the medical examiner’s office said in a release issued Sunday. …
Lutz finished fourth in Tuesday’s primary in the 11th Aldermanic District to fill the Common Council seat left vacant by the death of Joe Dudzik. He received 426 votes out of 4,155 ballots cast.
He retired from the Milwaukee Police Department after 17 years, initially receiving taxpayer-funded duty disability pay for post-traumatic stress disorder. His pay was later converted to a regular retirement.In 2005, Lutz was shot in the arm after he and his partner chased a suspected drug dealer into a house on the city’s near south side. He never returned to active duty.
Lutz later became a criminal defense attorney and was the anonymous source for a series of stories last year critical of Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm.
Lutz suggested that Chisholm, a Democrat, had a political agenda in overseeing a John Doe investigation of aides and associates of Republican Gov. Scott Walker during his time as Milwaukee County executive and in initiating a separate probe of Walker’s campaign.
Stuart Taylor wrote about Lutz:
Stuart Taylor follows up on his report of the real character of Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm:
After missing a scoop on Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm’s long-running investigation into Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker,Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writers, along with the district attorney’s staff, hunted down the key source who had asked for anonymity, fearing retaliation.
That story, produced by the American Media Institute and published by Legal Newsline last week, said that the district attorney’s wife was a teachers union shop steward, had taken part in demonstrations against the Republican governor’s proposal to curb public employee unions and was repeatedly moved to tears by governor’s legislative crusade.
Chisholm, a Democrat, said privately that it was his “personal duty to stop Walker,” the confidential source said.
AMI’s confidential source was a former prosecutor in Chisholm’s office who feared his reputation and his law practice would suffer if he were unmasked.
The district attorney’s staff launched a Nixon-style “mole hunt” to find the anonymous source, aJournal Sentinel columnist said, and was annoyed that the description of the confidential source wasn’t precise enough to identify him. The staff developed a list of roughly a dozen suspects, the columnist said. The Journal Sentinel never reported this secret search.
The feared retaliation was not long in coming. TheJournal Sentinel’s Dan Bice, whose “political watchdog” column is titled “No Quarter,” appeared after dark at the source’s home on Sept. 11. Bice’s persistent door-bell ringing and heavy knocks awakened and frightened the source’s sleeping 12-year-old daughter, he said. The noise was so loud that a neighbor came out to investigate the din, he said.
When the source, a decorated and disabled-in-the-line-of-duty police officer, Michael Lutz, came to the door, he opened it a crack to hear Bice demand to know if he was the person quoted in the story. He did not deny it and speaks exclusively on the record in this story for the first time. …
Most journalists’ first instinct is to protect the identity of whistleblowers against powerful people likely to retaliate against them. Not columnist Bice or the Journal Sentinel. They have devoted their energy to exposing Lutz’s identity, subjecting him to attacks, and seeking to discredit him.
I am certain no one in the Milwaukee County DA’s office, nor anyone at the Journal Sentinel, feels guilty about the death of Lutz, who was a Facebook Friend of mine. To feel guilt requires a conscience.
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Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld starts by saying …
Note: I consider Donald a pal. That’s why I’m critical of him. It’s because I like the guy. And if I didn’t, I wouldn’t bother. That’s how it works in the Gutfeld family: if we don’t like you, we don’t hammer you. But if we love you: we nag you like feral dogs.
Onto the list of things we’ve learned from DT:
1.) When you perceive criticism as disloyalty, you will never run out of enemies. But you will soon run low on honest friends, as you turn the faithful into scared minions.
2.) Donald is not to blame for Donald. The fault lies with the timidity of those who bowed to the first lesson: either you’re a butt kisser or a traitor. And if you succumbed to this bifurcating nonsense, you will unleash this weird illness on your friends too. Suddenly you will accuse your own likeminded pals of being “losers” for not agreeing with you on issues. It’s bad road to take, friends – so don’t. Calling people RINOS feels good the same way a sneeze does. It was sad to see apologists mocking Trump critics among their own political stripe, as if they were all out to get Trump. It’s like that show, Intervention: there are family members who want to help; and others who want to defend. Helping is better than defending, and often requires that you don’t defend, at all.
3.) To his credit, Mr. Trump destroyed the insecure, divisive name calling within the Republican party, by convoluting and confusing all sides on the political right. Now you see people who normally call you RINO or “squishy” on Twitter lining up behind the most famous RINO on the planet, Donald Trump. He’s been for a single payer health plan, higher taxes, gun control, among other fairly liberal planks. He likes the Clintons, a lot. It’s odd to see certain self-righteous flag-waving factions on the right, suddenly declare that it doesn’t matter if Donald dismisses a prisoner of war’s heroism. What does this tell you? That this inter-party game of “I’m a rightie, you’re a RINO” was never about issues. It was about competition, not collaboration. That kind of thing never wins elections. Maybe Donald got all of us to break this bad habit? (don’t count on it).
4.) Vindictiveness is no replacement for vision. Petulance isn’t presidential. Having said that, to say such behaviors are any worse than what we’ve seen in our career politicians would be false. Trump may be an asshole, but he might just be less of an asshole than all those other assholes. And I may be a bigger asshole (at least when I run out of rum).
5.) Criticism is the guard rail protecting you from going off the path. An expectation not to deviate from lockstep is the stuff of socialist dictators. Surround yourself with people who like you enough to tell you when you’re wrong, and you avoid petty feuds and cringe-worthy gaffes.
