Tag Archives: Twitter

media news, national news

Donald Trump: master of the obvious

I probably shouldn’t concern myself with yet another presidential Twitter tirade from Donald John Trump Sr.

But … here goes anyway.

The president of the United States just had to tell North Korean dictator/goofball Kim Jong Un that the United States has a bigger bomb than the North Koreans have and that his “button works.”

Why in the world does the commander in chief of the world’s greatest military machine have to goad, chide, needle someone who just might do something terribly and tragically foolish? That would be to start a nuclear exchange with the U.S. of A.

The world has known for a long time that Kim was battling to become the world’s nuttiest head of state. I am having trouble grasping that the Donald Trump is now rivaling the North Korean nut job for that dubious distinction.

However, he is doing the seemingly impossible.

Social media, of course, went crazy overnight regarding the president’s goofy tweet. Imagine my non-surprise at that!

I suppose it’s fair to remind everyone who reads this blog that Donald Trump said he’d likely set his Twitter habit aside once he became president.

To think that many of us actually had hope he would deliver on that pledge. Silly us.

So “unpresidented.”

national news

Hoping for best … expecting a whole lot less

I won’t say I’m expecting the worst in 2018, because the worst — as I perceive it — is too hideous to ponder.

But the presidency of Donald J. Trump didn’t get off to an auspicious start at the beginning of 2017, no matter what he has said to the contrary.

  • Trump promised to build a “big beautiful wall” across our southern border. He hasn’t — thank goodness!
  • The president vowed to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Not done. Thanks for that, too.
  • Trump vowed to unify the nation after winning what he called a “historic” victory in 2016. Do you feel unified? Aw, me neither.
  • The president has turned the Republican Party from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Trump. How does that sound?
  • The president vowed to “make America great again.” He hasn’t.

He will continue to use his Twitter account as an instrument for insults. He is going to bluster and prod North Korea’s nutty dictator, which likely could produce a bloody armed conflict with a nuclear-armed nation.

And throughout all of this the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department to examine allegations of collusion with Russian government agents will continue. The counsel, Robert Mueller, is working to piece together a many-faceted jigsaw puzzle to determine whether the Trump presidential campaign worked in cahoots with Russians to influence the 2016 election. Trump keeps saying there’s nothing to it, yet he continues to impugn the integrity of Mueller and his team.

The year that’s about to pass has produced a maddening, mind-blowing and stunning array of missteps, mistakes and misdeeds. Many of the president’s top advisers have left, willingly or otherwise.

The 2016 election installed a man in the White House with no prior government experience at any level. His ignorance of government certainly has shown itself. He hasn’t yet filled many top executive branch offices. Federal judgeships have gone unfilled. The government has run in a sort of stop-and-go fashion.

Yet, the president touts the “fine-tuned machine” he has assembled. Really?

All this happened in just a little less than a year. That year is soon to be history.

I truly want the best for the country. To be candid, I don’t care about Trump’s personal success, as I fear that what the president considers an achievement will be bad for the rest of us.

Moreover, I also want the new year to bring some semblance of optimism. I fear that we’re going to be sorely disappointed.

media news, national news

POTUS is a ‘wannabe autocrat’?

Walter Shaub isn’t going quietly into the night now that he has left an important public service job.

Oh, no. The former head of the Office of Government Ethics has kept his voice and is using it to criticize the man who made his job impossible to navigate.

Donald J. Trump posted a tweet showing “CNN”s blood on the sole of his shoe,” according to Shaub.

Shaub then fired off a tweet in which he called the president a “wannabe autocrat” who sends out “colicky tweets (that) reveal he is hurting this weekend. They make him (and our country) look weak.”

Trump keeps tweeting his message

The president has made clear his intention to use this social media device as his preferred method of communication. He tweets incessantly, spouting public policy pronouncements alongside petulant insults and even the occasional disrespectful utterance about this or that cherished institution or individual.

He won’t stop using this method. I am accepting this now as Trump’s modus operandi. 

However, he exposes himself to critics — such as government ethicists such as Shaub — to call it how they see it.

I happen to agree with the ex-government ethics watchdog.

Trump is weakening the presidency — and the country — with these idiotic Twitter tirades. This isn’t how you “make America great again,” Mr. President.

national news, political news

Trump continues to demonstrate unfitness for his office

Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!

What you see here is another demonstration from the president of the United States of his utter tone deafness.

