Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin writes in The New Yorker that Trump’s pardon of convicted felon Roger Stone proves that Trump is worse than Nixon. Nixon worries about appearances. Trump never does. Trump is shameless. He flaunts his lack of ethics and his complete indifference to norms.
On March 21, 1973, President Richard Nixon and John Dean, the White House counsel, conferred in the Oval Office about ways to keep the Watergate scandal from consuming the Administration. The two men weighed the possibility of a pardon or commutation for E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars. “Hunt’s now demanding clemency or he’s going to blow,” Dean said. “And, politically, it’d be impossible for, you know, you to do it.” Nixon agreed: “That’s right.” Dean continued, “I’m not sure that you’ll ever be able to deliver on clemency. It may be just too hot.” Neither Nixon nor Dean had especially refined senses of morality or legal ethics, but even they seemed to understand that a President could not use his pardon power to erase charges against someone who might offer testimony implicating Nixon himself in a crime. To do so, they recognized, would be too unseemly, too transparent, too egregiously corrupt. And, in fact, Nixon never gave a pardon, or commuted a sentence, of anyone implicated in the Watergate scandal.
But, on Friday night, Donald Trump commuted the prison sentence of Roger Stone, his associate and political mentor of more than three decades. Last year, Stone was convicted of obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, and witness tampering in a case brought by Robert Mueller, the special counsel. William Barr, the Attorney General, had already overridden the sentencing recommendation of the prosecutors who tried the case—a nearly unprecedented act—and Stone was ultimately sentenced to forty months in prison. But Barr’s unseemly interference in the case was somehow not enough for the President, so Trump made sure that Stone would serve no time at all. The only trace of shame in Trump’s announcement was that he delivered it on a Friday night—supposedly when the public is least attentive.
I preferred it when racists and authoritarians hid under rocks. At least that acknowledged certain norms. Trump’s strategy is to produce news generating noise over outrageous stuff that he knows will never come to pass. That way he can get away with the smaller but still truly terrible stuff that he and his enablers really want. That has been Republican strategy since Reagan. Unfortunately, the two-sides-to-every-question, we-gotta-compromise, meet-in-the-middle folks have fallen for it. Now, we are where we are. The rapacious capitalists got a lot of what they want. The rest of us, not so much. Time for us to fight for what we really want and be explicit about it.
Someday, someone will write about the tactics that Trump uses to distract the public from what he is doing quietly. He releases announcements late on Friday, when the press is not paying attention (firing an Inspector General, abolishing an environmental regulation), but keeps the public focused on whether athletes are kneeling when the National Anthem is played.
Plenty of people have written about exactly that. Problem is, it works. The media breathlessly report on every obnoxious tweet and liberals go into collective apoplexy. Meanwhile the budgets for the military and ICE and DHS get raised exponentially (with Democratic support), Muslim bans get enacted, families get separated, women’s, minority and LGBT+ rights get attacked, corporations get protected, workers get screwed and the Commons get privatized. I’ve been trying to tell people for three and a half years now to keep your eye on the ball and not get distracted, but I’m told that we have to react to every obnoxious tweet because silence equals consent. C’est la vie.
Incidentally, the late Friday announcement is a long hallowed political tradition on both sides of the aisle.
“I’ve been trying to tell people for three and a half years now to keep your eye on the ball and not get distracted…”
What is your definition of “the ball”? Because for most of us, “the ball” is defeating Trump and not normalizing Trump’s (and his enabler Barr’s) pre-fascist behavior.
Is that your definition of “the ball”?
I think many people get distracted from what is important — for example, while I know you probably disagree, many of us were surprised that some people did not believe “the ball” included the lifetime appointment of far right Supreme Court Justices and the reshaping of the federal judiciary to make it significantly harder for any progressive legislation to be passed in the future. That was a “ball” that people who said 4 years of Trump rule was no worse than 4 years of an “evil democrat” took their eyes off.
Had those people not taken their eyes off that ball, it is possible that Citizens’ United would already be ended and the progressive movement would not be faced with the disenfranchisement of as many of the voters likely to support them as the Republicans can manage.
