THE BIGGEST THREAT

THE BIGGEST THREAT

Maybe the biggest threat to democracy in America is not Donald Trump.

In the space of the last month, the country has seen his former lawyer plead guilty to tax evasion, bank fraud and orchestrating illegal donations to his 2016 campaign at his behest in order to cover up his affairs with a porn star and a Playmate. His erstwhile campaign manager has been found guilty of tax evasion arising out of work for Ukraine's former leader, and Putin ally, Viktor Yanukovitch.  His White House turns out to have been deemed "crazytown" -- and he,  an "idiot" --  by his own chief of staff. And, according to "Anonymous", there is -- and has been since day one -- some undefined group in the White House and executive branch preserving "our democratic institutions while thwarting [the President's] more misguided impulses until he is out of office."

The common thread here is Donald Trump's narcissism, dishonesty and paranoia.

But there's another, perhaps more important, common thread.

For, in each of the above examples, someone -- other than Trump --  is either getting ahead . . .

Or burying their head.

Start with Cohen and Manafort, the lawyer and operative, respectively.

Cohen became rich taking bullets for Donald Trump.  When approached by attorneys for Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, he could have done nothing.  Their tales would presumably have then seen the light of day and either would have been sufficient to kill Trump's presidential campaign or ignored by a loyal cadre that had already priced in and devalued Trump's degradations.  Instead of doing nothing, however, Cohen channeled six figure pay-offs for silence, with Trump's knowledge and assistance and in violation of federal law.  His probable expectation was that Trump would never be elected anyway (even Trump thought so) and the payments would never become public. Meanwhile, his image as Trump's protector would be burnished, and with it, his opulent life style.

Manafort became rich shilling for crypto-fascists.  That is what Yanukovitch, his political acolytes and his supporters in Russia (including a number of oligarchs) were and are.  When the Euromaidan Revolution ousted him in 2014, Manaforte's balance sheet took a beating.  For not only had he shilled for them, he was also in debt to them . . .

To the tune  of  $17 million to the oligarchs.

Over the years, this creates a lot of turmoil, especially when the gravy train goes dry.

So Manafort had to cope

To do so he (i) evaded taxes, (ii) committed bank fraud on loan applications to generate cash, and (iii) volunteered his services for free as Donald Trump's campaign manager.

This third tack was not motivated by generosity. 

Instead, Manafort thought he could later monetize the campaign job by advising Yanukovitch's Eurasian protector and Trump's "new best friend", Vladimir Putin.  No doubt Manafort also did not expect Trump to win or his finances to attract the attention of the Justice Department. 

Cohen and Manafort were trying to get ahead.

John Kelly and Anonymous, however, are burying theirs.

To begin, the notion that an American President actually requires a secret cabal of "adults in the room" in order simply to save the republic from its Commander in Chief is . . .

Scary.

This is not the 19th century.  Or even the early 20th. It's true that we have had bad presidents before, even very bad ones.  But they never had nukes or twitter and they could not cause a holocaust in minutes.  James Buchanan argued himself into paralysis and watched as the nation undid itself into a Civil War.  James Polk sent the Army to Texas to start a war with Mexico.  Warren Harding's brief administration was so riddled with incompetence and corruption that two went to jail, one committed suicide, and another -- his Attorney General -- resigned in disgrace.  And with Woodrow Wilson, the lights were on but no one was home following his stroke, and his wife became -- more or less -- the acting President.

These events, however, occurred over months, in some cases even years.  There was time to prepare and adapt.

And time to get our minds around some of the disasters that ensued.

Now is different. 

The country can afford an idiot president.  It can afford a lazy one.  It can even afford a self-absorbed Fox News addict who treats every day as a reality-TV episode where he has to win and Fox assures him he has.

What it cannot afford, however, is a lazy, narcissistic idiot who acts on his neuroses.

Which is what we now have.

Kelly and Anonymous tell us they are the "adults in the room".  They ostensibly are shielding the country from Trump's worst instincts.  They steal paper off his desk (Gary Cohn, erstwhile chief economic adviser, avoiding rupture of our trade agreement with South Korea),  or refuse to follow orders (General Mattis at the Defense Department, refusing to assassinate Assad), or slow walk demanded changes (Mattis again, this time delaying any ban on transgender troops), or do end-arounds that establish policy before the President can undermine or kill it (which is what National Security Adviser John Bolton accomplished by getting the recent NATO communique written and agreed to before Trump even showed up for the meeting).

The argument for remaining anonymous (or, in Kelly's case, now denying he said what Bob Woodward says he said) is that these people need to be on the inside, working their subterfuge in the interests of preserving the republic before our nutcase-in-chief kicks them out and installs a team of only true believers and complete enablers.  In other words, they're not just protecting us from Trump.  They're protecting us from . . .

