(Nothing better than a well written and funny dose of reality - TGIF! - CL)
The networks will need
to find another way to excite their ratings.
First a
preliminary word from someone whose published writings of the past two years
demonstrate quite clearly why these past nineteen months under President Trump
mark him already as one of America’s greatest Presidents in contradistinction
to the nightmare of the prior eight years that saw one of America’s three or
four worst-ever Presidents occupying the White House:
1. When a man is married to one of the most beautiful women who
ever lived… and she also is quite brilliant… and she also has a wonderful head
for business… and she is profoundly loyal to him… and she loves that man enough
to be pregnant with his child… and she stands by him publicly no matter what
scandals and other controversies embroil him amid his public ventures… then it
is quite unacceptable to imagine that such a man would cavort on the side with
a bimbo (or even a coherent person) whose sole assets are two balloons that
some physician presumably superimposed onto her torso. If a man truly
desperately needs to get his hands around two balloons, he can get himself
invited to a children’s birthday party, or he can go to Party City. The last
I looked, balloons at Party City were selling at ten cents each. For
an incredibly keen business tycoon, a billionaire, it seems a no-brainer to
prefer grasping two balloons at a dime apiece rather squeezing them at
$65,000.00 per balloon. And, when you get the balloons at Party City, you don’t
have to take those balloons out to dinner or pretend to be interested in
whatever babble they expel under the misconception that they are engaging in
“conversation.”
2. Two hundred and forty-two years of recorded American history
document that nothing good ever comes from being involved with someone named
“Stormy.”
Now,
to impeachment and why the whole discussion is nonsense…
The
television-news media desperately need to fill twenty-four hours every day in
order to sell advertising to support their stations, their management, their
employees, and their negotiated settlements and non-disclosure-agreement
pay-outs to women whom they must silence after one or another of their male
employees has violated them. CBS has had Charlie Rose. NBC Matt Lauer. With too
much money, too much perceived power, many intelligent media-attractive women
who benefit further from the daily efforts of world-class aestheticians and
make-up artists, the ingredients are there. Certainly Fox News has had their
share of pay-outs, too. And the thing is, we have no idea how many others also are being
paid to shut up. So the television-news media have to keep the money pouring
in. Same with the print media. They need to grab your attention and hold it all
day and night, every day.
Would
you watch TV news 24/7 to get the latest commodities reports on oranges? For
how many hours daily? Unless you deal in oranges, probably not a whole bunch.
How about “sweet crude oil” futures? It would have to be
pretty sweet, indeed, to keep your attention. I am an Orthodox rabbi, and I
cannot remember the last time I put down a volume of the Talmud to keep abreast
of the latest prices on pork bellies.
So
they have to figure out how to keep the ratings up. They love a murder — oh, how they love a murder! Especially
of a young pretty White girl. That grabs the attention of everyone: men, women,
liberals, conservatives, young, and old. (Amazing how, for all the Political
Correctness of “Black Lives Matter,” the media do not care a whit about the
genocide happening to African Americans under Democrat governance in cities
like Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Memphis, and Detroit.) And omigosh how they
love serial killers who
murder young White women! They make them as famous as Babe Ruth, Abraham
Lincoln, Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus: The Hillside Strangler, Ted Bundy, the
.44 Caliber Killer/ “Son of Sam,” the Zodiac Killer, Richard Speck. Imagine how
they would have loved to cover Jack the Ripper! Even an isolated unsolved
murder of a single young White woman gets the media exercised into a frenzy:
Jonbenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Short, Chandra Levy, Kate Steinle, Mollie Tibbets.
The Seedier Media obsess over these individual murders round-the-clock until it
emerges that the murderer was an illegal alien. Only then do they return to
sweet crude and pork bellies.
Other
methods to grab viewers and hold them are more idiosyncratic, like the
disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370. In its time, CNN milked it for
all it was worth. You would think that CNN had become the Travel Channel. And
then the great natural disasters: tsunamis that destroy much of Japan, volcano
eruptions that threaten to end Hawaii as a vacation spot, tornadoes that devastate
Oklahoma, and California wildfires enhanced by liberal environmentalist extremes that bar responsible forest
management and clearing dead and rotted wood and brush from forests, thus
assuring the fuel to create true man-made disaster. You would think that CNN
had become the Weather Channel.
