I Told You So

January 30, 2017 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Donald Trump’s use of mass media to directly manipulate the American polity may trace its roots to Richard Nixon’s infamous “Checkers” speech, but today’s science seems more string theory than the clunky Newtonian physics of the1950s. For the uncoerced, it is therefore worth noting that the @POTUS Twitter account has been wrested from Barack Obama. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who trolled the new president over his ban on Muslims, tweeted that the change of ownership means the acronym will henceforth stand for Prostitutes Oblige Trump’s Urinary Satyriasis.

Few of those who elected President PeePee Head actually voted for him; rather they voted against blacks, against women (Hillary in particular), against immigrants and against, most pointedly, the inescapable economic progress which has pushed their low-value jobs either overseas or into to an automated work space. Yet this formed a beautiful symmetry with a candidate who was for very little, but anti just about everything else, from the political establishment to sexual restraint to international trade to, well, telling the truth.

The hard part now, of course, is that PeePee Head has become the epicenter of the establishment, which means he has to be against… himself. Which is why he demands investigating fraudulent voting in an election that he won and why he nominated former Texas governor Rick Perry to a cabinet position that Perry promised to abolish. This is why he is pursuing a deportation program that, if carried to the letter of the law, would see his own wife expelled.

As I told you in my last missive, the anti-PC crowd has morphed into South Park’s PC Principal. After making a joke about 10-year-old Barron Trump, SNL writer Katie Rich was shit canned after a slew of Trump supporters barraged NBC with inane complaints like: “Time for SNL to re-evaluate it’s mission and raise the bar for what constitutes humor and become a positive influence in our culture,” or “The whole lot who think it’s funny to berate and dehumanize anyone, especially a child, is despicable and classless.” Clarifying the president’s feelings on the situation, a White House spokesperson noted yesterday, however, that dehumanizing Mexicans remains patently acceptable.

I also predicted the evidence of links of the Republican campaign to the Russian Security Service was too weighty to ignore. Hence the Congressional investigation into National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s backdoor communications with Russian officials. And if there could be any doubt that our country is swiftly becoming a Soviet Republic, take note at how the administration is trying to dictate how corporations do business. First the auto manufacturers were ordered to open superfluous factories and hire unneeded workers, then pipeline companies were told they must exclusively use domestic steel in their products. (“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain;” that Trump used Chinese steel in his in Las Vegas and Chicago high rises remains immaterial.) Such an attempt to establish state control over private resources can only be interpreted as a march towards socialism. We have become, in other words, Putin’s collective bitch.

Many, like Mr. Dorsey, argue that Muslim ban is un-American, while others cite the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 as evidence the policy is illegal. Regardless, the executive order makes no sense: countries which produced actual terrorists (recall: 9/11, etc.) are conspicuously exempt — namely Saudi Arabia*, Egypt*, UAE*, Lebanon and Pakistan — while millions of radicalized middle-Easterners holding UK or EU passports remain blithely unaffected. Lastly, given that the shooters in both San Bernardino and Orlando were native-born Americans, I fail to see how any of this will keep us out of harm’s way. What I do see it that is that the president and his gaggle of sycophants have no fucking clue as to what they are doing.

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* Countries where Trump has business interests.

Cruisin’ Down the Street in My 6-4

January 22, 2016 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

In a Quixotic attempt to derail Mr. Obama’s reelection, Donald Trump in 2011 sent investigators to Hawaii to “prove” that the president was in fact born in Kenya. One long-form birth certificate and a second administration later, the Donald remains unbowed. With his birther crosshairs now firmly trained on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the controversy is no longer a matter of fact, but of constitutional interpretation. To wit: Cruz was admittedly born in Canada to a Cuban father and an American mother. Twice before have Republican nominees faced such scrutiny: Barry Goldwater was born in pre-statehood Arizona and John McCain was born on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone. Each was deemed a “natural born citizen” eligible for election to our nation’s highest office. What complicates Cruz’ case is the fact that he retained his Canadian passport for the vast majority of his life.

But here’s the bottom line: Underneath his dark, phyletic dermis beats the heart of a red-blooded (read: venal, disingenuous) American pol. Mr. Cruz never misses an opportunity to portray himself as a Tea Party populist with a distain for Wall Street, recounting how he and his wife scrimped and saved and sold the house and cars to finance his 2012 senate run. In last November’s debate he pledged to never use taxpayer dollars to bail out a major bank, scolding Gov. John Kasich (R–OH), who rationally opined, “When there is a financial crisis or a crisis with Ebola, you’ve got to go there and try to fix it.” More recently, Cruz noted that “Goldman is one of the biggest banks on Wall Street… like many other players on Wall Street and big business, they seek out and get special favors from government… My criticism with Washington is they engage in crony capitalism. They give favors to Wall Street and Big Business, and that’s why I’ve been an outspoken opponent of crony capitalism, taking on leaders in both parties.”

