TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

I have been thinking about Christmas this week.

Actually, I have been thinking about Christmas Eve, which is today. And which, it seems to me, captures more of the essence of Christmas than even the day itself.

Christmas is about anticipation. About what will happen, not what has occurred. It's about the future, whether that future is mere hours in the offing or a millenia away. And it unites, in perhaps a way that no other holiday can or does, the pedestrian with the profound. In fact, it makes the pedestrian profound.

Kids will go crazy tonight. Most won't be able to sleep. Those not afraid of some cosmic retribution will sneak a peak out the window or down the stairs in search of Santa Claus. Others will become inveterate Holmes-es (Sherlock, that is), carefully processing every errant sound from a squeaky baseboard to determine if he has come down the chimney, with care or otherwise, along with a satchel of goodies. A few years ago, a friend told me his son had come into his bedroom in the middle of the night, swearing to his father that "Rudolph was in the driveway."

Two thousand years ago, it was all about anticipation too. We have encrusted that day with layers of theological speculation, so much so that we are now almost in need of theo-archaeologists to carefully remove the layers without destroying the initial insight. It was, after all, about the future, about hope -- cosmic and otherwise. Lots of us call it salvation, and tonight or tomorrow, when many of us cross the church threshold (some for our biennial visit, others for the second time this week), we will hear the ancient story of the incarnate One and be told it was the day we were saved.

Which has, of late, got me to wondering.

What for?

And the best answer I can come up with is . . .

Tomorrow.

And so that's what Christmas is about for me. Tomorrow. All the endless tomorrows. With their hopes and dreams and disappointments. Their risings and fallings. And tears and laughter. Even on the day I die, when tomorrow will be unpredictably exciting. In fact, especially then.

A friend recommended a book earlier this year by a theologian named John Haught. In it, Haught talked about the need to square Christian theology with the fact of evolution. One point he made is that theology should never compete with science, that the truths of the latter are not to be denied by the former, and vice versa. So the earth and all its inhabitants weren't created in six days, the universe (or multi-verse, we really do not know) is billions of years old, the human story represents hardly a nanosecond in this evolutionary time line, and the possibility of intelligent life in spheres beyond our third rock from the sun is hardly remote. The one thing certain is that, whoever and whatever we and our world are, it will not be the same tomorrow.

In fact, in the deep time of our evolutionary tomorrow, it's gonna be very different.

Which brings me back to Christmas. Or more precisely Christmas Eve. The one day when we think about nothing but tomorrow. And really look forward to it.

I am ready this year. All the presents are wrapped. The house is clean (I vacuum). Charles Darwin and Jesus Christ have become bosom buddies in my mind, the former telling me that nothing is forever as the world and its inhabitants constantly morph into newer forms, the latter teaching me that this in itself is a good thing and that somewhere over this evolutionary rainbow there is still a tomorrow that embraces us all.

And I have a shovel ready.

In case Rudolph leaves something in the driveway besides a missing sleigh bell.

Merry Christmas.

(This post was first published on Christmas Eve 2008.  A lot has changed since then. But not my view of Christmas.)

THANKSGIVING 2019 -- ENNUI AND AMDG

THANKSGIVING 2019 -- ENNUI AND AMDG

Let's face it.

It's a tough year for thank yous.

It's not that there aren't things . . .  or events . . . for which we should be grateful.  God has not taken a holiday and His ever inscrutable ways still leave us bounty and beauty in considerable measure.  One of my best friends, a Jesuit priest teaching at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, routinely posts photos on Facebook in his Ignatian search for God in the everyday.  

And he finds Her . . .

In the flowers, fauna, pristine snowfalls, gritty urban walls and antique gargoyles he happens upon in his jaunts through the New York (City and State) he has called home for seventy plus years and the New England his brother has called home for more than forty. At one point last year, I commented that he was the Gerard Manley Hopkins of photographers. "Nature is never spent," wrote Hopkins in God's Grandeur, and this 21st century Jesuit's photos prove what that 19th century Jesuit's poem recounted.

So, thank you God.

Now, could the rest of us step it up a bit.

As we approach the end of 2019, it strikes me as somewhat odd . . . or sad . . . or at least puzzling . . . that approximately 40% of my fellow citizens still approve of our President and do not want him removed.  There is no point in rehearsing the grounds for why he must go -- soliciting a bribe from Ukraine's president, obstructing Mueller's investigation, the thousands of lies, the recourse to the gutter whenever criticized.  "Facts are a stubborn thing," said John Adams.

But why do so many fail to see it?

I do not think it's ignorance. 

Either mine . . .

Or theirs.

As to the absence of mine, on the latest contretemps, there is no real dispute that Trump demanded political dirt on the Bidens and held up military and other assistance to the Ukraine in an effort to get it.  Anyone who watched those House Intelligence Committee hearings last week could not miss that reality.  Even his own guy -- the hotelier cum million dollar donor and (later) Ambassador to the EU-- was explicit: "I know that members of this committee frequently frame these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a 'quid pro quo'? . . . [T]he answer is yes."  

Sondland would not take a dive for Trump.  

And in refusing to do so, he merely confirmed what the half dozen erstwhile deep staters -- Taylor, Kent, Yovanovitch, Vindman, Hill and Holmes -- more than suspected.

Trump's errand boy -- Rudy Giuliani -- was hijacking foreign policy for his boss's (illegal) benefit.

This is impeachable.  It is a form of bribery, which the impeachment clause explicitly lists as a ground. It goes to the core problem for which the Founders fashioned impeachment as the remedy -- their fear that the country's chief executive might tie his interests to those of a foreign state and in so doing repudiate ours.  And even if it is not impeachable, it is seriously wrong and counts as yet another minus in Trump's extraordinarily long column of demerits.

So I am not wrong here.

But the 40% who still stand with Trump can't all be stupid, and the vast (and I mean vast) majority aren't.  Like me, they go to work, raise families, pay bills, maintain relationships, generally distinguish right from wrong, know that the earth revolves around the sun, will concede it is raining out if someone comes in with a dripping umbrella, and agree that 2 + 2 = 4.  

They're not inherently mean, nor do they confuse authenticity with dishonesty or vulgarity. 

And they aren't blind.

Which, perhaps, creates the greatest conundrum.  

Because, say what you will about Trump, he does not hide his malfeasance. 

So, what gives?

Why are 40% of my neighbors always giving Trump a pass?

I think it's ennui.

I get there mostly by process of elimination.  Having discounted ignorance, the next available candidates are the Fox network and self-interested politicians.  

According to surveys, about 2.8 million tune into Fox every day.  There are, however, 153 million registered voters.  As a matter of simple arithmetic, 40% of them are not watching Fox.  This doesn't mean Fox's bias has no influence.  It has a lot, just not enough to explain the views of 61.2 million people. And as for the politicians, the reality is that pols follow voters.  It's rarely the other way around. If the voters change, the politicians will change . . .

