CAN BERNIE WIN . . . AND WHAT IF HE CAN'T

CAN BERNIE WIN . . .  AND WHAT IF HE CAN'T

There is an old political saw about Republicans falling in line and Democrats falling in love.  It's designed to explain how the respective parties choose there nominees.  Repubicans supposedly pick the safe heir apparent, the next in line -- Bush I in 1988, Dole in 1996, McCain in 2008.  Democrats swoon over fresh newcomers -- JFK, Clinton, Obama.   

Like, however,  much that passes for conventional political wisdom these days, this is probably . . .

Wrong.

For every Democrat loved -- like Obama -- there is one who provoked either the sigh of boredom or a discontented "Meh".  Think Dukakis, Mondale, Carter.  None of them were loved.  Dukakis and Mondale were each the benficiaries of old guards unwilling to either embrace riskier (Jesse Jackson) or threatening (Gary Hart) alternatives that would have limited their power.  As for Carter, in 1976 he benefitted from a crowded field surrounded by candidates decidedly to his left, and though he won the 1980 Democratic nomination, the party's August convention is remembered mostly for Ted Kennedy's dream-shall-never-die speech . . . which is what Democratic love looked like then.

Same for the Republicans.

If Trump refutes any piece of conventional wisdom, it is the notion that GOP primary voters fall in line.  They never came close in 2016.  In a field crowded with papabile -- four former or current Senators, five former or current Governors -- Trump's irregularity stood out like a sore thumb.  Indeed, between his lies, foul mouth, school-yard taunts and bullying, Trump couldn't have been part of any GOP line, even had he wanted to be.

And he clearly didn't.

So, what's happening today?

After two caucuses and one primary,  Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist and registered Independent, is the front runner for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.    He won 46% of the vote in the Nevada caucuses yesterday, assembling a broad coalition of voters that left the second place finisher (Biden) more than twenty-five points behind. Five Thirty Eight, stat wunderkind Nate Silver's independent vehicle for modeling/predicting all things political and athletic, now gives Sanders a 45% (or almost even) chance of being the party's actual nominee come this summer.  

The next contest is the South Carolina primary this coming Saturday. That is closely followed by Super Tuesday on March 3, where 1,357 delegates (or 34% of the total pledged delegates) will be chosen in contests in fourteen states and two other jurisdictions (American Samao and Democrats Abroad). To win the nomination outright, any candidate needs half (or 1,991) of the pledged delegates on the first ballot or half of the 4,750 total delegates (2,376) on subsequent ballots. Of the total delegates, 771 are super-delegates (office holders, ex-Presidents, state party and county party chairs). They are  free to support anyone they want but only on the second ballot and going forward. 

In South Carolina, Biden is still ahead in the polls but not by much.  Sanders is a strong second, five points behind,  with Steyer five behind him and  Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar each seven or so behind Steyer.  Critically, however, Sanders has closed the gap between him and Biden with black voters, who make up a majority of the state's Democratic primary voters.

If Biden loses and Sanders wins  in South Carolina, it is difficult to see how Biden (or the other moderates, all of whom will presumably have done worse than Joe) can go  forward. Neither Biden nor the others have enough money to buy paid media in all fifteen Super Tuesday contests.  And though late-entrant Michael Bloomberg is on all the Super Tuesday ballots, and has spent more than anyone on paid media by orders of magnitude, his poor (indeed, positively awful) debate showing last week has taken the proverbial bloom off his rose.

In the category of not learning from one's mistakes, Bloomberg is set to appear in his second debate later this week, where there is no telling how he will do.  He has, however, not been partiularly good at debates throughout his brief political career and there is no reason to assume he will be magically transformed in the next few days.

Which leaves us with Bernie.

The candidate not by any means in line . . . 

But difficult in these times of Trump to love.

