Friday, December 9, 2016

Thank you, Trump voters, for this wonderful joke

Washington Post  By Garrison Keillor 

It’s a wonderful satire right out of Twain or Thurber. A minority of the electorate goes for the loosest and least knowledgeable candidate, certain that he will lose and their votes will be only harmless protest, a middle finger to Washington, and then — whoa. The joke comes true. You put a whoopee cushion on your father’s chair and he sits down and it barks and he has a massive coronary. You wanted to get a rise out of him and instead he falls down dead. Very funny.

Thank you, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for this wonderful joke. Voters in high dudgeon against Wall Street manipulators and the Washington aristocracy vote for the billionaire populist who puts tycoons in power and the Republican hierarchy who owned the logjam that the voters voted against. If Billy the Kid had been smart, he’d’ve run for sheriff.

And now we sit and watch in disbelief as the victor drops one piece of china after another, spits in the soup, sticks his fist through a painting and gobbles up the chocolates. Not satisfied with the usual election night victory speech, he stages a post-election victory tour and gloatfest, a series of rallies in arenas where he can waggle his thumbs and smirk and holler and point out the journalists in their pen for the mob to boo and shake their fists at. He puts the Secret Service through their paces, highways are closed, planes diverted, cities disrupted, just so the man can say how much fun it was to defeat Hillary Clinton and confound the experts.

I stood in an airport last Thursday and watched live cable news coverage of his first stop in Indiana where he toured a factory whose owner had been promised a $7 million tax break in return for not laying off 800 workers. In November, 178,000 jobs were created and unemployment fell, and here was a platoon of journalists in Indiana trailing a big galoot with a red tie who offered a corporation $7 million not to lose 800 workers. No gain, simply a non-loss. It was a classic TV moment, extensive live coverage of essentially nothing whatsoever and we all stood in a stupor and watched, like people mesmerized by drops of rain sliding down a windowpane.

Eighty thousand Trump voters in three states gave us this man, which goes to show you how much damage a few people can do. It takes 12 million to provide health care, 3 million to run the public schools, but 19 men with box cutters can turn the country upside down and empower the paranoid right and create the pretense for wars that will cost billions and kill a million people and give us a permanent army of blue uniforms yelling at us to take off our shoes and put our laptops into plastic trays.

He is a showman, and oddity has paid off for him, as it did for Lady Gaga and Gorgeous George and Liberace. But the public demands new tricks. Today, railing at the journalists who slavishly cover him is, like bear-baiting or lion-taming, entertainment enough, but by next fall he will need to pull canaries out of his ears, and by 2018 he’ll be diving on horseback from a high tower into a pool of water while playing “Malagueña” on a trumpet. Meanwhile, the Democrats wander in the woods, walking into trees. A wealthy San Francisco liberal is reelected as minority leader in the House, having flung millions into the wind and gotten skunked in 2014 and drubbed this fall, and a lackluster black Muslim congressman from Minneapolis is a leading candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee, the person who will need to connect with disaffected workers in Youngstown and Pittsburgh. Why not a ballet dancer or a Buddhist monk?

Meanwhile, the emperor-elect parades in the nude while his congressional courtiers admire him and the nation drifts toward the rapids. The one bright spot is the old draft-dodger’s newfound fondness for generals, including the one who talked him out of the idea of torturing prisoners of war. Military experience does encourage a certain respect for reality. There is hope that if the showman should decide late one night to incinerate Iran or North Korea and get it over with, someone might say, “Hold on. Let’s think this through.”

37 comments :

  1. Ignorant whining is what this rubbish is. The writer blathered something about Trump "dropping the china". Well, the Clintons literally stole the darned (White House) china. He is assembling a team of adults. Children need not apply. Whenever I think of crooked Hillary never being President, I smile. Yes, she is more crooked than Trump no matter what you say. The moniker crooked Hillary fits her perfectly. I defer to you, Reb Doniel, in matters of Torah. With regard to the 2016 election, however, you supported the most corrupt major party candidate in the history of the United States. The election is over, and to quote the crooked one, "what difference at this point does it make"?

