President Donald J. Projection Insists Jeffrey Goldberg Is A Con Man

Yesterday, CNN analyst John Harwood wrote that "From the outset of Donald Trump's presidency, Americans have told pollsters they consider him dishonest. That makes his re-election campaign entirely on-brand. In ways large and small, in targeted advertising and public remarks, Trump has made deceit the hallmark of his bid for a second term... Trailing Biden nationally and in key battleground states, Trump casts doubt on the legitimacy of the election by falsely associating mail-in balloting with rampant fraud. That amplifies what his own Department of Homeland Security calls Russian propaganda.

Attorney General William Barr joined him in that effort on CNN this past week by making assertions about fraud that the Justice Department later acknowledged were inaccurate. The president even suggested his North Carolina supporters attempt to vote in person after mailing in absentee ballots, which would be a crime.

American voters have noticed. In a July Quinnipiac University survey, 66% called Trump dishonest; 64% told Washington Post/ABC pollsters they didn't trust the president on coronavirus. Last week, a 55% majority told ABC/Ipsos said Trump's comments made disorder in American cities worse, not better. The recent Democratic and Republican conventions gave Americans a back-to-back opportunity to evaluate the unfiltered message of each presidential candidate. A CNN poll before either one showed that, by 51%-40%, voters preferred Biden over Trump for being 'honest and trustworthy.' After the conventions, the numbers changed. Trump's deficit on honesty had grown to 53%-36%."





Yesterday, in response to the national furor over Trump's latest exposure as an unpatriotic asshole who loves the military and hates the troops, he attacked Steve Jobs' widow, Laureen Jobs. Why? She's a part owner of The Atlantic, the magazine that started the whole furor for the would-be Führer. His pathetic tweet yesterday:

Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote the original exposé, is certainly not intimidated by Trump, generally considered the most despicable con man in American history, calling him a con-man. He was on Reliable Sources yesterday, where he told Brian Stelter that he "would fully expect more reporting to come out about this and more confirmation and new pieces of information in the coming days and weeks. We have a responsibility and we're going to do it regardless of what he says. We're not going to be intimidated by the President of the United States... We're going to do our jobs."

Trump and members of his foul regime are running around like chickens without heads denying his disdain for military service. I hope he read the report by Michael Kranish laying out his long history of disparagement. Big shot always derided men and women committed to any kind of public service-- but military service more than any. Years before he was a national figure and just a despised con man in New York, "Trump had bragged on a morning radio show about avoiding the Vietnam draft, remarking that one of the show’s hosts who had gotten out of service by declaring he had a bad knee had done a 'good job.'... Trump had a long track record of incendiary and disparaging remarks about veterans and military service... [H]e didn’t understand why the U.S. government spent so much effort to find missing soldiers who he believed had performed poorly and were caught. Trump told senior advisers that those who served in Vietnam were 'losers' because they didn’t find a way to avoid service."

Trump, who avoided military service by citing a bone spur in his foot, has disparaged veterans who were wounded or captured or went missing in action and even compared his fear of sexually transmitted diseases to the experience of a soldier, saying in 1993, “if you’re young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam. It’s called the dating game.”

It is a history filled with contradictions, of a man who denigrates his handpicked generals while saying no one supports the military more than he does, and of a commander in chief who questions the bravery of some soldiers even as he reversed disciplinary action against a Navy SEAL over the objections of Pentagon officials. He was raised in a family that criticized the value of military service, according to niece Mary L. Trump, but nonetheless he was sent to a military academy for most of his teenage years.

And now, Trump and his aides are fiercely denying a report in the Atlantic in which the president is quoted denigrating U.S. soldiers, including calling those killed in combat “losers.”

...Trump has had a series of fights with the generals he put in power, some of whom left in anger and dismay. In a 2017 meeting at the Pentagon, he called his top generals “losers” and “a bunch of dopes and babies,” according to A Very Stable Genius, by Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig. Among those who have departed include his chief of staff, retired general John F. Kelly, and his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, a McCain favorite.

Mattis said earlier this year that “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.” In response, Trump, who had once lavished praise on Mattis, tweeted: “I didn’t like his ‘leadership’ style or much else about him... Glad he is gone!”

Andrei Cherny And The Steve Jobs Act

I'm guessing most people who know who Andrei Cherny is know him as an author (The Next Deal: The Future of Public Life in the Information Age), or as the youngest ever White House speech writer or, more recently, as a prolific writer for a wide range of publications from the Washington Post and NY Times to the Huffington Post and The Atlantic. Almost incongruously, for the past 9 months he also been the chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party. And now this former Arizona Assistant Attorney General is rumored to be about to announce his candidacy for a new blue-leaning congressional seat in Phoenix.