Right now, a generic Democrat and Trump would appear to each have  226 electoral votes from states either in or leaning into their respective columns.  That leaves roughly 86 electoral votes in the clearly up-for-grabs category.  Those votes are in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Today, Bernie is ahead in the polls in Michigan and Pennsylvania and behind in Florida and Wisconsin.  In a very old poll, he was slightly ahead in Arizona.  Were he to lose Florida and Arizona but win the other three, he would be President, all else being equal; without Wisconsin, where he is now behind, he would lose.  Were he to flip Arizona but lose Wisconsin while holding Pennsylvania and Michigan, he would still win. And on the optimistic side, there are polls in Florida that say the race between Sanders and Trump is at this point tied. So, even there . . .

Maybe.

All of these scenarios, however,  are radically uncertain.  On the one hand, state polls are often not that good and in any case can age quickly into irrelevance.  On the other, even where he is winning, Sanders' margins are not insurmountable,  He leads Trump by five points in Minnesota, better than Hillary's margin but nowhere near a lock.  In the last Virgina poll, he was losing to Trump in a state Hillary won; that's 13 electoral votes he cannot afford to give up. 

And perhaps most importantly, the negative campaign against him hasn't really begun.

According to the polls, 65% of Americans hate socialism.  

Yet Bernie persists . . .

Happily embracing the title with a qualifier.

He says he is a "democratic socialist".

When asked to describe countries that fit into this category, Sanders says he isn't thinking about Cuba or Venezuela, neither of which are democratic in any functional sense.  Instead, he claims to have Denmark and Sweden in mind.  That's nice. . . 

But for two problems. 

One is that voters are not likely to investigate the difference all that closely, and the GOP will be more than happy to confuse them.  The other is that, assuming socialism involves some state ownership of the means of production, it's not clear to me that Americans favor allowing any vote to make that happen. 

For a number of reasons, all of this is really a shame for Bernie.  

One is that, if he is claiming to be a socialist, he's not a particularly good one. He's certainly not advocating the take-over of whole industries.  Even with heath care a la Sanders, the private sector will have to provide the services Medicare pays for. Though Sanders is pretending he'll be able to lower costs by some sort of legislated fiat, he knows that whatever emerges will be negotiated.  Doctors and the AMA are not going to sua sponte accept a price list.  Nor are the drug companies.

Bernie's aides and seconds are now blanketing the cable shows with claims that their man is really just a 21st century version of Franklin Roosevelt, and my view (which is also Paul Krugman's) is that this is pretty much correct.  He's not advocating state ownership of the means of production. He's  just talking up a heightened regulatory environment where the concept of "public goods" enters the lexicon as an alternative to all things market based.  In that world, we get to think about education, health care, clean air and water, and the fight against global warming as something we're all entitled to, as things that as a moral matter shouldn't go to the highest bidder and as a practical matter have often been destroyed on the altar of markets uber alles.

The other, of course, is that if you are really just FDR-redux, why not lead with that rather than the whole democratic socialist mantra?  I mean, it's not as if a non-American, more or less despised, foreign sounding label is his only problem.  He's also had a heart attack; he's 78 years old; and some of his more ardent supporters are acting like left wing versions of you-know-who's.  

So, please Bernie, give it a rest.  

Even AOC is telling us you won't be able to enact the full menu.

And she likes you.

Can he win?

I don't know.

But what I do know is this.  If he can't, we better figure that out now and come up with someone who can.  And from at least what the early primary voters are telling us, none of the current candidates on offer fit that bill.  

There are miles off Joe Biden's fast ball.  Warren and Klobuchar wax and wane from high to low moments; many of the former are inspirational but none are sustained.  Steyer and Bloomberg really do think cash is king in a party and at a time where we cannot let it be; if either is to be president, they'd have to be as eloquent as they are rich . . . and they're not.  And Mayor Pete, the smartest of the lot,  has of late revealed a snarky streak that makes intelligence over-bearing and therefore ineffective.  There's a reason Amy Klobuchar asked if he was calling her dumb for not remembering the name of the Mexican president.  He kinda was.

I am not willing to give up on them . . .

Yet.

But if, as and when I do, an idea sparked in a conversation with a friend yesterday was intriguing.

