Before I twirl off in a swirl of indecision over how to enjoy my birthday, just a few items of note.
• First there was The Mooch going off the reservation with his unguarded and ill-advised telephone call to a reporter. Then yesterday it was Steve Bannon on the same trajectory with a call to Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect (“Steve Bannon, Unrepentant“).
Among other tidbits, this stood out for me in the context of the past week.
He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: “Ethno-nationalism—it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.”
“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.
From his lips to Trump’s ear.
• Did you catch this one on the PBS Newshour–“Robert E. Lee opposed Confederate monuments.”
“I think it wiser,” the retired military leader wrote about a proposed Gettysburg memorial in 1869, “…not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
Lee died in 1870, just five years after the Civil War ended, contributing to his rise as a romantic symbol of the “lost cause” for some white southerners.
But while he was alive, Lee stressed his belief that the country should move past the war. He swore allegiance to the Union and publicly decried southern separatism, whether militant or symbolic.
• Then there was this report from The Australian: “‘Mob links’ killed Trump’s casino bid”
Donald Trump’s plan to build and operate Sydney’s first casino was killed off in 1987 by the NSW government on the back of a high-level police report that warned against the now-US President’s bid because of his “mafia connections’’.
The secret report by the NSW Police Board into the suitability of tenderers for the inner-city Darling Harbour casino project cautioned that it would be “dangerous’’ to go ahead with Mr Trump’s joint venture with the Queensland-based Kern Corporation, headed by the late developer Barry Paul.
Documents show that the Unsworth Labor cabinet met in May 1987 to discuss the assessment of the four tenderers for the project, which also included a financial report that concluded Mr Trump’s consortium had overstated projected revenues from the casino.
At the time the Kern-Trump consortium was making its play, Mr Trump owned two casinos in Atlantic City — Trump Plaza and Trump’s Castle — and was about to open a third with the Trump Taj Mahal.
Mr Trump had been approached by the Kern Corporation — a then successful developer of shopping centres, with strong ties to superannuation funds — to front and operate the casino.
Cabinet minutes from May 4, 1987, contain a summary of the Police Board’s position and show they considered the Kern/Trump bid to be unacceptable. “Atlantic City would be a dubious model for Sydney and in our judgment, the Trump mafia connections should exclude the Kern/Trump consortium,” the report concluded.
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Should have excluded Trump from being a presidential candidate.
President Lincoln offered Robert E. Lee full authority early on in the war but Lee chose his home state and sided with the Army of Northern Virginia. Any history buffs out there? We, who read here, know the cause of the war was slavery but many still buy into state’s rights and southern sectionalism. This does not mean we should ignore our history. The North let General Lee off the hook and Lee’s son stated he never heard his father say anything negative about another human. We, today must try harder.