It’s truly sad our ‘tweeting twit’ of a president thinks he can govern this way

Donald J. Trump is the Twit who Tweets, using the social medium that values insipidity (only 140 characters, really?) as his way of getting his limited thoughts out to the public; unchallenged.
 

TRUMP: Wants to go unchallenged in public eye!

It’s also becoming more and more clear this would be a presidency conducted by Twitter, if there were any way that Trump could get away with it.

TRUMP HAS BEEN in the news on a daily basis for the past six or so months, ever since he got himself elected president, with a barrage of nonsense and half-truths that make it clear the man has no respect for truth.

Of course, he doesn’t want to be called out for having this attitude – he wants to be able to lambast everybody else for thinking that a president ought to be truthful!

So it gets ugly, particularly with the activity surrounding the dismissal of James Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump probably committed the ultimate gaffe of his lifetime when he tossed out hints that there were recordings of meetings he and Comey held just before his professional termination.

As stated by Trump, it is Comey who ought to be fearful because the Trumpster could easily pull out a recording and use it to denounce anything that Comey tried claiming.

BUT THE PROBLEM is that the public at large (except for the minority of our electorate who actually voted for Trump and will desperately want to believe anything he says no matter how ridiculous it proves to be) is now going to want to know if there was a taping system in place at the White House these days.

And if so, we’re going to want to hear those tapes so we can have historical evidence of how irrational Trump himself is during his presidential conduct.

If it turns out there are no recordings, some of us are likely to believe that Trump somehow tampered with the system to destroy them. He created circumstances that will lead many of us to never again trust a word he publicly says.

Worse yet, he brings to mind the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, which eventually was taken down by the existence of recordings in the White House of the president talking with his top aides.

IT MADE IT impossible for anybody to believe anything Nixon said for the public record to the point where the only Nixon believers these days are those hard-core ideologues who are determined to ignore truth.

Which, when you come down to it, probably means some of them are the same people desperate to side with Trump. Or more likely, are the grandparents of the modern-day followers of the Age of Trump!

What should we think of anything Trump says? Personally, I found some of his Tweets from the past couple of days to be particularly telling.

Especially that one about how he’s so “active” that, “it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” Actually, that is exactly what we should expect from someone working on behalf of a government official – that we can count on every word they speak being truthful.

GOVERNMENT AIDES AT so many levels have lost their jobs and gone into professional disgrace for this very thing. Any reporter-type person who ever tried to justify less than “perfect accuracy” for their work would find themselves terminated “for cause” in an instant.

And that’s the way it should be!

There also was that Tweet about “cancel(ling)” future press briefings “and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy.”

My experience in dealing with government operatives is that the ones who refuse to answer questions and insist on doing everything in writing is usually because they’re such control freaks and they’re most concerned with making sure they don’t offer up any relevant information by mistake. A 600-word statement may fill newspaper space or broadcast airtime without serving a purpose.

AH, WHO AM I kidding! We have a president who probably thinks his 140-character Tweet (about a single sentence – this commentary, by comparison, is 4,356 characters) would be sufficient.

All I know is that there are people who argue Trump makes a wonderful president because of his business background, and I don’t doubt he ran the Trump Organization and its subsidiaries in a similar manner.

The only question I have is how he managed to avoid running his company into the ground amidst financial ruin the way he seems to be intent on doing with our country these days – not because it makes sense, but just because he can!

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EXTRA: Some political people have to learn e-mail lessons the hard way

When it comes to the controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton setting up her own personal e-mail to conduct government business, I can’t help but think she deserves all the political abuse she’s going to get in coming months.

You’d think that a public official who seriously thinks she is qualified to be president of the United States (she probably is better qualified than any other knucklehead who has expressed interest in the post in next year’s election cycle) would know better than to put herself in such a spot.

BUT IT SEEMS she doesn’t. I don’t know how many people are going to be swayed by her statements this week at the United Nations that she regretted the way she handled the situation.

Which was to set up her own private e-mail server for work-related correspondence. In a four-year period, some 60,000 e-mail messages were sent and received.

Clinton tries to make those of us who want to turn this into a scandal feel a bit better by saying that no classified information was ever transmitted with her own personal e-mail messages.

But the point is that if she had taken an official government-issued e-mail address and used that for her work, there would have been an easily-accessed record. We’d know exactly what was being done, and whether or not any allegations of her wrongdoing were just nonsense.

THE FACT THAT she says she will make her server accessible so that its messages can now be archived is going to merely feed wood to the campfire of those who have held their Clinton grudges for two-and-a-half decades now!

People who don’t want to trust her will not trust her just like they haven't trusted her since the days of when she allegedly defamed the reputation of singer Tammy Wynette.

