A Maureen Dowd Column, A Compaint to Google and to Apple and Our Corrupted Attorney General's Latest

 

Here’s a recent column by Maureen Dowd which Trump haters will enjoy, even though it won’t convince any of his supporters to desert him.   I note she mentions “Stella Dallas.”  Gawd, I remember listening to that radio soap opera when I came home from elementary school for lunch or late in the afternoon years and years and years ago.

 JL

 ALL THE PRESIDENT’S INSECURITIES

 

Maureen Dowd - As printed in the New York Times

WASHINGTON — During his 2016 bid, Donald Trump would sometimes pause from bashing elites and the media to speak with awe about a phone call he had with a Very Important Journalist.  Trump puffed up with pride as he told the story to bemused rallygoers, who only moments before had been jeering at the press.  It was, to say the least, a mixed message from the phony populist.  During an interview in June 2016 at Trump Tower, Trump bragged to me about the call with the journalist, who turned out to be Tom Friedman. Lately, Trump has been boasting about Tom’s praise for the White House’s Israel-United Arab Emirates peace plan.  

Like Stella Dallas standing in the rain outside the gates of the mansion where her daughter is getting married, Trump has always had his nose pressed up against the window of the elites.  “For a man who has risen to the highest office on the planet, President Trump radiates insecurity,” former Ambassador Kim Darroch wrote to his colleagues in London, in a leaked cable.  Steve Bannon once told me that Trump was much more concerned about CNN’s coverage than Fox’s. Trump was not seeking affirmation from the nighttime slate of Fox knuckleheads; they were in the bag. Unserious though he may be, Trump covets praise from serious people. And serious Sean Hannity is not.

Fresh off his win in 2016, he was eager to come talk to The New York Times. I’ve never seen Trump happier than in that hour with the “failing” New York Times. (He even got to upbraid me in front of my boss.) As we wrapped up, he told the assembled editors, reporters and Times brass: “It’s a great honor. I will say, The Times is, it’s a great, great American jewel. A world jewel. And I hope we can all get along.” 

That same eager tone was echoed in the audio of Bob Woodward’s tapes with Trump, as the president warmly spoke the name “Bob” again and again, yearning for acceptance from the very establishment that he had denounced to win the Oval Office.  Even though Woodward keeps writing books about Trump with titles that sound like Hitchcock horror flicks — first “Fear” and now “Rage” — Trump somehow thought he could win over the pillar of the Washington establishment. 

“I brought something that I’ve never shown to anybody,” the president told the writer in December 2019. “I’m going to show it to you. I’ll get you something that’s sort of cool.”  He had an aide bring photos of him with Kim Jong Un, including some capturing the moment when the two leaders stepped over the line between North and South Korea.  “Pretty cool,” Trump gushed. “You know? Pretty cool. Right?” He added, “I mean, they’re cool pictures when you — you know, when you talk about iconic pictures, how about that?”

 In a later interview, he gave Woodward a poster-size picture of himself and Kim, saying: “I don’t even know why I’m giving it to you. That’s my only one.” He trumpeted about Kim: “He never smiled before. I’m the only one he smiles with.” 

Trump also bragged to the man who helped break the Watergate story, which sparked an impeachment inquiry, that he handled impeachment with more aplomb than his predecessors.  “Nixon was in a corner with his thumb in his mouth,” Trump said. “Bill Clinton took it very, very hard.  I don’t.”

 Woodward once told me that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves.  But at least with Nixon, Woodward had to follow the money to expose the venality. With Trump, he simply had to turn on a recorder.

Trump is his own whistleblower.  As the Times' Nick Confessore put it on MSNBC: “Trump is the first candidate for president to launch an October surprise against himself. It’s as if Nixon sent the Nixon tapes to Woodward in an envelope by FedEx.”

Trump fiends for legitimacy even as he undercuts any chance of being seen as legitimate. He is fact-based and cogent on the Woodward tape talking in early February about how the coronavirus is airborne and deadly and dangerous for young people. But he vitiated that by publicly downplaying the vital information for his own political advantage.

 For more than a week, instead of focusing on his peace deals and his nomination for the “Noble Prize,” as a Trump campaign ad spelled it, everyone has been focused on a story that contends he called Americans who died in war “suckers” and “losers.”

Trump desperately wants approval even as he seems relentlessly driven to prove he’s not worthy of it.  He may be ludicrously un-self-aware, but even he sensed that his tango with Woodward would end badly. It was fun for a while, bro-ing out in the Oval with his fellow septuagenarian big shot, batting around the finer points of white privilege. But it could not last.

 “You’re probably going to screw me,” the president told the writer. “You know, because that’s the way it goes.”  Even so, the unreflective Narcissus will never drag himself away from his reflecting pool.  You know, because that’s the way it goes.

c. 2020 The New York Times Company

 

 

Listen Here, Google and Apple

The folks at Google who manage Blogspot through which this blog is published apparently believe that all change is good.  Well, it isn’t.  Doing things differently for the sake of what is improvement in some people’s mind does not necessarily make them better.  Recently Google changed some of its formatting in recording the statistics regarding how often blogs were accessed, and by whom in terms of country and internet server.  When they instituted the changes and asked for opinions, I gave them mine and they were not favorable.  Unfortunately, among other shortcomings, I can no longer determine how many “hits” the blog is getting from places like Russia and other refinements the old system provided. 

In a related area, recently, my mobile phone started misbehaving doing stuff on its own it had never done before.  After five years, it was wearing out so I replaced my IPhone7 with an IPhone11.  Apparently, Apple’s engineers operate like those at Google.  They think any change must be for the better.  T’ain’t so, McGee!  (Can you identify the source of that remark? I am sure those engineers I mentioned are too young to recall that.)  To clear the screen on the new model, all one has to do is swipe upwards, instead of pushing a button at the bottom which the old model had.  It’s different,  but is it better?  I bet that some future model (IPhone 15 or 16?) will replace the upward swipe with something revolutionary, like a button to tap.  And in signing on, a fingerprint has been replaced by facial recognition (which doesn't work when I wear a face mask or use my phone in the middle of the night from my bed.)   But in five or six years, some genius will come up with the idea of using fingerprints instead of facial recognition.  

 

 

 Our Attorney-General - An American Disgrace

The New York Time’s recently reported some frightening news from our frightening Attorney General, the first few paragraphs of which are is reported below:

Barr told prosecutors to consider sedition charges for protesters

By Katie Benner

The New York Times

 

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition, according to two people familiar with the call.

 

The highly unusual suggestion to charge people with insurrection against lawful authority alarmed some on the call, which included U.S. attorneys around the country, said the people, who spoke on the condition they not be named describing Barr’s comments because they feared retribution.

The most extreme form of the federal sedition law, which is rarely invoked, criminalizes conspiracies to overthrow the government of the United States — an extraordinary situation that does not seem to fit the circumstances of the unrest in places like Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere in response to police killings of Black men.

 

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment

 

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A friend recently moved, always a taxing experience.  Exhausted by it, she commented regarding her move, “This is it.  Never again.”  In view of items like that published above, and the possibility of Trump’s re-election in November, or a violent reaction to the election’s results, I implied to her that another move might be needed in the future, once another country in which to live in were determined.  This is the way bad things started in the first half of the Twentieth century.

JL