Trump, Bezos and Ben Franklin: A Chess Game Played in Hell

On July 26, 1775, the Continental Congress appointed Dr. Benjamin Franklin Postmaster General of what would within a year be called the United States of America. Over the past 245 years, America has had 75 Postmasters. The first - and to far only - woman to serve as Postmistress General, Megan Brennan, is scheduled to retire shortly.  According to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center, 90% of the American public has a favorable view of the United States Postal Service (USPS), handily outdistancing even such other popular federal agencies as the National Park Service and NASA.

Not only is the Post Office widely popular: it is of immense importance to the well-being of the nation. Establishing “post offices and post roads” is one of the powers of Congress explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, right up there with the power to tax and borrow, declare war, coin money, establish federal courts and issue patents and copyrights. And yet, despite its vast popularity and historic centrality, there are those who have long sought to dismember and then privatize the USPS. Chief among them are the nation’s current Chief Executive and his most doting, most conservative acolytes and financial backers. The question is, of course, “Why? Why do they want to dismember the USPS?” In truth, IMPOTUS’s reasoning is quite a bit different - and more obvious - than that of his political allies. In order to get a grip on the political right’s modus operandi, we must go back in time to the year 2006, when the Republican-controlled 109th Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) which required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs . . . 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation. PAEA must have been extremely important to those who introduced, supported and voted for its passage: from its initial introduction into the hopper to presidential signature was a mere 13 days (Dec. 7-Dec. 20, 2006).  

Writing in the journal of the Institute for Policy Studies, authors Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger and Brian Wakamo noted: If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years. This extraordinary mandate created a financial “crisis” that has been used to justify harmful service cuts and even calls for postal privatization. Additional cuts in service and privatization would be devastating for millions of postal workers and customers. Again, the question is “Why?” I’m not terribly sure what was behind the original bill and the speed-of-light alacrity which Congress used to get it passed and signed. For Republicans it is understandable: they have a tendency to want to see the federal agencies and programs shrink-wrapped to the point where they are eventually turned over to the private sector. That I can understand even if I am decidedly against it. However, two of the three co-signers of the PAEA (H.R. 6407) joining in with the bill’s author, Virginia Republican Tom Davis - were Democrats . . . one of whom was Henry Waxman (D-CA), one of his era’s craftiest and most universally respected progressives. So when I say “I don’t understand,” believe me . . . I don’t understand!

The part I do understand - minus the Democratic support - is that Congress was setting a future trap for USPS; making it possible to blame them for fiscal incompetence . . . for losing billions upon billions of dollars. Well, if it hadn’t have been for passage of H.R. 6407 in the first place, Ben Franklin’s great great, great, great grandchildren would have been showing sizable profits.

Just about a year ago (April 29, 2019 to be precise) Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio filed H.R. 2382, the “USPS Fairness Act,” which would eliminate the pre-funding requirement. Advocates claim that it could single-handedly put the Postal Service out of the red and into the black. (At present, it is estimated that unless something is done soon, USPS will run out of money by 2024). Supporters argue the bill makes financial sense, puts the Postal Service on an even footing with literally every other federal agency, and helps ensure the solvency of one the programs that most directly affects ordinary Americans. The bill garnered 301 cosponsors (61 of whom were Republicans, and passed the House on February 5, 2020 by a veto-proof vote of 309-106. It was then sent over to the Senate where it picked up 5 cosponsors and was assigned to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. It has gone no further since and likely will languish . . . especially in light of IMPOTUS’s recent involvement in the issue.

Then there’s IMPOTUS’ line of argumentation. This past Friday he threatened to block an emergency loan to shore up the U.S. Postal Service unless it dramatically raised shipping prices on online retailers, an unprecedented move to seize control of the agency that analysts said could plunge its finances into a deeper hole. “The Postal Service is a joke,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. To obtain a $10 billion line of credit Congress approved this month, “The post office should raise the price of a package by approximately four times,” he said.  Several administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said Trump’s criticism of Postal Service rates is rooted in a desire to hurt Amazon in particular. They have said that he fumes publicly and privately at Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, for news coverage that Trump believes is unfair.  Of course, raising postal rates “by approximately four times” would likely hurt rural Americans - heretofore among his strongest, most loyal allies - the most. 

Delivering packages has been a good business for the Postal Service, making up just 5 percent of the Postal Service’s volume, but accounting for 30 percent of its revenue. And package volume jumped 53 percent last week, compared with the same period in 2019, as a homebound nation dives into e-commerce for groceries, prescriptions and household essentials. As much as IMPOTUS believes this to be the start of a game-winning strategy which will end up in a fifteen-move “check mate,” he is actually playing his to opponent’s game plan.  What he likely does not realize is that should USPS raise its shipping rates by 400%, Amazon can easily save money by doing even more of its own shipping . . . which no doubt would be quite harmful to USPS.  But far from being able to blame Amazon for the post office’s further economic slide, voters will blame Donald Trump.  And there’s not thing one he can do about it.

‘45 has long claimed that he is “the most transparent president in American history.”  Goodness knows, he says it at  least one a week.  And it’s just possible that in this deranged bit of braggadocio, he is telling the truth without really knowing it. How so?  For as long as he’s been in the public eye - whether in real estate, on television, in the air at the head of some eponymous wine, water, airline or tie - he has clearly massaged those who massage him and attempted to pummel those who will not praise him.  Cases in point: his obsessive ridding - if not eradicating - virtually every accomplishment of Barack Obama and his administration.   His belittling, deprecating and re-tagging people who do not, will not and cannot go along with him.  In these things, he is both obvious and transparent.  (One of the latest is his renaming Amazon founder - as well as publisher of the  Washington Post and wealthiest person on the planet  - Jeff Bezos “Jeff Bozo.”)  It must really be galling for IMPOTUS to have to  play someone else’s game only to realize that he’s getting closer and closer to hearing the words “check mate.”  

189 days until the next election.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

"Damnatio Memoriae" Or, When Was the Last Time Anyone Named a Kid Caligula?

Damnatio memoriae is a Latin phrase literally meaning condemnation of memory, the sense being a judgment that a person must not be remembered. It was a form of dishonor that could be passed by the Roman Senate upon traitors or others who brought dishonor to the Roman State. The intent was to erase someone from history, a task somewhat easier in ancient times, when documentation was much sparser. In ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae could be used to condemn Roman elites and emperors after their deaths. He/they could have their property seized, their names erased, and whatever statues, coins or friezes might exist, reworked. Then too, it was a sure sign that no one would ever again be called by those names; I mean, when was the last time anyone named a child Caligula, Nero, Domitian (that’s his effaced bust on the left) or Vespasian?

(n.b. the Romans weren’t the only ones into damnatio memoriae: centuries before the Romans, the Egyptians removed all mention of Queen Hatshepsut and Pharaoh Akhenaten (the husband of Queen Nefertiti) from royal history; as recently as 2011, Hosni Mubarak, the President of Egypt for almost 30 years, was deposed. After his deposition, the names of both Hosni and his wife, Suzanne, were removed from all Egyptian monuments. The Soviets under Stalin were also hip deep in this practice, becoming expert at eliminating enemies of the state from photographs in which they were originally posed next their “revered leader.” The most famous case was likely that of Nikolai Yezhov, nicknamed ‘The Vanishing Commisar.’ Then too, it is an ancient Jewish custom to “blot out the name of Amalek” - from whom the wicked Haman was descended “from under the Heavens” - by the sound of noisemakers on the joyous [some would say “frivolous”] holiday known as Purim (c.f. Deut. 25:15.)

Were it up to me, I would heartily reimpliment damnatio memoriae and not just for the current POTUS.  Indeed, I would gladly place under this umbrella of ignominy the names of Mike Pence (V.P.), Mike Pompeo (Sec. of State), William Barr (Attorney General), Steven Mnuchin (Sec. of Treasury), Wilbur Ross (Sec. of Commerce), Betsy DeVos (Sec. of Education), Ben Carson (Sec. of Housing and Urban Development), and Elaine Chaio (Sec. of Transportation, not to mention Senator Mitch McConnell (Senate Majority Leader) and Chief Congressional Enabler), and Rep. Devin Nunes (Ranking Member, House Intelligence Committee, not to mention Jared Kusher and Stephen Miller, (Senior White House Advisers).

Why these folks, one well may ask?  Because they have gladly, willingly and chillingly lent their wholehearted support to a president whose political raison d’être has had since day one far, far more to do with his ego and their personal interests than the needs of the people or nation they are supposed to be serving.   I cannot for the life of me understand why these supposedly well-educated, highly successful people could maintain such silence and servility in the face of so much psychopathy. Are they afraid of being fired or of being called names? Or  are they more interested in bringing about some sort of religious rapture for the very well heeled?

Of course, the mere exercise of those mentioned above, who in my humble opinion should be considered for a spot on our national damnatio memoriae list, is a bit of satiric wish fulfillment. Nonetheless, what’s been going on these past 3+ years - and especially the past several weeks - certainly qualifies the POTUS and his enablers to be part of this ancient ritual. The sins for which he and his clique should be eliminated from memory include far more than the tax bonanza granted the hyper wealthy, the steady stream of lies, and the utter incompetence and what The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols calls his “political glossolalia.” The worst of the worst it seems to me, is the sin of convincing a solid minority that the media can neither be trusted nor believed ever again; that they are consciously engaged in taking this administration down; that anyone who disagrees with the POTUS - and this list includes the likes of Speaker Pelosi, Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff and the likely soon-to-be-fired Dr. Anthony Fauci - is a traitorous conspirator bent on destroying not only the president, but the nation itself. And if for no other reason than the video-taped fact that ‘45 will not supply states whose governors aren’t “nice to” or “supportive of” the man in the Oval Office with respirators, surgical gloves, masks and gowns . . . makes him eminently worthy of being forgotten.  Oh, I forgot, all these medical necessities belong to him personally .  . . not the people. 

The time will come when well-heeled Trump supporters begin collecting gazillions of dollars in order to create a presidential library/museum in perpetual remembrance of a man they never truly liked in the first place. For those who believe in damnatio memoriae, I am happy to report that purchasing land for such a library will be next to impossible. Think about it: the price of empty space to build a presidential library in:

• Independence, Missouri (Harry Truman)

• Grand Rapids, Michigan: Jerald R. Ford)

• Simi Valley, California (Ronald Reagan)

• Atlanta, Georgia (Jimmy Carter)

• College Station, Texas (George W.Bush)

• Little Rock, Arkansas (Bill Clinton) and

• Hoffman Estates, Illinois (Barack Obama)

was and is far, far less pricey than 725 5th Avenue, New York, New York, where the Trump Library/Museum would likely be located. And despite the fact that none of America’s previous 44 presidents were  outright paragons of moral or political perfection, they all spoke and wrote English with greater facility, and knew more about the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and Emancipation Proclamation than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  None, so far as I know, exhibited the mass of foibles, personal insecurity or contempt for both the people and the nation they were elected to serve as does ‘45.  It seems to me that the  greatest punishment the nation could mete out to this self-proclaimed “stable genius” would be a declaration of damnatio memoriae.

Just think: no more children named Caligula, Hatshepsut, Domitian or . . . Donald.

204 days until the next election . . . whether in person or via mail.

  Copyright©2020, Kurt F. Stone

The Psychology and Politics of Unfriending

As of 7:00 a.m. today, I have precisely 701 Facebook “friends.” For reasons largely unknown (perhaps the relative boredom of isolation), I decided to cull through this list and see how many of the 701 I could identify. I’m happy to report that easily more than half were known to me; a mixture of family, old school-mates, fellow “Hollywood Brats,” political people, students and colleagues from various universities, former synagogue youth group/summer camp chaverim (Hebrew for “friends”) and former and current congregants. Then too, there were literally dozens whom I had virtually no idea of who, how and why they were on my friends list, and more than a handful of people who were no longer alive . . . although their Facebook pages were still “idly active.” All this took somewhat a bit less than 2 hours. 

After (sadly) deleting the deceased, I started looking over the pages of people I couldn’t for the  life of me identify.  That’s when it dawned on me that if I checked  out who was on their friends list that might explain our “relationship.”  In many cases, it was but a single  individual we had  in common.  One such person - a writer who had one of my politics students on her list - had just posed a message stating, in part, “It's after midnight Sunday night, and I can't begin to think about getting to sleep. Listening to the things Trump said today has made that impossible. I know I have a number of "friends" on FB who support this man, and I have come to the end of my tolerance for you. Tonight I am unfriending all of you—and I don't care if we have been friends for decades or if we are related by marriage or blood. . . .You are no longer my friends or relations, on Facebook or in real life. Don't contact me to defend your position; I never, ever want to hear from you again. Goodbye.”

To be perfectly honest (unlike the POTUS), I’m not sure whether I agree or disagree with this Facebook friend. To unfriend or not to unfriend: that is the question. On the one hand, I really, truly hate the nausea and bile that well up every time I read the words of praise these otherwise intelligent, successful people heap upon their miscreant-in-chief.  But who ever said that just because a person is successful it follows that they understand thing one about civics, civility or sanity? Ridding oneself of the bile is as simple as pressing the “unfriend” button . . . one, two, three and voila!  They and their noxious nostrums have evaporated into the political putrescence. But it comes at a price: knowing that they are forever gone from my life.   On the other hand, there is a part of me that truly wants to believe that to unfriend those who are intolerably smug and small is to make me far less a mentsch - a decent human being - than I could cope with. But then I remember that quote from Winston Churchill: “Never give in, never, never, never–never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

This week’s essay is the 874th I’ve posted since February 2005 back when this blog was called “Beating the Bushes.". In all these years, I’ve received thousands upon thousands of comments . . . most praiseworthy, many thoughtful, and more than I care to remember nasty and vile. Since many are sent to one of my many email addresses, I have the ability to pre-screen and send the writers of vile drek directly into the various spam files. I must admit that every once in a while I do read what these folks write. Some are so strident as to be a stitch; others are threatening, horribly misspelled, and make me proud to have come from a bright, well-educated family. With Facebook it’s a bit different. If you want to keep the rest of your little world from seeing just how nuts and politically poisoned people can be, you first must unfriend them. But then I think: what do I care if the rest of my readers think they’re village idiots? That’s their - e.g. the village idiots - problem!

