Bill Kassel's Blog

Occasional reflections on religion, culture, politics, and anything else that comes into my mind...

bill kassel

Donald Trump

Us

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WHAT THE ELECTION
IS REALLY ALL ABOUT

It can be edifying to go back and reread commentaries from a few years past. They refresh the memory about issues debated and battles fought.

Sometimes they can surprise by showing how little has changed. More often, they reveal the beginnings of ideas and themes that would infuse later arguments.

During the run-up to 2016’s Presidential election, author and television writer Shalom Auslander penned an op-ed for the Washington Post in which he explored the comparison between Adolph Hitler and The Donald then becoming a popular anti-Trump rant. Auslander wasn’t fond of the comparison, and actually felt that it belittled Hitler…

“Hitler was a megalomaniacal psychopath who should burn in Hell for eternity,” he wrote. But at least der Führer was someone “who actually believed in something. There’s a difference. Trump is a two-bit con man. He’s playing the fools.”

The “fools,” of course, were us — which was Auslander’s main point. He wanted to show that Donald Trump could have gotten to where he was a genuine contender for President of the United States only because We The People were so irredeemably weak minded …

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A Tale of Two Hats

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AMID POLITICAL DIVISIVENESS
WE NEED TO TALK AND LISTEN

John Pavlovitz is a minister, a writer, and a rising star of liberal Protestantism. His blog, “Stuff that Needs to Be Said,” has a wide readership, and his books are prominent among Amazon.com’s Christian Living titles. [Read more…] about A Tale of Two Hats

Memo to Robert De Niro

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WHY ARE MOVIE STARS
SO BUGGED WITH TRUMP?

Dear Bob,

Okay, I get it. You don’t like The Donald. Your outburst at the Tony Awards made that clear.

I’m not surprised. There’s a lot of anti-Trump stuff going around.

But let me ask you:

Do you really think “F-ck Trump!” brings new clarity to the current political discussion?

Giving the benefit of the doubt now, I’ll assume you were just calling for proper presidential decorum and behavior.

But, don’t you see a little irony here, Bob?

[Read more…] about Memo to Robert De Niro

A Teaching Moment

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ROSANNE & SAMANTHA
HIGHLIGHT BIAS & IRONY

I’m old enough to remember when folks in the entertainment business tried to avoid saying offensive things — or to avoid being heard saying them. If something problematic did get out, stars and their PR minions would scramble to clean up after the ill-considered words.

Recall John Lennon’s observation that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” Given the slide in church attendance already obvious in 1966, that remark had a certain prophetic quality. Yet Lennon was forced to apologize to irate clergy and believers.

In a tense press conference, he nervously tried to explain the origin and context of his controversial quip…

“Well, originally I pointed out that fact in reference to England — that we meant more to kids than Jesus did, or religion at that time. I wasn’t knocking it or putting it down. … I just said what I said and it was wrong, or it was taken wrong, and now it’s all this.”

Lennon had at first dismissed what looked to him like the proverbial tempest in a teapot. But the furor — especially in America where there were credible death threats surrounding a planned Beatles tour — made him realize the price of his own thoughtlessness. As recounted in Rolling Stone…

“Faced with the realization that both the tour and his life hung in the balance, Lennon finally cracked. ‘He actually put his head in his hands and sobbed,’ [Beatles press aid Tony] Barrow maintains. ‘He was saying, “I’ll do anything … whatever you say. How am I to face the others if this whole tour is called off just because of something I’ve said?”’”

One wonders if Rosanne Barr is having similar feelings in the wake of her notorious Valerie Jarrett tweet and the cancellation of “Rosanne.”

[Read more…] about A Teaching Moment

Mr. President

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STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH
WAS A TRUMPIAN TRIUMPH

You might have called it Reaganesque.

Surely, The Gipper himself couldn’t have delivered it any more effectively.

But we were hearing it in The Donald’s true voice, with all those resounding Trumpian flourishes and — blessedly — few of his typical emphatic asides (i.e. “so great,” “not good,” “very, very bad,” etc.).

It was a triumph.

The hour-and-a-half performance demonstrated clearly, visibly, undeniably that Donald Trump has taken command of his presidency.

[Read more…] about Mr. President

What Is Truth?

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WILLFUL DETRACTION VS.
LEGITIMATE CRITICISM

Pontius Pilate is often portrayed as a hardened cynic for his remark at Jesus’ trial…

“What is truth?”*

In my novel, My Brother’s Keeper, I interpret his feelings differently. I credit the governor of Judea with a kind of wistful ambiguity. There he was, trying to govern according to the will of Caesar in the midst of dangerously shifting political currents and a lack of clarity as to what Caesar’s will might be on any given concern.

If my take is correct, then poor old Pontius was struggling very much like the rest of us: weary with the world’s hypocrisy and self-interestedness, trying to discern what’s true and act appropriately.

