#95 - Michael Cohen, the Slam Dunk Example of the Incomptency of DJTrump

From the get go, I have been amazed by the belief of many Trump supporters that the Donald was this tremendously successful businessman who could take what he had learned over his lifetime and apply it in a way that we would make our country greater.

From what I could tell, he ran a successful family business in one industry, but when he failed to stick to his knitting (airlines, football, casinos, retail, education), he either crashed and burned or never moved the needle one bit.  From what I could tell, he was a mildly successful host of a reality TV show, which if you stopped to think about, offered no redeeming value to anyone, anywhere under any circumstance.  From what I could tell, he was extremely successful at bragging about himself and more importantly, getting some people to actually believe him.   

If he had the background of a Michael Bloomberg or a Rex Tillerson or a Mitt Romney, I would have gladly given more credence to his skills.  These men succeeded in business in because they could work in large organization, influence those around them and move their businesses forward.   They succeeded in businesses where they had to report to independent boards, which no doubt challenged them and forced them to learn and grow, which made them better businessmen, which made them better leaders. (Note - Mitt Romney actually headed up a Private Equity firm, but the skills required to manage numerous other PE partners are even more challenging than those required for an independent board) 

It is with this perspective that the lion's share of the posts in With Malice Toward None (....mostly) have spoken to the ongoing incompetency of  our President Donald J. Trump.  I know, there is a lot of  low hanging fruit here.   I never said any of my musings were intellectually challenging. 

The recent news that the home and offices of Michael Cohen, the President's lawyer, the President's fixer, the President's consigliere and the self-described right-hand man of the President, were raided by the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York offers the definitive proof of the complete and total incompetency of our President.   It has been reported that Michael Cohen, the Fixer, failed to take the advice of Michael Cohen, the lawyer and went ahead and taped a lot of his conversations.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) on Friday blasted  Cohen, over the reports that he taped business conversations.  "Michael Cohen's an idiot. To be taping — if he did tape — conversations with his client, that's stupid," Graham said on "The Brian Kilmeade Show." 

"I don't know what kind of legal advice Michael Cohen gave Donald Trump. I'm not really impressed with him as a lawyer, just to be honest with you," he added.

The most successful businessmen will surround themselves with other talented and competent managers.  The most successful presidents know will surround themselves with the best and the brightest our country has to offer.  I am going to go out on limb here, but I don't think Michael Cohen meets this standard for either Donald J. Trump, businessman or Donald J. Trump, President of the United States.  But that's not the fault of Micheal Cohen.  The honor belongs to the Incompetent One.

#94 - The National Debt Is Out of Control

My taxes went down with George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001.  Like all Americans at the time, I thought this was a good thing.  

At the time, the National Debt approximated $12.5K per person.  Today that number is closer to $61K per person.  That's an increase of almost 5X in a mere 17 years, in just the blink of an eye.  How could it have gotten so bad in the time it takes to raise a child and send then off to college?  Assuming they can afford college...

Shortly after the Bush tax cuts, our world changed as passenger jets became missiles targeted at the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon and another crashed in a peaceful field in Pennsylvania. Beyond the impact to our national psyche, the subsequent costs to our economy and our society were massive and included the creation of yet another government entity, the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate our defense.  But strangely enough, despite the increasing costs that our country had to bear, no one came to ask me to pay my fair share.  Sure, I hung out the American flag like everyone else, but the additional costs were merely added to our country’s debt.  I didn’t pay a dime.

Not long after 9/11, America began our war in Afghanistan. We were certainly not going to sit back and take a defensive posture. We were going to retaliate, we were going on offense to find Osama Bin Laden and hunt him down like a dog.  I was all in on this. I wanted payback. I wanted justice. But still nobody asked me to pay my fair share. The costs were simply added to our national debt, and they are still being added to our national debt today, for this war is still raging on, some 17 years later. 

To make matters worse, we couldn’t be content with just one war, we needed more. So we turned our sights on a war with Iraq, which was predicated on either (you pick it) the stupidity or the dishonesty of the Neo-cons in the Bush administration who falsely concluded that Saddam Hussein was sitting on a stockpile of WMDs.  With Shock and Awe, we would be greeted with open arms, we would free all the little people and we would be in and out of there in twenty minutes. Right, that worked out well.

[For the record, the day the Bush  Administration announced there were no WMDs in Iraq was the day I stopped voting Republican]

I was too old to serve in both of these wars and so my share of the burden was picked up by the brave service-oriented volunteers in our armed forces and equally by their families, a group which represents less than 1% of our population. Still, nobody came to ask me to pay my fair share. The added costs of both wars just went to increasing the country’s debt.  I didn’t have to pay a dime.

In 2008, our economy, nearly crashed and burned when the sub-prime housing market tanked and almost took the rest of us down as well. My investments tanked, but the governments TARP program and federal stimulus and I believe, some steady leadership at the top, pulled us back from the brink and we recovered.  My investments recovered as well. Still no one asked me to pay my share.

And, while you might find this hard to believe, my luck was about to get even better

The Republicans came along in 2016 and took the trifecta winning the Presidency, the House and the Senate, but instead of holding to a now forgotten heritage of managing with fiscal responsibility and instead of asking me to pay my fair share, the Republicans did me a solid.  Not only did they lower my personal income tax rate, even more noteworthy, they lowered the federal income tax rate for my company (of which I am CFO) and all the other corporations in the country from 35% to 21%. That’s a reduction of 40% year over year. 40%!!  Wouldn’t you like it if your bank lowered your mortgage payment 40% and explained to you that they were doing it to Make America Great Again? Pretty cool, huh?