While I can certainly applaud my anonymous Facebook friend’s decision to unfriend all those who persist in being aggressively, aggravatingly pro-Trump – despite all the lies, the inability to accept the input of those far, far better versed than he, and that otherworldly egomania - I myself cannot push these folks overboard. Of course, I don’t have to read their screeds.    Sooner or later they will suffer loss, and may well come to grasp that there are more things under heaven and earth than can ever be blamed on Obama and Clinton, Pelosi, Biden, George Soros or even Dr. Fauci.

In the long run, unfriending those who annoyingly, flippantly oppose one’s political point of view and hate you for not loving Trump and all he stands for (and against) will, it seems to me, do next to nothing.  On the other hand, supporting those who agree can at least let you know that there are more sane people in the world than you ever dreamed of. Instead of grousing get cracking; there are candidates to support and elections to be won. There’s a country and a world to be saved . . .

“Never give in, never, never, never–never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

219 days until the next election.

Be well, read books and watch movies, be extra nice to those you are quarantined with and WASH YOUR HANDS!

Copyright ©, 2020, Kurt F. Stone

Is History History?

Among those who are reasonably well-educated, it is generally agreed upon that Herodotus (that’s him in the photo on the left) is “The Father of History.” Born and raised in Halicarnassus (modern-day Turkey), Herodotus (c. 484-425 B.C.E) is best known for his work The Histories, a straightforward account of the origins and execution of the Greco-Persian Wars, which lasted from 499 to 479 B.C.E. “Here is the account,” the work begins, “of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus in order that the deeds of men not be erased by time, and that the great and miraculous works–both of the Greeks and the barbarians–not go unrecorded.”  Most of what we know about the Battle of Marathon is from Herodotus. “The Histories” also incorporated observations and stories, both factual and fictional, from Herodotus’ travels.

Ever since, the writing, editing and reading of history has been of extraordinary importance. Across the centuries and generations, the study of history has been of paramount importance. “'Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” philosopher Georges Santayana. Speaking before the House of Commons, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill modified Santayana just a tad, changing it to “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.' Whichever is the true rendering, the truth remains; without knowing, understanding and caring about history, our mutual future is in dire jeopardy.

Over the past several weeks and days, national attention has been fixated on the United States Senate as to whether or not the Upper Chamber would vote to convict or acquit our impeached president of the United States (IMPOTUS), Donald J. Trump of abuse of power and contempt of Congress.  Among those Republicans in the political cross-hairs, none were more prominent than Senators Romney (UT), Murkowski (AK), Collins (ME) and Alexander (TN). All 4 had publicly spoken about their desire to subpoena witnesses for the senate trial. In the long-run, Senators Romney and Collins decided to vote in favor of subpoenaing witnesses like former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton, Acting Chief of Staff and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Nick Mulvaney. and Michael Duffey, a senior official in the Office of Management and Budget. Senator Romney evinced a level of moral courage seldom seen among members of the Republican caucus.  As can best be determined, Senator Susan Collins was given a pass by Majority Leader McConnell: not only was her vote unneeded; had she voted against subpoenaing witnesses, voters in Maine would likely have voted her out of office.  In the meantime, Senators Alexander and Murkowski changed their minds stating, in essence, that although the IMPOTUS was obviously guilty of the charges against him, they did not add up to impeachable offenses. So far as Tennessee Senator Alexander, who is retiring and thus not running for reelection, his rationale is, to my way of thinking nearly incomprehensible.  On his official website, he (or his staff) wrote:

I worked with other senators to make sure that we have the right to ask for more documents and witnesses, but there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense. …The Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate. 

“The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did. I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday. …Our founding documents provide for duly elected presidents who serve with ‘the consent of the governed,’ not at the pleasure of the United States Congress. Let the people decide.” 

Likewise, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s logic was more than a bit skewed: 

“Given the partisan nature of this impeachment from the very beginning and throughout. I have come to the conclusion that there will be no fair trial in the Senate. I don’t believe the continuation of this process will change anything. It is sad for me to admit that, as an institution, the Congress has failed.”

What Senators Alexander and Murkowski - along with a lot of other Republicans (and a few Democrats) - are going to wind up with is a tainted reputation - an acidic asterisk - for the rest of time for being elected leaders who, for whatever reason, decided that despite the IMPOTUS’s obvious guilt, were not going to vote to support hearing from a single witness against him. Imagine that: a trial of momentous import without a single witness! This makes virtually no sense. It seems that in the long run, Senators Alexander, Murkowski et al care not a whit about the judgment of history; they are far, far more concerned about what the president, his henchmen and supporters care about them today.

In other words: to hell with tomorrow.

History has become history . . .

In this essay’s second paragraph, we presented the nearly identical aphorisms of Santayana and Churchill about those who forget history being doomed to repeat it. Pretty chilling stuff. Well, in this instance - the senate’s 51-49 vote against subpoenaing witnesses - the man of the hour is neither as wise as the former nor as politically adroit as the latter. In this case the aphorist of note was a legendary industrialist and multi-billionaire (about $200 billion in today’s $$$) who also happened to be one of most the hateful bigots of all time: Henry Ford.  Unlike Santayana and Churchill, Ford believed with every fiber of his being that “History is bunk.”  In a widely-reported 1916 interview with a journalist from the Chicago Tribune, Ford told the writer, one Charles N. Wheeler:

"Say, what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care about what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don't know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across and I don't care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today."

(It should be noted that not only did Ford create the industrial assembly line and the world’s first affordable automobile, he also purchased a newspaper [The Dearborn Independent] in order to publish a multi-issue screed entitled The International Jew: The World’s Problem . . . which incorporated most, if not all of, history’s most vicious anti-Semitic tract: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  To this very day, Ford remains a god to White Nationalists, neo-Nazis and conspiracy addicts of all stripes.)

It is more than depressing to imagine people who are supposedly of accomplishment and rank, people who are in a position to play a significant role on the stage of history, having so little - if any - concern whatsoever about their future place on that stage. I guess so long as they maintain their political positions, not draw the fury or ire of their “highly stable genius” and live out lives of comfort and recognition, that’s all that matters. I for one cannot understand how so many people whose lives are both guided and guarded by deeply-held religious scruples and theological concerns of eternal life, can at the same time be so lacking in curiosity - so uncaring - about their place in the annals of history. Does it not matter to them that history - if not G-d co-self (my term for “him/herself”) - will have the final judgement. Has it not dawned on them that in five, ten, fifty years and more, historians will have uncovered just how corrupt, self-serving and traitorous this administration has been from even before day one? That in large part, it was due to their spineless lack of moral courage, their robotic need to put partisanship above patriotism that led to America’s no longer being the world’s “last great hope?” If history will remember them at all, it will not likely be for their greatness . . . but for their turning their backs on both the people they were supposed to selflessly serve and on history itself.

Tell me: has history, like Herodotus, himself, become history?

274 days until the presidential election.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Adam Schiff: Superego to '45's Id

There are any number of Yiddish words which have, over the years, become recognizable to speakers of American English. Most of these folks - whether Jewish or not - know the words mentsch, meshugga (or meshuggeneh), chutzpah, drek, gonif and perhaps even kvell, to mention but a few This last one - kvell - which figuratively translates as “boast” or “brag” takes a bit of explaining. When one boasts or brags, it is frequently about oneself, and just as frequently can be a bit overblown and self—serving. When one kvells however, it is rarely if ever about oneself; one kvells over a child, grandchild . . . even the family dog or cat. And unlike boasting, kvell’n (the verbal form) can be better than true. In the Jewish world a kvell can be as simple as “My daughter the doctor” or “My grandson the Hollywood screenwriter.” To kvell is to publicly bust one’s buttons over someone else . . .

Imagine, if you will, how much kvelling (that’s “Yinglish”) Ed Schiff (Rep. Adam’s Schiff’s father) must be doing these days. For not only is his son Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s choice for lead “Manager” in the upcoming impeachment proceeding against the POTUS, but has just been named by the Gallup Poll one of America’s 10 most admired men - a list which includes Barack Obama and Donald Trump (tied for first at 18%), former President Jimmy Carter, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Pope Francis, Bernie Sanders, the Dalai Lama, and Warren Buffett.  Ed, who is not one to spread the word about either of his sons (there’s also Adam’s older brother Dan, a financial planner in San Jose) couldn’t help but send out en email to family and friends giving us a proud-as-proud-can-be heads-up about Adam’s Gallup Poll ranking. That’s the living breathing definition of kvellling! 

Mazal tov Ed!

Without question, Adam is the best choice for lead manager in the impeachment trial. For in addition to being both terribly bright and a highly skilled, experienced prosecutor; he is the straightest arrow in the Congressional quiver, possesses a thick skin, a low temperature setting, and can show a surprisingly witty sense of humor. In other words, he is, in just about every imaginable way, the bipolar opposite of the man on trial. Where Trump is a congenital liar, Schiff has long been addicted to the truth; where The Donald barks and threatens, Adam hums and listens.

Brother Dan recently recalled a situation when Adam was about 7: Already a striver, Adam determined that he would outdo the neighborhood boy who was the best “burp-talker.” His relentless faux belches wore on his brother’s nerves, until Dan threw his jacket and the zipper caught Adam squarely in the mouth. Dan begged Adam to come up with a story, any story, to tell their parents. Adam howled. “There was all this blood. But what triggered him was that I was asking him to lie,” recalled Dan. “The fact that he was being steered to a lie . . . that really rankled him.”

Where the POTUS is voluble, high-strung, insulting and can, without notice, go off like a Roman candle; Adam Schiff is mostly low-key and laid-back. Schiff also possesses a far, far greater degree of self-awareness than the man he is prosecuting, and thus understands the important advantage it gives him: “What I’ve discovered is that ... in an irrational time when you have an erratic hothead in the Oval Office, there is a real premium on not having your hair on fire,” Schiff recently reflected to a reporter. “I suspect that part of it is just my own temperament, which I couldn’t change even if I wanted to.”

This is not to say that Adam Schiff takes all the insults lying down. During the Intelligence Committee impeachment hearings he compared the president’s furiously debated phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to a mob boss engaged in a “shakedown.” Trump and his followers then bestowed two nicknames on the committee chair: “Shifty Schiff” and “Pencil Neck Adam Schiff.” He has been called a “liar” and “traitor,” and watched as Republicans urged that he himself be impeached on grounds of being a traitor.

In Adam Schiff’s Capitol Hill office, one will find a photo of President Theodore Roosevelt, the nation’s 26th Chief Executive. Although I do not know of a certainty why T.R.’s photo adorns the wall, I would guess it’s because of a truism that the old Bull Moose committed to print in a 1918 essay: “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President . . . “ (n.b. the rest of the quote, from an essay entitled ‘Lincoln and Free Speech'  continues: “. . . or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him in so far as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth — whether about the President or about anyone else — save in the rare cases where this would make known to the enemy information of military value which would otherwise be unknown to him.)  This is the truth which permeates Adam Schiff’s political life.

More than being Donald John Trump’s legal and political adversary, Adam Schiff has also become what might be referred to as “The Superego to ‘45’s Id.” What in the world does that mean?” one may well ask.  

Before answering, let’s dip a toe into the pond of Freudian psychoanalytic personality theory. Don’t worry: it’s neither difficult nor obscure. According to Freud, there are 3 parts of the human personality which develop at different stages of a young person’s life. These three parts combine to create the complex behavior of human beings. He refers to them as “id,” “ego,” and “superego.”

• The “Id” (das Es): the most basic part of the personality, the Id represents our most basic, animalistic urges. It is the first part of the personality to develop. The Id seeks instant gratification for our wants and needs . . . such as a man who grabs and kisses women at will . . . because that’s what he wants to do. If animalistic needs or wants are not met, a person can become tense, anxious, or angry.

• The Ego (das ich): The ego deals with reality, trying to meet the desires of the id in a way that is socially acceptable in the world. The same man, really wanting to grab a pretty woman and kiss her, refrains from doing so because he knows he could get into a lot of trouble. He compromises by complimenting her on her glasses or hairstyle.

• The superego (Über-Ich) The superego develops last, and is based on morals and judgments about right and wrong. Even though the superego and the ego may reach the same decision about something (such as not grabbing and kissing a beautiful woman), the superego's reason for that decision is based mostly on moral values, while the ego's decision is based more on what others will think or what the consequences of an action could be on the individual.

Taking our toes out of the Freudian pond, it should now be pretty understandable what referring to Adam Schiff as “The Superego to ‘45’s Id” means. What fuels Donald Trump’s actions (mainly if not exclusively) is his Id - the most primitive, psychologically puerile and self-centered aspect of his being.  He does what he does and says what he says because he wants what he wants. And if he cannot get it or finds his actions, statements or claims challenged, lashes out with childlike anger. Period.  He has little or no ego (at least in the Freudian sense of the term) to act as a restraining mechanism.  Adam Schiff, on the other hand - like many fully-realized, better balanced human beings - is guided largely by his superego.  He knows right from wrong and uses that knowledge as a measuring rod for his actions.  Although accused of being a  “deranged ultra-leftist who hates America” by both the POTUS, his followers and political allies, he is anything but.  Adam Schiff’s upbringing, education, professional experience and superego have made him a quintessential moderate . . . in both life and in politics. When it comes to acting as manager in the upcoming Senate trial, Adam Schiff is the ideal package; one which will no doubt stick in the Trumpian craw for the rest of his life. 

But before getting on with the “rest of his life,” ‘45 and his team must deal with a prosecution, a trial and a vote . . . not to mention a headlong collision between the supreme presidential id and a towering superego. I predict that the proceedings will so enrage the POTUS that he will find it next to impossible to forgo Tweeting, performing for the camera or sinking even deeper into the swamp of absurdity.  If his ‘45 further embarrasses himself before the public, it could cause some Senate Republicans (especially those up for reelection) to start paying more attention to their own egos and superegos . . . even if it is at the expense of their leader’s Id.

Adam Schiff, who is my pick for either Attorney General or Director of the CIA in a Democratic White House, is the right man in the right place at the right time.

And for that, we can all rightfully kvell.

287 1/2 days until the election . . .