It is an issue that could easily have been avoided if only she had just used the proper e-mail account, just as many of us who have jobs that require constant message sending get a work e-mail while also maintaining a personal address off some service like Yahoo! or Google.

What amazed me about Clinton’s desire to not use a government e-mail address is that it appears she didn’t learn one single lesson from the plight of Sarah Palin back in 2008.

REMEMBER WHEN THE now-former Alaska governor got caught using a personal address for her government business because she didn’t like the idea of her personal messages being automatically recorded?

This came out when some teenager got cute and managed to hack his way into her account. Because those personal services we all use aren’t THAT secure. They certainly don’t have the layers of protections that government messaging services have.

That truly was another situation that Palin brought on herself; even though federal prosecutors ultimately got a conviction (and some incarceration) against the man who thought it was funny to figure out her password, then post pages of her messages on a public site.

Clinton hasn’t undergone anything this humiliating. But it is always a possibility for those political people who just have to think their e-mails are none of the rest of our business.

WHICH MAY BE part of the reason that I’m gaining a bit more respect for Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C.; who recently said he can’t face this situation because he never uses e-mail.

That is a situation which I must admit I wish I could resort to – even though my work often requires I have access to sending and receiving messages.

Even though I can’t help but think that for all the stupid, nonsensical e-mails I get from people trying to influence the way I think about certain issues, we’d be better off as a society if sending messages required ink on paper and the death of a few more trees.

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My ‘isolation’ is over; it's great to be back in touch again w/ the masses even if much of their talk is trash

You don’t know how grateful I feel to be able to post this commentary and reconnect with the few of you who have nothing better to do than check out this weblog.

If you were reading it, you’d notice there were no updates for Tuesday or Wednesday. It’s not that I couldn’t have come up with issues to rant and rage about.

IT’S THAT I experienced a level of technical difficulties that made it complicated to try to comment to the point where I figured it wasn’t worth the while. So I’m back, and now more fully appreciate how just much we as a society have become tied in to our communications technology.

I’m trying to figure out whether that is a plus or a minus.

What happened was that my cellphone developed technical difficulties with its connections. For the past couple of days, it was just a piece of junk that couldn’t do anything other than tell me what time it was.

My ability to make phone calls on it conked out during the weekend, and my ability to receive and send e-mail messages (along with access anything on the Internet) died when I woke up Monday morning.

IT WASN’T UNTIL Wednesday morning that I was able to work out the kinks of the system and get my device fully restored to all the little services it provides that I apparently have become attached to.

Now there was one plus to my situation; I never lost access to the land line telephone at home. But for the past couple of days, that was my sole connection to the outside world.

Suddenly, I had to recall exactly what my home telephone number was, and I have to admit it took me a minute or so to do that. I’ve become too accustomed to thinking in terms of my smart phone number when I give out a contact for myself.

The inability to get on the Internet from home made it impossible for me to easily post new commentary here. Although I suppose I could have written it, stored the copy on the hard drive of this computer I’m now using, then send it all out when full service was restored.

ALTHOUGH I DOUBT anybody would care about my pre-State of the Union thoughts in this post-State time period. So I’ll spare you.

Or I could have traveled to my local public library and used one of their computers to file copy. Although that would have been a hassle, and I must admit to feeling a little more compassion for those individuals who are in situations where they have to rely on public computers in order to take care of any personal business.

I must admit that Tuesday was a particularly nerve-wracking period because the paranoid portion of my personality was starting to wonder if this lack of contact was going to stretch out indefinitely. I was wondering if I’d ever get restored, or if I was going to have to seriously adapt my daily routine.

As it turned out, I was at a restaurant Wednesday morning with my brother having breakfast when the quirks got worked out. It was something of a relief to “refresh” my cellphone and see a flood of e-mail messages come in – some 95 on my personal e-mail account and 46 on the g-mail account whose address is published on this weblog.

ALTHOUGH I MUST confess to realizing how little I had actually missed – I’d say I deleted about 90 percent of the messages unread because they were just too obsolete.

So all those political operatives who sent me their statements reacting to the State of the Union Address Tuesday night will have to learn that their attempt to influence my thoughts were unsuccessful.

I am not the least bit dizzy from their political spin, although I’m sure they will continue to try to influence me on future issues with their rhetorical junk.

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Do we really need to read text messages while riding underground the city?

I'd bet that when the subway tunnels were built in the early 1940s, no one thought they'd ever have to be upgraded for an improved communications network. You want to talk to someone? Use a payphone! Photograph provided by CTA Historical Photo Connection

Perhaps this is a generational issue, and I’m just on the wrong side of the equation. This definitely is a move being contemplated by the Chicago Transit Authority for people not like me in mind.

But I can’t really comprehend the need for an upgrade of the underground wireless network that currently exists in the tunnels that are used by elevated trains for those moments when the track drops down from being an “el” to being a “subway.”