The problem is that your “ball” seems to be to defeat and disempower the current Democratic party, and for most of us, a more important ball to keep our eye on is to defeat and disempower the Trump/Republican party while also supporting the progressive candidates like AOC and Jamaal Bowman to move the democrats to the left.
Is your “ball” the defeat and disempowerment of the Trump Republican Party? Or is your “ball” defeating the Democrats that you don’t think are progressive enough because you believe that having Democrats in power is no better than another 4 years of Trump?
The late John Lewis told Americans to stand up for what you truly believe. He didn’t tell them to shut up and not be outraged when Trump demonizes athletes kneeling because the mere expression of outrage about that “distracts” from calling out other things that they want to stand up for.
There is no limit to what you can stand up for and speak out about. But if you are turning your criticism against the people outraged at some of Trump’s actions and all but implying that they are wrong to mention their outrage publicly, instead of turning your criticism to Trump, then you are the one who is taking your eye off the ball.
Diane Ravitch was referring to Trump distracting his own followers (and perhaps the co-opted media) from the reality of how bad of a president he has been. The rest of us can express outrage at Trump’s racist attacks on kneeling athletes and also “keep our eye on the ball”. But perhaps we have our eye on different balls than you do.
You spend a lot more time being critical of democrats than Trump. I get that Adam Schiff is not perfect, but how did your non-stop criticism and demonizing of Adam Schiff keep your “eye on the ball”? Unless you are playing a very different game than the rest of us, and that game is how to defeat the Democrats, even if it means another 4 years of Trump.
Yep, the “two-sides-to-every-question, we-gotta-compromise, meet-in-the-middle” philosophy led us to the neoliberalism and capitalism that we have today. The only “happy” people are those that are at the extreme polar ends politically, because they have all the wealth and all the power. I truly believe that KARMA is a _itch. When it slaps back, it’s going to be something they won’t know how to handle. I know this is awful, but I wonder what Herman Cain would say if he could speak from death?
And yet, there are two sides to every question, or more accurately, myriad approaches to every human problem. Therein lies the problem of democracy: How do you deal with an electorate that is willing to accept a version of the truth that is contrived.
The southern “fire eaters” were able to sell the hardscrabble scotts-irish farmers of the south on the notion that the Confederacy was able to defend their freedom when the real truth was that poor whites and slaves shared a common interest in acquiring the means of production that were monopolized by the very voices that were convincing them to defend their land against the yankee invdader. In this historical instance, there were not two sides. Freedom is freedom.
Example of the manipulation of simplistic two-sidism:
The defund the police call is meant to get folks to rethink how the U.S. thinks about inequity, ensuring public safety, and moving away from control with a gun as the only paradigm. It get’s portrayed as a choice between total lawlessness and what exists. The meet in the middle folks argue for retraining police to use guns less often rather than injustice itself.
Our education system is often inequitable, unjust, ineffective, and racist. Privatization is portrayed as a solution (often disingenuously). Defenders of charter schools accuse opponents of wanting to maintain the status quo as if the only choices are what we have and what they want. So, the meet in the middle folks agree to just a limited number of charter school, instead of dealing with the injustice.
Defund the police is losing battle of semantics. Defund has harsher connotations than the real message. In my opinion a better choice of words would have been “Modernize policing” or even the overworked word reform would not have played into the right wing’s agenda the way the word defund does.
I live in a conservative area. The political ads are calling Biden a “socialist.” Why? He thinks people should have access to affordable health care. In politics loaded words are used to cause maximum damage, and worse than that, they do not even have to be the truth.
“The Idiot is worse than Nixon”: file under the bleedin’ obvious:
Let’s not forget that Nixon and Kissinger prolonged the Vietnam War, resulting in millions of deaths, bombed Cambodia and Laos, engineered the Pinochet coup, supported Pinochet and numerous other mass murderers who ran totalitarian states with arms and intelligence and training and funding, and created the disastrous war on drugs to target “the hippies and the blacks.” A lot of blood on their hands.
