PUT THIS FLATULENT FRAUD IN JAIL

 

Been There, Don That

 

PATHETIC ASSHOLE

 

HOWARD TULLMAN AND LISA DENT TALK ABOUT THE "NEW" WORKFORCE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE 

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

HERE WE GO AGAIN

 

The Big Liar and His Losing Little Liars

 

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The Big Liar and His Losing Little Liars

Nov. 15, 2022

 

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

 

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

I got a little emotional voting this year.

First, I went to the wrong neighborhood school, where a poll worker carefully searched for my name and then explained that I was registered at the Bethesda elementary school down the road. When I got there, a team of volunteers — my neighbors, from eager twentysomethings to gray-haired retirees — patiently explained how to mark the paper ballot. When my cellphone suddenly rang, they practically strangled me: “Shut that off!!!”

This was the best of America — these people, this process, carried out with integrity and solemnity. What a privilege to be able to vote this way.

And what an absurdity that it was these very same people and this very same process that Donald Trump spent the past two years smearing and undermining, managing to bring a majority of his party along with him in his giant, fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

But wait — where was Trump last week?

Did you hear allegations by him or his lackeys that these midterm elections were stolen from his handpicked candidates? Other than some baseless claims by Trump here and there, including that the failed Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake (a clownish Trump impersonator) was being cheated, there wasn’t much. Trump instead spent most of his energy denigrating some of his anointed candidates and blaming his wife and others for persuading him to endorse the bizarre collection of election-denying sycophants who became Team Trump in this election and lost almost every big race.

The fact that Trump is not today mounting lawsuits on all their behalf to prove election fraud speaks volumes. It’s Trump basically telling them all:

“Sorry, this lie about stolen elections only pertains to me. There is only room for one martyr in this party. You don’t get to use my lie in your state elections. I only backed unprincipled, ambitious people — like you, J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano and Adam Laxalt — to amplify my lie in order to prove I’m not a loser. I can never be seen as a loser. If you’re losers, it’s your fault.”

That also explains why most of the election deniers who lost, like Oz, simply conceded and did not claim fraud. Why not raise a ruckus, Mehmet? Hey, J.D., why aren’t you alleging that your Republican colleagues lost because their elections were “rigged,” the way you did for Trump? What about you, Doug? What was it you said on Sunday when you conceded losing the governor’s race in Pennsylvania: “Difficult to accept as the results are, there is no right course but to concede, which I do.”

What? Why is that the right course today, but it wasn’t the right course for Trump two years ago?

Because none of you ever believed Trump’s lie to begin with, so you never dared deploy it in your own elections!

You were just renting Trump’s lie on the belief that it was your golden ticket, your easy shortcut, to victory. You thought you could echo Trump’s lie, get elected with the votes of his supporters and then just drop it. Now that most of you have failed to get elected on election denialism, you want us to forget how you shamefully tried to exploit that lie to gain power, while you slink away.

No, no, a thousand times no.

We must never, ever forget the damage that Donald Trump and his cynical imitators, cult followers and media amplifiers did to the reputation of our democracy, the reverence for its institutions and the unity of our society by perpetrating this Big Lie. Alone it was a shameful travesty — but to do it in the midst of a hugely stressful pandemic, when we needed more than ever to trust one another, look out for one another and work with our government to stem Covid, was criminal.

I don’t think we fully understand the damage this has done to our social fabric and political system. It tore apart families at Thanksgiving dinners. It sundered longstanding friendships. It divided neighborhoods, City Councils, state assemblies, PTAs, boardrooms and newsrooms. And it distracted our whole country from the work of nation-building at home, making it next to impossible to do anything big and hard together.

It not only sullied our nation’s reputation as a democracy but also motivated a mob on Jan. 6 to storm our nation’s Capitol — with the expressed aim of overturning the election. Five Capitol or Metropolitan Police officers died in connection with that attack. Many of the rioters made clear afterward that they were motivated by that Big Lie. The extremist who attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in their home was marinated in election conspiracies.