Or they'll lose.

Ennui is defined as weariness, dissatisfaction.  It manifests as boredom.  We all have experienced it.  If you've ever had a bad job (check) . . . or a bad marriage (check) . . . there comes a point in time when you are just tired of it all.  My ex-wife told a friend of hers that she knew our marriage was over when I stopped fighting.  No kidding.  And in that sad interregnum between the knowledge that things are bad and the energy to enact the solution that might be good . . . 

One gets weary.

According to polls, a sizable group of Trumpers only support him "somewhat." Those who "strongly approve" of him account for no more than 25% of the electorate, and in September a poll found that 69% actually dislike him personally.  With Trump, therefore, and in particular with his supporters, I suspect we are in that interregnum, somewhere between the bad and the not-by-any-means-inevitable possibilities of either removal by impeachment or removal by defeat. In other words, we are in a period of . . .

Ennui. 

Which can become permanent.

Just ask Camus. 

Life for my Jesuit friend in Syracuse is not all roses.  The city and region are economically depressed.  There's more than enough grounds for ennui.  

That, however, is not the Ignatian way, the Jesuit way.  

To the contrary, their encounter with weariness seems to spur them on.  

The Jesuit motto is AMDG.  It is an abbreviation for the Latin phrase "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam".  I translate that as "toward the greater glory of God". That's "toward", not "for".  It conveys that faith is active, not passive; that we have to work at it, not wait for it.

In Syracuse, the Jesuits have created Le Moyne College, the little engine that could.  Founded in 1946, it ranks second in New York and sixth nationally for value in its class, colleges with 2,500 to 10,000 students. Thirty per cent of its undergraduates are first-generation college students.  

It's president is Dr. Linda LeMura, a Syracuse native, child of immigrants, and first ever lay female president of any Jesuit educational institution in the western hemisphere.  Reflecting "what the Jesuits have refined in 500 years of scholarship and reflection," she explains that "my story, and the story of my family, is also the story of Le Moyne College.  Whether from humble origins or great wealth, immigrant or native born, we are united in our belief that education is an act of faith, an expression of confidence and calm in the face of the unknown."

"An act of faith, an expression of confidence and calm in the face of the unknown."

It sounds an awful lot like what was produced in 1776 and 1787 . . .

By the Founders.

They looked ennui in the eye . . .

And beat it.

So can we.  

Happy Thanksgiving!

MARATHON (WO)MAN

MARATHON (WO)MAN

I am not a runner.

In fact, it hurts.

Large parts of me, the whole of which is itself getting larger as I age, are located between my knees and stomach.

The result is that, while some are designed to run, I am not.

I have, however, a lot of admiration for runners.

And an especial admiration for those who complete marathons.

America today is in desperate shape.  We are being run by a mad man narcissist accurately described by insiders working for him as self-absorbed, uninformed, inattentive, incoherent and cruel.  He governs by whim if he governs at all. He abhors truth.  He will not or cannot read and routinely violates the law or tells others to do so. Says Anonymous, the senior insider who penned the famous 2018 op-ed "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" and has now written the about to be published "A Warning": "He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity."

How did this happen?

The answer is that 62 million Americans, strategically located, voted for him and 40% of the country still supports him.  The sexist pussy-grabbing and transparent racism?  Ignored.   The nod to so-called "fine people" among the Nazis in Charlottesville? Forgotten by those who heard it, fake news to those who saw it reported. The unconstitutional emoluments rolling in from foreigners? Elitist nonsense. Impeachment for trying to enlist Ukraine to get dirt on the Bidens? A coup. And the repeated, pathological lying? Actually believed.

And if not believed, then at least forgiven.

Trump world is not stupid.

The most ardent Trumpers think people like me think people like them are stupid.

But I don't.

I think they are angry.

All. The. Time.

The anger is on display most clearly at his rallies.  They routinely dissolve into vitriolic threats against opponents in general and any reporters covering the event in particular.  The anger is also on display in the hatred his supporters visit upon the government.  Even when the government is helping them. How else to explain the otherwise insanity of the "keep your government hands off my Medicare" types abhorring the very hand that created Medicare in the first place.  Or the banana-republic chants of "lock her up."

I may be wrong . . .

But I do not think there are many marathoners in Trump world.

Marathoners are individualists but not narcissists.  Narcissists expect recognition without achievement.  They exaggerate their talents. They fantasize about their success, their power, their brilliance, their beauty.  They lack empathy.

Marathoners are recognized after they achieve.  They do not exaggerate, they demonstrate.  They endure but do not insult.  If there is fantasized brilliance or beauty or power in them, it's impossible to find in the sweat stained pain you can observe close up on their faces at mile 20.

The work is hard.

And they do it.

All of it.

They do not delegate it or avoid it.

The 26.2 miles on the actual day is preceded by months of training, managed increments of longer distances.   By the time they run the actual marathon, they've pretty much  run a few in practice beforehand.

Sometimes you can spot them early in the morning.

Solitary figures training for the big day, pounding the pavement in search of . . .

What?

I think it's themselves.

Or their selfs, those inner beings that give us the courage to recognize our limits while trying to exceed them.

Which is exactly what our country needs now.

In the millions.

I have known a number of marathoners and have admired four of them.  One I married.  Two I raised.  The last is my soon-to-be daughter-in-law, who ran the New York City Marathon last week.

She grew up in Florida where she was raised and educated. When she graduated from college, she moved alone to Pittsburgh and thereafter, and again alone, to New York. She embraces difference and has no fear.  I thinks she got that from her parents and family.  And from her inner self.  The one on display last Sunday.  The one that ran to raise money for a children's charity.

She has three Dads, two of whom made the trip to New York to watch in awe as she ran last Sunday, the third cheering from Tampa; one Mom, who tracked her daughter mile by mile on Facebook;  a sister, who now thinks her sibling a "badass";  a brother-in-law, whose job qualifies him as one; a  nephew marathoner-in-waiting (if his speed crawling last summer was any indication); and  . . .

A very lucky boyfriend.

The boyfriend's Dad thinks she's pretty cool too.

WAY TO GO, DONNIE BOY

WAY TO GO, DONNIE BOY

The number of pejoratives that accurately describe Donald Trump has always been large.

Racist, sexist, narcissist, egotist.  Con-man, cheat, megalomaniac, bully. Unprepared, temperamental, lazy, rude.  Nasty, mean, foul-mouthed, conceited. And of course . . .

Pathologically dishonest.

One would think so large a list more or less exhausts the possibilities.

One, however, would be wrong. 

