It’s obvious that corporate America is easily bullied. Even 30 years ago, Jesse Jackson, a snake oil salesman by nature, extorted millions from Coca-Cola (among others) by threatening a boycott as if on his say-so black Americans were going to surrender their soft drink of choice.

Ever since, major corporations have caved to almost any creep who threatened to put them out of business. In fact, the only one who wasn’t able to get away with it was Stormy Daniel’s creepy lawyer, Michael Avenatti. He tried to convince Nike to hand over $20 million. What they did was hand him over to the cops. He should have known better; he’s the wrong color to get away with that sort of shenanigan.

But sometimes, when corporate CEOs start taking orders from hyper-partisans, you have to wonder if they actually went to a business school and are aware of something called a bottom line.

I mean, what could Goodyear CEO Richard J. Kramer have been thinking when he announced a new dress code for his blue collar employees? It is now okay to wear slogans on clothes that support Black Lives Matter or any group promoting gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender rights (although the only possible rights they are currently denied is the right to have sex with each other or farm animals in public places), but it is now forbidden to wear any item of clothing that fosters support for the President, for the nation’s cops or dares to remind people that All Lives Matter.

Now if Mr. Kramer had announced that for the sake of peace on the Goodyear assembly line, anything that smacked of political partisanship was off-limits, he might have had a case. But by being so woke, so one-sided in his edict, he will be held up at Wharton as an example of what an executive, especially one pulling down $16,970,700 a year, should never do.

For openers, President Trump went on TV to announce that he’s having Goodyear tires removed from the presidential limousine. Now I’m not saying 60 million Americans will do the same with the tires on their cars, but I suspect that those who are shopping for tires this week will buy anything but Goodyear. And because tires are a high ticket item, people who agree with Kramer’s politics aren’t going to run out and spend $350 on tires they don’t need.

And while we’re on the subject, where do they come up with salaries like $16,970,000? Was he holding out for $17,000,000 and the board of directors dug in their heels and said, “No way, Dick, we like you, but not that much. If you insist on getting that extra $30,000, forget about it. You better start checking the want ads for a job.”

---

Brit Hume, the grand old man of politics at Fox News, seems like a nice, homespun fellow, but sometimes I get the idea that he’s spent too many years sucking in the fumes of the Potomac. And if he doesn’t exactly have Potomac fever, I’d say he at least has a head cold.

During a recent appearance on Bret Baier’s panel, he said, in the midst of the Democratic convention, that Trump was harming his campaign by making an issue of Goodyear’s wiping its feet on the First Amendment rights of its employees.

I believe he’s mistaken. I suspect that if Trump is re-elected, it will be because he recognizes when the media, the corporations and the billionaire class, are trying to bully the little guy and he calls them out for it. Sure, he could brag about the economy prior to the Wuhan virus and the trade deals and the fight for religious rights, but he’s someone who can walk and chew gum and juggle five oranges at the same time.

He’s always there sticking up for regular Americans every time some group of high-profile Fascists try to deprive them of their constitutionally-guaranteed rights to free speech and gun ownership.

None of us know whether Trump will win out against the array of enemies in the media, corporate boardrooms and the federal bureaucracy, but we can only hope and pray and vote, and just maybe we’ll all get to see the folks at CNN and MSNBC cry once again on camera.

---

If America is half as bad — no, make that one-tenth as bad as the Democrats claimed it is at their convention, they would flee the country. After all, that’s what people do when they find themselves in systemically racist nations where the leader is an evil despot and the police are corrupt.

We’ve seen it in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam and Venezuela. But even though Canada is just above us and Mexico is just below us, and nothing is stopping them, even those complaining the loudest — people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Michelle Obama — not only aren’t packing their Louis Vuitton suitcases, they’re sitting in Congress or in a $20 million mansion on Martha’s Vineyard.

It does make you think they don’t mean what they say. And they should either apologize or get packing.

---

Speaking of the Biden-Harris coronation, it not only lacked the fun and color of a normal presidential convention, it was as mean-spirited as a Saturday Night Live bit about Donald Trump.

Ministers at such events generally deliver a non-partisan benediction. The oaf the Democrats hired was no doubt a disciple of Jeremiah Wright. He warned us that if we kept illegal aliens out of our country in spite of having the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, we would go to Hell.

A few thoughts: For a party that doesn’t believe in God but does believe in late-term abortions, it’s an act of blatant hypocrisy to even have a man of the cloth (sounds a lot like a person of color, which this guy was) speaking from the dais.

Again, I find it peculiar that Democrats who don’t hesitate to disrespect the flag and the National Anthem always want to make a sacred totem out of Lady Liberty. Maybe it’s time to turn it into a lighthouse or convert it to condos. At the very least, we should sandblast those saccharine words off the pedestal. We have quite enough of the poor and the huddled masses to hold us for a while. We met our quota a long time ago and it’s time we stopped having the high-sounding piffle penned by Emma Lazarus, a Socialist, over a century ago shoved down our thoughts. It was a few lines in a mediocre sonnet titled “The New Colossus,” and should stop being passed off as national policy.

On top of everything else, the statue wasn’t even made in America. It was a gift from France and when you realize how rarely the French give anything away, if you don’t count surrendering their freedom to Germany, you might regard the Statue as something of a Trojan horse, a typically sly way for the Frenchies to sneak haute cuisine into this country.

---

Some people were surprised that in the era of the #MeToo movement, when even Kamala Harris believed the woman who accused Joe Biden of raping her before deciding that one rape is the equivalent of a do-over on the golf course, they allowed Bill Clinton to address the convention. As luck would have it, it was the same day that a photo of Clinton being massaged by a young female on Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile airplane was revealed.

But the masseuse came to Slick Willy’s defense, saying he was a perfect gentleman for the entire flight.

I got a kick out of her testimony because here in the San Fernando Valley, every strip club calls itself a gentleman’s club. For all I know, they even sell yearly memberships and have a secret password.

But having someone like Clinton accuse Trump of destroying the sanctity of the Oval Office is somewhat reminiscent of Claude Rains telling Humphrey Bogart that he was shocked to hear that gambling was taking place at Ricks Café, as he was pocketing his winnings. But it was even more like Ted Kennedy sitting in moral judgment of Clarence Thomas at his Senate confirmation hearings in 1991, condemning him for his alleged sexual improprieties.

---

Almost as bad as rolling out a haggard-looking Clinton was having the Democrats wheel out that wizened old anti-Semite, Jimmy Carter, the bigot who, in exchange for Arab millions donated to build his presidential library, compared Israel to apartheid South Africa. He even wrote a book on the subject. Or at least put his name on it.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to Mr. Peanut. Maybe he didn’t sell out for Arab greenbacks. Maybe he really does believe that a nation that has its sworn enemies serving in its legislative body and provides regular Arabs more rights and privileges than they’d have in any of the other Middle East nations is a bigoted society. Which means he’s not really an anti-Semite, he’s just an ignoramus who shoots his mouth off about things he knows nothing about.

Or perhaps he’s a smooth operator who really is an anti-Semite and the Arabs didn’t have to bribe him to say all that crap, after all.