12.9.2022 – and each day has the

and each day has the
potential to influence
ones that come after

something can be weak
and considerable force
is compatible

Adapted from:

… and each day has the potential to influence the ones after.

Something can be weak and a considerable force in politics or culture at the same time; someone can be losing and influential at the same time.

These things are compatible.

In the article Donald Trump Is Weak. And Powerful. Now What? by Katherine Miller, who is a staff writer and editor in Opinion page of the New York Times.

12.8.2022 – when the shoe fits it

when the shoe fits it
pinches one wearing it which
about says it all

Which gets to the larger question that supersedes all the ins and outs of the maneuvering over the Republican presidential nomination and the future of the party: How, in a matter of less than a decade, could this once-proud country have evolved to the point that there is a serious debate over choosing a presidential candidate who is a lifelong opportunist, a pathological and malignant narcissist, a sociopath, a serial liar, a philanderer, a tax cheat who does not pay his bills and a man who socializes with Holocaust deniers, who has pardoned his criminal allies, who encouraged a violent insurrection, who, behind a wall of bodyguards, is a coward and who, without remorse, continually undermines American democracy?

The closing paragraph of the Guest Opinion piece, Trump Is Unraveling Before Our Eyes, but Will It Matter? by Thomas B. Edsall.

I have no comment to make on this remarkable sentence, and notice it is one sentence, but instead I turn to familiar old idioms:

If the shoe fits …

AND

only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches …

I think the above sentence is truly fitting to a certain person.

I also think that those who might complain about what the sentence says about that person know too well why it fits.

Overall, I end with another idiom, ’nuff said!’

11.28.2022 – how can that creepy

how can that creepy
guy be a hero to you
all in big trouble

Commenting on the ’60s and Lyndon Johnson, Doris Kearns Godwin writes in her book on LBJ, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, that:

“How in the hell can that creepy guy be a hero to you?” Johnson asked me after we saw The Graduate in the movie theater on his ranch.

“All I needed was to see ten minutes of that guy, floating like a big lump in a pool, moving like an elephant in that woman’s bed, riding up and down the California coast polluting the atmosphere, to know that I wouldn’t trust him for one minute with anything that really mattered to me.

And if that’s an example of what love seems like to your generation, then we’re all in big trouble.

All they did was to scream and yell at each other before getting to the altar.

Then after it was over they sat on the bus like dumb mutes with absolutely nothing to say to one another.

Don’t know why but I never imagined LBJ watching The Graduate.

Now that I know, I am not one bit surprised by his reaction.

The scary part, now in my 60s, I am not sure that I don’t disagree.

What was the quote sometimes attached to Mr. Churchill?

To be 25 and not be a liberal is to have no heart.

To be 50 and not be a conservative is to have no brain.

10.30.2022 – He literally

He literally
willed what was in his mind to
be reality

He felt that victory required belief.

As a boy, friends recall, “he was always repeating” the salesman’s credo that “You’ve got to believe in what you’re selling”; decades later, in his retirement, he would say: “What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing; if you don’t, you’re as good as dead.

The other person will sense that something isn’t there.”

And Lyndon Johnson could make himself believe in an argument even if that argument did not accord with the facts, even if it was clearly in conflict with reality.

He “would quickly come to believe what he was saying even if it was clearly not true,” his aide Joseph Califano would write.

“It was not an act,” George Reedy would say.

“He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies.

He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.”

He would refuse to hear any facts which conflicted with that “reality,” to listen to anyone who disagreed with him.

(Robert A. Caro. The Passage of Power (2012). Knopf. Kindle Edition.)

Is there something in the water at the White House?

Or in Washington, DC, overall?

The author Jim Harrison once wrote something along the lines of asking that when you consider the buildings and such in Washington, DC, how could elected officials NOT become pompous?

Mr. Harrison recommended turning the Capitol into a museum and setting Congress up in a pole barn in Anacostia and then watch how long it took for the Government to make things happen.

I second the notion with the added stipulation of no air conditioning.

10.26.2022 – do what they think in

do what they think in
faithful disinterested
judgement what is right

In a 1955 document titled, Modernisation of the House of Commons – First Report, contributed to by Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, Mr. Churchill said that:

The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what they think in their faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain. The second duty is to their constituents, of whom they are the representative but not the delegate. Burke’s famous declaration on this subject is well known. It is only in the third place that their duty to party organisation or programme takes rank. All these three loyalties should be observed, but there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.

Let me put that in bullet points.

The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what they think in their faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain.
The second duty is to their constituents, of whom they are the representative but not the delegate.
It is only in the third place that their duty to party organisation or programme takes rank.

All these three loyalties should be observed, but there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.

Let me, repeat part of that last line.

But there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.

Change Parliament to Congress is easy.

But then you also have to change the last line to read, There is no doubt of the order in which they stand under this current un-healthy manifestation of democracy.