An Idle Thought…

You must admit, Donald Trump brought out the best in us — from coast to coast, and overseas as well.

Author: Mike Maltz

Michael D. Maltz is Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice and of Information and Decision Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently an adjunct professor of sociology at the Ohio State University His formal training is in electrical engineering (BEE, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1959; MS & PhD Stanford University, 1961, 1963), and he spent seven years in that field. He then joined the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (now National Institute of Justice), where he became a criminologist of sorts. After three years with NIJ, he spent thirty years at the University of Illinois at Chicago, during which time he was a part-time Visiting Fellow at the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. Maltz is the author of Recidivism, coauthor of Mapping Crime in Its Community Setting, and coeditor of Envisioning Criminology.

7 thoughts on “An Idle Thought…”

  1. We might have done a better job cleaning up after ourselves. I'm seeing a lot of reports today about the trash left behind.

  2. That would actually be an admission to far for me at this point. I am enough of an optimist at heart to hope and imagine that in the long run good will come of this, but I am not ready to sign on to such a cheery sentiment just yet.

  3. Imagine how much good could be brought out of us if David Duke were to run for President! (and you forgot to include #hottake in your headline)

    1. I think we may have already begun exploiting it by pointing out how Trump's inauguration was not as well-attended as Obama's —with the implication, of course, that Trump isn't as well-liked as Obama. That spurred Trump to do some blatantly asinine things, and for his staff, especially Baghdad Sean and Baghdad Kellyanne, to do asinine things on his behalf, in an attempt to spin things in Trump's favor. The end result is that Trump comes across not only as a liar, but as petty to boot.

      1. I'd like to include in that "we" the mainstream press, which, I'm very happy to see, is actually calling him and his staff on clearly false claims. The real danger, I'm afraid, lies in the "working the ref" phenomenon, whereby the watchdogs/referees/reporters, having been (unfairly) blamed for making bad or unfair calls, bend over backwards to be overly generous.

  4. It was no doubt right for the initial protests to be unstructured and spontaneous. But for the future, they must gain more focus. Contrast the failure of Occupy Wall Street with the eventual success of the civil rights movement. "I have a dream", and King was not lying when he said that. He also had a strategy. Trump's is to distract the opposition by a blizzard of outrages, in which the important (the Reagan rule on abortion funding) is lost in the trivial (the crowd size at the inauguration). Don't let him control the agenda.

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