MoDo: Nancy Pelosi Spanks the First Brat

[CatWoman]

Two men, sons of immigrants, rising to be the head of their own empires, powerful forces in their ethnic communities. Both dapper and mustachioed with commanding personalities. And both wielding a potent influence on the children who learned at their knees and followed them into the family businesses.

But here’s the difference: Big Tommy D’Alesandro Jr. taught little Nancy how to count. Fred Trump taught Donald, from the time he was a baby, that he didn’t have to count — or be accountable; Daddy’s money made him and buoyed him.

Fred, a dictatorial builder in Brooklyn and Queens from German stock, and Big Tommy, a charming Maryland congressman and mayor of Baltimore from Italian stock, are long gone. But their roles in shaping Donald and Nancy remain vivid, bleeding into our punishing, pressing national debate over immigration, a government shutdown and that inescapable and vexing Wall.

At this fraught moment when the pain of the shutdown is kicking in, President Trump and Speaker Pelosi offer very different visions — shaped by their parents — of what it means to be an American.

According to The Times’s blockbuster tax investigation, Fred lavished Donald with three trust funds and $10,000 Christmas checks. When Donald was 8, he was already a millionaire, thanks to his tax-scamming father. Fred Trump was hauled before a congressional panel investigating whether he had looted government money through fraud. (One congressman said the patriarch’s chicanery made him “nauseous.”)

By the time Donald was 27, he had fully absorbed Trump family values, a callous inversion of noblesse oblige: He and his father were getting sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent to blacks. As Woody Guthrie, who lived in a Fred Trump complex near Coney Island, wrote in a song, “I suppose/Old Man Trump knows/just how much/racial hate/he stirred up/in the bloodpot of human hearts.” Not quite the same as “This Land Is Your Land.”

Fred’s favorite parlor trick was calculating big numbers in his head. But when Howard Stern had Donald, Ivanka and Don Jr. on his show in 2006 and asked them a multiplication question, they were all stumped.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/12/opinion/sunday/dowd-nancy-pelosi-donald-trump.html?linked=facebook

[MyOwnPeace]

1. To show how times have changed............

"One congressman said the patriarch’s chicanery made him “nauseous.”

Now they'd get in line hoping to approve him for a Cabinet seat.

[mcar]

2. Finally, a Dowd column I can appreciate

No gratuitous slaps at a Clinton, no snide swipes at "Barry," no weird worship of RWNJ.

[CatWoman]

3. this is perhaps her best work

[NNadir]

7. Nothing she says or does in the realm...

...of "too little, too late," can make up for the fact that her career bad consisted of trivializing asinine and puerile rhetoric. Why this moron Maureen ever got more of a platform than her high school newspaper amazes me.

[mcar]

8. I agree

I don't know why she still commands prime real estate in the NYT.

[gulliver]

4. Outstanding column. MoDo has a muse.

[EffieBlack]

5. A few hundred more of these and she'll have made up for the reams of crap

she's written in the past.

[thinkingagain]

6. After reading this it got me wondering

What if part of Trumps agenda is revenge?
Revenge on American government for what they did to his dad & him.
"Fred Trump was hauled before a congressional panel investigating whether he had looted government money through fraud. (One congressman said the patriarch’s chicanery made him “nauseous.”)
& "He and his father were getting sued by the Justice Department"
Sure he wanted money etc from Putin but what better "revenge" could he get by creating chaos in America the part he is pissed off at those he felt responsible for making his dad and him look "bad"