4541 Voting Our Feelings

That’s how they used to spell it.

The trump cult has swallowed the Kool-Aid.  This all started with the soft drink in the 1890s, the brainchild of a Nebraska Postmaster, Edwin Perkins.  The brand remains a good seller.  But it carries the weight of the Jim Jones debacle in which the religious cult leader caused the deaths of 900 followers who drank a generic version of the drink laced with poison.

So for the past 48 years, “Drinking the Kool-Aid” has acquired a sinister meaning.  And we are fond of saying “Drinking the Kool-Aid” has become shorthand for the irrational following of a madman.

This leads us to today’s thought: We vote our feelings, not our beliefs or thoughts.  Some Very Smart People are affected just the same as the rest of us dummies.  IQ doesn’t count.  

Buried among the trumpets, there are bound to be some people who see him as the scuzz he is but will vote for him even so. Why? 

--“I’m a Republican. The Dems are commies. I don’t want to live in a socialist state. He may be imperfect, but he’s OUR imperfect.”

--“He’ll keep the teeming hordes of people with dark skin from infesting our neighborhoods, raping our women and stealing our jobs.”

--“It’s about time someone tells it like it is.”

These are the pipedreams of the right.

You can’t break people from this kind of thinking, so don’t try.

About those Very Smart Voters, the ones on the left? They’re for this democrat or that because, well, it feels right.  And often they hide behind intellect.

--“We need a revolution.”

--“We need to eliminate billionaires,”

--“We need to tax the super-rich into poverty that matches our own.”

--“We need to end corruption.”

--“No Justice, No Peace.”

These are the pipe dreams of the left.

None of these pipe dreams has a future if we remember a few well-chosen things:

--Dreams, pipe or otherwise, don’t come true without the cooperation of the non-dreamers.

--No one’s agenda, no matter how extreme can overcome an overwhelming vote.

--No one’s agenda -- not trump’s, not Bernie’s, not Mike’s, not Biden’s (if you can figure it out) will be approved and become law in your lifetime, if ever.

So what’s the secret to this Kool-Aid Krowd? 

There are two.  One is as old as George Washington’s campaign for a second term:  Swill them with Bumbo. Our First President was not averse to ladling out stiff drinks to a walk-by campaign lineup.

The other: Swamp ‘em at the polls.

While the inconsequential candidates remain inconsequential, the consequential candidates are busy with inconsequential nonsense.

C’mon, people.  The only issue is trump.  Not the man, but the leader of the pack-gone-wild. Once gone, the so-called “base” will fall apart, the name of the game is winning. Nothing more, nothing less.  His surrogates -- McConnell and Graham, et al., will fade into oblivion where they unquestionably belong.

The Democratic Socialists don’t realize that the US is way more complicated than Denmark and way more diverse. The knee-jerk peaceniks don’t realize that pulling out of Afghanistan and the war for the so-called soul of Syria are marginal to many voters.

Sure, our overseas underworld deserves to be eliminated. Sure, the individualism over community of the Libertarians is unworkable. And the anti-establishment wackos don’t realize that “establishment Democrats” are people, too and they have values that are encouraged by the Constitution and by history.

I’m Wes Richards, the pro-establishment dupe and whore. My opinions are my own but if you don’t like them, you’re likely to be destroyed by normal and average Americans. And some Very Smart People.

© WJR 2020  

4537 Knee Deep in the Big Sandy

Tehran at night. No sign of sand here, but you don’t have to travel far to find it.

LBJ brought marathon escalation to modern warfare. Now trump is carrying on a great American tradition.

Johnson didn’t start the war in Vietnam.  But he didn’t finish it, either. Ho Chi Minh did that. We lost.  Folksinger Pete Seeger had a small label mini hit record with “Knee Deep in the Big Muddy (And the big fool says to push on.”)

Now, we have the Big Sandy. It’s more complicated than ‘nam.

Ho was a national hero. He had the support of his own puppet regime and the secret allegiance of millions of South Vietnamese who didn’t see him as a commie, but as a great wall against China.