Steve Bannon . . .

Or Corey Lewandowski . . .

Or Stephen Miller.

So far so good.

But what disaster awaits if they fail?

We came close to finding out earlier this year.  According to Woodward, Trump planned to tweet that the US was going to pull its dependents out of South Korea.  The Pentagon went into overdrive. It had reliable information, again according to Woodward,  that North Korea would have read that tweet as an announcement that war was imminent and would have taken preemptive action. Fortunately for us, the Pentagon was able to stop the tweet.

But what if the tweet had been sent from Trump's bedroom, the "devil's workshop" according to former chief of staff Reince Priebus, or at 5 am  or on a Sunday evening, Trump's "witching hours", as Priebus also has proclaimed?  

Would anyone have been there to stop it?

The problem here is not that Trump is a megalomaniac or dim, though he appears to be both.

The problem is that he is impetuous . . .

With not an ounce of self-doubt.

And Anonymous and the other "adults in the room" cannot save us from that.

In the Bush II Administration, the war on terror was governed by Dick Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine".  Under it, a 1% chance of a nuclear, biological or chemical attack against us was to be met with a full on response.  The theory was that the infinitesimal likelihood of the occurrence was overcome by the catastrophic nature of the consequences were the remote event actually to occur. 

Maybe we're now in a "One Percent Presidency".

Because, while Buchanan never had nukes . . .

Trump does.

And, even more importantly, so do our adveraries.

What should be done?

Here's my view.

The adults should resign.  

En masse.  

Following that, Republicans in Congress -- the Speaker, the Senate Majority Leader, and all the committee chairs -- should go to Trump with a list of acceptable replacements, some of whom could even be the resigned adults themselves, and one big ultimatum -- if Trump does not agree to the replacements and to stop tweeting, they will impeach him.  If enough of the anonymous adults also happen to be in the Cabinet, the GOP could even threaten Trump with a call for his ouster under the 25th Amendment.

Will this be done?

Not a chance.

Why?

Because Anonymous and his or her confreres are not just protecting the country.  

They are protecting themselves. 

These so-called "adults in the room" are all GOP appointees and operatives. They presumably want jobs, and therefore a preserved Republican Party, long after Trump is gone. And as for GOP members of Congress, they long ago put their courage in a blind trust in exchange for tax cuts, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.  Public denials from the press podium and spin aside, everyone knows the danger inherent in this President and this Presidency.  It's the one opinion now held in Washington, D.C. on a completely bi-partisan basis.

The "adults" know it too.

And they want to be forgiven -- indeed, praised as our saviors -- once the age of Trump passes.

Let's pray we get there.

If we don't, the biggest threat to democracy will not have been Donald Trump.

It will have been . . .

Careerism.

WEIGHT WATCHER

WEIGHT WATCHER

I'm on a diet.

It's not the usual kind --  cutting carbs, avoiding sugar, portion control.

My diet is cultural and political.  

It tries to avoid ingesting . . . 

Anything Trump.

This is not easy and may not even be possible.  Every time I turn on a news program or flip through a newspaper, I am confronted with all things Trump -- his latest lie or mean tweet or juvenile tantrum or just plain stupid claim.  

Some are quite serious, like his statements in Helsinki last month more or less denying the Russians interfered in the 2016 Presidential election.  They enable both an enemy and a domestic fifth column of support for that enemy's fascist regime.  

There really is no difference these days between Russia and the old Soviet Union.  In both, the governmental norm is/was  Orwellian double speak, the arbitrary arrest and/or killing of dissenters, and a kleptocratic corruption at the top.  As Timothy Snyder has made clear in his recently published "The Road to Unfreedom", the old USSR and the new Russia differ only in the ostensible ends to which their authoritarianism was/is directed -- a world wide communist revolution in the case of the former , a fascist Eurasianism in the case of the latter.  In both, oblvious to history, the dictatorial regime asserts the inevitability of its ends and rigorously subverts competing systems -- capitalism in the case of the USSR and rule of law liberalism in the case of the new Russia.  The subversion is accomplished by any available and effective means -- military support for other communist regimes and the subjugation of the whole of eastern Europe in the case of the USSR; poisoning adversaries, cyber warfare, old fashion spy craft (e.g., Maria Butina) and phony elections in the case of the new Russia. 

That the head of today's new Russia was a committed KGB spy in yester-years' old Soviet Union is no accident; to the contrary, it is perfect symmetry.

And, because he is President, Donald Trump's toadyism -- his unwillingness to confront Vladimir Putin, and his practiced habit of pulling punches or suggesting false alternative explanations for Russia's blatant interference in elections both here and in Europe -- is at best dangerous and at worst treasonous.

But then . . .

There is everything else.

Like the latest Omarosa contretemps.

That episode ranks somewhere between utterly predictable and side-splittingly comical.  

