Tag: Kim Kardashian

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Opinion The Last Word

Trump and Other Natural Disasters

CREDIT: © Doddis | Dreamstime.com

© Doddis | Dreamstime.com

There’s an old saying: “Be grateful you’re only miserable, because some people are horrible.” Watching the daily disaster known as Donald Trump is like that proverbial pileup on the interstate from which you can’t turn away. The Trump campaign has turned into a moshpit of tweet tantrums and discredited surrogates screaming repugnant falsehoods. It’s all become, frankly, horrible.

I did not savor the thought of writing about politics again when there are so many other important things to discuss, like Kim Kardashian being robbed of $10 million worth of jewelry at gunpoint in a Paris hotel. Of all people, she should have known not to stay at the Paris Hilton. Or, Lindsay Lohan losing a fingertip in a Turkish boating accident. Fortunately, the piece was found and surgically re-attached, adding to Lohan’s cosmetic procedures.

Anything would have been more pleasant than delving into the bilge known as Trumpworld. But this carnival continues to grow more bizarre by the day. Despite the best efforts of his handlers to contain him, Trump’s post-debate trashing of a former Miss Universe continued for a week. All Hillary Clinton had to do was mention the name Alicia Machado to send Trump into a stammering frenzy. All he had to do was shut up, and no one would have thought twice about it, but he couldn’t help himself. Trump’s taking to Fox News to say Machado was a “disgusting” person who “gained massive amounts of weight” struck at the heart of every woman who has ever struggled with a diet. And in so doing, Trump proved himself to be something other than a con artist; he’s a mark as well. Hillary hooked him and reeled him in.

I don’t understand how any woman could vote for him, but Trump is correct in saying there’s nothing he could do to shake his supporters. This puts him in league with former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, who said, “The only way I can lose is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” Trump’s misogyny is fairly easy to trace, since he has so diligently documented it through the years. The victims of his ugly attacks include Rosie O’Donnell, Hillary Clinton (who “doesn’t have the look to be president”), Carly Fiorina, Megyn Kelly, Huma Abedin, Heidi Cruz, reporter Katy Tur, columnist Gail Collins (who has “the face of a dog”), Arianna Huffington (of whom he tweeted, “I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man”), and “goofy” Elizabeth Warren, whom he calls “Pocahontas,” not even cognizant of his racist remarks.

Trump has promised to attack former President Bill Clinton’s sexual transgressions and relitigate the whole Monica Lewinsky affair. Hasn’t this poor woman suffered enough? It’s hard enough to be known as the world’s most famous fellator without having to relive it 20 years later. We know all about Bill Clinton’s infidelities from the voluminous Starr Report of 1998, which described in detail everything from intimate sexual acts to the shape of the former president’s penis. The author, Kenneth Starr, has recently been ousted as president of Baylor University over a sex scandal involving the football team. Karma’s funny that way.

The New York Times‘ explosive exposé of Trump’s partial tax records from 1995, in which he declared a personal loss of nearly a billion dollars (which would theoretically allow him to avoid paying federal income taxes for 18 years), was verified by his personal accountant. Fox News immediately declared that the Times was “trying to take Trump down” and castigated all those liberal newspapers that endorsed Hillary, like The Dallas Morning News, the Arizona Daily Star, and USA Today. 

The Trump campaign countered by saying newspaper endorsements are meaningless because no one reads them anymore, and they’re probably right. Logic and reason don’t dissuade the Trump army. They’re locked in, even though the online fact-checker Snopes.com declared that in the previous debate, Trump’s lies were “unprecedented.” Some undecided voters, however, might have been among the millions who watched the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. Remember when Al Gore’s staff had to force him to sit down and watch Darrell Hammond’s brilliant parody of his sighing, pompous debate performance against Dubya in 2000? If Trump’s team forced him to watch SNL, he’d probably spend the next week invoking Alec Baldwin’s sexual history.

The tax charade is rapidly falling apart. Trump’s claim that it’s “smart” not to pay taxes just makes him a burden on the rest of us. The only comparable tax cheat that comes to mind is Leona Helmsley, who once famously said, “Only the little people pay taxes.” It doesn’t matter to Trump supporters. They don’t care. Trump recently tweeted, “Remember, don’t believe ‘sources said’ by the VERY dishonest media. If they don’t name the sources, the sources don’t exist.”

Such stunning hypocrisy from someone who prefaces every other sentence with, “Many people say,” or “I don’t know if it’s true, but a lot people are saying it.” This is the laziest rhetorical trick in the book. You can say whatever the hell you want if your sources are anonymous, like the time Trump tweeted that “an extremely credible source” told him that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was a fraud.

I don’t care how much you hate Hillary Clinton or how much you think she’s a liar, at least she is in control of her mental faculties. Trump doesn’t seem to be in control of much of anything.

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (April 2, 2015)

CREDIT: Markwaters | Dreamstime.com

So in the past week or so I’ve received numerous emails from President Obama, inviting me to come to Washington to meet with him. He’s practically begging me to come spend some time with him. I’m quite flattered and trying to figure out what to wear. I may even go to Sears and get some new elastic-waist pants that don’t have frayed bottoms like most of my other elastic-waist pants from Sears that are draped over a chair in my bedroom. It’s the curse of being not only portly but also kinda short.

Markwaters | Dreamstime.com

President Obama

Of course, these aren’t really true invitations. It’s a contest and a fund-raiser. I’m not sure what the funds are for, since he’s nearing the end of his presidency, but I assume the money just goes into a big pool to help keep repugnant trolls like Ted Cruz at bay. The Prez and his staff keep telling me that I need to send him “my story,” and that there will be a drawing for all of the other people they’ve invited and that if my name gets pulled out of the hat, they will take care of my airline ticket and hotel costs. Nothing about meals and taxis and such, but it’s still a pretty good deal, especially given the hotel rates in the nation’s capital.