LBJ had some saving graces, even so, the war did him in.  The present occupant of the White House doesn’t have any graces or savings.  But he will not fall victim to the kind of public outcry and uproar that ended the Johnson presidency. And that says more about us than it does about him.

Does the coming war with Iran have any big-time US supporters?  Um… it doesn’t look that way. The chorus of democrats seems pretty united about the idea of not having another shooting war. But if you are a person of draft age, it’s time to have those bone spurs or flat feet certified by a friendly physician.

And some notes to the Pentagon:

1.    Agent Orange doesn’t work in places where the average annual temperature is in three-digit numbers.

2.    It’s way harder to dig secret hiding places and tunnels in sand than it is in the rich, rice-growing soil of ‘nam.

3.    Attention Department of Defense: It’s tougher to work up a supply line from anywhere in the middle east to Tehran than it was from South Vietnam to Hanoi.  So build some roads.

4.    Kissinger is the Ikea of peace talks. He has diagrams for big tables. Learn from his experience. The Iranians are better at complicating things than North Vietnam was.

So, seriously… do we need another shooting war to lose? Do we need another perpetual war?  Do we need another draft? All of these “winning” strategies loom large in the future.

There’s another little problem in fighting with Iran. As far as we know, North Vietnam did not have an atomic weapons arsenal. We can’t be sure that Iran doesn’t or won’t. And we can’t count on anyone else joining us in a new war.  Our alleged president has alienated all of our would-be allies.  There will be no coalition, not even the kind the Bushs faked in Iraq.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020

4531 The Piltdown President

Prehistoric man swings more modern caveman’s club.

Maybe Piltdown man wasn’t a hoax, after all.  Back in the era when PT Barnum was considered non-fiction, someone claimed to unearth the skull of the missing link -- what supposedly came b

just before humans.  The “discoverer” was an archeology hobbyist named Charles Dawson.  And he said he made the discovery in Piltdown, which is near Sussex which is in England.

This happened in 1912 which itself is often considered pre-historic.

It took actual archeologists and a bevy of other scientific types to conclusively “prove” that Piltdown Man was a hoax.  That happened in 1953.  It took 41 years to figure out that Dawson might have made the whole thing up.  Apparently, the bone fragments smelling of hide glue didn’t set off any alarms.

Piltdown man was said to be half a million years in England’s past.  But current thinking has changed.  Put an underdeveloped brain into a critter with a big, loud mouth and what do you get?

That could be the answer about this guy as a throwback and how he set off the reappearance of throwbacks hiding in the closets of their caves.  Those described by the scientists as “fully developed but small-brained.”

The Piltdown skull seems to have been cobbled together with spare parts.  The so-called hoaxers used a handy British skull fragment and some bones from ancient animals and made it look like something half man and half ape.

The only remaining question is how did Piltdown stay out of sight for so long. We’d know more if we had a skull with an open mouth and orange hair.

You have to credit this guy Dawson.  He pulled a fast one on practically everyone.  And those everyones spent longer than the average lifetime of a Piltdowner proving there was no such thing.

But what if they were wrong?  What if there really was a Piltdown Man?  Well, it’s starting to look like there may have been. When we see bones, we don’t also see body fat or development. 

The original skull is still around. Maybe we should dress it up in a fatsuit. Hang a too-long red tie around his neck and compare this with you-know-who.

SHRAPNEL:

--Boeing fired its CEO because of planes that crashed and killed people. But that’s not enough. CEOs are essentially “idea people” and paper pushers.  There’s a whole string of lackeys standing on the line behind the top guy and executing the screwups for him.

--Figurehead Chief Justice Roberts says he will consult with his “inner umpire” in conducting the Senate trial of the impeached president. Who’s he kidding?  The fix is already in.

The staff and management of Wessays™ wish you a happy holiday filled with joy and well-aged fruitcake.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Comments:  Please send to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

4530 Capone Speaks from the Grave

don and Al, brothers who never met.  That we know of.

Al Capone was the most famous gangster of the prohibition era.  He was a ruthless murdering crime boss whose downfall came from a small and insignificant breaking of the law.  If Al had had the inept Rudy Giuliani for a lawyer, he would never have been brought down by the likes of the Federal Prosecutors on the small charge. Eliot Ness got lucky.

