Trump's Supporters, Leviticus 19:16, Money Talks, Columns by Friedman and Krugman plus a New Chrissy Frost Story

Trump's Supporters

These are going to be harsh words about the Presidential campaign.  It is not about the candidates.  Rather, it is about their supporters.  "Dangerous" Donald Trump is what he is, an insensitive braggart, constantly changing his barely thought-out positions, and most of all totally unprepared by education and experience to fill the office he aspires to, and which he is unfit to hold. 

   

But Trump is not the problem.  It is the vast majority of his supporters who are.  By and large, they are naive and gullible, ready to swallow the half truths about his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama, which Trump is constantly mouthing.

It is very hard to confront these folks and tell them that they are naive and gullible.   But in 2016, that is the case.  It even extends to  smart people like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who does not support Donald Trump but who says he will vote  for him.   

                            

Why does a man like Ryan fall for Trump's pitch?  His naivete stems from the fact that he is willing to vote for, but not support, someone he recognizes to be a totally unqualified candidate, risking the survival of the nation, just because he values maintaining a Republican-controlled Congress as more important!  Ryan fails to see the consequences of his position.

When I hear that someone who doesn’t support Donald Trump but is going to vote for him anyway because they don’t want a Democratic in the White House making Supreme Court appointments, or simply feel that “anybody but Hillary” is a sufficient reason, I am amazed.  They remind me of those Germans who failed to see the danger in Hitler’s rise to power in 1932, when the choices were limited to Hitler's party, the Communists or continued governmental disintegration, the other alternatives at the time.  Once in office, he will “soften,” they believed.  But he meant what he was saying.  They, like many today, were naive and gullible.  When they finally woke up, it was too late.

I never had to deal with a problem like this with supporters of prior Republican Presidential candidates like Ronald Reagan, both Bushes,  Bob Dole, John McCain or Mitt Romney.  While I might have disagreed with the views of their supporters, I never considered them as being gullible, naive or having a screw loose somewhere upstairs.  But that is the case in 2016 with my friends and neighbors who support Donald Trump.  And when I see the crowds at his rallies cheering him on, listening to his simplistic solutions to problems he does not seem to even understand, I recognize that they are empathizing with him because they also have no real understanding of them either.  And what he says does not matter to them, regardless of how frequently it changes.  

Trump supporters, correctly or not, feel that for years they have been shortchanged by our economic, social and political systems and that from what he says, to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton, they believe that “he feels their pain.”  Their support of him is no deeper than that. And believe me, he does not "feel their pain."  As much as one may love the cheerleader with the megaphone and pompoms, would you want her 

     

playing quarterback on your team? Only if you have a screw loose somewhere.  Watch the crowd at the next Trump rally you see on TV.  Listen for the rattling of the loose screws.

Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings (her email servers, her relationship with the Clinton Foundation and even her behavior at the time of the Benghazi tragedy) are far more smoke than fire, and on close examination, are far outweighed by Trump’s total lack of qualifications for the Presidency. Her supporters recognize this.  Trump supporters, immersed in naivete and gullibility fail to see this, overwhelmed by their candidate's slogans and innuendo based on unproven charges.  Hear them chant at rallies "Lock Her Up, Lock Her Up." What planet are they from?  What kind of country do they think they live in?

In regard to what unproven innuendo can accomplish, check out Paul Krugman's latest New York Times column.  Just click right here.    Krugman points out how unproven and false charges were among the factors resulting in Al Gore's defeat in 2000.   But such innuendo is what Trump's supporters feed upon, and Trump's campaign has nothing much else to dish out to them.  

Read some of the conservative, usually Republican, right wing columnists in the newspaper of your choice.  They have some good ideas.  But I question whether the typical Trump supporter can understand the ideas about which they are writing.  I wonder how many Trump supporters actually read newspapers. Trump himself gets most of his news from television and reportedly has a short attention span.  It takes a fair attention span to understand what George Will, Kathleen Parker, Mona Charen, Ross Douthat or even Charles Krauthammer are writing about.  Frankly, the Trump supporters I know just don’t have that.  They prefer TV lectures by Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh’s radio diatribes or heavily advertised superficial and shallow books dedicated to exposing the shortcomings of the Clintons and President Obama..  Their gullibility prevents them from absorbing anything any deeper.