For me, it is a given that we need to defeat Trump.  He is getting worse, not better.  The lies, narcissism and paranoia are hollowing out the government, replacing any remaining competence with sycophants, crippling institutions, and turning the law into a private vendetta-machine.  I do not believe it at all certain this experiment we call a democratic republic can survive a second term.  And I am certain Trump doesn't give a damn if it does.   

Perhaps there is a third way.

An independent fusion ticket that could actually win in the electoral college and save us from Trump.

Twenty years ago, one of them decided "for the sake of . . . unity . . . and the strength of our democracy" to honor a flawed decision that stopped a vote count that would have elected him, and eighteen days ago,  the other decided to remove a flawed President despite the opposition of his party and the certain vilification that followed.

Candidates for the White House regularly talk about putting country above party. 

These two have already done so.

So, my fusion ticket, a political Hail Mary if you will, is . . .

Al Gore and Mitt Romney.

To be continued . . .

VALENTINES DAY 2020

VALENTINES DAY 2020

Todays is Valentines Day.

Romantics among us, conscious of our sacred obligations in this cynical world, enlist the assistance of Hallmark and florists in an effort to send the right message of devotion to our inamorata.

The day, however, like love itself, is shrouded in mystery.

Some claim it was simply the outgrowth of the pagan holiday Lupercalia, a fertility festival celebrated by the ancient Romans in mid-February.  The name comes from the Luperci, an order of Roman priests.  On the appointed day, they would gather at the cave where the she-wolf  ostensibly suckled and cared for Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus, and sacrifice a goat and a dog, said for some reason to represent fertility and purity, respectively.  After dividing the goat's hide into strips and dipping the strips in the dog's blood, the priests then walked Rome's various via and fields slapping welcoming women and crops with the bloody strips.  Fertility supposedly enhanced, the women placed their names in a big urn at the end of the day and were paired for the year with the Roman bachelors who picked their names from the urn.

Like many things Roman, Lupercalia died at the hands of a Pope, in this case Gelsius at the end of the 5th century  who deemed the holiday "un-Christian".  Also like many things Roman, however, the festival was popular with the masses.  So the church couldn't  just kill it.  It had to find a substitute. And thus was born . . .

St. Valentine's Day.

St. Valentine was a martyr.  

Or, more accurately, there were a number of St. Valentines who were martyrs.

One was a Catholic priest who performed secret marriages in violation of Emperor Claudius's decree that soldiers remain single. Another was a bishop beheaded by Claudius.  A third was a prisoner who fell in love with the girl who regularly visited him in jail and sent her a "From Your Valentine" letter just before he died.

It's not particularly clear which of these St. Valentines the church fathers intended to honor on February 14.  And,  in truth,  the connection between this Feast Day (which is what we Catholics call the days that honor our saints) and our own mid-winter festival of love was for centuries pretty dubious.  Though Pope Gelsius is ofen credited with substituting St. Valentine (or one of them) for Lupercalia, that's more a theory than a fact.  He definitely outlawed the latter but it's not clear he intended to replace its message with the former. 

For that we have to thank Chaucer.

Who appointed "Seynt Valentine's" as the day "whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate."

For the record, he was talking about the mating habits of  . . . 

Birds.

Shakespeare, as was often  his wont, got a little racey with the day.  In Hamlet, Ophelia innocently says "To-morrow is St Valentine's Day,/ All in the morning betime,/ And I a maid at your window./To be your Valentine."  Things then get R-rated as she continues: "Then up he rose,/And donn'd his clothes,/And dupp'd the chamber-door,/Let in the maid, that out a maid/ Never departed more."  

Once opened, or "dupp'd" as Shakespeare would put it, the door linking the day to romance has never been shut.  

Cards became the rage in the 19th century, and in 1868, Cadbury marketed chocolate in a heart shaped box for the first time.  In the US today, more than 190 million Valentines Day cards are sent or exchanged, with total expenditures exceeding $18 billion.  

And the holiday has also gone global. 

