Friday, March 13, 2020

More Thoughts About Trump's Disastrous Oval Office Speech

"These guys are businessmen, the ONLY thing they care about is money."

That's what our lawyer said to us when a businessman tried to steal some of our family land.  As he is still alive and in practice - and a good lawyer he is - I won't name him.  We won the case and the crook had to admit he was wrong, though he didn't know till it was too late that he would have to admit it. I will never forget the look on the crook's face when he read the boundary agreement our lawyer wrote up that he was compelled to sign.  I'm sure he realized the crook wouldn't read it till he was standing in front of the notary.  I'm smiling as I type this. 

As a number of people have noted throughout the Trump regime, it pretty much puts to rest the slogan and the notion that what the United States really needed was a businessman in the White House.   

RMJ, I believe, noted that we have had a real businessman who had run a successful business as president,  Jimmy Carter .  But, certainly in his long and rightfully illustrious post-presidency,  Jimmy Carter proved that he was entirely more than a businessman, a farmer, a nuclear engineer - his educational and military career credentials.  

I would guess that the entirely idiotic idea that businessmen were universally competent was hatched by businessmen or those who wanted to suck up to them in academia, economists, etc.  If there's one thing that businessmen are sure to do as soon as they have the money to do it, is to collect a sycophant or so to praise them. And there are academics who have always been willing to be those.  

In thinking about this the last couple of days I kept thinking of how if you narrowed the range of your thought it could make what seems like sense, if you looked at it superficially.  Which is what modern thought seems to specialize in doing, looking at complex things superficially and categorizing things and people who are not really much like things.  I think Adam Smith was guilty of some of that but nothing like 20th century economists were, especially in the most recent period when they like to pretend they're evolutionary biologists.  

But I doubt the low to mid-brow, college credentialed businessmen and children of the such members of the Trump regime, the Republicans in Congress, on the Supreme Court, in the media do more than get the notions that flake off of that academic babblage, perhaps picked up in their business and econ courses in college.  

I would guess more of it comes from the movies and TV shows and scribblage in the Wall Street Journal style of journals or, most influential, TV bull shit.  If some academics are ready to prostitute themselves, people in show-biz will claw each other apart to do that. I would bet that most of that kind of nonsense that spurts from the mouths of the talking heads comes from what they or their writers heard other talking heads on TV say about it.  I would guess in the early years of that stuff on TV it might have come from the idiotic, total bull-shit. Tracy-Hepburn movie State Of The Union.*  Though I'm sure there were other sources.  Rich people like to be flattered and no one flatters rich people like the shills of show-biz. 

Its probably not worth thinking of where it originated from, it's far more worth kicking the stupid idea to death so that, for a while at least, it is buried.  

Being a politician is the job of being a public servant hired directly by The People.   In every way it should be held to be a higher calling than making money and maximizing profits and self-gain.  And all politicians should be held to the ideals that we have a right to expect from people who ask us to trust them to keep us safe and to protect us from dangers as well as enemies.  

Donald Trump is the mentally deficient, pathologically spoiled son of a fascistic, racist gangster who made money in one of the sleaziest of all businesses,  New York City real estate.  He was sent to about the most minor of the minor Ivies, no doubt kept there because the school wanted money from his gangster daddy, in a major that really never had any business being a department in a university.   My guess would be that since Jimmy Carter majored in a real topic at a real place of learning, one that trained people for doing some of the most serious work there is, that saved him from the evil banality that the businessmen who have held that office make of it.  Trump,  George W. Bush.  

But I think that Jimmy Carter was always more than that because he was always about more than just his own, personal interest.  And I think his religious belief had everything to do with that.  I think he really does believe as so many others merely profess to. 

*  It has a line here or there but boy, did I hate that movie.  

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