“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” –War Criminal Henry Kissinger
Adding to Nixon’s amorality and nefariousness: From Smithsonian -President Johnson had at the time a habit of recording all of his phone conversations, and newly released tapes from 1968 detailed that the FBI had “bugged” the telephones of the South Vietnamese ambassador and of Anna Chennault, one of Nixon’s aides. Based on the tapes, says Taylor for the BBC, we learn that in the time leading up to the Paris Peace talks, “Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.” The Atlantic Wire:
In the recently released tapes, we can hear Johnson being told about Nixon’s interference by Defence Secretary Clark Clifford. The FBI had bugged the South Vietnamese ambassadors phone. They had Chennault lobbying the ambassador on tape. Johnson was justifiably furious — he ordered Nixon’s campaign be placed under FBI surveillance. Johnson passed along a note to Nixon that he knew about the move. Nixon played like he had no idea why the South backed out, and offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nixon-prolonged-vietnam-war-for-political-gainand-johnson-knew-about-it-newly-unclassified-tapes-suggest-3595441/
Breathtaking. I didn’t know this. I have read that there is some evidence that it was Nixon who actually went to Tehran and cut the deal, on behalf of Republicans, for Iran to hold the hostages until after Reagan’s election in exchange for arms sales.
Good points all, Bob and Joe.
And because of the bombing of Cambodia, led directly to the Cambodian Genocide of the late 1970s, in which about 1/4 of the population of Cambodia died.
Exactly, Threatened!
So many unintended consequences of these insane policies of propping up dictatorships. I have a story about that. Years ago, when I was at Indiana University, I came out of an English class to find a bunch of Iranian students protesting the Shah. They had brown paper grocery bags over their heads. I asked someone in the crowd, “Why the bags?” and he said, “Well, if they were photographed, the Shah would disappear them or members of their families.” And so it was. For decades, the Shah ran a police state. There was hardly a family in the country that hadn’t had someone disappeared in the middle of the night by the Shah’s secret police, never to be heard of again, and everyone there knew how the Shah got into power and stayed there–American support. So, then, when the revolution occurred, ushering in a theocratic dictatorship, and there were people in the streets yelling “Death to America,” Americans had no freaking clue why. “Oh, they hate our freedoms,” George Bush, Jr. said. They were just those crazy fanatics. NO CLUE about the decades of violent repression and American funding of that. So, the policy of installing and supporting the ruthless dictator led to exactly the outcome we wouldn’t have wanted–the theocratic revolution and state. Same story in Iraq, where we put Saddam Hussein in power and propped him up for decades. Our guy. Insane, short-term thinking and policy.
Bob: Similar story from my experience. There were multiple students from Iran in my college in the mid-seventies. All of them attended daily English classes in hot emforeign language department. They daily trudged by my German professor, who was very sarcastic toward those with whom he disagreed and very vocal in expressing his political beliefs. Each day he would stand at the door of his classroom and make disparaging remarks about the Shah when a certain boy walked by. This was the boy known by all as the Shah’s informant. One day the boy stopped and spoke.
“What is your name? I will write this down.”
“What is your name? I will write that down,” responded the teacher.
The boy stopped and extended his hand. “Let us be friends.”
Some might say the “insane” policies were quite intentional.
It was common knowledge before the US invasion that the only thing holding Iraq together was the dictator Saddam Hussein.
People like Paul Wolfowitz , architect of the overthrow of Hussein certainly were aware of what would happen (eg, between the Shia and Sunni Muslims) if Saddam were toppled.
Chaos is not always a bad thing.
Better to have Iraqis fighting amongst themselves than to have them joined under Saddam to target the US, Israel and American interests” or so, the logic goes.
Wolfowitz claim that the purpose was to bring democracy to Iraq is laughable, but lots of people buy it.
I suppose that you are right, for the following reason: the disaster that ensued was so entirely predictable.
But I have this odd revulsion for people dropping bombs and napalm on poor peasant children across the globe. A number of our presidents and presidential advisors haven’t had any qualms there.
People sit in their offices or in Congress and debate going to war in the abstract. Typically, as an unavoidable result of such action, innocent people, including children, will suffer horribly, will be maimed and killed. And the question at the front of their minds should always be, what end would justify that? If they aren’t psychopaths, the answer would almost always be, obviously, none.
My father was a CO in World War II. The objector kind, not the commanding kind. Since he was of more advanced age and a farmer with elderly parents at home, a friend on the draft board got him an agricultural deferment instead. Some people in the community whispered to the preacher about him even after he was disabled from cancer and sitting in a chair.