It is a tweet from Donald John Trump Sr.

It also shows many millions of Americans — including yours truly — how totally unfit he is for the office he occupies.

He says Sen. Gillibrand “would do anything for them,” implying that she would do something of a sexual nature to obtain a campaign contribution from Trump.

This man has shown at every level imaginable an absolute lack of decency. An editorial in USA Today provides a profound and stark commentary on the president’s shameful demeanor. What I find remarkable about this editorial is that comes from a publication that does not possess a fiery, partisan editorial policy.

USA Today calls Trump “uniquely awful” and declares that he is not fit to “clean the toilets at Barack Obama’s presidential library or shine George W. Bush’s shoes.”

As the paper notes: “Not to mention calling white supremacists ‘very fine people,’ pardoning a lawless sheriff, firing a respected FBI director, and pushing the Justice Department to investigate his political foes.

Read the editorial here.

Yet, despite this serial demonstration of a lack of humanity and common decency, Trump’s supporters stand by their man. They applaud him for “telling it like it is.” They endorse his nativism and tribalism and call it “populism.”

Donald Trump is unfit to be president.

As USA Today’s editorial concludes: The nation doesn’t seek nor expect perfect presidents, and some have certainly been deeply flawed. But a president who shows such disrespect for the truth, for ethics, for the basic duties of the job and for decency toward others fails at the very essence of what has always made America great.

He should resign from the presidency.

national news, political news

Turn off the TV, Mr. President

Donald J. Trump told us he wouldn’t tweet once became president of the United States.

“I’ll be too busy” making America great again, building a wall, defeating ISIS and bringing back jobs that had been shipped to “China and Mexico,” the president said.

The president has gone Twitter crazy. He can’t stop tweeting policy decisions, criticism of foes, friends and the media.

He also told us he wouldn’t have time to play golf, that he doesn’t even think he’ll take vacations once he took the presidential oath. How’s he done there?

Trump is set to play more golf in his first year than his predecessor, Barack H. Obama, did during his eight years as president.

He’s now zero for two.

OK, now he says he doesn’t watch much television. No time for that, either. The president says he reads “a lot of documents.” Is he telling the truth on this one? The New York Times reports that Trump watches more than four hours of TV daily; it might be as much as eight hours.

He watches CNN, Fox, a little MSNBC, perhaps a broadcast network news show or two, according to the Times. Then he tweets almost immediately after hearing the news, whether it’s “fake” or whether it comes from Fox — his favorite news network.

So, by my score, the president is zero for three on these promises and declarations.

Oh, but what the heck. He “tells it like it is.”

national news

Get ready for a real donnybrook in the U.S. Senate

Donald John Trump wrote this via Twitter …

Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!

The president has endorsed a man — Roy Moore — who stands accused by several women of sexually abusing them.

U.S. Senate Republican leaders say they believe the women. They have asked Moore — a twice-ousted chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court — to bow out of the race for the Senate seat in Alabama.

Given that I no longer predict these things, I won’t forecast a Moore victory next Tuesday over Democrat Doug Jones in that special election to the Senate. I’ll just suggest that Moore appears to be picking up some momentum.

Alabama Republicans just cannot stomach the thought of a Democrat filling the seat once occupied by Jeff Sessions, who’s now the attorney general of the United States. GOP voters appear to be standing by their guy, an allegedly God-fearing politician who speaks their language.

He’s called the accusers liars. He blames it all on the “liberal fake news media,” Democrats, those who oppose Moore’s brand of Christian values. They support LGBT rights and want to “change our culture.”

Man, it’s resonating in Alabama. Or so it seems.

Doug Jones? Oh, he’s just a former federal prosecutor who has fought for the civil rights of those who’ve been denied them. He’s a mainstream politician who is far from being “soft on crime.”

If Moore manages to win, we ought to prepare ourselves for a serious donnybrook in the Senate.

Oh, wait! That presumes that GOP leaders who say that Moore doesn’t belong in the Senate are going to hold fast to that belief … or whether they’ll cave in.

Sigh …

 

media news, national news

Trump’s lawyer did … what?

Donald Trump might need a new lawyer.

The guy he has hired to represent him in this “Russia thing” investigation has done something that, according to an ethics counsel who worked for President George W. Bush, should qualify him for disbarment.

Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, allegedly wrote this in a tweet: I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!