But
no subject, no Holy Fire, has proven as sure-fire a media
grabber as President Donald J. Trump. Half of us have come to appreciate him so
much that we cannot get enough of him. Many watch each-and-every one of his
almost-weekly stadium-overflowing live campaign speeches. One week in
Wisconsin. Another week in Pennsylvania. Missouri. Montana. West Virginia. The
fans cannot get enough of him. Eighty percent of each speech is the same as all
the others, but fans like to hear it again and again — like listening again and
again to a favorite song. And one never knows what kind of comical inanity he
will interject in any given speech at any given moment. Will he start talking
off-script about flies and mosquitoes? About some childhood
inanity? One never knows, and that makes it even
more fun. In a completely different way from the way that President
Reagan meant it when he said it about Jimmy Carter, when President Trump goes
off-script into inanity and ridiculousness, fans gleefully chuckle: “There he
goes again!”
At
the same time, half the country really oppose him. Many hate him. Some despise
him. Others just don’t care for him. But
they also are glued. They also cannot get enough of him. And
so the media feed the beast that pays the bills — heavy daily doses of Trump.
The
thing is, people will get bored if the Trump story is the exact-same every day
for nineteen months. So the Seedier Media have to vary it. One week, they
generate the lie that Trump has Alzheimer’s.
Then he runs a cabinet meeting with such proficiency that they need to change
the story. So maybe it is that Trump is a traitor because a guy who voted for the Soviet Communists says so —
a guy whom Obama made head of the CIA and who conducted the CIA as though he
still were a supporter of Soviet Communism. (Come to think of it, what better
way to cover your own tracks as an insider Soviet Double Agent with access to
top American security secrets, colluding with the Russians, than by tweeting
that some other guy
is the double agent?) The next week it is that Trump is going to cause a
nuclear war with North Korea. Then when the North Korea Doughboy invites Trump
to talks, the media change the story line to Trump being unprepared for such
high-level negotiations. Then when the talks result in a signed agreement, and
the Doughboy stops shooting missiles and returns the bodies of American heroes
who fell there half a century ago, the media change the story to Trump not
having achieved enough. When the Admiral who serves as the President’s personal
physician reports that Trump has passed his physical with flying colors, the
media start picking it to pieces and start analyzing his cholesterol numbers
and whether he is taking enough statins — because they are oh-so-concerned that he live to 120 years
of good health. Then when his wife undergoes surgery — understand that doctors
are cutting her up, then sewing her back together — and she understandably
decides that she does not want to appear before the media for a few weeks while
she recovers, the frenzied media report that maybe she is divorcing the
President or maybe she is dead. Then when she shows up in public at the
border to evaluate the situation there first-hand, they obsess over the writing
on her jacket. (A good thing they cannot see the writing on her undergarments,
or they would start a two-week frenzy over whether she is having an affair with
Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, or whoever else’s name is on the label. One can
imagine the headlines: “Is First Lady Melania Cheating with a Lover Code-Named
‘Wash in Cold Water with Like Colors’”?) And, of course, when all else fails,
Omarosa.
So
now that Omarosa has played out her fifteen minutes of media usefulness, the new idiocy is
the impeachment story: Michael Cohen, at the behest of Clinton Enabler Lanny
Davis, has pleaded guilty to election-law violations for having remitted some
$130,000 to Stormy (at $65,000 per balloon), and now the media have President
Trump out of office. So
let’s get real:
Let’s
say two Antifa members hold up a bank. That means they are wearing masks over
their masks. One gets caught and faces a hundred years in prison. He or she
makes a deal with Robert Mueller and pleads guilty as follows: “I held up the
bank, and my masked accomplice was Donald Trump.” OK. So the person who copped
a plea is guilty. But that does not mean that Trump was in the bank with him or
her. Well, you may ask: “Why would a person plead guilty and knowingly set
himself up for a prison sentence if the underlying plea were not true?” Lots of
reasons:
Let’s
say he is facing $500,000 in future legal bills in defending himself, and he
just cannot bear that cost. Let’s say he faces 50 years in the hoosegow, but
this deal will assure him that he is out in 3-5 years. Let’s say he also has
perpetrated tax fraud or $20 million in bank fraud. Or — only in New York — taxi-medallion fraud. (And, in a state
where it once cost over a million dollars to have the right to drive a taxi,
Andrew Cuomo can say that American never was that great?) Let’s say he, an
attorney, also has been exposed to the world as a creep who audio-records his
own law clients — pretty much assuring that his legal career is over: either
the New York State Bar will close him down for good, or he simply will find
that no new clients ever again retain him. (OK, one exception: Omarosa. Can you
imagine Omarosa coming into Michael Cohen’s law office to retain him, and the
two of them are secretly recording each other?) So, Cohen has any number of
reasons to cop a deal.
