This has been a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and pop culture using the Google Blogger platform with the address halbrown.org. As of Oct. 10, 2023 it has been renamed Hal Brown's Stressline and moved to the WordPress platform with the new address Stressline.org - Posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky.
A lot was made of the time Biden fell off his bicycle. However I don't think anybody pointed out how fit he was in the first place to even be riding a bike which he could fall off from.
Trump's main form of exercise seem to be walking from his golf cart to hit a golf ball.
You can listen to "Let It Be" be clicking either images above.
Here's an article from Raw Story about Rockstar, Dolly Parton's new album which include numbers not only with Sir Paul, Ringo, Peter Frampton, and Mick Fleetwood on Let It Be, but also Elton John, Sting, Lizzo, Pink, Debbie Harry, Steve Perry, Steven Tyler, Stevie Nicks, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, John Fogerty, Miley Cyrus and Ann and Nancy Wilson on other songs.
Aside from what promises to be an instant classic album this Dolly Parton collaboration is a celebration of geriatic musicians. All except Miley Cyrus (30) and Lizzo (35) are 70 (Pat Benatar) or older.
Reading about this led me to take the lazy route to writing a blog for today and republishing with a few revisions my May 30 piece about ageism and how it relates to politics.
Biden and Trump's candidacy and ageism
WaPo column "3 reasons we’re stuck with Trump and Biden" led me to write about ageism in America and say humbly that at almost 80 if it was between me and Trump I'm more cognitively capable of being president.
This is the opinion column that jumped out at me when I looked at The Washington Post online on May 30, 2023:
The question I pose is whether this column by McArdle and the polls she cites reflect ageism. I will turn 80 in January. I live in a senior community where while I know many residents who succumb to dementia or demonstrate cognitive decline in their early seventies, I also know many who are cognitively sharp well into their nineties.
In an April NBC poll, nearly two-thirds of voters said they did not think Trump should run for president again — and more than two-thirds said the same thing about Biden, in large part because they think he’s too old. How did a once-great nation end up facing an election between two very old, very unpopular White dudes?
I can sketch out the proximate causes. On the Republican side, just as in 2016, a massive primary field is splitting the votes of the moderates, giving Trump plenty of room to consolidate his ultra-MAGA minority. Democrats, meanwhile, have no good options as long as the vice presidency is occupied by the hapless Kamala D. Harris, whose impolitic blurtings, inability to hold staff and tendency to choke under pressure make her an even less appealing candidate than her boss. Every Democratic operative I’ve asked blanched at the thought of running her — and also agreed that for reasons of coalition management, she cannot be pushed aside.
Aside from using the word "stuck" which in context is a pejorative, I found this paragraph problematic:
Yet that only describes the problem; it does not explain why we seem stuck with two broadly disliked candidates, one already in his 80s and the other turning 78 before Election Day 2024. Nor does it explain America’s broader problem of political gerontocracy, as embodied by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who seems too cognitively impaired to fully carry out her duties or to realize she ought to retire.
Biden is only disliked by the GOP. He may be disliked as a candidate by Democrats because of his age but he is not personally disliked the way Trump is. To include both Trump and Biden with Feinstein as emblematic of what is wrong with having seniors in political power, which McArdle calls a political gerontocracy, is patently unfair. Feinstein is an outlier because she has a serious cognitive impairment. With the average ages of 117th Congress at 58.4 years for Representatives and 64.3 years for Senators we are stretching it to call this a political gerontocracy. Being 58 or 64 is not being old. Sure it is reasonable to say Trump and Biden are old, but of those two only one has his reality testing impaired which is a sign of cognitive impairment.
Both Trump and Biden statistically have a higher chance of dying than if they were, say, in their fifties or sixties, but because as far as we know neither has a life threatening medical condition both could live into their nineties and, while risk of dementia increases as one ages, many elders never develop the disease.
A poll of Democrats should include a question asking whether assuming Biden will live with no impairments until he is in his nineties would you favor him as a candidate.
