The "Most" Corrupt President in History???

Written on another thread, where a writer challenges someone for suggesting that Trump is the "most corrupt" President in history ... to that challenge, I wrote the following:

Well, he may not be the "most" of anything ... but the word corruption certainly applies to this man of lies, deception and self-serving manipulation of everyone and everything around him.

A lot of people were willing to "give him a chance," but after a full year, with constant chaos, and what I see to be the unravelling of American foreign policy, not to mention the collapse of education under DeVos, and the collapse of most everything related to environment, climate and health, there aren't many chances left for this man to show us something good.

I don't know where Trump fits on some kind of scale, but in my eyes, with what little I know of our history, and what it means, I think, to be a leader, a President, Trump reflects something dark and insidious, something hollow and angry ... whether it be his business dealings or his family life, none of it seems to make any sense, and everyone around him is scrambling constantly to stay on their feet, and most seem to stumble, falling flat on their faces, where he wants them to be, believing that everyone else's fall will make him look great.

He's not a nice man - that's obvious to me. He's the first President since 1897, or something like that, to not have dog, and I know why: because a dog knows better than we sometimes what a man is like - he loves nothing or no one except his own image in the mirror and the money he seeks, never satisfied, but alway needing more.

Maybe I'm the blind one. Maybe he's wonderful and sweet and kind; maybe he's a world-class leader, a man of vision and compassion; maybe he's a terrific husband and father; maybe he's deeply spiritual and a man of faith, hope and love. Maybe he is, but I don't see it. Maybe I'm blind ... or maybe not!

Teacher Unions and Tenure

The way I see it - anti-union forces in this nation have been skilled at pointing our the flaws of the system. Are there flaws? Are there corrupt union officials and lousy teachers? Of course there are. But such is the human condition, and it's found universally.

Every day I open the business section of the Los Angeles Times, I read of component failures, bad designs, cheap materials, counterfeit parts, management glitches, fraud, corruption and cheating. I don't see folks lining up to do away with Big Business because of this. 

So we work hard to be sure systems work ... doing away with unions, or weakening them to the point of crippling them, and throwing teachers into a high-anxiety produce-or-perish environment will only worsen American education. But conservative voices have always painted unions as the all-time worst element standing in the way of prosperity. But it's simply not true. A case could be made, using the same logic, that Big Business is the worst element standing in the way of prosperity.

It all depends on what sources we trust for our point of view - and those sources might stretch back as far as our parents, our Sunday School, as well as the news-sources to which we listen and the books we read.