Fates willing, on May 27th the iconic writer, Herman Wouk, will celebrate his 103rd birthday.
This morning, as I caught the latest day’s “news” about President Trump and stormy daniels, my thoughts turned to what may well be Mr. Wouk’s best-known work, The Caine Mutiny: specifically, the part where Captain Queeg (immortalized on film by the great Humphrey Bogart) exposed his derangement by triumphantly “proving” that too many stawberries had been eaten one night by the ship’s crew.
The point of this electric scene – which, I have to believe, Jack Nicholson drew on for his equally electric courtroom explosion in A Few Good Men – was to show how the enormous pressures of military engagement could take an otherwise good, competent man and twist him into something very different and very dark.
So here we are, months after the “story” broke that, 12 years ago, stormy daniels may have had a consensual (even she admits that) one-night stand with Donald Trump.
Other than maybe the “Extra” and “People” crowd, no one gives a damn about this. Try to find a voter who thought of the three-times married, twice-divorced President Trump as a faithful, one-woman husband; I dare you.
His apparent sexual excesses were fully known to us before the election took place (pussy tape, anyone?)….and he won anyway, in an electoral landslide.
But our mainstream media, preponderantly anti-Trump…with much of it outright hating the man…needs this story.
Why? Because, with the economy humming, stocks far higher than they were the day he took office, unemployment at record lows, our NATO partners jolted into paying up the funding they were behind in, NAFTA being reworked to our benefit, an unprecedented dialogue between South and North Korea which conceivably could end that conflict, and an increasingly farcical “investigation” which has produced absolutely no evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, media has to latch on to something.
So, just as Captain Queeg tried to dismiss all his mistakes and deficiencies by obsessing on a few strawberries, media are trying to dismiss all of President Trump’s accomplishments by obsessing on the stormy daniels story.
Well, here’s the news, guys: as noted above, other than gossip fans, nobody cares about stormy daniels.
What they care about is an excellent economy and a significant upgrade in our position on the world scene – which Mr. Trump seems pretty clearly to be providing.
Maybe that is why, as this silly stormy spectacle continues, Mr. Trump’s approval ratings are going up instead of down.
Let me finish by again wishing the great Herman Wouk – who also wrote such classics as Marjorie Morningstar, The Winds of War, and War And Remembrance (among many others) – not to mention Sailor and Fiddler – Reflections of A 100-Year-Old Author just two years ago – an early, heartfelt, happy 103rd birthday.
Please keep writing, sir.