Omarosa is, as we all know, a one-time and thrice-fired contestant on Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice" reality television show.  With no qualifications other than having said "great" things about the Donald, she became a White House adviser once he became President.  He then fired her a fourth time, with Chief of Staff John Kelly this time doing the dirty work.  On the day she was fired, the grounds appeared to be her misuse of a car service; over time, however, her general obnoxiousness and divisiveness has worked its way into the story in a White House where there is no room for either inasmuch as this space is fully occupied at the top.

Over the course of the last week, we learned that Omarosa had tape recordings (how many is still unknown) of her days in the President's employ, and last Sunday she began slow walking them to the public.  First she broadcast the tape of Kelly firing (and threatening) her in the Situation Room where her forced removal was announced.  Later she released a tape of her and three campaign aides discussing Trump's apparent use of the n-word.  In response, the White House accused her of imperiling national security and Trump tweeted that she is a "dog".  Trump also tweeted that the n-word is not "in [his] vocabulary", limited as that may be in any case.

OK, so in pot calling kettle black territory, this is up there for a number of reasons. 

One is that Trump imperils national security more or less on a daily basis. So much so that, before he talked to European leaders at last month's NATO summit, his national security adviser, John Bolton, made sure the NATO communique had been signed and agreed to by all members just so the President could not screw it up.  Alongside denials about Russian cyber crimes, a trade war with Canada, inept tariffs, and friends across the world more irate than allied,  Omarosa's violation of the sacred Situation Room is small bore.

Another is that Omarosa and the Donald deserve each other. Both are back stabbing narcissists. Nothing Manigault-Newman is telling us now (e.g., Donald is a racist) was not known to her quite some time ago.  Between birtherism, Mexicans as rapists, Maxine Waters' "extraordinarily low I.Q", "shithole" African countries, and his own history in NYC (condemning five black youths to death for a rape they did not commit and racially profiling would be tenants for his family's apartment buildings), there is no news here.  

Donald Trump is a racist . . .

And has been for a long time . . . 

Regardless of whether he ever uttered the n-word.

In one respect, however, Omarosa hit the nail on the head.  "There's only one way to shut Donald Trump down," she said in an interview on Wednesday, "and that is just don't give him the oxygen.  And the oxygen comes from the clicks, the likes, the shock, the discussion."

She's right.

We all need to  . . .

Go on my diet.

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ -- SAVING THE REPUBLIC ONE ELECTION AT A TIME

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ -- SAVING THE REPUBLIC ONE ELECTION AT A TIME

Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez is a 28 year old woman from the Bronx.  In 2011 she graduated from Boston University with a degree in economics and international relations.  In the seven years that followed she held four jobs -- waitress, bartender, teacher and entrepreneur.

As best I can tell, the first three actually paid her.

A week ago, in a shot heard round the world only a short distance from the Coogans Bluff site of the original, her employment history changed dramatically.  She unseated a  ten-term incumbent and became the Democratic Party's nominee for Congress in New York's 14th Congressional District.  Absent some earthquake-like change in voting patterns in that district this fall, she will become the youngest member of Congress next January.

This is good news for the Democratic Party and even better news for the country.

Ocacio-Cortez is for single-payer health care and free public college, thinks housing should be a right, wants to abolish ICE and would have the federal government guarantee jobs.  When asked to explain what she means when she says she is a Democratic socialist, she is crisp -- "In a modern, wealthy and moral society, no American should be too poor to live."  Echoing that sentiment, she recently noted that "in the last three years or so, the median price of a two bedroom apartment" in her district "has gone up 80%. Our incomes certainly aren't going up 80% to compensate for that."  The result has been "a wave of aggressive economic displacement", a "New York . . . changing to be a temporary playground rather than a place for people to actually raise families and transform their own economic opportunities and their own lives."

Were that all there is, Ocacio-Cortez could easily be silo-ed as just another New York lefty.

But there is a lot more.

She got into politics by organizing.  She is not a wonk spouting position papers or a focus-grouped candidate carefully playing to a select crowd.  In fact, when told by political pros to focus on those who actually voted in primaries, she rejected the advice and enlarged her effort to attract those who hadn't.

She is also young.

And that is good news for the country.

In the past month, the gratuitous cruelty of Donald Trump and his enablers has been on full display.  Migrant children have been caged and separated from their asylum-seeking parents, and even after reversing course, the government has not reunited the families.  The Supreme Court -- Trump's court with Neil Gorsuch's appointment last year and Mitch McConnell's theft of the seat from Obama the year before -- gutted unions financially by refusing to allow assessments against non-members who nevertheless receive the benefit of union wages and bargaining agreements, more or less eliminated the ability of employees to sue employers by sanctioning adhesionary arbitration-only agreements as conditions of corporate employment, and endorsed Trump's racism by refusing to recognize the travel ban for what it was -- a Muslim ban.  Meanwhile, North Korea is re-nuking after Trump told us the problem was solved, Canada and Europe are engaging in a trade war in response to Trump's asinine tariffs (faux justified on national security grounds), Robert Mueller continues to indict, and Trump's acolytes continue to embrace hate at his regular rallies.