Copyright 2020 Kurt F. Stone

Nancy Pelosi: Strategist Par Excellence

Those who have been paying attention to the televised portion of the impeachment process, have undoubtedly observed the many differences between Democrats and Republicans - and not just in terms of whose side they’re on. The most obvious difference, it seems to me, is that for Democrats, facts are paramount, while for Republicans its process. I guess it’s that way because the Republicans know that arguing against the facts would be a waste of breath. Another obvious difference is that Democrats serving on both the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (chaired by California’s Adam Schiff) and the Judiciary Committee (chaired by New York’s Jerry Nadler) are nowhere near as gratingly voluble as their Republican colleagues. To compare the relative decibel level of an Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell or Jamie Raskin to that of a Devin Nunes, “Gym” Jordan or Doug Collins is akin to comparing Herons to Hoot Owls.

Then, after a long day’s worth of 5-minute speeches, everyone “reserving the balance of their time,” recording votes on useless resolutions that were bound to be defeated along strict party lines and forensic codas by House leaders, came the final votes on 2 articles of impeachment commenced. And standing high above the House, dressed in black, gavel in hand, stood Speaker Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in America, both the de facto and de jure leader of her party. When, after results of the first vote were announced, Democrats, below and to her right, began to cheer. Within a nanosecond, the speaker had shot her colleagues a stern look and pointed a tally card directly at them. Immediately, there was total silence from her side of the aisle. The same thing occurred after results of the second vote were announced. Where another Speaker might have used the gavel to quiet down the majority, Speaker Pelosi did it with a single sharp-eyed glance; the power of her presence. Say what you want about her: the woman is a political force to be reckoned with.

And yet, despite how long she’s been around, how much respect she has garnered and her unparalleled political skills, most Americans know little about her . . . outside of the fact that the president calls her “Nervous Nancy,” and that she’s from San Francisco . . . which I guess means we’re supposed to assume she’s some kind of a gonzo Commie. Actually, she comes from a famous and politically powerful Baltimore family; both her father and brother served as mayors of the place John Quincy Adams tagged “The Monumental City.” At the time of her birth in March of 1940, her father, Thomas D’Alesandro, had just been elected to Congress, where he would serve for 3 terms. She’s been around the political scene long enough that she attended JFK’s inaugural 59 years ago and interned in Senator Daniel Brewster’s  (1923-2007) office with fellow college student Steny Hoyer, who today is her #2 (Majority Leader) in the House.

Rep. Schiff and Speaker Pelosi

Since returning to the post of Speaker of the House on January 3, 2019, Nancy Pelosi has been at the epicenter of the entire impeachment debate.  Viewed from afar, it would seem that she has been uncertain as to what to do; of what possible effect going ahead with the impeachment of Donald Trump would have on her party in the 2020 elections and beyond.  Would it put victory firmly into the hands of the GOP or would it work to the Democrats advantage?  Yes, until rather recently, she was publicly against going ahead with the procedure.  And then, shortly after news of the Trump/Zelensky/Hunter Biden imbroglio became public Speaker Pelosi seemed to change her mind and decide to go ahead. In matter of fact, she was just waiting for the right time. And in giving House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff a greater public role than Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, she was showing great political wisdom; for Rep. Schiff is a world-class prosecutor, totally unflappable, and can go toe-to-toe with the opposition without ever losing his smile. She knew that he would make the ideal face of the forces of impeachment. Look for her to name him - and perhaps Rep. Eric Swalwell (also a former prosecutor) to act as “managers’ (prosecutors) for the upcoming trial in the United States Senate.

Now comes the Speaker’s latest move on the political chessboard: delaying the start of the impeachment trial in the senate.  According to an op-ed piece by Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe published in last Monday’s Washington Post, Speaker Pelosi’s delaying tactic is nothing short of brilliant . . . and for a couple of reasons. Wrote Professor Tribe: “As a tactical matter, it could strengthen Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) hand in bargaining over trial rules with McConnell because of McConnell’s and Trump’s urgent desire to get this whole business behind them. On a substantive level, it would be justified to withhold going forward with a Senate trial. Under the current circumstances, such a proceeding would fail to render a meaningful verdict of acquittal. It would also fail to inform the public, which has the right to know the truth about the conduct of its president.“

Responding to one revered Harvard Law professor with the words and thoughts of another, Fox News broadcast an op-ed by retired Professor Alan Dershowitz which originally appeared in Newsmax rebutting Professor Tribe and declaring that Pelosi’s delaying tactic is grossly unconstitutional: "It is difficult to imagine anything more unconstitutional, more violative of the intention of the Framers, more of a denial of basic due process and civil liberties, more unfair to the president and more likely to increase the current divisiveness among the American people. Put bluntly, it is hard to imagine a worse idea put forward by good people." 

Senators Graham and McConnell

It so happens that I am in total disagreement with Professor Dershowitz, and find myself wondering whatever happened to him; he used to be far more progressive in his legal reasoning. I also find myself in awe of Nancy Pelosi’s strategic acumen; the ease with which she maneuvers about the political chessboard is truly something to behold. If there is to be anything resembling a fair trial, it will necessitate Senators McConnell and Graham (and many of their colleagues) taking a step back, rereading the Constitution, and finding the courage to live up to the oaths they take. And while I do not for one moment believe our IMPOTUS (“Impeached President Of The United States”) is going to be found guilty, I, along with every fair-minded American, can at least hope for a semblance of even-handedness in the proceedings to come. Unless and until they can, I know that Mrs. Pelosi will continue holding on to the Articles of Impeachment. like any world-class strategist would. Let her tie McConnell et al in knots until they do the right thing. And may they come to understand just who it is they’re dealing with.

298 days until the presidential election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Refusal and Recusal

By the end of the week, we can expect to see the POTUS impeached by a majority of the House of Representatives. It will undoubtedly be on a strict party-line basis, although there is a chance that a couple of Democrats may - I repeat may - cast their votes against impeachment. If so, it will neither be because they are enamored with ‘45 nor believe there is insufficient factual evidence to impeach, but rather because they are looking to save their political hide from an electoral tanning come 2020. From there, the bill of impeachment will move over to the United States Senate for trial. Said trial will be, according to the Constitution, presided over by Chief Justice Roberts. The prosecutors, chosen by Speaker Pelosi, will likely be Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, both members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and both former prosecutors.

Prior to beginning the trial, each senator will, according to strictly dictated rules, swear an oath to carry out “impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.”   Most lamentably, several Republican senators, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rand Paul (R-KY) have already publicly stated that they are steadfastly in support of the president, and absolutely refuse to cast a vote for conviction.  In other words, they see no purpose in pledging “impartial justice,”  which means that legally, they have announced their intention to suborn perjury.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took that a step further, telling Fox News last week that he was working in “total coordination” with the White House.  Responding to leader McConnell’s perjurious statement, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler said that was like “the foreman of the jury saying he’s going to work hand in glove with the defense attorney.” This attitude amounts to a “violation of the oath that they’re about to take, and it’s a complete subversion of the constitutional scheme.” Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) went further, calling on McConnell to recuse himself from the Senate proceedings based on his Fox News remarks.  

Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest allies in Congress ever since he defeated Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, also said that his mind was made up even before the process began. “I’m not trying to hide the fact that I have disdain for the accusations in the process,” Graham said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation. Speaking with CNN on Saturday, Graham further said that he wasn’t “trying to pretend to be a fair juror.” Graham predicted that impeachment “will die quickly” in the Senate and vowed to “do everything I can to make it die quickly.” It should be remembered that in 2015 and 2016, Graham referred to then candidate Trump as “a complete idiot,” and “a nut job,” and swore that under no circumstances would he ever vote for the New York real estate magnate for POTUS.

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the  Union” yesterday, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul told interviewer Jake Tapper  he doesn’t expect any Republicans in the House to vote in favor of impeachment and that he expects a “handful of Democrats” to vote against impeachment efforts. In terms of the Senate, he said he believes all Republicans will vote against convicting Trump and that they’ll likely be joined by two Democrats.  “I think what we’re seeing is this is a very partisan thing,” Paul told Tapper. “This is a disagreement. People on the Democrats’ side don’t like President Trump. They don’t like his demeanor, and so they’ve sort of decided to criminalize politics. But I don’t think it’s a good thing,” Paul added. “I don’t think it’s a good day for the country. I think it’s a sad day because I hope it doesn’t devolve into every president — like in different parts of Latin America — we either impeach or throw presidents into jail just because we don’t like their politics. I think that will really dumb down and destroy the country.”

Paul concluded by saying quite incorrectly, “This is a disagreement over policy and this is sort of an extension of politics, but this isn’t about the Constitution or the president breaking the Constitution.” 

Where Senator Paul - and Senators Graham and McConnell - most obviously err, is in contending that the House’s impeachment of ‘45 has nothing  to do with the Constitution; that it is simply because they don’t like him and are still as angry as a swarm of hornets over Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.  How utterly inept and disingenuous. 

I have the feeling that  already, Republican strategists are plotting separate impeachment scenarios for Vice President Biden, Senators Sanders and Warren and Mayors Bloomberg and  Buttigieg - whoever may possibly defeat Donald Trump in November 2020.  As much as I fear that ‘45 may be reelected, what nauseates me the most is the thought that American politics will devolve in to 2- and 4-year clashes between Democrats and Republicans where nothing gets done; that the central focus is cutting down the other side to size.

There has been so much whittling away at the Constitution, political credibility and maturity that it now seems as if generations have passed since our leaders last acted  or worked with seriousness of purpose.  Our elections more closely resemble a turf war between vicious neighborhood gangs than serious political competition.  

I am of the strong opinion that those senators who have already announced their votes even before the first gavel is heard or first witness deposed should be brought up on charges of subornation of perjury. This is not a 1st Amendment “freedom of speech” issue.  It is, without question, a gross conflict of interest.  Senator McConnell: you should recuse yourself if for no other reason than the fact that your wife serves in 45’s Cabinet as Secretary of Transportation.  Senator Graham: you should listen to some of your early speeches and refuse to partake in the hearings.  Senator Paul: you must determine whether your first allegiance is to the law or to your fundraisers.  And in general, members of the Republican Party, you must acknowledge in public what you whisper behind closed doors.  The very future of this once grand country depends on  it.  

Ask yourself: how do I want history to remember me?

222 days until the election . . .

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Ralph Waldo Emerson Is Turning Over in His Grave

If I am not mistaken, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, that most American of all philosophers, who first noted “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Found in perhaps his most memorable essay, “Self Reliance,” Emerson (1803-1882), nowhere explained the difference between “foolish” and “wise” consistency. Nonetheless, it would seem that the “Father of American Transcendentalism” was warning future generations against those whose public pronouncements run counter to their private predilections; whose words would be at obvious odds with their often heartless deeds. Emerson would have had a field-day pointing out the utter inconsistency of those who today are publicly - and self-righteously - “pro-life,” but politically supportive of most everything which counters their oft-stated position. In matter of sad fact, they are misnamed: they are really “pro-birth.” Once the “pre-born” take their first breath, they are pretty much on their own . . .

The Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which struck down a Texas statute banning abortion (thus effectively legalizing the procedure across the United States), was far more than a victory for women; it also created an issue which has served as both a 30-decibel storm warning and perhaps the most divisive political litmus test of the past 150 years.  Prior to Roe v. Wade, far, far fewer conservative and fundamentalist Christians participated in the political process than today. In truth, in pre-Roe times, many of their pastors, reverends and other assorted religious leaders thundered from thousands of pulpits that politics was the work of the devil. Then came the Roe decision, and secular political strategists discovered an untapped market, which they initially referred to as the “Moral Majority.” (I remember wearing a button bearing the slogan “The Moral Majority is Neither!”) Secular political strategists convinced several generations of the devout that they could enact God’s will - especially when it came to the “the pre-born” - if only they would lend their voices, votes and overall support to those who were running on the side of the Lord. And by the way, so the strategists informed them, God also favors low taxes for corporations, a generous oil depletion allowance, far, far fewer federal regulations, support of charter schools . . . the entire conservative agenda.  And by the way, “global warming” is lie perpetrated by those who do not believe in the word of the Lord . . .

But it all began with the divisive clash between the forces of morality (e.g. pro-life/pro-birth/anti-welfare/anti-science) and the forces of evil (e.g. pro-choice/pro-environment/anti/anti ”trickle-down” economics). Nearly a half-century after the Roe decision and all that it has wrought, the sides have become so case-hardened that one side will rarely - if ever - engage in civil debate with the other, let alone find an ounce of humanity, comity or moral consistency on the part of their political opponents. 

Protecting the lives and rights of the “pre-born” became so absolutely central to the politics espoused by the merchants of morality that they somehow convinced their customers that nothing else really mattered.  Poll after poll proves this point: so long as ‘45 (backed by the cacophonous "hallelujahs” of the Federalist Society) continues appointing anti-Roe judges to lifetime seats on the federal bench (where they will hold sway for the next 30-40 years), his utter lack of probity, humility  and humanity will not keep his largely white-Christian base from supporting him . . . from believing he’s the second coming of King Cyrus.  These people form the strongest, most consistent part of the Republican base . . . despite the fact that in  a 2019 survey, about six-in-ten U.S. adults (61%) said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with 38% who said it should be illegal all or most of the time.  

And yet, the past several years have seen state legislatures passing increasingly restrictive laws - banning abortions after a mere six weeks; limiting (and even eliminating) the number of abortion clinics in a state; threatening any doctor who performs an abortion with serving a maximum of 99 years in prison, and forcing women seeking an abortion for any reason (including incest or rape) to have to wait several days after initially appearing at a clinic.  Studies have shown that these laws - some of which have already been overturned in state courts (and now heading towards the Trump-appointed federal bench) have a far greater negative impact on poor, rural, non-white women than those who are largely white, urban and middle-class.  You had better believe that were, God forbid, the daughter of a far-right senator or representative become pregnant as a result of rape or incest, her family would find a way to terminate that pregnancy.  Oh yes, it’s still legal; I almost forgot. 