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  2. The left doesn't want to admit the people are sick and tired of clintonian and obaman politics.

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  3. I am so impressed with this deeply insightful, substantive and brilliant article. It's all honest substance, unlike Trump.
    Here is the best line:
    Eighty thousand Trump voters in three states gave us this man, which goes to show you how much damage a few people can do


    Oh, what an ignorant fool I was! I thought that over sixty million people voted for Trump. Thank you Rabbi Eidensohn for enlightening me that it was only eighty thousand people who gave us this man. Brilliant!

    Thank you for not attacking the integrity of the voting system. Only bad Trump does that. This article values the voting system.

    _____
    And as to the worst part of Trump: His tour to fight back against smart article like this one. Through this, he is destroying all of the sunken Titanic's China. Wow! Such deep insight. Amazing.

    What happens if Amazon is cut down to size through trade laws? Will Beezos be forced to sell off the Washington Post? Will these sort of brilliant articles stop?
    _____
    Conversely, the truth and history of Keith Ellison is not relevant. That should be ignored. If he rises to lead the dems, then he should be proudly quoted. He is not a dangerous kook.

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  4. The liberals will never be able to grasp that most people who voted for Trump actually believe (as I do) that he was the better candidate.Period. It seems to be giving them the coronary.

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  5. This post is digesting. My conclusion after the first paragraph. Where I stopped. And, no, it is not worth the electrons to comment further on it.

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  6. This guy is a sore loser. If voters chose Trump they wanted Trump.

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  7. There is no limit to sore losing.

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  8. Trump saved 800 jobs in Indiana. At an average of $25,000 a year, these workers generate a gross income of $20,000,000. Indiana's state tax rate is a flat 3.3% of a taxpayer's federal adjusted gross income. Thus, Indiana stands to gain $660,000 in tax income (plus sales taxes of the spent income). Giving the company a 7 Million dollar tax break was a win win for the State of Indiana, its workers and Donald Trump. Don't trust articles written by the Washington Post.

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  9. Politically IncorrectDecember 9, 2016 at 7:46 PM

    I think it is time to speak about the Clinton 'ma'alos'....

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  10. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=10336

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  11. The truth about idiot bigot Keillor

    http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/21/garrison-keillor-falls-flat/

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  12. I missed your point
    . Every time a company wants to get millions of dollars of tax breaks it simply threatens to move - right? Not everybody agrees it was a win-win situation and not everybody agrees with Trumps description of the number of jobs or the value of what he did- and it is not just the Washingoton Post that raised questions about this "win-win" perspective

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  13. there is no limit to legitimate criticism of the winner - even by the losers. You apparently think that since Trump won the election there can be no legitimate criticism?!

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  14. that wasn't the point. There is no justification for saying that Trump is beyond criticism just be cause he won the election.

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  15. Trump did not with the popular vote. He won the electoral college by winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pensylvania by close to 80,000 votes in total.

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  16. But Trump lied that he saved more than 1000 jobs and then attacked an employee (a private citizen) who called him out his sheker.

    http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/08/union-president-jones-challenges-trump-on-carrier.html

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  17. the "trivial" point Trump and his followers don't seem to understand is the nature of democracy. Democracy doesn't mean going to the polls and voting for a candidate and shutting up until the next election. It doesn't mean ignoring behaviors which inhibit democracy. It doesn't mean ignoring lies and severe distortions of the truth by the president or any other official. Saying that Trump won doesn't mean he gets carte blanche for four years

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  18. The conservatives will never be able to grasp that most people who voted against Trump believe (as I do) that he was the worse candidate. That's why they go on about "those lefty toady liberals" who love such a brutal monster like Hillary and hate a great fluffy teddy bear like Trump just for being anti-Gay and anti-abortion (which he isn't), and can't accept democracy (like the conservatives did (not) when Obama became president as well as throughout his terms).

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  19. New York has a policy of giving (or paying) any company that increases ny jobs or saves from out of state or moves to NY at a rate of $35,000 per employee. (Plus padding the number of employees.)