Because this past week we learned that Donald Trump is also . . .

Preternaturally stupid.

Until a week ago Monday, there were about a thousand American soldiers bivouacked in a portion of northern Syria then under Kurdish control.  The Kurds are an ethnic group spread over at least four countries -- Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.  They played a central role in freeing northern Syria  from ISIS, an al-Qaeda terrorist spin off and wannabe caliphate, losing 11,000 of their own troops in a five year war. 

Throughout that period, the United States led a coalition of thirty countries that supported first the Kurdish People's Protection Units (PPUs) and then the more heterogeneous Syrian Defense Force (SDF). At American insistence, 40% of the latter is comprised of indigenous non-Kurdish Arab fighters.  The coalition supplied SDF with training, special forces operations, artillery and spotting, and over 45,000 air strikes. 

As ISIS was defeated, SDF took over governance of the area.

The border of northern Syria is with Turkey and for years Turkey has viewed the PPU as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (KWP). For its part, as the The New York Times  has reported,  the KWP is considered a terrorist organization by both Turkey and the United States and "has waged a decades long insurgency inside Turkey." 

Turkey has long considered Kurdish control of the northern Syrian border to be a national security threat, albeit a somewhat inchoate one.  As the Turks saw it, the success of the PPU in Syria emboldened the KWP in Turkey . . .

 Even though the former never attacked it.

When intelligence resided in the White House, America squared this circle of conflict between its NATO ally (Turkey) and its only effective ISIS-fighting ally (the Kurds) with astute diplomacy. It forced the PPU to enlist non-Kurds and become the SDF, and it made the Kurds withdraw from the border.  Under these arrangements, there were no border incidents and no PPU sponsored incursions into Turkey. 

On October 6, Trump and Turkey's president, Recep Erdogan, spoke on the phone.

In that call, Erdogan asked Trump to withdraw American troops from the Turkish-Syrian border.

Trump agreed.  

None of this was planned in advance.  Nor was acceding to (or even discussing) withdrawal  part of the talking points given to Trump in advance of the call.  

The Pentagon opposed any withdrawal, as it has for months, and so did Congress (on a bi-partisan basis).  The fear in both was that withdrawal would give the Turks a green light to invade northern Syria, that millions of Kurds would either be killed or made homeless in the process, that ISIS prisoners held in northern Syria would escape and re-constitute, and that the Kurds would have nowhere to look for help other than Bashar al Assad and Vladimir Putin.  

The fear was also that America would thereafter be viewed as a dishonest broker and worthless ally.

All these fears have now come to pass.

On Wednesday, the Turks invaded northern Syria and by the weekend they controlled 75 square miles of previously held Kurdish territory.  Along the way, they executed Kurdish POWs and bombed civilians, creating 160,000  refugees.  

On Sunday, the Kurds cut a deal with Assad to allow Syrian government troops (backed by Russia) to return to the northern territory. These are the same government troops that last year, along with their Russian mercenaries, had stopped attacking the Kurds once American bombers let loose.  They are also the same government troops that petrify locals in northern Syria, many of whom opposed Assad. "If the regime returns," said one, it will be a "bloodbath".

As predicted, ISIS detainees are escaping.  The US reported that it could not transfer 60 "high-value" ISIS detainees out of the country before we left, and ISIS has already claimed responsibility for two attacks.  Meanwhile, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the pull out made ISIS's return "absolutely a given".

The Kurds themselves . . .

Now hate us. 

And with good reason.

An American Army officer who fought with the Kurds said "They trusted us and we broke that trust. It's a stain on the American conscience." Another said he was "ashamed."  A Kurdish official was more exact. "The worst thing in military logic and comrades in the tenches," he said, "is betrayal."

None of this was necessary. 

In the immediate aftermath, as Congress exploded with anger and even his usual political allies eviscerated him, Trump and his seconds careened from one idiotic excuse to another.  

On Wednesday,  the President justified abandoning  the Kurds by tweeting that they "didn't help" at Normandy.  On Sunday, his Treasury Secretary implied that Turkey was going to invade northern Syria regardless of our presence; if so, of course, there had been no need for Erdogan to ask Trump to step aside. 

On Monday, Trump went all 18th century on the issue, saying  "anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China or Napoleon Bonaparte.  I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away."

The Twin Towers were 7,000 miles away too.

But that didn't stop 9/11.

Earlier in the week, Trump justified the pull out as consistent with his campaign pledge to get us out of "endless wars".  This, however,  wasn't one of them.  It was the Kurds' war.  At minimal cost, and with enormous gain, we were just helping them out.

All that has now been lost.

In 2014, six years into his presidency,  an angry Barack Obama walked to the back of Air Force One and had it out with critics of his foreign policy.  They thought his policy disjointed, ineffective and a large come down from his soaring rhetoric about human rights and democratic possibilities.  He thought their criticism unfair.  In the wake of Bush II's Iraqui debacle, non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and the humbling of his own "red line" crossed without consequence, he told reporters that his foreign policy was simple . . .

"Don't do  stupid shit."

So that year, we allied with the Kurds, formed an international coalition, and began the process of eliminating ISIS and its self-proclaimed caliphate with locals doing the work on the ground as the coalition provided intelligence and air cover. 

By this year, that policy had succeeded.  

Last week, for no good reason, without any thought, and on the whim of a man who neither reads nor listens, that success was reversed.

Or . . .

To make it simple . . .

Trump just stepped in it.

WHO THE HELL WAS WILLIAM LOEB . . . AND WHY DOES HE MATTER TODAY

WHO THE HELL WAS WILLIAM LOEB . . .
AND WHY DOES HE MATTER TODAY

It was 1976, a Presidential year.

Indeed, it was the first Presidential year since Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation of the Presidency in 1974.

I was a sophomore at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

All the candidates -- Carter, Udall, Harris, Shriver, Church, Bayh, Sanford, Benson, Reagan and Ford -- traipsed through the snows of New Hampshire,  knockin' on doors and drinking coffee in more living rooms than they could count, each in search of votes in that state's  first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

All of them also had to deal with William Loeb.

And his front page editorials.

In 1976, William Loeb was the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader.  Unlike most newspaper publishers at that time, he told his readers what he thought above the fold and just below the front-page headlines, pretty much the sweet spot in any newspaper.  

He was also mean. 

In 1972, he published a forged letter claiming presidential candidate Edmund Muskie had referred to French-Canadians as "Canucks".  This was bad for Muskie, principally because  there were many French-Canadians in New Hampshire at that time.  It became worse for him, however, a little later, when falling snow created the appearance of tears on Muskie's face as he stood outside the  Leader's offices angrily denouncing Loeb as a liar.

Long story short, Muskie's campaign cratered as anger and tears were falsely turned into emotional instability.