And now comes the most frightening law of them all: Ohio House Bill 413, known as the “abortion murder” bill, which carries language that appears to require doctors treating a woman who suffers an ectopic pregnancy to re-implant the fertilized egg in the patient’s uterus or face criminal charges.  The procedure required by this piece of legislation is both medically impossible and morally reprehensible.  If passed, it would mean that a state legislature is now in a position to tell a physician how to practice medicine or face a charge of murder.  In checking with several physicians whom I work with on an Institutional Review Board (IRB - a group of doctors, pharmacists, bio-engineers and lay specialists whose job it is to protect the rights and safety of subjects partaking in medical research) they all quickly (and firmly) said the same thing: “re-implanting a fertilized egg in a woman’s uterus is alchemy.  Period.”  And yet, there are enough “pro-birth” members of the Ohio legislature that the bill will likely be enacted. 

If I live to be 120 (the same age as Moses), I will never understand the inconsistency of some people; of how they can demand that the government stay away from regulating in any way, shape or form the air they breath, the water they drink or the guns they purchase - to give but three examples - and then turn  around and fervently support the government’s intrusion into our bodies, bedrooms or marriage canopies - to again name but three. Historically speaking, “morality by fiat” has always had a chilling effect on civil society.  What one does, says or believes within their church, shul or mosque - the religious dictates people follow within their own faith-based lives - must neither be ordained, transmuted nor demanded for people of different persuasions. To create a secular political identity out of the clay sectarian belief is both cynical and foolhardy - not to mention a foolish consistency that can easily tear apart a secular, democratic society.

Emerson taught a far younger America a lot about “small minds.”  I wonder what he’d say about our modern hobgoblins?

228 days until the 2020 election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Maddeningly Inevitable . . . Frighteningly Unconscionable

Frankly speaking, I’m a bit surprised that the ugly, twisted specter of anti-Semitism has taken quite so long to reappear on the stage of impeachment. To me, it was all but inevitable that as the dramatis personæ of the tragedy entitled Trump v. Constitution of the United States became better known to the public, a certain twisted segment of America would once again claim that Jews - merciless, acquisitive, immoral Zionists - were behind the craven plot to overthrow the Chritian world.  This has been on my mind for quite some time; the question was not “will the age-old conspiracy reemerge from the shadows?” but rather, “when?”  

About two weeks ago - November 22 to be precise - Rick Wiles, a controversial right-wing pastor, and founder of TruNews, an online hate site, launched a virulently anti-Semitic attack on leading congressional Democrats, claiming that impeachment proceedings against POTUS amounted to a “Jew coup.” On his “True News” program, Wiles, putting Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff between the cross-hairs (“Just look at his eyes . . . you can tell he’s utterly demonic”) and warned:

“That’s the way the Jews work, they are deceivers, they plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda. This ‘impeach Trump’ effort is a Jew coup and the American people better wake up to it really fast because this thing is moving now toward a vote in the House and then a trial in the Senate. We could have a trial before Christmas.

This country could be in civil war at Christmastime. Members of the U.S. military are going to have to take a stand just like they did in the 1860s with the Civil War. They are going to have to decide: are you fighting for the North or the South? People are going to be forced, possibly by this Christmas, to take a stand because of this Jew coup in the United States.

This is a coup led by Jews to overthrow the constitutionally elected president of the United States and it’s beyond removing Donald Trump, it’s removing you and me. That’s what’s at the heart of it. You have been taken over by a Jewish cabal.”

Wiles and his demented allies are scared witless by the roster of Jews “leading” or “involved in” the impeachment of the POTUS:

• Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA): Chair, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

• Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY): Chair: House Judiciary

• Elliot Engel (D-NY) Chair: House Foreign Affairs

• Ted Deutch (D-FL) Chair: House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Terrorism

• Ted Deutch (D-FL) Chair: House Ethics Committee

• Steve Cohen (D-TN) Chair: House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

• Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman: Director of European Affairs, National Security Council - witness

• Amb. Gordon Sondland: U.S. Ambassador to European Union - witness

• Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine

• Other Jewish members of the House Judiciary Committee include Steven Cohen (D-TN), Ted Deutch (D-FL) David Cicilline (D-RI), and Jaimie Raskin (D-MD)

• Other Jewish member of Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: Elise Stefanik (R-NY)

Not surprisingly, many of those accusing Jews of belonging to an insidious, conspiratorial cabal bent on overthrowing the government, claim it is being financed by George Soros, a liberal Jewish billionaire. (These same anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists have also long believed that during the Holocaust, the then-teenage Soros was a Nazi collaborator.)

During her testimony before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Dr. Fiona Hill, former deputy assistant to the president and senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council staff, likened a right-wing narrative casting liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros as all-controlling to a notorious anti-Semitic forgery. The narrative that Soros is behind an array of evildoings “is the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Hill said Thursday in hearings. “It’s an absolute outrage.”

Soros has become a bugbear for some right-wingers, who blame his liberal philanthropy for a number of ills, citing little evidence. Trump himself last year blamed Soros for an “invasion” of Central American migrants that never materialized. Even loony Texas Representative Louie Gohmert brought up the Soros-as-Nazi-collaborator canard while being interviewed on Fox News. Despite having been thoroughly discredited years ago, the Soros fabrication, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a lie that will not die. 

Even as “classical” anti-Semitic memes and tropes are beginning to resurface with a vengeance, evangelical support for Israel - which they tend to refer to as “The Holy Land” - remains strong.  It is a fact that the largest pro-Israel group in America is not the overwhelmingly Jewish AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) but the overwhelmingly Evangelical “Christians United For Israel,” which was founded by the Pastor John Hagee in 2006.

Indeed, it is more than anomalous that some of the most fervently pro-Israel Christians can, at the same time, find such innate, conspiratorial evil in Jewish people themselves. But even here, a crack is beginning to appear. “Doc” Burkhart, Rick Wiles’ on-air co-host recently gave a call for listeners and viewers to repent for supporting Israel. Burkhart led his audience to confess their sin of standing with Israel: “Lord, I’m so sorry. I don’t how I was so deceived. I don’t how I was so bewitched by all of this,” he asks his viewers to pray. “I thought it was a good thing to support the people of Israel. I thought it was a good thing to help Israel. But now I see it’s just people using the name of Israel, people using the people of Israel in order to line their own pockets, in order to build their own kingdoms, in order to make themselves feel important.”

Burkhart/Wiles’ astonishingly foul heresy even has a name: “Replacement Theology,” which teaches its adherents and acolytes “Jesus, You are my Zion. Jesus, You are my Promised Land. Jesus, You are my Temple. Jesus, You are my Eternal Capitol, Lord.”

We live in an increasingly angry, maddening and dangerous world. That Jewish support for Israel has been called into question by those who see it as a portal to the Apocalypse and its Chosen People as agents of evil is frighteningly unconscionable.

חָזַק חָזַק וְנִתחַזֵּק

(Chazak chazak v’neetchazayk):

“Be strong, be Strong and We Shall Be Strengthened”

335 days until the presidential election

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

The Revolving Door

Stephen Miller

As anyone with half a brain knows, access and egress to the Trump White House comes in the form of a revolving door. The list of those who have either resigned or been fired extends all the way from Foggy Bottom to Fredericksburg, Va. and from the West Wing to the West Coast. The list of the dismissed is a lengthy one. The reasons for their leaving - whether voluntarily or by fiat - vary and are occasionally even eyebrow-raising.  The latest to be fired - America’s Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Louise "Masha" Yovanovitch - never got a reason for her dismissal.  Sneering at her to his 66 million Twitter followers, ‘45 informed them that “Wherever  Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad . . . . She started off in Somalia, how did that go?” Gee, I for one never fully realized how much political and strategic power a single ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary possesses; I must have been sleeping when they covered that subject in my diplomatic history class.

The roster of the rejected in Trumpland is both long and occasionally inexplicable.  What, for but one example, caused Anthony Scaramucci’s tenure as White House Communications Director to last a mere 6 days, the shortest tenure in American history?  (For those who are trivia buffs, the second shortest tenure belongs to Ronald Reagan’s Communication’s Director, Jack Koehler, who lasted in his post for 11 days back in March 1987.  The longest tenure belongs to FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins - an amazing 12 years, 4 months.) It is true that Scaramucci was and is a world-class egomaniac with a mouth like the Okefenokee Swamp; then too, he is totally self-aware and has disproved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s epigram about there being “no second acts in America.”  

By far, employment-wise, the two greatest mysteries of the current administration are Senior Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller, the president’s Senior Adviser for Policy.  Of the former, one can be amazed that she still occupies her position if for no other reason than who she’s married to: George Conway, a conservative Harvard-trained attorney who spends a great deal of his time being a hostile thorn in the president’s side. The other day he likened his wife’s working for ‘45 to being a member of a cult. For his rhetorical efforts, Mr. Conway has been compared to Martha Mitchell, the wife of Richard M. Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, and an open critic of the Nixon administration during the Watergate scandal.  And yet, Kellyanne still has her job.  

Of the latter, Stephen Miller, much has been written.  By now, most news junkies know of his early years, being raised in an  upper-middle class Jewish home in Santa Monica, California; of his early “conversion” to hardcore political conservatism and his years at Duke University, where he helped future white supremacist leader Richard Spencer raise funds and promote an immigration policy debate between between Peter Laufer, an open-borders activist and University of Oregon professor, and journalist Peter Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigration website VDARE.  

Prior to going to work for Donald Trump, Miller served as press secretary for former Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann and as an adviser to Alabama Senator (and future Attorney General) Jeff Sessions.  Miller signed on early with the Trump campaign, aligning himself with Steve Bannon on most political issues.  He traveled the country with the campaign, often acting as Trump’s “opening act.”  It was Miller - along with Bannon - who created the anti-immigration strategy which would become central to the 2016 presidential race.  He, more than anyone, created the anti-Muslim ban, the removing of refugee and immigrant children from their families, and keeping the administration from showing the public an internal study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees had a net positive effect on government revenues. Miller insisted that only the costs of refugees be publicized, not the revenues refugees bring in.  Then too, Miller - along with then-Senator Jeff Sessions - was largely responsible for creating and priming Trump’s obsession with building a wall on America’s Southern Border - the one that Mexico was going to pay for.

Stephen Miller is the great-grandchild of Jewish immigrants; people who came to the United States from Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century in order to escape murderous pogroms, state-sponsored anti-Antisemitism and the prospect of serving 25 years in the Czar’s army. Had Stephen Miller been a White House adviser back in 1903, his family would have been sent back to Europe, where they likely would have been exterminated by the Nazis years later. How in the world did Miller, who came from such a background and a family that prospered so greatly in a land which welcomed them with open arms, turn out to be such an anti-immigration hawk? How does a person reared in an atmosphere of progressive idealism and civility come to be a such a strident white nationalist?

MIller’s affinity for white nationalism has been thoroughly researched and documented through leaked emails. From what has been revealed - largely by the Southern Poverty Law Center - Stephen Miller really, truly believes that non-Nordic people possess lower IQs than Hispanics, Muslims and people of African descent; that they present a clear and present danger to the West. In sum, Miller wants America to look more like his home town of Santa Monica - rich and white. He is worse than an utter embarrassment to his family, his heritage and indeed, his country.

Of late though, various groups and Congressional caucuses have been gathering signatures and support, all demanding that Miller either be fired or resign his White House position. The chances of ‘45 ever firing him are somewhere between slim and none. The chances of him resigning are even less than that.

For those who refuse to sit back and groan in pain, there are petitions to be signed and steps to be taken. Among the places to go and add your name to the fight are:

1. MoveOn Petitions

2. Change.Org

3. The National Council of Jewish Women

4. The Action Network

5. Stephen Miller Must Go!

To paraphrase a line from Fiddler on the Roof: “May God bless and keep Stephen Miller . . . far away from us!”

The revolving door is right in front of you . . .

350 days until the next presidential election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

To Boo or Not to Boo: That Is the Question

Like you, I am both pleased and thankful that American Special Forces took out Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the most wanted murderer on the planet. Although he undoubtedly will be replaced by yet another fanatic mastermind, for the moment Isis is both headless and flat broke.  In watching and listening to the president’s speech/press conference about al-Baghdadi’s demise, I  found myself comparing his presentation to that of President Obama at the time he announced the death of Osama bin Laden. Obama’s 1,383-word report took just under 9 minutes to deliver, and consisted of precisely 9 uses of the word “I” or “I’ve.”  It was anything but a “victory lap.”  By comparison, President Trump’s 7,728-word announcement - including a brief Q and A - lasted 48 minutes, 15 seconds, during which he used the words “I,” “I’ve,” “me” and “my” more than 125 times. 

(n.b. For what it’s worth, the picture above shows the ‘situation room’ during both the al-Baghdadi and bin Laden strikes. One is obviously posed - the president and his men are looking straight into the camera; in the other the president and his men and women are looking at a screen. In the top photo, neither the computer nor phone cables are plugged in to anything; that on the bottom shows a fully operational cyber table.)

One of the other major differences between Obama’s announcement regarding the death of bin Laden and Trump’s about al-Baghdadi was tonal: while the former’s was as solemn and matter-of-fact as a Yom Kippur confession, the other’s was far more akin to a victory lap - a rookie running back spiking the ball and receiving a 15-yard penalty for taunting the opposition. As the Washington Post’s Max Boot noted, “President Trump has a preternatural ability to turn any occasion, no matter how solemn or important, into a ridiculous, risible spectacle. . . . When he began to ad-lib about what happened near Idlib, Syria, he treated the world to his usual blend of braggadocio and bluster — dishonest and distasteful in equal measure.  

Among other things, ‘45 managed to insult Democratic congressional leaders by not informing them of the upcoming raid (although he did notify both Russia and Turkey) and offer a minute-by-minute account of al-Baghdadi’s final moments worthy of an obsessive compulsive.  The only problem with this accounting (“. . . he died like a coward . . . whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.”) was that there was no audio, so how did he know what Baghdadi was saying? When asked about this, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley pointedly refused to confirm those details.

One of the eeriest, most ear-scratching aspects of this past Sunday is what occurred that night . . . when the POTUS attended the World Series game between the hometown Washington Nationals and the American League champion Houston Astros: upon seeing ‘45 up on the stadium, Jumbotron, a sizable percentage of the fans booed him and shouted “LOCK HIM UP!!” over and again.

