We are never going to have a president like this again.

We never have.

A president so unaffected.

"Yes, I have an iPad." "Do you have a computer?" "Yes...Jorge, whaddayou...I'm the president of the United States, you think I have to borrow somebody else's computer?"

Somebody as decent, as good, as good-natured.

Somebody who can sing Al Green! Are you kidding me!!!

...? How the fuck did I get on to all of this?...Oh! Ol' Stubby Fingers. I was reading on my phone at the restaurant when the lights went out but the music didn't, I was reading what Donald Trump said about Ted Cruz today to George Stephanopolous:

"I don't think Ted Cruz has a great chance, to be honest with you," [Rule of construction: When someone says "to be honest with you," he's not.] Look, the truth is, he's a nasty guy. [Nasty. Nasty? I haven't seen "nasty."] He was so nice to me. I mean, I knew it. I was watching. I kept saying, 'Come on Ted. Let's go, okay.' But he's a nasty guy. Nobody likes him. Nobody in Congress likes him. Nobody likes him anywhere once they get to know him. He's a very –- he's got an edge that's not good. [HE'S got an edge. Man, that's the knife calling the edge sharp.] You can't make deals with people like that and it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing for the country. Very nasty guy."

"Nobody likes him." That made me feel bad. I have a deep spot in my soul for people who aren't liked, it's painful for me. I have felt at times that I am "alone," that I am not liked, or, in Willy Loman's formulation, "liked but not well-liked," not liked enough, while I have at other times in my life pushed people away, not wanting to get close...Most other times of my life, shit...I have felt when I have thought I was well-liked that it was by "too many" people, (lol, that's fucked up), I have felt that I must be doing something wrong or that some of those people who seemed to really, really like me were being insincere, (They weren't, history has taught me. Shit, that is really fucked up.), while at the same time, I feel sincerely and equally deeply that one must have people who don't like you, "enemies," that having enemies is telling, that it means you're doing some good because in a morally monochromatic universe if you have no enemies you have no friends, everybody's the same, and there is no good because there is no evil. 

WHATEVER!

Damn it. Okay, back to the main point, Cruz, Trump. I then got on Trump's twitter account and he had pasted excerpts from a Wall Street Journal article by Peggy Noonan. This is what Trump tweeted:

So then I read Ms. Noonan's article.

For Mr. Cruz the lesson hit home with the damage, however small or significant, caused by Mr. Trump’s putting forward the issue of Mr. Cruz’s constitutional eligibility, due to birth in Canada, for the presidency. Mr. Trump was particularly devilish: He didn’t insist Mr. Cruz was ineligible but simply said, with an air of mock concern, that a President Cruz could bog the country down in years of court challenges. This was primo Doubt-Casting, aimed at giving potential Cruz supporters reservations.

As for Mrs. Clinton, she has clearly been rattled by Mr. Trump’s merciless resurrection of her alleged complicity in the sometimes brutal handling of women involved in her husband’s dramas. This reminds everyone of—and introduces young voters, who were children during the Gennifer Flowers through Monica Lewinsky stories to—the whole sordid underside of Clintonism. Mrs. Clinton clearly wasn’t expecting it, and she bobbled. She has never gone up against a competitor like Mr. Trump.

That made me angry. Hillary Clinton was NOT complicit in her husband's philandering! That is TOTALLY UNFAIR, outrageous. SHE WAS DECEIVED, LIED TO, BY BILL, JUST AS WE ALL WERE. She stuck her neck out, believed him! And Bill Clinton decapitated her.

The second thing she and Mr. Cruz are both learning, I suspect, is something most people learn by their 20s: It matters what people think of you. It’s important that people have a high opinion of your essential integrity, trustworthiness and good faith. It matters that they like you. Mr. Cruz, when challenged by Mr. Trump, could have used some backup from prominent Republicans, but they didn’t throw him a lifeline. John McCain: “I am not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into.” You know why Mr. Cruz had no backup? Because almost no one who works with him likes him. They haven’t experienced him as a trustworthy person of good faith. They waited, as people do, for a chance to hurt him, and when they got it they did.