But that was a different era.  They got “Al Brown” of the Bronx borough of New York on income tax evasion. He died after serving time, his syphilis did him in, not his criminal empire that had gripped Chicago and much of the rest of the nation.

And now, we have a different kind of gangster.  A con man, a deceiver of a magnitude Capone could never have conceived of and we’re treating him the same way we treated the anti-hero, Capone.

Throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks. Plenty. But the “cops” who “got him” are amateurs.  They have no idea how to bring down a Mobster-Mastermind, which precisely what trump is. (Neither did Giuliani, if you check his record as US Attorney.  Good thing he went into politics, because he had no future as a lawyer as his current client shows.)

Yes, the Democratic majority in the house of representatives impeached trump on two of a potential 11,356 possible counts.  And maybe there’s more to come.  Now, the totally nonpartisan United States Senate will deliberate his fate for ten seconds and declare him “not guilty.” After all, that phone call with the Ukraine president was … perfect.

And Chief Justice Roberts will have no choice to pronounce the President as such.  Delaying the start of the trial sounds delicious. Let that hang over his head for a while.

To be fair, trump is more John Gotti than Capone. He doesn’t observe the kind of silence and grit that Capone represented when questioned about his “associates,” as lawyers and prosecutors call his groupies and lackeys. 

Did you watch any of that eight hour “debate” in the House on Wednesday? Screaming Republican kindergarteners vs. boring self-righteous Democratic know it all frat boys and girls.  

New York Times columnist Gail Collins worries in print that the crazy president will get even crazier and do still more damage before he leaves office, which at some point he will have to.

But what about Capone? What would Al say to trump?  Impossible to tell for sure, of course.  But most likely it would be along the lines of “Cancel the twitter account.  Try to look more like a President.  Hit a bucket or two of golf balls on a driving range each morning. Don’t worry, pally, Americans have a collective short term memory problem. If they can resuscitate my image, they can resuscitate yours.” 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Comments? Please send to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

4529 We Made This Mess

Could the people who thought up and then made America soon find their thoughts put to a new use?

We’re in trouble up to our noses.  It’s not trump or Moscow Mitch. They’re just the byproducts. Maybe the end products. We put ourselves in this muck by being what most of us are: Good Americans.

What’s that?  For the most part, we are generous of spirit.  We have a feeling -- sometimes faint -- for the other guy’s point of view.  We are willing to say that people will do what they believe is right and won’t do what they believe is wrong.  And often, when we’re wrong about something, we admit it.

And we respect authority, at least with our mouths if not our hearts. And sometimes, we respect too much.

The seeds of our current crises were sewn in the 19th century, then grew -- slowly at first -- but steadily.  When the Robber Barons were in their prime we listened to them. They fed us 19th century junk food.  But, look, they’re rich and powerful. Those are good things to be, right?  Let’s try to be Jay Gould or JP Morgan or at least Astor’s pet horse.

People of deep perception took note. And basically, they reigned in the financial terrorists of the Standard Oil era.  Most of us alive today don’t remember when people fought the creation of regulatory agencies as “socialist.” Also “socialist?” Social Security. Voting rights. The war on poverty. Desegregation.  Medicare. Medicaid. Unions.

None of that was even close to socialism. It was simply American institutionalizing helping hands.

But we’re also bent toward letting things go too long in the wrong direction.  After what Tom Brokaw calls the “Greatest Generation,” we got soft. Consumerism was on the rise. The Saturday Evening Post told us it was a big, wide, white and wonderful world. We believed the Dulles brothers -- there were commies at every bus stop waiting to sell us into wage slavery.

Then came William F. Buckley, a fabulous recontour with an agenda. He was essentially an apologist for Pope Pius XII, but an amusing one.

Then came Ayn Rand with her combination of individual “rights,” and “rational self-interest.”

Then it was the John Birch Society, with guns and ammo for the oppressed white majority.  And the anti-Semites and the George Wallaces and the countervailing Black Power-ites and Nation of Islam and the most violent of violent groups the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.  (My mom was Stokely Carmichael’s homeroom teacher.)