All this has put the country on outrage overload and the Democrats -- especially after the announced retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy from the Court and the almost certain fact that his replacement will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate any campaign financing regulation -- on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

But then came Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez.

She is not the magic wand we can wave to rid ourselves of this seminal moment of discontent.

But she is telling us what that wand looks like.

First, the wand has a message.  Whether you are for single payer, Obamacare that is funded and enforced, free college, any of the myriad solutions to the housing crisis or any of the myriad programs designed to create good middle class jobs, she has a message --  "in a modern, wealthy and moral society, no American should be too poor to live."  Say it loud and often.  It take less than five seconds.  It is the antidote to Trump's narcissism . . . and racism . . .  and wannabe fascism.

And it fits on a bumper-sticker.

Second, the wand is young. I have no problem with Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and Nita Lowey and Joe Crowley and Chuck Schumer and all the other Congressional Democrats that have been fighting the good fight for most of my adult life. I've met many of them and admired lots of them.  But they have been there too long, and fair or not (and I think largely the latter), they have become the face of a Democratic Party that voters think of as tired and worn out.  They have also frozen out a whole generation of new leaders by virtue of occupying their positions for what seems like . . . forever.  

Third, the wand is electoral.  If we count on op-ed columnists and impeachment Congresses to rid ourselves of Trump, we are likely to be very disappointed.  The first will never do it, and unless Mueller finds evidence of Trump's treason (which he might), the second is likely to fail as well. In fact, the second might fail even with evidence of treason.   Republicans like Trump and Republican office holders have turned enabling into an art form.  There is no Trump outrage too great to ignite their opposition.  Consequently, there really is only one answer.

Democrats have to win elections.

At the local, state and national level.

Something Ocacio-Cortez just did.

Against enormous odds.

Finally, because you have to win elections in the age of Trump, the wand is also psychological.  And this may be Alexandria Ocacio-Cortezes greatest lesson.  Trump doesn't throw her.  To be honest, Trump doesn't throw a lot of women; it's the guys who go postal, not the girls.  Why?  My own view is that women have always dealt with the type that is Trump -- the blowhard with bucks, the sexist who wants to get laid, the man-child caught in a perpetual mid-life crisis because he never was forced to . . . grow up.  

For them, Trump is so much more than a source of outrage, a decadent who assigns them numbers based on bust size.  He is pathetic, an empty vessel easy to ignore.

They refuse to engage him and enable him.

They move on.

And in doing so, a number of them are winning elections.

Which, on the eve of America's 242nd birthday, is a gift that . . . 

May well save the republic.

FINDING GOD -- A BOOK REVIEW (OR SOMETHING DIFFERENT IN THIS SPACE)

FINDING GOD -- A BOOK REVIEW (OR SOMETHING DIFFERENT IN THIS SPACE)

In Stop Blaming Adam and Eve,  John  Foley  unveils  the truth buried in Biblical myth.  In so doing, he rescues Christianity from fundamentalism and destroys the false choice between Darwin (science) and Jesus (religion).  And though he accepts the former, he is absolutely in love with the latter.

And wants us all to be as well.

Foley is no itinerant preacher.  A Jesuit  high school and college religion teacher and philosophy professor (full disclosure – I was one of his high school students forty-five years ago), he’s what the McCourt bothers, Frank and Malachy, would have become had the Jesuits and Vatican II  gotten hold of them rather than the dysfunction that was mid-century Catholicism in Ireland.  There’s a lot of humanity in Angela’s Ashes.   But the endless tragedies that plagued the clan Mc Court make it hard to see the pony of God’s gift in what was otherwise the manure of endless poverty, alcoholism, early death and churchly neglect in Frank McCourt's Limerick. 

God’s gift of humanity, however, is Foley’s central point.

His other is that it doesn’t come gift-wrapped.  

You have to look . . . 

And care-fully, which is Foley’s  take on  that ancient Socratic maxim -- the unexamined life is not worth living. 

The examination, we discover in this "religion" book, should not be restricted to the Bible.  Foley was a student of Hannah Arendt’s at NYC’s New School for Social Research before quitting a business career (much to the chagrin of his extended family,  but with the full -- albeit singular -- support of his wife, who quite clearly is Foley’s most important muse) in favor of what became a decades long mission in teaching high school and college students at two Jesuit institutions, Xavier High School in NYC  and St. Peter’s University in Jersey City, NJ.  So, as is made plain in well-constructed asides sprinkled throughout the book, part of the reason we need not blame Adam and Eve is that we can call upon a host of thinkers – Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Husserl, Nietzsche, Sartre – along with those theologians who left us the Bible’s myths and histories pregnant with truth,  in an effort to chart our own personal relationship with God.

