Monthly Archives: May 2017

national news

Does the POTUS know anything … about anything?

If you strip away Donald John Trump’s obvious knowledge of cultivating a massive business empire, you might be left to wonder as I am wondering: Does the president know a single thing about the history of the nation he now governs?

He was interviewed by SiriusXMPolitics and said this about the Civil War, according to the New York Daily News:

“Had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” Trump told SiriusXMPolitics about the seventh President, who left office 24 years before, and died 16 years before, the onset of the American Civil War.

“He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War,” Trump said.

“He said, there’s no reason for this. People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question,” Trump continued. “But why was there the Civil War. Why would that one not have been worked out?”

Let’s set aside, first of all, the mangled syntax that poured out of Trump’s mouth. I’ll merely not that this man cannot speak in coherent, complete sentences. For example: “He said, there’s no reason for this. People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question,” Trump continued. “But why was there the Civil War. Why would that one not have been worked out?”

Then he utters absolute nonsense about one of the nation’s more colorful and well-known presidents.

Could Old Hickory have prevented the Civil War? Well, maybe … if he had lived long enough to renounce slavery and free the human beings he held in bondage.

This is what we have now: a know-nothing president.

Or is this what his supporters mean when they say the president “tells it like it is”?

International news, national news, political news

Border security, yes; the wall, no!

Well now, that wasn’t so hard, was it Congress?

Federal lawmakers have approved a stop-gap budget bill that keeps the government operating through September. They have avoided a federal government shutdown that some in Congress — and the White House — had feared might occur at the end of this week.

Here’s the thing, too: The budget contains zero money for a “big, beautiful” wall along our nation’s southern border, which Donald Trump had insisted be included … that is, until he backed down and withdrew his demand.

The bill allocates $1.5 billion for enhanced border security. Hey, that’s not a bad load of dough to protect our borders against illegal immigrants and assorted criminals and, yes, potential terrorists. More Border Patrol agents and better surveillance equipment can go a long way toward making us more secure along both of our lengthy land borders.

It also sets aside $15 billion in defense spending to fight terrorism, with $2.5 million of it contingent on the president developing a strategy to fight the Islamic State. I like that idea, too.

Let’s get busy with longer term deal

Congress isn’t done. Not by a long shot. How about lawmakers hunkering down immediately to start working on a longer-term arrangement that keeps the government functioning well past the next deadline?

Believe it or not, September will be upon us before any of us knows it. Congress, though, likely will spend the bulk of the summer spread out on recess. Members will go home, or perhaps travel on those infamous “fact-finding” junkets to exotic locations in the South Pacific, South America or the south of France.

But I’m heartened to know that the wall gets no taxpayer money, given that the president’s efforts to get Mexico to pay for it have fallen flat.

International news

Kim Jong Un is a ‘smart cookie’?

Donald J. Trump is locked in a battle of wits with a young dictator who is threatening to launch a nuclear attack against the United States of America.

So, how does the president refer to Kim Jong Un? He calls him a “smart cookie.”

That is such an interesting term to ascribe to someone who starves his people while spending a grotesquely inordinate amount of money building up North Korea’s conventional weapons arsenal and also while seeking to become a nuclear power.

Trump said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “And at a very young age, he was able to assume power. A lot of people, I’m sure, tried to take that power away, whether it was his uncle or anybody else.”

He added: “And he was able to do it. So obviously, he’s a pretty smart cookie.”

Smart cookie. That’s a term one might use to describe, oh, a nephew or niece who’s just been named to a high school honor roll, or perhaps to a small business owner whose company survived a serious economic downturn.

The term “smart cookie” isn’t something most of us would attach to a murderous dictator.

I kind of prefer the president use terms that are a good bit more descriptive, such as, say, “cunning killer,” or “ham-handed tyrant,” or perhaps “ruthless bastard.”