"No one who works with him likes him." That is really too bad. I feel for Cruz there. But that is my sense, also. But what Noonan is talking about there is a working relationship, they don't like to work with Ted Cruz. From what I've seen and heard, that is a fair criticism but that is different from saying that a person is not personally likeable, which is what Noonan says is Hillary Clinton's particular likeability issue:

[Mrs. Clinton] when she wants to emphasize an applause line, her voice becomes loud, flat and harassing to the ear. She lately reminds me of the landlady yelling up the stairs that your kids left their bikes in the hall again. Literally that’s how it sounds: “And we won’t let them roll back the progress we’ve made. Your kids left their bikes in the hall.”

Brilliant writing by Ms. Noonan, true, and mean. Since Hillary is running for president it's fair also and since it's true, she should try to change BECAUSE SHE REALLY DOES SOUND LIKE THAT! I have thought to write the same thing about how her voice grates on me but I thought coming from a man I would invite a shitstorm of charges of misogyny on my head. (I wanted to be liked. SHIT!)

The second [reason for Bernie Sanders' appeal] is antipathy to Mrs. Clinton, even a lack of the old affection. I’m not seeing the fervor for her one saw in 2008. Where is the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit? 

I remember that. It's been replaced by the Moving Rope Line.

The real problem for Mrs. Clinton is that so many people do not find her to be a person of reliable integrity. It’s not more complicated than that, really—her character is not admired. It’s all in the polls.

I think that that is right and for the reasons Noonan goes on to say (but not complicity in Bill's affairs). 

After 23 years at the highest levels of public life, Mrs. Clinton has become encrusted by scandal, from her part in her husband’s dramas [BULLSHIT] straight through to Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation and the emails, in connection with which she may be indicted. ["SHE MAY BE INDICTED?! First time I've ever heard that.] She brings scandal with her, always has. I would be surprised if many people were not thinking: “Do we really want to go back to all that again, knowing it never ends, knowing there will be another scandal, that all we have to do is wait?”

I have said that in exactly the terms bolded.


Maybe she’ll gut it out. But maybe it’s like 2008 again, a reverse Sally Field: They don’t like me, they really don’t like me.

And that made me feel bad again. 

I remembered the one time, not "the," I remember one time that Hillary Clinton's voice did not make the hair on the back of my neck stand up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3DeCLPwxXI. 

"That hurts my feelings," she says, not shrilly or defensively, genuinely, and winningly.

She faux jokes "But I'll try to go on" and the audience laughs. It was a great way of dealing with a painful question.

She then says that Barack Obama is "very likeable" and he returns the compliment with "You're likeable enough, Hillary, you don't have to worry about that" and she waves her head from side to side a couple of times and says softly, over the laughter, "I appreciate it." 

You felt sympathy for Hillary Clinton there, you felt admiration for her in the way she handled it, with grace and humor and that cost Obama the New Hampshire, the con-wiz says!  His response was deemed to be dismissive (I don't know.) un-empathetic (It was that.); he tossed her a leaded life preserver. 

Back to Cruz for a moment. My ass is getting sore and my back is beginning to ache. George W. Bush told some moneyed Republican big-wigs, "I just don't like the guy," and I wrote here that I don't either. There is just something about Cruz, I don't know him well enough, meaning I haven't seen or heard enough of him, to put my finger on it, but neither did 43 put his finger on it and presumably he does know the guy. But Cruz is liked, he is loved, he has friends and family, as I do, who like and love him and maybe it's unfair, un-empathetic of me, to say I don't like somebody without being able to articulate why (But I don't.). However, to call Ted Cruz "nasty," "very nasty," to have DONALD TRUMP call you "nasty," that is also personal, as was Noonan's critique of Clinton, mean, and without the explanation that Noonan provides for her mean, brilliantly true characterization of Clinton. Trump demonizes people is the difference, he is really out to "kill" his opponents, not just defeat them. Trump is an asshole.

Okay, and to finish where we started:

Swatting a fly in an interview!

He is so totally unaffected. The coolest.

Great form on the J! 

The guy played a game of P-I-G, P-O-T-U-S, oh lol, against Clark Kellogg, a former college star and NBA player. You should have seen the shots Obama made! He was damn good! He won! And then had the authenticity to say on tape afterwards that Clark had deliberately missed a couple to let his president win, but Obama made all his own shots! I was frigging impressed.

T'ain't NEVER gonna have a POTUS like that again! He has more than frustrated me at times, hell, he has turned me off voting again, but he's the greatest. Love that guy. Really, really like him. Really, really gonna miss him.