Trump has been as good as one can be to John McCain, however McCain by no means [reciprocates], making an attempt to Derail the Trump [Transition].
Most mainstream media reported Saturday that John McCain has gone offensive in opposition to Trump’s reported nomination of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson for secretary of state.
That is the report from The Blaze [sic throughout]:
Sen. John McCain blasted the probably secretary of state nominee of President-elect Courageous Donald Trump Saturday, saying he’s involved about Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s shut ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I don’t know what Mr. Tillerson’s relationship with Vladimir Putin was, however I’ll let you know it’s a matter of concern to me,” McCain mentioned Saturday throughout an interview with Fox Information.
“You wish to give the president of the USA the advantage of the doubt as a result of the individuals have spoken. However Vladimir Putin is a thug, a bully and a assassin, and anyone else who describes him as the rest is mendacity,” he added.
McCain. You like him? You can have him.
The word ‘hero’ used to mean something. Now it’s just an advertising label, used to sell maniacally narcissistic creeps.
Yeah, you and what army? Priceless lech. Not as big a lech, though, as he is a joke.
Really. The only sexual contact this old fool has is what he steals by groping women at state occasions. Does he actually think no one knows what a disgusting dirty old man he is? I guess not. That would go nicely with his 75 IQ.
I hate him. I’ve hated him ever since he led the senate mob that lynched Clarence Thomas. Rot in hell, Biden.
It happened on the campaign trail. A young Trump fan smuggled a cat into a Pennsylvania rally and held it out to the candidate as he passed. “Sweet pussy,” he remarked, whereupon the cat scratched him viciously.
According to reports by NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, FNC, MSNBC, and TMZ, Trump was immediately rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital for emergency surgery.
Anonymous sources within the RNC have disclosed the surgery did not go well, and Trump is now clinging to life by a thread.
“The wound was just too massive to repair,” chortled CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.
NBC’s Chuck Todd confirmed the report in exactly the same words, adding with a chuckle, “What many would call poetic justice.”
Stay tuned for updates as this story develops.
In related news, a team of DNC physicians has announced with great relief that Hillary Clinton is “AOK” after a momentarily disturbing event at a campaign appearance before twelve supporters at the Astrodome in Houston.
Nothing to see here. It was just a mote in the corner of her eyes, probably a fly or something.
Mrs. Clinton is expected to be fine after a 48 hour nap at her home in Chappaqua.
You may have noticed I didn’t blog the debate, and I’m not blogging the polls. It’s all nonsense from here on in. Just a gigantic barroom brawl. Why I’ve been mostly laughing and watching dark documentaries on Netflix.
Spend the next few weeks ignoring the news and having fun.
Howard Roark of The Fountainead spoke eloquently about ego and the creative impulse. Roark was an architect. He refused to compromise and destroyed his own greatest work.
Roark was right and he was wrong. When he talks about the uniqueness and importance of individual creative vision, he is right. When he is prepared to cut off his nose to spite his face in the name of selfishness, he is wrong. It took many compromises for the much maligned, arrogant, and egocentric Trump to create this architectural legacy.
To my knowledge, none of the combatants on either side of the Trump War have ever posted anything like the picture above. No, they talk about how he could have invested his inheritance and made more money. They don’t want you to see what his visionary investments created. Whole fields of more valuable real estate than existed before a Trump building went up. What trust fund kid can claim credit for the thousands and thousands of jobs huge construction projects and the businesses they house engender? Steel and concrete trades, plumbers, electricians, interior designers, desk clerks, blackjack dealers, parking lot attendants, waitresses, chefs, not to mention hotels, casinos, and the architects, structural engineers, and city planners and union workers who derive income from same.
Not to mention what appears to be a unifying esthetic. Sleek, aspirational, glittering. You can hate it if you like, but personally I compare it favorably to the brutalist architecture of Le Corbusier — the Boston City Hall, FBI Headquarters, and mysterious MI-6 enclaves in London.
Boston City Hall
FBI Headquarters
Office block in concrete near High Holborn in London. MI-6? You tell me.
Ah, but if you write a couple of snide columns a week for National Review, you absolutely must be superior to Trump’s architectural and economic record. You incline to the Brutalists. They’re your bread and butter. No bare tits. Just the stacks of stacks of money the establishment controls, along with the force to command obedience. What your wife the lobbyist can bring home. That’s the concrete of your foundation.