The morning after the boo-fest at Nationals Park MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and his wife and co-anchor Mika Brzezinski (who are by no means Trump supporters) said it was “un-American” and “disrespectful” for the crowd to have acted in the manner they did. Quickly, more than 10,000 tweets including the phrase “sorry Joe” began trending on Twitter as users defended the actions of onlookers at Nationals Park on Sunday night. “The misrule, cruelty and infantilism of this administration is such that some sense of an enduring ethos is actually redeemed when we the people openly express our contempt,” wrote author and TV writer David Simon. “Dissent is the most American thing there is -- and to get clean, we need as much as there is on display.”

Scarborough took to Twitter after the segment aired to defend himself against his critics.

“So let’s see if I’ve got this straight: When crowds chant 'Lock her up” toward Hillary, it is illiberal and anti-American. (I agree). But when crowds chant the same toward Trump, it is suddenly a fulsome exercise of sacred First Amendment rights. What hypocritical clowns,” he tweeted.

He added that those who “think that democracy is strengthened by calling for the arrest of political opponents” are as “ignorant and illiberal” as the president himself.

“Delete your account and read some civics,” Scarborough fired back. “Stop embarrassing yourself.”

And so, to boo or not to boo . . . that is the question. This is no simple thumbs up/thumbs down question. To me, it is a real challenge:

On the one hand, I myself have a deep and abiding respect for the office of the President. Indeed, over the past 230 years, it has been occupied by 44 men (Grover Cleveland having served 2 non-consecutive terms) whose backgrounds, personalities, accomplishments and shortcomings were as varied as the nation they led. And whether or not they be blue bloods or tailors, slave owners or abolitionists, professorial or plainspoken, they managed to share one common trait: a deep-seated respect for both the Constitution and the Office they held. And up until recently, this has been an utterly true statement of fact. Sadly, this statement of fact now contains an asterisk . . . which reads “*except for Donald J. Trump.“ For in his words and actions, his demeanor and psychological makeup, he has shown himself to lack that one telling trait which has bound all the nation’s chief executives together.

But one can blithely argue - and correctly so - that his asterisk represents the failure of the man himself, and not the office he holds. If one accepts this argument, then the boos and catcalls (“Lock Him Up!”) even if unintentionally directed at both the man and the office are, in my humble opinion, wrong.

On the other hand, one can say “Enough already! He’s besmirched the presidency, abused his power and turned the White House into just another Trump, Inc. subsidiary. He gets what he deserves!” Although one can certainly understand and perhaps even accept the emotional anger this response engenders, it pushes the swamp well beyond the Anacostia River and perfectly-named “Buzzard’s Point” all the way to America’s collective front porch. This response, although again, understandable, is tantamount to fighting stink with stench, inhumanity with incivility. 

So what are we to do?  To boo or not to boo . . . that is the question.

Personally, I would never join with those shouting “LOCK HIM UP!! LOCK HIM UP!!”  It is both a waste of time and a further degradation of the office.  Seems to me we are better off using our energy to VOTE HIM OUT.  Then too, perhaps we can take chapter out of the book of the sixties’ protests.  I remember a day long ago when then-California Governor Ronald Reagan came to a meeting of the university Board of Regents on campus.  Now mind you, this was at the height of the anti-war, anti-draft  “Don’t trust anyone over the age of 30” era.  And so, when the governor entered the campus, we formed two long, long lines of greeting . . . a cortege of complaint.  As he entered the line, likely wondering if he were about to be screamed at, pelted with eggs or what have you, a unique form of protest ensued: we all, one by one, turned our backs on him, thereby forcing the Governor of California to cross the quadrangle surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of silent backsides.  We opted for silent humiliation in lieu of cacophonous insult.

What are your thoughts?

To boo or not to boo . . . please share your answer.

378 days until the next election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

The Audacity of Taupe

Exactly five years ago today (i.e. September 28, 2014) then-President Barack Obama became embroiled in what was the gravest (and to my knowledge, only) scandal of his administration. So what happened? After surviving “birtherism,” being damned for having bowed down to the Saudi King and assorted other heresies, the 44th POTUS had the utter gall to show up at a press conference clad in a . . . are you buckled up and ready for this? . . . a beige suit! Horror of Horrors!

Predictably, Fox News commentators came down on Obama for wearing the suit, claiming that he was “cheapening” the presidency; Representative Peter King (R-NY), who is still a member of the House, fumed that the suit “pointed to a lack of seriousness” on the president’s part. Five years later it’s hard to recall just how much press time this “scandal” consumed. Cable news shows held round-table discussions, fashion critics and image consultants weighed in, and TV news reporters conducted person-on-the-street interviews to find out what the people of Northeast Ohio thought of the controversial look. (Happy to report that to a person, they thought the question was absurd; that there were many things of far greater importance to discuss.)

Where Obama normally limited himself top either grey or blue suits and, unlike Gerald Ford never wore a vest, he by no means was the only president to wear a khaki-colored suit. Check out FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and JFK to see their color sense. Interestingly, most of them - including Barack Obama - had their suits made by the same tailor: “George of Paris” (née Georgios Christopoulos) of Kalamata, Greece. Unlike ‘45, who wears $5,000.00 suits that are tailored to hide his bulging gut, monumental tuchas and over-long red ties, Barack Obama was a fashion plate whether clad in jeans, or khaki slacks. He must have learned from my father - a wonderfully-tailored gentleman in his own right - who used to say that the best way to keep one’s weight in check was to find a great tailor whose prices were just a hair beyond your means. “This’ he used to say, “would force one to keep their size, shape and weight because five pounds one way or the other would cause your trousers and jackets to be obviously out of whack.”

But this is far from the purpose of this essay. As much as I may personally chortle at 45’s tailoring, I am far more disgusted by his absolute inability to laugh at himself. Where ‘45 responds to any negative comment about himself with all the vengeance of a tiger (long recognized as the most retaliatory creature on the planet) Barack Obama’s innumerable cracks about the suit became part of his repertoire of bad jokes: He told attendees of a September 2014 awards dinner for the Congressional Black Caucus that he would have worn his tan suit if the event wasn’t black-tie, and joked at his final news conference in January 2017 that he had been “sorely tempted” to wear a tan suit for the occasion.

How’s About Them Sartorial Apples?

And although after 5 years most fashionistas still contend that Obama’s taupe suit (no matter how impeccably tailored) was a boo boo, what shocks them most is that it came to dominate an entire news cycle. If this turns out to be the worst personal scandal of the eight Obama years, so be it. In comparison to what his successor has put the planet through over the past 19+ months, Obama’s “Audacity of “Taupe” is nothing more than a quaint twitter (pun intended) in the annals of presidential history. In retrospect, the Obama years now seem as innocent and charming as an episode of The Donna Reed Show. Of course they weren’t; after all, these were the 8 years which included Obama’s “red line in the sand” vis-à-vis Assad’s Syria, the assassination of Bin Laden and the deportation of more illegal immigrants than ‘45 ever dreamed of. And yes, for virtually everything Obama did, did not do, said or wore, he had tons of militant detractors.

But if anyone had looked into the political crystal ball and foretold that our next president would be known for monetizing his office; for making creepy comments about finding his own daughter attractive; for being investigated for allegedly colluding with Russia and obstructing justice; and for cozying up to dictators from Rio to Moscow to Pyongyang, we would have immediately sent that crystal ball to the repair shop and deported said seer to the lunatic asylum of Charenton.

What most of us crave is a return to sanity and maturity; to honesty and humility; to empathy and compassion . . . if not to far more use of the first person plural instead of a steady diet of the first person singular. And who knows, perhaps even a return to the audacity of taupe, if not pin stripes or power pantsuits . . .

435 days until the next election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

The Inexplicable Confidence of the Utterly Incompetent

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It seems that with every passing week and month, the partisan political divide has become wider, nastier and far more case-hardened. Political stereotypes (“Hollywood is made up of nothing but intellectually snobbish, irreligious, far-left dupes”; “the South is made up of uneducated, gun-toting bigots”) have supplanted reason and made conversation - let alone progress - next to impossible. We’ve all been victimized by stereotypical belief patterns, whether at work, while socializing or at family gatherings. And, to be perfectly honest, it hurts; precisely because it drives a wedge between people who used to be close. One of the hardest things to deal with is the political certainty of those who in reality evince precious little - if any - knowledge of politics. If it is of any succor however, remember the words of King Solomon, writing under the name of Kohelet:

.מַה־שֶּֽׁהָיָה֙ ה֣וּא שֶׁיִּֽהְיֶ֔ה וּמַ֨ה־שֶּׁנַּֽעֲשָׂ֔ה ה֖וּא שֶׁיֵּֽעָשֶׂ֑ה וְאֵ֥ין כָּל־חָדָ֖שׁ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּֽׁמֶשׁ

Namely, “What has been is what shall be; and what has been done is what shall be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.”

Long, long ago, the extreme confidence of the incompetent was noted by Socrates who, we are told, said something along the lines of “the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Then there was Charles Darwin who, towards the end of his life noted that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Not long after Darwin’s demise (1882), a new academic field, Political Philosophy, proved that this was actually true. The so-called “father” of political philosophy was a French polymath (a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning) by the name of Gustav Le Bon. Le Bon (1841-1931) whose areas of academic interest included medicine, sociology, anthropology and physics, was most famous for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which has long been considered one of the seminal works of political psychology. As far back as 1895, Le Bon described the psychological underpinnings of support for such demagogues as Hitler, Mussolini, Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump - who wouldn’t become part of the world scene for decades to come.

In a 1999 paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger brought statistical truth to what has been known by philosophers since Socrates and Darwin. Simply put, that incompetent people think they know more than they really do, and tend to be more boastful about it.

To test Darwin’s theory, the researchers quizzed people on several topics, such as grammar, logical reasoning and humor. After each test, they asked the participants how they thought they did. Specifically, participants were asked how many of the other quiz-takers they beat.

Dunning and Kruger were shocked by the results, even though it confirmed their hypothesis. Time after time, no matter the subject, the people who did poorly on the tests ranked their competence much higher. On average, test takers who scored as low as the 10th percentile ranked themselves near the 70th percentile. Those least likely to know what they were talking about believed they knew as much as the experts.

What do YOU see when you look in the mirror?

Dunning and Kruger’s results have been replicated in at least a dozen different domains: math skills, wine tasting, chess, medical knowledge among surgeons and firearm safety among hunters. For readers of this blog, the most important finding of their study - and those studies which have since followed - is that the less people know about civics, politics and foreign policy, the more they claim to understand. Whether or not Donald Trump, his advisers and strategists have ever read, heard of or digested what has come to be known as the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” is as irrelevant as it unlikely. Nonetheless, they act as if they do.

The Dunning Kruger Effect is a type of cognitive bias, whereby people with little expertise or ability assume they have superior expertise or ability. This overestimation occurs as a result of the fact that they don’t have enough knowledge to know they don’t have enough knowledge. When they look in the mirror - assuming they ever do - they see a genius . . . or a titan or one whose every judgment is correct. A study published in the April 2018 issue of the journal Political Psychology aimed the “Dunning Kruger Effect” specifically in the direction of partisan politics. Researched and written by University of Maryland Political Science professor Ian Anson, Partisanship, Political Knowledge, and the Dunning‐Kruger Effect found that those who evinced the least political knowledge (e.g. the ability to name Cabinet secretaries, identify the length of term limits for members of Congress or the names of programs that the U.S. government spends the least on) were far more likely to overestimate their level of political knowledge. Anson’s study found little difference between unknowing Democrats and unknowing Republicans. Indeed by itself, this is awfully depressing.

While the results of Anson’s study suggest that being uninformed leads to overconfidence across the political spectrum, other studies have shown that Democrats now tend to be more educated than Republicans, possibly making the latter more vulnerable to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. In fact, a Pew Research Center poll released in March of 2018, found that 54 percent of college graduates identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, compared to 39 percent who identified or leaned Republican.

Writing in Psychology Today, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian speculated that the Dunning Kruger Effect “ . . . may help explain why certain Trump supporters seem to be so easily tricked into believing proven falsehoods when the President delivers what have become known as “alternative facts,” often using language designed to activate partisan identities. Because they lack knowledge but are confident that they do not, they may be less likely than others to actually fact-check the claims that the President makes.”

Getting through to people is never easy . . . especially in light of what everyone from Socrates and Darwin to Dunning, Kruger and Anson have both posited and proved. The best answer on the horizon is, of course, to overwhelmingly defeat Donald Trump and all those who feed their partisans with half-truth and outright lies, and replace them with people possessing greater intellectual honesty and modesty.

Remember this: a wise person knows what they know; a very wise person knows what they do not know; a truly wise person knows, trusts and engages with those who know the things that they themselves do not know.

452 days until the election . . .

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

It

Clara Bow: The “It” Girl (1905-1965)

This week’s essay, simply entitled “It,” is the 756th hebdomadal (weekly) essay I’ve written and posted since February 5, 2005. Back then, the blog was entitled Beating the Bushes: Barack Obama was a virtually anonymous junior senator from Illinois, Pete Buttegieg had just graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and was heading off to Oxford’s Pembroke College where had had just been named a Rhodes Scholar; real estate magnate Donald Trump was beginning the second season of The Apprentice, and the bestselling fiction novel was John Grisham’s The Broker. No one had yet heard of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, or the terms sexting, and ransomware; for weeks and months on end, one of the top news stories dealt with Terri Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged woman, whose epic life-or-death battle came to the forefront of America's conscience — and to the highest court in the land.

One of the biggest differences between writing essays in 2005 and today is that back then, one had at least a week’s worth of leisure to research, cogitate and prepare before coming up with – and committing to - a title . . . let alone determining what in the Hell one was going to be writing about. By comparison, today, each potential topic lasts about ten minutes before taking a backseat to some other breaking news of earth shattering importance. Take for an example this week: just as one was beginning research on an essay dealing with the 2nd round of Democratic debates, there was the presidential attack on Rep. Elijah Cummings, and the city of Baltimore with all its racist overtones; the Presidential son-in-law’s involvement in that city’s decline, and the horrific massacres in Gilroy, California, El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio which have led to yet another debate about automatic weapons, gun safety laws, mental health and the relationship between the current administration and galloping white supremacy. This is not even to mention the Iranian seizure of additional oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, North Korea’s newest nuclear missile tests or the administration’s promise to impose new tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese consumer goods.

