Innoculation Alert: Anti-venom serum may be needed because the viper-snark is flowing hot and deep with today;s Daily Double from The Krait (Gail Collins) and The Cobra (Maureen Dowd). Both of these vipers bite The Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office repeatedly. If this is a (fair & balanced) lesson in Political Herpetology, so be it.
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[1] The Oval Office Rabbit Hole — Gail (The Krait) Collins — With The First Snark-Venom Injection
[2] Oval Office Corporal Punishment — Maureen (The Cobra) Dowd — With The Second Snark-Venom Injection
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Down the Rabbit Hole With Donald
By The Krait (Gail Collins)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
If you had to pick the weirdest moment of the week, would it be:
Feel free to add your own. Whatever you say, I’ll probably believe you. It’s as if we’ve fallen down a rabbit hole and landed in a Wonderland totally devoid of wonder.
Even if you really, really want Donald Trump to be a total failure hurtling his way back toward civilian life, it’s not comforting to have a president who’s so out to lunch. Just think about that trip to Texas. McAllen, the city Trump chose to demonstrate the terror of wall-free borders, was recently listed by US News & World Report as one of the best places to retire in the nation. But the president, who was making only his second trip to the border since he took office, assured the public he knew how terrible things are because “I have been there numerous times.”
And that was just one tiny piece of his week! The big news, of course, was our catapult toward an all-time government shutdown record.
Pop quiz: When Trump was invited to comment on the pain of the unpaid government workers, did he say:
A) That it’s better than being killed by an illegal immigrant.
B) That a lot of them think it’s worth missing their salaries to get a wall.
C) That he, too, had to suffer by spending the holidays in the White House.
D) All of the above.
OK, I know that was too easy.
It does feel as if we’ve fallen down a rabbit hole into an alternate universe that is definitely not Wonderland. Just keep telling yourself that it isn’t going to last forever. Soon the presidential primary races will be underway and concerned citizens will have something to talk about besides the Mad Hatter. It looks as if the Democrats are going to have lots of serious policy discussions. And the fact that this week Beto O’Rourke posted videos of himself having his teeth cleaned is just one hint that there will also be plenty of cheering diversion.
Meanwhile, your best options near-term are either to get together with friends and drink heavily, or crawl under your bed and assume a fetal position.
If the floor under the bed looks too dusty, you can always hire a government employee to vacuum.
Just for the sake of perspective, try to imagine how the nation would have responded if Trump’s week had happened under Barack Obama. Obviously Obama didn’t have a yen for border walls. But he was a big proponent of gun regulation — suppose, just for the sake of comparison, he told Congress he wanted billions of dollars to confiscate all the automatic weapons in the country.
Then imagine the opposing party dug in its heels, and Obama announced he was going to veto any spending package that didn’t include his plan. The government shuts down. Then Obama makes a special address to the nation from the Oval Office. “My fellow Americans: Tonight I am speaking to you because there is a growing crisis over guns,” he begins.
No fair pointing out that at least he wouldn’t sound like he was gasping for breath every time he read a sentence off the teleprompter.
By now, in our parallel universe, the nation — which had heard the gun speech several thousand times before — begins to drift away or debate whether his sniffling was from hay fever or nerves. Nobody’s mind gets changed, but the next day congressional leaders try to sit down and work out a compromise that might, say, invest a lot more money to enforce the existing laws. Obama ignores them and demands, “Do all guns go?” When they say no, he slaps the table, walks out the door, and lets the government just… stop. And maybe whines a little bit about how he had to spend Christmas in Washington.
Well, obviously Republicans would be shrieking for Obama’s impeachment. But Trump just goes babbling along. Secure in his conviction that the best way to protect our safety involves stopping the pay for air traffic controllers.
When a reporter asked whether he accepted the old Harry Truman line about how “the buck stops here,” our president responded that “the buck stops with everyone.” He won’t even admit where the buck stops! Do you think that’s because he’s just incapable of accepting responsibility or because he doesn’t know who Harry Truman was?
On the plus side, in the future you can tell your grandchildren that you were there when the government set records for not being open for business. For now, take a federal worker to lunch. ###
[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she took a leave in order to complete America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to the Times as a columnist in July 2007. She received a BA (journalism) from Marquette University and an MA (government) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Gail Collins’s newest book is As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda (2012).]
Copyright © 2019 The New York Times Company
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Nancy Pelosi Spanks The First Brat
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
Two men, sons of immigrants, rising to be the head of their own empires, powerful forces in their ethnic communities. Both dapper and mustachioed with commanding personalities. And both wielding a potent influence on the children who learned at their knees and followed them into the family businesses.