Emotional instability was something we did not  tolerate in our Presidents back then.

In 1976, the Manchester Union Leader was the only statewide newspaper in New Hampshire.  In fact, given the mountains, which limited over the air radio and TV signals, and Boston's sense of itself, which limited its curiosity to Massachusetts, the Leader was pretty much the only statewide source of news at that time.

Loeb never apologized for the "Canuck" letter, not even after its genesis as part of Nixon's "dirty tricks" operation became known.  Instead, he continued to use the Leader to pursue his vendettas and libel his detractors.  

He once wrote that President Eisenhower, the architect of D-Day and victory in World War II,  had "done more to destroy the respect, honor and power of the United States than any President in his history." Later, in the '70s, he attacked the teenage daughter of a Governor for allegedly advocating the use of marijuana. The girl suffered a nervous breakdown.

Loeb also routinely lied about his past . 

He claimed to have been a reporter for eight years at the old New York World.  The paper's publisher denied the claim, and in any case the paper did not even exist during the years Loeb said he worked for it.  After his own mother disinherited him, Loeb sued her estate on her death for a 75% share, claiming they had reconciled,  and then settled for a small percentage of very little, his scorched earth litigation tactics having exhausted the estate (and, not coincidentally,  his siblings' shares).

Many of his journalistic ventures either died . . .

Or became exhibits to his transparent nastiness.

His Haverhill Journal went belly up in eight years, the Connecticut Sunday Herald in five (though incomplete records make its date of death uncertain). In 1949, he purchased a group of Vermont papers and founded the Vermont Sunday News.  That same year, he fired the printers of those papers when they tried to unionize.

Loeb was also a hypocrite.

Though married to three different women himself, he attacked Nelson Rockefeller during the  1964 Presidential primary.  Rockefeller had divorced his first wife in 1962 and married his second in 1963.  In 1964, however, he was running against Loeb's favorite conservative, Barry Goldwater . . .

So,  thrice married Loeb vilified twice married Rockefeller as a "wife swapper".

Even Loeb's patriotism was suspect.

He  avoided the draft in World War II on the ground of ulcers. But he reportedly helped his case by drinking a lot and causing the ulcers to flare up just before his medical examination. 

In 1975, Kevin Cash wrote a book entitled "Who the Hell is William Loeb".  In it, Cash recounted the lies, libels and licentiousness of his subject.  In response, Loeb threatened legal action in an effort  to stop Cash from publishing the book.  As a result, four New Hampshire publishers would not touch it and Cash himself had to set up his own publishing company to get the book printed.  The company was incorporated in Delaware (out of Loeb's reach) and the book was printed in Vermont.

Loeb died in 1981 and in the years that followed no one was able to replicate his unique ability to unite dishonesty, hypocrisy and malice in a suit of shameless promotion.

No one, that is, until Donald Trump.

Earlier this week, we  learned that, in a phone call last July, Trump asked Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelensky,  to do him a "favor" and investigate former Vice President Biden and Biden's son, Hunter.  The request violated the law, which prohibits the solicitation of foreign help in our elections, and otherwise had all the trappings of Trump-brand sleaze.  

Shortly before the call, Trump had frozen $391 million in aid to Ukraine, and during it, he reminded Zelensky of all the United States had done for his country as he asked for dirt on the Bidens.  Afterward, Trump ordered the electronic transcript of the call deep-sixed in a super-classified computer file meant to protect the nation's most important secrets (but not the President's mob-like shakedowns).

Later in the week, more shoes dropped.  

On Thursday, America's former special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, handed over text messages confirming that Trump was in fact holding up aid until Zelensky played ball.  Among the texts was one from our Ambassador to the Ukraine, William B. Taylor.  He wrote:  "I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign." 

This is . . .

Game Over.

Trump will be impeached.

Though he claims the call was "perfect", the administration's own rough transcript of it renders that claim ludicrous . . .  

As will  the actual electronic transcript of the call, once freed from the super-classified imprisonment to which it was sent to die.

Trump is in full meltdown.

Yesterday,  he decided to violate the law in plain sight, asking China and Australia to investigate the Bidens as well.  This morning,  he repeated that Ukraine should do so.  

Earlier in the week, he was wildly tweeting to his base, imploring them -- with a word salad of lies -- that he was being "harassed"; that the whistle blower and listeners who outed him are "spies"; that Congressman Schiff, the Chair of the House Committee investigating the matter, should be "arrested" for "treason"; and that those following Constitutional processes were nevertheless staging a "coup". Meanwhile, his seconds -- who include a deranged former Mayor named Giuliani -- were reduced to screaming (in Rudy's case) or just plain ducking (in the case of most everyone else).

Expect our Commander in Chief to become more unhinged . . .

And our politics to become more fetid.

Trump is not Nixon.  

The latter respected our institutions.  

Trump is trolling them.  

He vilifies  any reporters, whistle blowers, legislators, judges or civil servants who oppose him. He lives in the gutter, his word repository and the reputed source of an authenticity that supposedly confuses none who take him seriously but all who take him literally.  In 1974, senior Republican Senators went to Nixon and told him the gig was up.  Nixon respected them and quit.  Trump, however, respects no one (and in any case fears prosecution once he leave the Oval  Office).  He will not go quietly into the night.

Trump is also not Clinton, our other most recently impeached chief executive.  

Clinton compartmentalized, walling off his official duties and policy-making from the continuing storm of subpoenas, media reports, and the drama inherent in an on-going impeachment saga.  Put simply, he got the work of the Presidency done.  

Trump is paralyzed.  

He cannot hold a press conference with a foreign leader, or walk by a gaggle of reporters on the south lawn, without it turning into a profanity-laced tirade against his enemies, real and imagined. 

He is all tweets, all the time.

And nothing else.

With Nixon and Clinton, impeachment was serious, sad and tragic.

With Trump, it will be all that . . .

And something more.

During the 1976 Presidential campaign,  Kevin Cash visited  Dartmouth College to talk about Willian Loeb.  I met him outside the studios of Dartmouth's radio station, WDCR.  I asked him how he felt in the wake all the fights to get his book published and the attacks from Loeb.  In response, he repeated what he had posted in his book's epigraph . . .

Something his father had told him years ago.

"When you fight with a skunk, you wind up stinking even if you win."

SUNDAY DINNER

SUNDAY DINNER

I had dinner last night . . .

With Jen and Pete Salinetti.  

On their farm . . .

In Tyringham, Massachusetts.

With 171 of their soon to be best friends.

The Salinettis are a dying breed. They are actually family farmers making a living on their family's farm.  In an age of giant agri-businesses, tariffs and irrational love-affairs with he-who-will-not-be- named, their brethren in the fly-over states are taking it on the chin.  The Salinettis, however, have figured a way out.