Looking back at all of these significant events of the last 17 years culminating in this Republican give-away, I realize this is probably the closest thing to real magic that I will see in my lifetime.  

But as you might suspect, this was ALL simply too good to be true.

At the time of the vote, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the new tax bill would cost about $1.1 trillion over a decade. That was bad enough on its own, but now, four months later, a Congressional Budget Office estimate released Tuesday showed the bill will add $1.9 trillion to deficits over a decade.

After hearing this, the man that cast the deciding vote on the tax reduction, retiring U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on the new CBO estimate, “If it ends up costing what has been laid out here, it could well be one of the worst votes I’ve made,”

“None of us have covered ourselves in glory. This Congress and this administration likely will go down as one of the most fiscally irresponsible administrations and congresses that we’ve had,” Corker said.

Business Insider also reported that the new CBO estimate also showed the U.S. will now reach an annual budget deficit of more than $1 trillion beginning 2019.

I am on record as railing against the Republican Tax Cut before it happened (See posts #72, #73 and #74), so while this won't help my children deal with the overhang from this decision over their lifetime, at least I will be able to look myself in the mirror in the morning and take comfort that my head was still screwed on straight.  Republican leadership who, in the words of Republican Bob Corker will be viewed as one of the most fiscally irresponsible that we’ve ever had, will look in the mirror every morning and simply remember, that they screwed us.

We are all shareholders in America.  We all have an equity stake in it and we want to see it grow and prosper. And despite the differences in our politics, our beliefs and our religions, we are joined together at the hip.  When our country does well, the benefits accrue down to us all, as it’s shareholders.  When our country hits some rough patches, even those created by the poor or even stupid decisions of our management, we can’t simply walk away from it, as much as we might like.  We must all suck it up and contribute to make our corporation strong again.  We must all pay our fair share. 

And that means that those of us who have more, must pay more.  That’s the way it works in Corporate America.  Someone just needs to explain that to the Republicans.

#93 - The Failure of Fox News

Ralph Peters, a retired United States Army lieutenant colonel, has been a Fox News contributor for over 10 years.  He has been a tough critic of Barack Obama, once describing him as having been “date raped” by Vladimir Putin and was briefly suspended in 2015 for calling President Obama a "total pussy" while on the Fox Business Network.

I lead with this background for its important to appreciate that Peters is no Liberal Snowflake hiding out in a fox skin fur.  Earlier this month, Peters chose not to renew his contract with Fox News stating "Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association.  Now I am ashamed”.   Ashamed….

“Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers”, Peters said in resignation letter to his colleagues, adding , “In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration. When prime-time hosts--who have never served our country in any capacity--dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller--all the while scaremongering with lurid warnings of "deep-state" machinations-- I cannot be part of the same organization, even at a remove. To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.”

Peters makes several extremely important points that speak to the selfish behavior of Fox News, which is causing long term damage to our imperfect democracy.

First, he reflects upon the fact that Fox once had a mission to offer a legitimate and much needed outlet for conservatives.  On the surface, this was a well-intended goal, but the face of American press has morphed dramatically over the last few decades.   Walter Cronkite was once considered to be the most trusted man in America, so much so that when his perspective turned on the Viet Nam war, President Johnson was quoted as saying “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country."  Since those days, the press has clearly leaned left in its outlook, which set the stage for the arrival of Fox News. It was a void waiting to be filled.

If Fox News had only stayed true to its original mandate, things might have turned out better for them and better for all of us.   While the network was being established back in 1996, co-founder Roger Ailes actually used the slogan ……."Fair and Balanced".   Honestly, I am not making this up.  Check out Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. 

Peter’s resignation refers back to those days, when real value could have been added by the arrival of the network, but sadly, somewhere along their path, they lost their way.

Second, Peters references the Fox’s more prominent role in the press today as “a propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration”.   Think about this for a moment.  A Fox News contributor is accurately depicting the network’s action as the defacto spokesperson for the Trump administration, where the only speech that emanates out is so far from the truth, it’s officially …“propaganda”.

Third, Peters hits the nail on the head when he states that “Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.”   The profit motive was not far from the minds of the Fox executives who released a reply to Peter’s resignation statement which read “We are extremely proud of our top-rated primetime hosts and all of our opinion programing,”

Their reference to their top-rated primetime hosts is accurate.  Of course they are top-rated, Fox News effectively has a monopoly owning the only major conservative voice in the main stream media, while all the other networks fight over the left leaning and moderate voices in our country, so how can they lose?  Fox’s profits is their raison d'être.   They achieve those profits by catering to a large minority of America, and they are not going to let anyone poach their territory.  So as many conservatives and republicans morphed into the current base of Trump supporters starting back in 2015, they moved with their market.  They moved to protect their brand with no concern for the loss of the any remaining credibility they might have once owned.

There is a reason President Trump is not rushing to fill the Director of Communications role, formerly held by Hope Hicks, who officially left the White House on Friday.  It’s not because he is his own Director as many political commenters have postulated.  No, it’s because he already has Fox News acting in this role.  Under the guise of being “independent”, they offer additional validation to his base.  This has led to a circular, reinforcing dynamic, where the President is happy, Fox News is happy, and Trump supporters are happy.   They are all tucked in and cozy, in their hermetically-sealed bubble, undisturbed by all the fake news around them. 

And for the rest of us, who choose to live outside of any bubble, it’s now confirmed.  Walter Cronkite is no longer with us and we are not in Kansas anymore Dorothy.