Calling Trump and Biden "relics of an era when America was more stratified by race and gender but less polarized by income, education, ideology or party" McArdle's concluding paragraphs shift focus from a critique of Trump and Biden's age to the way they speak:
Perhaps more importantly, they also talk like it. For both the Wharton transfer student and the guy who graduated near the bottom of his law school class, lower-middlebrow is their native language. In the mouths of the younger products of the high-intensity meritocratic rat race, this register of the American dialect sounds foreign — and given that only about one-third of U.S. adults have a college diploma, this matters a lot. In fact, it is in many ways the most compelling of the three explanations. It is also the most depressing, not so much for what it says about Biden and Trump, but for what it says about younger politicians: They don’t think like non-college voters — and therefore can’t communicate so well with them.
It’s very risky to be so dependent on people who are well into their golden years, who will not be with us forever. And what will American politics look like when the front-row kids who can’t speak lower-middlebrow are the only ones left in the room?
Trump, who despite his lack of exercise and poor diet, seems to have the DNA to be a super-ager. I suggest that to say either Biden or Trump is unfit to be president soley because of their age is ageism.
My impression is that when the 50 year old McArdle writes "golden years" she isn't really being complementary. Perhaps I react this way because I will be 80 in January and although to function well I generally need a 45 minute mid-afternoon nap I am both cognitively and physically unimpaired and if the choice was between myself and Donald Trump in all humility can say that political positions aside I would be more capable of carrying out the responsibilities of being president.
Recent blog stories:
Will Trump's Tucker Show be a Big Whoop or a Whopping Wowza?
Trump and Tucker hope that their planned competing event (click left or here) will get people to watch the One True And Only Best And Greatest Now And Forever President Donald J. Trump on the latest episode of The Tucker Twitter Show instead of the GOP debate.
Obviously both Trump and Tucker want their show to be a whopping wowza and not a big whoop. It's impossible to say who wants this more, but clearly Trump needs this more than Tucker does. If it stinks or sinks, or both, they'll both tout the fact that it got the biggest audience for anything ever posted on Twitter and for once this self-aggrandizement might not be a lie.
“This tube is the Gospel. The ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers!” Howard Beale in the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film “Network.” Of course the character's best known line is "I'm mad as hell I'm not going to take it anymore (watch video clip) but his comment about the power of television still holds true. There is a difference today. The big boob tube now competes with the Internet for influence which for most people is either the size of a cell phone screen or the size of a laptop screen.
It takes a small amount of effort to use the Internet while turning on a television and switching channels is easy. In the early days of TV you had to get up to switch channels and then we had clickers that used to acutally click and now we can just say Fox News out loud, like I did to take the above photo, and viola, there's Fox and Friends.
To find Tucker Carlson's Twitter page where he'll be presenting the glorious Trump event which he hopes is the climax of his career, call it the Orgasm in Orange, you have to do a little work.
The most recent episode is his interview with Ramaswamy lower right.
It won't be diffiuclt for regular users of Twitter to find. The real question is whether they'll want to see Trump so badly they'll decide to do it on the little screen instead of the big screen.
Trump knows how adicted people are to their big, often giant, screen televisions.
Click to read article
They are just like him. They love their television shows. Most of them don't read for entertainment or information. They watch television or YouTubes. This is why Trump is so outraged over the Fox News no longer functioning as his personal soapbox and megaphone, and why the preening narcissist (read my story) is making such a fuss over the unlfattering photos they are using for screenshots of him.
This is what Trump posted on Truth Social:
"Why doesn't Fox and Friends show all of the Polls where I am beating Biden, by a lot. Also, they purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big 'orange' one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they're not."
I found it amusing that he called himself "big 'orange'' with the quotes around the word "big" when his critics sometimes call him "big orange" or mock him because of the orange tinted makeup he apparently applies to his face:
We'll have to see whether this plan works for Trump, or if he changes his mind at the last minute and decides to ditch Tucker and join the debate. The chance to prance on the big screen may be to hard to resist.
If he does the Twitter Twist and shakes his booty on Tucker's show no doubt many people will watch it instead of the TV debate on Fox News, and others may do what I did when I took the photo on the top of this blog. They may make their own version of the split screen and watch both at the same time.
I doubt I'll watch either on Wednesday. I don't know what streaming video show we'll be watching next week, but it's sure to be more entertaining than Trump and Tucker or the GOP debate. Chris Christi if the only candidate worth watching and he'll have to split his time with these yahoos:
I'll count on Morning Joe to show clips of the highlights and lowlights.
While I think this is possible I think it is not likely because it will get more people to watch his arrest at the jail. I doubt he'll want addtional people to see him being led through the process like an ordinary criminal. This will be televised so it won't be up to courtroom artists to show how he looked. He's a good actor but pretending this doesn't bother him for the cameras may be beyond his ability.