They go small.

And they spend a lot of time getting their hands dirty.

The Salinettis' farm is called Woven Roots.  It is a linguistic testament to their agri-committments. On their web site, they sound like hippies from an age past.  "We recognize," they say,  "the interconnectedness of all life: soil, plants, microbes, insects and animals." 

Don't be fooled. 

They generate an unheard of annual average of $100,000 in crop value per acre (the big guys are at 5-7k per acre). And they make enough money to raise their two children, Diego and Noelia.  

They've perfected the art of permanent bed, no-till farming. In permanent beds, the soil is never compacted and rarely disturbed.  Woven Roots' crops are grown in 30 inch rows, separated by 12 inch aisles. "Once these spaces are defined," the Salinettis explain, " they remain that way." The beds are carefully aerated with a u-bar (no tractors and no tilling) and local compost, cover crops and mulches feed the soil and literally build it up over time. 

The compost and mulch is carried in five gallon buckets and then spread and lightly raked. No chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides are used, and Jen and Pete harvest by hand, leaving the root structure in the ground.  As a consequence, the top inch of soil is minimally disturbed but "the structure below is not disturbed" at all.  And, as they note, "[w]hen the soil is aerated, but not disturbed, water and nutrients percolate through with ease, creating a perfect environment for nutrient dense crops."

The results are impressive.

Woven Roots grows more than 75 crops and harvests almost year round.  More than 80 households are enrolled in its CSA ("Community Supported Agriculture ") program, which allows locals to purchase a share of the Salinettis' annual produce.  For those members, farm-to-table isn't a night out at a restaurant. It's a near daily event.

The farm is set in the rolling hills of the Berkshires.  Its fields slope gently into a narrow valley that lies against a small, wooded rise too large to be a hill, too small to be a mountain, but undoubtedly breathtaking when colors explode in fall foliage.  

Though yesterday's panorama was still late-summer green, the cultivated fields told a different story.  Before dinner, we walked by lush rows of celery, lettuces, growing carrots, red peppers, eggplants and the occasional grape vine (Pete plans to add vintner to his resume).  Every so often we stopped and the two farmers became our professors, explaining the yin and yang of their small but prosperous enterprise.

Some things I learned . . . 

Weeds -- or more precisely -- their seeds do not grow the deeper they lie beneath the soil.  This means that building up layers of soil naturally inhibits weed growth because the seeds are too far below the surface to thrive.

Here's another . . . 

If you harvest by hand and cut just slightly below the soil line, the remaining root structure is a natural source of nutrient for the soil.

And a third . . .

No till is a climate change no brainer.  

When you either do not -- or only minimally -- disturb the soil, the carbon from organic content remains below the surface, is not exposed to oxygen, and thus does not become carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Some experts believe that if all farming were no till, you would reverse climate change, and while this has not been statistically proven, one thing is certain -- tilling contributes significantly to the earth's carbon footprint and no tilling more or less  reverses that.

Back at Woven Root . . .

Dinner was delicious.  

The four courses included an eggplant, grilled squash and fire-roasted red pepper combination; wild coho salmon in the farm's own succotash salad and cherry tomato-herb relish;  bison short rib with cheddar polenta and green popcorn shoots; and an abenaki corn pudding with whipped cream and the farm's own peach compote.

All of us sat at a long table out in the field.  (The meal itself was prepared by a locally renowned chef.   And all of the logistics -- field kitchen, table prep, serving and clean-up -- were handled by "Outstanding in the Field" (OITF), which has been running these year round "farm to table" events nationwide for the past twenty years.)

The meal was served family style to each section of  the table.

You met and talked to the people seated alongside and in front of you as each section passed around its platters. No phones, no televisions, no Internet. But lots of back and forth.  And lots of laughs.

It reminded me of Sunday dinner at my grandmother's back in Brooklyn.

Earlier in the day, Jen Salinetti had reminded us that no till farming was nothing novel.  It's how Native Americans farmed.

As I left, nourished in more ways than one, I was thinking about . . .

Nana and Native Americans. 

You can learn a lot from your ancestors.

THE AGE OF RAGE

THE AGE OF RAGE

You can learn a lot on Facebook.

In the past month, for example, I have learned that I am "ugly", "ridiculous"  and have "half a brain".  I have previously been told to "get a life" or "a grip" and to "stop hating".  Generous souls have surrounded their insults with "prayers" for me.  The not so generous wonder what "rock" I have crawled out from . . . or under . . . or behind.

Welcome to the Age of Rage.

In these tantrums of ostensible analysis, I have noticed certain . . . aah . . . flaws in my interlocutors.

For one, they have trouble spelling.  For another, though they profess expertise on subjects far and wide, they often opine on subjects on which I myself -- half brained though I am -- have some expertise. 

Yesterday, for example, I was sent a post that said "Democrats are not trying to 'overthrow Trump.' They are trying to overthrow the American voter -- the will of the people."

I innocuously responded with "Certainly not the will of all or even a plurality of the people. And impeachment is in the Constitution, just like the Electoral College Trump voters love."  

All these statements are facts.  

Trump did not win the popular vote.  And the Constitution, in Article Two, Section 4, expressly states that "The President . . . shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

This did not go over well with at least one Trump supporter.

Which is how I met . . . 

Gwen . . .

From Florida.

Giving up on the whole "will of the people" claim,  Gwen told me that a President "actually need[s] to commit a crime to be impeached." 

I responded that this was "not true." 

Because it isn't.

This was then Lol-ed.

Which is Facebook-speak for "laughing out loud". 

When someone on Facebook says they are laughing out loud, it is often at you, not with you.  

In this case, there was no ambiguity.  Gwen's "Lol" was followed by "Sooooooooo, what are the grounds then?????" "Hurt feelings or did he offend you???????"  Then another  "Lol".

Wow, I thought,  that's a lot of question marks . . . and nine o's in the word "So", all  apparently missed by auto-correct.  

The laughing out loud must have been catatonic

But hey, said I to me, I'll play.

And soldiered on.

I am a lawyer.  I explained to Gwen that one of the Constitution's grounds for impeachment --  "high crimes and misdemeanors"  -- was lifted from English practice by the Founders and that, while certainly including criminal conduct as a possible ground, it was also meant to include other conduct deemed seriously disqualifying in the eyes of members of the House of Representatives regardless of the conduct's status in criminal law.  I further explained that, while "hurt feelings" would obviously not count, obstructing an investigation into foreign interference in an election would.

In England, the phrase had covered impeachments for non-criminal abuses of authority, including the failure to honor one's oath of office. James Madison thought the impeachment clause as a whole would protect against "the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate." Benjamin Franklin thought it necessary when the President "rendered himself obnoxious."  None of the Founders limited impeachment to criminal conduct alone.