    Standard NYC / NYS policy.

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  20. Obama -- not exactly believes in democracy. I don't know if you know about this in England, but he had unprecedented "executive orders" to bypass congress, which refused to give him certain powers, so he arrogated these powers to himself, via executive orders.

    And trump wasn't the worst candidate, Hillary was. He's not great, but he will "make America great again."

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  21. don't know why you think you can only do one or the other. Is this a problem that you can't chew gum while walking or is it something deeper?

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  22. Yehoshua,
    1) Trump won the votes that counted. He won over 60 million votes. There is no proof that he would not have won the popular vote, had the rules been changed BEFORE the election. He would have campaigned differently. Many people in places like NY who did not vote because they see their vote as irrelevant, would have voted.

    2) For most of the campaign, regardless of how close the polls were, the libs claimed that Trump would lose in a landslide because of the popular vote.

    3) All this is irrelevant. Trump won fair and square.

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  23. Honesty, firstly, Yehoshua is a good man, but I am not he. Secondly, I agree with you that Trump won - I mean that is obvious. Fair and square? Well, that is debatable. All I meant in reference to the post, is that Trump won because he got MI, WI and PA. If he had lost these states (by a total of about 80. 000 votes ) Clinton would be President. i.e 80,000 votes made the difference in this election.

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  24. Not sure why you are responding to me, as I did not make the above comment.

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  25. Unless that is your attempt at humor, as if it were impossible for there to be more than one progressive reader of this blog. Ha ha.

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  26. If the rules allow "executive orders", then that seems to be democracy - just like having the un-elected Theresa May as PM is acceptable within the British democratic system. My argument was against the Trump supporters who claim "the liberals" won't accept democracy, because they protest Trump, yet constantly protested Obama (which of course they were in their rights to do).

    Who is a worse candidate is a matter of opinion. Rabbi Hirshman's criticism of "liberals" for having an opinion is unwarranted.

    As for the Democrat Party? Like Labour in the UK, the moderate Left can't tolerate genuine socialists and social responsibility. Even dirty tactics must be utilized to get a dynastic neo-liberal with shady financial connections into power instead of someone who will actually look to improve the lives of millions of Americans. And you know what? The voters agree - they would rather have the hard-Right and exclusionism in power ahead of the socialists or neo-liberals. That is why despite the widening financial gap in the UK and massively increasing poverty the great British public voted for Cameron and Brexit, and a non-neo-liberal led Labour party is slipping in the polls.

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  27. I have no problem believing that those who voted against Trump thought he was the worst candidate. Actually, there was no other rational reason to vote for Hillary. Unfortunately for them (and you), there were not enough such voters (dead or alive) to get the job done.

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  28. I agree. But please don't lump all non-Trump voters into the same "liberals" box. There were many different reasons to vote for one candidate or the other, or even for neither.

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  29. You didn't adopt this attitude for Obama or Hillary

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  30. as most people realize Trump is not playing by the "rules" and thus his twitter fits and other activities have a much greater harm than those of either Obama or Clinton

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  31. It's ridiculous to think that some random twitter noise should be more significant than Obama's program to deligitimize Israel.

    http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Checkmating-Obama-471059

    Twitter over weighs destruction of America's economy, health care system and military, support of Jihadists and the breakdown of law and order in America. That's a balanced point of view / not.

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  32. you really don't get it. Trump's obsession with twitter is of great concern. As Krauthammer pointed out recently his acting like an undersecretary of commerrce rather than a president. His focus of his tweets is very problematic as is his decision to use it on everyone who irritates hims

    so a president who acts in a very unbalanced (unhinged )manner needs to be given feedback from as many people as possible

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  33. rabbi avigdor miller [who was recently quoted here]
    would consider the w.post a fitlhy rag...
    & thats just for starters

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  34. and of course you have a source or are you just making it up? BTW what do you think he would say about Trump? I am sure he would have a choice quote which would express his admiration for Trump's moral values, his respect for those who are different and are critical of his rather elastic concept of truth?

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