It also empowered autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping and phony democrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orban to strut around boasting that their own people will never have to worry about the “chaos” that democracy and voting bring.

Big Liar Trump, and all the little liars who surfed his scam for fun and profit — particularly Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and virtually the whole Fox crew — have done incalculable damage to our country. Shame on every one of you.

And Trump now has the gall, the rancid shamelessness, to plan to stand amid this bonfire of lies, hate and broken relationships that he ignited and declare that he’s running for president again?

And now the Murdoch crew, after indulging this fraud for two years, has the gall to say, “Well, maybe we should move on to Ron DeSantis” — without any accounting for what they enabled? No, sorry. History will not be kind to you.

As David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, put it on CNN.com about the abandonment of Trump by some Republican politicians now that he’s become a loser: Watching their “exodus from his camp, led by Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing media empire, has been something to behold. For them, trespasses against democracy and decency may be tolerated, but losing cannot.”

It’s why, for the first time in a long time, I now feel some hope for the American political system again. Since Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the G.O.P. establishment has tried to have it both ways: harvest the votes from Trump’s base and avert their eyes from his shameful behaviors, even his denigration of our electoral system. Trump could never go too low for them because they were addicted to the votes of his base.

Well, a majority of Americans just established a floor. Or as Nick Corasaniti of The Times reported: “Every election denier who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls this year, as voters roundly rejected extreme partisans who promised to restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process.”

Sure, most of Trump’s cult followers still embrace his lie, because openly abandoning it in front of family, friends or co-workers is just too embarrassing. But the G.O.P. establishment is going to have to choose — keep losing with Trump or vote him off the island for DeSantis. Welcome to “Survivor: Florida.”

The best part is that this reckoning was delivered not by the G.O.P. leadership — they are cowards — but by the most important and quietly courageous people in this election.

It was delivered by everyday Americans: principled Republicans and Democrats and independents, young and old, voting against the Big Lie and its perpetrators in their local voting stations, just like mine, and our principled neighbors and fellow citizens who counted the votes carefully, fairly and honestly, just the way they always did — including in 2020.

NEW INC. Magazine Column by Howard Tullman

 

You Need to Rewire the COVID Kids

The youngsters now showing up in your office have a wildly different understanding of what being an employee means. This is going to take some work. 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

The early returns are in and they're not encouraging.  I'm not talking about the midterm elections, which so far have had some pretty encouraging results as the country overall seems to have largely regained its senses. There's no longer any upside to talking about politics in the office or anywhere else where relatively civilized, two-sided, and factual discussions used to take place. Those days are long gone and the swift and informal flow of important information within our organizations -- critical to building an effective, inclusive, and collaborative culture -- will suffer immeasurably from its loss.

Once water cooler chats turn into confrontations and outright warfare among your people, it's time to tell them to take those conversations elsewhere. But, having banished the bluster and boosterism, it's hard to see how we will fill the crucial communication gaps that will remain.

While we're worrying about that void, a more pressing concern is handling the "return" to the office of those brand-new team members, who are joining your company in person for the first time. I call them "team members" as opposed to "workers," not to be politically correct, but to suggest that we're already seeing some serious issues with the attitudes, aptitudes, and work ethic of the incoming wave of newbies. One clear concern is that their view of work may no longer have the same priority and primacy to them as it does to us old-timers and traditionalists. Some combination of college and Covid-19 has sorely skewed their vision of work/life balance in a different direction. And not in a way that's particularly helpful.

Let's just say that there's more than a little confusion in their minds about why we call it "work" in the first place rather than something pithier like "fun", "self-actualization," or "communal therapy." Whether they're fresh out of college, where they've been fed a steady diet of fiction, fantasy, and wishful thinking, or they're freed from two years of home captivity with their noses next to a screen offering cheap stimulation for 16 hours a day, the traditional messages about what it takes to build and sustain a successful business and about each person's essential contributions to that effort have somehow been largely lost in transition. Whatever good you can say about Zoom, there's no way you can build a company culture remotely.

