Tag Archives: barack obama

09.02.18
by

I Like Meghan McCain?

It was the sneer that finally won me over.

I’d like to say it was Pres. Obama’s lofty message of inclusion or George W. Bush poking fun at himself and finally seeming to mean it.

But it wasn’t.

Even the lost, help me looks on the faces of Ivanka and Jared as they desperately searched the room for allies, or even a safe place that would never materialize, couldn’t match it.

but like.. WHY ARE YOU THERE?!

That was because this was a simple rebuke to everything they now stand or perhaps sit for, as they were forced to do on this day.

Yup, the words that preceded it made it better.  But many of the words in Meghan McCain’s 17-minute eulogy of her father, Sen. John McCain, at the National Cathedral on Saturday were powerful.  Though none more so than:

The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXRlkQVinTI?start=788

Those words, clever though they may be, might have hung in the air as yet another slogan of pure patriotic psychobabble were it not for – that sneer.  That two

seconds of unbridled emotion that encapsulates everything the majority of the country now feels each and every day.

You can’t plan that look, it just happens when you’re in the moment and feeling it.

Okay, perhaps Meryl Streep could mete it out but who among us has that kind of technique???  There are 21 Oscar nominations to answer you back – NO ONE.

Well, yes, but only because I’m dead.

Still, words are words, slogans are slogans and who among the now 60% of the country that stand against Trump haven’t at one time or another thought, said or heard variations.

Certainly Ms. McCain’s aren’t much better than any of the ones we’ve encountered and will ourselves utter in the not so distant future (Note: Nee tomorrow).

But that spontaneous look of disdain the minute those words sputtered out.  Heck, that was some rare, unvarnished truth on display on the national stage.

Say what you will, but this was REAL

Anyone who has lost a parent will tell you that nothing you feel is phony.  You might know Mom or Dad is terminally ill, play out the moment endlessly, but still, when it occurs, and for an unforeseeable time afterwards, you are in a jagged whirl of gut-wrenching reality.

Not everything you SAY, especially the polite and nice stuff, is true but every emotion your face SHOWS is real…and raw.   Every moment of anger, of disdain, of acidic retribution (especially the non-verbal kind) are as dependable as the fact that for the rest of your life you will be either motherless or fatherless.  It doesn’t matter what is later countered, massaged or full out denied.  Trust what a mourner is showing you, if you dare.   They are the most honest moments any of you, or us, will ever see from them.

I’ve never been a Meghan McCain fan or hater.  She’s one of those people – and they are rare – that I’ve never had much of an opinion about because she’s had so little effect on my world.

That’s all changed.  You can count me now always on the side of fan.

wait… what?

It takes a lot to get up before a large group of people at your parent’s funeral and in so many non-words, tell one of his enemies to go F—K himself.  Now think of what it takes to actually have the nerve to say it in words, feel it on your face, and do it before an international audience, where it will be preserved in perpetuity, to the President of the United States.

Okay, the Electoral College President of the United States.

As far as we know.

For now.

Srsly. When is he gone??? #AREWETHEREYET?!?!

I’d like to think I could do that, gladly, but I’m not entirely sure.  It’s one thing to tell DJT to bugger off on Twitter, or in your living room to your TV set – as I’ve roared countless times – but it’s a whole other ball of wax to muster it publicly and withstand, as Kathy Griffin calls, it, the Trump Woodchipper.

You won’t read here what the Trumpsters are saying about her but go online to the platform of your choice if you need confirmation.  Though it doesn’t take much imagination.  They’re not known, for the most part, to be original with the insults.  Pick up any rock pre-1962 and something might crawl out akin to what you might read.  Or hear.

Yep, logic no longer exists. #theend

I’d like to be able to take a lesson from the words said by Pres. Obama at the service.  To really hear him and act accordingly when he says:

So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse seems small and mean and petty.  Trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage.  It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear.  John called on us to be bigger than that, he called on us to be better than that.

Well, I believe I am doing that by in some small way by writing about the death of a person with whom I never agreed with politically (Note: Actually, I loathed his views on pretty much everything and will never forgive him for creating Sarah Palin) and really seeing him, his family and those he surrounded himself with merely as people who today I could not only learn something from and admire but…actually…could like.

But to accept as valid or do anything but repudiate what Sen. McCain’s former campaign manager Steve Schmidt on Saturday called….