Except that Trump is not Howard Roark. He built all this stuff along the way. He does not drink. He does not smoke. He loves women, and regardless of our envy they seem to love him. Alpha male.
Now, when he could be degenerating like Hugh Hefner or Roger Ailes or Bill Clinton into a grasping senile grabber of asses, he puts his life very considerably at risk to be president of the United States. If I were Kevin, I would never have thought about this. The man would have to take a reduction in his standard of living to be president. He already has his own version of Air Force One. Is it possible he loves the country he tried to decorate with his buildings and other largesse? Is it possible a lifetime of experience with the rich and powerful has made him a new age Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. That with old age sometimes comes a character and wisdom we never saw in the youth? That it’s actually his intention to serve?
No, no, no, no, no, no. He’s vulgar. He went to Wharton but not Harvard or Princeton. His wife is beautiful. He talks like a drunken sailor, no mind how many Annapolis grad admirals also talk like drunken sailors. Strikes One, Two, and Three. He is not one of us.
Therefore, we are prepared to hurl the United States into a simulacrum of the fifties Soviet Union.
You know what? Fuck you.
There was always a time when a revolution was required. It’s only the stuffed shirts of every persuasion who ever disagreed.
Kind of like AC/DC. 100 percent cool, 0 percent intellect. But it worked for them. (Except for Bon Scott.) Maybe it will work for us. If we’re not named Bon Scott.
Yes, the woman who wrote a series of goofy children’s books while on the dole in the U.K. has an ax to grind with The Donald.
“British Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling unloaded on presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump in an essay posted to her website this week, calling the candidate a ‘fascist’ who possesses ‘the temperament of an unstable nightclub bouncer.”
We’re supposed to believe her because some clothheads think the Harry Potter books amount to some kind of social satire. Like, she really really hates Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to reduce the number of freeloaders living on the dole. Get tough on the lower classes and they’ll man up or some such thing Rowling really hates. Her not so subtle avatar for Thatcher is Dolores Umbridge.
You know. Disciplinarians are mean, mean, mean.
Except that Dolores Umbridge is actually more a symbol of the socialist welfare state than a stand-in for Thatcher.
And it’s all crap, even in her own terms. The Potter story has nothing to do with politics. She has nothing whatever to say about politics. Rowling’s books are harmless children’s fare, mostly. She is harmless as a spokesperson for anything. Yet another woman who can’t think. Why children’s books are children’s books. Written by children who haven’t ever gotten over their mommy and daddy issues and have to keep inflicting them on the rest of us.
Dolores uses magic but insists that her students don’t. Gun control, anyone? She is not the voice of liberty and individual responsibility. Harry Potter is. Harry is more Thatcherite than most in Britain are today. Though we’ll see, won’t we, if the state succeeds in snuffing out the Brexists?
It’s not politics that’s driving Rowling’s antipathy to Thatcher. It’s the domineering mother figure. Just as her male nightmare, the phantom Voldemort, the abusive father who might still return, is the exemplification of her other terror: the absent abusive father who might yet return.
So Rowling hated her parents. Fine. Her response is to conflate them into a conception called the Dementor. Who steals the life from children.
There’s fictional life and there’s real life. In fictional life, Rowling wants to set the kids free from their oppressive abusive parents. In real life, she aspires to be the Dementor-in-Chief. Taking control of the state and everybody’s lives until there are no lives left worth living.
Good thing we can dismiss it all as a children’s yarn, eh?
We called him Gross Bob. Member of our class at the Cornell Business School. He had livid raised red scars on his face. He was happy to tell you the story. Got pulled over by the state police in Florida on a party night. They didn’t like his off-handed answers, his obvious disdain for their authority. So they beat the crap out of him with their nightsticks. He said he got in a couple of licks too.
He was smart. Good student. But he hadn’t given up partying. So one night a handful of us went to Trumansburg after hours, to a place with a bad rep but a late closing time. You know. Being at Cornell in the middle of nowhere makes you a risk taker unless you’re an Ithaca drone. So we drank, played pool, drank some more. You know the place. Dark, dirty, wide bar with muddy mirror and a lot of resentful locals who don’t like the uptown outsiders on principle.