Time-honored virtues and historical values such as focus, hunkering down, nose to the grindstone, perseverance, learning before earning, taking direction, accepting rather than deflecting constructive criticism, and simply following orders rather than debating them all seem to be somewhat foreign concepts. Far too many of these newbies are just too smart for their own good.

Some of this is just another residue of the prime directives of the sleazy Trump years: hard work is for suckers; paying dues and taxes is for the little people; bogus bone spurs are far better than serving your country. And, of course, fake it 'til you make it and lie about it if you don't. The reigning philosophy for too many of these kids seems to be that the game and the goal is to learn the "tricks" of the trade - the shortcuts and the cheats - rather than committing to putting in the effort required to actually learn the business. It's all about Survivor sneakiness or Big Brother backstabbing and the amoral attitudes that were the very heart of the Apprentice, where so much of the unfortunate awfulness began to take hold. While the substantial youthful voting activity in the midterms suggests that no one under a certain age wants to deal with the Donald any longer, it's going to take a while to drain all the poison from their systems.  

It still seems that their default posture, again courtesy of the Orange Monster, is victimization when things don't work out. The poor dears feel so taken advantage of and under-appreciated. They're blame shifters par excellence and especially adept at offering explanations, excuses, and arguments as to why nothing is ever their fault or responsibility. It's a movie we've seen and lived with for years - the girl who can't dance says the band can't play.

Now's the time - before the numbers and the problems scale - to start figuring out how your managers are going to deal with some of these new employment realities. I don't think, as business owners and operators, that we've ever faced such a flood of unprepared, uninterested, and unwilling young men and women who are also frightfully entitled, skilled in shifting accountability, and firmly resolute in the belief that they are doing their employers a big favor just by showing up for work -- whenever they choose.

It's not entirely their fault that the pandemic basically screwed most of the recent college grads out of two years of serious education but still moved them along on time with fewer academic tools, more modest social and networking skills, and basically high school levels of maturity. But now we're stuck with making them into productive employees and remediating their deficiencies. When people talk these days about a gap year, they're not referring to a period of time off and travel, they're whining about the year it's gonna take to get their newest employees up to speed on some embarrassingly basic skills.

And the newbies' cockeyed beliefs are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the underlying problems. They're not gonna be remotely pleased to hear that they're lacking in anything or that, before they can jump right into the pits, they're going to need some additional basic training and they're going to have to spend some time watching the grown-ups from the sidelines. Remember that these are the "trophies for everyone" kids who were told by their teachers and parents that they could do anything and everything they set their minds to. All that BS and strident positivity is now coming home to roost.

You need to tell your team to be on the lookout for all of the following waffle words and behaviors:  

A world of "why?" Everything's up for discussion and debate. Maybe we should take a vote. If your people aren't ready to defend and justify their directions, they're in for a rude awakening.

 A world of "who says?" Authority, hierarchy, and directions are things of the past. Everything, in a post-truth world, is just a matter of opinion and everyone's opinion matters.

 A world of "good enough!" Attention to detail, proofing your work product, dotting the i's and crossing the t's are all old school ideas and old-fashioned nit picking. Just enough is good enough.

 A world of "what's next?"  Everyone's in a hurry to get things done so they can get on to whatever's next. Meetings need to be a matter of minutes, or you'll lose your audience. Patience, pride of craft, and perseverance are no longer valued in a world of onward and elsewhere.   

A world of "whatever!" They're surprisingly thin and thick-skinned at the same time. Easy to trigger or offend, but hard to really reach because they've mastered the "whatever" defense. Nothing matters so much that they should pay attention, change their approach, or adjust their attitude.

A world of "gotta go!"  They're gone at the stroke of five and they're happy to leave their troubles, tasks, and team members at the office door until tomorrow. There's a world out there of better and more important places to be and that's where they're headed.

Bottom line: We're all headed into some extremely challenging times because the "new" normal and the new workforce aren't like anything we've seen before. We may not see future decades, but they will and it's our job to help them make something important and valuable out of it in spite of themselves.

NEVER NEVER EVER AGAIN

 

MOTHER KNOWS BEST