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE reported Thursday that CTA officials are seeking bids from telecommunications companies to see who could install an improved system the cheapest in the 12 miles of track that run as subway along the Red and Blue lines.

It seems that the current system that has been in place in recent years merely allows for someone to use their cellular telephone or smartphone while underground to actually make a telephone call.

For sending text messages or trying to read something off the Internet, it just isn’t capable of handling such tasks.

Which means people who are in the process of transporting themselves via the “el” from one point to another have to actually wait until the train pops out of the portions where it is subway.

OR, A MORE radical thought; they have to wait until they actually get to their destination and leave the underground stations before they have full access to the many services a smartphone can offer – but which all too often are wasted on such trivial tasks.

CTA officials told the Tribune that people riding an “el” train during its moments of being a subway to refresh Facebook feeds or watch podcasts.

Personally, in those moments when I ride underground on the “el,” I’m more focused on paying attention to the people who happen to be surrounding me on the train. I’d think paying too much attention to one’s little device would be a sure-fire way of making myself a target for someone who might have “robbery” on their mind.

At the very least, I’d think it would be advertising myself as someone who has a smartphone worth stealing. I’d feel more secure reaching into my wallet and waving around whatever dollar bills I happened to have in my possession at that given moment.

EVEN IF THAT weren’t the case, I can’t help but wonder what could be so important that it couldn’t wait a few minutes (because most of the “el” system is above ground, which is why we call it the “el” even when it is underground)!

There are times when I think some of my Facebook friends do little more than put narcissistic thoughts about themselves out there for all to see – although I’m sure some of them probably think I’m posting dreary, dull stuff.

Or maybe they think I’m as full of myself as I think they are of themselves.

The point being that maybe we’d all be a bit better off if there were moments when we weren’t fully accessible at all seconds of the day.

GUESS WHAT? IF you had to wait a few minutes before you could read this particular commentary, it wouldn’t change the overall stance. The point being made would remain the same!

But it seems this is the direction the CTA is headed. The Tribune reported that officials hope to have an improved system in place by next summer.

Although I should admit one potential plus to this trend – the fact that the last time I rode a subway/el (Saturday, I used a train/bus combination to get to the Criminal Courts building and back for the duties I do for a suburban daily newspaper) there were no newspapers or other paper scattered around the train cars.

I’m just not sure that litter-free railcars justify the cost of a communications upgrade.

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Gaining respect for Mr. Speaker

I carry a Nokia Lumia smartphone these days, and will admit it comes in useful when it comes to work.

MADIGAN: No phone?!?

I’m not anchored to a desk with a landline waiting to hear from people. Yes, there literally have been times when someone returned my call, and I conducted an interview with a “source” while standing in an aisle of a supermarket.

BUT I HAVE to admit there are times I yearn for the days when I didn’t carry any type of telephone on my person. It wasn’t that long ago. I was a hold-out for many years!

I have to confess to feeling a little bit of admiration these days for Michael Madigan. The almighty and powerful “Mr. Speaker” of the Illinois House of Representatives has gained attention for the fact that he allegedly does not have his own personal cellphone.

The issue came up when Gov. Pat Quinn was to meet Tuesday with the leaders of the Illinois Senate and House of Representatives to try to figure out what can be done to resolve the problems confronting state government when it comes to funding pension programs.

Madigan didn’t bother to show up.

THERE HAD BEEN some hope that Madigan, who had a prior commitment at the time that Quinn wanted to meet in his office at the Thompson Center state government building, could somehow “call in” to the meeting and participate in that way.

Except that he doesn’t have a cellphone, and apparently decided that nothing of significance was going to take place at such a gathering. So he was just a no-show.



SORVINO: Could he play Madigan in movie?

The tidbit from Quinn that Madigan doesn’t have a cellphone has triggered countless criticism from the people who spend way too much of their time on the Internet posting their views to other peoples’ opinions.

It’s a generational thing, particularly from people who can’t conceive of life without having some sort of gadget on their person. How can anyone possibly think they can exist in our times without having a phone that makes them completely accessible to all at virtually every moment of the day?

I HAVE READ people who compare Madigan to the “Paulie Cicero” character from the film Goodfellas – played by actor Paul Sorvino, he was the gangster boss who refused to have a telephone placed in his own home and instead had all his calls received by other people who then had to pass messages along to him.

Heck, in the novel The Godfather, it is explained that Don Corleone didn’t like to talk on telephones because he feared someone would listen in and somehow “rearrange” his words to be used as evidence against him.

Madigan the “mob” boss of the Illinois House “family” is the image that some people are trying to put on him, just because Madigan doesn’t have a phone on him – preferring to borrow a phone from someone around him if he has an absolute need to make a quick call!

