December 2, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you imagine a good president, one of the greats, a good president, what is decorum for them? What should be their behaviour?
Rick Rosner: All right. You’ve asked… there’s an assumption in there that there’s ever been a good president. If you really look at the presidents one by one, even the best presidents, they had huge fucking flaws.
Washington owned a shitload of slaves. Didn’t none of the early presidents do anything to fix the slavery situation? Lincoln, while one of our emotionally deepest presidents, presided over the greatest slaughter of Americans in history.
I don’t think anybody wouldn’t argue that he had no choice. But still, he was president while 650,000 Americans were killed in the war. FDR, he got us out of the Depression kinda because what really got us out of the depression was World War Two.
He ignored that the Jews were being slaughtered in Germany. I mean even the best presidents are shitty in a lot of ways. Obama has been our most decorous president, perhaps in my lifetime, but that’s wasn’t necessarily the best thing for him to be.
He should have been more feisty and combative because he got played for years by the Republicans. He kept wanting to make deals with them and work with them, and they just wanted to fuck him up whenever they could.
So, he didn’t get as much done as a more angry, confrontational president would have. He let us just slide straight into Trump. He didn’t announce that Trump was being investigated for the Russians who were all over the election of helping Trump.
He didn’t announce this. If Obama did turn it into a partisan issue, and Obama didn’t because everybody thought that Hillary would get elected… anyway, what was the question? What makes a good president?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Obama is known for his empathy. I think that’s probably the biggest element of decorum. Once you get to a basic level of just non-animal behavior like Trump, occasionally, less so as President, in his past, he had Elvis moments where somebody would come to him with a charitable request.
Trump would occasionally say, “Okay, somebody whose plight would strike my fancy.” But that doesn’t really add to any greatness to him as president, because he’s an asshole 24/7, regardless of the occasional acts of mercy.
He pardoned some deserving people at the behest of Kanye and Kim Kardashian. But that small gesture does nothing to clean him up as president. So, you need to start with a basic decency. And then beyond that, you achieve greatness in emotional areas by actually and clearly feeling empathy for people.
There are all sorts of instances of Obama convincingly demonstrating sympathy and empathy. You get that same feeling from Lincoln that he was really suffering along with the country. You get the idea, JFK from certain photos, and I don’t know what else, but you get the idea that JFK really, really took the presidency to heart, that he really agonized over the responsibilities of president.
Now, at the same time, he had a fuck room in the basement of the White House for banging people he wasn’t married to. Also, he was all jacked up on drugs because he was super sick. So, he was on this. For a while, he was on speed.
He was getting injected with by this doctor nicknamed Dr. Feelgood, who is, basically, just shooting people full of speed. B vitamins, but the B vitamins didn’t make you feel good. That’s what he told you made you feel good, but it was really the fucking meth.
But really the ability to demonstrate empathy, sympathy, kindness is what it takes, Jimmy Carter was a very unpopular president and is still loved by a lot of hyper conservatives, but is also beloved and is pretty much regarded as the president who’s had the greatest ever post-presidency.
Because he’s just behaved with decency and charity. He was a fairly young man when he left the presidency. So, he’s like 93 or 94 now. So, that means he was born in 1926 and he left the presidency in 1980. So, he was around 54 years old.
For 40 years, for one thing, most presidents don’t live 40 years after they leave office, but he’s lived for 40 years and he spent that those 40 years being just an example of a charitable decent, Sunday school teacher, the builder of homes for humanity.
Even he’s there, all these pictures of him, like beat to shit by the bike, by being a carpenter, at fucking 94 years old, being a construction worker isn’t for somebody in his 90s. He’ll give himself a bullet. He’ll get hit with something he’s working with and will give him a massive black eye. He doesn’t give a fuck. He just keeps working. That makes him saintly. So, there you go.
Bush too, you have to think back, remember what an asshole he was, a disaster he was as president because he’s just kept very quiet in the 12 years since he’s been president. He’s painted cute pup paint. He paints doggies.
So, not being an asshole goes a long way. Most presidents are rehabilitated in the public’s mind as they forget what pissed them off about them as president. That’s happened probably with every single president.
I’m hoping it won’t happen with Trump because he’ll just keep reminding everybody what a fucking asshole he is. I mean, eventually, he’ll die and then people may forget. I mean, he did so much terrible stuff, but nobody can keep it all in their minds at once.
Some day, some historians will enumerate every single act of dickedness and every lie and every scam. He’s already at 25,000 public lies while being president. When everything is tallied, everything he did, it could amount to close to 50,000 acts of shittyness.
Jacobsen: So there you go. Wow.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal (ISSN 2369-6885). Jacobsen works for science and human rights, especially women’s and children’s rights. He considers the modern scientific and technological world the foundation for the provision of the basics of human life throughout the world and the advancement of human rights as the universal movement among peoples everywhere.
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
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- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 