The former president has been quizzing confidants lately about whether he should debate. He has fixated on former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is expected to be his harshest critic on the stage. And he has expressed a particularly intense disdain for the low-polling former governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, suggesting privately that it would be almost insulting to share a stage with him, according to a person who spoke to Mr. Trump.
Senior members of Mr. Trump’s team — Chris LaCivita, Jason Miller and Mr. Cheung — all plan to attend the debate. The Trump campaign has arranged for prominent surrogates, including members of Congress, to visit the “spin room” after the debate to make Mr. Trump’s case.
But as of Friday, Mr. Trump appeared to have lost interest in attending the debate, according to people with knowledge of his thinking. And he is now planning to attempt to upstage the event by participating in the interview with Mr. Carlson, though the exact timing and online platform remain unclear.
It seems like the Fox New website isn't even reporting on anything to do with Trump. They are, however, reporting on President Biden.
I doubt many of you will click to read the articles about Maui so here's an excerpt from the second one which is as I write this is featured near the top of the website main page.
The article begins:
A Maui resident grew visibly emotional during a CNN appearance Thursday, asking why President Joe Biden was taking so long to visit and asked if Hawaiians aren’t "Americans too."
"It's really affecting me because where’s the President?" Maui resident Ella Sable Tacderan asked. "I mean, aren’t we Americans, too? We’re part of the United States. Why are we getting put in the back pocket? Why are we being ignored?"
Biden notably waited to announce that he was coming to visit Hawaii until Tuesday. When initially asked by a reporter if he had "any comment on the rising death toll in Maui" a few days earlier on Sunday, Biden said he had "no comment."
The featured video shows a tearful resident of Maui blaming President Biden for waiting two weeks until he announced his plan to come to Maui while the host solemnly looks on.
I suppose the powers that be at Fox News didn't have any Hunter Biden in league with the criminal mastermind president stories to report on so their fallback story was one woman blaming President Biden for not coming sooner to Maui and for the fact that "her parents recieved a check for $700 which was a slap in the face" which wasn't enough to buy groceries.
If Hunter Biden and this is all they got, they got bupkis.
Today this is a top story on Raw Story decribing what was discussed on Morning Joe in their first hour (and is still being talked about as I write this):
Above: Opnion on the decision to indict Trump o Jan 6 case
Up until recently Trump has been even more slippery than my bag of Teflon furniture sliders.
He has been able to slide out of trouble, whether legal entanglements or his crude misogynist Access Hollywood comment and having extra-marital sex with a porn star just after Melania gave birth, like an egg on a Teflon frying pan.
Trump's demise has been predicted before. The covers of The New York Daily News depciting him as a loser clown are a good example.
The Daily News featured this story on their front page on July 4, 2018. More than five years later it may finally be true.
Trump was considered a loser clown on these fromt pages duriing his first primary.
The only issues I have with the depictions of Trump as a clown in the illustrations above is that they merely show him as a sad or smiling clown.
In fact while Trump was clownish he was anything but benign. He was the clown of nightmares. He was like a classic scary clown in movies like Pennywise from "Stephen King's It" and all the other scary clown moviesonly in a suit and ridulously long red tie.
The clown who was the president/king and tried to overthow the "bedrock values" the United States were founded on during his presidency and ever since he lost this bid for reelection he has continued to do so.
The Constitution was a joke book, more a book of cartoons for the man notorious for not reading anything more complex than simple words on notecards. He not only ignored the Constitution but took pleasure in doing so and getting away with it. Kings, emperors, and dictators write their own rulebooks.
Hopefully one or more juries of citizens treat him like any other citizen who is not above the law, and will prove he has lost his Teflon protection. If he is found guilty he'll be cooked. He will slide out of the frying pan into the fire where Teflon won't do him any good. He'll need a fireproof suit.
Addendum 1:
Trump and the clown references and imagry, below about a clown car with Trump as the driver honking sadly on the oversized horn, keep coming up. This is from
My comment and drawing: One way to put it is that he's skating on thin ice in a heavy suit of armor. Another is that Trump thinks he can jump into shark infested waters wearing his super-suit of armor will it protect him without realizing it would assure that rather than being eaten alive he'd sink quickly to a watery grave.