Latin America calls it the "Day of Lovers".  In China, it's "lovers' festival". In Iran, though the ayatollahs ban it, they have had to fight fire with fire, resurrecting the Persian festival known as Esfandegan, where celebrants on February 17 tell their wives and mothers how much they love them.

Of course, the day has not always produced the orgy of love the saints, poets or free-marketeers (may) have envisioned.

In 1929 in Chicago, it became home to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, a macabre, sub-machine gun rub-out of seven bootleggers by their Capone-led competitors.  One of the victims even survived for three hours, long enough for him to tell the police no one shot him . . .which I guess was his Valentine to Capone.  And speaking of organized crime hits, Jimmy Hoffa was actually born on Valentines Day.

This year, though the day is still not over, nothing particularly untoward has happened.  

The Justice Department just announced it will not prosecute Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators about a media disclosure regarding the Clinton email contretemps, which is good, mostly because McCabe didn't commit any crime. Trump, who hates McCabe, is now furious, and with hours left in the day, you never know what he'll do before bed time.  This comes a day after Attorney General Barr was forced to (finally) tell the President to stop tweeting about Justice Department investigations and cases involving his convicted friends, another good thing in view of the fact that Trump's tweets now have career prosecutors resigning,  justifiably convinced that the President is hell bent on destroying DOJ's independence so that it can be turned into his own personal vendetta-machine . . .

With, of course, the power to subpoena.

And indict.  

All of this is news.

As --  before it --  was bribing Ukraine's president, impeachment, the Senate trial, the GOP's cowardice, Mitt Romney's courage, the State of the (Dis)union speech, the Mueller report, obstruction, the 16,000 (and counting) lies,  the suck-ups to fascist Putin and sundry other authoritarians, generals called "dopes", countries called "shitholes",  neo-Nazis called "fine people", the media called the "enemy", the p**y g******g . . . 

And the primaries .  

Bernie, Pete, Amy.

Biden and Warren.

Iowa, New Hampshire, and Bloomberg in the wing$.

All news.

But not today.

Today is Valentines Day.

My wife prohibited me from buying her a present. 

So I did.

Flowers.  

And one of those 190 million cards.

The front said "Guess Who Loves You Today!"  Inside: "Same Person Who Loves You Every Day, But Today You Get A Card."

Without her, I could not survive the bad news.  

Or celebrate the good.

Happy Valentines Day

LINCOLN WEEPS

LINCOLN WEEPS

And so it has come to this.

The party that  started by ending  slavery will end by endorsing bribery.

Sometimes less is more.

There is nothing left to say.

Lincoln weeps.

PLAYING FOR HISTORY

PLAYING FOR HISTORY

So, here's a question.

When is something so obvious that denying it becomes . . .

Impossible?

Some think the answer, at least theoretically, may be . . .

 Never.

There are whole schools of psychology founded on the notion that our perceptions are flawed. They hold that people routinely come to incorrect judgments about reality given a host of tricks our brain plays on us.

Confirmation bias. Present bias. Hindsight bias. Adversity bias. The endowment effect. The clustering illusion. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

The list is endless.

We routinely deem true what we expect is true and false what we do not expect is true.  We undervalue the future in relation to the present.  We assume that what occurred was predictable all along. We think people are happier elsewhere if the weather is better there.  We overvalue what we already have.  We ignore differences but overemphasize similarities in data.  We make the data fit our conclusions rather than have the conclusions follow from the data.

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut.  We infer reality from memory, from what we can recall.  But recall, especially recent recall,  is not necessarily reality.

So we can  get it wrong.

And it gets even worse.

Attach an irrelevant  pejorative to someone and your assessment on what is relevant declines before you even  know anything else about the person.  It works in the opposite direction too, which is why people often think handsome men or beautiful women are ipso facto smart.

That bit about "sticks and stones" your mother taught you?

 It ain't true.

Names matter. 

The only way to combat these biases, effects and fallacies, to check our heuristics so that they enable accuracy rather than distort reality, is through . . .

Evidence.

Which leads -- regular readers knew we'd get there -- to the current impeachment of Donald John Trump.

