If I could find enough clever cartons I would not have to write anything because they are often more effective.
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We are leaving Thursday to take our grandson, Blake, back to Maitland. He spent the last four days with us and we all had a good time.
He met many of Lynn's girl friends and her trainer, Lenny. He took a tennis lesson from Tall Paul and ate dinner at one of our clubs. He watched some cartoon shows and was a pleasure to be with. Very mature for a 4 year old and he had a lot to talk about considering he had learned how to swing on the trapeze at the circus camp at Club Med. He already water skis as does his sister, Dagny.
We will return Friday and then next week we drive to Sarasota on Thursday to attend the wedding of a dear and long time friend returning on Sunday.
On Wednesday before we left several things happened that were in line with my thinking. Fed. Chairman Powell decided to ease on the pace of rate increases as I has suggested he should do and this set off a Santa Claus Rally as I recently stated we should look for.
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I am re-posting Victor Davis Hanson's excellent op ed on "Shane." because he hits the nail on the head and more eloquently says what I have struggled to say.
I would like to highlight several things that tie in with Hanson's article. (See 1 below.)
First, Trump is who he is and he is not going to change. You either accept this or not. For those who continue to believe hating the man is their best option, I feel sorry for them but they are welcome to stew in their own putrid juice. I am not suggesting one should embrace and love Trump but I am stating that you will see him in a different light if you are fair minded and focus on what he does and less on the way he says what he says. Also, think for yourself and stop relying on the mass media.
Second, Obama is now taking credit for the economic recovery, America's oil success and energy pricing that has occurred on Trump's watch. Obama's middle name always was "chutzpah" not Hussein. The man's insecurity is amazing.
The Trump recovery is because he unburdened the economy with bilious rules and regulations Obama imposed and cut taxes, thus, restoring confidence that possibly America could become 'great again.'
Obama opposed pipelines, he was against fracking and mocked Palin who said "drill baby drill" when he said and believed "we cannot drill our way out of the problem."
Obama remains the intellectual fraud, the empty suit he always was and the man has no shame and those who love him are equally shameless. They either got sold a bill of goods and bought into his own ignorance and/or were fearful opposing his nonsense would cause them to be branded racist. I am no racist because I know a fraud when I see it. After all, they come in many colors.
Third, Shane and Trump have sordid histories but came upon the scene at the right time. However, they will not receive the credit they were/are due because once matters improve people, who were distraught and down, tend to forget.
Fourth, the negativism towards Trump comes from every direction and will intensify now that Democrats control The House and Mueller's report is soon to be released. Because Trump loves a fight he will handle the frustration better than many who would throw in the towel.
Trump is the one who voters called upon to stand against and reverse the tide that was eroding our nation. Because he kept his campaign commitments it is understandable why he would be unpopular. Change is never fun even if it is for the better. Shaking the tree is disruptive. Forcing people out of their lethargy and stupidity is not initially embraced as a welcomed event.
He also has kicked the shins of our "so-called" allies who were even more attuned and comfortable embracing their self-imposed dry rot status.
It is hypocritically ironic that Hillary recently chastised Europe for their immigration policies. Is she trying to get on the right side of the issue before 2020 rolls around and more caravans, that were simply a Trump campaign ruse, occur as they rumble toward Obama's unprotected border policies?
Trump's actions, often bestowed in a blunt and crude manner, are hurting some shins. It is about time. For some, Trump might have to even kick ass and I hope he does.
He did so when he moved our embassy to Jerusalem and I kept hearing how the sky would fall. Now more nations are quietly following suit and the sun still rises.
Five, Shane like Trump is not necessarily lovable but under the circumstances they both face(d), and in view of what they are seeking to correct and/or reverse, being liked is something they must forego if they are to succeed.
This is little understood by many but Shane and Trump understand and we should count ourselves lucky they are willing to keep their oar in the water..
Six, the polarizing issues Trump faced upon being elected were two fold.
First, he did not fit the intellectual mold of the mass media. He was always considered beneath their self-anointed elitist status. To make matters even worse, he was brash, his hair color and coif lent themselves to being lampooned by cartoonists and he had a history of sleaze which was always there but beneath the surface which they could now exploit.
Second, this terrible despicable human being had made fools of the mass media by being elected and did so by rubbing their noses in their own hypocrisy and excrement. The mass media were made to look like the fools they are and thus, they have to strike back because Trump goes against everything they regard as holy. Furthermore, his election threatened not only their own power but the power of those they serve - read Democrat Party.