This I can understand. After the wearying vilification heaped on Donald Trump throughout 2017 — as discussed in my last post — I feel a bit wistful myself.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no letup in sight.

[Read more…] about What Is Truth?

The Year of Lying

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AWASH IN FALSEHOODS
WITH NO END IN SIGHT

Can you sum up 2017 in a famous quote?

I’m going with a line from Adolph Hitler. He’s the all-purpose stand-in for everybody you think is bad, and his enduring observation remains as fresh today as when first uttered…

“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

Lord knows, that’s the assumption behind pretty much everything that’s been said about Donald Trump’s first year as President.

Yes, The Donald is given to flights of wild hyperbole and intemperate criticism. And yes, such things can involve an element of mischaracterization (not to say untruth).

But, could anything Trump has ever spoken or tweeted beat this Newsweek headline for total disregard of fact and proportion?…

“How Trump and the Nazis Stole Christmas to Promote White Nationalism”

Now that’s imaginative.

[Read more…] about The Year of Lying

Change that Matters

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PRAY FOR TRUE REFORM IN
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

For the sake of argument, let’s assume Donald Trump is as reprehensible a person as the Democrats claim he is.

If that’s the case, what does it say about them (Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party leadership) that Trump won the election?

And, no. The Russians didn’t put him in the White House. Forget that. Everyone has always known it’s a stupid assertion. As Jonathan Tobin, opinion editor of Jewish News Service, observed in the New York Post…

“[Obama] saw that the hacking was having almost no impact on the course of the campaign and thus wasn’t going to mess with the results. Far from the crime of the century, it was, at worst, a minor annoyance to Clinton that Obama obviously felt didn’t warrant a major dustup with Putin.”

After Trump won, of course, Obama had second thoughts. He decided the email hacks and their disclosure by Wikileaks amounted to a gift from Russia with love. He saw — as in a bright light — how Putin’s cyber-tinkering proved the American people wanted Hillary all along.

The better to cast doubt on the election’s legitimacy.

[Read more…] about Change that Matters

Whatever He Damn Well Pleases

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TRUMP’S FIRST PRIORITY
IS SELF-CONTROL

Donald Trump is learning a fundamental truth of life — that our greatest strengths often contain within them our profoundest weaknesses.

Certainly The Donald’s candor and spontaneity were tremendous assets during his campaign. People loved that shoot-from-the-hip attitude by which he gave voice to their frustrations. As I observed in a blog post back in August of 2015…

“Trump is rich enough to not worry about alienating anybody. This has had a refreshingly liberating effect on his campaign style, freeing him to say whatever he damn-well-pleases about things that are obvious but politically charged.

“The public is eating it up …. People are weary of being told that what they know to be true is simply a shadow of their own fears and biases.”

They ate up all of his tweets just as eagerly. The more blunt and colloquial, the better.

Here was a guy who expressed himself “just like you and me” — who wasn’t intimidated by “The Establishment.” Maybe he really could “drain the swamp” in Washington.

For my part, I’ve often been annoyed at this Trumpian verbal bent, criticizing it as “stream-of-consciousness rambling.” But hey, it got him elected, so I guess you can’t blame the guy for assuming it’s what people want.

Now that he’s President, however, Trump is finding that the tendency to vent his inner convictions-in-formation does not serve the objectives of governance as well as it did those of ambition.

[Read more…] about Whatever He Damn Well Pleases

The O’Reilly Factor

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MORAL LAPSES HELP THE
ANTI-TRUMP CAMPAIGN

I emerge from the distractions of Easter Season to find that the world has been shaken. Bill O’Reilly is gone from Fox News.

A pillar of conservative punditry is brought low by that most common human frailty: sexual crudity.

I have no trouble imagining that O’Reilly is a jerk with women.

Projecting and maintaining such a distinctive and well developed persona — the all-knowing, all powerful defender of truth — requires a mighty ego. And when the flame of self-confidence is stoked to such a degree, respect for other people’s personal dignity may not seem all that important.

Good-looking babe? Hey, what’s a little harassment between friends?

[Read more…] about The O’Reilly Factor

Don’t You Believe It!

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JOURNALISTS SHAMELESSLY
ABANDONING THEIR ETHICS

Whatever you may feel about Donald Trump’s assertion that he was wiretapped during the election campaign, his claim has been treated by the media in an excessively skeptical way.

After all, it’s not like the Obama Administration didn’t engage in such activities (see the link to a review of Obama shady ops below*).

But turn things around for a minute. Imagine it was Barack Obama leveling a charge of being spied on. Headlines would have run something along the line of…

President Claims Campaign Sabotage by Outgoing Administration.

Simple as that.

Instead — from the very first stories about The Donald’s infamous tweet — his allegation has been addressed in this way…

Trump’s Unsubstantiated Wiretap Charge Raises Doubts.

[Read more…] about Don’t You Believe It!

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