Lest we forget, to lock in these supporters Trump has signed on a new campaign guru, Stephen Bannon.  It is said that he is a bigot (his ex-wife, in their 2007 divorce proceedings, contended he did not want their children going to a private school with Jews), but it is pretty clear that America's "bigot" voters already are in Trump's camp, so why bother hiring him, one might ask.  But Stephen Bannon's experience at Breitbart News indicates that he is an expert at handling the innuendo referred to in Paul Krugman's article cited above, and besides locking in the "bigot" vote, he knows how to appeal to Trump's naive and gullible supporters.  That's why he is, and makes Donald Trump, very dangerous! 
Jack Lippman  

The Bible Says So!

Although different versions of the Bible give slightly different wordings to Leviticus 19:16 of the Hebrew Scriptures (referred to by Christians as the Old Testament), part of that verse tells us not to stand idly by while a neighbor bleeds.  

                                   

In this world where suicide bombings occur daily and a significant portion of the population of the Middle East and Africa does not know where to turn, that injunction should not be ignored.  Certainly, we do not have the power to cure all of the evils in our world, but when questions arise as to helping or even admitting refugees from such terror to our country, it is wrong to oppose them.  It was wrong when Germany was persecuting Jews in the 1930's and 1940's and it is wrong today.  We cannot stand by idly while neighbors bleed.  The Bible says so.
JL

                                       

Mostly How Money Talks

Oh, there have been investigations and hearings about Benghazi, and nothing 

much new has come out of them.   Hillary Clinton’s emails have been investigated too and the FBI, other than saying she was extremely careless in what she did, said that no prosecutor would ever charge her with anything based on what they found.  And as for the Clinton Foundation, which pays for a lot of good things done by other organizations world-wide, its connection to former President Bill Clinton, and to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, cannot be shown to have led to any government actions which otherwise would or would not have been taken.  Clinton’s opponents see a lot of smoke but find no fire and certainly, nothing to justify the ridiculous cries of "Lock Her Up!" heard at Trump rallies.  Most of these screamers are not even aware that the Clinton Foundation receives higher ratings that even the American Red Cross from independent rating organizations such as Charity Navigator and Charity Watch!

Money talks.  If you gave a wheelbarrow full of money to a political candidate, would you expect to get at least a Christmas card from him or her?  And if you had some political views of your own, and that wheelbarrow had been big enough, would you expect them, or someone on their staff, to return your call and at least listen to what you had to say?  Sure, or next time, there might not be a wheelbarrow around.  But that doesn’t mean they will pay any heed to what you have to say!

And if you gave a couple of truckloads of cash to a charity which carried the family name of people who were or had been in high political office, wouldn’t you expect the same kind of treatment?  But note, getting a phone call returned doesn’t mean you have the power to influence political decisions. 

The Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision said that corporations and organizations have the same First Amendment free speech rights as individuals.  Of course, without money, corporations and organizations wouldn’t exist, so the Court in effect said that “money talks” and that it is unconstitutional to try to stop it from doing so.

Many of those who make the kind of donations discussed above expect something in return.  Whether or not they get it, however, is another matter entirely!  If they do, it very well might be a crime … and this is the chimera (go look that one up) for which Clinton’s opponents keep looking.

The sage Maimonides  once described three levels of charitable giving.  One is where a donor gives something, knowing where it is going, and not hiding the fact that they made the donation.  The second is where the giver makes such a donation anonymously.  The third and highest level is where the donor not only remains anonymous but has no idea where their money is going, except that they have been assured that it is a good and noble cause.  

The Clinton Family should accept the fact that from now on, donations to their Foundation should be made at that third level, or on a basis which would amount to its accounting and legal equivalent, so that other than for the bookkeepers and the tax people, the identity of donors would not be known, even to those who had established and ran the charity.  

Someday, political donations of all kinds will be banned and the Government will pay for all election advertising and activities.  Then, nobody will ever be in the position of being asked for a favor because of money having changed hands.

JL

                         (This is a clue!)

Division Among Us

At the end of August, Thomas Friedman wrote a fascinating New York Times column which rang a bell with me.  In the previous posting on this blog, I had talked about a video I viewed on line in which Canadian arch-conservative media person Ezra Levant urged American Jews to vote for Donald Trump.  I had asked Levant, via email, whether he believed that voters should vote for what they perceive as being good for their personal religious beliefs rather than what is good for their country, and pointed out to him that the United States is not the Islamic Middle East. 

