Comment from dear friend, fellow memo reader and overall great Savannah citizen who knows tragedy due to crime in our city:
| "My day is not complete without your memes, and this one is very fine, Dick. Thank you! C----" | ||
My son is staying in town so he can monitor Stella, our granddaughter, while she in tennis camp because she is diabetic.
I always enjoy chatting with him because he is bright, rational, and I asked his permission whether I could paraphrase how he looks at the recent history of our relationship with Russia and he agreed.
Daniel believes with policy there also needs to be presence. Reagan had both and the Berlin Walls came down because Russia ran out of chips.. Bush 41, benefited from this and the fact that Russia was suffering in Afghanistan. No policy change and some presence. Clinton entered Kosovo a bit late but finally crafted a delayed policy and had some friendly relations with Russia but also left sending a message of weakness. GW was totally occupied with Iraq and Afghanistan and thus relied upon residual policy, had presence and mis-interpreted those "blue eyes." Obama had the wrong policy cast a weak presence and then comes Trump inheriting the mess from the past decade or so.
Trump has a policy that is tougher than his predecessors and is now trying to build a presence to match and doing so against some self-inflicted verbal wounds and total resistance from the haters, fascists, lefties and above all the mass media and Democrats who cannot accept their defeat and believe obfuscation will return them to power.
This is succinct and fleshes out what Daniel believes is a book end type policy , ie strength followed by mostly passivity, weakness and mistaken judgement and now the bookend of strength and presence re-appears.
Hope this gives you his perception. Daniel is a rational, thinking conservative and deals beautifully in his development business with an entire cadre of Democrat city officials and union leaders. Consequently he is being very well received and has been asked to join several committees serving Pittsburgh.
On another topic:
I began to muse about what if we had President Clinton and she was appointing Obama to The Supreme Court because he was that great constitutional professor. I did not hear his entire talk from Kenya today because my nausea pills were not handy. Unrealistic platitudes, more social policies that please and lead to more government that does not work and runs up un-payable costs.
My mind wandered to hospitals. Why hospitals? Because in tomorrow's memo I speak about Hayek.
Hospitals are local because they need to be in order to treat their local patient loads and we have specialty hospitals, throughout the country, where patients go for their more specialized medical demands. Swamp located government saw a need to legislate and The Hill Burton act was passed to finance building hospitals to serve more rural medical needs with government low interest loans. This turned out to be an initial blessing and then local hospital overbuild resulted, competition to survive became prevalent because all hospitals were state of the art equipped and had to lower prices to attract a patient load sufficient to cover bloated costs. Insurance providers began to raise fees as more patients were seeking/need coverage and America's overall population was growing as veterans returned , married and more babies were being born. The government saw a need to step in and began to take over more control from afar and thus dictate policy from afar. Move the ball down the field and Obama saw an ability to bring 16% of GDP under government control and circumvented Congress in the process and we have the testimony of Professor Gruber to prove Obama purposely lied to the "ignorant" public.
Had Obama been nominated for The Supreme Court, Obamacare would have survived and the nation probably would have eventually gotten incurable cancer of what was once a productive medical system that needed to attack more distribution at a reasonable cost to cover more of our uninsured population which , in part, was caused by poor eating habits and aging.
Socialists believe every unfulfilled need/demand should be cared for my morphing it into an entitlement and disregarding the cost. This is economically and mathematically insane but Socialism, based on Hayek, is insane because it defies logic and reasoning and historical evidence. The more Democrats swing toward infusing their party by electing youth who substitute their lack of brains/knowledge with passion the more that Party moves away from free market solutions and an economic system that , though not perfect, has proven it does more for more than any other such system devised by man, who is not perfect either.
I have covered a lot of complexities in the space of a few paragraphs never intending to provide answers but to get the reader to realize Socialism is unlikely to solve our problems and more likely to create more that will, over time, turn us into a nation we will no longer recognize. For those who hate America, who are perpetually seeking solutions bordering on nirvana and who benefit from chaos, using passion as their umbrella, I would prefer we send them free tickets to Venezuela, Cuba Russia or any other Socialist Society of their choice. You cannot reason with them, they are impenetrable and I posted an op ed in a recent memo about the need to have upgraded dialogue and what we must do to achieve that worthy goal.
This is a very rapid/kaleidoscopic walk through a complex problem and I have used some hyperbole to make sardonic points but I believe I have given you food for thought.
