Out of the mouths of babes

If the children of Iowa were allowed to caucus, Trump would surely have won in a landslide last night. They seem to instinctively like Donald Trump, and I don't think that can be entirely attributed to his celebrity. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, has a history of terrifying little girls with his apocalyptic language. Now, I'm not necessarily saying that we should be picking our leaders based upon how kids react to them, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to factor that into the equation. After all, they are the ones who will be inheriting the world that we entrust to these political leaders. I'd also like to see how dogs react to them as well. Because if kids and dogs don't like someone, that tells me all I need to know about them.

Clavar un tenedor en él

When Jeb Bush launched his ill-fated presidential bid in June of last year, he made the announcement in both English and Spanish. Bush would also sit down for at least one interview in which the language spoken was Spanish, and I believe that his campaign rolled out some Spanish language ads as well. He is married to a Mexican-American woman, and Bush is fluent in her native tongue. Clearly, the Bush campaign felt that their candidate was uniquely positioned to appeal to Hispanic voters and proceeded accordingly. And if Donald Trump had decided to do another season of The Celebrity Apprentice, instead of running for president, the strategy might have paid off for Bush.

 Bush isn't the only Republican 2016 candidate who is fluent in Spanish. Both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are the sons of Cuban immigrants, and presumably speak the language at least as fluently as Bush. But I can't recall having heard either of them speaking Spanish on the campaign trail. In fact, both men go to considerable lengths to downplay their heritage, and they make no special attempt to appeal to Hispanic voters. As a teenager Cruz changed his first name from Rafael to Ted, and never looked back. Just as relevant is the fact that the immigrant experience for white Cubans, like Cruz and Rubio, is altogether different than what most Hispanic immigrants to this country experience.

All of which means that Jeb Bush would have had a decent enough shot at attracting Hispanic voters, that is if he hadn't abruptly ended his outreach after a couple of months. Because while Bush celebrated Mexican heritage in his announcement speech, Trump actually attacked Mexican immigrants when he delivered his own announcement speech. And he would follow that up by brutally attacking Bush for having the audacity to speak Spanish during his own campaign events. Trump told him pointblank during one of the debates that he should speak English in this country, and we haven't heard Jeb utter a word in Spanish since that night. He pretty much left his cojones behind when he walked off that stage. 

Bush might hang on after tonight's results in Iowa, but he would only be prolonging the inevitable. He is expected to finish far back in the pack and his prospects don't look any brighter moving forward. His presidential bid never got off the ground, and the fact that he has been on the main stage for every debate is nothing short of a travesty. If that process were above board, Bush would have been relegated to the undercard long ago. But the combination of his family name, and the seemingly limitless amount of money his campaign was willing to burn through, was enough to buy him a free pass to the main stage each time. 

Trump Über Alles

We New Yorkers have long since become accustomed to seeing the name TRUMP all around us, because the man emblazons it on everything he touches, and typically in 10-foot tall gold letters. It is the Trump Brand, and he attaches an inordinate value to it as evidenced by this remarkable deposition he was once forced to give. But, for New Yorkers, the sight of a giant airplane with TRUMP plastered on the side only makes us think of his failed plunge into the airline business back in 1988. However, the grounding of the short-lived Trump Shuttle would be small potatoes compared to the beating he would later take in Atlantic City. In the span of little over a decade, Donald J. Trump would go from being the poster boy for a decade marked by greed and excess, to being a bankrupt tabloid curiosity. By the early 2000s, Trump had fallen so low that he actually lent his name to a scam get-rich-quick scheme called Trump University.

But redemption was soon at hand in the form of a crass reality television game show that turned out to be the perfect vehicle for Trump's comeback. Not so much in the monetary sense, although I suspect the money did come in handy for the perpetually cash-starved Trump. No, the real value of his long tenure on The Apprentice came from the priceless exposure it provided him with. Every week Donald Trump had an hour of prime-time television that he shrewdly used to promote himself ahead of the inevitable presidential run. And not only did he introduce himself to the American public, Trump also worked his family members into the mix. The happy result for Trump is that millions of potential voters already feel that they know, and like, Donald J. Trump. He was a celebrity before he became a politician, and it would be impossible to overstate how valuable that is to his presidential prospects.