…the vileness, the corruption, the self-centeredness, the selfishness and the cruelty that we see emanate from the White House in the form of President Donald Trump everyday….

It’s s a bridge too far for me.

… and yet here I am quoting a man who ran the McCain-Palin campaign #miraclescanhappen

And that goes for anyone who works for him, votes for him or in any way supports him.

For me, it only starts with a sneer.    I have no idea where it will all end.

Unless we all VOTE.

“Danny Boy” – Renee Fleming

12.31.17
by

A New Year?

It was a simple thought, really. But is anything simple when it comes from 2017’s most admired man in America?

Talk about the Audacity of Hope. Or Despair. How you read this message depends on what you see as the world and how you want to change it.

(Note: And yes, I’m calling it a message. I refuse to say what the above guy writes are tweets).

So – what HAS he written that has provoked so many negative, vitriolic responses? Things like:

— Empty words from a souless man  

— Liberalism: Logic’s Retarded Cousin

Or my personal favorite:

— Isis has run out of money now that Obama’s not in office.

Yes, those were real. And no, I didn’t include the very worst of them. One of my 2018 resolutions is to be more positive and the year has barely even started yet.

So then — let’s break it down.

Get Involved.

Get Engaged.

Stand up.

Don’t we ALL want (our fellow) citizens to do this? Or, maybe only the people who are fighting for what’s right. People on OUR SIDE.

You feel me???

I’ll cop to some of that. It was appalling to me that this was the year I saw tens of thousands of people unfazed that actual NAZIs or NAZI supporters were marching through the streets of Virginia – with weapons and lit Tiki torches they bought at Home Depot – shouting anti-Semitic and racist chants at Blacks, Jews and anyone else who would listen.

No, I didn’t want them to NOT be allowed to march. I was just mortified that so many other people I’ve probably met in traveling across our country don’t really care. Or, in part, agree with them.

I wonder if the drowning of sorrows has been good for the wine industry #illtakeabottle

So yeah, there’s a chunk of me that does NOT want them standing up any more than they already have or getting engaged any more than they probably did for fear that they will win. And continue to do so.

Each of us can make a difference, and all of us ought to try.

On the other hand, the healthier part of me relishes their engagement.  Because I can’t believe that the more engaged they get the more educated and real their worlds will become and they will meet enough Blacks and Jews, or be exposed to so many more real facts on their issues, that they will realize the error of their ways and spread the word to those who are like-minded.

Pass me the rosie shades

Historically, hate and exclusion always does LOSE in the very long term because human beings have the power of critical thinking and, at the end of the day, will do the right thing…after they’ve exhausted all other possibilities.

Okay, I didn’t make up that last part. It’s an unconscious paraphrase of what Winston Churchill once presumably said about us:

You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.

Or a paraphrase of a key line from Anne Frank’s famous diary:

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

Trying to find that optimism

Anne, like Martin Luther King, Jr. and others after her, didn’t live to see the days of peace and tranquility. But we all stand in proof that they did happen. Which does not answer a question that always comes to mind when thinking about such wise, forward-thinking individuals:

What would they think of iPhones? What would they be like on social media? And – who would THEY say their most admired American is of the last few years? Or ten years?

So go keep changing the world in 2018.

I suspect that they might agree with the majority of Americans in every Gallup poll of the last decade and choose Barack Obama.

Mic drop forever

Yes, it was announced a few days ago that he once again topped the poll for the 10th time in a row. But it’s the fact that he did it this time that makes it so record-breaking. 2017 was the first year EVER that an elected American president did not win in his first year in office.

So clearly the world has not changed enough for some people.

Perhaps that is because our current president – nee ELECTORAL COLLEGE POTUS –wasn’t so much elected by the majority (Note: He LOST the popular vote by more than THREE MILLION) but barely chosen by a Constitutional anomaly (i.e. the Electoral College – a system designed to protect the voices of smaller states but, given the radical population shifts away from them in the last century, has caused a more lopsided tilt of power in recent years towards a much smaller but very vocal conservative base).

There’s that optimism again #help

This is not to tar and feather all of that base with raging responses citing Isis, a lack of soul and the 2017 politically incorrect use of the word retard.   Just some of them.

Do I really want them to continue to be engaged?

Oy.

Do we(I) have a lot of work do to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88EB0TEGQDA