And that is Foley’ central point.  The human challenge of Christianity in general and Catholicism is particular is to create that personal relationship.

For Foley, the watchword of the relationship is love, essentially because that is what God is and that is what we can become.  It is the glue that makes Kantian morality possible, the reward one gets for that examined Socratic life, and cures existential despair.

Wow!

Sign me up.

If only it were that easy . . .

Because Foley's other point is that all of this is possible only if we try hard.

Which means that, at the end of the day, this short but dense book (it took me weeks to get through because I had to keep going back to re-read portions) is as much a work out manual as it is an exegesis on Biblical truth.

We are instructed in the need to recognize our own Garden of Eden (and to admit that we too have often squandered the inheritance; hence, stop blaming the original sinners); the ability and need to see the God of love in everyday life (especially in those parts of our everyday life where we confront suffering; hence, don’t blow by the homeless on the street and don’t assume, as Foley puts it, that you have to “discover Narnia or climb Mount Everest” to find God; He or She is everywhere); the redemptive power of love (without which,  Foley makes quite clear, his own life would have been a mere chimera of the rich middle class (that is not an oxymoron), Brooklyn and neighborhood based , family, extended family and friends it has become); our duties as citizens (because we are social, politics is not optional, and none of us can claim to be neutral even as all of us are required to be thoughtful); and the meaning of Biblical truths (those shepherds in the New Testament’s infancy narratives were outcasts (dirty, smelly, unsanitary and -- generally speaking -- univited in polite society), not some quaint boys who show up in the seasonal Christmas creche, and that is why they are featured in Luke's Gospel; those prophets in the Old Testament were courageous -- and often ostracized -- truth tellers, not wizened old men sililoquizing in the Bible’s version of a middle eastern Athenian agora; they condemned injustice (Amos) and immorality (the Noah story), hypocrisy (Isaiah) and paralyzing despair).

You won’t agree with everything Foley says.  I didn’t.  On politics, he appears captured a bit by the au courrant false equivalence that blames liberals and conservatives equally for the sorry state of today’s polity; my own view is that, while the America left has often been thoughtless in the past, the American right is thoughtless today.   And on the Catholic Church he loves,  he is uncharacteristically quiet on some of the hot button issues (e.g., the all-male priesthood, gay marriage), even as he spares no church hierarchs (or anyone else who is culpable) on the abuse of children.

None of that, however, detracts from the overall worth of this fine volume.

Because Foley, like the Jesus he loves and worships, is a bit of “nudge.” 

He makes you think.

About western philosophy, the Bible, its authors, context, history and message . .  .

But mostly about ourselves and how to relate to that person . . .

We call God.

STOP BLAMING ADAM AND EVE

JOHN P. FOLEY

WEST BOW PRESS, 2018

MEGHAN AND HARRY -- HOW THE OLD WORLD CAN SAVE THE NEW

MEGHAN AND HARRY -- HOW THE OLD WORLD CAN SAVE THE NEW

Winston Churchill  never admitted defeat beforehand.

He did, however, contemplate it.

"We shall go on to the end," said Churchill to Parliament on June 4, 1940, as the last of the   British Expeditionary Force retreated back to England from Dunkirk. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender . . ."

But . . .

"[I]f," he warned, "this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

Churchill did not have to suffer the subjugation.  

The Japanese and Germans helped him out. The former attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941;  the latter declared war on the United States four days later.

And the New World sallied forth "to the rescue and liberation of the old."

Something of the opposite, less martial but perhaps no less significant given the sorry state of the present day American polity, may have happened a little west of London today . . .

Where the Old World was rescuing the new.

Americans and the British have many things in common.  The structure of their respective heads of state, however, is not one of them. 

Great Britain is a constitutional monarchy.  The head of state is the Queen.  She is apolitical but not by any means uninformed or uninterested.  For sixty-six years, she has represented the United Kingdom and the British commonwealth of nations.  If she faltered, she never did so meanly or rudely, nor was she ever vulgar or dishonest. And when she faltered, perhaps most notably in her initial reactions to the death of her former daughter in law, the late Princess of Whales, she recovered with grace and even an uncommon-in-royals touch of humility.  She never chose to be Queen.  She did, however,  choose the dignified manner in which she has exercised her royal warrant.

The United States is a constitutional republic.  The head of state is the President, who is also the executive officer in the government.  We have had forty-four of them and are now on our forty-fifth.  Unlike the Queen, he is not apolitical, and while that may explain in his mind the rest of his character, it by no means justifies it.  