6.) Talking heads constantly categorizing Trumps blunders as “blunt honesty” should realize this only works once. After that, it’s on us zombies for egging him on. We are like the audience at a Comedy Central Roast, seeing how far Jeffrey Ross will go. We’re willing to forgive Trump things we wouldn’t forgive a liberal. What he said about McCain would bring out the torches from the right, if Obama had said it. (Or imagine this: On a fictitious episode of the Apprentice, a burned-scarred Marine is competing among of group that includes a young stock analyst. In the heat of a project, the analyst says to the Marine, “Just because you got burned up doesn’t make you a hero.” America would convulse, and Trump would frog march the asshole out of the building himself after the prerequisite, “You’re fired.”)
7.) George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Jonah Goldberg were fighting the good conservative fight, when Donald was donating to Hillary. Donald should realize many of his ideas had been articulated by those three pointy-heads years ago – so maybe call on them, instead of calling them out.
8.) You can’t have a world leader who lives by his own Google alerts. How does Trump get work done, when he’s reading columns that are two years old? Granted, he only sleeps a few hours a night – but it’s way beneath him to get pissed off over a blog on Salon. Hell, people at Salon don’t even read Salon. Putin doesn’t give a fuck, so neither should he, right?
9.) Trump reminds us of my simple maxim: you need a candidate who speaks for you, not the other way around. The right candidate must be persuasively correct and better than you at articulating your own desires. Trump could do that if he counted to ten before his next rhetorical cliff jump. A renegade will not be president, unless we try to tame it.
10.) Trump could have deflated the McCain mess in an instant, with three words, “it’s a joke.” When he went on to repeat the comment, you knew he was serious. That’s why it wasn’t funny. But if a comedian had said it during a roast of Senator McCain, even McCain would have laughed. “Good to see you Senator tonight. I know many people refer to you has a hero. But where I come from, heroes don’t get caught.” Imagine Jeffrey Ross saying that. It’s funny. And really, Trump is still, at heart, funny – like when he described Holy Communion as “a little cracker.” Like I said, on The 5, I’m glad he didn’t say that about McCain.
11.) Given Trump’s ambivalence about political parties, and his raw populist appeal and name recognition – he is the ideal third party candidate, attracting people to the polls to cast ballots out of anger – and ultimately ushering in an establishment candidate these rebel voters liked least. That’s another lesson: when you vote for a third party candidate, you only hurt the candidate you would have otherwise voted for – and greatly benefit the one you dislike most. Symbolic gestures are losing ones. That’s why they’re symbolic.
12.) The TV hacks who happily embraced this circus expose the crucial part of television. It’s entertainment. It’s not supposed to be boring. We use Trump to get the clicks, not the votes. The Donald is a lot like Celebrity Rehab – we watched it knowing the subject in question may get worse with more cameras – but it’s certainly fun to watch. Speaking of which, when this is all over, Donald will have one hell of a talk show on cable news in 2016. It’s what he’s destined for – a place where he can talk and we can listen.
About point 10: I doubt those members of sacramental churches that believe the “little cracker” is the body of Jesus Christ found that comment very funny. I know from my Facebook feed that veterans, particularly former prisoners of war, did not find Trump’s comment about John McCain very funny either, though delivered at a McCain roast it may have been funny. (Context is important, as you know.)
I do not understand why Trump’s current supporters in the Republican Party do not see how Trump is coming off in public. He is a walking, talking stereotype of the arrogant rich, and a perfect target for the “1%” complaints. So is Hillary Clinton, who has received financial and other support from Trump throughout her political career. The fact that he says things the GOP establishment seems too timid to say is countered by what he has said in the past (in favor of a lenient immigration policy, single-payer health care and other Democratic positions), which proves that Donald Trump is about Donald Trump, first, foremost, and to the exclusion of everything else.
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Today in 1958, a study by Esso (formerly one of the bazillion Standard Oil companies, now ExxonMobil) reported that drivers drove faster and therefore waste more gas when listening to rock music.
If a driver wastes (however you define that) gas, the oil companies sell more gasoline. It’s unclear to me why the oil companies would consider that to be a bad thing, particularly in the 1950s when cars got all of 12 or so mpg.
Today in 1968, Sly and the Family Stone failed to appear at a free concert in Chicago.
A riot ensued.
Today in 1977, John Lennon did not get instant karma, but he did get a green card to become a permanent resident, five years after the federal government (that is, Richard Nixon) sought to deport him. So can you imagine who played mind games on whom?
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Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones were to release “Beggar’s Banquet,” except that the record label decided that the original cover …
… was inappropriate, and substituted …
… angering one member of the band on his birthday.
The number one single …
… and album today in 1975:
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Today in 1964, the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” hit number one and stayed there for 14 weeks:
Today in 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival and played with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The controversy was that Dylan played electric, not acoustic, guitar.
Contrary to myth, Dylan didn’t leave after three songs because he was upset at the crowd’s reaction. Dylan left after three songs because those were the only songs the band knew. He did return to play two acoustic songs at the behest of Peter, Paul and Mary.
Today in 1969, Crosby, Stills and Nash performed at the Fillmore in San Francisco.
The band asked Neil Young to join them at the end of the concert, and liked the result so much they asked him to join the band.
Young joined, then quit, then rejoined, then quit. (I am told by someone more conversant than me with CSNY that Young didn’t like merely being a member of the group.)
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 