Trump's victory came at their expense and that borders on sinful.
Seven, for a man who could be the poster child for a second Playboy, Trump uncharacteristically is unwilling to allow America to be treated in a "whorish" manner. He campaigned by saying he was unwilling for America to lay back and enjoy our treatment as so many of his predecessors and Congresses have and most particularly the last president. Trump is an activist, up to a point, and is willing to right what he perceives are wrongs we have allowed to happen.
Though he is not into nation building, as was GW, he understands the world is safer when America is strong and capable of defending itself against ruthless adversaries who have their own expansionist dreams and goals. Yet, he realizes we cannot continue to protect allies who are unwilling to foot their own part of the cost.
The same goes for matters of commerce. Trump believes we should embrace policies that encourage American Companies to come back home and employ our own. When it comes to trade the playing field should be leveled until such time as all tariffs are removed.
Eight, all is not necessarily bleak. The Republican Senate has been cleansed of those who opposed Trump at every turn. Offsetting this is the fact that many Obama holdovers remain in office and there are still those in the various intelligence agencies who are still smarting from Trump's campaign attacks.
Trump is far more prone to cross the aisle than Democrats and this might inure to his benefit as voters eventually realize recalcitrant Democrats are more to blame for gridlock.
So let the Trump drama play out, let the Trump haters and detractors bask in their hypocrisy and mis-directed beliefs and attitudes. Time will tell.
As for myself, I continue to place my bets on logic and common sense and hope Trump's "uge ego" does not cause him to self-destruct. I know walls against Trump succeeding are being built higher and higher while our borders remain vulnerable. I am reminded of Bill Maher's sick/diabolic comment that he hoped for a recession in order to make Trump look bad. Yes, America's political ideological divide is that strong and distorted. Even patriotism is under siege.
Meanwhile, in my book, the verdict is in on Obama who reminds me more and more of China and their efforts to steal the intellectual property/accomplishments of others.
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Dick
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1)How Did Shane End Up?
The gunslinging outsider saved the vulnerable farmers, but they didn’t love him for it.
In director George Stevens’s classic 1953 Western, Shane, a mysterious stranger and gunfighter in buckskin with a violent past, rides into the middle of the late-1880s Wyoming range wars between cattle barons and homestead farmers. The community-minded farmers may have the law on their side, but the open-range cattlemen have the money and the gun-toting cowboys.
Shane enters the mess but decides to settle down, incognito, with a farm family, shed his past as a hired killer, and begin leading a settled and honest frontier life.
Almost immediately, however, he senses his tragic predicament. The West is not yet so civilized. The farmers, the future of civilization, hardly possess the gun-fighting ability to survive against the ruthless cattlemen and their hired guns.
So a reformed Shane is insidiously brought into the fray, as he figures out how to aid his new hosts while, at least at first, playing by their rules of civilized behavior.
Shane ultimately accepts that his second chance life is not sustainable. He learns that his newfound friends, the sod-busters, lack the skills to survive against Wilson, the cattlemen’s psychopathic hired killer.
Sensing that there’s no solution to his dilemma, Shane finally puts on his killer clothes again, straps on his six-gun, and kills Wilson and the brutal ringleaders of the cattlemen.
Stevens’s movie gives us the familiar paradox of the ostracized outsider and savior in tragic literature and film (The Magnificent Seven, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider . . . ). Although they hesitate to say so, the farmers, if they are to survive, must rely on the very antithesis of their own idealistic commitment to law, order, the settled life, and the way of the future. Shane himself wants to reject gun-slinging and stay civilized.
But to do so would mean that Shane’s newfound friends would be killed or driven off by the cattlemen, and their farms returned to the open range — they don’t have the skills to win a range war against cowboys and hired guns. Yet by picking up his gun and going outside the law to take down the evildoers, Shane himself —apparently a former Confederate, Yankee-hating hired gun — loses his recent claim on civilized life.
Even the very farmers whom he will save are uncomfortable with the idea that Shane is willing to shoot someone to save them. Or as one self-righteous farmer puts it when Shane warns the sod-busters about the dangers of the cattlemen’s hired gun, Wilson, “I don’t want no part of gun-slinging. Murder’s a better name.” Shane himself appears impatient with gradual change and seems to believe that he alone, not the distant law, can stop the murderous bullies.