For he is mean, vulgar, graceless, dishonest, undignified and uninformed . . .

More or less on a daily basis and as a matter of committed habit.

Some subset of American public opinion has applauded this exercise in boorishness.  They view it as authentic. 

Meghan Markle is not one of them.  She is a mixed race American actress, was born in Los Angeles, was baptized Catholic and is divorced. She graduated from Northwestern University with a double major in theatre and international studies.  She is a feminist.

Today she married His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales.

The Prince -- Harry to the world -- is Diana's second son.  Though sixth in line to the British throne, he is grounded.  He served with the British military in Afghanistan and founded the Invictus Games for wounded, sick or injured armed services personnel when he returned.  He is also quite obviously crazy about his wife.    

The wedding was broadcast to the world. The couple held hands throughout.  The Kingdom Gospel Choir sang "Stand By Me". Later,  nineteen year old cellist and wunderkind Sheku Kanneh-Mason played "Ave Maria" while the newlyweds signed their registry. 

The Most  Rev. Michael Curry, Chicago's Episcopalian bishop, preached.  His thunderous sermon on the "fire of love" quoted Dr. King and the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin.   In it, the black preacher unveiled the power of agape to conquer the world's most pressing crises, and brought wry smiles to a host of sitting royals unaccustomed to exuberance in, of all places, a church.  "When love is the way," he said, "poverty will become history [and] the earth will become sanctuary." 

Shortly after the ceremony, the  American Jesuit James Martin remarked that, when an "African-American bishop quotes a French Jesuit priest at a British royal wedding, who says the world cannot change."  

Quite so.  

But this time, the change was the Old rescuing the New.

The message of love that Bishop Curry preached, and that Meghan and Harry unabashedly exhibited for all the world to see, came from the staid precincts of Windsor Castle's St. Georges Chapel. The Old World of Europe gave us respite from the new world of Trump.  For a day, we were without tweets and insults.  No one bragged about their wealth  or gilded real estate.  There were no faux castles, only a real one, and not much new money but plenty of old.  Thanks to Harry and Meghan, what could have been a mere fairy tale became a  message. 

Or, as the Bishop put it, quoting the French Jesuit, "If humanity ever captures the energy of love, it will be the second time in history that we will have discovered fire."

During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Meghan Markle, now Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Sussex, called America's current head of state  "divisive"  and a "misogynist".  Correct on both counts.  Prior to his election, she half-jokingly threatened to move to Canada -- where her TV show was filmed --  if he won.

She now gets to move much farther away. 

And can call Britain's head of state . . .

 Mom.

MR. MATTIS'S WAR

MR. MATTIS'S WAR

James Mattis, America's Secretary of Defense, attacked Syria last night.  

As part of a coordinated attack with the British and the French,the retired Marine Corps general and current cabinet member in the Trump Administration launched about 100 missiles at three targets.  The targets were thought to be research and storage facilities used by Syria to produce chemical weapons. Most of the missiles were aimed at the Barsah research center in Damascus.  The rest targeted two storage facilities west of Homs, a city 100 miles north of Damascus.

The attacks were a response to last weekend's chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government on a rebel held area in the town of Douma.  That was the second time during the Trump Administration and the third time overall that Syria's President, Basha al Assad, had used chemical weapons, which are banned by the Geneva Convention to which Syria is a signatory.  

After the first attack, the Obama Administration backed a Russian plan to remove chemical weapons from Syria and more than 1300 tons of chemical agents were in fact removed. This did not eliminate the entire stockpile, essentially because some chemical agents (e.g., chlorine) were legitimately used (e.g., for water treatment) and could not be listed and removed.  Back home, of course, this led to thunderous outcries of partisan condemnation inasmuch as Obama had announced a red line which the Syrians had then crossed, all without sufficient consequence in the minds (and lungs) of the partisans.

Enter Donald Trump.

The putative antidote to all things Obama.

Throughout his campaign and his still young but exhausting presidency, Trump has reflexively condemned and opposed anything Obama did or supported.  Exhibit A on the domestic front is Obamacare, which Trump wanted to repeal without having anything to replace it and regardless of the consequences.  Meanwhile, on the foreign policy side, his love affair with Putin and tough talk on North Korea and Syria are all meant to contrast with Obama's supposedly feckless and ineffective policies on these fronts, as is his embrace of Brexit and constant criticism of the European Union.

In the end, however, all of this turns out to be mere rhetoric.  

Trump is about to sit down with North Korea's Kim Jong-un.  He is doing so without preconditions and without having received anything in exchange for Kim having obtained a long sought seat at the table with the United States.  No administration in the past has been willing to give up that leverage, but Trump did it unasked.

He  hasn't enforced the legislated sanctions against Russia that were Congress's response to the cyber-attacks on our 2016 election.  Instead, he has criticized the investigation into Russian meddling as a partisan hoax and "witch hunt" and defamed all the investigators, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his prosecutors.

