Tag Archives: POTUS

military news

Gen. Mattis comes clean: ‘I had to leave the administration’

James Mattis is showing his class, his devotion to country and his dedication to public service. How? By revealing that Donald Trump’s shamble-driven management style forced him to resign as secretary of defense.

He quit because of policy differences with the commander in chief. Trump, quite unsurprisingly, dismissed the differences he had with Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general, a combat veteran and — to my way of thinking — one of the few actual grownups who has served in the Trump administration.

Mattis became frustrated with Trump’s policy pronouncements by Twitter. He couldn’t function while there was no clear line of communication between his staff and the White House.

So, he quit.

I, along with other Americans, was struck by tone of Mattis’s statement announcing his resignation. He took great pains to salute the men and women who served under his command; he paid tribute to his Pentagon staff and to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t say a word of praise for the president of the United States.

Gosh! Can you imagine that?

Atlantic magazine has published a story telling how Mattis told those close to him about his decision to leave the administration. See the story here.

The bottom line for James Mattis is that he just “couldn’t take it any more.” Who knew?

national news

How does POTUS cling to his political base?

I don’t hang out exclusively with Anti-Trumpers. Really. I don’t.

Many of my friends and family members stand staunchly with the president of the United States. They’re all good folks. They are straitlaced and God-fearing — and I mean that in a good way, not in the prudish, stuck-up version of the words.

I haven’t asked many of them personally a question that continues to nag at me, so I’ll pose it here. Perhaps some of them will respond to me personally. Hey, they might even join the occasional social media frenzy that usually accompanies any discussion involving Donald Trump.

The question? How do these folks justify standing behind a president who embodies almost every possible personal trait that they would find detestable in any other politician?

I do not get it. Not at all.

It simply baffles me that a man who said he has never sought “forgiveness” retains such high standing among those who understand that forgiveness and grace are essential to their Christian faith. It also strains credulity to understand how this politician scarfs up the support of evangelicals even after he admits to grabbing women by their pu***. Think of how they would respond if any other politician would make such a hideous admission.

I am speaking as well not just to my pro-Trump family members and my actual friends, but also to the social media “friends” who are kind enough to read my blog and offer comment on my musings from time to time. I won’t presume to know them as well as I know those with whom I am close, but surely they must harbor some misgivings about how they feel toward this fellow … don’t they?

I have said from the very beginning of his political career — which began with that celebrated/infamous escalator ride in Trump Tower in June 2015 — that Donald Trump is fundamentally unfit to hold the office he now occupies. His unfitness spans the gambit: professionally, politically and personally.

And yet this individual continues to cling to that base of support, to whom he speaks exclusively whenever he pops off on Twitter or speaks to us through the media he continues to call “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.”

It blows my mind! All of it.

national news

Mr. President, the docs didn’t leave patients to shake your hand

Mr. President, your penchant for disgracing your office is utterly boundless.

You say that doctors in El Paso and Dayton left their patients’ side to greet you as you entered their hospitals? Is that right?

Your visit to the latest cities victimized by mass slaughter of people through gun violence was not about you, Mr. President … no matter what you might want us to believe. It ostensibly was about the victims, their loved ones and the communities that are grieving to this moment over the senseless loss of innocent lives.

Yet you continue to lie with a straight face. No doctor worth his or her medical experience would ever leave a patient while performing surgery. Especially to greet you, for crying out loud!

Your narcissism, your self-aggrandizing proclivities, your egomaniacal statements in the face of national tragedy simply demonstrates — as if we needed more demonstration — your abject unfitness for your high office.

“Our physicians and staff at no time leave an active operating room, procedural area or patient room to greet anyone,” said a spokesman for Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio.

I choose to believe him. Not you.

Donald Trump, national news

Wanting a president who’s better than this

I consider myself a fairly liberated male.

However, I do have some old-fashioned notions about how the world ought to work. Such what we should expect from our government leaders.

Take the president of the United States … for example.

I want my president to be better than the rest of us. I want that person to lead by example. I want the president to set the example for the country — as well as the rest of the world — to follow.

Does the current POTUS, Donald Trump, fit that description? Is he your kind of president? He damn sure isn’t my kind of individual I want leading my country.

I love the United States of America as passionately as anyone. I will take a back seat to no one when it comes to honoring our flag and what it symbolizes. I like the pageantry of patriotic events. I have been known to choke up over patriotic music. I honor our military men and women; I thank the older veterans for their service.

Accordingly, I want the president to symbolize all that is good about my country. Donald Trump does not come close to filling that bill. He dishonors the country, the office he occupies, the government he heads. He does not represent the best of the great nation he was elected to lead.

