In her opinion piece today,“Corker Told the Truth About Trump. Now He Should Act on It.”, Michelle Goldberg, a fine mind, must have been in a mega-cruel mental state, or President Trump must have asked the New York Times and Ms. Goldberg to “help him resign or be impeached” through her slashing humiliation, in a blood-soaked attack on the President – that even if partly true is so far out of line as to be dismissable.
By Jeffrey Koopersmith, Editor Emeritus
WASHINGTON DC – 10 OCTOBER 2017 – The New York Times has done little to spare the reputation of Donald Trump, as a civilian, and moreso as a President.
While I do not agree with the Times battle for “truth and justice – not in an American Way – I cannot fault it for pointing out some of President Trump’s mistakes, awkwardness, petty white lies and worse. Whether I agree with what the Times has printed in the past, I refuse to allow this disgrace of the Office of the President, or a lynching of the man himself.go unanswered.
The New York Times owes an apology to Donald Trump who, no matter his job performance in the Time’s view, as he is the only one who can judge that because, in fact, he is the President of the United States. I have written before that this President is not a racist, not ready to throw other’s dreams to the lions, even if unable to adopt the polished professorial attitude of former men who lead the nation. This is especially true when you examine several past presidents – at least one of whom suffered under similar unmentioned aging inconveniences which hit many of us all as we grow older.
Yet, where is the New York Times, and MIchele Goldberg when it comes to President George W. Bush and his father’s dreadfully foolish permission to men as evil as Vice President Richard Cheney – who has, in my and millions of others around this earth, caused tens of millions not only to die or be maimed in warfare but lose everything, Golberg should taken pains to mention Cheney particularly when she wrote her screed.
President Trump is shocking in his re-invention of the presidency, and in the manner in which the White House is managed And his sometimes teenaged reaction to insult or most any provocation contributes to this. I don’t agree with him on climate change, “dreamers” dreams, the impossible desire to bring back the coal industry for fuel, or his constant flipping and flopping about race relations, racism, and true neo-nazis having ‘some members who are good people’. However if you look at what he has NOT done to many of our more liberal pet projects of which I am proud, it seems he may not be as “bad” as Ms. Goldberg tells us, and certainly her own age and demeanor should not allow it.
It is Ms. Goldberg who seems to be in a trance today, not the country. The citizens of this nation are not in a trance, they have been frightened by what happened during the past 40 years of what must have been terrible mismanagement by other Presidents. Was Ronald Reagan – a hero of mine as a man – sick with Alzheimer’s toward the end of his eight years, or were many of his ill-informed positions as well.
Was Richard Cheney who came too far, with too much power first with Reagan, who led the liars about Iraq and so much more should be skewered. Many believe that Cheney should be in prison as war criminal including two or more national governments. I also believe he should be in prison for the same, and have written so over and over again, as have others daring enough to take on what has become a scarey climate in the United States for those who dare to indict other’s performances in office.
Thus far President Trump has not had success with most of his campaign plans. This is true for the same reasons that President Obama was often stymied in his try to move the nation to the “left” – as the GOP defines caring. The real question may be that Donald Trump knows very well he is not prepared to be the President of the United States as MIchelle Goldberg and the New York TImes believest. Could it be that he knows he cannot survive the evil of both Republicans and Democrats and Corporate actors who the Supreme Court calls People, and who are holding Trumps body to the fire for undeserved tax rebates?
So, it could be that Donald Trump shows how unprepared most members of our House of Representatives especially, and some – a great deal of them- in our Senate who are also at best incapable, if anyone can, to run such a complex country in such a complex world complete with Advertisers running the show behind our backs or directly in front of us?
Sure, Mr Trump is different even unappealing to many, and by far – he, like almost every businessman has lied and stretched the truth to make “deals”. But let me say- no group anywhere on earth compares with the lies and stretching of the truth this nation has seen not only from Congress and past Presidents, but also from Governors, County Supervisors, Mayors, Police Chiefs, Fire Chiefs, CEOs, and government related labor unions. I suppose this is true with almost any government or dictatorship – and so it has been throughout history unless you are too ill-educated to know this, and for that, I apologize.
Perhaps Donald Trump should leave office, but not because of MIchelle Goldberg – who has never put her life on the line for her country – as do all Presidents and even members of Congress like Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana who suffered terribly from an assassination attempt, on a baseball field, and may never be fully recovered as a result.
Many mayors, and city councillors, and police and even firefighters have also been gunned down by loonies akin to Michelle Goldberg as she fashions herself this day, not with bullets, but with a pile of manure – some unproved and other unimportant disgraces aimed at Mr. Trump who I also oppose because of harm his actions could cause but not have caused to date.
