Mr. Trump Goes to Israel
Many of the people who voted for Donald Trump seven months ago fully expected he would keep his campaign promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As you may have noticed, he hasn’t carried through on that pledge, and this time he can’t blame the obstructionists in Congress.
Many of the people who voted for Donald Trump seven months ago fully expected he would keep his campaign promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As you may have noticed, he hasn’t carried through on that pledge, and this time he can’t blame the obstructionists in Congress.
But even worse, the White House released a video prior to Trump’s five-stop tour involving Saudi Arabia, Israel, Rome, Brussels and, finally, Sicily for the G7 meeting, titled “POTUS Abroad.” In the map of Israel displayed in the video, all of the Golan Heights, Judea, Samaria and the Old City of Jerusalem, which includes the Western Wall, are shown to be outside the Jewish state.
You have to wonder if the State Department hired the 82-year-old head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, as their official cartographer.
Speaking of the State Department, it’s no wonder that, no matter who the president is, their allegiance always seems to be on the side of Israel’s enemies. One might suppose it’s because we have only one embassy in Israel, whereas we have 50 embassies in Islamic nations and another 20-odd in Arab nations. Pretty easy to figure out which side will have greater influence with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and therefore with the administration, independent of the way that most Americans feel about it.
We Republicans have the facts, the values and the patriotic instincts, on our side of the ledger, which is the reason that liberals can never successfully debate the issues with us, but must always resort to name-calling. However, it doesn’t help that our representatives in Congress are so gutless they’d even surrender to the French.
They don’t even bring knives to a gun fight. They bring water pistols, but only after registering them with the authorities, lest the Democrats accuse them of breaking the law.
In the wake of Trump’s firing James Comey, Ann Coulter observed that it was time to remind everyone that Attorney General Eric Holder ran guns to Mexico, lied to Congress about it, was found in Contempt, and yet was never prosecuted.
I also recall that Rep. Charles Rangel was investigated and found to be a tax evader, but the pride of Harlem never served a day in jail and is still taking up space in the House of Representatives.
And then, of course, there’s Hillary Clinton, who hasn’t stopped lying or accepting bribes for the past 25 years, but is apparently revving up to make another run for the White House in 2020.
If anyone ever tells you that Justice in America is blind, point out that she also happens to be deaf, stupid and corrupt.
When I happened to mention in an article that it would be tough to prove that glass could take up to a million years to wear out, as rumor had it, because man hasn’t been manufacturing glass that long, reader Sandra Duncan took me to task for ignoring the fact that glass needn’t be produced by Corning. The name of natural glass, she recently reminded me, is obsidian.
I, in turn, pointed out to her that the name of natural gas is Charles Schumer.
Another reader, Patrick Miano, picked up on the fact that I had recently mentioned Rodney King in an article about Maxine Waters and the Watts riots to remind me that King received a settlement of $3.8 million from the city of Los Angeles, even though the cops had had to use desperate measures to get the handcuffs on the 300-lb thug after he had led them on a PCP-inspired 100 mph chase through the streets of the city.
King finally died in 2012, 21 years after his arrest, in a swimming pool. According to the autopsy after his accidental drowning, there was found to be a combination of alcohol, cocaine, marijuana and PCP in his system.
In an interesting sidebar, his body was discovered by his fiancée, who just happened to have been a member of the jury that decided that the schmuck was entitled to $3.8 million.
Because I have been a major movie fan most of my life, having even spent a dozen years reviewing them, I take the decline of the art form more personally than most people.
My problem with the majority of the movies being produced these days is that, besides being laced with obscenities, nudity and characters whose origins are juvenile comic books, the acting isn’t very good.
That’s not to say that all the actors and actresses in the 30s and 40s were worth watching, but many of them were. That doesn’t mean Jimmy Stewart, William Powell, Eddie G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Jean Arthur, Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Bette Davis, Ronald Colman, Charles Laughton, Joseph Cotton, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Carole Lombard, Teresa Wright, Fredric March, Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland, could all have been convincing as King Lear or Lady Macbeth, but they could certainly portray believable human beings and make you care about them.
But hastening the decline of Hollywood productions was the disappearance of what used to be called character actors and actresses. Every studio had a stable of these people who they could call upon to prop up the likes of Errol Flynn, Betty Hutton, William Lundigan, Dorothy Lamour, George Raft, Lana Turner, etc., stars who couldn’t act their way out of the proverbial bag.
Among the best of them were Charles Coburn, Claude Rains, Frank Morgan, Jack Carson, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, Beulah Bondi, William Demarest, Spring Byington, Harry Davenport, Eve Arden, Eugene Pallette, Cedric Hardwicke, Dan Duryea, Rudy Vallee, Gene Lockhart, Peter Lorre, Edmund Gwenn, Sydney Greenstreet, Hume Cronyn, Joan Blondell, Brian Donlevy and Raymond Walburn.
They were so plentiful in the halcyon days of the movies there was even a second team that included Oscar Homolka, Millard Mitchell, Helen Broderick, Roman Bohlen, Akim Tamiroff, Margaret Hamilton, Al Bridge, Mischa Auer, Laird Cregar, Nat Pendleton, Eric Rhodes and Elisha Cook, Jr.
But even in that garden of plenty, there were a few weeds that called for plucking. Those would include Ned Sparks, who had a voice that made fingernails on a chalkboard sound melodic; Robert Ryan, who never quite grasped the fact that villains don’t usually go out of their way to look and sound like villains; and Keenan Wynn, who was so awful that he proved himself equally adept at ruining comedies and dramas.
In fact, in my small circle there was a parlor game that involved trying to guess what it was that Keenan Wynn had on the likes of Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner and Harry Cohn, that could explain his constant state of employment.
