Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Dignity Matters

     Look, I'm sorry, but dignity matters.  Especially if you're the village preacher, the Mayor...or President of the United States.  You wear a nice suit and you mind what you say.  As President Coolidge observed, in public office, "...the American public wants a solemn ass...."

     I just spent ten minutes looking up the source of a Presidentially-applied nickname, thanks to Mr. Trump using it (as he has for at least six years) and a social-media teapot-tempest that erupted over it.  Sources I can trust to take a jaundiced view of President Trump, from a Left-leaning Israeli newspaper to the Washington Post, not to mention the guy who carries the nickname himself, assure me that "sleepy eyes" has barely got legs as an anti-Semitic slur.  It stands up well as a nickname right out of a rejected Little Rascals script, and that's probably about as deep as it gets.

     But dammit, why am I even wasting time looking this up?  Doesn't he have a surgical scar from a gall-bladder operation he can show us, an enemies list to compile or an intern to chase around the desk in the Oval Office?  A homicidal rabbit to clobber?

     Some days, I miss Nan Britton.  But I miss Calvin Coolidge even more.

3 comments:

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

I have no idea what this latest hurnicane* is about, having too much to do right now to be bothered by the news media — but your token Jew here assures you that he has heard the term in question all his life and has never associated it with anti-Semitism.

___________
* Cyclonic storm in an urn, i.e., tempest in a teapot.

pigpen51 said...

I find Trump to be an ass, and am ashamed of the way he acts. Some of the things that he does I actually approve of. Some of the things he has done have caused our country to have a greater standing within the world, at least as part of the power of our military and our resolve to protect our selves and our friends and allies.

It would be for the best if he were a one term president, but I don't know if that will happen. It is certainly sad that it has taken a buffoon like him to bring about change to our country, which is needed. Let's hope that our next president has the same intentions, but not the baggage.

Roberta X said...

Fuzzy, you're not a "token!"

Pigpen51: I find him crass and his policies strike me as floundering -- though the policies of most (if not all) Administrations are, with varying degrees of good or bad PR. Time will tell how it works out. Like nearly all Presidents of my lifetime, he gets more hate than he probably deserves, much of it over trivia or speculative nonsense. Nobody wants to hate the President they've got when when they can reinvent him as the President they fear he might be, and loathe *that.*