Letters to the Editor: Trump 02.23.17

Kooks and Commies

Springs

February 19, 2017

To the Editor:

The obviously orchestrated cascade of anti-Zeldin letters and the cacophony of whining, crying, screaming, and marching we are witnessing is clearly calculated to make the anti-Trumpers look like a genuine grassroots movement, much like the Tea Party that rose up to protest Obama’s neo-Marxist policies and tactics. But they’re not fooling anyone.

These Soros-funded, D.N.C.-scripted rants, chants, and riots are clear evidence that for the most part this is a sock-puppet army of party hacks, kooks, Commies, and crazies marching in lockstep to leftist rhetoric. Fueled by a thoroughly corrupted and biased mainstream media, they are making lots of noise but almost no sense. We knew the media were capable of propagating Fake News; now they seem determined to promote a Fake Movement.

Mr. Trump can be a little rough around the edges, and some of his speech patterns could use some fine-tuning, but for the most part he is on track toward his goal of draining the D.C. swamp. With congressmen like Lee Zeldin to help him, he has a good chance of succeeding.

Sincerely,

REG CORNELIA

Insulting and Troubling

 Springs

 February 18, 2017

Dear Mr. Rattray:

Whoa!

I just watched the most terrifying of presidential news conferences. It was a spectacle! The bully pulpit in the East Room of the White House, the most elegant of rooms, with the gold damask draperies, was just used to insult, trash, lie, brag, threaten, mock, twist, and insult our intelligence, the news media, and the intelligence community.

We were told by this president of less than a month that he inherited a mess. This was repeated again and again. Any shock-and-awe endless wars going on? Any financial systems collapsing? Did the stock market crash, is the unemployment rate climbing at 4.8 percent, are we losing 700,000 jobs a month?

No. But those hungry wolves and hyenas of Wall Street and fellow elite swampers, all millionaires and billion aires, are circling D.C. to join his government. They — who have always had the common man’s and the country’s interests at heart!

The newly elected president’s doublespeak, alternate reality, and alternate language is both insulting and troubling. It is distracting, a diversionary tactic that aims to destabilize. Fake news, he claims, is the language of the major news networks. Major news networks are the enemy of the American people? This is exactly what Richard Nixon said. This Teflon Don is a fraud, and is frightening. 

In less than 30 days, the new president has insulted two close allies, fired his national security adviser for lying to the vice president, the F.B.I., and the American public. His choice for labor secretary has just withdrawn due to dubious issues. He has rolled out poorly constructed executive orders and collided with two courts. I question this “well-oiled machine.” He does not utilize our State or Defense Departments, and for the most part his blind-eyed Congress is mute. I wonder why?

 He speaks newsspeak, lies, and contradictions, repeated and repeated to become fact. He and his surrogates make up fake news, alternative facts, and alternate realities to confuse and lie. He beats up the press for reporting and questioning Kellyanne the Con and Melissa Motormouth Spicer, who lie, deflect, evade, and even create imaginary events. The White House is filled with flunkies. They drink the Kool-Aid and have signed their loyalty oaths. The surrogates have zero credibility. Every day more fake news and new bombshells drop to cover previous nuggets of tainted information. A new golden shower spectacle is created by the TV star president to outshine and overcome the previous day’s sins. This is chaos deliberately created. It is all kind of psycho.

This press conference illustrated a lack of stability. The new president tried to create smoke and mirrors and shake his iron fist, and showed no respect for the office. All combat, no content. It certainly was not very presidential.

He has created a crisis in confidence, maybe not for the true believers, but for the rest of us, the vast majority of the country and the world. This 70-year-old narcissist is an emperor with no clothes. His freewheeling, vindictive, demagogic megalomania will not serve him or us well. He is not draining the swamp, he is draining the reserve of good will which traditionally has been given to all new presidents except, of course, his predecessor.

I understand he is having another campaign rally this weekend. Oh, my, no more toxic fumes for me. Time to chill out and put my pussy hat on. Maybe I will go look for a protest — they are everywhere.

BETSY RUTH

Yelling the Loudest

Springs

February 14, 2017

Dear David:

Where was the Democratic Party when hearings were being conducted against the I.R.S.? Elijah Cummings was yelling the loudest, that the G.O.P. was filled with malice against the I.R.S. Do you remember, when Hillary Clinton was on the hook for Benghazi, Elijah and the liberals screamed the G.O.P. was exceeding their authority by all these hearings?

Now that the security of America is in jeopardy because of Flynn, the question of the day from liberals and the fake news media is what did President Trump know and when did he know it. When did the Democrats tell the American people the truth about the I.R.S. and Benghazi? Don’t you think the plan the I.R.S. had against conservatives should have had hearings, and that President Obama protected this woman?

As far as Benghazi is concerned the idea that Hillary went into the face of the parents whose children were murdered and lied about a video causing this attack. We were under siege in that country, why didn’t we help them, and why when our country’s security is involved no one from the White House offered any information. 

So Elijah, rant and rave and demand hearings against Flynn, make sure you are heard. It seems the Democrats are doing their best to demonize President Trump’s election.

In God and country,

BEA DERRICO

Actual Facts

East Hampton

February 17, 2017

To the Editor,

Just to reaffirm the actual facts, these are the electoral vote results for every presidential election since 1960. (Remember that Donald Trump’s claimed enormous electoral vote majority was 304, against Clinton’s 227.)