Now we have the remaining Koch, Rush Limbaugh, Moscow Mitch and the puppet, trump.  They are anti-reason, they are anti-intellectuals, they ignore facts. They ignore science and they ignore -- the rest of us.

Their central premise is that America has “always” survived and prospers and “always will,” no matter our greed, our excesses and our ignoring of or hostility toward facts, reason and situational awareness.

That’s wrong. And if you don’t stop it, we will implode.  The dynamite for that already is in place. All that’s left is to light the fuse.

It’s too windy for the Bic lighter. Anyone have a Zippo?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Comments? Send to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

4528 The President and the Hershey Bar

This used to cost a nickel.  And it was bigger.

What do you think of when you hear the name “Hershey?” Chances are it’s a candy bar, the chocolate of peasants and kings the world over.

Or maybe you think of the small, unincorporated company hamlet in Pennsylvania with the chocolate factory, museums, a large and well-attended amusement park where people don’t fall off rides. 

There’s also a pretty decent hospital, some charity offices and a couple of dozen saloons, none of which is called “The Hershey Bar,” where people can retire while their friends and families are busy not falling off rides, having their hearts transplanted or getting contact chocolate highs from the factory smokestacks.

And you can’t swing a dead cat in certain areas of the state without hitting someone named Hershey.

it’s also a place where people gather to hear tall tales told by America’s Storyteller, donald trump, currently pretending to be president and always on tour.

And there he was, earlier this week, with a sputtering 90 minute extravaganza of a tall tale, delivered to an allegedly unpaid cheering crowd. And showman that he is, he followed an important rule of vaudeville, never turn your back on the audience.  We’ll see why that’s important at the end of this tale, which is roughly five times shorter than the Great Man’s speech.

Selling his usual snake oil concoction of lies, brags, racism, sexism, antisemitism; salting it with seeds of victimization, and manufacturing fake enemies for you to devour along with him, trump zigged and zagged through his ever-expanding repertoire of disconnected insults.

--The FBI is corrupt, he says.  Then there are the usual cast of countries and characters:

-Hillary

-Russia

-Ukraine

-Any and every Democratic officeholder, former officeholder, potential officeholder… But especially

-Schiff

-Nadler

-Pelosi

-Obama

-Jews

-Nazis

-Socialists

The usual gang of people and things he’s either for or against.

An hour and a half of that is poison. Tell him that and he’ll give you the cure: more poison, more venom.

To use a trumpestuous form of the language: “I don’t know whether or not this is true.  But what I heard is that our teller of tales has a tail. Also, Doctor Bone spurs removed the horns.

The scars that may be on his head are why he wears his hair that way. And the tail is why he never turns his back.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Comments: please send to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

4527 Toiletgate

Where Michael Corleone’s pistol was hidden.

Ok, America, are you flushing too many times?  Your president seems to think you are and that has provoked him to propose deregulation of toilets. 

There is some logic. New toilets must provide for low-water eco-flushes.  So, goes the thought, you’ll have to flush more, thus using one of those old fashioned jobs that can suck the air out of the bathroom and use mega-gallons of water in the process.

Is big water toilet-ness an issue?  Maybe in parts of the south, desert and mountain west. (It’s a dry heat) or in places like North Jersey and Michigan (that water can be used to kill household pests and damage the brains of young children.)

But for much of the country, water is not a big deal -- not nearly as big as in places like sub-Saharan Africa.

The key idea here has nothing to do with water. It has to do with regulation.  Let us point out what a mess deregulation has made of air travel, broadcasting, home mortgages, banking and telecommunications.

Deregulation destroys in the name of creating competition.  It endangers public safety and wellbeing.  It puts your life in the hands of corporate giants and petty locals who don’t care about current generations, let alone that of the future -- if there is one.

Deregulation clouds the air, poisons the water (no matter how often you flush or don’t.)  It puts workers in danger. It provokes greed. It makes education falter and puts students into a lifetime of debt.

Why, you may ask, are politicians so eager these days to deregulate everything except abortion, birth control and international travel, among other bodily functions?  Well, some of it’s the money, the catnip of politicians good and bad.  And power, the crack cocaine.

