Mueller the Impaler
It’s not just because Robert Mueller looks like someone that Hollywood would have typecast to spend his entire career portraying one of those ancient ogres who went about crucifying his enemies that I despise him. It’s because he behaves like one.
It’s not just because Robert Mueller looks like someone that Hollywood would have typecast to spend his entire career portraying one of those ancient ogres who went about crucifying his enemies that I despise him. It’s because he behaves like one.
It’s bad enough that he has pretty much destroyed the lives of George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, but after two years of trying to nail Donald Trump to the cross, the best he has been able to do is send Papadopoulos to jail for two weeks and suggested that Flynn serve no time for misspeaking to the FBI. Even the FBI decided he hadn’t intentionally lied but had only been confused by a question.
As bad as all of this is, Mueller hasn’t seen fit to go after members of the FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department who told a series of known and provable lies to Congress. That tawdry group would include James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, James Clapper, and John Brennan.
Also, inasmuch as Mueller’s mandate was to investigate collusion with Russia, how is it that his net somehow managed to miss Barack Obama, who vowed to be more flexible in his collusion with Putin after the 2012 election? An even bigger colluder with the Russkies was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, along with her husband, accepted bribes from Russia and on her own turned over 20% of our uranium deposits to them.
And let us not forget that when it comes to working hand in glove with Russia, it was Hillary’s campaign and the DNC that paid Christopher Steele to concoct the phony Russian dossier.
When it comes to getting to the truth, Mueller could take lessons from Peter Sellers’ bumbling French detective Inspector Clouseau. The major difference is that Sellers was playing it for laughs, whereas Mueller is deadly serious about destroying the lives of those he dislikes for purely political reasons.
We have all been on pins and needles wondering whom 76-year-old Joe Biden thought was the smartest and best qualified person the Democrats could possibly nominate to be their flag bearer in 2020. To nobody’s great surprise, but coming as a major disappointment to the likes of Michael Bloomberg, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Eric Swalwell, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, and Hillary Clinton, Biden’s choice was Biden.
I’m not sure why Biden, who tried for the brass ring in 1988 and 2008, figures he would be more electable at 78 than when he was 48 or 68, but, as a Republican who prays that Trump will be reelected in two years, I’m all for Biden tossing his hat into what should be a very bloody ring in 2020.
I hope everyone is enjoying as much as I am what is taking place in Tijuana these days, as Mexicans, for a change, are turning on their own invading migrants. It explains why outlets like CNN and MSNBC have gone silent on the Hondurans. It’s a lot easier to dismiss American conservatives as bigots and racists than when it’s other Latinos objecting to Central Americans blighting their city and country.
Speaking of which, in spite of all the hoopla we hear from Democrats insisting that the 22 million illegal aliens are a boon for the American economy, the Census discloses the inconvenient fact that 63% of them are collecting some form of welfare for which the rest of us are paying.
Predictably, women are having an increasingly difficult time finding jobs on Wall Street because men are afraid of being accused of sexual harassment. No doubt, some of the men are afraid because they know what sort of creeps they are. Others, just as surely, are terrified that in the current climate where we’re all expected to believe the accuser, even when that person is no more credible than Christine Blasey Ford and Julie Swetnick, men don’t want to walk around with targets on their backs just because some woman doesn’t think she’s being promoted quickly enough or being paid enough.
I saw some of this taking place 20 years ago when I was still working in Hollywood, and people who thought they should be hiring more blacks suddenly discovered to their chagrin that it was easy enough to hire them, but nearly impossible to fire rude, lazy, or incompetent employees without being hit with state or federal lawsuits.
It’s bad enough that we are still militarily engaged in Afghanistan after all these years, but I just heard from a Nam vet named Tim Martin.
He had just returned from a visit to the VA hospital, where a nurse had told him that her friend, the mother of a Marine, reported that her son had just lost three of his fellow warriors in Afghanistan.
That was bad enough, coming 17 years into a stupid unwinnable war, but making it even worse is that the VA is refusing to honor the insurance policies or benefits of the three dead Marines because they had allegedly removed their protective gear.