  

Friedman’s column deals with the dichotomy developing in the United States between the left and the right where an unwillingness to compromise is comparable to the unwillingness of Shia and Sunni to work with one another in the Middle East, the same point I made in my email to Levant.  Please read Friedman’s column.  Click here to do so!  Could it be that in one respect, maybe we are getting to be more like the Islamic Middle East?
JL

                                                       

The Tin Bell -  Another Chrissy Frost Story

Jack Lippman

The assignment given to my "Writng Group" last month was to prepare a story based on "narrow escapes."

Narrow escapes were common in Chrissy Frost’s family.  Many, many years ago in seventeenth century England, a distant ancestor of Chrissy’s, Rufus, an itinerant troubadour, was kicked in the head by a horse.  He lay unconscious for days with a barely detectable heartbeat and breathing too weakly to fog a mirror held up to his nostrils.  Finally, after several weeks of being comatose, the local bailiff declared him to be dead.  The family scraped up enough for a simple wooden casket into which they shoved his body and dumped it into a hole six foot deep.  As the laborers shoved dirt on top of the casket, the sound of a bell tinkling was heard.  In those days, putting a small tin bell into caskets was standard procedure.  Historians have estimated that about a third of those declared to be deceased in those days were really not, so this was an excellent practice.  And for Rufus, it certainly was. Hearing the bell, they quickly lifted the casket out of the hole and pried it open.  There was Rufus, reclining with his arms at his side, smiling, and asking what the hell was going on.  That was indeed a narrow escape, all the more fortunate because embalming was not a common practice in those days either.  Rufus went on to be appointed as troubadour to the King’s Court, an honor comparable nowadays to winning an Emmy, where he served until 1655 when Oliver Cromwell had him beheaded.

More recently, Chrissy’s grandfather, an unemployed London clarinetist, was told there was an opening in a cruise ship’s orchestra.  He went for an audition and did just fine, except for the fact that the bandleader was an anti-Semite.  The family had not yet changed its name to Frost and the bandleader just didn’t want Chaim Finkelstein as part of his orchestra.  Chaim became so enraged when some musician friends told him why he hadn’t gotten the job that he ran right down to the docks fully intending to punch the bandleader in the nose.  Unfortunately, when he got there, he found that the Titanic had already sailed.  Whew, that was a close one, he thought when he read the papers a week later.

Well, Chrissy’s family moved to the United States, but the narrow escapes continued.  Her father had put most of his savings, as well as those of his elderly parents and his uncles and aunts, who trusted him, into the stock market which was producing tremendous returns at the time.  He even had put all of the funds of the synagogue of which he was the treasurer into his personal market account too, an act which was highly irregular if not illegal.  One day, finishing lunch in a Chinese restaurant, he cracked open the fortune cookie the waiter had left on the table with the check.  On one side it read “You are a wise man.”  On the other it said “Learn Chinese:  Word for today is ‘Mai’ which means ‘sell.’”  So he took a cab to his stockbroker’s office and told him to sell everything.  He did and the next day, October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, big time!  Another narrow escape for a Frost family member.

If you sit down with Chrissy, she will tell you about her audition for the lead in a Broadway show that never took place back in 2001 when she mistakenly marked it for the wrong day in her appointment book.  She was supposed to meet the producers at 9:00 a.m. in their offices on the 88^th floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, not September 12, as her appointment book incorrectly read.  Another narrow escape.

Right before Chrissy came to South Florida to cap off her career by becoming the Queen of the Condo Circuit, she was booked to perform at several major venues in the Far East, which was hungry for American talent, regardless of how stale it might be, and by 2014, Chrissy was already pretty stale!  After being booed off the stage in Melbourne, she managed to put on a pretty good show for a non-English speaking audience at a hotel in Bali in Indonesia, but their failure to applaud convinced her to cancel her date in Beijing.  Anyway, she would have had to fly to Kuala Lumpar in Malaysia to connect with a flight to the Chinese capital, and that just looked like too much of a hassle for her, particularly since she was still using a walker.  So she flew back to the United States, cancelling her tickets to Beijing on Maylasian Air 307, which they are still looking for somewhere on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. 

                                             

In Chrissy’s pocketbook, you will find a small tin bell.  She doesn’t know why she always carries it, but her father gave it to her and told her never to go anywhere without it.  His father, who had gotten it from his father, had given it to him with instructions that it be passed on from generation to generation.  She had once shown it to someone in an antique shop who told her it looked about three or four hundred years old, and probably was of British origin.

                                             

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