Final thought entree:
I believe it was Dana Perino who contrasted the way the mass media approached their coverage of Obama and Trump by focusing on what Obama said and downplaying most of what he did whereas, in the case of Trump, the mass media focuses on everything Trump says and very little of what he accomplishes.
There is a great deal of truth in this observation and since we still depend upon the mass media for most of our news this influence simply provides negative nourishment for shaping the thinking of those who are avid Trump haters, assorted Democrats and yes, the public at large.
Again, I would remind readers what I have said about the fourth estate: Once corporate America acquired more and more of the nation's mass media the emphasis shifted from reporting news objectively to entertaining. You generate far more revenue from entertainment than you do from dry news reporting because social media technology offers increasing competition. When you spice news reporting up by sensationalizing you generate more revenue, readership and viewers and this has saved The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC and also enhanced FOX, though I submit the 6PM news report by Bret Baier still captures the essence of the better days of what the news hour should be and once was as does FOX's " Wall Street Week."
The recent outpouring of mass media hatred spewed towards Trump's "Hellsink Meeting" and the outrage expressed among the Trump haters , in my opinion, is far more comforting to Putin than Trump letting him off the hook as a tactic of building a relationship which he hopes will lower tensions, lay the groundwork for resolving some issues where there remains a modicum of unity etc.
If Trump believes our intelligence reports, he knows Putin is a thug, knows Russia is not honoring their nuclear agreement with us and certainly knows Russia engages in espionage, cyber attacks and meddled in our elections and he, again, went public on the latter. When you are a New York Real Estate Tycoon you learn what you must do to get permits from a corrupted city government, controlled by mafia types, strong unions and politicians with hands out. That is the real world . No doubt, Trump , learned well the lessons of smearing and kissing behinds to lower his costs because delay is the enemy of the builder and the weapon of choice of those who seek patronage.
In my son's case, bureaucratic delay/inertia is one of his most irksome, frustrations and it is not even based on corruption/graft. It simply is the way things are done and changing to meet over costs is not going to move the ball.
Daniel has used praise, syrup, honey and southern charm and has been effective, up to a point, just as he brought Dixie Land to The University of Pittsburgh.
He recently told me of an experience he had when he approached a large Charitable Foundation and he began the conversation by complementing the person who decided on funding projects. He turned Daniel down because their funding for the year had been committed, He later received a call from the official who said some funding had come in after their conversation and he was taken aback by what Daniel said and though the funding could not be allocated towards his direct needs it would be allocated for beautification.
Daniel's sincere sweetness and ability to charm is genuine, comes from Lynn, not me. I am too direct, get to the point and a move on Wall Street type. Lynn says I am too goal/ destination driven and miss the beauty of the trip. I live my life on a military schedule. My clothes closet still could pass inspection.
I will also say my four daughters all are compassionate and productive and good citizens. They are all different in appearance, style and behaviour but they have a common theme of being decent,
I always invite rebuttal and commentary.
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Dick
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1) Everyone Needs to Get Out of Fantasy Land and Own Trump
Did you see what Vladimir Putin did? He said he wanted Trump to be president. Then he denied meddling in our election. The two things can certainly be true at the same time, if only we didn't have overwhelming evidence that he meddled. We can also deduce from the evidence that Putin didn't care if Trump won or lost, as long as America was politically divided and focused on fantasies of vengeance and stolen elections.
I've heard it a bunch of times since yesterday: Trump colluded with Russia. He committed treason! Putin must have something on him. Trump stole the election! Why aren't the generals overthrowing him?
Do people even know what they're saying? They're advocating for a putsch. They're dredging up 18-month old conspiracy theories that have been investigated thoroughly by the FBI, the intelligence community, Robert Mueller's team, and both Senate and House intelligence committees. None of these investigations have found evidence of Trump colluding with Russia. None of them found evidence that a single vote was "stolen" or hacked by the Russians.
In 2008, I remember the feeling when Barack Obama won the presidency. It was not a good feeling. I felt we conservatives were in for a lot of stinging, and my feelings proved correct. We ended up with Obamacare literally shoved down our throats without a single Republican vote. We ended up with a president who meddled in race relations, gun control, and foreign relations in a way that divided America more than 20 years of Reagan/Bush/Bush ever did. (The Clinton years only flourished when New Gingrich and his Contract with America inspired cooperation between the GOP Congress and the Democratic White House.)