This week, Eric Cantor, ran like a mangy cur with his tail between his legs when he realized his speech at the University of Pennsylvania was open to the public. That didn't keep his undelivered speech on income disparity from being widely panned. Cantor then announced he is about to unveil what he's calling "The Steve Jobs Act," coincidentally the exact name of the widely acclaimed article on jobs creation by Andrei last week: The Steve Jobs Act: Why It's Time to Invest in Entrepreneurs. Cantor's proposal, little more than a shrewdly crafted partisan hit piece to attack President Obama, doesn't stack up well to Andrei's serious look at how to move forward now that the Republican Party has killed the American Jobs Act.

Americans struggling to put food on the table and pay the mortgage are not looking for grand notions; they need the kind of immediate relief Obama's proposals would provide. However, an America struggling to find its way in a bewildering, humbling world needs something more-- a sense of larger purpose and direction.

The eulogies and encomiums delivered to Apple founder Steve Jobs seemed to capture some of this longing. They were celebrations of greatness and vision in a middling, small moment. At the end of a decade that saw Iraq, Katrina, and Lehman Brothers become watchwords of American weakness, they were paeans to someone who believed, with Thomas Paine, that we had it "in our power to begin the world over again." But, perhaps most of all, in a floundering economy, they spoke to a sense that it is entrepreneurs and innovators-- and not merely infrastructure spending and payroll tax cuts-- that are needed to rebuild the engine of economic growth.

The facts back up this assumption. Research from the Kauffman Foundation has demonstrated that new and young companies, those under the age of five, are responsible for all net job creation over the past generation. It is the entrepreneurs who start these businesses-- and not the business tycoons courted by both parties-- that are the true "job creators." But while Republicans focus on tax cuts and regulatory relief for large corporations and Democrats look to keep teachers and police officers in their jobs, it is these entrepreneurs-- the next generation's Steve Jobses-- who are being overlooked.

This has real consequences. At the heart of our jobs crisis is an ongoing entrepreneurial recession. Over the past three years, the number of new business being started has fallen by a quarter. The number of new companies with employees in 2009 was at its lowest level since 1992. Since the year 2000, the number of jobs created by startups has been sliding consistently to the point that in 2010 there were about half the number of jobs created by these new companies as there were a decade earlier.

While no set of government programs can create the revolutionary zeal needed to launch and lead a company such as Apple, we do need a set of policies to encourage and aid innovators as they turn their ideas into new, high-growth, job-creating companies -- the "Steve Jobs Act." In a Washington that worked, these ideas would be embraced by both parties. Such a measure would include elements from President Obama's plan such as aid to small businesses and reform of the unemployment insurance system to allow for more flexibility for potential entrepreneurs. And it would build on the emerging bipartisan consensus that certain regulations such as the accounting requirements in the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms have a disproportionate impact on young firms ill-equipped to handle the onerous burdens.

Yet the "Steve Jobs Act" would go much further. It would make healthcare and retirement benefits more universal, personalized, affordable and portable so that entrepreneurs have a greater ability to strike out on their own. With the knowledge that companies such as Nike, Intel, FedEx, and, yes, Apple Computers all started out with the benefit of government loans, it would create a National Innovation Bank to invest in companies with a potentially high rate of return in job creation. It would open the doors of legal immigration to hard-charging, determined new Americans like those who came through Ellis Island a century ago and like the Syrian immigrant who was Steve Jobs' biological father. And it would make sure our public schools put a greater emphasis not only on science and mathematics, but on the creative problem solving skills that are at the heart of the entrepreneurial drive.

As much as anything else, the "Steve Jobs Act" would give Americans a sense of direction about our economy. Despite the rhetoric out of Washington, America's economic future lies neither in competing with off-shore tax havens over the lowest corporate tax rates nor with authoritarian dictatorships such as China to produce high-speed bullet trains. It lies in doubling down on what has historically made America an exceptional economy: an entrepreneurial culture, a willingness to dare greatly, an openness to new ideas, the ability to tap talent that other countries' castes would overlook. If we want to create jobs and recreate a strong American economy, this is where we should focus our energies. It might not mean an iPod in every pot, but it would help innovators get their tinkers out of their garages and into our lives.

Speaking of Steve Jobs's passing, we do know he's not in Christian heaven, don't we? Plus Bob Mankoff offers a cartoonist's Jobs tribute

Probably I was the only viewer of this cartoon who didn't
who didn't pick up on what's wrong with it, right?