I was cleaning out some stuff during Covid layoff and found a poem about the conscientious objector my father had typed on the back of a discarded 3by 5 from the library. Some lines stand out:
God give me the strength
To die the hardest way.
To die for peace, conviction
And the dream of brotherhood-
I grew up having to justify my father’s behavior before my friends. Luckily, the lack of historical understanding that now elects the trumpmeister made my friends forget my father, so it was not a perpetual thing. Then the Vietnam era blunted the militarism for a time until the eighties brought back a sort of faux military mentalite.
My own take, Roy: The world being what it is–a dangerous place–it’s important to have overwhelming deterrent power AND a commitment not to use it except in defense and as an extreme last resort. But when you have that kind of power, there will always be some evil person who wants to use it to a nefarious end. And the only way to prevent that is to have a woke, educated populace, which it’s the job of the press to create.
Fascinating about your father, Roy. My stepfather was a kid serving as a paratrooper and fighting his way across islands off the coast of Japan. Decades later, he was still having pieces of shrapnel work their way to the surface of his body, where he would pick them out. He was a big, strong fellow–he had played on the Dogers’s farm team for a time–and of a very stoic John Wayne archetype. But when he was an old man, I took him to see “Saving Private Ryan,” and at the opening scene (I think it was) in which the Americans were hitting the beach and being blown to holy hell, I looked over, and he had his head in his hands, fighting back his weeping.
My neighbor was the head of the American legion post. A veteran of the Battle of the Buldge who saw real action, he later was the community man who oversaw the local Cemetary. When my father passed, he rode with me ove to the Cemetary to make sure we had the right plot. He knew it was a perfunctory duty; our families had had their plots for decades. On the way he recounted seeing a mass grave after the battle.
“Every politician should see that before they vote a war,” he told me.
Unlike some of the more self- righteous members of the community, he never had anything disparaging to say about my father.
I’ve encountered the same sentiment from many a military person. I think of the Joint Chiefs trying to talk sense into George Bush, Jr.
My current prediction:
Trump loses the popular vote and the Electoral College in November by a HUGE margin. He will still claim they cheated. With 77 days left and the court cases against him growing into a mountain, he makes a deal with Pence and resigns before January 20, 2021.
With a couple of months left before Biden is sworn in as President, President Pence pardons Trump for all of his alleged crimes. Then Pence does all he can in that small amount of time to turn the U.S. into a klepto-theocracy with him as the first (fake) Christian Emperor of the United States.
Pence fails in his attempt to subvert the U.S. Constitution and leaves the White House in shame on January 20th. Trump, safe from prosecution in federal courts is still Tweeting like a maniac, criticizes Pence and calls him a wimp. Trump tweets that Pence is the worst president in U.S. history. Trump will claim that if Pence had been stronger as a VP, Trump would have gone down in history as the greatest leader in the history of mankind.
Trump will continue to hold hate rallies but attendance will drop off until he has trouble filling a room that holds 100 people – the reason his deplorable followers have deserted him is become almost all of them ended up with COVID-19 and many died.
Trump will continue to Tweet and repeatedly blame Pence and Kushner for the failures of IQ 45’s presidency.
By the time Trump turns 80, fearing for his life because protestors with signs are always outside of wherever he is living, he will move to Moscow and live there.
Trump’s last breath as he dies in Moscow at the age of 98 will be that he was the greatest U.S. president ever and anyone that disagrees with him is a liar and a fake.
Strangely, your prognostications don’t seem beyond the realm of possibility. It will, indeed, be fascinating to watch the events that unfold after the Idiot is gone from office and the White House is fumigated.
I saw Trump day today that it might take weeks, months, or years to know who won the election.
Years!!
My heart sank.
What comes out of Trump’s mouth is not to be trusted.
Do not forget that this is the thug and fraud that has told more than 20,000 lies since he told his first lie taking the Oath of Office.
The election will be held in November, and it will not be close. Trump is going to lose BIG.
Trump might spend the rest of his life filing court cases claiming he lost because of cheating. For the rest of his life, he will probably hold rallies and tweet that he had this election stolen from him, but he isn’t going to stop the winner from winning.