All-in-all, a vast smörgåsbord of temptations guaranteed to afflict one with acute weltschmerz combined with progressive intellectual dyspepsia. Oh how one longs for the days when screaming headlines were the exception, not the commonplace. What those of us who closely follow, write about - and are deeply invested in - politics on all levels, we cry out for change; for a reality in which class replaces crass; for a stable of political animals who place the broad weal of humanity above the narrow straitened path of partisanship. In short, we seek those who possess that ineffable quality called “It.” Being ineffable (too great to be spoken in words) “It” is nearly impossible to define; but one senses it when one sees it.

On the window shelf in my library, one finds several keepsakes which are, in my estimation, the symbols of my rather complex being. There, from right to left one finds a small statue of Moses grasping the Tablets of the Law, (representing my Jewish self); a magnificent wooden cigar box (my fascination with the inexplicable); a bust of Thomas Jefferson (symbolizing the ultimate Renaissance Man); a photo of my beloved father Henry in uniform, with the Taj Mahal looming in the background (the ultimate gentleman as warrior); a photo with Annie (the strongest, most resilient human being I know), and a truly rare photo of silent actress Clara Bow - the original “It” girl - my all-time favorite movie star.

I am happy to report that over the past several weeks I believe we have been in the presence of an “It” leader-on-the-rise: South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg, whose name is still so unpronounceable that most people refer to him as “Mayor Pete,” possesses “It.” He is a masterful articulator and very good at sidestepping controversy. Asked, as he stood next to Bernie Sanders onstage at the most recent Democratic debate, whether age was an important factor to consider in the upcoming election, Buttigieg gave a roundabout answer that stressed the importance of ideas and vision over age, while also explaining that looking to younger people was the important evolution needed for our country’s future. But probably most memorable was his directing a statement to sitting Republican congressmen: “And if you are watching this at home, and you are a Republican member of Congress, consider the fact that when the sun sets on your career, and they are writing your story—of all the good and bad things you did, the thing you will be remembered for is whether in this moment, with this president, you found the courage to stand up to him or you continued to put party over country.”

As a serious practicing Christian (He was raised and educated Catholic as a child, and became an Anglican [Episcopalian] while studying at Oxford), Mayor Peter has had no problem calling out Republicans for what he sees as their sectarian hypocrisy: “For a party that associates itself with Christianity, to say that … God would smile on the division of families at the hands of federal agents, that God would condone putting children in cages,” Buttigieg said, “has lost all claim to ever use religious language again.” This is the kind of straight-shooting attack that many Americans have been waiting for. Possessing “It,” Mayor Pete has the ability to be animated without being antagonistic; didactic without being demeaning and plain-spoken without resorting to puerility.

At age 37, Mayor Pete may seem too young to be a serious contender for POTUS. Indeed, he is 36 years younger than ‘45, 40 years younger than Joe Biden, 41 years younger than Bernie Sanders and 33 years younger than Elizabeth Warren. Were he to be elected, this would represent the greatest age differential between a president and his successor; JFK was 27 years younger than Dwight Eisenhower. The one thing JFK and Mayor Pete have in common - besides a Harvard education - is that ineffable quality we began this essay with: IT.

(And by the way, for those whose primary interest in any candidate is where they stand vis--à-vis Israel, Mayor Pete is a strong - though not totally uncritical - supporter of the Jewish State . . . far more prominently so than most progressive Democrats.)

2020 may well not be Mayor Pete’s year, although, in my humble opinion, the time is ripe to - in the soaring words of JFK, to

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans . . . .unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

458 days until the election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

To Impeach or Not to Impeach: That Is the Question

Although relatively low in entertainment value, former counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s testimony before two House committees did prove at least five things:

First, that a majority of the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence never read more than the briefest of summaries of the Mueller Report;

Second, that Attorney General William Barr’s assessment of that report was an absolute crock of beans;

Third, that candidate and then President Trump and his associates engaged in potential profit-making ventures with one of America’s worst enemies and then committed numerous provable acts of judicial obstruction;

Fourth, that not only did the Russians cyber-invade the voting systems in all fifty states in an effort to guarantee a Trump victory - they are hard at it for the 2020 election; and

Fifth, that despite the hearings, the House is hardly any closer to impeaching the POTUS than it was the day before the hearings. And while Democrats should be applauded for asking hard questions based on their (or their staff’s) reading and understanding of the lengthy, dry-as-dust report, Republicans were far more interested in bad-mouthing and taking cheap shots at Director Mueller - turning an American icon of Lincolnesque proportions into a senescent partisan hack.

Yesterday, Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) announced that he had asked a federal judge to unseal grand jury secrets related to the Mueller investigation, using the court filing to declare that lawmakers have already in effect launched an impeachment investigation of President Trump. In a legal maneuver that carries significant political overtones, the committee attorneys told a judge that it needs access to the grand jury evidence collected by Mr. Mueller as special counsel — such as witness testimony — because it is “investigating whether to recommend articles of impeachment” against the president. With the filing, Chairman Nadler was attempting to sidestep the debate raging inside the Democratic Party over whether the full House should hold a vote to formally declare that it is opening an impeachment inquiry. By declaring that his committee was in effect conducting such an inquiry, he was heading off a politically difficult vote in the committee or the full house to pursue impeachment.

To impeach or not to impeach: that is the question. Although a majority of Democrats across the country favor impeachment proceedings, only around 100 Congressional Democrats have already gotten on board. (Follow this link to see the latest tally of which Democrats favor impeachment, which say “not yet,” and which have yet to respond.) The percentage of Republicans polling against impeachment proceedings easily equals the president’s national approval ratings - about 43% at best. Among independents, impeachment is supported by a plurality, with “not sure” coming in a rather distant second. For House Democrats, impeachment is being debated and discussed along three different lines: the legal, the political and the moral.

The Legal: Despite what A.G. Barr, Republicans in Congress, the president’s base and conservative trolls everywhere may aver, there is a welter of evidence to show that crimes have been committed. Perhaps no one pierced what the New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan called “the clouds and cacophony” of the morning session (e.g. the Judiciary Committee) more magisterially than Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) who wielded the gavel during afternoon session. (n.b.: for purposes of full disclosure: I have long been close to the Schiff family; his father and late mother were students of mine for many years, and I have, on occasion, served as family rabbi. My respect and admiration for Adam are boundless.) In his opening remarks, Chairman Schiff “. . .scorchingly outlined President Trump’s three-way betrayal of his country and the American people.” Adam is always low-key and lawyerly; broad emotionalism is simply not his style. The most important point he got across in his opening remarks was that even if the two-year Mueller investigation couldn’t establish criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians, their disloyalty to country was “something worse” than a crime, and Mueller’s team amply established it. “A crime is the violation of a law written by Congress,” Schiff intoned, “but disloyalty to country violates the very obligation of citizenship, our devotion to a core principle on which our nation was founded, that we, the people, not some foreign power that wishes us ill, we decide who shall govern us.”

As one who has actually read, digested and taken copious notes on the entire Mueller report (it took me more than 5 weeks), I can attest to the fact that there were crimes ‘aplenty involving  candidate Trump, President Trump and much of his staff and administration.

The Political: To impeach or not to impeach is also an issue with a major political component. As of today, Speaker Pelosi is not in favor of impeaching the 45th POTUS. Why? Certainly not because she believes he is innocent or falsely accused, but rather because there is a highly critical national election on the horizon. As the highest ranking official in the opposition, she must determine if supporting and carrying out impeachment proceedings in the House (which stand a snowball’s chance in Hell of succeeding in the Republican-led Senate) will put a major roadblock in her party’s attempt to take back the White House and both houses of Congress in 2020. Knowing that there will undoubtedly be a tremendous amount of Russian meddling in the 2020 election, she must do what is best and politically smartest to garner the maximum number of votes in places like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and West Virginia. As such, will it be better (and politically smarter) to run on “kitchen-table issues” like jobs, healthcare, taxes, and Social Security (among others) or on impeaching Donald Trump? If it’s the latter, will she then see her party drowning in the very swamp he has created? She must determine which is more politically potent: hatred of Trump or concern for the working class. Never underestimate the political smarts of Nancy Pelosi; she is one of the shrewdest political operators in American history.

Make no mistake about it: Should House Democrats decide to proceed with impeachment hearings, the Trump White House will Twitter away with all the wrathful vengeance and fury of the Biblical plagues. And while they will be applauded by their base for standing up to “the Socialist Squad,” they will likely gain few if any new supporters. On the other hand, it is possible that pushing the impeachment envelope may keep many independent voters away from the polls, fed up with Democrats who, in their opinion, are far more interested in getting rid of ‘45 than in addressing their middle-class needs and concerns. For the Democrats, this could easily become their Sisyphean challenge.

In an interview Adam Schiff gave nearly 2 months ago (well before the Mueller’s presentation to Congress) to Los Angeles Times staff writer Christine Mai-Duc, the California Democrat summarized the political conundrum about as well as is humanly possible:

I think the most powerful arguments both for and against impeachment are really mirror images of each other. If we don’t impeach him, what does that say to future Congresses and presidents about whether this kind of conduct is compatible with office? And by the same token, if we do impeach him, and he’s acquitted in the Senate, and there is an adjudication that that conduct is not impeachable, that may be a worse precedent. So I think before we go down the road of something that would absorb the whole Congress and whole country and lead to a very predictable result, we should be sure that this is the right thing to do for the country.

The Moral: Without question, our current president lacks both a moral compass and basic human decency. It may well be that Democrats must respond to all this immorality and indecency with a tactic which is not all that politically smart. After all, to many Americans - whether they are consciously aware of it or not - Donald Trump has two distinct advantages: he is a media celebrity and he stridently opposes virtually everything that has a moral component.

Those who aren’t ferociously enamored with Donald Trump are well aware of his many, many flaws and shortcomings: his racism, sexism, xenophobia, crudity, heartlessness, narcissism and perhaps above all, his utter inability to tell the truth. He is, without question, the least moral, most disloyal citizen to ever occupy the White House. And if for no other reason than this, Democrats should proceed with impeachment. Much of the nation is both benumbed and bewildered at the Republicans’ spinelessness; at their rank inability to confront the leader of their party. It seems to me that if the Democrats do not proceed with impeachment hearings that they too will be guilty of spinelessness. It may not, in the long run, make for smart politics. Goodness knows it will - succeed or fail - carry all the marks of courage and good citizenship - qualities sorely lacking in our time and place.

In the mid-1930s, shortly before the beginning of World War II, Austrian Robert Musil, the author of The Man Without Qualities (easily one of the greatest novels-of-ideas ever written) noted that “No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.” Herr Musil, you said a mouthful. The political culture of the United States (and now, with the ascension of Boris Johnson, of Britain) is sick. It is unserious, crooked and lethal. There is no honest way to dissociate the rise of Trump and Johnson from the societies that produced them. The triumph of indecency is rampant. Choose your facts. The only blow Trump knows is the low one. As the gutter is to the stars, so is this president to dignity. 

Although impeaching him will likely not succeed in the Republican-controlled United States Senate nor fix what is wrong with our political culture, it is nonetheless, in my very humble opinion, the right thing to do. Some will respond “Although I agree with your assessment, winning the presidency is far more important.” I disagree: sometimes it is essential to do what in the short-term may be the wrong thing . . . but for the right reason.

In the long run, if we impeach him it’s not because we despise ‘45 so much; it’s because we love our country and its ideals so very much more.

467 days until the presidential election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Will There Be a Morning After?

Once upon a time, the new school year began shortly after Labor Day. I don’t know about you, but here in South Florida, our Fall Semester begins on Monday August 12 - when many kids will still be up north at summer camp. So why does our school year begin so incredibly early? Only G-d and the Palm Beach County Board of Education know. for certain . . . perhaps. Likewise, once upon a time, presidential elections began in earnest on Labor Day weekend of the year in which the nation went to the polls. Nowadays, presidential campaigns begin on the day the president takes the oath of office. And mind you, some of the potential candidates are gearing up not for the election four years hence, but occasionally a full eight years into the future. Of course, our current POTUS began his reelection campaign the very day he placed his hand on the Bible - a book he’s probably never read cover to cover. In other words, nowadays we seem to have both a never-ending school year and a presidential election season without end.

It goes without saying that a high percentage of the American public is anxiously awaiting - if not praying for - the end of the Trump presidency. We are up to here with all the bald-faced lies and “leadership via Twitter”; with the ceaseless name-calling, and revolving door executive department; with the utter societal divisiveness and the disparagement of the CIA, FBI and the press; with the dismembering of our international alliances and the catering to those who are most base and intolerant . . . and on and on and on. For the first time in our lives, many, many Americans - myself included - are in fear for the future of a country whose very slogan, e pluribus unam (“Out of many comes one”) is on the critical list.

But merely dislodging Trump and his clueless, avaricious crowd’s hands from the levers of power is neither a certainty nor a cure-all; American polity and society have long been fraught with cancerous cleavages. But never in our history have they been so case-hardened and, what’s even worse, so frighteningly weaponized. One of the most pernicious things Trump has done in his brief political career is to make fear the central plank of his presidency; the fear of the “other.” Historically, that is the despot’s way. Where most candidates for president have presented policies and visions meant to inspire, Trump has somehow convinced a sizable plurality that without his firm grip on the reins of authority and leadership, America is doomed - doomed to be brought down by enemies invading our once-great nation. Trump’s America is largely peopled by White Christian males (financed by self-serving billionaires) who fear that their “kind” are losing the country to “socialists,” “illegal aliens,” the arbiters of “political correctness” and atheists.

In the past week, we’ve gotten more than a sneak peak of their 2020 campaign strategy: running against the “socialist America haters”; making the entire “Democrat Party” into a tool of Representatives Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. (I predicted this in an essay nearly six months ago entitled Politics - Like Acting - Ain’t for Sissies..) Trump has his mindless minions so well-trained, so brainwashed, that should he actually lose both the popular vote (which he did in 2016) and the Electoral College, there will begin, the morning after the election, a cacophonous hue and cry of refusal and threat. The “defeat,” they will stridently claim, was all a gigantic hoax; a deadly lie promulgated by the “fake media.” This may well be, I fear, the first time in American history where there won’t be a relatively smooth transition from one presidency to the next. In short, it is possible that there may be no morning after. We saw a minor version of this with the election of Barack Obama in 2008: for 8 years, millions refused to accept him as ‘‘their president,” because he was not - and never would be - “one of us.”