The movie ends in classic tragic-hero fashion: Shane rides into cattlemen’s town alone, wins his gunfights, is wounded, and finally rides off alone into the stormy Grand Tetons — content that he rid the farmers’ valley of the hired guns. The means he used to save the sod-busters are precisely those that must have no place in an agrarian world that, thanks to him, is now peaceful. Only a small boy, Joey, will yell out, “Shane! Come back!”
Stevens leaves the exact fate of Shane is doubt — at least sort of. We do not know the true extent of his wounds. And where will he end up on the trail? As a gunfighter, he can never settle down in the turn-of-the-century, civilizing West that no longer has a place for either him or his enemies.
Or, as Shane puts it at the end of the movie to Joey, the son of his farming hosts:
A man has to be what he is. . . . Can’t break the mold. There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back.
In less melodramatic fashion, we see variances of the Shane paradox in all aspects of our lives, and we are now also witnessing something similar to it in the current Trump administration, especially in these confusing and unsettled times after the midterms.
Two years ago, as the 2016 election approached, neither party seemed to have an answer to lots of seemingly insolvable issues: ten years of a stagnant economy, when we failed to achieve the old standard of 3 percent annualized GDP growth; a dangerously open border and massive illegal immigration; serial optional, costly, and indecisive military misadventures abroad; an increasingly defiant, lawless, and ascendant China; a fossilized NATO alliance unwilling to meet its investment commitments; a de-industrialized and written-off red-state interior; identity-politics tribalism as the new norm; and a deer-in-the-headlights impotent political class.
To the degree that either party offered possible solutions, the establishment, like the wary sodbusters, seemed to think that they were even worse than the original problems, whether those solutions meant systematic deregulation, a Neanderthal border wall, less utopian internationalism and more self-interested nationalism, offending Europeans, dreaded tariffs, a taboo interest in the plight of the white lower-middle class, or an ossified idea that immigration should be legal, diverse, measured, and meritocratic.
In early 2015, it looked as though Republicans would nominate the third Bush, Jeb, against the Democrats’ second Clinton, Hillary. In some sense, the public could neither win nor lose: There was little risk that either likely nominee would as president disrupt the status quo, and yet the status quo was also slowly ossifying America.
Neither Jeb nor Hillary would run on “Make America Great Again.”
They’d prefer something similar to the Obama administration’s idea of slow and managed decline, putting the U.S. more on par with other nations — and deservedly so given our relative un-exceptionalism and our horror-filled past.
The idea of welcoming in the gunslinger-outsider Trump was deemed absurd. To the extent that we sod-busters had contemplated something similar (a Ross Perot candidacy in 1992 and 1996) or actually voted in larger-than-life “problem solvers” (Governors Jesse Ventura in Minnesota and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California), the results had ranged from unimpressive to disastrous.
Then came 2016, and the public turned to Trump, despite his lurid personal history. Voters did not ask too much about Trump’s checkered but admittedly successful business career; they assumed that he somehow had enough skills to become a billionaire, despite having to navigate New York City’s unions, politicians, community organizers, regulators, environmentalists, tax collectors, and tough competitors. So perhaps the fewer questions about Trump’s past, the better. Trump himself joked that he had few good traits, and that had he taken to drink, he would have become “the worst.” (As he put it recently: “I can honestly say I’ve never had a beer in my life. It’s one of my only good traits. I don’t drink. Can you imagine if I had? What a mess I would be? I would be the world’s worst.”)
Trump himself seemed to welcome the idea of riding into Washington, becoming a settled politician, at least for a while, and standing up for his sod-buster red-state base against the proverbial barons of globalization, the swamp, and the bi-coastal elite.
But Trump had achieved success not by temporizing and splitting the difference, much less by euphemisms and “presidential” comportment. Rather, he was flamboyant, controversial, blunt, often cruel, and apparently indifferent to the controversies and even animus that he inspired in the pillars of the establishment. One of the brilliant nuances in Stevens’s film is that he hints that the smiling, nice-guy Shane is not always such a nice guy, as we glimpse in the retro verbal insult he lobs to provoke a fatal shoot-out with Wilson and his bosses: “I’ve heard that you’re a low-down Yankee liar.”
Trump has often tried to act the part of a president, despite the nonstop media criticism and the 24/7, 360-degree Resistance that has pulled out all the stops, declaring him an ethically corrupt profiteer and authoritarian, physically unfit, and mentally unhinged — in any case, subject to removal by either impeachment or the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
But as the centrists of the suburbs showed in the recent midterm elections, those who saw Trump as necessary in 2016 may now see him as optional in 2018 — and probably because of his successes rather than his failures. In other words, good times allow well-off voters to forget bad times. Success breeds options. They are freed to turn their attention to the controversial means that had achieved for them their desired ends.
The once impossible is now deemed ordinary. The third-quarter 2018 economic and monthly employment reports have set near records.
Between July and September 2018, the U.S. economy expanded at a 3.5 percent clip. That was the first time in a decade that it had exceeded 3 percent growth over a consecutive twelve-month period. In October alone, the economy added a quarter million new jobs. That number included 1,000 manufacturing jobs a day.
Unemployment has dipped to 3.7 percent, the lowest peacetime jobless rate in a half century. There are now more unfilled jobs than the number of those unemployed. Wages grew 3.1 percent in 2018.
The number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits fell to just 1.63 million. That was the lowest since 1973, when there were 120 million fewer Americans. The U.S. is now the largest producer of coal, natural gas, and oil in the world.
Trump more or less achieved such success by helping the Congress ram through tax reform. He ignored hysterical criticism as he deregulated on a massive scale and green-lighted the largest energy expansion in recent history. Trump jawboned corporations to stop outsourcing and offshoring. He bullied allies and rivals to trade fairly rather than freely.
In other words, the outsider and gunslinger Trump, as president, used the same brutal and at times unsavory skills he had picked up in the private sector. Daily, Trump tweeted retorts to his myriad of attackers. No one was too small or too big to win exemption: All that mattered was that if anyone drew first on Trump, he would empty his six-shooter back, in a way quite disturbing even to those who had once invited him in.
Two years later, then, the hostile reaction to Trump is a sort of proof of his success.
Recently ex-president Barack Obama barnstormed the country trashing Trump. No longer was he ridiculing the candidate Trump of 2016 as a faker who would need a “magic wand” to get the economy to a promised 3 percent rate of GDP growth. Instead, Obama claimed that Trump was merely running on the fumes of Obama’s own supposedly successful presidency. After eight years of (unimpressive) investment, Trump is unfairly receiving the belated dividends, Obama says, and is being unduly lauded for 44’s unheralded work.
Now we hear that Hillary Clinton, while in Europe, suggested closing borders to the West and admitted that massive illegal immigration is disrupting the social stability of Europe and by implication the United States. Who knows, she may soon talk of a border wall, albeit no doubt dressed with Diego Rivera–like murals and smiley faces.
Only rarely does a naïve but honest op-ed writer confess that Trump’s punitive measures against Vladimir Putin have dwarfed those of the reset Obama administration, or that his energy policy has cut into OPEC and Russian oil profits. In some sense, Trump is Saudi Arabia’s greatest threat, given that fracking and vast new American oil production have weakened the kingdom’s grip over the West.
But mostly the press and the Resistance focus on Trump’s crassness. This past week, they were appalled for the nth time by Trump —because he dared to say that the federal circuit court of northern California is politicized and often used by progressives as a means of stopping Trump, and because he noted that terrible forest management resulted in California’s recent infernos of death and destruction, and because he frankly stated that the status quo, and long engagement with Saudi Arabia, should not be thrown away because of a crown prince’s atrocious medieval murdering of an internal and likely Islamist dissident.
How then did Shane end up?
Likely limping away alone and un-credited back among the sod-busters of Wyoming.
Never has suburban America done better economically. It certainly appreciates that North Korea is not threatening nuclear-tipped missile launches at the West Coast. It likes the idea that the U.S. is producing more oil than either Saudi Arabia or Russia. If polls are an indication, it certainly does not want throngs of illegal aliens crashing through the southern border. And it probably thinks that China has no business cheating its way to world dominance.
But suburban dwellers seem embarrassed, of late, that the solutions to these once intractable dilemmas came from someone with a dubious past and a habit of saying and doing things incompatible with their own suburban norms. And they are learning that Trump can no more stop tweeting or ridiculing than Shane could put down his guns (“There’s no going back”). I don’t think the sod-busters in later years ever put up a statue to Shane, the liberator.
Whether Trump rides out wounded in 2020 or 2024, he will likely do so as a lonely figure — and perhaps he will not be appreciated or even especially missed by the very people he benefited.
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