There is no way Trump can win this election. He has already lost. He knows it. Trump hates to lose. That’s why he will try anything to win just like all the people he cheated and went to court to fight.
Donald Trump, to put it mildly, is not a bright guy. He managed, in 2016, to squeak through to victory, running as an outsider candidate against both the Democrats and his own party, based on tapping into white suburban and blue-collar resentment. He talked about cities in ruins and putting “forgotten Americans” back to work. This was the major theme of his Inaugural Address, doubtless crafted by Steve Bannon. He promised a two-trillion-dollar infrastructure program to put blue-collar folks back to work. But then what did he do? He spent his presidency spewing out his petty personal grievances and attempting to enrich himself via emoluments and tax cuts for rich people like himself and attempting to inflame various parts of his base base. Imagine having the power of the presidency, which consists to a large part in having a bully pulpit from which to rally the country behind policy, and doing as little with it as he has. He has enjoyed enormous support from insiders in his own party like Mitch McConnell because he is so ignorant and incompetent that with him in charge, they could rape and pillage to their hearts’ content–delivering up bill after bill to please their oligarchical masters. Trump wanted to fame of being president but not the job. He’s so dumb that he thinks he can do it without having to learn ANYTHING, based on his intuition, which is really ironic and would be funny if he were just another schmuck privileged from birth and not the holder of an office with real power. And now, here we are nearing the end of his term, and it’s starting to dawn on him that people don’t like him, and he’s desperately looking around for something that might please–give them all a payroll tax cut, promise a healthcare package. I think of it this way: Consider the rock group The Beatles. They had the ear of the entire world at one point, and all they could say with it is, “Love, love, love. Love is all you need.” Saccharine. Childish. But they were mostly uneducated and just KIDS. Trump has had the presidency for 3 3/4 years, and he’s squandered it because beyond his petty resentments (against people of color, for example), he’s never stood for or cared about anything except himself, and he hasn’t been smart enough even to see what would serve his own best interests.
Might happen, Lloyd. Do not suggest this too loudly.
No worry. Trump hates to read anything that doesn’t have his name in it. He has a short attention span and a very leaky memory. He also only listens when his name appears in every sentence he hears, and any mention of his name must be linked to his greatness. Any criticism and he explodes in anger and walks slowly and unsteadily to his phone to launch another attack through Twitter.
Trump thinks he is the greatest Tweeter ever.
And, I cannot afford to buy an ad on his favorite Faux program from Fox like the Lincoln Project is doing.
Well, Lloyd, Trump doesn’t have to read our posts. He has William Barr in charge of the FBI and John Ratcliffe as Director of National Intelligence. You doubtless know the lyrics to the children’s Christmas song: “He sees you when you’re sleeping.”/”He’s making a list. He’s checking it twice.” These guys are doubtless compiling their list of friends and enemies in preparation for a second Trump term in which, having squeaked through again, Vlad’s Agent Orange goes full-on fascist. This is an important election coming up.
Ah, but Trump is planning that his second term will be for life or he will manage to extend his first term for life. Pray that his life is cut short by a massive McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets triple stroke.
Trump’s favorite foods: Diet Coke, McDonald’s, and meatloaf ( probably made from the cheapest ground beef and pork).
“A growing body of evidence suggests that diet soda consumption correlates with an increased risk of a wide range of medical conditions, notably: heart conditions, such as heart attack and high blood pressure. metabolic issues, including diabetes and obesity. brain conditions, such as dementia and stroke.”
“McNuggets are high in unhealthy fats and sodium, but I doubt they are doing you any harm if you’re only eating them a couple times a week as part of an otherwise healthy diet. Though you would have to be eating a 20 piece to reach 50g protein, and that’s a bit much.”
“The New York Times characterizes Trump as ‘the nation’s fast food president.’ And he likely wouldn’t dispute that title. Even though he can afford to eat wherever he’d like, Trump famously enjoys McDonald’s, where he orders a Filet-O-Fish, Big Mac, or Quarter Pounder. On the campaign trail, he also ate Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King on his private plane. Like many Americans, he just likes fast food.”