And then -- or now -- there is Syria.

He has no policy on Syria per se or on the conflict itself.  He is not willing to use American leverage to help oust Assad, a war criminal, and his cat and mouse game with Putin in any case makes that impossible.  One day Putin is up with Trump, the next he is down.  A small contingent of US forces is deployed in the eastern part of the country  to clean up the remnants of ISIS. Otherwise, however, Syria has been left to the Russians and Iranians, neither of whom are willing to see Assad go.  

In truth, his policy on Syria, to the extent he has one, is no different from Obama's.  Both have been reluctant to get involved, principally because there appears to be no strategy that can oust Assad and replace him with a stable government that is not allied with Iran.

Nevertheless,  Jim Mattis attacked Syria last night.

Oh, I know, Trump, not Mattis, authorized the attack.

But that was only the show.

The strategy was Mattis's.

Principally because Trump doesn't have one.  

Instead, he has tweets and bombast.   He got into a school yard brawl with Putin this week, warning the ex-KGBer -- in response to Russia's vow to shoot down any missiles fired on Syria -- that Putin should "get ready . . . because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'"  While, however, the kid President was playing in his twitter sand box, promising to punch the Russian bully, the adults were busy at the Pentagon fashioning a very limited response to the Syrian chemical attack that did not in any way bloody Russia.  In fact, the reports this afternoon are that Russians actually evacuated from the areas that were attacked, which suggests they were tipped off to the attack in the first place.

Will this strategy work?

Count me dubious.

As part of a coordinated response with Britain and France, it has the advantage of sending at least some message that the west is still allied against any use of chemical weapons and is willing to enforce that prohibition at some level.  The alternative is dulce et decorum est in the middle east, and that did not work out so well in Flanders a hundred years ago.  At the same time , however, last year's attack in response to the use of chemical weapons did not stop Syria from using them last week, and last night's attack is being correctly perceived as a pinprick.

We'll see if last night results in any progress.

In the meantime, we can count ourselves lucky that, for now at least, this is . . .  

Mr. Mattis's war.

FAKING LEFT AND GOING RIGHT -- THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY AS POLICY

FAKING LEFT AND GOING RIGHT --  THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY AS POLICY

Tonight on CBS's 60 Minutes, Americans will be transfixed by the porn star's story of her affair with Donald Trump.  This follows the attention paid last week to the erstwhile Playboy Playmate's story on CNN of her affair with His Hairness, and Trump's branding of both women as liars.  It also follows months during which we have been bombarded  by obnoxious tweets, daily speculation on who's up or down in our musical chairs White House,  and the endless chaos that is this child-President. 

Under these circumstances,  it is easy to forget another more important reality.  

So, for all of you who have, and most especially for those of you who want to . . .

Here's an important wake-up call.

Trump is a liar, a cheat, a con man and a bully.  But he is also a right winger.  And despite being all of the former, he is having some success at the latter.  Put differently, the office hasn't altered his character.  But it has altered his promised policies.

Begin by recalling that Trump did not run for the Presidency as a right winger.  

In fact, to the contrary, he took on and rejected some of the outworn shibboleths of the far right.  

Trump was vociferously against the war in Iraq during the campaign. And, unlike his fellow-candidates, he was outspoken in criticizing the Bush/Cheney weapons of mass destruction-led march into that quagmire.  On Medicare and Social Security, he was alone among those in the GOP field in claiming that benefits would not be cut on his watch, and on health care, he promised something better than Obamacare -- affordable insurance coverage for all without Obama's mandate or taxes. To that he added the promise not to cut Medicaid and tax reform that would not benefit the super-rich.

A year and two months in, all has changed.

The tax cut put billions in the pockets of corporations and Wall Street, with nominal reductions for individuals that will expire in ten years and the elimination of deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes that will fall with particular heaviness on large blue-state cities and suburbs.  My taxes in Putnam County, New York are going up, as are those for any who live in or near Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago or Boston.  

The tax bill also repealed the individual mandate, which will likely be fatal to the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  The ACA's solvency was three legged -- the elimination of insurance exclusions based on pre-exisiting conditions, mandatory participation in the insurance market to expand the number of premium payers, and state-based exchanges and subsidies for those who could not otherwise find insurance. The first and third of these legs remain, but the second has been gutted, with the likely result that companies will not get the needed expansion in premium paying policy-holders necessary for them to avoid unaffordable price hikes.  

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are now talking about "entitlement reform." For them, that  means cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.  As the deficit rises thanks to shrinking revenue, we can expect that chorus to swell. 

All of this occurred in 2017 during the first year of the Trump Administration.  

And now, on foreign policy, Trump has moved in lock-step.