And there’s a page of the flower power era that answers that: deregulation is Power to the People, with some unnecessary middlemen along the way.

The 1960s liberals eventually brought sanity to abortion and birth control laws, and to the freewheeling capital pirates and hatemongers.  But the slogan is more powerful than what it represents.  Power to the people. The people spoke in the 60s. They are speaking now.

It’s not the same people and the same ideas. But it’s still power to the people.

In the 1960s, the “establishment” thought “we” were wrong. They’ve come around.  And now, they’re the outliers. Again. 

M&A Watch:

--The hillbilly bank of BB&T and the other hillbilly bank, Suntrust, have completed their so-called merger of equals.  This space has predicted failure since the deal was announced.  Now, as further evidence comes the combined bank’s new name, “Truist,” completely moronic despite its near-gargantuan size but judging by the completely moronic name, a failure waiting to happen.

--Let’s look at some other “mergers of equals.” Best example: Daimler Chrysler which ended in disaster for both companies.  Then there’s Chemical-Chase. The smaller partner, Chase, won that one because it had a better known name but survives because the seriously overpaid CEO Jaimie Dimon is a genius with an edge and no one remembers Chemical which actually was a good and temperate junior partner had the assets to make it work.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Comments? Here’s where to send them: wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

4524 Where's the Beef?

Clara Peller rose to fame by asking “Where’s the beef?” in commercials for the Wendy’s fast food restaurant chain.

No, no. Not that kind of beef.  The kind where you “settle this beef outside” if the bar or the malt shop is too crowded for a full-scale knock-down. Malt shops, should any be left, are no longer great venues for hooligans with chips on their shoulders. Bars, that’s another story.

But more to the point, where is your anger?  I mean look at what’s going on all around you and you’re holding it all in?  The president and the rest of his crime family have taken over this country and is dragging it down to third world status faster than can say “quid pro quo.”  Why aren’t you out there raging about this?

Yeah, there are other important issues in your life.  Like “what’s for dinner” or “boy was that a lousy Thanksgiving Day” when your plane to grandma’s ran five hours late and you had to slog through snow en route to the airport at 4 a.m.  

Maybe you’re worried about health insurance or finding a second nickel to rub against the one you have left. Or climate change, the war in who-knows-what-istan, or the Mets or the crack in the ceiling you noticed during your semi-annual sexual encounter.

And maybe you should have a beef with all that stuff.  But don’t diversify. But all your beef in one basket… um...basket case, trump.

Sometimes, all of the michugas we’re going through now has an upside.  Here’s one example.

There is an “Express Bus Only” lane on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. The president has placed a lawn chair thereon. The lawn chair has a sign. It says “reserved for Mr. Giuliani.”  So, Rudy, have a seat.  After telling people to “go see Rudy” about his Ukraine nonsense, trump is ready to allow the express bus to mow his “personal lawyer” down.

When do we hear the president say “I really didn’t know the guy very well?”

Happens all the time with this guy. ReXXon was only the beginning. 

Here’s an election era oddity. Former press secretary Sarah Huckabee says she doesn’t like being known as a liar. Well, Sarah, it would help if you hadn’t spent your entire tenure as press secretary lying.

Under the bus.

ReXXon was the greatest Secretary of State since Thomas Jefferson (1790-1793.) Says... nobody. An oil tycoon with business interests galore in Russia.  Now what?

Here’s the central question, whether or not you’re an American Exceptionalist: Do you want Belgium, China, Russia and Who-knows-what-istan to think of us as one of their own or as a world power? The US is a world power.  But we’re fast becoming Alsace-Loraine or -- even worse -- Monoao or Surinam, Venezuela, or a subsidiary of United Fruit, the one-time kings of Banana Republics.

Grapeshot:

-When Rudy is turned into a real two-dimensional caricature by a fast-moving MM-1 MTA bus, he’ll die like Liberace -- laughing all the way to the bank. 

TODAY’S QUOTE:

- “Hello, suckers!” -- Texas Guinan (1884-1933), Stunningly attractive actress, entrepreneur and con artist who set the pace for generations of politicians and stunning female con artists and is donald trump’s secret role model even if he never heard of her.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please send comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019