A satirical novelist would create just such a diet for such a McPresident, to go with the orange clown makeup and the name Donald. McDonalds, of course, appropriated the name of a Scottish clan chieftain for its own clown–Ranald McDonald, ancestor of the MacDonalds of Clanranald. The original hamburger clown Ronald McDonald was played by the same guy who created Bozo, which is as good a name as any for our bad joke of a president. Here, a breathtakingly beautiful old song featuring the Scottish Ronald McDonald, sometime falsely attributed to Robert Burns, who collected it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7677MLq0ZhQ
The Lyrics
Leezie Lindsay (“Someday My Prince Will Come,” Highlands style, lol)
Will ye gang tae the highlands, Leezie Lindsay?
Will ye gang tae the highlands wi’ me?
Will ye gang tae the highlands, Leezie Lindsay,
my bride and my darling tae be?
Tae gang tae the heilands wi’ you sir,
I dinna ken how that may be,
for I ken not the road that I’m going
nor ken I the lad I’m going wi’.
Oh Leezie lass, you muan ken little
if you say that ye dinna ken me,
For my name is Lord Ronald MacDonald,
a cheiftain of high degree.
Oh if you are the laird of MacDonald,
i great yin I ken you muan be,
but how can a cheiftain sae mighty
think o’ a poor lassie like me?
Tae gang tae the heilands wi’ you sir,
would bring the saut tear tae my e’e
at leaving the green glens and woodlands
and streams o’ my ain country.
Oh, I’ll show you the red deer a-roamin’,
on mountains where waves the tall pine,
and as far as the bound of the red deer,
ilk moorland and mountain is mine.
A thousand claymores I can muster,
ilk blade and its bearer the same
and when round their cheiftain they rally,
the gallant MacDonald’s my name.
She has gotten a gown of green satin,
she has kilted it up tae the knee,
and she’s off wi’ Lord Ronald MacDonald,
his bride and his darling to be.
There’s dancing and joy in the heilands,
there’s piping and gladness and glee.
for MacDonald has brought home Leezie
Lindsay,
his bride and his darlin’ to be.
As I read the poem. I imagined that Lord Ronald McDonald’s bride to be was Trump in drag wearing size H fake boobs under the dress and bragging that she/he has the biggest boobs in the world.
Lloyd, you are an original!
I hate to ask, “An original what – something that is going extinct or is something else entirely?”
There is only one Lloyd Lofthouse, and he is one wonderfully amusing and creative fellow!
Thank you. I think the same could be said of Bob Shepherd and others that leave comments on Diane’s site.
Leezie, Lizzie, dim. of Elizabeth; gang, go; tae, to; heilands, highlands; ken, see; wi’, with; maun, must; dinna, do not; laird, lord; yin, one; saut, salt; e’e; eye; sae, so; ain, own; ilk, each; claymore, a type of sword; kilted, lifted
Why not come up with ideas that Barr and his thugs would add to their lists and pass on to The Lord of Lies Donald Trump. If we word these suggestions/ideas properly, we might be able to trick Trump into doing something else that would land him in boiling oil.
One ide: Trump orders one of his federal law enforcement agencies to dump billions of gallons of hydroxychloroquine into the country’s water supply like they do fluoride.
Two days ago the NYT ran a front page story, “[The Idiot’s] Family Legacy: Empathy Is for the Weak” that ended with a hilarious four paragraph conclusion the first of which was: “In response to this article, Hogan Gidley, a former White House spokesman who has since transitioned over to the campaign, said [the Idiot] did show empathy. He sent three news clippings as evidence, which all generated positive coverage for [the Idiot].” I laughed so hard because it reminded me of a story Earl Long used to tell in his stump speeches when he campaigned for Congress in Louisiana (as documented by A.J. Liebling in the best book on politics ever written, in my humble opinion, The Earl of Louisiana):
“We got the finest roads, finest schools, finest hospitals in the country—yet there are rich men who complain. They are so tight you can hear ‘em squeak when they walk. They wouldn’t give a nickel to see a earthquake. They sit there swallowin’ hundred-dollar bills like a bullfrog swallows minnows—if you chunked them as many as they want they’d bust.”
“Amen, Earl,” the old man said. “God have mercy on the poor people.”