The big news last week was the firing of Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster as Trump's National Security Advisor (NSA) and the appointment of former Ambassador John Bolton to that post.  

Bolton is an unrepentent hawk who never met a war he was unwilling to send others to fight (he himself avoided the Vietnam War via a stint in the National Guard).  He defends the Iraq War to this day. At the time, he was a full-throated proponent of the  claim -- since refuted -- that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. 

On North Korea, Bolton has come out in favor of the President having a right to strike preemptively.  His theory is that Kim Jong-Un's possession of nuclear weapons is itself an imminent threat and thus eliminates any legal need to go to Congress before striking militarily.  Bolton takes over at NSA at a time when the State Department  has been gutted of under-secretaries and seasoned diplomats with deep experience in regional issues.  And in the wake of that gutting, another war hawk -- the current director of the CIA -- will replace Rex Tillerson as Sectretary of State, and Gina Haspel will take over at the CIA.  Haspel ran a secret CIA prison in Thailand after 9/11, and detainees in that prison were waterboarded.

In the Bush II Adminstration, Vice President Dick Cheney was the author of the 1% doctrine.  Under it, a 1% chance of nuclear or biological war warrants a full-on military response -- along with enhanced interrogation techniqes, i.e., torture -- on the grounds that the harm itself would be utterly catatrophic even if the likelihood was remote.  The caution of real soldiers like Colin Powell is either ignored or greatly minimized.  Back in W's Administration, while Cheney had Bush's ear, Powell was sent out to tout the flawed WMD story.

Bolton, Pompeo and Haspel are Cheney cubed.

Expect Defense Secretary Mattis -- who like Powell understands that wars have unintended consequences -- to be sidelined along the way.

To sum up . . .

We now have a domestic policy, the principal feature of which is a tax cut that guts revenues in order to set up an assault on our already weakened safety net, and a foreign policy, the principal feature of which is likely to be a shoot-first-ask-questions-later resort to guns and the death of diplomacy.

In the Nixon Administration, conservatives bemoaned the fact that, as President, Nixon would regularly fake right and go left.  He was after all the author of liberal gems that included the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).  The former helped clean up our polluted air and water and the latter made workplaces safer.  

In the Trump era, however, the opposite has occurred. 

On the campaign, Trump faked left.

In the White House, he has gone right.

Trump even does this on issues where he has been right wing all along.  On immigration, he wants a wall.  To try to get it,  he overturned DACA, Obama's executive order allowing childhood arrivals to avoid deportation essentially on the grounds that they were innocent victims of someone else's illegal conduct.  The idea was to bribe Democrats into funding the wall in exchange for legislation protecting childhood arrivals.  Trump even claimed to favor DACA recipients and told the nation he would sign a legislative DACA if Congress passed it.  The Democrats then blinked; Sen. Schumer okayed a wall for DACA exchange.   Trump then did nothing to get his party to pass a bill.

The same has occurred on guns.  In the wake of the Parkland massacre, Trump faked left  in a televised round table, telling the assembled bi-partisan Congressional delegation that the law should "take the guns first, go through due process second." He also told GOP Senators at that meeting that they were afraid of the NRA but he, Trump,  wasn't.  The next day, the NRA visited the Oval Office and there was no further talk of taking guns off the street.  Instead, Trump now wants to "harden the targets" that are our middle and high schools and arm teachers.  The vast majority of teachers, however, do not want to be armed, and the kids want to go to schools, not prisons.

Ditto on tariffs.  Trump's original proposal was music to the ears of those old economy workers in Ohio and western Pennsylvania but it was anathema to conservative economists.  The result is that Trump's initial announcement was followed by implementation that literally eliminated its impact. In the end, the vast majority of imported steel will not be tariffed. The duties will fall principally on China.

Trump has the lowest approval ratings since Nixon.  He also has Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller breathing down his neck.  He routinely threatens to rid himself of that prosecutor, labelling the investigation a "witch hunt"  and encouraging his seconds in Congress and on his legal team to "work the refs" by calling for an immediate end to the investigation.  In all this, he is channeling Nixon, the author of the famous Saturday Night Massacre during Watergate.

And in faking left and going right on policy . . . 

He is channeling Nixon's jujitsu on that front as well.

He's just doing it in a different order.

Why?

Part of the reason is that Trump is dishonest and does not care much about policy in any case.  

The other, however, is that he is buying impeachment insurance.  

So long as there is either a majority of GOP members in the House or  less than sixty-six Democrats in the Senate, he will not be impeached and convicted, no matter how terrible the outcome in the pending sexual harassment suit against him or how unseemly -- or graphic -- the porn star's story turns out to be.  

Faking left helps him with those old economy working class white men  who want tariffs and affordable health care. 

But going right gives him a House and Senate that, he thinks,  avoids impeachment and removal.