In the deathless imperial Roman epic that is the reign of Caesar Donaldus Johnus Trumpus, the citizens of the empire careen from one Circus Maximus to another. As Caesar Trumpus seeks godlike status, there is fresh outrage among members of the Senate and the citizenry after Caesar uses language most foul to describe Africa and other allied nations during a meeting at the Domum Album (which Caesar one sniffed was really a dump-us). ...
Read more
Read More
Every revolution has a counterrevolution. We push a pendulum away from us and it comes back to us with equal force. That’s just physics.
And, as it turns out, politics. A pair of Catherines – actress Deneuve and writer Millet – have joined with 100 Frenchwomen to sign a letter in Le Monde stating that #MeToo has gone too far. They want men to be treated fairly. They don’t want women to appear as wimps. And, most of all, they don’t want sexual freedom curtailed. The “freedom to bother” – as in a man bothering a woman – is “indispensable to sexual freedom.” ...
Read more
Read More
You have to hand it to President Donald J. Trump. He really knows how to commemorate an occasion with a bang. On the anniversary of the Haitian earthquake and Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, Trumpet decided to let the world know that people are not to be judged by what King called “the content of their character” but by what one witty Washington Post poster called “their country of origin.”
Trump apparently told Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Durbin – who thought they were at the White House to negotiate the bipartisan immigration “bill of love” that “Apprentice” Trump spoke of Tuesday when he was trying to disprove the lunatic persona portrayed in Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” – that we don’t need people from Haiti, El Salvador and “s---hole” countries in Africa. No, what we need is immigrants from places like Norway. ...
Read More
With the fire and fury over Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” comes the question – this one courtesy of The Washington Post – of President Donald J. Trump’s mental stability. Is he insane? Does he have dementia?
I’m not one for armchair psychology or speculation. Nor do I believe in using language imprecisely. Insane people don’t live in the real world. Just because many of us don’t like Trump’s take on reality doesn’t mean he dwells in the realm of unreality. ...
Read More
The nor’easter that raged this week from the Gulf of Mexico to Rhode Island isn’t the only storm that broke. There were gale force winds at the White House as Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” hit bookstores, with Wolff, an author-reporter known for playing fast and loose with the truth, and former kingmaker Steve Bannon portraying President Donald J. Trump as a baby who must be coddled by a staff that is alternately self-sacrificing and opportunistic. ...
Read More
There were no less than three sexual harassment stories in Tuesday’s New York Times.
A story headlined “300 Strong: Hollywood Women Unite to Fight Harassment” detailed the agenda of the new Time’s Up initiative, which includes a legal defense fund, already backed by $13 million in donations, to protect underprivileged women “from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.” The initiative is also calling for women to turn the Golden Globes’ red carpet Sunday into a bully pulpit as they don basic black to talk about the sexual harassment issue instead of what they’re wearing. ...
Read more
Read More
Hindsight, they say, is 20/20. If it is, it must be with prescriptive rose-colored glasses. Because the past has been completed – successfully or otherwise – we tend to think of it as having been lived with a foregone conclusion. We forget that at the time, the past was the present, the outcome never assured.
“Darkest Hour” – an inspirational new film directed with subtle tension by Joe Wright (“Pride & Prejudice”) – recounts several weeks in May 1940 when England stood alone in a world on the brink of totalitarianism. It stars a soaring Gary Oldman, virtually unrecognizable ...
Read More