“Of course, I know many fine rich people,” the Governor said, perhaps thinking of his campaign contributors. “But most of them are like a rich old feller I know down in Plaquemines Parish, who died one night and never done nobody no good in his life, and yet, when the Devil come to get him, he took an appeal to St. Peter.
“‘I done some good things on earth,’ he said. ‘Once, on a cold day in about 1913, I gave a blind man a nickel.’ St. Peter looked all through the records, and at last, on page four hundred and seventy-one, he found the entry. ‘That ain’t enough to make up for a misspent life,’ he said. ‘But, wait,’ the rich man says. ‘Now I remember, in 1922 I give five cents to a poor widow woman that had no carfare.’ St. Peter’s clerk checked the book again, and on page thirteen hundred and seventy-one, after pages and pages of this old stump-wormer loan-sharked the poor, he found the record of that nickel.
“‘That ain’t neither enough,’ St. Peter said. But the mean old thing yelled, ‘Don’t, sentence me yet. In about 1931 I give a nickel to the Red Cross.’ The clerk found that entry, too. So he said to St. Peter, ‘Your Honor, what are we going to do with him?’”
The crowd hung on Uncle Earl’s lips the way the bugs hovered in the light.
“You know what St. Peter said?” The Governor, the only one in the courthouse square who knew the answer, asked. There was, naturally, no reply.
“He said: ‘Give that man back his fifteen cents and tell him to go to Hell.’
“He had the crowd with him now…”
LOL
Everybody, gather ’round.
Loosen up yore suspenders.
Hunker down on the ground.
I’m a cracker; you are, too.
I’m gonna take good care of you.
What kind of “cracker”? There are good crackers and bad crackers. According to Faux Presiden Trump crackers are not all created equal.
Lyrics from a Randy Newman song about Huey Long
Patrick Smith, author of the wonderful historical novel A Land Remembered, which is about the early settling of Florida by whites from the North, attributes the term “cracker” to its use to describe the drovers who used whips to round up from Florida swamps the feral descendants of escaped Spanish cattle. For a time, there was a hard living to be made doing this and driving them to rivers for transport North. The swamp dwellers came to be known as “crackers.”
Thank you for sharing. IT is possible that there are different origins with different meanings for the term “Cracker”. Case in point, I also found this from The Urban Dictionary:
After the Civil War, some whites were so poor they had to crack their own corn because the could not afford mill.
That cracker thinks he’s high and mighty. He forgot where he came from.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracker
Then I found this from Wikipedia’s English dictionary:
“Cracker, sometimes white cracker or cracka, is a derogatory term used for white people, used especially against poor rural whites in the Southern United States. It is sometimes used in a neutral context in reference to a native of Florida or Georgia (see Florida cracker and Georgia cracker).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_(term)
Then Wiki.org’s English dictionary had this for a Florida Cracker.
“Since the huge influx of new residents into Florida in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, from the northern parts of the United States and from Mexico and Latin America, the term ‘Florida Cracker’ is used informally by some Floridians to indicate that their families have lived in the state for many generations.
NPR also reported on “The Secret History of the Word “Cracker.” After reading what NPR reports, you might agree with me that they did a better job than the other sources above.
“Cracker,” the old standby of Anglo insults was first noted in the mid 18th century, making it older than the United States itself. It was used to refer to poor whites, particularly those inhabiting the frontier regions of Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. It is suspected that it was a shortened version of “whip-cracker,” since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip (not to mention the other brutal arenas where those skills were employed.) Over the course of time it came to represent a person of lower caste or criminal disposition, (in some instances, was used in reference to bandits and other lawless folk.)”
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/07/01/197644761/word-watch-on-crackers
I am surprised by nothing any more. Nothing! Trump is definitely more conniving that Nixon, more of a thumb twaddler in the face of danger to the Union than Fillmore and Pierce, more scandalously corrupt than Harding, more of a dangerous tax cut zealot than Coolidge, more racist than Buchanan, more. racist. than. Buchanan, more inept than Hoover… He is the worst president of all time, for every reason. I am only surprised Trump never owned slaves.
He didn’t have slaves, just extremely poorly paid (when they were paid at all–he often cheated them) undocumented immigrant workers.
Slavery adjacent.
Very well put, Greg!