But here’s the difference: Big Tommy D’Alesandro Jr. taught little Nancy how to count. Fred Trump taught Donald, from the time he was a baby, that he didn’t have to count — or be accountable; Daddy’s money made him and buoyed him.
Fred, a dictatorial builder in Brooklyn and Queens from German stock, and Big Tommy, a charming Maryland congressman and mayor of Baltimore from Italian stock, are long gone. But their roles in shaping Donald and Nancy remain vivid, bleeding into our punishing, pressing national debate over immigration, a government shutdown and that inescapable and vexing Wall.
At this fraught moment when the pain of the shutdown is kicking in, President Trump and Speaker Pelosi offer very different visions — shaped by their parents — of what it means to be an American.
When Trump gave his Oval Office address, the framed photo of his dad was peering over his shoulder. In her House speaker’s office in the Capitol, Pelosi prominently displays a photo of herself at 7, holding the Bible as her father is sworn in as Baltimore mayor in 1947.
D’Alesandro was a loyal New Deal Democrat, just as Pelosi — the first daughter to follow her father into Congress — is a resolute liberal. She grew up in a house with portraits of FDR and Truman.
Donald Trump spent most of his life as a political opportunist, learning from his dad that real estate developers must lubricate both sides of the aisle. Trump was once friendly with Pelosi, sending her a note in 2007 when she won the speaker job the first time — with a boost from his $20,000 donation to the party — calling her “the best.” (Unlike with “Cryin’ Chuck,” Trump has not gone for the jugular with a nasty nickname for Pelosi.)
In her memoir, Pelosi recalled that her Catholic parents “raised me to be holy.” She told me, “My mother and my father instilled in us, public service is a noble calling” and to “never measure a person by how much money they had.”
A constant stream of strangers lined up at their house in Baltimore’s Little Italy, seeking food and help. One of Pelosi’s most arresting memories, she told CNN’s Dana Bash, was giving immigrants who came to the door advice on how to get into the projects or to the hospital.
Alexandra, Pelosi’s documentarian daughter, recounts this anecdote: Her son, Thomas — who was named after Big Tommy and who stood at the speaker’s side as she reclaimed her gavel — wanted an Xbox in 2017, so he set up a lemonade stand in Manhattan and raked in $1,000.
His grandmother sat him down and asked, “That’s going to the victims of Hurricane Harvey, right?”
He set up the stand again the next year and was once more schooled by his grandmother asking, “That’s going to the victims of the California wildfires, right?”
Contrast that with Don Jr.’s uncharitable message on Instagram on Tuesday: “You know why you can enjoy a day at the zoo? Because walls work.”
Where the D’Alesandros saw the downtrodden and immigrants as people to weave into the American dream, the Trumps saw suckers to squeeze.
According to The Times’s blockbuster tax investigation, Fred lavished Donald with three trust funds and $10,000 Christmas checks. When Donald was 8, he was already a millionaire, thanks to his tax-scamming father. Fred Trump was hauled before a congressional panel investigating whether he had looted government money through fraud. (One congressman said the patriarch’s chicanery made him “nauseous.”)
By the time Donald was 27, he had fully absorbed Trump family values, a callous inversion of noblesse oblige: He and his father were getting sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent to blacks. As Woody Guthrie, who lived in a Fred Trump complex near Coney Island, wrote in a song, “I suppose/Old Man Trump knows/just how much/racial hate/he stirred up/in the bloodpot of human hearts.” Not quite the same as “This Land Is Your Land.”
Fred’s favorite parlor trick was calculating big numbers in his head. But when Howard Stern had Donald, Ivanka and Don Jr. on his show in 2006 and asked them a multiplication question, they were all stumped.
Over the years, Fred funneled tens of millions of dollars to clean up Donald’s messes. The father even gave the son $3.5 million in chips to save an Atlantic City casino. By the time he was in his 40s, Donnie’s allowance was more than $5 million annually. No wonder he’s still an infant.
When Trump said he could “relate” to federal workers who are now going without pay, it may have been the most audacious lie he told all week. He may know what it’s like to go from bankruptcy to bankruptcy — though always with a paternal safety net — but he has no idea of what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck, much less none at all.
As Pelosi told reporters: “He thinks maybe they could just ask their father for more money. But they can’t.” She also leveled the barb on Trump in person.
Pelosi deploys what she calls her “mother of five” voice on our tantrum-prone president, perhaps in an effort to reparent him. But how do you discipline the world’s brattiest 72-year-old? ###
[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]
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