And
what is the Trump link? That (i) Trump cavorted with two balloons, (ii) the
mouthpiece attached to the two balloons threatened to tell the public about a
man whose relationship with the “fairer sex” the voting public already knew
quite well after 24/7 reportage of his taped comments years earlier in that
trailer, (iii) Cohen paid $65,000 per balloon to shut the mouthpiece, and (iv)
Trump paid Cohen $130,000. Oh — and by the way: instead of Trump handling the
whole messy matter through a business associate, he specifically went to his
attorney, a member of the New York State Bar presumed to have expertise in the
law, to assure that everything would be handled in proper compliance with
governing law.
And
that is a supposed to be a violation of election law?
First
of all, such men, alas, pay women to be quiet all the time. What elected office was R. Kelly seeking? Howzabout Tiger Woods? (For theater-goers and
ten-dollar-bill lovers: Alexander Hamilton.) It almost seems to
comprise actionable societal sexual discrimination against men: If only more
men could be eligible to get $130,000 to stay quiet about something (other than
baseball). Wouldn’t it be amazing — and just plain fair — to live in a society
where men likewise have women paying $130,000 to remain quiet? Most men are
pretty quiet anyway. And most men even would be glad to give the paying woman
two balloons as a gift. But married male tycoons throughout history have been
paying such women to shut up. That is not election law. That is erection law.
Second,
was it a violation of campaign election law when Wall Street insiders were
paying Hillary Clinton $225,000 a pop for 15-minute “speeches” behind closed
doors? In three speeches, she pocketed $675,000. They knew how to invest without
listening to her. They did not need her advice for investing in land deals
like Whitewater — and it was the insider pros
who advised her on cattle futures. So what wisdom were they
paying Hillary for? Obviously they expected her to be President, and they were
contributing to her effort in return for having a pro-Wall Street President who
would “talk the talk” of “sharing the wealth” and would condemn “Deplorables”
but who, like Obama, actually would take good care of friends on Wall Street.
Likewise,
was it a violation of election laws when mobster and later-convicted
felon Tony Rezko helped the Obamas acquire a
magnificent house for hundreds of thousands below market? Gimme a break.
The
bottom line is that this is The Swamp. Our billions and trillions in tax money
float around Washington and attract the mosquitoes and tsetse flies that
inhabit The Swamp. They infect the public not with Yellow Fever but with Green
Fever — the color of money. The President has done an amazing
job of exposing Swamp People: James Comey, John Brennan, Peter
Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Ohr’s Wife, the Hillary Basketful of Deplorables
(Huma, Weiner, Hillary Herself, etc.), Andrew McCabe. That is how it goes.
None
of this has anything to do with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Realistically,
in order for the President to be impeached it will take a majority of the House
of Representatives to vote for impeachment. If Republicans hold the House in
November, all the talk about impeachment will be so much Fake News like all the
talk about Alzheimer’s: there will be no impeachment. End of story. By
contrast, if the Democrats take the House they might very well pass a Maxine
Waters–Al Green bill for impeachment. It then
will go to the United Senate, where a two-thirds
majority will be needed for conviction. The Republicans will
control the Senate with between 51-57 seats. Even if the Democrats miraculously
grab the Senate in November, there still would be at least 48 Republicans in
the Senate. The Democrats would need to get 15-20 Republican Senators to vote
with them to oust President Trump. Any
Republican Senator who would vote that way would be signing his or her
political death warrant — the end of his or her political career. They
all know it. Therefore none of them would do it. Thus, after much ado about
nothing, and two weeks of evidence presented in the Senate about the cost of
two balloons and how they were reimbursed, a vote on conviction would go down
in flames anyway. The last time this gambit was tried, the Republicans paid
severely for wasting the country’s time and money over a President who lied
under oath about cavorting with women behind his wife’s back. This time will be
no different, and this President has not even lied about it under oath. Thus,
another weekly drama will pass.
In
the end, the media will need a new Omarosa, a new missing plane, a new murder
of an innocent pretty White young lady. Or it will be back to orange futures,
sweet crude, and the revival of much-lamented pork bellies futures.