Saturday, February 03, 2018

A Tale Told by an Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying........ Nothing.


At some point, the whole nation will suffer from Trump fatigue and boot the guy out of office. I would prefer impeachment, because that would signify that there is some behavior so repugnant that even Congress can not stomach. But I'll settle for a resignation in the face of criminal indictment.

In any event, on a not unrelated note, I'm a proud graduate of an institution that boasts among it's alumni and faculty 28 Nobel prize winners. https://en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliat…. And at least one 9 time Grammy winner among many other notables. https://news.upenn.edu/…/award-winning-musician-humanitaria…

And two presidents, neither of whom were (or will be) on the list of top 43 presidents (we've only had 46- I'm counting Bush-Cheney as two). One, William Henry Harrison, has the dubious distinction of the shortest lived presidency in history (31 days). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Harrison.

The other? Well, sad to say, it's the current occupant of the White House. A moron. A douchebag. An idiot. But I'm only quoting the FBI agent who helped author the infamous Comey memo regarding Hillary Clinton that effectively sabotaged her 2016 campaign at the last minute. http://www.foxnews.com/…/fbi-agent-strzok-co-wrote-initial-…


https://nypost.com/…/fbi-agent-kicked-off-mueller-probe-ca…/

So, my alumni magazine, the Pennsylvania Gazette (which is truly an awesome magazine- no irony, here) had a raging controversy in the letters section about whether or not The Gazette should put the Dumpster Fire on the cover and appropriately "honor" him. Here was my contribution to the debate:

I note that some of my fellow Penn alumni are grousing that the Pennsylvania Gazette and the University of Pennsylvania have insufficiently honored the current occupant of the Oval Office who graduated from Wharton in 1968 (they want a cover photo and top story, at the very least). This is my second go round of being a graduate of an institution with an alumnus who is the current President of the United States. My first experience, in 1973-1974, was at a university where I was then a first year law student in the school, Duke University School of Law, which had a portrait of the then current president, Richard M. Nixon, Duke Law 1937, prominently hanging in our Moot Court room while the Watergate impeachment hearings were ongoing in Congress.

This time the current president went to a different school at my university- Trump was a Wharton grad, my degree was from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (although I did take courses in Economics and Accounting at Wharton). So I'd like to bring my perspective to the debate. When then President Nixon was being revealed as a criminal who, among his multitude of crimes, authorized burglaries at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and the Watergate offices of the National Democratic Party, followed by his authorizing the payment of hush money to cover up those and other crimes, my classmates and I petitioned the dean of the law school to take down Nixon's portrait from where it was hung in his honor after he became president. The dean didn't want to cave to student pressure, but he wasn't happy with the revelations about Duke Law's most (in)famous alumnus. In the midst of this furor, the portrait was apparently stolen, which made national news. Days later we found out that the portrait never left the law school- it was hidden above the false ceiling in a nearby classroom. Once it was found, the dean used the fig leaf of "security" to avoid rehanging it in any public place, thus solving our mini crisis. Nixon resigned a few months later and the portrait was never displayed again.

My modest proposal to appropriately honor the 45th president, rather than putting him on a cover on the Gazette, is that a large statue of him be erected in the most public place possible (in front of the main library, perhaps), funded by donations from the president's most fervent supporters among Penn's alumni. At the bottom of the statue a permanent bronze plaque will contain some of his most famous quotes. And underneath that, also in permanent bronze, will be a list of the supporters who subscribed to put up the statue, in order of the amounts of their donations, along with their school and year of degree. Here's some samples for the plaque:

"I moved on her and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try and fuck her. She was married. I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn't get there. And she was married."

"I've gotta use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful - I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

"You have to treat 'em [women] like shit."

"Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?! I mean, (Carly Fiorina's) a woman, and I'm not supposed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?"

"You know, it really doesn't matter what they (the media) write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass."

"I don't think Ivanka (his daughter) would do that [pose for Playboy], although she does have a very nice figure. I've said if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her."

"Yeah, she's [daughter Ivanka] really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren't happily married ..."

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

"I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering."

"There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good."

"(John McCain is) not a war hero.. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured."

"So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of 'em, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell - I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise."

`You know what I wanted to. I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them. No, no. I was going to hit them, I was all set and then I got a call from a highly respected governor... I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard his head would spin and he wouldn't know what the hell happened... I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard their heads would spin, they'd never recover. And that's what I did with a lot - that's why I still don't have certain people endorsing me: they still haven't recovered." (reacting to the Democratic National Convention, July 29, 2016).

"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

"Don't tell me it doesn't work - torture works. Half these guys [say]: `Torture doesn't work.' Believe me, it works."

"The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families,"

"Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure, it's not your fault."

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay? It's, like, incredible,"

And finally, the quote that should make the University of Pennsylvania and all of its alumni very proud:

"I went to an Ivy League school. I'm very highly educated. I know words, I have the best words."

The list is almost literally endless, and gets longer every day he is in office. I'm sure the complaining alumni will be thrilled to put up the statue (with hair blowing in the wind and a tie about a foot longer than his shirt to partially cover up the overhanging belly). And with the inclusion of the plaque below listing the contributors, they can rest easy knowing that in future years their heirs and legacies will have the opportunity to visit and see what made their ancestors proud.