Cruz Control

An article in the LA Times this morning highlights the importance of Heidi Cruz to her husband's presidential campaign, and reading it made me curious about the woman who married Ted Cruz. Without a doubt, Heidi Cruz is an attractive, intelligent, and accomplished woman who would seem to be the ideal political spouse. And she has indeed been a huge asset, acting in the role of Ted's "better half". It almost goes without saying that convincing women to support Ted Cruz would be a very tough sell, and that is where Heidi comes in. The thinking being that if Ted could land a woman like Heidi Nelson, he can't be all that bad. Unfortunately, on issues that are important to women, he is indeed all that bad.

And, as Cruz has recently learned, utilizing his wife in his campaign has provided Donald Trump with an opening, and he didn't hesitate to exploit it. Heidi Cruz is an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and her employer provided the no-interest loans that Ted used to finance his 2012 Senate run. It appears that Cruz took pains to hide the source of that money by not disclosing the loans as required by campaign laws. Trump immediately pounced by tweeting that Cruz is "in bed with Goldman Sachs". Heidi is currently taking a leave-of-absence from her job to work on her husband's presidential campaign.

Cruz's problem with this goes deeper than just a simple filing error, which is what his campaign has been trying to argue. He has been trying to run as a populist, but these Goldman Sachs revelations are making a mockery of his efforts. And the fact that Cruz's hypocrisy is being called out by a defiantly unapologetic billionaire does does not seem to be mitigating the damage to the Cruz brand. As we have seen time and again during this presidential campaign cycle, there are two sets of rules. One for Donald Trump, and another for everyone else. Over the course of his utterly bizarre campaign, Trump has managed to turn the conventional wisdom completely upside down.

 Like Ted Cruz, Donald Trump also has an attractive spouse and a photogenic family. However, the similarities end right there. Because while Heidi Cruz is a conventionally attractive women, Melania Trump could more accurately be described as perhaps "exotic". She also happens to be Trump's third wife, and his impressive brood of children are the products of those three marriages. Melania is a retired supermodel, who has left a rather extensive portfolio of photographs that show her practically naked. One could easily be forgiven for assuming that would be a deal-killer for evangelical voters. Why on earth would they vote for a thrice-married New Yorker, who cannot even plausibly fake being religious, over the son of an evangelical preacher? I simply don't have an answer for that.

The Rebel Robin Hood

"Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.” - Phil Caputo, A Rumor of War

A Marine Corps sergeant said those words to Caputo during the Vietnam War, but they could just have easily been spoken with Jesse James in mind. The notorious outlaw could not have been much more than 19 when he sat for that photograph. James cut his teeth at the tender age of 16 as a bushwhacker in one of the various rebel paramilitary organizations that engaged in vicious guerrilla warfare with Union militia organizations in Civil War Era Missouri. The fact that Missouri didn't secede, and was even staunchly Unionist in sentiment, didn't keep the state from descending into barbaric chaos. The war as it was fought in Missouri was one that pitted neighbor against neighbor and it was marked by atrocities on both sides. And that was the cauldron out of which Jesse James emerged as a fully-formed menace to peaceful society.

I am about 3/4s of the way through T. J. Stile's excellent biography titled Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War and thought it might make for an interesting blog post. The subject of Mr. Stile's book has become a fixture in American culture, so it is hardly surprising that I likely first learned of Jesse James from watching an episode of the 1970's sitcom the Brady Bunch. Not to be confused with the New England Patriots, of course. Anyway, the premise of the episode revolves around the fact that young Bobby Brady thinks Jesse James was a hero, and his concerned parents track down a man whose father was killed by James during a train robbery, and invite him over to give Bobby the straight dope. In the words of the old codger, Jesse James was a "coward" and a "mean dirty killer".

My next exposure to Jesse James probably came by way of the terrific 1980 Western about the James and Younger Gang titled The Long Riders. The film cast three sets of brothers to play the gang members, many of whom were in fact siblings in real life. The scriptwriters got it mostly right with the history, although the film's depiction of the disastrous bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota took a few liberties with the record. That scene has bodies dropping left and right, but in reality only two townspeople and two outlaws died during the shootout itself. Still, it vividly captures the raw violence and chaotic confusion of the event. I would definitely recommend the movie.  It is highly entertaining. 

