Don Pesci: Murderer Putin evokes Trump's admiration

VERNON, Conn.

Progressives, who sometimes have great difficulty making proper distinctions between populism and progressivism, may want to take a gander at populism Trump style, which appears to be a toxic combination of demagoguery laced with ineffable stupidity.

Here is the sad tale according to Charles Cooke of National Review:

“US presidential hopeful Donald Trump has said it is a 'great honor' to receive a compliment from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The property tycoon hailed Mr. Putin as a man 'highly respected within his own country and beyond.' It comes after Mr. Putin said Mr. Trump was a 'very colorful, talented person' during his annual news conference... 

“Just a few hours ago, Trump confessed exactly that. He was not caught in a 'gotcha.' He was not misquoted. He was not led down the garden path by the ‘liberal or ‘mainstream’ or ‘pro-Obama’ media. Rather, he said, as plain as day, that he has ‘always felt fine about Putin’; he called him ‘strong’ and a ‘powerful leader’; and he suggested that he should be respected for his ‘popularity within his country.’ Nothing could pry him from this reverence. When it was pointed out to him that Putin is a man who ‘kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries,’ Trump said flatly, ‘At least he’s a leader,’ which I can only imagine sounds an awful lot better in the original German. Then, for good measure, he took aim at the American system: ‘Unlike,’ he added, ‘what we have in this country.’”

It fell to Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe to point out to Mr. Trump that his amorata, President Vladimir Putin, formerly a KGB agent, the butcher of Ukraine and bosom pal of Bashar al-Assad, whose father was also a butcher of Syria, is “also a person that kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries.”

Mr. Scarborough asked his guest, whether he thought “that would be a concern.”

Trump: “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader. You know, unlike what we have in this country.”

Scarborough: “But again, he kills journalists that don’t agree with him.”

Trump: “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe. There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on and a lot of stupidity and that’s the way it is.”

Mr. Trump is probably the only politician in the United States, though he has confessed he is new to the political game, who can survive an all-night rhetorical binge and emerge in the morning raring to meet the press. There is no mare’s nest of his own making from which he will not try, so far successfully, to extricate himself – for, see you, Mr. Trump is a populist, and populists who are popular receive from the media fewer yanks on the hangman’s noose than do, say, brothers of presidents running for president or articulate conservatives.

Mr. Trump likes Mr. Putin because the ex-KGB agent is popular in Russia; Mr. Trump, should he succeed to the presidency, hopes to be popular in Russia, though for different reasons of course; and, no, Mr. Trump was not suggesting that Mr. Putin was stupid, a sliver of the vast stupidity in the world, or even affected by the stupidity, a sort of mental flu, that appears to be making the rounds among Republican presidential aspirants, all of whom are much stupider and far less rich than Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump’s sad suspicions about Republicans, not to mention the other dark corners of our stupid Republic, may be confirmed should he be nominated by the Republican convention as their bell-weather -- because Mr. Trump is not a Republican or a conservative. And he may have more in common with Mr. Putin than he or anyone else knows.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.

Don Pesci: The unmentionable 'F' word

VERNON, Conn.

Wander into the badlands of any large city in the U.S.,  shout out “Father” and nothing will stir. Fathers are rare in this environment; far rarer, shall we say, in the north end of Hartford than they are in posh New Canaan. What happened to them? Have they all fled to the Left Bank in Paris to become expatriate artists?

The problem is cultural, say most sociologists. Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said of the  very rich – “They are very different from you and me” – so is the underclass very different than the middle class or the upper class. No one pauses very long to entertain the question: Why are they different? That is one among many questions assiduously avoided whenever well intentioned liberals get together with equally well intentioned professors of raceology to discuss the equally absorbing question: Why can’t we have an honest discussion on race in America?

Answer: We can’t, among other reasons, because we shy from answering the all-important question posed two paragraphs above: Who killed fathers in the African-American community? Indeed, we refuse to acknowledge its importance. This question cannot be properly probed without mentioning the “U” word – underclass -- and its connection with households without fathers.

“Poverty” is the polite word most often used by polite liberals and more earnest progressives to describe the plight of the unmentionable underclass. And, no, people who discuss these things are not racist for having so brashly mentioned the unmentionable; namely, that there is an underclass under the noses of most well-intentioned liberals and that this underclass has become a permanent feature of modern day America.

Poverty in the United States has never been, with some rare exceptions, permanent; in fact the impermanence of poverty is what has driven the desperate poor to the United States since its founding. The boast engraved on the edestal of the Statute of Liberty -- “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The  wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door” – is a celebration of the impermanence of poverty. But an underclass has since become a permanent fixture of our social order; it is that very thing the huddled masses were hoping to escape in their desperate flight to America, where a steady advancement up the ladder of success was impeded by speed bumps rather than the fortress walls of a class system that in Europe kept the rich in splendor and the poor in rags, more or less permanently.

It seems ages ago that the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan  warned us all that the African-American family – dad, mom, kids -- was becoming an endangered species. Part of the problem was – and is – that the welfare system replaced Dad with a kind of sustenance that imprisoned people within the system; welfare clients were held in welfare cages on the periphery of poverty. The more they were helped, the more secure and inescapable their prisons became. A welfare state that was supposed to allow movement from temporary dependency to self-sufficiency became a more or less permanent holding cell, a purgatory whose doors, unlike the door mentioned in the Emma Lazarus poem, never opened upon more hopeful vistas.

How many fatherless children are there in our welfare system? Lots and lots and lots. For the most part, fatherlessness is a precondition for receiving welfare. And some of the younger “fathers” of children born out of wedlock – how ancient that word sounds – have never made it to the alter. Many of them are in prison. Brought up without fathers themselves, they drifted – like ships without rudders, blown here and there by every ill wind. Their children will drift also, unless they are made of very stern spiritual stuff.

Grandmothers and grandfathers, if they have been lucky enough to remain together, may help. Ministers, priests, rabbis, imams, social workers, other siblings and teachers may help. Still, the chance that a young African-American boy whose caretakers have relied on a social-welfare system that strives to “play father to the child” will be able to avoid the pitfalls that lead to gang affiliation, poor marks in school or a prison cell, is considerably more remote than would be the case if the boy were reared under the watchful eyes of a self-sufficient, responsible and employed father who would love and guide him down sure and well-marked paths.

Sons need fathers. And a society that cared for fathers and sons -- and its own welfare -- would not so perversely ignore the ruin at its door.

 

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a political writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.

Conn. regulation too much for Tenet Healthcare

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