Everyone Knows The Truth About Politics

 Everyone Knows The Truth About Politics

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Peggy Noonan
 

Peg Noonan bloviates her way through another weekend article in the 9/14-15/19 issue of the Wall Street Journal.  Don’t get me wrong, believe me I don’t mean bloviate in its negative sense but, since it doesn’t have a positive sense, I mean in a more neutral sense—she’s just talking and I like a good talker.  Peg is the best.

I nearly fell off my chair when in her first paragraph she mentions James Burnham.  That’s going back quite aways to an obscure figure.  Of course her photo is probably touched up but she doesn’t look old enough to know James Burnham except from his books and history.  If you catch my good side, which is a toss up, in a photo I look younger than Peg.

Burnham was your usual Commie who turned whatever post-WWII when the 1917 generation felt that Stalinism failed them, which is to say his crimes could no longer be concealed, so they chose a different boring from within strategy and called themselves born again conservatives.  Burnham, Peg says, was a founder of the magazine National Review.  Good title, it sounds definitely right-wing.  It took me about two issues in the Sixties when I launched into what has passed for an adult life to realize that the Review was a magazine run by born-again Reds.  Christ, Whittaker Chambers said he ‘abandoned’ Communism and immediately became a senior editor of Time Magazine, a so-called conservative rag.  Time and Newsweek both were suspect outfits.  Newsweek marketed a book because it weighed five pounds.  I still have my copy.  Still weighs five pounds.   I have since moved higher and recently bought a twenty pounder.  I’m heavy into self-improvement.

Anyway, Burnham wrote books. Just before 9/11, to leap ahead a moment, it was announced that 2.3 trillion dollars couldn’t be accounted for, just disappeared.  Went away.  Can anyone really wrap their mind around 2.3 trillion.  Incomprehensible.  Without asking yourself how much 2.3 trillion dollars weighs which can be represented in comprehensible numbers, do you how much 2.3 trillion dollars is?  Nobody does.  Incomprehensible.

What this has to do with Burnham?  Along about 1951 an atom bomb disappeared from the stockpile.  Do you know how big an atom bomb was, how much it weighed?  One can’t even consider it in relation to Newsweek’s five pound book.  But that’s not the important part.  Burnham though he knew where it was, in a general sense. It was in the basement of a house in the South Side of Chicago—in the Black Belt, Chicago.  Yowsuh, Negroland.  How do you get a bomb that big into the basement of a house in the Black Belt.  Obviously you disguise it as a five thousand pound book going by at five miles an hour on a flatbed.  What and how else?  It must have easier to build the Great Pyramid.

So, here’s Peg, quoting this guy Burnham who sagely said:  If there’s no alternative there is no problem.  OK, I can dig that.  I used to be a beatnik a few decades back and we could talk like that all day long.  Once you get the swing of it it’s easy.  Viz. ‘the greatest minds of their generation’ Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and geniuses of that stamp.

So, having made her point Peg goes off on a blizzard of ‘everyone knowses’.    Everyone knows the Democratic candidates are dildoes.  But everyone knows that Pres. Trump is a nutcake so I suppose that means dildoes to the left of me, nutcakes to the right, Sane people in the middle.  There is no alternative so there is no problem to follow Burnham and Peg’s logic.

As much as I like Peg’s stuff, she could develop a more subtle understanding.  Trump is the alternative and Democrats find that a problem.  Everybody knows that, and, she says everyone knows Trump makes a fool of himself with his tweets as though that were an unforgiveable sin.  She doesn’t ask why Trump turned to making tweet storms with winds up to 180 miles per hours.  I can answer that question.  Because from the moment he announced his candidacy the United Media of America made the greatest noise of denunciation America has ever heard.  Even H.L. Mencken who was always prepared for the worst in politics would have been stunned into breathlessness.

How else was Trump to breach this wall of vitriol?  Every reasonable remark he made was turned into something ridiculous by the media.  As President of the United States he was openly mocked by ignorant TV commentators during interviews.   No, Lemon, no, put your hand down, you’ve got your own forum.  Trump’s only way to make a point as everyone knows was to tweet it out.  And then Twitter intimated it was going to ban him for, get this, hate speech.  Nevertheless his tweeting has worked and breached the offensive of the media.

So my point is that until Left and Right acknowledge  how unfairly the President has been treated I have to dismiss every single criticism of the Pres. as mere bigotry.

Peg writes:  By my observation something is going on with Trump supporters.  They now concede much more about him in private than they did in the past.

In other words Peg is insulting Trump’s supporters as total nutcakes who now realize Trump is dropping below even their nuttiness.  Nonsense, we Trump supporters have always served as apologists for his seeming faux pas and gaffes.  Now they’re beginning to make sense.  Everyone knows….

There is no middle Peg and if there were they would have the alternative of voting for delusional Leftists or intelligent Rightists.  In the same issue of the WSJ containing your ruminations Peg the Journal records that China has just blinked in Trump’s ‘crazy’ trade war.  They are removing the ‘punitive’ tariffs on food stuffs- that is principally pork and soybeans. Why?  Not as a concession to encourage Trump but because they can’t feed their people.  They need us more than we need them. 

