Trump Jumps In / Denny Is Nobody’s Fool / The Not-So-Hot Cup

Trump’s In… Television news these days, whether it’s local, cable or national, can be aptly labeled as ‘The Triumph of the Trivial.’ Significant news, i.e., the Middle East, the pervasive and enveloping corruption of our political system, the accelerating erosion of American infrastructure, is barely discussed; it’s all about rains in the Midwest, a fire in an empty three-floor warehouse in Jersey City, Kim Kardashian’s rear end, 45-minute car chases on the 405, or another barely believable health ‘breakthrough’. Broadcast news is ‘broken.’

That’s why I have to laugh upon observing broadcasters on television snicker quietly about the entrance of Donald Trump into the 2016 Republican primary race for the nomination to run for President. Because, in actuality, Mr. Trump is an early Christmas gift to television news reporters. With already-announced Republican candidates such as Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry and Jeb Bush in the race, the campaign looked mighty dreary to the likes of Don Lemon, Scott Paley or Joe Scarborough. And, let’s not forget who’s on the other side: how long have we been compelled to gaze upon the countenance of Hillary Clinton? Since the dawning of the Bronze Age?

You're Welcome, Journalists.

So, when Donald Trump announced, you could almost hear the hurrahs and exhalations coming out of the television set.  Why shouldn’t a personage like Wolf Blitzer, whose monotonic delivery could cure anyone of insomnia, jump for joy? Instead of issuing pleas for candidates to be forthright on immigration, farm subsidies, civil rights, and a million other issues that every candidate will avoid, Mr. Blitzer just puts the microphone in front of Mr. Trump and he gets all the juicy racist, xenophobic and belligerent sound bites he wants. ‘Hey,’ Mr. Blitzer says to himself,’ I don’t have to do anything. This is a hell of a lot of fun. Keep nuking ‘em, Donald. I’ll just sit here, as mute as a church mouse, and bask in your feigned outrage.’

Of course, let’s face it, Mr. Trump doesn’t stand a chance. Right now, though, he sucks the oxygen out of any room he’s in with his bombastic comments, and his Republican opponents are completely overshadowed. And, as sure as the sun will come up tomorrow, we’ll begin to see stories out of the press that assert ‘Trump is rising in the polls…a groundswell.’ But, I suspect his future will be akin to the phenom pitcher who wins his first couple of games, is shelled in the next two games as the hitters figure him out, and is back in the minors soon after: Mr.Trump, who appears to have tripped over his enormous ego and injured himself [his ‘brand’], will be dispatched soon as a viable candidate. In fact, my money’s on his dropping out within a couple of months.

In the meantime, let’s all just relax and enjoy the spectacle of a Trump campaign for President. Because if it’s fireworks and some ‘juice’ you want, and, yes, even some guffaws, Mr. Trump will certainly provide that. All good things do come to an end, though: just consider what is coming down the pike after he’s gone: a series of scintillating debates between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush [probably]. Yikes. A triple espresso, no sugar please, before I nod off.

Denny – He sure had Mr. Gripes fooled. Dennis Hastert, formerly the Republican Speaker of the House, appeared to be a rather innocuous sort: good-natured, affable, a good old ‘Joe.’ In fact, I’d hazard a guess that his amiable demeanor went a long way in securing for Mr. Hastert the prestigious Speaker job, following the skein of disreputable characters who preceded him.

So, imagine my surprise when I opened the newspaper one morning and read that Uncle Denny had been arrested for a series of personal bank withdrawals of more than $10,000, and then lying about them. [In the FBI’s mind, withdrawals of that size may be a ‘trigger’ for money-laundering crimes.] Then, surprise turned to shock when I found out that that Mr. Hastert had been paying a blackmailer individual payments of $50,000 a month for some time, and had at the time of his arrest already shelled out $1.75 million!

At this point – evoking the old adage that ‘Yes, I was born at night, but not last night’ -- Mr. Gripes immediately pondered questions that any half-sentient being would bring up, “What the hell was Mr. Hastert up to, paying that kind of money?”, and “How did a simple man such as Mr. Hastert get his hands on so much money?” After all, he never made more than $175,000 annually as a Congressman, a princely sum surely, but certainly not enough to pay that $50 Grand every month without, apparently, difficulty.

Well, it turns out Dennis Hastert needn’t take second place to the King himself, Bill Clinton, regarding smarmy and sleazy affairs. It seems that Mr. Hastert, when he was wresting coach at a high school years ago, molested adolescent boys on the team. [Coaching wrestling seems to bring out the pedophiles, doesn’t it?] Much later, one of his victims threatened to expose Mr. Hastert and demanded money to keep quiet; arrangements were then made for the monthly $50,000 payments. 