He embodies some sorry traits that have carried over from his time as a real estate mogul/reality TV celebrity/beauty pageant owner-operator.

I came into this world in 1949. Harry Truman was president at the time. He was a plainspoken man of the Midwest who inherited the presidency upon the death of the great Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman rose to greatness himself with his decision to end World War II quickly by dropping those two horrible weapons on Japan in August 1945. He won election to the office despite heavy odds that he would lose the 1948 election.

Every president since Truman — Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama — all sought to put the country above their own aggrandizement.

I surely didn’t vote for all those men, but I honor their service to this day, recalling their commitment to the public; yes, some of these men had political fatal flaws, but they knew how to behave like our head of state, our commander in chief.

Not the individual who’s in office now.

I want a president who embodies the best of our nation. I do not want someone who keeps reminding me of his crassness and coarseness.

It’s an old-fashioned view of the president and the presidency. I’m fine with it.

national news

Time has run out for Trump to change his ways

I quit some time ago relying on my trick knee. It has failed me too many times. So I quit making political predictions.

But I want you to consider this forward-looking observation:
It is too late for Donald John Trump to change his ways while posing as president of the United States of America.

He’s been at this gig now for more than two years, going on three. Trump has been acting more erratically than ever. He just recently compared himself to God, called himself the “chosen one” to lead the country, joked that he wanted to grant himself the Medal of Honor, blamed Barack Obama for the souring economy, pitched a goofy notion about buying Greenland from Denmark, lashed out at Democrats and the media continually via Twitter.

Were the president to actually start acting “presidential,” how do you think that would look to rank-and-file voters? Well, it would like what it would be, a desperate attempt to pander to those beyond the “base” of supporters that like Trump just the way he has been all along.

It’s too late, therefore, for Donald Trump to change his ways. It’s too late for him to start acting like the president.

Therefore, if he gets re-elected in 2020 — and I shudder at the thought — Americans will have themselves to blame for ignoring the signals that ring out loudly and clearly: The country made a huge mistake when it allowed Donald Trump to win an Electoral College victory and, thus, become president of our great nation.

national news

Is something wrong with the ‘Stable Genius’?

The man we have heard call himself the “Stable Genius” is making me re-evaluate my aversion to armchair/peanut gallery psychoanalysis.

Donald J. Trump’s recent “press availabilities” with the media have me wondering about the man. I am not qualified to offer any form of diagnosis of him. I do want to offer some observations about what I have seen and heard from the president of the United States.

It is troubling … to say the very least.

He stood in front of the helicopter the other day and went off on a riff about a lot of things and about a lot of people — chiefly his immediate presidential predecessor, Barack H. Obama.

He keeps saying Obama got “outstmarted” by the Russians when he got Russia kicked out of the G-8 ranks of industrialized nations; actually, the G-7 voted to boot the Russians out over their ongoing conflict with Ukraine. He made some idiotic reference again to the former president, saying that the Danes outmaneuvered him on some such thing; I don’t know what the hell he was talking about.

Then he spoke to some veterans and joked about wanting to award himself the Medal of Honor; does he not get how offensive such a “joke” is, given his history of draft evasion during the Vietnam War? Trump said he was open to considering universal background checks for those wanting to purchase firearms; then he appeared to back away from it. Trump keeps blaming Fed chairman Jerome Powell for allegedly hasty decisions regarding interest rates; POTUS just won’t own any part of the concerns being expressed about the future of the economy.

What is with this guy? These are just the latest among a lengthy series of weird statements and behavior. I have seen some psychiatrists seek to offer diagnoses at a distance. I get that they are trained medical doctors who can spot certain signs of something that over the rest of our heads. I admire their knowledge and their intellectual wattage, both of which dwarf my own.

But as I watch the president writhe, wriggle and rant these days as the presidential election year approaches, I am beginning to wonder if this guy is actually starting to panic. I’ve read the views of those who believe Trump didn’t expect to win the 2016 election and that his victory caught him by complete surprise. I also have heard those who believe that Trump’s ego won’t allow him to accept the possibility that he has failed at the job and that voters just might be wising up to his abject failures as a politician.

I am not prepared to even offer a wild-ass guess as to what might be wrong with this guy. I do wonder, though, whether the pressure of seeking re-election to a job that is way over his head is getting to him.

If so, is he up to doing the job?

Let’s remember, the “Stable Genius” is just an arm’s length away from those nuclear launch codes.

national news

Picture speaks volumes about POTUS’s unfitness

This picture well might provide one of the most glaring examples I can imagine of Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency of the United States.