These forthcoming sins would bring most likely harms never as evil as the two Bushes’ and Vice President Richard Cheney who have already and for nearly a decade or more shot-dead or burned-dead, or drowned-dead, or starved to death millions directly or derivatively from their ignorant and evil multitudinous lies and misdemeanors as well as, directed and supervised out and out murder of individuals without trial, and those responsible for them. And they were not the first or the last to do so.
Yes, I might agree with the New York Times – which I read daily – that Donald Trump could or may consider leaving his office under the control of someone else, not because he said he groped women, or because he fired or insulted so many “leaders’ of our American Civilization, or because he believes there is more to climate change than motor-cars and coal mines; But, for the reason he has not been trained on a leash by the true rulers of this and most nations. The ultra rich. He was holding that leash for a time – but now the change of places has proved a terribly difficult one for him.
I could go on, yet I wanted simply to introduce the New York Times Opinion Editors and Ms. Goldberg, as they should be introduced. Each could have made their suggestions so much more human, caring, careful, and truthful all along. They chose not to – and therefore have made many things worse instead of “better”- Better? =- a term they hide behind all too often..
BELOW IS A LINK TO MICHELLE GOLDBERG AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
Corker Told the Truth About Trump. Now He Should Act on It.
By: Michele Goldman
Over the past few months, the country has been in a foul sort of trance. Among people who work in politics, Republicans as well as Democrats, it iconventional wisdom that President Trump is staggeringly ill-informed, erratic, reckless and dishonest. (He also might be compromised by a hostile foreign power.) But it’s also conventional wisdom that with few exceptions, Republicans in Congress are not going to stand up to him. America’s nuclear arsenal is in the hands of a senescent Twitter troll, but those with political power have refused to treat this fact as a national emergency.
Thus, even though a majority of Americans consider the president unfit for office, a fatalistic sense of stasis has set in.Credit Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, for momentarily snapping us out of it. On Sunday evening, after a Twitter feud with Trump, Corker gave an interview to The New York Times in which he said publicly what Republican officeholders usually say only privately. Trump, Corker told the reporters Jonathan Martin and Mark Landler, is treating the presidency like “a reality show” and could be setting the nation “on the path to World War III.” Corker has previously said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly “help separate our country from chaos.” On Sunday, he identified the agent of that chaos. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Corker said of Trump.
Now that Corker has done the country the immense favor of acknowledging the obvious, the key question is: What’s next? Corker, despite his culpability in helping to legitimate Trump during the presidential campaign and despite waiting until he’d announced his retirement to speak out, has behaved more patriotically than most of his quietly complicit colleagues. But as Trump continues to tweet threats at a war-ready North Korea, it is not enough to simply hope that the president’s minders can stop him from blowing up the world.Corker, after all, is not a passive spectator; he’s the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“The Congress holds the ultimate power for war,” Jerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, told me. “Though they have more or less delegated that power away to the executive branch, they can take it back.They could start with a pair of bills introduced by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey and California Representative Ted Lieu, both Democrats, prohibiting the president from launching a nuclear first strike without a congressional declaration of war. So far, the only Republican to sign on in either chamber is Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina.
But given how little faith Senate Republicans have in Trump’s judgment, they have a duty to take up this legislation or develop an alternative. “Increasingly, senators and members of Congress are going to come to the conclusion that there has to be a firewall that is erected so that a single human being cannot impulsively launch nuclear weapons,” Markey told me.Despite its overall record of weakness, Congress has already acted on one occasion to curb Trump’s worst foreign policy impulses. In July, Republicans voted overwhelmingly for a bipartisan bill that, among other things, limited Trump’s ability to unilaterally lift sanctions on Russia. Tying Trump’s hands on nuclear weapons would be a far more aggressive step, but it’s one that members of Congress who are mindful of this moment’s profound peril should take.Of course, “should” is the key word here. There are plenty of things that Republicans should do about Trump, including impeaching him for violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution. We’ve grown so inured to Republican politicians’ persistent refusal to put the welfare of the country above their re-election prospects and lust for tax cuts that complaining about it feels banal and naïve.But Corker’s expression of alarm is a reminder that we are teetering on the cusp of horror. He made it clear that Trump’s tweeted provocations of North Korea are impulsive rather than strategic.
“A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true,” he said. We need to take seriously the possibility that Trump might cavalierly start a war that could kill millions of people. It would be a human calamity of inconceivable, history-bending scale, and it would leave America as a hated global pariah. Now that Corker has admitted that Trump cannot be trusted with the power he holds, he and other Republicans have no excuse not to try to take that power away.Taylor, of the Niskanen Center, is in frequent contact with anti-Trump Republicans, and he senses a growing sense of urgency among them. “Having an unstable narcissist who is ignorant of politics, policy and foreign affairs with the nuclear codes has probably turned them white as a sheet,” he said. “There is some degree of serious responsibility that they fully realize that they hold.” If so, now would be a good time to show it.