Truth be told, not only is his wife a managing director at Goldman, but she wrangled a $500,000 loan from Lloyd Blankfein’s firm that funded the bulk of Cruz’ senate campaign. Unabashed, the Senator purposefully hid this information (along with the fact he borrowed and additional $200,000 from Citibank) from both the inbred population of Texas and the Federal Election Committee. Today, he unapologetically brushes off the violation as merely “inadvertent.” In sum, his inherent prevarication is indistinguishable from that of the other – and indisputably natural born – idiots vying for the White House.

Weaving financial legerdemain into swarthy integument would understandably drape Mr. Cruz in a rather Semitic cut of cloth; sadly, he is less the heroic Othello and more the villainous Stephen Friedman. Friedman, you may recall, is the undisputed king of government bailouts having simultaneously served – despite the explicit prohibition – as Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Board and a member of the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs. In 2008, insurance giant AIG went into default because of obligations related to credit default swaps; Mr. Friedman negotiated the taxpayer funded takeover of AIG to the tune of $180 billion, with the stipulation that AIG pay full face value to its CDS counterparties despite both historical precedent and market conditions dictating a discount in the neighborhood of 50%. As a Director, then, Friedman well knew that Goldman would be made whole on a $13 billion call; using this inside information, he bought 50,000 shares of Goldman stock, pocketing a cool $5 million in the process.

While it is a credit to President Obama that few remember how dire things truly were during the Bush meltdown (hint: triple today’s effective unemployment rate, quintuple the recent China-and-crude-oil-led market swoon and shit the bedclothes nightly), Friedman’s heinous actions recall such other traitors as the Rosenbergs and Nidal Malik Hasan. It might be fitting, then, for the new Jihadi John, aka Siddartha Dhar, aka Abu Rumaysah, to give Mr. Friedman a little snip during the final broadcast of Al Jazeera America on April 30 of this year. Perhaps, too, he could do something about Mr. Trump’s appalling hairdo.

Man’s Best Friend

April 30, 2013 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Though Tariq Aziz claims Saddam is still alive, the CIA is dubious, noting the former deputy prime minister is miffed at his placement in the infamous deck of cards. Aziz merely represents the lowly eight of spades, number 43 out of 52 bad guys. As US and British forces round up more faces on the wanted list it has become clear that a broader coalition in Iraq would not have hastened the war. Indeed it could make the aftermath all the more difficult. Imagine painting miniscule pictures of Saddam’s most wanted henchmen on Chinese checkers or the strain of carving those images into bocce balls?

But now that the President has officially declared the war over, it’s time to focus on domestic issues like health care, tax cuts and keeping Rick Santorum away from my dog.

Axis of Idiocy

March 6, 2013 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Devoid of any coherent strategy from the White House, the situation in North Korea is rapidly escalating out of control. When Pyongyang removed cameras and sensors from a dormant nuke plant, we sent up spy planes to confirm resumption of their nuclear weapons program. Intercepting our surveillance aircraft with MIG fighters has induced 24 U.S. bombers to be deployed in Guam. A few small missteps and we are miles down the Cold – War Road. How did we get from the “axis of evil” to the brink of full thermonuclear exchange? Probably the same way that a bag of fajitas precipitated indictments of six high ranking San Francisco police officers.

As for Saddam, the French have shown no stomach for conflict. This dyspepsia has a known etiology – namely oil giant TotalFina Elf’s multi-billion dollar Iraqi gamble. At a million bucks per smart bomb this war won’t come cheap for us either. Self interest aside, we Americans are simply more resilient than the Euros: All star French chef Bernard Loiseau committed suicide after a leading restaurant guide cut his rating, whereas bad reviews can’t stop Mariah Carey from singing.