That just sounds way too over the top to be believable.

BESIDES, LIKE I already stated, a part of me remembers with some fondness the days when I didn’t carry a cellphone with me. I also remember a former work colleague who once tossed a pager into the Chicago River, claiming, “It beeped one too many …… times.”

There’s a certain sanity to the idea of focusing one’s attention on the here-and-now and what we’re supposed to be doing – instead of being available to anybody who thinks they can suddenly snatch away our attention with their phone calls.



QUINN: Needs to lead on pension problem

Particularly when those calls are usually just their efforts to impose their trivialities into our lives. Yes, I would think much more of modern communications technology if I didn’t see the trivial messages it often is used to deliver. So to the degree that Madigan is actively trying to maintain his privacy and avoid the trivialities, I can respect him.

Now if only he and Quinn and Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, could take their heads out of their collective behind and address the pension funding issue that threatens to bankrupt Illinois, then I’d have real respect for our officials. Because right now, I fear that the special session Quinn called for on June 19 is going to amount to a whole lot of nothing.

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We’re in for generational warfare, and I’m on the side of the ‘old farts’

Talking on a phone in the car has come a long way

I’m not a kid anymore.

That concept got reinforced on Tuesday when I learned that Illinois state Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, talked of the chances of banning cellular telephones outright in automobiles.

FOR THE RECORD, Cullerton says he does not expect that to happen anytime soon. Although he won’t be surprised if it is an issue that the Illinois General Assembly will someday take up.

When it does, we’re in for a serious battle of the generations. I couldn’t help but notice in the couple of hours after stories started cropping up on the Internet about Cullerton’s comments, one anonymous person went so far as to characterize a ban on cellphones while driving as being the same as banning breathing while driving.

To me, that is pure nonsense.

In fact, to me, the idea of not using a cellphone while in the car makes all the sense in the world – particularly since I have noticed the number of times that drivers who were busy yakking away on their hand-held communications devices weren’t paying attention and would have hit me had I not managed to engage in a sudden maneuver.

AS FAR AS I’m concerned, I actually have one of those devices in my own car that lets me talk on my cellular telephone without holding it in my hands (it was a birthday gift from my brother a couple of years ago).

Yet I rarely use it, preferring to ignore most calls to me while driving (I call them back once I get to where I’m going).

CULLERTON: Predicting cellphone fate?

On those rare occasions when it is someone whom I do need to talk to, right there and then, I pull over to the side of the road and stop (which led to one recent story I reported, in part, for an area newspaper from the side of Interstate 80 just outside of Joliet), then talk.

In short, I will have no problem complying with the idea that using a cellular phone in the car is absurd.

BUT I CAN also tell that this will be a generational thing. There will be the younger crowd that just won’t get it. They’re going to be prepared to fight and shout and scream that it is their “constitutional right” to talk on the phone, or use it to send text messages, or whatever, at whenever the urge strikes them.

It is something I have noticed with my oldest nephew, who is 17. That kid spends a lot of his time locked up in his bedroom. If one didn’t know better, they’d think he was some sort of anti-social, serial killer-the-making, plotting some diabolical scheme all by himself.

Actually, he’s texting constantly with his friends, who are all scattered at their own homes. They’re in constant contact with each other at all times, able to engage in friendly banter and sarcastic wisecracking – just like we all do in groups of REAL people.

I’ve even noticed on those occasions when he comes out of the room, with the texting still going. He even texts during meals. Or tries to, anyway.

IT SEEMS LIKE holiday celebrations lately have turned into my father (my nephew’s grandfather) berating him for texting while eating.

My point is that I doubt my nephew is alone. There are going to be a lot of people who are going to think that this is some sort of serious intrusion on their personal lives by telling them where their cellular telephones can (and cannot) be used.

Even though personally, I consider the cellular telephone itself to be the serious intrusion on my own personal life. As though some people think they have the right to speak to me whenever it is to their convenience.

It’s not like we haven’t had similar situations in the past.

I CAN RECALL just over a decade ago when the Illinois General Assembly passed bills that placed restrictions on where, in public, people can use laser pointers.

We got to hear legislators get all indignant about people imposing their own warped  sensibilities on all of us (I still remember the tale of a person who was using his pointer in a movie theater to show his friends all the traces of nipples and genitalia on the screen).

Then later, I got to hear from people who said that laser pointers are “fun” and that someone who can’t stand having a private part or two pointed out should learn to “lighten up.” I will be curious to see how this issue (which has been recommended nationally by the National Transportation Safety Board) plays out in coming years, although nine states already have such cellphone bans.

Are we going to hear some variation on “lighten up” in defense of cellphones in the cars? Have I really become the grouchy old man because I can side with such a ban?

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