Which is why, as Gross Bob was starting on his umpteenth scotch, some local got in his face. Which was a mistake. Bob looked like he might be kind of soft, with that middle bulge and all. But it’s the same kind of build heavyweight fighters from the fifties had, and he decked the guy in two seconds flat. Then the others joined in, and Bob was laying them out like a scene in the movies. The action moved back toward the bar and the bartender brought out his baseball bat. So Bob hoisted the guy he was in the process of punching out and hurled him over the bar, into the bartender, and thereby shattered the muddy mirror.
Which kind of brought everything to a halt. The bloody faced bartender was on the phone to the cops. The little Cornellians were ready to flee. Honestly. They wanted to leave Gross Bob behind. I told them we couldn’t do that. So we gathered up Bob and sped off into the night before the police arrived.
The next day, Gross Bob had a cheery grin. “That was some fun last night, right?”
Yeah. It was. Why so many lesser folk are roaring behind Trump. The Gross Bob of 2016. Time to smash the mirror behind the bar. Don’t you think?
So Trump spilled the beans ahead of time with George Stephanopoulos. Told him he tries his best to pay no taxes. Betting money says he’s succeeded at this. Spectacularly. Maybe he can tell us how to do this too.
Second gun. Steve Martin is like Monty Python. Women tend not to get it. They go WTF. Here was his debut on the Tonight Show. Guys wet their pants. Women went WTF.
Trump’s taxes? Who cares. Jennifer Rubin cares. WTF.
Into the barracks at 13. New York Military Academy.
Trump is an ignorant, know nothing, unqualified, undisciplined, vulgar, pampered rich boy idiot?
That’s the story isn’t it? Isn’t it?
Pass this post on to your NeverTrump know-it-all friends.
I know something about Wharton. They and my Cornell Business School, maybe alone in the Ivies, departed from the Harvard Business School model of bullshitting about case studies to learn the math and the formal disciplines of economics, statistical methods, accounting (I, II, III, and IV), and operations methods (Oh yeah. Real math.)
Here’s a list of notable Wharton Alumni. Note who’s pictured as an outstanding member of that unique Ivy League crew.
Before that he attended Fordham Prep/Fordham University, from which he transferred to Wharton. Here’s the background on an incredibly prestigious and historic Jesuit institution.
Geraldine Ferraro, the first female Vice Presidential candidate of a major political party in the United States, attended Fordham, as did three current members of the United States House of Representatives and numerous past members of Congress, including at least two United States Senators. Current New York State Governor, Andrew Cuomo, is an alumnus. A number of Fordham graduates have served at the highest levels of the U.S. Executive Branch, including John E. Potter, former Postmaster General of the United States; William J. Casey, Director of U.S. Central Intelligence from 1981 to 1987; John N. Mitchell, former U.S. Attorney General; and Bernard M. Shanley, Deputy Chief of Staff and White House Counsel to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John O. Brennan, current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Fordham claims a number of distinguished military honorees, including three Medal of Honor recipients and a number of notable generals, including General John “Jack” Keane, retired four-star general and former Vice Chief of Staff for the United States Army, and Major General Martin Thomas McMahon, decorated American Civil War officer. Fordham has produced college and university presidents for at least 10 institutions around the United States, including two for Georgetown University and one each for Columbia University and New York University. Francis Cardinal Spellman, the late Archbishop of the Metropolitan See of New York, was also a Fordham graduate. Fordham alumnus James B. Donovan, who defended Rudolph Abel in his spy trial and later negotiated the release of Francis Gary Powers is the subject of Steven Spielberg’s, Oscar-nominated film, “Bridge of Spies.”[124]
Business and finance magnates that have attended Fordham include Anne M. Mulcahy, retired Chairman and CEO of Xerox and named one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” in 2006 by Fortune Magazine; Rose Marie Bravo, Vice Chairman and former CEO of Burberry and named one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business Outside the United States” in 2004 and 2005 by Fortune Magazine; E. Gerald Corrigan, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Maria Elena Lagomasino, CEO of JP Morgan Private Bank from 2001 to 2005 and currently on the board of directors of Coca-Cola; Joe Moglia, Chairman and former CEO of TD Ameritrade; John Leahy, Chief Operating Officer of Airbus; Stephen J. Hemsley, CEO of UnitedHealth Group; Wellington Mara, former owner of the New York Giants; John D. Finnegan, Chairman, President, and CEO of Chubb Corporation; Mario Gabelli, billionaire and founder and CEO of GAMCO Investors; Lorenzo Mendoza, billionaire and CEO of Empresas Polar; Eugene Shvidler, billionaire and international oil tycoon; and billionaire Donald Trump, who attended the university, but left with no degree. (Because he transferred to Wharton.)