This did not go over well with Gwen.

She did not contest my analysis or offer up an alternative view of the history of the clause. 

She did, however, refer to "Hillary",  her missing emails,  and  the "LAME stream media". 

She claimed Robert Mueller had found "NO CRIME".  

And she told me I was "ugly". 

Her exact words were "your hatred for our President is very ugly on you". 

I couldn't quite decide what she meant. 

Was "hatred" an ill-fitting coat?  And how had I put it "on"?  By taking Mueller at his word when he said he was not exonerating the President for obstruction of justice? By ascribing to the Founders what the Founders actually meant when they made "high crimes and misdemeanors" one of the  grounds for impeachment ? By merely repeating what I had been taught in law school?

Oh well . . .

No worries.

Help was on the way.

In the form of Andy . . .

From California.

Who decided to weigh in.

Andy said that "my" view of the Founders' position was "ridiculous".  He "doubted" I had even gone to law school.  When  I named my Alma Mater,  he claimed I was bragging because I felt "inadequate".

Things did not improve.

He noted -- repeatedly -- that the word "crimes" was actually in the impeachment clause.  

I agreed.

He said that I  could look it up.

I already had.  

I thought this -- the looking up part, that is -- should have been obvious to Andy in that I had quoted the clause in my discussion with Gwen.

But, whatever, I guess people get confused in the heat of intense Facebooking.

As with Gwen, Andy did not offer his own analysis of the English practice or what the Founders had meant in embracing it. Instead, he asserted  that crimes "mean a crime" and reminded me that "hurt feelings" didn't count.  

Helpfully, Andy explained that I could take up all of my "hurt feelings" with a "psychologist". Perhaps to help my shrink,  he also asked me to fill out a form called a "Butthurt Report", which he thankfully photographed and added to his comment.   According to what it says, this form is filled out by "idiot[s]",  "crybab[ies]", the "thin-skinned", and those who "want [their] mommy" or feel "picked on".

I guess it lets the psychologists in on what they are dealing with.

Anyway, Andy found all of this funny.  He finished his diatribe with "LMAO".  This is Facebook-speak for "Laughing my ass off."

Andy is fixated on assholes.  Unlike  the Founding Fathers . . .

He doesn't  think they're impeachable.

INSANITY

INSANITY

The quote is famous.

"The definition of insanity," it is said, "is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

Its author, however, is . . . 

Disputed.

For years, the working supposition attributed the insight to Albert Einstein.  This seemed plausible.  The consummate scientist re-invented our world view.  At its most basic level, he looked at things differently, hypothesizing a relativistic space-time out of a radical challenge to Newtonian physics that empiricists spent the next century confirming.  So, it seemed, the good scientist, a man willing a la Karl Popper to falsify anything in the search for truth, would naturally tell us to stop driving ourselves crazy by expecting different results from demonstrably ludicrous behaviors. 

Unfortunately, however, there is no evidence that Einstein uttered the phrase -- no letter, note, or even memory. And nothing from the great man himself. In fact, the only actual evidence of the phrase, or versions of it, is a 1983 novel by Rita Mae Brown, and before that, both a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous ("NA")  and 1980 Alcoholics Anonymous ("AA") pamphlet.  In the latter two, "Insanity is repeating the same mistake and expecting different results."

So, on this one, it looks like the addicts beat the intellectuals to the punch (line).

Which is probably the way it should have been.

Yesterday and earlier today, there were mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.  

In El Paso, nineteen minutes beforehand, a 21 year-old white nationalist from Dallas announced on 8chan, a far right message board,  that his planned "attack [was] a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas." He claimed white people were being replaced by foreigners (the so-called "great replacement" theory promoted by the French white nationalist Renaud Camus) ; asserted that "if we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable"; and praised the white supremacist New Zealand shooter who earlier this year killed scores in Christchurch. Armed with an AK-47, he then drove to a Walmart next to El Paso's Cielo Vista Mall and began shooting in the parking lot before moving inside the store.  By the time he was apprehended, twenty were dead and another twenty-six injured, some critically.  

In Dayton, a 24 year-old suited in body armor and carrying a .223-caliber high capacity magazine killed nine and injured twenty-seven in an early morning rampage in that city's entertainment district. He was killed by responding police.

In the aftermath of these shootings, the right-wing recurred to its typical, and by now worn out, shibboleths.  President Trump's acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, defended the president against charges that his own racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric bore any responsibility for the El Paso assault, claiming instead that the El Paso and Dayton shooters were just "sick, sick people" and that Trump himself is "angry", "upset" and "wants [the killings] to stop".  Meanwhile, both the GOP's House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, and Texas's Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, claimed that violent video games were the cause.  For good measure, Patrick also asserted that "kick[ing]" God "out of the town square" was a culprit. Both McCarthy and Patrick made their comments on Fox's Sunday shows and declined invitations to appear on CNN.

The premise behind all these claims is false.  In the case of video games, studies have more than shown that they are not linked to and do not increase the chances of violence.  In fact, the contrary is the case.  And as for God, whether He or She enters or leaves the public square is beside the point.  The atheists are not the ones trying to take out Hispanics with AK-47s.  For that matter, there'd be a lot less carnage if Patrick and his cronies (i) worried less about where God gets to operate as a consequence of the First Amendment and (ii) stopped the Second from allowing white supremacists to sport AK-47s.

Then there's Trump, always a case unto himself.

Mulvaney's defense is that Trump is not to blame because white supremacy is abnormal. This is a version of what is known as a category mistake.  

White supremacists are abnormal in the sense that they do not define the majority of Americans or even a substantial minority.  They may even be abnormal in the sense that they suffer from some diagnosable mental illness, though this is less likely and in any case does not follow simply from the fact of the belief itself.  There have been racists and fascists throughout history who have been rational actors; the Jefferson Davises and John C. Calhouns of our history knew exactly what they were doing; so did the Ku Klux Klan; and as far as we now know, so did Patrick Crusius, the apparent El Paso shooter.  

Whether  Trump's incendiary, anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric incites or gives permission to this minority is, however, an entirely different matter.

It does.

And the notion that it doesn't is just another layer of denial Trump supporters are trotting out to defend the indefensible.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was roundly criticized for calling Trump rally goers "deplorable".  But look at those rallies today and what they have become.  There is sheer joy on so many faces as the crowd chants racist bromides like "Send her back" or revels in the President's take down of a black Congressman from Maryland, literally enjoying -- laughing about --  the fact that his home in Baltimore had been invaded the night before.  Trump himself regularly, indeed habitually, degrades Hispanics, whether he sees them as judges whose ancestry amounts to bias against him or as "terrorists" camped at our southern border. He has separated children from their families, caged innocents, and instructed federal agents to basically terrorize Hispanics in an effort to root out the undocumented. He famously claimed that a scrum of racists and neo-Nazi white supremacists  in Charlottesvillle contained some "very fine people."  