2012: Obama, 332

2008: Obama, 365

2004: Bush, 286

2000: Bush, 271

1996: Clinton, 379

1992: Clinton, 370

1988: Bush, 426

1984: Reagan, 525

1980: Reagan, 489

1976: Carter, 297

1972: Nixon, 520

1968: Nixon, 301

1964: Johnson, 486

1960: Kennedy 303

I thought it might be of interest to go back a bit further; here are those that exceeded Mr. Trump’s:

1956: Eisenhower, 457

1952: Eisenhower, 442

1944: Roosevelt, 432

1940: Roosevelt, 449

1936: Roosevelt, 523

1932: Roosevelt, 472

1928: Hoover, 444

1924: Coolidge, 382

1920: Harding, 404

1912: Wilson, 435

1908: Taft, 321

I didn’t check past 1900, as the total number of electors begins to get small enough that you’d have to start figuring percentages and life is too short to even do this!

Cordially, 

FRED KOLO

All Very Frightening

East Hampton

February 17, 2017

To the Editor:

Four weeks into the new administration, it is difficult to grasp the disconnect from the norm that is taking place. Analyzing past presidents to understand this one gives some insight into his behavior. 

The second Bush provides the countervision to our current leader. Bush was not driven but chosen. Not his choice, not his desire. He filled a spot without passion, drive, or real interest, ceding control to his associates. 

Obama, by definition, was driven. Being black gave him little choice. His reception by the Republicans confirmed that need. He wanted to change our world; he wanted a safer, better world for everyone. He drove the country with a tempered intellect, rarely letting the emotions of the moment cloud his thinking or behavior. His sustained elegance redefined the ideal of a president.

Our current president is also driven — maniacally so. He has extraordinary energy and drive. Yet he doesn’t grasp the complexity of the office and lives in an alternative universe buried inside of his psyche. The disconnect between his world and the real world is hard to fathom. His obsession over minor moments questions his capacity to dig deeply. His obsession with the surface of everything leaves the impression that only the surface exists. His inability to pass on anything that flows differently from his vision questions the expansiveness of his mind. He simplifies the most complex ideas, and his interest in connecting dots to associated realities is never there. He lies relentlessly and pathologically to sustain his fake world.

Three appointees — Michael Anton, senior national security official; Stephen Bannon, National Security Agency adviser, and Stephen Miller, White House adviser — are the keys to recognizing the primary motivating forces behind our president. These three men have guided the president during his first weeks in office. Disciples of the theories of the German intellectual Carl Schmidt and the Italian fascist philosopher Julius Evola, Anton, Bannon, and Miller share a common core belief that is autocratic, racist, and anti-immigrant in a world of permanent chaos. They identify all opposition as enemies, believe that the press must be subjugated for the good of the state, and accept the abuse of the rule of law to avoid perpetual carnage.

They are all adherents of the anti-jihadist philosophy of Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy. Gaffney and his adherents, who include Jeff Sessions and Andrew Puzder, believe in a great Islamist conspiracy and the eventual Clash of Civilizations between Islam and the West. Comparing the damage done by Western nations to the Middle East, economic, political, social, and war-related, to 9/11 and terrorist attacks throughout the world is disingenuous. It’s like comparing a dripping faucet to a tsunami and arguing that the drip is driving us crazy. (If there were 10,000 successful terror attacks, the carnage would be less than half of the Iraq wars.)

Yet while the logic is without basis, the threat of the weak and powerless against the strongest on the planet (we could wipe out most of the Muslim world in a couple of hours), it has a great deal of traction in the current White House. The travel ban was a tiny first step in a much bigger and more dangerous policy. Obama correctly equated the vilification of “Islamic terrorist” as blaming blacks for slavery.

The philosophical problem with these three men is that they are bent on destroying all of the governmental systems and rules that were developed over the last two centuries. Disrespect of conservatives as well as liberals is one of the major ideas in Anton’s “Flight 93” opus that outlines their plan for the future of America, to create a new order based on white male superiority to try and return the country to a time that never existed.

Our problem is that what we were promised during the campaign is not where we are going. The vision these advisers support was not the vision that elected the president.

Where Trump sits in this neo-fascist conundrum is hard to grasp. His intellectual acuity would never have permitted him to understand the complexity of these ideas beyond his egocentric psychosis. He seems more like the manipulated puppet than the great manipulator. It is all very frightening, and reading Evola, Schmidt, and Gaffney elevates the urgency to bring some sanity back to our governance.

NEIL HAUSIG

Such an Ally (Russia)

Springs

February 18, 2017

To the Editor:

Russia and the U.S.A., a puzzle. Why do we have a problem getting along with them? Or do we? 

2017: President Donald Trump inheriting an international mess. North Korea a ranting, threatening, juvenile tyrant, blood-red Communist, launching intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear capabilities. Iran also test-firing I.C.B.M.s, bragging about its nuclear relationship with North Korea. China brazenly constructing naval bases in international waters, insultingly ignoring international and U.S. protests, brushing off bids to help in containing North Korea. 

And there is Russia, a vast part of a continent, 17,000 square miles, a major-power nuclear population, nine time zones stretching from Eastern Europe over the Middle East, the Far East, bordering China and North Korea. 

One does not have to be a Julius Caesar, Napoleon, or Eisenhower military strategist to assess and appreciate the monumental advantage to have such an ally (Russia) to the north of this threat — an astute, pragmatic businessman will do. A good start can be to invite the crew of the Russian spy ship currently cruising off our coast to dock in Montauk Harbor and have dinner at Gurney’s Inn. Our U.S.A. treat.

EDWARD A. WAGSCHAL