Trump wins if he knows how to weaponize food and doesn’t get into any Democratic sentimental maunderings.  You see, it is easy to win trade wars when you can starve the other guy out.  Everybody knows that and I believe the Pres. does too.  Just takes a little time but then that is what negotiations do, isn’t it?  You may learn Peg, that the Pres. isn’t nutty, just crazy like a fox.

Time Must Have A Stop

by

R.E. Prindle

 

President Trump is really changing our lives.  I’m doing all kinds of things I haven’t done for years.  I bought a copy of the National Review with a cover story about President Trump and that sour grape Obama.  Now, after forty years on I actually bought a copy of Time Magazine because the cover story promotes a revolution against the President.  ‘The Resistance Rises (in pink, indicating a female resistance).  How  A March Becomes A Movement.  The picture portrays the pink bonnet of the revolting ladies.  A symbol of the vulva makes the front cover of Time.  Pornography in disguise.  The whole issue of only 60 pages drums up a revolution. 

Sixty pages, and Time calls that a magazine.  I remember when they were thick, a hundred twenty pages or more,  maybe two hundred, with a hundred pages of prime advertising.  This pitiful thing has ads from Kelloggs and Chevy and a bunch of medical stuff, White guy with hepatitis.

Time-Life used to be the life blood of intellectual America then they were merged with Warner Bros. of Hollywood and it was all downhill from there.  The mag was founded about 1923  by Henry Luce and others and quickly became a success, then they bought the Life name for mega bucks from its publisher.  The first Life was a humor magazine of the early century that fell on hard times when the country lost its sense of humor, hasn’t found it yet.

Founded in New York City, Time posed as a conservative mag.  But as NYC was 25% Jewish and another 25% Communist or left leaning the staff reflected the demographics of the city which meant it was boring from within staffed mainly with Reds.  Henry Luce married Clare Booth which made her the famous Clare Booth Luce.  She had been an NYC party girl of liberated morals.  At one time the mistress of the notorious Bernard Baruch, the advisor of presidents.  She never lost her attachment after marrying Henry.  She even bought a house next door to Bernie, presumably so she wouldn’t have to walk too far. 

That was in the early forties at the same time Whittaker Chambers began his rise to editorship of the mag.  While hiring a notorious Communist like Chambers may have seemed a folly to more balanced minds, Chambers claimed he had renounced Communism a few months before assuming the job.

Possibly, but isn’t that a Communist ploy to insinuate operatives inside the Capitalist horse so they can bore from within?  Sometime later infamous Red, Max Eastman, who also supposedly saw the light, rose to prominence at Reader’s Digest.  After having thought and lived as Communists for decades did they suddenly learn to think like seasoned Capitalists?  Does anyone believe that?  Send 9.99 and a stamped return envelope  and I’ll return a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge.  I said ‘a’ deed not ‘the’ deed.  Read the fine print.

Whittaker Chambers made big money at Time through the forties until he suddenly quit his lucrative job for a non-lucrative job exposing Communists in government.  Exposing Communists is OK but proving it is another thing.  How many dedicated conservatives made themselves look like fools chasing Reds?  Is it possible that Whittaker was maybe a lure to destroy the Right?  If Alger Hiss hadn’t lied Nixon would never have redeemed his name, and to this day there are people to defend Hiss even though subsequent information has proven that he not only lied but was a Communist agent of the deepest dye.  My thought is that while Chambers may have turned in his card did he ever sever his loyalty to the Party?

So, with all of the Time-Life publications there was a Red tinge to them.  Kind of like when you feel like throwing up but never do.

We all read Time, I began shortly after graduation from high school after I joined the Navy.  At home the closest we got to intellectual matters was a subscription to the National Geographic.  I was a fairly avid reader then from 1957 to 1965 when I realized that the mag was not only pink underneath but totally dishonest.  Many of their news stories, maybe all for what anyone knows,  were total fiction.  What spurred me to leave was Time’s reporting of Howard Hughes departure from Las Vegas. The guy, or woman, who wrote the ‘eye witness’ report wasn’t even there and it didn’t happen as it was reported.

During the period I was reading the magazine though, Time-Life was instrumental in creating the culture of the early Sixties.  The two magazines made the art scene of New York.  That’s where they published.  While billed as a national magazine it was essentially New York in its outlook not much different from the New Yorker in that respect.   Andy Warhol might have lived and died a cypher without the fabulous exposure, or advertising if you will, of Time-Life.  Life even put Ed Sanders of the Fugs on their cover.  How’s that for diving deep into the barrel?  Life even gave a photo essay to Edie Sedgwick, one of Warhol’s drama queens.  Unknown beyond the Hudson but making the scene in New York City.

And Now, Vol. 189 #4, 2017 this pitiful relic fighting for its life attempts to make an exhibition of snit a movement.  Given that the mag was fiction in 1965 what is its coverage of the President likely to be?

I’ll let you know as soon as I read a couple articles.  I’ve already looked over the Chevy and Kellogg’s ads.  Never bought either and now I never will. Boycott everything that smells of the other half.  A pity though that after a hundred years it is a small distance from now until Time must have a stop.