But eight years of Obama were marked by tin-foil hat theories about his birth, the legitimacy of his presidency, the secrecy surrounding his college records, and the lies he told while in office. And Obama told some whoppers. Those who stayed in the conspiracy corner turned out to be Donald Trump's biggest supporters. In fact, you might say that he cultivated those people. Trump's 2012 embrace of birtherism set himself up with a coterie of true believers in fantasy. That was always my chief complaint about early Trumpkins: they divorced themselves from reality and lived in a fantastic world where Trump was always right, even when he contradicted himself the next day.
What am I saying? That's his supporters now!
But I'm not talking about Trump's zombie brigade, who would swear on a stack of Bibles their leader was innocent standing on Fifth Avenue after he shot a toddler holding a puppy dead on the street, claiming the toddler was really a Chinese spy.
I'm talking about liberals and so-called Never Trumpers who daily fantasize about Trump's downfall. They openly proclaim every story the smoking gun that will bust Trump's presidency wide open like it was a crime syndicate, and result in his immediate impeachment and conviction. They turn everything Trump says or does into an argument that Trump hates America, that he's a racist, a Russian stooge, a xenophobe (they may have a small point there), an idiot, a dangerous dictatorIn fact, they believe Trump is worse than Putin. They believe it not because it's true, but because it's their fantasy. Living in a fantasy benefits nobody. And when large portion of the country is living in a fantasy, America suffers. We cannot begin to heal until the deranged, angry left owns Trump.
I don't mean "own" like "dying at Disney World to own the NRA." I mean "own" as in President Trump is our president, and we should own that. He can't "collude" with Vladimir Putin simply because he had a conversation alone with the Russian president. That's his job. The president is head of state, head of government and commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces. Donald Trump holds all those positions and titles.
Trump was elected by a legally binding process we've had in America since John Adams. He didn't steal the election.
When Obama was elected in 2008 and inaugurated in January 2009, it took some time, like a month or so, but I decided to own Obama. I didn't like what he did--I didn't like that Obama tried to meddle in the Israeli elections to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu. I didn't like that he created a power vacuum in the Middle East the North Africa that directly led to the rise of ISIS (after we left Iraq hanging), the migrant/refugee crisis plaguing Europe, and the empowering of Iran, whose leaders despise America with a religious fervor immune to Obama's charm offensive.
I didn't like it but I owned it. I never claimed Obama wasn't our president. I never claimed he was "colluding" with Dmitry Medvedev when he was heard over an open microphone telling the Russian PM that he could be more "flexible" after his re-election, and to let Mr. Putin know that. Obama had the right to say whatever he wanted to Medvedev, because he was president.
Those in the media who dwell in the fantasy land of catching Trump in the "big lie" or playing All the President's Men on his administration are not helping themselves or the nation. All they do is cause Trump, who reacts like a fourth grader playing "I know you are but what am I?" in the lunchroom, to double down on how the press is the enemy of America. He provokes them, and they pull the tin-foil hats down further over their brows.
Birtherism was wrong, and it was wrong of then-citizen Donald Trump to engage in it. He knew what he was doing (he registered "Make America Great Again" the day after Mitt Romney lost the election in 2012). He knew he was going to use the Birther Brigades to be his foot soldiers. They still are.
But the left has its own foot soldiers, who are equal in their fervor, and more dangerous by far, who live to hate Trump and believe he's not their president. The media feeds them, and the Democrats use them for their own political purposes. It's bad for America. It will lead to violence (it already has). It will lead to the loss of free speech (it already has on campuses and in the public square). It will lead away from democracy and into despotism. All because a large group of Americans won't acknowledge that Donald Trump is their president and deserves the respect of the office. Even if you don't respect the man, respect the office. One day you might have someone you like occupying it, and it will be partially your fault when they are not respected.
A message for the left and the Democrats and the media: own Donald Trump. Be the adults in the room and say, out loud, he's our president, and what he does he does for America. You might not like what he does, but he's not trying to kill people, or cage children, or shut down free speech. Those are things Vladimir Putin does do.
Putin didn't care if Trump won or Hillary won. Either one accomplished his goal, to distract America by our division and descent into tin-foil hat fabulist conspiracy. Then Putin can build his Greater Russia without us to worry about. Do you see what Putin is doing here? The way to stop him is to own Trump, like we own our own lives, and then maybe we can learn to be adults.
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