There was no big story of the day on Tuesday, but there were more than enough small ones to fill the remaining newspapers and the cable network’s 24-hours. The partial government shutdown continues, so does the “Russia thing,” and Republican congressman has been rebuked for his long history of racist sentiments. On the pop culture front President Donald Trump served the reigning national collegiate football champs a feast of fast food, and a legend of a better era of show biz showed up in the obituary pages.
The Democrats who now comprise a majority of the House of Representatives declined Trump’s invitation to a negotiating session to end the partial government shutdown, and we can’t blame them, as Trump would have insisted on funding for his long-promised wall along the entire southern and every public opinion poll shows that majority of the public doesn’t want it. Public disapproval of the both the wall and the partial government shutdown are such that a few Republican senators up for a ’20 reelection in purplish states will vote for a spending bill to fully reopen the government with no wall funding, a few more are willing to vote for a bill with less wall funding than Trump insists on, while a few more are willing to vote for a deal that gives Trump his border wall funding but also the Democrats’ position on amnesty for the “dreamers” who were illegally brought into the country as children. At this point the Democrats can plausibly win a veto-proof number of votes in both chambers of Congress to end the shutdown on their terms, and have no reason to let Trump act tough in front of the cameras for his die-hard base of support.
Meanwhile, the “Russia thing” keeps getting worse for Trump. The special counsel investigation have made new court filings about former Trump campaign manager and already-convicted felon Paul Manafort, and although they’re heavily redacted for national security reasons they all indicate his contacts and financial dealings with the Russians were even more extensive than theist year’s alarming reports had already indicated. In other interesting “Russia thing” news, Trump’s Treasury Department’s attempts to lift sanctions on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, whose name keeps popping up in this “Russia thing,” met with congressional opposition, and eleven — count ’em, eleven — Republican Senators joined every last one of the Democrats in voting for the resolution to stop the deal. So far as we can tell this Deripaska fellow is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, as W.C. Fields would have put it, and we can’t blame any Republican who doesn’t want to explain why he’s siding with Trump’s Treasury Department about it. What with the recent reports about Trump’s disdain for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and keeping his talks with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin secret, this “Russia thing” keeps looking worse.
Elsewhere in the news the House of Representatives voted to rebuke Rep. Steve King of Iowa and take away his committee assignments for his long history of outrageously racist statements, with the resolution passing by a margin of 424-to-1, which of course of included all but one of the remaining Republicans. Although King has long been over-the-top in his defense of what he calls “western civilization,” but his recent lament to The New York Times about how “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” somehow have a negative connotation these days was too much for even the most wall-building sorts of Republicans.
Trump did well with the fast food feast in the White House dining room, on the other hand. There was the predictable snooty sniping about the portrait of Abraham Lincoln looking down a White House dining table stacked with McDonald’s Quarter Pounders and Big Macs and Wendy’s double-cheeseburgers and Burger King’s Whoppers, along with some Domino’s pizza, but Trump reportedly paid the few thousand-dollar tab himself in honor of the partial government shutdown and the visiting Clemson University Tigers seemed to appreciate it, including that very promising quarterback with the hippy-dippy haircut.
Once upon a more genteel time in America President Franklin Roosevelt treated the King and Queen of England to a meal of hot dogs in the White House dining to room, an apparent attempt to reassure Great Depression America he had the common touch, but First Lady Eleanor spoiled the effort by passing the accent on the second part and asking the Queen if she’d like another “hot dog.” Trump’s affinity for fast food is obviously more authentic, the reigning champions of college football seems to share his tastes, and for whatever that says about America’s diet Trump got a rare photo opportunity with some winners.
Also on Tuesday we were saddened to note the passing of Carol Channing at the ripe old age of 97. It’s such a ripe old age that most Americans won’t remember her long career as a Broadway show-stopper, but we’re old enough to know from her occasional show-stopping and Oscar-winning movie roles and frequent variety show appearances and several hit records, and can testify that she was really something. She was a gangly six feet tall with weirdly wide eyes, yet inexplicably attractive enough to star in Broadway and Hollywood movies, and she had a raspy voice that all the nightclub comics did impressions of, yet she’s still one of our favorite singers, and Republicans and Democrats alike agreed she had one of those irresistible personalities that projected all the way to the back of any theater.
We expect that today will bring lots more news, too, and hope that some of it will be good.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 