Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
The words communicated what fair minded representatives wanted to say, what fair minded voters needed to hear.
But Pelosi and Schumer looked like they had been pushed together into an invisible locker. It was awful.
Then I saw the polls.
Continue reading “Tag Teams: Pelosi and Schumer vs Trump and the Oval Office”
An old joke and an ancient legend might give a Senator or two guidance in doing the right thing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, and the Republic itself.
Continue reading “Kavanaugh, a Sober President, and Republican Clean Hands”
It is a fictional lament from four decades ago. When our national leadership sees only winning and losing sides, we all lose.
This is not the first time a President decided to use the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents.
This is just the first time a President is proud enough to boast about it in public.
My President and his lawyer thought they could buy all the dirt their friend had on Mr. Trump. But J. Edgar Hoover had taught later generations how to play the game for fun, profit, and power.
They never had a chance.
Continue reading “Hoover, Pecker, and Trump – the Wheel Turns, the Game is the Same”
If Donald Trump decapitated every horse that ever won a race, he still could not intimidate intelligence officials.
He is no Dick Cheney.
Continue reading “National Security and the Head of a Racehorse”
It was the worst disaster of its kind ever. It was accompanied by horrific photographs of the aftermath. Photographs in newspapers were still a bit of a novelty in 1912.
The loss of life affected even our language. More than a century later, we still occasionally talk of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, inhibited only by excessive familiarity: the phrase has become trite because we all know it.
The tragedy is iconic in another sense. It has become an archetype of class division: lifeboat passengers who complained about having to submit to the instructions of a crew member who looked Asian, navigators of those lifeboats who were offered bribes to ignore the cries of those still in the icy water, immigrants who were caged by iron bars in steerage until upper class passengers could be safely sent off.
A recurring theme remains the disgust of the wealthy British about those iron gates confining lower class passengers. The indignation was said to have come, not because the access to lifeboats was blocked, but because access had to be blocked. Simple morality ought to have been enough to hold back third class passengers until their betters were evacuated.
Of course, we now wonder at such values. People of means considered the lives of the lower classes to be of little value. Their reactions went from bemusement, as they discovered that those lower class people did not agree, to outrage as those same lower class people could not be relied upon to obey simple rules of class order as rising waters engulfed them and their children. Amazing.
The existence of shipboard rules, the obedience of staff to those rules, may have imposed a degree of order in a chaotic situation. Forcing everyone into line, enforcing limits on the number allowed into lifeboats, may have made possible the rescue of additional survivors.
Today, we do not find it hard to defend those lower class passengers. Even if rules are a necessary part of orderly life, humans are under no moral obligation to respect rules that they had no part in creating, rules that put their lives at risk.
Unless, of course, those rules apply to immigrants.
Continue reading “Don’t Compare Us to Nazis”
Donald Trump is a forgetful guy. I can relate.
I’m always leaving my glasses in odd places. I have to think a little harder to remember names I’ve known pretty much forever.
My President is in his 70s now, and I’m close behind. The old joke is that when memory fades, we can save money on books. We can read the same mysteries over again and still be surprised by the ending.
In my case, lets update that to include videos from old television shows. I’ve been watching some programs from The West Wing. Remember that?
In one episode, a shooting nearly takes away some favorite characters. We watch scenes from their past as we wait to see whether they will survive. One character is an important advisor to the President: Toby Ziegler. We’re taken back to his experience as a minor political operative. He describes his success rate to a young lady he meets in a bar. She asks how many campaigns he has won.
Including city council, two Congressional races, a Senate race, a Gubernatorial campaign, and a national campaign…
He has to think for a moment.
…None.
None of them?
You gotta be impressed with my consistency.
He is questioned by an angry campaign official who is about to get him fired.
Do you enjoy losing?
Not that much, no. But then I haven’t had much to compare it to so…
He’s about to be fired because he gave the candidate, the candidate who would later become the President, a piece of simple advice. He is not fired after all, and that disastrous advice turns out to be an important reason the candidate goes on to win.
Toby’s perfect record of losing is broken.
I can’t say I learned much from that show, except there can be hope. I did hear a formula that I learned as a kid. When I have followed it, the most important memory issues have lessened, and sometimes even disappeared. I recommend it to my President now.