Before Fordham was New York Military Academy, where Trump’s oh so indulgent father sent him when he was 13. I know something about this. I went away to school when I was 13, too, and my school played multiple military academies in sports. The difference between their quality of life and ours was night and day. We had white tablecloths, commercial silver utensils, cloth napkins and napkin rings, and masters who tolerated ties at half mast and routine hijinks. The military school kids had linoleum tables in their dining room with diner paper napkin dispensers. Their food was awful. They were indeed living a military life with marching drills and discipline none of you Grotties and Choaties have ever experienced unless you joined the armed forces. We had discipline too, but ours was marching around chairs in a parking lot on Saturday afternoons for two hours if we’d gotten into a fight. Theirs was daily drill and abuse from student drill sergeants who never countenanced a fight.
Hitlerian, right? Mussolini at least. Ask Stephen Sondheim and Francis Ford Coppola how they felt sitting there.
Here’s their history, now completed. Since discipline at an early age is no longer tolerable.
Including this one, the guy who isn’t fit to be in the same room with Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, Paul Ryan or the Dark Lord Kevin Williamson. In short, anyone Jennifer Rubin would be willing to have sex with. After all, the only piddling school she ever went to was Berkeley.
What a mediocrity, eh?
As I said, pass it on to all your elite Ivy and prep school friends. And then wait for their usual howls of vulgarity, lowness, and meanness. And mediocrity. Which for them is an uncomfortable glance in the mirror.
Thing is. There’s a certain combination that strikes out on its own. It marches, not off to war, but to a new sense of things.
He used to be Bernard, a mouse at the Plaza Hotel. Now he’s Al.
He almost got into college. He thinks cheese is good. He is smart enough to make Donald Trump look good. At some point he is going to take a junior college major in architectural drafting. Or, maybe, just drafting.
He has a Chevy II Nova. And a girlfriend who works hard at the Tiffany Diner in Northeast Philly. They’ve not actually met yet, but everyone is looking forward to it.
He has also heard of Israel. How many people can say that?
Come on, you Establishment Republicans. These leading lights of the conservative cause are for Trump. They’re just dumb bitches, right? Send them to the kitchen to fetch you a beer.
Okay Trump haters. Spin this one. Think oh so carefully before you start your usual name calling.
Palin. Paglia. Pirro. Coulter. Ingraham. Schlafly. Tammy Bruce. Women. Trump supporters. My wife supports Trump more than I do. Trump says bad things about women. Awwwww. The haters love this line of attack, which is complete hypocrisy.
Ya know, everybody says bad things about women. Including women. If you want to get into pejoratives… Well, we won’t go there. The most capable and intelligent women don’t always line up on the distaff side. They’d rather be on the winning side that actually accomplishes something.
Awaiting your attacks. [Bluster, Bluster… well he attacks men too, and we don’t like it. Excuse me. Who called your dick small in the last 30 days? Try try again.]
Waiting for the long lists of adjectives which usually constitute the whole of Trump critiques. This time they’ll be sexist. And personal. Zincavage threatened to punch my teeth out because of my anti-male-chauvinistic act of gender equality in demanding that a blogger who made jokes about Trump’s penis show me her tits. Guess what. If he describes any of these women, particularly my wife, as stupid, I will drive to whatever godforsaken Pennsylvania town he lives in and punch his teeth out.
Live by the arrogant glib generalization. Die by the arrogant glib generalization. Start promoting your guy, start laying off Trump, start acting like grownups, or you’ll have nowhere left to go.
“An Architectural tour of Donald Trump’s gaudy ass skyscrapers.
Before Donald Trump signed up for the presidential race, he signed his name to buildings. Lots of buildings. Sure, presidential candidates have owned real estate before. But no other candidate has been such an ostentatious developer of a real estate empire, with so many gilded phallic structures built in his likeness…”
What is gaudy? Overdone according to the esthetic diktats of the age. The name came from a Spanish super genius named Gaudi, who didn’t care what people thought. Only what he envisioned. Nothing phallic about his work. His was a finger, a hand, a soul, reaching toward God.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RcDmloG3tXU
So Gaudi was obviously wrong to be bigger, more ornate, monumental. Who would use buildings to enshrine their own egos in the history of time?