I can easily imagine ‘45 holding a series of post-election campaign-style rallies in which he fans the flames of militant dissension by refusing to concede defeat. He will likely claim that “millions of undocumented illegals” voted twice, thrice and even more to steal victory and insure his defeat; that the will of the people had been thwarted by the Communists and Socialists who, beginning day one of the new administration, will begin confiscating their weapons, outlawing Christianity, and putting the government into the hands of “The Squad.” If such be the scenario, his intent will be nothing short of calling for civil war. Now, whether or not he has given thought to what his words could actually lead to is worth debating, for likely he has not. Nonetheless, as haunting as this possibility is, do remember that a clear majority of the approximately 390 million guns in America, are in the hands of self-identified conservatives, white nationalists and fans of conspiracy. Theoretically, what havoc they can wreak is beyond belief.

So what is to be done? (And mind you, I am plagiarizing neither Lenin nor Chernyshevsky; I may be a progressive, but I ain’t no Commie. This is incredibly close to our family history; just yesterday, Madam [our mom, who’ getting close to 100 years] was loudly decrying all her friends and colleagues - like John Garfield, Marsha Hunt and Larry Parks - who lost their careers due to accusations of being Commie sympathizers).  It seems to me that the first thing we can do is accustom ourselves to the fact that we may very well wind up voting for a Democratic candidate who is not our first choice. In the long run, we must vote for - and lend support to - the candidate who has the best chance of sending Boss Tweet back to where he comes from - whether it be Germany, Queens or his mother’s womb. I could care less, just so long as he leaves. Our support must be given to a candidate who is fearless, not feckless, who carries him- or herself with dignity, and has a functioning moral compass. This person must be skilled in the art of governance, capable of appointing a Cabinet of skilled professionals whose virtuosity is vastly above the venality of their predecessors; a president who is already on speaking terms with the people he or she will have to work with, and knows the value of doing justice, loving mercy and walking with humility. Again I repeat: it is likely that this person may not be your ideal candidate and may have a few cobwebs in the attic. But then again, as Grandpa Doc used to say: “If heaven were meant only for perfect people, it would be the emptiest piece of property in the universe.”

Once we have our candidate, we cannot - indeed must not - go sit on the sidelines licking old wounds. We must do everything in our individual and collective power to ensure that ‘45 and his ilk suffer the greatest defeat in all history. It’s time for progressives and moderates, for Democrats and Independents to finally start acting like a vast majority and rid our country of the mindless meanness which suffuses society. America still has the ability to be a beacon of light to the world . . . to guarantee that there will be a morning after.

No one said it would be easy . . . but it’s as essential as the dreams we dream or the very air we breathe.

473 days until the most significant election in American history.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

A Circus of Spineless Enablers

In the world of social psychology, “enabling” is a term often used to connote a relationship with an addict. It might be a drug addict or alcoholic, a gambler, or a compulsive overeater. Most frequently, it’s the enablers, rather than the addicts, who suffer the effects of the addict’s behavior. In the world of contemporary politics, “enablers” are those who sit silently and spinelessly by, while their leader(s) - who are addicted to a mélange of outrageous behaviors and psychological instabilities - lead the nation along the path of destruction. These spineless enablers, are better known as “the Republican caucus” where seldom is heard a discouraging word . . . but the skies are much cloudier all day.

About the only ones who’ve found spines are those who have already retired from office, announced that they will be retiring or, in a few rare cases, have actually been defeated for reelection. Then there are those like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who have gone from voluble anti-Trumpster to mostly adoring lapdog. How many remember all the way back to 2016 when Graham - the late Senator John McCain’s best friend - called Sir Donald of Orange everything from a “kook,” a “jackass,” “a little jerk,” a race-baiting bigot,” and “the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican Party.” What a difference an election makes.

Then there is the case of Texas Senator Ted Cruz. During the 2016 primary season, when Cruz was a serious candidate for president, then-candidate Trump made fun of Cruz's wife's appearance and suggested that his Cuban-born father had had a hand in John F. Kennedy's assassination. He also savaged the senator on Twitter: "Why would the people of Texas support Ted Cruz when he has accomplished absolutely nothing for them?" Back when he had a spine, Cruz responded by calling Trump "a sniveling coward," ''a pathological liar," "utterly amoral" and "a serial philanderer." He refused to endorse him during the 2016 Republican National Convention, only to suddenly announce his support barely a month before Election Day 2016. Today, they are as thick as thieves.

There once was a time when Republicans stood for things like balanced budgets, limited government, a strong military and could be counted on for expressing a full-throated loathing for dictators and autocrats. And, beginning with the post-Nixon years, they frequently carried the Holy Book into battle against immoralists and malefactors of all stripes. From today’s perspective, that time seems to have been generations ago. Today, Republican office-holders at nearly every level are little better than clowns in a circus made up of spineless enablers; men - and even women - who remain mute while their leader rants and raves, sets records for telling lies, adds trillions to the deficit, picks fights with our closest allies and further isolates America from the rest of the world. Don’t these elected officials realize that their “leader” is a racist, immoral, foul-mouthed buffoon . . . not to mention a criminal?

Why won’t they open their mouths even once? How can anyone with an ounce of sense, a conscience and a true love of country stand idly by while the POTUS and his administration of acting understudies separates already traumatized children from their parents and then sequester them for weeks and perhaps months on end in for-profit “detention centers” (here I’m using the term we employed back in WWII); how can they continue showing loyalty to a man who spends the majority of his time playing golf, Tweeting, and holding endless love-fests (campaign rallies) and firing staff? How in the name of all that’s holy, healthy and sincere can they get a good night’s sleep? The answer to this last question is difficult to parse. However, it would seem that many, many Republicans are simply in fear; fear that should they rise up and relocate their backbones, take a stand against corruption, mendacity and gross incompetence and quit being enablers, that they will be called foul names, find themselves facing deep-pocketed challengers in the next primary, and actually losing their seats in Congress.

Is there ever going to be a “straw that breaks the camel’s back” before it’s too late?  Will the Jeffrey Epstein case turn into America’s “Profumo Scandal” and bring the government down? Will ‘45’s latest race-tinged rant against four members of the House of Representatives finally get the (mostly) white men on Capitol Hill to scream out ENOUGH ALREADY!? And most importantly, can all we’ve been through over these past 2 1/2 years finally get the workaday world to figure out that America deserves far, far better than a circus master with an unerring sense of that which is both immoral and macabre, and vote him out?

What America needs now, more than ever, are citizen patriots; experienced leaders; incorruptible elections and a solid moral compass. And while about a dozen or so Republican senators and representatives have called the president’s latest “Love it or leave it” rant “unacceptable,” their response - in a great Talmudic idiom - is little more than דחית בקנה (dah-kheet ba-kaneh - “pushing him away with a weak reed.” I have to believe that in their heart of hearts, a large majority of the president’s spineless enablers are truly embarrassed by the words and deeds of their party’s leader and fear for the country’s future should he retain his office. But what they fear even more is being voted out of office if they turn their weak reeds into steely spines.

Without question what we do not need is a circus of spineless enablers.

479 days until the next national election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Sen. Elizabeth "I Have a Plan For That" Warren

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There is a specter haunting presidential politics: whether to support the candidate whose policies and personality one likes best, or instead, to support the one person you believe will have the best chance of defeating the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. At this early date, few political wonks, geeks or activists have come close to aligning themselves to a particular candidate. Indeed many are caught between the devil and the deep-blue sea when it comes to answering the question “What yardstick or barometer should one use in selecting their presidential candidate?”: ideology and policy (which are based largely on fact) or a sense that candidate X or Y has the best chance of cold-cocking ‘45 and his alternate reality universe on November 3, 2020 (which is, of course, based far, far more on emotion)?

Hey, here’s a novel thought: what’s to say that we cannot find and support a candidate who combines intelligent, well thought-out policies with passion, a down-to-earth personality and the ability to inspire? For those of us who are already deep into our search, the name “Elizabeth Warren” is growing in stature and believability. While few have been watching, Senator Warren has been crisscrossing the United States and talking to voters face-to-face. It seems that hardly a day goes by without her offering up yet another plan or proposal addressing America’s most pressing “kitchen-table” needs. As a result, she has been moving up in the polls; as of today, June 17, 2019, the newest NBC NEWs/WSJ poll shows that a combined 64% of Democratic primary voters now say they are either enthusiastic or comfortable with Elizabeth Warren, up from 57% in March. A combined 27% say they either have reservations or are very uncomfortable with her candidacy, as compared to Senator Bernie Sanders (her chief progressive opponent) for whom 56% are either enthusiastic or comfortable (down from 62% in March), and a combined 41% say they either have reservations or are very uncomfortable with him. And, according to Bloomberg News’ Sahil Kapur, “A national Economist/YouGov poll released last week showed Warren in second place among the large Democratic field with 16%, behind former V.P. Joe Biden’s 26% and ahead of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s 12%.

Typical of the Massachusetts’ senator, candidate Warren has neither crowed nor led a pep rally over these new polling figures. “I’m out there doing what I believe in. I get a chance to talk about what’s broken in America, how we can fix it, and build a grassroots movement to get that done. And I get to do it every day.” The one thing she does seem to communicate virtually every day is her latest “plan” for everything from rebuilding America’s infrastructure, to providing (and paying for) childcare for working-class and impoverished families, addressing (and paying for) Medicare for All, fixing a broken immigration system without resorting to fear-mongering, addressing global warming and reversing the Trump tax cuts for corporations and the hyper wealthy. (At this point in the essay, you may wish to check out Senator Warren’s campaign website, which details all of her proposals; they are a real eye-opener.)

And for all her efforts, the Republicans’ response has consisted of precisely 3 words: “Pocahontas,” “Socialist,” and “Radical.”

Pocahontas (Rebecca Rolfe)

I would venture a guess that only a tiny fraction of those referring to her as Pocahontas have any idea of who she was, of why she has a place in American (and British) history, or that she who was born Princess Matoaka, in present-day Gloucester County, Virginia in c. 1596 and died Rebecca Rolfe in Kent County, England, at age 21. All they likely know is that in 1986, Senator Warren claimed to have Cherokee ancestry, took a DNA test to back it up, and has since apologized. The DNA test concluded that the “vast majority” of her ancestry was European but that her lineage was very likely to include one Native American ancestor somewhere between six and 10 generations ago. Regardless of this, ‘45 stuck her with the nickname “Pocahontas” and continues to mock her to this very day. And that, as mentioned above, is the sum and substance of what most Americans know about her . . . which is really next to nothing.

The coming months will predictably bring a whittling down of the roster of Democratic pols seeking nomination. They will leave the field either because they’ve:

• Come in 5th, 6th, or lower in a primary;

• Run out of money;

• Made an on-camera boo-boo;

• Had something from their past dug up and magnified to the point where it defines them;

• Shown themselves to be not ready for prime time.

And since a majority of the 20 or so hopefuls are currently spending the majority of their time and money just making a name and identity for themselves with the public - separating themselves from the pack - you had better believe that there’s also going to be quite a bit of negativity.

Here’s where Senator Warren is different. Quite different. Like Senator Sanders, former Vice President Biden and Mayor Pete-of-the-unpronounceable-last-name, Elizabeth Warren doesn’t need to spend all that much time introducing herself to the public. But unlike them, she spends the lion’s share of her campaign time speaking truth to power; explaining what she intends to do in a Warren Administration.

And unlike most - if not all - of those running for the nomination, Senator Warren already has an enormous paid staff in place and working. By the end of March, Warren's campaign staff numbered about 164 people, according to payroll spending released this week in a quarterly Federal Election Commission disclosure. The 69-year-old candidate, who was the first major contender to jump in the race with a New Year's Eve announcement, now has a team of more than 170 people and plans to bring on new hires every month in the second quarter of 2019, campaign officials confirmed.

As Warren and her advisers see it, it's part of a larger strategy that diverts from past presidential campaigns that have prioritized spending on television ads. As voters change the way they consume information online, they say, Warren has focused on building a campaign operation in early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire, holding events (58 town halls in 14 states) where the emphasis is on answering questions (more than 250 from audiences), engaging with the press (105 one-on-one interviews and 44 media availabilities), and demonstrating substance on policy.

“We are building a grassroots organization that’s built to last,” said Kristen Orthman, the campaign’s communications director. “We have front-loaded a tight-knit team and set our organizational plans, priorities, and culture faster and in finer detail than anyone.” In other words, Elizabeth Warren began putting together her campaign - and future presidential staff - long, long before her official announcement.

As far back as 2009, journalists were beginning to take interest in Elizabeth Warren. In late October 2009, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote a major piece entitled Elizabeth Warren for President. (And mind you, this was less than a year into the Obama Administration.) In that article, Taibbi wrote: “We need someone … to re-seize the Party from the Wall Street interests that have come to dominate it … [Someone] who will know the difference between real regulatory reform and a dog-and-pony show, and will not be likely to fill a cabinet with bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.”

The strength of Warren’s campaign is a series of detailed policy proposals aimed at correcting a series of corrupting inequities in American life. The first major proposal she released, on January 24th, was aimed at perhaps the biggest problem in American society: the wealth gap.

While working people almost all live off highly-taxed “income,” high net worth individuals mostly live off other revenue streams: carried interest, capital gains, inheritance, etc. Warren’s plan would create a net worth calculation that would hit households worth between $50 million and $1 billion with a 2% annual “ultra-millionaires tax.”

She has a similar plan for corporate tax, one that would wipe away the maze of loopholes big companies currently use, and force any firm that makes over $100 million in profits to pay a new 7 percent tax. “Amazon would pay $698 million instead of zero,” she says. “Occidental Petroleum would pay $280 million … instead of zero.”

Other proposals include a Too Big To Fail breakup program for Silicon Valley that would designate internet firms that “offer an online marketplace” and have annual revenues of $25 billion or more as “Platform Utilities.” Under the plan, “Google’s ad exchange and businesses on the exchange would be split apart,” and “Google Search would have to be spun off as well.”