What’s in play here? The lawyer supposedly wrote a tweet that contradicts something Trump had said earlier, that he fired former national security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the vice president. He made no mention earlier of his lying to the FBI.

Now it’s Richard Painter, who served President Bush as ethics lawyer, who has weighed in. Painter, no friend of Donald Trump, wrote: “A lawyer who writes a tweet like that incriminating a client should be disbarred. He can tell (special counsel Robert) Mueller he wrote it.”

Of course, this all presumes that Dowd actually wrote the tweet. I am just going to state up front that I don’t believe that Dowd wrote it. Painter is likely correct to presume that a lawyer who would actually send something like into universe isn’t smart enough to operate under a law license.

I don’t know the first thing about John Dowd, but I am going to make an assumption that he’s probably alert enough to avoid something so stupid.

What still might need explaining, though — if Dowd didn’t write the tweet — is why he would fall on the grenade in the first place.

Taking the fall for doing something he might not have done is pretty stupid, too.

But if he did … then why in the name of presidential stupidity would Donald Trump allow someone else to use his Twitter account to incriminate him?

national news

POTUS revives phony ‘birther’ issue

Allow me to express my absolute disgust, disdain and dismay at the president of the United States.

While calling this week for a boycott of CNN and retweeting vicious anti-Muslim videos — two things worthy of criticism as well — Donald John “Smart Person” Trump Sr. decided to reignite the phony birther issue involving the man he succeeded in the White House.

Sources told CNN that Trump believes he would have done even better in the 2016 election had he kept hammering at the bogus notion that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was ineligible to run for president of the United States.

How else can one view the president’s notion here … except to declare him to be racially motivated? It’s fair to ask whether the president harbors racist sentiments. Why does the idiot in chief keep insisting that this is a real issue?

See the CNN story here.

I suppose I should note briefly that the story is bogus on another level as well. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in August 1961; he has proven it.

However, his mother was an American, a U.S. citizen, which granted him American citizenship immediately upon his birth.

This … is a non-story. It’s phony. The “birther” issue is yet another lie.

Disgusting.

national news, Sports news

Donald vs. LaVar: Battle for the Ages?

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It’s come down to this: The president of the United States, the commander in chief of the world’s mightiest military machine, is waging a war of words/wits with a loudmouth father of sons who aspire to athletic greatness.

That’s right. Donald John Trump and LaVar Ball are going back and forth via Twitter.

This is how the Leader of the Free World chooses to spend some of his time. He calls Ball “an ungrateful fool” because Ball said the president didn’t do what he said he did to obtain the freedom of one of Ball’s sons, who got caught shoplifting in China.

The president has made a stupid feud even more stupid by his engaging this blowhard bozo in a Twitter feud.

I know the president is hopelessly addicted to Twitter. I won’t call on him to quit engaging in this kind of petulance. He’s acting like an overgrown, overhyped pubescent punk. He can’t help himself.

The man is diminishing the high office to which he was elected.

Don King without the hair?

But … he “tells it like it is.”

national news, political news

Trump shrinks a big office

I wish I had thought of this, but since I didn’t I’ll deliver appropriate credit to the source of this piece of wisdom.

It comes from U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who fired off this tweet today about Donald J. Trump Sr.:

“The President would have left American students in a foreign jail because their families didn’t lavish sufficient praise on him. How can someone in such a big office be so small?”

What a great question, even though it’s more or less a rhetorical inquiry. Here’s another twist on it: How can Trump shrink the high office he won a year ago in one of those most stunning political upsets in U.S. history? I think it shrunk the very moment he took the oath of office.

POTUS shrinks his office

The object of Schiff’s retort concerns the Twitter tussle that Trump entered with LaVar Ball, the father of one of three UCLA student/athletes who were charged with shoplifting at a high-end store in the People’s Republic of China.

Trump talked to Chinese leaders while visiting that country and reportedly persuaded them to release the young men instead of convicting them and sentencing them to potentially years-long prison sentences. LaVar Ball then tweeted that Trump didn’t do anything to obtain the release of his son and the other athletes.

Then the president decided to fire back at Ball — a man known for his big mouth and outsized public presence in the lives of his athletically gifted sons.

He said he “should have left them in jail” because LaVar Ball didn’t lavish enough praise on the president for his efforts.

That is one way a small man can occupy such a big office. Indeed, Trump is managing to shrink the office itself with his persistently petulant behavior.

Trump has turned this remarkable “skill” into an art form.