Continue reading “A Memory Trick for My President That Will Solve the Perjury Trap”
More than 40 years later, it still makes me kind of sick to think about it.
I didn’t know that much about Marvin Mandel when I campaigned for him in 1970. I just knew enough. His kind of political figure was the answer to the Nixons and Agnews and Mahoneys dominating the political landscape in those days.
George Mahoney was the last rancid blast from Strom Thurmond days. He was a Dixiecrat who made it possible for Spiro Agnew to get into office. He ran for Governor of Maryland in 1970 and got the Democratic nomination by running against Fair Housing laws. His slogan was simple.
Your home is your castle – Protect it.
It wasn’t hard to hear from what menace white folks needed protect their homes. It was black people who might want to buy a house.
In 1966, Mahoney became the Democratic nominee with 30 percent of the vote. Seventy percent voted against him in the Democratic primary, but that vote was divided, broken up among other candidates. He won the primary by one third of one percent. Non-bigots in Maryland voted Republican that year and Spiro Agnew became governor.
Yeah, Spiro Agnew was Maryland’s anti-bigot in 1966.
A year and a half later, when Martin Luther King was killed, Governor Agnew was furious about the riots that tore through Baltimore. Black leaders had walked through the streets all night long, confronting angry teenagers, trying to calm things down. When Governor Agnew called them to a meeting, many were still wearing clothes stained by soot and sweat from their all night efforts. Governor Agnew called them cowards.
And you ran.
He told them that they themselves were the cause of rioting, that they had cowered in fear.
You were beguiled by the rationalizations of unity; you were intimidated by veiled threats; you were stung by insinuations that you were Mr.- Charlie’s boy, by epithets like “Uncle Tom.”
Richard Nixon read about the tough talk and was impressed. Agnew had really told off those black leaders. So Governor Agnew became Vice President Agnew. Later on, convicted criminal Agnew.
Maryland had no Lieutenant Governor to take the place of ex-Governor Agnew. The legislature selected Democratic leader Marvin Mandel to be a sort of caretaker until a real Governor could be chosen in the next election.
But Mandel was no caretaker. He got into the nuts and bolts of government. He streamlined the way departments were organized. Efficiency was the word of the day. He got Maryland’s first Metro-rail system going. Pollution went down as commuters could leave their cars at home. Employment went up as hard working city residents found it practical to get to jobs outside their limited areas.
But most interesting to me, he stood up to all kinds of pressure for the sake of a medical theory. A close friend had almost died in an automobile accident. He should have died, but he didn’t. Mandel wondered if the fortunate fact that the accident had occurred very close to a hospital had something to do with his friend’s good luck. And that’s how Mandel came into contact with an American medical officer who had served in France just after World War II.
Continue reading “My Hero the Thief, and the Role Model for My President”
In the movie The Counselor, a lawyer sees an opportunity for quick money. But things go awry. A man is dead, a shipment is missing, and he finds himself accused by dangerous people.
His friend is not optimistic about his chances.
I am perfectly willing to believe you had nothing to do with this but I am not the party you need to convince.
The friend, played by Brad Pitt, offers little help.
They’re a pragmatic lot. They don’t believe in coincidences.
They’ve heard of them. They’ve just never seen one.
Most of us are not quite that skeptical – or that dangerous. We often find coincidence believable.
The national election of 2016 is just one example. We start with a series of facts that would require a series of connections much harder to believe than simple coincidence. Hillary Clinton stumbles in the heat of New York City while cameras roll. Paid speeches to Wall Street banks come back to haunt her. Her technical clumsiness with emails get amplified way beyond its actual significance. Key people, one a valued friend, are lost to killers in Benghazi. Votes are distributed in just the right way in a mishmash electoral system originally installed to preserve slavery.
Coincidence.
Add to that other coincidences: A frightened FBI director, scared down to his socks by the possibility that Republicans will see him as unfair, decides to act unfairly in order to look fair to conservatives. He administers a rhetorical beating while announcing that nothing legally wrong has been found. And, of course, the Wikileaks campaign using stolen, and occasionally edited, electronic documents.
All coincidence.
I do have to confess that other against-the-odds events form an accidental pattern that is hard to ignore.
Continue reading “Coincidence and ZTE”