And we're now surprised that a white supremacist drove ten hours with an AK-47 to a mall on the Mexican-American border with the express purpose of killing Hispanics to stop them from replacing whites?

Puh-leeze.

Violence is addictive.  So is racism and hatred.

They are drugs.  

Trump is the neighborhood dealer, winking and nodding at the racists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, call them what you will.  

The crack pipe is the view of the Second Amendment that puts AK-47s in the hands of people like Patrick Crusius, a view Trump shares.  

NA and AA were right.

This is insane.

TWO PARTIES, TWO YEARS, TWO PROBLEMS

TWO PARTIES, TWO YEARS, TWO PROBLEMS

Someone --  maybe Mark Twain but probably not -- once said that history doesn't repeat itself . . .

But often rhymes.

We're in the summer of rhymes.

George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1947 and 1948 and published it in 1949.  In the wake of World War II, the cold war had begun and Orwell imagined a world less than forty years hence with a superstate called Oceania --  basically North and South America, Australia, southern Africa and Great Britain --locked in perpetual cold combat with its two enemies, Eurasia and East Asia, superstates as well.

In fictional Oceania, a so-called Ministry of Truth regularly revises history so that the past conforms to its dictator's (Big Brother's)  present; dissent is "vaporized" as opponents are not just killed but -- in a kind of anti-birtherism --  removed from history as well; and relationships are transactional (sex to reproduce and spawn additional  Party servants is the working pre-nup).  To support the project, science does not exist and a new language -- an ungrammatical amalgam with few words that limits both thought and self-expression -- is invented.

The glue holding this superstate together is propaganda.  

And the foundation for that propaganda is Big Brother's and his apparatchiks' doublethink.

Or as Orwell defined it:

"To know and to not know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, . . . to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself." 

Though Orwell himself was always a struggling writer, often starved for publishers given an integrity he refused to relinquish for any amount, and though 1984 was critically acclaimed when it was published, it has only recently become a best seller.

Thanks to Donald Trump.

In 1928, New York Governor Al Smith became the first Catholic ever nominated for President by an American political party.  In November of that year, he lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover.  Republican Hoover won forty-one states (to Smith's mere seven, which did not even include his home state of New York).  The electoral vote count was 444 for Hoover, 87 for Smith.  

During the campaign, the anti-Catholic vitriol was palpable.  Opposition to Smith from Methodist and Baptist ministers on account of his religion was nearly universal; of 8,500 Southern Methodist ministers polled prior to the election, only four supported Smith.  This, moreover, in the south (where six of Smith's winning states were located in an age when the south still despised the party of Lincoln).  The charge was that Smith as a Catholic owed allegiance to a foreign power, the Vatican; the joke upon his defeat was that he sent a one word telegram to the Pope -- "Unpack".

In the thirty-two years that followed, the notion that a Catholic could ever be President or should ever be nominated was considered ludicrous.  So ludicrous that, in 1960, John F. Kennedy literally had to run the table by winning every primary contest he entered, including the primary in overwhelmingly Protestant West Virgina, to get the Democratic Party nomination.  And even then, JFK had to go to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association during the general election campaign in an effort to finally put the so-called religious issue to rest.  He barely succeeded, winning by one of the smallest margins in American political history.

Today, the GOP has a 1984  problem and the Democrats have a version of what was -- until Kennedy -- their 1928 problem.

Trump is an Orwellian nightmare.

His penchant for claiming 2 + 2 = 5 is now legion.  (The proposition itself, which Orwell lampoons to great effect in 1984, was invented by Stalin as he tried to convince the Soviet Union that he could accomplish the government's second five year plan in four.) Whether he's libeling Mexicans as "rapists" or Central American refugees as "terrorists"; illegally imprisoning asylum seekers and their children in inhumane (and separate) lock-ups; lying to claim that loss of the popular vote was on account of millions of illegals having voted; falsely claiming to having had the largest crowds at any Inauguration; finding "good people" in a scrum of racists and neo-Nazis; mocking Russian interference in the 2016 election; praising dictators and their wanna-be's the world over (Russian's Putin, North Korea's Kim Jung Un, Hungary's Orban, the Philippine's Duterte); claiming vindication Robert Mueller specifically and expressly withheld; touting an economy he inherited as one he created; or turning July 4th's celebration of "We the People" into a militaristic promotion of "me, the President", truth is more than beside the point with Trump.  

It's his first casualty.

And has been his entire life.

The sound of 1984 is also echoed in the administration's treatment of the media.  Abroad, he turns a blind eye to state sponsored killers of journalists in Russia (Putin) and Saudi Arabia (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman).  At home, he routinely charges  "fake news" on anything remotely opposed to his lies and supplements that with fascist claims that the free press is the "enemy of the people" or that "what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening".  His sycophants then pile on, with Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" or  Rudy Giuliani's "truth isn't truth" explaining or excusing  His Hairnesses latest fantasy. 

Marching in lock step with Trump  is the larger GOP.

You can count on one hand, and only when it doesn't matter, the number of GOP House members or GOP Senators who confront Trump or call him out, and now, even the supposedly independent Supreme Court has issued at least one recent decision that should scare us all, shielding as an absolute matter extreme partisan gerrymandering from any form of judicial review or oversight.  

The gerrymandering case is instructive.  The practice of drawing district lines to favor one's party is not new.  What is new, however,  are the computer-based data analytics that can predict votes down to the household and that result in a type of extreme gerrymandering never previously possible.

In the North Carolina case decided this past week, data analytics allowed the party that won less than 50% of the votes to nevertheless  get 76% of the seats.  That's not democracy. It's also not equal protection of the law or one person one vote and renders the free speech exercised in political campaigns more or less superfluous.  

Finally, relying on those who got the seats to solve the problem -- which is the remedy Chief Justice Roberts and the four other GOP appointed justices  suggest -- is the equivalent of asking Jesse James to guard the bank. 

Ain't gonna happen.

(Mitch McConnell, of course,  praised the decision as precisely the sort of hands off role the Court should play, but he's also the guy who stiffed Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 and therefore put the current GOP court majority in place. Meanwhile, in a moment that brought Orwell's doublethink to life in the Senate, McConnell also said his party would confirm any Supreme Court nominee proposed by Trump in 2020 even though it had refused to do so for Obama in 2016.)