Abba Zabba, Mothafucker

January 27, 2013 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

abbazabba Rumors that Honey Boo Boo was competing in a nearby pageant coaxed me out of a Kentucky bomb shelter (read: abandoned coal mine) that I cleverly located by cross-referencing an episode of Doomsday Preppers with Google Earth. Sadly, such reports proved unfounded, though I did notice, once my pupils adjusted to the light, that our great nation had not only survived the Mayan prophecy of spontaneous extinction but somehow had avoided plunging over the fiscal cliff. Well except for those misfortuned investors who’s Apple stock is hurtling towards ground zero at breakneck speed. The tech giant this week revealed that EPS fell for the first time in a decade as gross margins tumbled from 45% to 38%. Worse yet, the company may be forced to restate (read: lower) Q4’s $13.08 billion profit as a significant portion of the gain was due to in-app purchases made on my toddler’s iTunes account that my wife had unwittingly linked to her credit card. These are now in dispute. And after listening to AAPL’s conference call with Wall Street, erstwhile bullish analysts were agog at the company’s desultory guidance for future phone sales (despite whispers of an iPhone6 production run) and the unwelcome prospect of reduced subsidies by AT&T; they were left to desperately cling to CFO Peter Oppenheimer’s stillborn explanation that because the iPhone5 rollout was faster than expected, revenue growth going forward would be uncharacteristically listless.

What did hew to form was the inability of Congress to meaningfully address the burgeoning budget crisis in Washington. Sure, agreements were reached on taxation (you’ll pay more) and the debt ceiling (we’ll owe more), but the real work, slashing outlays, was forestalled by lengthening the fuse on sequestration. Even the automatic cuts codified by the Budget Control Act of 2011 exempt Medicare and Social Security, each responsible for consuming a fifth of federal spending. Interest payments, once rates rise from these Bernankein depths, could easily swallow another 15%. Republicans, despite their parsimonious rhetoric, want to radically scale back any cuts to the Pentagon, despite the fact that we spend more on “defense” than China, Russia, France, Japan, India and the U.K. combined. And to what end? We just wasted more time in Afghanistan and Iraq than we spent in both World Wars and essentially got our asses kicked by a bunch of seventh-century throwbacks wearing robes and sandals, armed with little more than duct tape and abandoned munitions. Perhaps we could have done a better job of shooting jihadists if we had surreptitiously lured Al Qaeda into a movie theater (by showing Leni Riefenstahl and Mel Gibson films) or gulled the Taliban into attending an elementary school (to ostensibly prevent female students from learning) because we Americans are practically experts at killing in those milieux.

But then again, who needs terrorists when we’ve got Boeing to threaten our air safety? And the government concurs. To wit: just as the FAA grounded the entire fleet of 787 Dreamliners, the TSA is removing all controversial “naked body scanners” from U.S. airports because, according to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, “ a concealed weapon is no match for a GS Yuasa lithium-ion battery in terms of bringing down our commercial aircraft.” Production glitches, electrical fires and fuel leaks have continuously plagued Boeing’s bellwether offering, necessitating a handful of emergency landings and prompting suspicion that Yuasa was awarded the custom battery contract as a quid pro quo for securing orders from ANA and Japan Airlines.

Yet the mainstream media barely mentions such threats to the commonweal. Rather, it is obsessed with Manti Te’o’s fictional girlfriend, incessantly combing over every phone call and e-mail in order to determine who said what to whom. Yet I can’t for the life of me understand why this is newsworthy; my cousin Andy has been engaged in Internet relations with dozens of imaginary paramours ever since he dropped out of Dartmouth. And other than his monthly Spankwire bill, it’s not really material.

With all the pomp and lip-syncing of the inauguration behind us, we can return our focus to President Obama’s obstructionist foil on the Hill, namely Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). The House leader, to refresh, sports an iconic perma-tan that stubbornly confounds even the most seasoned beltway pundits. Is it merely another manifestation of Mr. Boehner’s compulsive, nay, addictive, personality (recall: chain smoking, alcoholism)? I think not. I believe it is a feeble and disturbing attempt by the congressman to “blackify” himself. (It would register as far less feeble were Mr. Boehner to sport an Afro and tracksuit instead of mirroring Don Draper.) You see, despite ample evidence to the contrary, my hunch is that the Speaker is more cunning and acute that he is given credit for. He is trying to capitalize on the fact that African-Americans, a half-century after Gov. George Wallace (R-AL) personally barred the doorway of Foster Auditorium, now receive preferential treatment. Rather than resorting to reverse-discrimination lawsuits likeFisher v. University of Texas or Ricci v. DeStefano, he has decided to (clumsily) infiltrate the other side.

And who could blame him? Ray Lewis is lauded as he prepares for his Super Bowl swan song despite presiding over a double murder. Lance Armstrong, by way of contrast, has become a pariah for simply engaging in the same behavior as every other elite cyclist. And now the International Cycling Union (which itself faces allegations of covering up unfavorable test results) has partnered with the World Anti-Doping Agency to offer clemency to every other rider on the planet in exchange for testimony related to blood doping and steroid use. In simple terms, I, like Mr. Boehner, have no ambition to trade lives with Sugar Bear. But that Shawty Lo, with all them baby mommas, now that shit be poppin’.