There he is, standing alongside first lady Melania Trump. They were visiting El Paso, Texas, on what was billed as a mission to lend aid and comfort to those who experienced the horrific massacre at the Wal-Mart shopping center this past weekend.

The moment demanded solemnity. It required the president to embrace family members. To tell them he supports them.

So … what does the first couple do? They pose for pictures that included an infant who was made an orphan when his parents were killed by the lunatic who opened fire at the Wal-Mart complex.

Don’t they look happy? Aren’t they just so darn full of good cheer? Is that the image they should project while the nation mourns the deaths inflicted in El Paso and also in Dayton, Ohio? I’ll answer the final question: Hell … no!

When the president’s critics talk about his lack of empathy, his inability — or unwillingness — to express authentic sorrow, this is the image they might use to illustrate the point.

The baby has no idea what has happened. That is not even close to the point! My point is that president and the first lady ventured to the latest “ground zero” of gun violence in the United States. Twenty-two people died at the hands of a madman. There is mounting evidence that the shooter was inspired by the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has come from the president.

Has the president owned any of that? Has he suggested even the slightest hint of remorse or regret at the things he has said that could have spawned such insanity? No. He has not done anything of the sort.

The job of president compels the president at times of national grief and shock to speak from his heart. It’s an unwritten part of his job description, but it’s there. Did the president deliver on that responsibility? No. He went to El Paso and Dayton and sought to turn the tours of both cities into self-serving testimonials.

Then he grins like a doofus in the presence of an infant who is going to grow up never remembering the man and woman who brought him into the world, two victims of gun violence gunned down in the worst slaughter ever inflicted on the Latino community.

Absolutely sickening.

crime news, national news

Here’s what POTUS could have added about massacres

Donald Trump today laid the blame on the mass shootings at the feet of several institutions and cultural trends.

He blamed the Internet for promoting violence, the media for their “fake news” reporting, a lack of mental health awareness and care, the preponderance of violence-ridden video games.

I’ll accept that most of those causes as valid areas of concern; the media, though, have been singled out only because of the president’s hatred and mistrust of them.

What he didn’t do was take any personal responsibility for the coarseness of the political dialogue. Therefore, if I were writing his remarks, I would have added something like this:

Finally, and most significantly, I want to call attention to the coarse rhetoric that has infected our political discourse. I also want to express my personal regret for contributing to it.

Yes, I declared my presidential candidacy in 2015 with a direct assault on Latin American immigrants who were — and still are — crossing our border illegally. However, I went too far in ascribing criminal intent to too many of them. For that I apologize.

Furthermore, from this day forward I am going to dial back my own hard-bitten rhetoric. I will pledge to work openly toward developing a more civil political climate. 

My regret runs deep and I am sorry for whatever I have done to inflame the deeply held passions to which I have referred already in the wake of the El Paso and Dayton massacres.

Why didn’t he say that? It’s simple. Donald Trump does not possess the gene that allows him to express regret for any mistake he commits. So he shrouds institutions and people all around him with blame and responsibility for matters that he –as the president of the United States — has the power to control all by himself.

He once said that “I, alone” can fix what ails the country. He ought to say that “I, alone” will demand an end to the hate-filled rhetoric that has poisoned our political atmosphere.

national news

POTUS exhibits bottomless pit of indecency

This is a Twitter message that the president of the United States fired off this morning.

Elijah Cummings is a Baltimore congressman with whom Donald Trump has ignited a feud regarding Cummings’s criticism of the president. He has called Baltimore a “rate- and rodent-infested” hellhole unfit for human habitation. He blames Cummings for it.

Then we hear that Cummings’s home was robbed. This tweet is the president’s response to the news.

Picture any president of the United States expressing such utter disdain for the misfortune that fell on a fellow elected official. What might the public reaction be?

Yet somehow, in ways that defy my ability to discern any sense of what goes through what passes for the mind of Donald Trump, he gets away with it.

This individual — our head of state — is a disgrace.

media news, national news

Waiting for the ‘perfect headline’ to present itself

1 Comment

I won’t belabor this topic, but it deserves a quick-hit mention anyway.

I am waiting for the chance to use several acronyms in the same headline. I am don’t yet know the circumstance will present itself, but I’m going to look for it.

They are: POTUS, VPOTUS, SCOTUS and FLOTUS, referencing the president, vice president, U.S. Supreme Court and first lady.

I use them individually whenever I write about them on High Plains Blogger. I’ve even written a headline a few times that contains two of them. Three is a stretch. Four seems impossible.

But bear with me. I’m on the hunt. Patience is the key.