Oh, and speaking of the nation’s capital. Why is it that having and smoking marijuana in the capital of the United States of America is now legal and has garnered less press than Monica Lewinsky’s recent TED Talk or Kim Kardashian’s blond hair? People, IT IS LEGAL TO SMOKE WEED IN THE CAPITAL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Did you even know that? The catch is that it’s still against the law to buy or sell it, but if you grow it, you can smoke all you want with no repercussions. I was reading an article the other day on the online Washington Post about a restaurant that was giving away free pot seeds to people who were lined up around several blocks in the middle of the night. And while that was fascinating enough on its own, the brilliant part was that halfway through the article, there was an advertisement about a new product designed to prevent you from losing your keys, cell phone, wallet, or any other item that people tend to lose on regular basis. I praise the agency that was smart to figure out that brilliant ad placement! But back to “my story” and my invitation to visit with President Obama:

Mr. Obama, my story begins with my birth in Memphis in July 1959. Yes, I am older than you. I have only a vague and selective memory of my early years on Earth, but I do recall almost choking my infant baby brother to death on the day he came home from the hospital by trying to feed him by stuffing a maraschino cherry down his throat. I was 3 and just trying to make him feel welcomed into the family. Not long after that, I again tried to do a good deed by attempting to brush our Chihuahua’s teeth. I thought it would improve his dental hygiene. Unfortunately, for both the pooch and me, I was trying to brush his little teeth with thick, brown glue. He bit me in the eye and my father shot and killed him in our backyard. Does that rhyme with “emotionally scarred?”

The next thing I knew I was ripped out of my grandmother’s arms in the middle of the night, leaving bloody scratch marks on her neck, and was kidnapped. Actually, my father, who shot the Chihuahua, had been transferred by his employer to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I would spend the next six years, attend elementary school until grade three, and live with a 40-pound cat named Herman and a pet squirrel named Mr., who lived in the lining of our den curtains and slept on my pillow beside my head every night — all while living a few houses away from the neighborhood bully who was killed by electrocution and whose parents went insane because their talking bird kept screaming the boy’s name from its cage on their patio every day when school was dismissed because the bird was expecting the boy to come home.

Skip ahead a few years and my family moved back to Memphis in the summer of 1968, just months after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tanks were still in the streets and there were curfews, and I was starting the fourth grade at Coro Lake Elementary School and I have no clue why there were riots in the cafeteria every other day and why the kid who lives a few houses down on the lake continually picks up cottonmouth snakes by their tails and hurls them at me.

Skip a few more years ahead to my life in a Memphis neighborhood known as Parkway Village, where I lived from seventh grade until moving out of my parents’ house at age 17 into a part of Memphis known as Midtown. It was 1977 and I was transitioning from an overweight high school hippie into a very skinny hippie (please don’t ask how) who is torn between the folk-music genius of Joni Mitchell and the new disco vibes of Thelma “Don’t Leave Me This Way” Houston. What was I supposed to do? I had no idea. Still don’t. It gets only crazier from there, Mr. President, so just put the ticket in the mail. I’ll rearrange my schedule to fit yours.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Sex, Lies, Videotapes, and Hackers

When I was in high school, I worked as a stockboy in a drugstore in my small Missouri hometown. My job was to replenish the shelves and do general grunt work. One of the store’s services was developing photos. The task fell to an older fellow (we’ll call him Joe), who spent hours in the store’s basement darkroom, turning rolls of film into family snapshots.

One day, as I was loading my two-wheeler with boxes to take upstairs, Joe called me over. “Look at this, kid,” he said, holding up a picture. I looked. And looked again. It was a photograph of female breasts. My 16-year-old eyes must have widened. Joe laughed and said, “Happens all the time. People take dirty pictures of themselves and hope I’ll develop them and not say anything.”

Then Joe opened a file drawer and pointed: “Look in there.” The drawer was filled with “dirty” pictures. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I see,” he said.

The impulse to create nude or sexually titillating pictures has been with the human race forever — from cave drawings to ancient Hindu temples to Manet’s “Olympia” to Playboy. Small-town Missourians were not exempt from the urge.

Nor are celebrities. The news is filled this week with stories about the release of private nude and sexually explicit photos and videos of Jennifer Lawrence, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, and others. The source of the photos obtained them by hacking into “the cloud.” Which is a lot like Joe’s file drawer, only bigger. Now, what the celebrities thought was private is public.

We may, in fact, be in the process of redefining the very term “private.” In a world of cellphone cameras, sexting, home-made sex videos, and internet servers that have access to it all, “private” only means you hope nobody ever opens the drawer where your stuff is. All your “secret” text and Facebook messages, all your “funny” racist emails, your “silly” naked phone pictures, your potentially libelous personal Tweets, your ice bucket challenge gone wrong — all are potentially available to the public, if someone wants to make it happen badly enough.

This too, is nothing new. Only the methodology has changed. The FBI and the CIA — and lately, the NSA — have been invading Americans’ privacy for decades. Even presidents have not been immune. John F. Kennedy’s sexual adventures were closely tracked by the FBI, for example. In those days, they used phone-taps, stealthy photographers, and informants. Now, it’s easier. We do the leg-work for them.

Being outed as gay or having smoked pot used to be enough to keep someone from public office. It was potential blackmail material. Now there are many openly gay public officials, and people shrug it off when they learn a politician once smoked pot. If the walls of privacy continue to crumble, revelations about a public figure’s sexy private pictures may soon engender the same response.