When Mr. Gripes learned that Mr. Hastert had an accumulated wealth of between $3.5 million and $11.3 million the day he left Congress, he immediately smelled a rat. Or, if I may mix metaphors and animals, something was mighty fishy. And, sure enough, Mr. Hastert had ‘stolen’ that money. In Congress, though, they steal money stealthily, even quasi-legally.

Mr. Hastert didn’t have to rob a bank, or steal from some widow’s estate. He simply passed some federal legislation. Here’s how the scam works: A group of investors, inclusive of Dennis Hastert, forms up and buys a tract of acreage out in the boondocks in central Illinois. [The group defines itself as a ‘trust’, thereby precluding anyone from finding out that Mr. Hastert is one of the investors, an obvious indication that something nefarious was going on.]
 
Mr. Hastert then sponsors a federal appropriations bill authorizing a highway to be built through the very land that his trust had bought, and shepherds the bill through Congress authorizing its construction. Bingo….the land he bought is now much more valuable, as a highway is about to be built through it. He clears millions of dollars from the subsequent sale.

Mr. Hastert is now a scorned and disgraced individual and probable molester of children, but really I suspect he’s not alone in pulling off this kind of thievery: a lot of politicians enrich themselves in exactly this manner, or by utilizing other behind-closed-doors, secretive methods. And, the hypocrites that they are, they constantly are badgering us for not participating in elections in sufficient numbers. Why should we, when we know this kind of monkey business goes on all the time.

Mr. Hastert, though, will skate through this arrest and subsequent trial [if there is one], Mr. Gripes assumes. Oh, yeah, he’ll be fined a bit [not enough to hurt him, mind you], get a suspended sentence perhaps, and be lectured on ethics by some political-hack judge. He should be sent ‘upstate’ for a long time, but he’ll basically get off scot-free. His cronies will protect him. And, that virtual impunity enrages Mr. Gripes more than anything else in this sordid tale. 

World Cup Hype - Yeah, Mr. Gripes will admit he is on occasion a stick-in-the-mud grump. Hyperbole, for one thing, automatically blows up his ‘grumpiness’ meter; yesterday’s women’s World Cup championship game, between the United States and Japan, was simply nauseating in its delivery of those good old American staples of jingoism and exhibitionistic braggadocio. [One sports talk host admitted he ‘shed some tears’ after the Americans won – get a life, big guy.]

No country on earth is as self-centered and as in love with itself as this country. We as a nation are simply unable to show the least humility vis-à-vis other nations. And that lack of modesty and ‘our-way-or-the-highway’ thinking get us in trouble a lot, i.e., Vietnam, Iraq. We’re very bad winners; today I did not see one word of graciousness or kindness toward yesterday’s opponent and loser, Japan. 

But enough geo-political malarkey. Let’s look at the World Cup competition as a whole this past month. I think I may be the only clear-eyed observer of the overall play who saw just how awful the competition actually was. Scoring was virtually non-existent [the championship game was an exception], and the play on the field generally shoddy and sloppy. And, very frequently, the games were played in cavernous stadiums, with a few hundred fans in attendance, bunched together amidst fifty or sixty thousand empty seats. A pitiful, sad tableau for the TV viewing audience. 

Perhaps Mr. Gripes is disappointed because last year’s Men’s World Cup in Brazil was so exhilarating: jammed stadiums, fans and citizens of every country in attendance, rolling, rollicking energy both on the field and in the stands, a multitude of national flags on display, and, of course, magnificent play on the part of world-class soccer players, demonstrating astonishing athleticism: it was a joy to watch, and a glimmer of our eternal hope of an utopian world in which all countries get along.

The enormous difference between men’s and women’s sport play, out of political correctness, is never discussed in the press – never. But, it’s a fact of life. Yes, the athletic abilities of the women participating in this competition were extraordinary -- I don’t want to diminish that fact. But, let’s be real: male athletes – stronger, bigger, faster – make for a much more interesting spectacle – in this sport, and a lot other sports, too….OK, you’re great at synchronized swimming, I’ll concede that.

Oh, while I am huffing and puffing about women’s sports, there’s something else that’s bugged Mr. Gripes: women’s professional basketball is in dire need of a face lift. There are too many turnovers and too many missed shots, including, rather remarkably, lay-ups. There’s remarkably little ‘flow’ in the games; there are so many mistakes. The solution is simple: lower the height of the basket rims from 10 feet to 9-1/2 feet. Immediately, there’d be injected into games much more excitement, with more scoring, and slam dunks, too. 

And, the women’s league, now basically subsidized by the men’s National Basketball Association, might actually flourish, and manage to sustain itself. Lowering that rim would work wonders. It’ll never happen, though: there simply is no way that rights groups would accept a lower rim – somehow, in these bizarre times, some women activists would equate a lesser height with a regression to second-class citizenship.