Warren has also unveiled ambitious plans for cancelation of student debt and free college, universal child care and a new corporate accountability plan that would force high-ranking corporate executives to certify they’d conducted a “due diligence” inquiry, making it easier to prosecute them for misdeeds conducted under their watch.

She even created an “economic patriotism” plan that overtly targets many of the excuses for domestic job loss offered by her own party — automation, a “skills gap” or just blunt economic reality when trying to compete with cheaper labor abroad. She calls bull on it all. “No,” she writes, “America chose to pursue a trade policy that prioritized the interests of capital over the interests of American workers.”

She then laid out a series of plans that create “aggressive intervention on behalf of American workers,” create a “Department of Economic Development” and put an end to practices like corporations using public money for R&D, then eating the benefits in stock buybacks while exporting jobs. Her plan would give taxpayers an equity stake in publicly developed enterprises.

This idea has such broad appeal that it even had Tucker Carlson talking it up last week as he denounced companies that “wave the flag, but have no loyalty or allegiance to America.” She even got Carlson to rip Republicans, saying, “Republicans in Congress can’t promise to protect American industries. They wouldn’t dare. It might violate some principle of Austrian economics…”

Can Elizabeth Warren capture the Democratic nomination and even the White House? Can her utterly unique blend of political progressivism and economic populism; of small-town-Middle-American-single-working-mother values and Harvard Law School professorship; of writing books for the masses which discuss elite topics . . . actually work? (Senator Warren has written more than a dozen books. My favorites include A Fighting Chance, This Fight is Our Fight: the Battle to Save America’s Middle Class, All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, and The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke.

Can Elizabeth Warren succeed? Can she actually grab the Democratic nomination and then defeat ‘45? To be honest, I do not know the answer; my crystal ball has been in the repair shop since early November 2016. What I do know is that she is not the radical her opponents accuse her of being; rather, she is running against a radical who has instilled fear and silence in his supporters and both hatred and total fatigue in his challengers. Simply stated, Elizabeth Warren is surging in the polls because the more people learn about her and hear what she has to say, the more they realize just how refreshing and revitalizing a bipolar opposite can be.

The more ‘45 calls her Pocahontas, accuses her of being a Socialist and an effete intellectual snob without engaging her in serious debate about all the serious dinner-table issues she has spent a lifetime dealing with, the more obvious it will be that the emperor has no clothes . . . and even fewer brains.

When it comes to running against Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren can honestly say “I have a plan for that too!”

508 days left until the 2020 election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Buchanan and Trump: What's Past Is Prologue

One of the spookiest aspects of what’s going on in modern media is that major news stories and sidebars - which could and should be of historic importance - come and go in the blink of an eye, while pieces which are really no more than spicy gossip hang around for weeks and months on end. As but one example: a week ago, Federal District Judge Amit P. Mehta’s handed down a decision, which gave the president a stinging defeat in his bid to block a House subpoena of his financial records. Less than a week later, the case, DONALD J. TRUMP, et al. Plaintiffs v. COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF ) REPRESENTATIVES, et al. Defendants (Case No. 19-cv-01136 (APM) has already faded into oblivion. At the same time, the doctored YouTube video of a “drunken” Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already attained legendary internet status. And, to make things worse, hardly any major media coverage included a key element in Judge Mehta’s decision: a section dealing with the nation’s 15th president, James Buchanan.

In what may well be the greatest irony of the century, the White House’s appeal of Judge Mehta’s decision will now be heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose current chief judge is none other than Merrick Garland, whom President Obama nominated to the Supreme Court in 2016 after the untimely death of Justice Antonin Scalia. (For those who may not recall, within minutes of President Obama making Judge Garland’s nomination public, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proclaimed it DOA . . . a first in American history. And what makes Judge Mehta’s decision even more ironic is that all ‘45 said about it was something to the effect that “What do you expect? The judge was appointed by Obama!”)

Very few news sources mentioned that Judge Mehta opened his decision by quoting President James Buchanan protesting against a congressional investigation nearly 160 years ago, in which he claimed that said congressional investigation was a means of “furnishing material for harassing [the President], degrading him in the eyes of the country.”

I do, therefore, . . . solemnly protest against these proceedings of the House of Representatives, because they are in violation of the rights of the coordinate executive branch of the Government, and subversive of its constitutional independence; because they are calculated to foster a band of interested parasites and informers, ever ready, for their own advantage, to swear before ex parte committees to pretended private conversations between the President and themselves, incapable, from their nature, of being disproved; thus furnishing material for harassing him, degrading him in the eyes of the country . . . – President James Buchanan

In this statement, the feckless Buchanan (who served as the nation’s 15th POTUS from 1857-1861) was objecting to the House of Representative’s decision to investigate whether his administration had sought to improperly influence the actions of Congress. Sound familiar? Buchanan argued that Congress had no general powers to investigate him, outside of formal impeachment proceedings. If Congress were allowed to investigate his conduct outside of impeachment, he warned, it “would establish a precedent dangerous and embarrassing to all my successors, to whatever political party they might be attached.” Again: sound familiar?

“Some 160 years later,” wrote Judge Mehta in his introductory paragraph, “President Donald J. Trump has taken up the fight of his predecessor.”

At this point, two truisms come to mind: the first from Winston Churchill (who was likely misquoting philosopher George Santayana) and the second from Shakespeare:

• Churchill: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and

• Shakespeare (from The Tempest): “What’s past is prologue.”

In light of our current political imbroglio, the apothegms of Churchill and Shakespeare are most prophetic. From what we know about ‘45 and a majority of his advisers and followers, they aren’t what one would call “students of history.” Lacking knowledge of - let alone curiosity about - American political history - they could easily cause history to repeat itself . . . which might not be such a bad thing.

Certainly, there are profound differences between James Buchanan and Donald Trump. For one, Buchanan (1791-1868) was our only bachelor president, while ‘45, of course, has been twice divorced and thrice married. And while Trump is the only president who never held elective office and one of the few who never served in the military, Buchanan was perhaps the most “prepared” public servant to ever be elected to the presidency. For prior to his election in 1857, he had:

• Served as an enlisted infantry man during the British invasion of Baltimore (1814);

• Was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (1814-16); the United States House of Representatives (1821-31) and the United States Senate (1834-45);

• Served as chair of the House Judiciary Committee (1829-31), Minister (Ambassador) to Russia (1832-33); U.S. Secretary of State under President James K. Polk (1845-49); and as Minister to England (1853-56).

And yet, besides being our only bachelor president, he is best remembered - if at all - for such historically disastrous episodes as “Bleeding Kansas,” the “Dred Scott Case” and the “Panic (financial collapse) of 1857.” And oh yes, at a time when the nation was terribly divided between pro- and anti-slavery factions, he was a a divider . . . a “Peace Democrat,” soon to be known as “Copperhead.” Much of what Buchanan accomplished (or rather, failed to accomplish) made the Civil War inevitable. Many historians and political scientists considered him “an invertebrate” when it came to making difficult decisions.

There are, to be sure, quite a few similarities between Buchanan and Trump:

• In his run for the White House, Buchanan carried five northern states while sweeping the South, accumulating 45 percent of the vote. Trump would take six northern states, almost sweeping the South, and capturing 46 percent of the vote.

• Both men were educated in Pennsylvania. Both were northerners and nominated to the presidency in Ohio cities.

• Our 15th and 45th presidents came into office extremely wealthy. Both were old for their era when elected: Buchanan, 65, and Trump, 70. Popularity greatly mattered to both. Their views on states rights paralleled one another to a considerable degree.

• Quarrels with Mexico and border protection dominated a great deal of their attention during their time in office.

• White males were primarily responsible for both of their elections (of course, in 1857, neither women nor few non-whites could vote). Investigations also dominated both presidencies, with Buchanan dismissing his investigation as an “inquisition” while Trump branded his a “witch hunt.”

And oh yes, for the past many decades, presidential historians and political scientists have ranked Buchanan - along with Andrew Johnson, William Henry Harrison and Warren G. Harding - as America’s worst presidents. For the past two years, Donald Trump has ranked dead last . . . even worse than Buchanan.

Where ‘45 has to contend with the likes of House Committee Chairs Adam Schiff, (Intelligence) Jerry Nadler (Judiciary), Richard Neal (Ways and Means), Elijah Cummings (Oversight and Reform) and Maxine Waters (Financial Services), Buchanan’s single bugbear was Pennsylvania Representative John Covode, a former blacksmith who rose to become chair of the The Select Committee to Investigate Alleged Corruptions in Government. In 1860, Covode (1808-1871) and his committee (known to history as ‘The Covode Committee’) was mandated to conduct an investigation of the Buchanan administration to see if there was sufficient corruption and mismanagement to warrant impeachment. Despite the fact that they never did find sufficient grounds to impeach, it doomed the president; Buchanan was largely responsible for the dismemberment of his political party (then known as “Democrats,” caused the creation of a new party (“the Republicans”) and aided greatly in the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Founding Father of that party. For his efforts - or lack thereof - Buchanan went down in history as the worst (or second worst) President in American history.

Without question, Judge Mehta knows his political history. Otherwise, why would he quote Buchanan at the beginning of his legal decision? Churchill/Santayana/Shakespeare were right: ‘45 will not only challenge Buchanan for last place in the ranking of worst presidents; he could also be responsible for the dismemberment of an entire political party.

If only he, his advisers, staff and family had paid attention to the lessons of history, ‘45’s legacy might look more hopeful today. But do remember: Abraham Lincoln, the man who succeeded the heretofore last-place Buchanan, is unanimously considered the best POTUS in our history. (With the single exception of the preeminent presidential historian Jon Voight . . . who claims ‘45 is even greater than the Great Emancipator.)

Shakespeare’s Antonio was correct: “What’s past is prologue.”

530 days until the next election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Laughter: The Only Medicine?

Let’s face it: the level of civic anger and despair - not to mention the consequent imbibing of Gamay Beaujolais and other tasty varietals - is at an all-time high. Patience, propriety and political maturity have become as rare as a winning season for the Miami Marlins. What were once low-decibel disagreements between friends, colleagues or acquaintances have morphed into cacophonous, often friendship-busting battles. Families have to think twice about who will or will not be invited to Thanksgiving dinner - or next week’s Passover Seder - lest a rancorous dust-up occur. Simply stated, in far too many cases, partisan politics have driven a wedge between far too many people. Our levels of pique and personal enmity have soared to stratospheric heights; we have forgotten how to laugh - at ourselves and at others.

I have long been of the opinion that one important mark of a successful person is that while co (my pronoun for her/she) tends to be quite serious about what they do, they don’t necessarily take themselves too seriously. A bit of self-directed humor - the ability to laugh at oneself - can be a good thing. Those who laugh at - and make fun of - others but go bananas when others laugh at - or make fun of - them are - in my experience - people afflicted with terribly thin skin, as well as an admixture of low self-esteem, egotism and overarching narcissism. When it’s a run-of-the-mill person that’s afflicted with this “thin-skin-mixed-with-egotism-low-self-esteem-and-narcissism syndrome” there is little harm that he or she will tear down society. When it’s the most powerful person on the planet who’s so afflicted, we’re all in danger.

Unlike just about anyone who’s ever been in the public eye, ‘45 greatly prefers that people be angry with him, rather than laughing at him. To him, it’s a mark of achievement to infuriate women, minorities and assorted college-educated progressives. Unlike just about any other “leader” we’ve ever encountered, our anger is something he revels in. What he cannot and will not abide is for people to laugh at or ridicule him. That’s why he never attends the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (often referred to as WHCD or “NerdProm”). The last one he attended was in 2011 - 5 years before he ran for POTUS. You may remember how infuriated he became when then-President Obama skewered “The Donald” saying, among other things, ”No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” (n.b. The 2011 WHCD took place just days after Mr. Obama released his long-form birth certificate - a document Mr. Trump then claimed did not exist. )

Yes, ‘45 simply hates it when people laugh at or ridicule him. And when they do, he fires back, both guns blazing. How many times has he threatened and insulted” Saturday Night Live” for portraying him as a malevolent, clueless clown?  Seeing a humorous - though accurate - reflection of himself is something ‘45 just can’t stomach.  It tears at his self-image - one of vast wealth, brilliant achievement and utter decisiveness. But ‘45, like any vainglorious narcissist, cannot tolerate looking in a mirror that reflects his true ugliness.

That’s why he hates it when anyone laughs at him.  He thinks people should be afraid of him, angry at him, in awe of him and in love with him. It gives him power when anyone gets outraged.  He wants that attention along with the adoration.  But he cannot stand being a joke or a failure, and he will go to great lengths including obstructing justice to maintain his self-image.

We are all familiar with the various nasty nicknames he’s pinned on those who run against or disagree with him: “Low Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Crying Chuck” and “Pencil Neck [Adam] Schiff” to name but a few. In ‘45’s case, he’s not laughing at them; rather, he’s in full-scale attack mode. And woe betide anyone who actually tries to employ facts to back up their case against him - or to use his own words to show up the wizard behind the curtain. It’s at that point Sir Donald of Orange will haul out the “Fake News!” claim.

There are already far, far more nicknames the public has created for our ‘45th POTUS than ‘45 has created for his enemies. There is actually a website devoted to the more than 400 nicknames people both great and small have affixed to the man who would be tyrant. Some of my favorites are:

• America’s Black Mole: Given by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight.

• Barbarian at the Debate: Given by Charles M. Blow.

• Groper-in-Chief: Given by Nicholas Kristof.

• Riptide of Regression: Given by Dan Rather.,

• Dimwit Don : by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Kurt Eichenwald, and

• Cadet Bone Spurs by an anonymous blogger who goes by the handle “Eagle of Freedom”

Want to get past the anger and distress while brandishing little more than a verbal whoopee cushion? Perhaps the best thing will be laughter and ridicule; two things which the POTUS hates the most. True, if enough people would join in on the laughter and ridicule, it might force him to respond with acts of madness. But who knows? Perhaps if he acts with even greater madness, people on his side of the aisle will gird their loins, hitch up their trousers and finally, finally stand up to him, shouting out ENOUGH ALREADY . . . SIT!!

If you’ve got a new nickname for “Don the Con,” please send it along and we’ll add it to the list.

For after all, in the long run, laughter could very well be the best - if not only - medicine of all.

How’s about Mrs. Putin?

569 days until the next election.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone