really hate this stuff. I am so sick of it, so disgusted by it. It is enough almost to get me thinking about watching football again. But the Year Without Football has been too sweet. So, energized by another weekend of seeing no one kneel in disrespect to my flag, here goes:
1. President Donald J. Trump is occasionally very crude, a boor. A bulvan. The kind of person whom many mothers a century ago would bring into a bathroom and wash his mouth with soap — and real soap, a solid bar of ivory, not the fragrant liquid soaps of today. The thing is, American voters knew all of this well in advance of electing him to be the 45thpresident of the United States. We knew about the size of his hands — because he told us. We knew about his plumbing — because he told us. That is who he is. There were so many debates, so many speeches. No one honestly can say “I had no idea that the man speaks like this.” We all knew — and the American people, after balancing the pros (Trump) and the cons (the Clintons), elected him.
2. Trump Tower may be in Manhattan, but the man is not “of Manhattan.” He is from Brooklyn and Queens. In Brooklyn and Queens, people tawk differently from the way they communicate in Manhattan. I grew up in that ’hood. The horribly vulgar and offensive term “sh*thole” isnota racist term. In Brooklyn and Queens parlance, it simply is not. It refers to the typical New York subway station, to three-quarters of the neighborhoods, to the homes of friends who beat you at poker or in games of flipping baseball cards when you lose. It refers to the home of anyone who beats you in anything. Any Mets or Yankees player who has had a bad week is assumed to hail from such a residential aperture. Outfielder Jay Bruce, when he first arrived at the Mets two summers ago and had a miserably inauspicious run, heard any numbers of encouragements from Mets fans to return to the “sh*thole” whence he came. In fact, he had come from Cincinnati, a lovely city on the majestic Ohio River, home to some of the finest cuisine in America, and at least as elegant as Bensonhurst, Brooklyn or Jamaica, Queens. But, with his unproductive summer, New Yorkers at CitiField urged him to return to whatever sh*thole he came from. Thereafter, in the following year, Mr. Bruce played magnificently for the Metsies, and the fans loved him. Indeed, when he was traded to Cleveland late last season, they mourned his departure — so much that the team just bought him back from Ohio for the next three years at a cost of $39 million. That is the meaning of that vulgarity. It is used too easily, too matter-of-factly, to describe everything from a snooty 5-star restaurant that will not permit the male patrons to dine without a proper coat and tie, to a school that assigns homework over Christmas. So, a bit of translation is in order.
3. Mitt Romney never would speak like that. That is why so many of us Republicans would rather see our children grow up like Mitt Romney than like Donald Trump. We would hope that our daughters would marry a fellow like a Mitt Romney rather than like a Donald Trump. Mitt Romney bears himself with dignity. He speaks with gentility. He is, by every definition, a refined statesman. One other thing: He also lost the 2012 Presidential election, partly because he was too polite and well-mannered to call Candy Crowley out for cheating during the critical third presidential debate. Donald Trump? One shudders — or giggles — just to imagine how he would have handled Crowley’s cheating during that debate. By contrast, Romney handled it like a gentleman — and that is why Obama was reelected in 2012 and empowered to continue damaging the American economy, weakening and imperiling American security overseas, and promoting the decline of American culture. Had the 2012 Republican candidate showed courage and presence of mind at that crucial moment in that third debate, today there would be no Iran nuclear program with a ridiculous treaty that saw us secretly flying $33 billion in cold cash to pay ransom to the mullahs. The achievements of the Surge in Iraq would not have been squandered. The tax cuts and reform could have been implemented four years ago. No salsas and sell-out to Havana and the murderous Castros. Five brutal savage butchers would not have been let out of Gitmo for Bowe Bergdahl. The Cliven Bundy nonsense would have been avoided. The Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline would have been approved years ago. We would have been spared John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Susan Rice. The federal appellate courts and federal district courts would have been cleaned up years ago. Alas, the Republicans instead ran a refined, genteel candidate, and he lost an election that he should have won.
4. After eight years of Obama in office, signing executive orders and bypassing the constitutional legislative process of governing, bragging of his phone and pen, Republicans understood that it would take a bulldozer, or even a bull, to come to Washington and to make American great again. Even Trump has discovered that even he could not just walk in with a mop and bleach, and clean the swamp. No one — not even Trump — even began to realize how deep the Deep State is, what a mess the swamp is.
Anyone that has gone through a full remodel knows this isnt going to be pretty.
Trump has already begun draining the swamp of its worst bottom dwellers. Blumenauer, Lewis, Waters and Wilson will not be present at the SOTU speech. Maybe more Democrats that have contributed to creating shitholes all around the nation will choose to keep their faces off the television screen. So much the better.