But, if opponents might stop and consider a change to 9-1/2 feet, look at all the positives that would ensue: a lower rim means more scoring [right now, it’s appalling how low-scoring the games are]; more scoring would mean more interest and more fans of the sport, and men might even start attending in significant numbers; more interest and more attendance means more money coming in; more money coming in means more games played [right now, the season consists of a meager 32 games], and possibly even an expansion of the league to other cities. And, guess what? A thriving women’s professional basketball league would lead to more players playing, more front-office executives, and more auxiliary jobs created, i.e., in the playing arenas. That’s right: jobs, jobs, jobs, and very good ones, for women.

Hillary, I’ve got a great idea:  forget all that ridiculous populist hokum [the $125 million you and Bill have currently in the bank kills that BS] you’re attempting to foist on us, and make part of your platform this wonderful jobs-creation concept of 9-1/2 feet. A landslide victory is assured.

Jim Israel
Mr. Gripes
July 6, 2015

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Chappaquiddick’s ‘Black Waters’ / Same-Sex Grammar / A Knight – Lady, No Less – in Shining Armor?

Chappaquiddick – Weird how the brain functions when you’re approaching the age of decrepitude, as Mr. Gripes may be experiencing. One moment, a memory that’s been buried 20 leagues under a sea somewhere, resurfaces with all the original emotion and shock intact. 

I happened upon a novel, ‘Black Water,’ by Joyce Carol Oates, which is – pardon the cliché – a ‘thinly veiled’, fictionalized portrayal of the events leading up to the drowning death of a campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne, in a submerged car driven off a wooden bridge by Senator Ted Kennedy in July 1969.

The entire evening is channeled through the thoughts of Ms. Kopechne – beginning with her attendance at a summer lawn party on Chappaquiddick Island, her subsequent meeting up with the late-arriving senator, and an ensuing walk on the beach with him. She’s smitten, of course, and later accepts a ride in his car to a ferry heading to the mainland, and a hotel tryst that was to be the inevitable conclusion of the evening.

In the car, Ms. Kopechne realizes the senator is drunk, or at least very much impaired, and is driving too fast along a rutted, damaged road that was supposed to be closed to automobiles. Intimidated a bit, she doesn’t raise any concerns to the senator. Soon the speeding car is slipping sideways onto a sandy road shoulder, and drives off a tiny wooden bridge, into the ‘black waters.’

From then on, the reader is privy to the panicky, increasingly incoherent thoughts of a drowning Ms. Kopechne, upside down in a sunken automobile, trapped in her seat, her right knee severely injured, but never giving up hope and the belief that her hero-senator would save her. To the last sentence of the novel, she’s certain he’s coming for her, and will lift her out and up to the surface. Then ‘she dies,’ Ms. Oates writes suddenly, and the story’s over.

At the book’s conclusion, Mr. Gripes recalled that Mr. Kennedy got off scot-free. All the Kennedys-on-Cape-Cod power and clout were brought to bear after this event, and somehow the Senator managed to emerge unblemished, his ass not in jail, and his political career intact.

After a little research, I present the rest of that night:  after the accident, Mr. Kennedy immediately extracted himself from the car, but made no attempts to rescue Ms. Kopechne, or seek any assistance. Instead, he abandons the car, and Ms. Kopechne, and begins to walk back toward the party. At some point, later in the evening, still without contacting the authorities, he swims across the sound – a considerable physical feat, incidentally – and returns to his motel on the mainland. It’s now a couple of hours after midnight, 3 or 4 hours after the accident, and still no one’s been contacted. He stays there for the remainder of the night.

The car, sunk in 6 feet of water, and Mary Jo Kopechne’s body were discovered early the next morning, before Kennedy had made any contact with island authorities. In fact, it wasn’t until Kennedy spoke to his lawyer around 10:45 the following morning that calls were made to report the accident, nearly eleven hours after his car ran off the bridge. Unbelievable. 

In the end, Kennedy was given a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident, with no mention of the dead woman in the affadavit. [Another curious fact: Ms. Kopechne was buried one day after she died, and no autopsy was performed.]

The entire event seems right out of ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’, doesn’t it? Later he runs for President of the United States, with allusions to the crime mysteriously never brought up, even by opponents. Seems crazy all these decades later.

If this had occurred today? Posted instantaneously would be 100,000 vitriolic messages on the internet and social media. The hue-and-cry would have compelled the police to haul Kennedy to jail, and arraign him on very serious felonies; we’d have for our viewing pleasure a trial that would have made OJ’s seem as insignificant as a parking-ticket dispute in traffic court.  Just imagine the press presence. Plus, Kennedy’s political career would be finished.

When Senator Kennedy died, once again there was very little mention of his complicity in the death of Ms. Kopechne.  I don’t recall any, in fact.

Instead, he was eulogized, glowingly, in speech after speech, as one of the great Senatorial ‘Lions’ in American history. 