"It may be hard to remember how transformative the Macintosh was when it débuted in 1984, but it changed my life."

-- New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, in his
newsletter/blogpost tribute to Steve Jobs this week (see below)

by Ken

I'm sorry I didn't notice Daryl Cagle's Monday blogpost on his Cagle Post cartoon website in time to incorporate it into my post last night prompted by the passing of Steve Jobs. Actually, when I finally did notice it, I got stuck on the Nik Scott cartoon he heads with, reproduced above, because although I must once have known that Jobs was a Buddhist, the fact had long since slipped my mind. (Most everything seems to slip my mind these days. More and more often, I no longer know just what it is I know. Or knew.)

I think what really got my attention, though, in an abbreviated version of Daryl's post was the reference to the passing of George Carlin. Yes, I suppose George would have had quite a lot to say about the heaven into which so many of his eulogists plunked him. But then, George would have had a lot to say about all sorts of stuff. I'm still steamed about the fact that he's stopped.

Christian Heaven for Buddhist, Steve Jobs

By Daryl Cagle | October 10th, 2011 | 49 Comments

My Australian cartoonist buddy, Nik Scott, reminded me that Apple’s Steve Jobs was a Buddhist, which makes the many heavenly cartoons that were drawn after his passing rather, erm … off the mark? That’s Nik’s take [in the cartoon I've put at the top of this post -- Ed.].

We often see editorial cartoonists imposing Christian imagery on non-Christians when they die. (After all, only one religion can be right, huh?) Comedian George Carlin, a famous atheist, found a Christian heaven in many editorial cartoons. When Beatle George Harrison, a Hindu, died, the editorial cartoonists drew dozens of cartoons with George showing up in Christian heaven.

Perhaps it is insensitive to impose your own religion on someone else when they die – but what the heck - readers and editors love it. Among the cartoonists we syndicate, the Jobs Pearly Gates cartoons were the most reprinted.

Here are just a few of the cartoons -- including the one above -- that Daryl chose to include with this blogpost. (You can click on any of them to enlarge.)



What's remarkable is how many of the commenters on Daryl's post (the 49 is as of this morning) talk up, down, and around the simple point he's making, apparently without getting it. In fairness, there are naturally a few sane, lovely comments.


MEANWHILE, BOB MANKOFF OFFERS HIS PERSONAL
JOBS TRIBUTE: A CARTOONIST'S COMPUTER HISTORY

Regular readers know how much I look forward to New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's weekly newsletter-slash-blogpost. His tribute to Steve Jobs takes the form of the story of his history using computers for cartooning. (You can sign up for the free newsletter on the magazine's home page. I can't find a weblink for this week's, but here's last week's "Drinking Games," Bob's tribute to prohibition -- inspired by Ken Burns's PBS Prohibition series -- as chronicled in New Yorker cartoons. I'll add the link to the new post when I can.)

Bob starts with a cartoon he produced in pre-Mac days, drawn for Saturday Review in 1982 on a Radio Shack TRS 80-Model III -- and includes a picture of that ancient beast. ("That it could do anything at all with 16K of memory is a marvel.")

Three years later, however, he had acquired an original Mac ("with 128k of internal memory and a 400k disk drive"; again, a picture is included), and he produced this cartoon:

"Amazingly," Bob tells us, "you could draw on it with this thing called a mouse [he includes a contemporaneous Mac ad trumpeting the wonder], in Mac Paint. "In practice," however,

it wasn’t so amazing -- it was like drawing with a bar of soap, and the cartoons didn’t look very good on a dot-matrix printer. When I showed them to Lee Lorenz, my predecessor as cartoon editor, he wondered what the point was. I had no good answer then, but I liked the Mac so much I wanted to come up with one.

His Plan B, to "draw the cartoon on paper and get it into the computer," hit snags. "Trying to stuff them into the disk drive didn’t work," but he discovered that with an early handheld scanner he could scan a drawing in a mere two passes; "then the software would stitch the image together."

As scanners got better and Macs more powerful, I began store all my cartoons on the computer. From this it was not much of a leap to think I could store all my friends’ cartoons, too, and sell them, which is how the Cartoon Bank got started twenty years ago.

Bob rattles off a coterie of fellow Mac-devoted New Yorker cartoonists, and signs off with "this cartoon that Danny Shanahan sent in as a trbute to Jobs":


Sweet, Danny, and as always thanks, Bob!

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