If Gaudi were alive, he’d agree to tea with Donald Trump. Who else in our time has imagination and aspiration?
“ARCHITECTURE VIEW; Proof That All That Glitters Is Not Vulgar
“It is hard not to see in this design the influence of the great glass-and-iron structure of the Cleveland Arcade, but here Graham Gund, who is a native of Cleveland, and Adrian Smith have reinterpreted this model in a kind of post-Modern Viennese Secessionist mode. The key thing here is not structure but surface articulation; the room is lushly finished, yet never to excess. The walls are done mostly in a series of beige and reddish-brown marbles, wonderfully patterned in a way that suggests that the architects have looked carefully at sources as disparate as Classicism and 20th-century abstract painting. If the rich, warm palette of marbles calls to mind the peach marble inside Trump Tower, the splendid patterns and textures, and the setting off of the marble with mahogany instead of the brass used at the Trump building, set the arcade of 75 State Street apart and remind us that this is a building that uses decoration not as glitz but as part of a larger goal toward a civilized urbanity.”
So common and oblivious of city context, unless you count mirrors as echoes of the long tradition.
So. I can read what the NYT dilettantes say, or I can remember what I learned in Art History at college and my sister’s experience in architecture school at a time of incipient upheaval. Her courses were designed to imbue her with the gospel of Le Corbusier, “form follows function.” These days it’s called the Brutalist school. Two examples.
Keystone of Boston’s “Government Center.” I was required to write an admiring paper about it. I got a B-. Maybe a lack of enthusiasm.
The IRS HQ in DC. The columns are a vestigial ruse.
I graduated and spent some time hanging out at the same university where my sis was studying architecture. They were getting the Corb gospel in spades, but they were also beginning to rebel a bit. True, they didn’t foresee this.
Venturi strip center times a hundred. The boardwalk.
But they did feel that deep seated impulse to rebel against totalitarian architecture, and I spent some all-nighters with them in their model building sessions (often 16 hours at a sprint, kind of like Face-Off), express a yen toward the cheap strip architecture, inspired by Vegas, of the pioneer post-modern architect Robert Venturi. I scoffed. But they were right. Architecture is supposed to show people who they are and challenge them to respond unblindly but seeingly. A step toward actual consciousness.
We are all living in a Venturi strip center now. Except those of us who can still remember the pre-postmodern era. I can. Can you? Until you can, Venturi, just like Gaudi, is a lesson. Sometimes vulgarity is the necessary slap in the face of a soldier who let down the side.
A quick Venturi gallery.
Brutalism never worked. It was ugly and dehumanizing. Venturism probably doesn’t work either, too coarse and loud. But Trump has sponsored a wide range. He is a wide range of man. I grew up in the country with all kinds of people. Most people I met later lived on a block with the same kind of people their parents were, same incomes, same cars, same limited aspirations. Why the conformists of all stripes and classes hate Trump so much. He defies classifications. He’s a patron of architecture, whether you admit it or not. That puts your mind in a different space. Not everything can or should look like Eliot House at Harvard. Not everything can or should look like the Guggenheim. Or the Empire State Building. Or the Vatican. Your eyes and mind get bigger when you imagine the possibilities.
All I’m suggesting is that if you want a progressive art critic, go with Prince Charles, who wants everything to look like the Houses of Parliament unless it can be buried by the rising seas of Global Warming. As a Patrone of architecture, Trump has let the whole gamut of styles loose. Don’t forget, he commissions, he critiques designs, and he has to get them built to make money in their particular business environments. True he could have put his inheritance in the bank and watched his trust fund grow until, like a sad sibling, he expired of unexplored potential. What the Bernie people would expect and a surprising number of Yalies would prefer. Because it is better to be born with money and die young than do something creative with the money and aspire to greatness. Got it. Something Jonah Goldberg and Charles Krauthammer and Kevin Williamson and David Zincavage have forgotten. When they come in to take this apart, they should be very very careful they don’t sound like Prince Charles taking a first in the Twit of the Year Contest.
Truth is, it’s always the smallest people who can’t abide anyone larger than life.
Stay tuned for the literary side of the argument. Even worse for the Scrooges of the eight.
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