Ted Kennedy, in a supreme moment of crisis, turned out to be nothing but a quivering, fearful little boy, hoping that all of this was a very bad dream, and would just go away. Some lion. He was nothing but a shameful coward.

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My views on what’s permissible in terms of human conduct and relationships coincide splendidly with those of that wise man, Mark Twain, who famously wrote, “I don’t care what people do, as long they don’t frighten the horses.” [I’ve paraphrased a bit]. Live and let live, be it a homosexual coupling, heterosexual, transgender, transvestite, whatever: at my age, I’m too grizzled and gray to give a damn in what manner anyone manages to bring some serenity and contentment to this often disappointing life.

BUT, my equanimity about same-sex relationships only goes only so far. I read a couple of weeks ago of a physical dispute between a gay couple one evening in Houston. Nothing unusual these days about news of a domestic disturbance, of course. The argument, ending in the arrests of, and injuries to, both parties, was between two professional female basketball players, who happen to be married to each other. [Subsequently, these players were suspended by the Women’s National Basketball Association, which runs the league, for a few games.] Still nothing to get all hot and bothered about, Mr. Gripes reasoned.

Mr. Gripes’ equipoise regarding this affair, however, was shattered by one two-word phrase in the newspaper account: ‘Ms. Griner and her wife were released early from jail…’ You see, Mr. Gripes, who once toiled as a typesetter, and is almost Prussian in his obsessive adherence to the rules of correct grammar, cannot possibly abide by that ‘her wife’ phrase. It just sounds dumb and ignorant. [Granted, ‘his husband’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue easily, either.] 

It’s often stated that languages never are finished, and certainly they can’t be. Change is the one constant all over the world, and language must adapt to these changes. There’s nothing static about a language ever. In that vein, I fervently hope new words and expressions are created to fill the vacuum of language around same sex relationships. Because, as long as Mr. Gripes continues to bitch and moan on this earth, he will never use ‘her wife’ in a meaningful sentence. Enough is enough.

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A  Lady Knight in Shining Armor?  ‘Who Hates Barack Obama the Most?’ That was the unspoken, essential qualification which, up to a couple of months ago, every prospective Republican candidate for the Presidency 2016 had to adhere to. Not any longer. Now, Republicans, with their detestation of Obama certainly still intact, have altered the calculus: These days, it’s ‘Who can beat Hillary?’ Whoever comes out ahead in that contest will win the nomination.

In that vein, Mr. Gripes, who finds the Donald-Trump-Rand-Paul-Gov-Bridgegate-of NJ-George-Pataki [!!]-Bobby Jindal-Mike Hucklebee clown-car array of Republican candidates blissfully hilarious, now presents his selection of the one individual who has the best chance – by far – of beating Mrs. Clinton. Jeb Bush sure as hell isn’t going to beat Hillary, and neither will Scott Walker or Mario Rubio. Losers. No chance. Only one could do it…

Carly Fiorina…

Why? For one, the electorate will not be inundated with a thousand stentorian ‘feminist’ shibboleths that Ms. Clinton’s operatives will surely view as a winning strategy. There’ll be no ‘It’s the Year of the Woman,’ or ‘Be Part of History: Elect the 1st Woman President’, and, thank God, we’ll be spared about a million tedious-to-the-point-of-narcolepsy ‘Women’s Empowerment’ television ads. You see, Carly Fiorina, unfortunately for Democrats, is a woman, too. Bill and Hillary, where Mr. Gripes comes from, we call that checkmate. 

Another thing: Ms. Fiorina is no shrinking violet, and does not suffer fools easily. Mr. Gripes was struck how quick on her feet she has been in dealing with the smarmy press, who are always looking for those ‘got-cha’ moments. She’s obviously very smart, and it looks to me that she’ll do very well in any Presidential debates; in that setting Ms. Fiorina could crush Ms. Clinton, who is too wedded to rehearsed, drab sound bites.

Also, Ms. Fiorina has had a very successful career in the private business world – she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard, so she’s had a lot of experience dealing with a huge staff, bureaucracies, budgets, planning and financial crises, executive skills she’ll need as President. In contrast, Hillary Clinton has worked only in government for the past 40 years: she’s been on the public dole forever.

However, there is one major problem regarding the prospect of Carly Fiorina emerging as the Republican candidate: in a political party that still is contesting abortion rights, gay rights, and equal pay issues, as if we’re still living in the 1950’s, is this party ready for a woman to run under the GOP banner? A female President may be simply too ‘radical’ an idea for all those conservative Republican voters in state primaries leading up to the nomination. The notion that only a man can and should be President may be too formidable to be dislodged.

But, Mr. Gripes would relish a Fiorina-Clinton battle. It’d be a lot of fun.

Jim Israel
Mr. Gripes
June 4, 2015