Clearly, if they had been engaged in battle, they would not have taken off their helmets. And inasmuch as most of our casualties over there are the result of roadside bombs, I can’t imagine what sort of protective gear the VA had in mind that would have saved their lives.
It sounds like the VA is still a work in progress, even two years after Trump took office.
Until I read an item in The New American, I had no idea that the UN was subsidizing Chinese postage. I’m not surprised; I just didn’t know that China could send products to the U.S. cheaper than our manufacturers can send similar items domestically.
When China isn’t literally getting away with murder, it’s figuratively getting away with murder. By now, we all know that the Paris Accords, which were meant to stifle our own industries, gave a pass to China and India until 2030.
The way the United Nations Postal Union was set up, the intention was to assist so-called developing nations by charging them less to ship goods. Somehow, China, with the world’s second-largest economy, got itself on the list along with all those tiny African nations you’ve never heard of — the ones whose major exports are Ebola and the more exotic forms of flu.
The good news is that Trump is pulling our support unless the UNPU starts to charge China the same rate it’s charging us.
Further proof that liberals are inveterate party poopers can be found in the controversy swirling around the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Those on the left, particularly the feminists, are out to ban the song because they regard it as a song of seduction. That’s because it’s a duet in which the woman keeps telling the man that she has to go home, and the man reminds her that it’s nippy outside and she should consider staying right where she is. Which happens to be in his apartment.
Originally, the song, written in 1944, was sung at Manhattan cocktail parties by its composer, Frank Loesser, and his wife Lynn.
But in 1949, he sold it to MGM, which used it to good advantage in “Neptune’s Daughter,” where the song was sung by Ricardo Montalbán and Esther Williams, while it was cleverly intercut with Red Skelton and Betty Garrett also singing it. The twist was that while Montalbán was out to seduce Williams, it was Garrett who was trying to have her way with a very reluctant Skelton.
When I recently listed the Oscar-winning movies, actors, actresses, supporting actors, and supporting actresses, I was hoping it would provide some nostalgic moments as you encountered names and titles you may not have thought of for years, even decades.
In one case, a reader wondered why I occasionally repeated the name of an Oscar winner. But before he concluded his email, he guessed that it was that I had actually agreed with the Motion Picture Academy’s selection. That was right. It didn’t happen very often, but once in a while I felt the academy got it right.
Connie Desmond let me know that a special favorite of hers was “Judgment at Nuremberg.” I confessed I had loved the original TV production, which had appeared on “Playhouse 90” and starred Claude Rains as the judge at the war crimes trial.
My problem with the movie was it ran on far too long, typical of every movie Stanley Kramer ever directed, and although Spencer Tracy was a fine replacement for Mr. Rains, it was jarring to see Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland in cameo roles as Jewish survivors of the concentration camps.
Coincidentally, LeRoy Foster let me know he was disappointed that Claude Rains never won an Oscar.
I let him know I felt the same way about Rains, Charles Bickford, Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Thelma Ritter. But at least they were all nominated. Edward G. Robinson never even got that close.
Best of all was an email I received from Jerome Reyer, who wrote to say: “I always love your movie stuff. I didn’t think anyone else noticed what a great job Richard Castellano did in "Lovers and Other Strangers” [I gave him the 1970 Best Supporting Actor award over John Mills’ mute to “Ryan’s Daughter”], and I especially loved the way he delivered the line: ‘Your mother and I got a lot in common; we both like a nice leg of lamb.’ I’ve watched it again and again just to watch Richard Castellano.“
I recently watched "Hollywood Hotel,” a ‘30s Busby Berkeley musical starring Dick Powell, in which Benny Goodman and his orchestra, which included Gene Krupa on drums, Lionel Hampton on vibes, Teddy Wilson on piano, and Harry James as the trumpet soloist, appeared.
Although some of his singers and musicians disliked Goodman because they considered him cheap and mean-spirited, his was the first of the big bands to integrate racially, which explains why Hampton and Wilson were in the movie.
I was reminded that Goodman had such a tough time remembering names that an associate of his told me he solved the problem by calling everyone “Pops.”
So it was only natural that when he and his wife had a baby girl, he called the little tot “Pops.”