Prior to reading the Stile's biography, I had managed to pick up a fair amount of knowledge about Jesse James because of my interest in the Civil War. From a purely military standpoint the theater of war in Missouri was essentially a sideshow, at least after the first year, at which point conventional military operations shifted away from the state. But, for the many thousands of citizens living in Missouri during the war, it was sheer hell. What I find particularly interesting is that outside of a few counties, slavery wasn't that deeply-rooted in Missouri, which had a very diversified economy. But

the slaveholders in the state had become intensely radicalized by the troubles in Kansas during the 1850, and it would have been difficult to find more ardent secessionists anywhere in the South. And the most ardent one of all was probably a formidable woman named Zerelda Elizabeth Cole James Simms Samuel, the mother of Frank and Jesse James. 

 

Zerelda Samuels deserves to be the subject of a feature length film. Just reading about her strikes terror into my heart. A botched attempt by the Pinkerton's to flush Frank and Jesse out of her house using an incendiary device ended in tragedy when the thing exploded inside the house killing her young son Archie, and blowing off one of Zerelda's arms. Needless to say, the botched raid only resulted in an avalanche of sympathy for the James brothers. That was in 1875 and she would go on to live until 1911, outliving her infamous son Jesse by nearly 30 years. I really need to find a biography of her. There must be one out there. 

 

Ice Princess

"Megyn Kelly's false eyelashes are so big, every time she blinks, the breeze wakes up Ben Carson"

I can't say with any certainty if Donald Trump's absence was the reason I didn't watch Thursday night's GOP debate, but this was the first one that I missed. For the previous two debates I did live updates on Facebook, as I watched, and that made the experience somewhat less painful. That option was not available to me this time, although I suppose I could have live-tweeted the thing to my 8 Twitter followers. My feeling at the moment is that my Twitter account is not going to amount to much. I hate the format, and that 140 character limit just does not work for me at all.

But, in fairness to the Twitter platform, it is the perfect vehicle for delivering pithy one-liners like the example I pasted above. Users had a field day with Megyn's ridiculously long false eyelashes, and for whatever reason, Ben Carson was the target of most of the better ones. Another user pondered whether they were strong enough to pierce a belt buckle, which was an obvious shot across the good doctor's bow. I once suggested that the Carson campaign slogan should be "Nap Time in America", but they never took me up on it. Maybe I'll tweet it out and see what happens.

Feet of Clay

"I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake." - Mark Twain

The target of that marvelous insult, British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, is making headlines this morning. Oriel College, one of 38 largely self-governing colleges at Oxford University, released a statement saying that it has decided not to remove a statue of Rhodes from the campus. The surprise announcement has infuriated student activists who, under the battle cry of Rhodes Must Fall, had been petitioning the school to take it down. The students were seeking to emulate the protest movement at the University of Cape Town in South Africa that culminated in the removal of a statue of Rhodes from the campus on April 9, 2015.

The problem they have with Cecil Rhodes boils down to the incontrovertible fact that the man was an unapologetic racist, and imperialist, who does not deserve to be honored. Yet, on the other side, you have those who support keeping the statues and they generally frame their argument by invoking the defense of history. It typically sounds like this: "Yes, Rhodes was a complicated figure who held some decidedly incorrect opinions about many things, but we shouldn't judge him through a 21st Century lens. We must not erase our history, however unpleasant it may be, because that would make us no different than the Taliban". The very tenuous connection there being that the Taliban blew up some statues of Buddha when they took power in Afghanistan.

If those arguments sound familiar to you, it is almost certainly because we have been hearing the same things coming out of the mouths of Americans, who have their own monuments to white supremacy to defend. The symbols of the failed slave republic, called the Confederate States of America, have become weapons in the ongoing culture wars that roil our political waters. In particular, the Confederate battle flag has been a lightning rod especially since the mass-shooting that took place in an historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina in June of this past year. And once it became known that the white gunman, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, had posed in photos brandishing both guns and the Confederate battle flag, a movement targeting the flag started. A movement that quickly broadened to include other symbols of the Confederacy, including the statues of prominent Confederate political and military leaders.