Archives for July 2017

“Front Stabber” Anthony Scaramucci

There are few people more obnoxious than the little man with the big mouth. You know who I mean – that short guy who always acted tough, threw his chest out and threatened to fight everybody for no other reason than to overcompensate for his own perceived physical inadequacy. Every high school graduating class had a least one, and every office, sports team, or wedding reception includes a loud little guy who manages to offend everyone else.
Yeah, there are few people more obnoxious.

Unless it is a guy with a little man complex who happens to be from blue collar New York, that is. With a double dose of “in yer face” and “you tawkin’ to me?” a little man from New York is always unavoidably crude, loud, and offensive. Instead of using punctuation or adjectives or verbs, every other word is a variation on the “f-bomb.” That’s even worse than a plain old “little man,” for sure.  But not the worst.

Even worse is a New Yorker with a little man complex who is also Italian. Oh yeah, that little man with the inferiority complex from New York who acts like he’s a “made man” and can intimidate anybody with threats and squinty eyes while he pokes his finger in your chest and says “badda boom” and things like that. There can’t be anyone more distasteful, you would think. You would be wrong.

The pinnacle of scary social belligerence is an Italian guy, from blue collar New York, with a little man complex, who has actually earned some street cred and finds himself in a position of formidable power. Like Charles “Lucky” Luciano, or Joe “Bananas” Bonanno, or Vittorio “Little Vic” Amuso. These were all bad guys who had both the inclination and the ability to do serious harm to those who crossed them.

Enter the new proposed White House Communications Director: Anthony “Mooch” Scaramucci.

This little Italian guy from New York is so full of himself that the word “braggadocio” isn’t quite sufficient to describe him. He is a crude, offensive, and tasteless miniature Rottweiler of a human being. In less than a week, he has actually done more damage to the administration than Trump’s tweets have done in six months. This guy is the attack dog that was invited into the Oval Office and the first thing he did was eat the couch.

President Trump may be frustrated, and he may be angry, and he may even be desperate to get control of his people, but he doesn’t need a gangster with a baseball bat to walk around in the conference room and smash the skulls of anyone who falls from favor.

The Mooch needs to go. Now.

pelvic girdle or angry cartoon face?

The Rorschach Inkblot Test is a projective psychological test consisting of 10 inkblots printed on cards (five in black and white, five in color) created in 1921 with the publication of Psychodiagnostik by Hermann Rorschach.

Over the decades, the validity of using the test for the measurement of emotional functioning and thought disorders has been criticized, but the premise of the test remains undisputed: Even when looking at the same identical thing, different people have remarkedly different interpretations.

Remember those summer days lying in the yard with your friends and looking up at the clouds? Where one person sees a ship, one may see an animal, another one sees a castle. Each mind constructs the same image differently, and each observer sees what the mind tells it to see.

The same thing happens in the media. Where one observer sees a meeting, another sees a conspiracy plot. One may see an endorsement of western civilization, another sees a validation of white supremacy. A single word can mean many things to different people, and a person’s interpretation is largely affected by their predisposition to see what they expect to see.

And this is the crux of the problem in the media these days. Rather than have someone show us the ink blot, and let us figure out what it represents to ourselves, the media is telling us what the ink blot represents to them. It is a battle between fact and bias, and unfortunately the media consistently presents us with much more bias than fact.

The publication of Donald Trump Jr.’s email exchange concerning the meeting with a lawyer from Russia is a great example of the media’s Rorschach treatment of fact. While the plain text of the emails is there for all to see, some pundits see treasonous collusion, others can’t see any “there” there.

It would be refreshing if the media would just show us something, and stop telling us what we are seeing. Let us believe our own “lying eyes” rather than what you think it is.

As an aside, does anyone really think that the U.S. government never had a preference for a particular candidate in a foreign election?