The trial of Trump started yesterday in the Senate.  He was impeached a month ago by the House of Representatives, which voted out two counts. The first accuses Trump of abusing the office of the Presidency by, in effect, bribing Ukraine's president into announcing a phony investigation of Joe Biden in exchange for a White House meeting with Trump and unlocking the military assistance money previously appropriated by Congress.  The second accuses him of obstructing Congress's investigation of his wrongdoing.  

There is a already a mountain of evidence establishing both counts -- witnesses (e.g., Lt. Col. Vindman) who recount Trump asking Ukraine's Zelensky in a July phone call to investigate Biden; the actual read out of the call produced by the White House; contemporaneous accounts from Ambassadors Sondland, Volker and Yovanovitch confirming that Trump held up aid to get his demanded "investigations"; other witnesses confirming that Ukraine knew it was being held hostage; and complete stonewalling by the White House in response to subpoenas for documents and witnesses.  No documents were provided. No witnesses were given permission to testify.  Those who did simply defied the White House.

So far, and in the face of this onslaught, not a single Republican member of Congress has broken ranks and come out against the President. Instead, there have been ludicrous claims that no "direct" evidence establishes any of the charges against Trump (false; Vindman and Sondland are as "direct" as it gets), or that the so-called call "transcript" actually exonerates him (false; "I would like you to do us a favor, though"), or that what he did was not an impeachable offense (or a crime) even if it actually happened (false; bribery is a crime; so is wire fraud; and stopping Presidents from using foreigners to obtain power was pretty much the Founders' principal reason for the impeachment clause in the first place).  

At the same time, in a turn that embraces Orwell  and Alice in equal measure, Trump's Congressional enablers have both refused calls  to hear from other witnesses who have relevant knowledge -- Secretary of State Pompeo, former National Security Advisor Bolton (who has said he can provide relevant evidence), and OMB Associate Director of National Security Programs Michael Duffy (whose email states that "POTUS" put the hold on aid to Ukraine)-- and lambasted the House for not having obtained the evidence they now refuse to demand. 

And, of course, between the time the House voted its articles in December and the Senate started its proceedings this week, even more evidence has come to light -- emails and other documents and media interviews with Giuliani's hatchet man, Lev Furman, who now tells us that "everyone" -- Trump, Pence, Giuliani, Barr, Pompeo, Bolton -- either knew or had to have known exactly what was going down.  Like David Holmes (the counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Ukraine), Furman even overheard Trump yelling about it in a phone call.

Through it all, Trump has performed to type.  He does not typically  do formal addresses, and when he does (e.g., in connection with the killing of Iran's Soleimani), he has to surround himself with generals and the Joint Chiefs to create an appearance of credibility he can't remotely pull off on his own.   His go to forum is the "rally", one of the ubiquitous venues where red-hatters and MAGA enthusiasts swoon to a President who prefers cursing to thinking while regularly channeling his inner school yard bully to the delight of assembled worshippers.  There, Speaker Pelosi is "crazy",  House Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff is "pencil neck", and the 73 year-old whose real day job is tweeting pretends he is mature . . .

Or sane.

Whether all this is actually working for Trump depends . . . 

And grudge holding GOPers will love this . . .

On what the meaning of "working" is.

If it means retaining approximately 40-42% approval ratings and requiring 53 (the number of GOP) Senators to place their courage and honesty in blind trusts as they dutifully find him not guilty in the upcoming impeachment trial, then the answer is most certainly "Yes".

But if it means playing for history, for the respect or approval of all those unborn Americans who will someday read about this era and weep, for coming through this, as Jon Meacham puts it, more "Margaret Chase Smith than Joe McCarthy", the answer is . . . 

Not even close.

Remember all those biases, fallacies, effects, and  misleading heuristics.  

We have lots of ways to fool ourselves and today's GOP is using them all.  

But, at the end of the day . . .

Truth outs.

That's why they are called fallacies.

Just ask Mandela . . .

Or King . . .

Or Lincoln.

On impeachment, even John Dean will do.

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.