Give Him Enough Rope...

Good Tuesday to you, Friends,

There are really very few advantages to getting older. Aside from the 'senior discount' you get just about everywhere you go, there's only one other benefit that comes to my slowing mind...perspective.

I sure didn't appreciate much of the advice that my elders tried to pass down to me when I was a young buck, and I don't expect that anyone who hasn't lived on this crazy planet very long would take any pearls of wisdom from the likes of me.

But I am going to make an observation from having lived on Earth into my seventh decade.

I see a horrible scoundrel sucking in a major political party, who's waging the ugliest personal attack on his opponents and is bringing out the worst in this country.

I've witnessed this play out before in other areas of my life. Interestingly, these scenarios invariably ended according to the old saying, "Give him enough rope, and he'll hang himself."

Hello Donald Trump. I have your name
on me. You know you can't control yourself.
Hello Donald Trump. I'm calling youuuuu!

The first time I witnessed this firsthand was as a young TV reporter at WECT-TV in Wilmington, NC. Any of my colleagues who are still around will remember it well.

The station GM, who's now deceased, and who I won't name, was a vindictive misogynistic megalomaniac who sexually harassed several of the women working at the station.

At that time, women in the workplace dared not complain. My girlfriend was one of them.

To make a long story short, this tyrant let his unchecked power take him one step too far, and he was very publicly fired. YES!!!

This happened again at American Airlines in the early 90's when a little Hitler of a boss named Phil J. was resoundingly canned for cheating on his expense account.

And this is stranger than fiction; it happened the day after he'd flown all of his managers to Dallas to scream, cuss and threaten all of us innocents not to do that exact thing!

Now you'd have to have lived a little to have experiences like this, so getting to be a crusty old curmudgeon (which thank goodness I haven't quite reached) has at least some upside.

But the reason I bring this up is because I'm having 'deja vu all over again' with Donald Trump.

He's absolutely crossing the line with his latest round of ugly personal attacks on the Clintons, and he's going to hang himself.

Trump may be impervious to any criticism coming from the outside, but he's his own worst enemy.

Sometimes it takes a little time, and there can be a lot of collateral damage. But even the worst monster in human history wound up shooting himself in the head.