Saintperle

10/21/17

Trump's amazing power and ability


    Meaning Trump's power and ability to diminish anyone who comes into his sphere --
to totally compromise and destroy the integrity, intelligence, credibility, reputation and standards of anyone who is willing to work with him.
    Case in point -- General Kelley, a man I've admired for many years, whose defense of his boss (a good thing to do -- that or resign) went so far into the surreal and hypocritical, it took less than 60 seconds for me to lose all respect for him.
    He attacked a congresswoman for having interjected her person experience in having helped name the building being dedicated, name it for FBI personnel who had died on the job. And can almost see one of the little demons in Trump's retinue giving him the information to repeat -- information totally wrong in one of Trump's patented garbling of reality.
    I had to wonder how it is possible Kelley hasn't noticed that his boss does that exact thing -- makes everything be about him, invariably and continually, on every topic that comes up, asserting his own wonderfulness and denigrating anyone people might like, usually his bete noir: Barack Obama.
   It left me trying to decide if Kelley had become a liar or just senile, mind broken under the strain of the conflict between his commitment to the ideals of America fighting it out with his ability to tolerate close personal contact with an insane criminal whose neediness demands and incites the corruption of all those ideals.
    And this time, specifically, the fooferaw going on is, as always, the direct result of hearing a question and immediately making it be something else, but always something else about him.
    When Trump was asked why he'd made no public comment on the death of 4 special forces warriors in Niger, he immediately answered as if it were about his failure to make a Commander-in-Chief phone call to the next of kin of one of the fallen -- a tradition highly regarded but rarely kept as such, usually replaced with a letter expressing compassion and/or a Presidential-hosted event for several survivors' families.
    But the question was only asking why there had been no comment on the disturbing death of 4 Special Ops warriors in a country where we actually had -- to the surprise of most journalists -- a military presence. An answer a sane man might give is "We don't have enough information yet to make that statement."

   But to Trump, it was a personal assault on him for failing to do that, and he spewed out a pugnacious stream of incoherent bullshit -- including a series of alternative facts about himself and what he did and didn't do, and then about how he's a good boy who pays personal attention to all the next of kin of those who die under his command, unlike Obama, that nasty blackamoor, and also George W Bush, so they're the bad ones not him.    
   Of course Sarah Huckster Sanders also sent out of stream of alternative bullshit, but no loss of respect there, since I always thought ill of her from her first appearance at that podium in rude terms I'm embarrassed to have --  but to me, my own biases made me see her as a "mean girl" and the model for the unpleasant stereotype called "trailer trash" whose total  job qualification was being the daughter of a right wing preacher, a Ted Nugent wannabe who worshiped Donald Trump.
    I'm ashamed of that because while I can see there's something seriously wrong with her,
I can't come up with anything better than tired old sexist and elitist terms.
   
It comes to mind now that she's wearing a lot of eye shadow, so maybe it's nothing more than the preacher's plain daughter, bullied in school and controlled at home, finally being the one on the stage, dancing clumsily for the world to see and with a handy story to account for disrespect, real or imagined.
    Anyway, Kelley and Sanders and Trump himself, make me keep thinking of the old cliche, painfully apt as it is these Trumpian days ---
            "When you point your finger at someone else, 

             there are three fingers pointing back at you."

   
I admit I share many of the shortcomings and blindnesses that I see in them, but I can take some pride in trying to wake up and get past them, and more importantly, knowing I am too flawed to ever take a position of authority, in which my failures will hurt others. 
   I already have let down and disappointed more people than I care to remember.

"The biggest business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television.

It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety ...
Logically extended, this process can only terminate in a mass nervous breakdown
or in a collective condition of resentment..."
Eric Severeid (Quoted in Organ Magazine, 1971)


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