David McElroy

Donald Trump is so shamelessly corrupt that he’s not even trying to hide the corruption anymore. And his adoring followers worship him so much that they accept whatever outrage he pretends is normal.

Trump is evil and corrupt, but those followers who enable this evil and corruption are downright obscene. You know who you are.

No U.S. president has ever been brazen enough to openly accept a bribe worth nearly half a billion dollars, but that’s what Trump is doing. And he’s even bragging that the bribe is coming at no cost to taxpayers. What a deal, huh?

Trump announced Sunday night that shady Middle Eastern oil billionaires are giving him his very own Boeing 747. Isn’t that kind of them? They must be really kind-hearted to hand out luxury jetliners without expecting anything in return. And that’s what Trump and his kleptocrats expect you to believe. Are you that stupid?

Here’s the scam. The government of Qatar — a tiny old kingdom run by corrupt oil billionaires — is going to give this luxury airliners to the U.S. government for Trump to use as Air Force One. At the end of his term, this fancy plane will be transferred to the foundation for Trump’s future presidential library — so Trump will continue to have exclusive use of it.

Seriously. That’s the deal. And if you think they expect nothing for this, you’re an idiot.

Keep Reading

For most of my life, I had generally avoided novels written before I was born. They were stodgy. The language was outdated. They were boring. Even if they were significant in the historical sense, I saw them as the literary equivalent of reading the King James Version of the Bible.

I was wrong, of course, but I didn’t realize that until the last decade or so. I first started reading English translations of some Russian classics. I came to love Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” among others.

Then a friend introduced me to German novelist Hermann Hesse. To one extent or another, I found that I loved “Steppenwolf,” “Siddhartha,” “Narcissus and Goldmund” and “The Glass Bead Game.” I’ve read “Narcissus and Goldmund” four times so far — and I keep finding new things to appreciate about it.

But I was slow to appreciate the English writer Charles Dickens — and I’ve come to understand that this has meant depriving myself of a kind of literary joy that I haven’t experienced for a long time. I just finished the Dickens novel, “David Copperfield,” a few hours ago — and I’d like to suggest that this book is better than almost any fiction that’s been written since I was born.

I’m left feeling serious regret that I’ve had such a huge hole in my education about literature and human existence.

Keep Reading