For their part the Democrats have now started the process of selecting the candidate who will oppose Trump in 2020 and toward that end, the crowded field was split into two debates within the last week, showcasing twenty of their twenty-four hopefuls.  In post debate polls, viewers agreed that Sen. Warren and Sen. Harris fared best in their respective debates.  Former Vice President Biden was a bit shaky but certainly held his own and will only improve as his lines and responses become more crisp; in any case, oratorical discipline has never been his hallmark and won't necessarily be expected in this go round.  Others who had a good day were Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former HUD secretary Julian Castro

Almost immediately, however, polls also showed substantial numbers of Democrats concerned that a woman, were she to be nominated, could not beat Trump in 2020.  Typically, the result came in the form of concerns about whether other voters were ready for that first (an Ipsos poll had three-quarters comfortable with a woman president but only a third believing their neighbors would be) and so-called "magic wand" questions where a quarter of those who picked a male candidate said they'd pick a female if they had a "magic wand" and could ordain the result they really wanted.

Thus, on the "can a woman be President" question , many Democrats are stuck in 1928.  In this time warp, Hillary lost because she was a woman or because the country is not yet ready for a woman. So no other woman can win or should try.

Too bad.

For many reasons.

One of which is that it's not true.

There are two things one needs to say about Hillary and the 2016 election.  

The first is that the election was very close and that more than a dozen things -- most of which were unexpected -- had to go wrong to keep her from winning.  Imagine what the result would have been without James Comey's 11th hour histrionics, or Russia's interference, or the political malpractice by the twenty-somethings at Team Hillary in Brooklyn who should have been polling in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in the last month rather than thinking Arizona and Texas were in play.

The second is that, prior to January 20, 2017, Trump's bluster could persuade rust belters who hadn't received a raise in more than thirty years that, perhaps, a loud mouth businessman could improve their lives.  That hope, however, is now lost.  The bluster is still overt and over the top but there are no results to match it. Inequality is still a problem, coal mines are still closing, and opioid addiction continues apace.  Given the negatives that attach to him as a matter of course, and the fact that he has not really grown his base by any amount, the notion that Trump can run the same inside straight he drew in 2016 is at best dubious and at worst delusional.

What Democrats need is a candidate with the fortitude to confront and remove Trump without any of the adhesion that might allow his negative campaign (and that is all it will be) to stick.  If Biden is the nominee, he can't be "sleepy" or "creepy".  If it's Warren, she can't be Hillary 2.0.

None of this means the nominee cannot be a woman or a gay guy or Obama's former Vice President.  Sen. Harris at this point appears more than capable of taking Trump on and disarming whatever ad hominems come her way. So does Buttigieg. And Biden is ahead in the polls not just because of name recognition and the Obama connection; he's also a moderate in this field and that may be what the voters want.

The Democrats need to stop acting like it's 1928 . . .

So the country can stop acting like its 1984.

MEMORIES

MEMORIES

It's Memorial Day, 2019.

Time to remember the vets.

Here's one I remember.

It was the summer of 1979.  I had just finished my first year of law school and had a summer internship working for the U.S. Attorney's office in Newark, New Jersey.  There were about twenty interns and we were each assigned to an Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA), one of the hundred or so line prosecutors in the office. 

I was assigned to AUSA Ted Lackland.

Columbia Law grad.  Ex-associate at a Wall Street law firm with a Masters in Philosophy from  Howard University. Grew  up in Chicago, where he went to college and married his girlfriend.  And . . .

Ex-Captain in the US Army, graduate of Ranger school, and Vietnam combat veteran.

I learned a lot that summer -- how to try a case, do an investigation, cross- examine a witness, joust with a judge and persuade a jury.  

But mostly, that summer, I learned a lot about the Vietnam War and about one guy who served there, came home, made a life and career for himself,  and . . .

Was never bitter.  

Even though he had a right to be.

The Vietnam War Ted Lackland described was not the one I had read about in the newspapers.  He had left for Southeast Asia  from Oakland on June 6, 1968, the day Bobby Kennedy died.  He told me he thought he might be going to a safer place given the turmoil and riots which by then had become that era's domestic imprint. He must have been quickly disabused of that notion once he arrived in South Vietnam, however, because he also told me he thought he was going to die there -- from the first day he arrived 'til the last day he left.

Which, for me, was lesson one in the life of a combat vet. 

You live in constant fear.  It's a mental tension that never goes away.  We all now know about post traumatic stress  disorder. This is pre-traumatic stress disorder.

When he got to Vietnam, Capt. Ted Lackland  was supposed to command a mechanized battalion, for which he had been trained. But there either weren't any there then, or weren't enough of them. So the higher-ups made him run an infantry battalion. They said he was a Ranger and that Rangers could do anything.  The fact that they said this tells you a lot about how bureaucracies cover their butts. 

The fact that Ted did it tells you a lot about him.

As the summer continued, so did my education.  The first thing Ted did when he got his battalion was blow up the liquor bunker.  In Vietnam, even if every day seemed to be your last, drunkeness did not increase the chance that you might be wrong and live to worry tomorrow.

The next thing he did was enforce order.  No back talk.  In fact, no conversation.  This was war, not a debating society, and survival, not feelings, was what counted.  He fined anyone who was not wearing their flak jacket properly.  The troops complained.  In Vietnam it was 120 F and humid on the best of days. "It's too hot to wear," one GI bitched about the flak jacket order. "It's supposed to be," remarked the Captain, "It stops bullets."

Others were fined for walking on the dykes in the rice paddies. The dykes were booby-trapped.  The  chest deep water in the paddies was  rat infested and snake riven.  But it wouldn't kill you.

Then there was the racism.  

Some guys were constantly drawing perimeter patrol duty, which materially increased the chances of coming home in a box. Lackland regularized that duty so that everyone had to take his turn.  One black private came up to him, their black Captain,  and said, "I know I'm gonna get fined for this, but I just wanted to tell you that the black guys in this outfit hate you.  Which is OK. 'Cause the white guys in this outfit hate you just as much."  Lackland looked at him and said, "You're right.  Fifty dollars."

When he collected the money, he sent it to the private's account.

Which is what he did with all the fines.

In June 1968, Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced Gen. Westmoreland as the head of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). Within the year, Abrams noticed this Captain from Chicago and asked him to make a career of the Army. Ted, however, had other plans.   They included law school and . . .

Dorothy.

Who he married soon after he returned.

After graduating from Columbia, Ted was an associate for three years at Dewey Ballantine Bushby Palmer & Wood.  (That's the old Dewey Ballantine of Gov. Dewey and, before him, Elihu Root, not the ad hoc version that greed recently ran into the ground.)  He then served as an Assistant US Attorney for three years before moving to Atlanta,  where he still practices law.   

There are lots of guys alive today because of Ted Lackland.

And at least one law student who learned about a lot more than law in the summer of '79.

Thanks, Ted.