Dancing in the Dark,

                     Charisse & Astaire: “Dancing in the Dark”

Despite its title, this week’s post has virtually nothing to do with the sensual balletic piece essayed by Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in the 1953 MGM classic “The Band Wagon.” Rather, this post deals with the second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump, which is winding up even as I write these very words. Up to this point, the 9 Democratic House managers have presented a tour-de-force - a prosecutorial masterstroke - which even gained the muted plaudits of Republican members of the United States Senate and the former inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. For those of us who watched their tag-team prosecution, it seemed inconceivable that anyone could turn a blind eye to the crime of the former POTUS, and vote for acquittal. Then came the presentation of Trump’s legal team which, in comparison to the triumph of Reps. Raskin, Liu, Castro et al fell as flat as a sheet of Saran Wrap.  And yet, even before closing arguments, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues began announcing that they would unhesitatingly vote for acquittal. 

How is this possible?  What fills their hearts and brains?  What do their eyes see or their ears hear? Do they suffer from some kind of collective Spondylosis which makes it impossible for them to stand erect and do the right thing?  Are they toadies or patriots?  Are they motivated by fear, greed or hatred? 

First things first: the chances of Donald J. Trump being convicted by a two-thirds majority of the Senate are impossible; he will be acquitted.  His 2016 prediction will once again be proven true: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."  

(THIS JUST IN: THE SENATE, BY A VOTE OF 57-43, VOTED AGAINST CONVICTION. ONLY 7 OF THE SENATE’S 50 REPUBLICANS VOTED FOR CONVICTION WHILE 43 VOTED TO ACQUIT HIM OF THE SINGLE CHARGE; ALL 50 DEMOCRATS VOTED FOR CONVICTION.)

After listening to both sides - the prosecution and defense - and weighing both the facts and fantasies separating the two sides, I am absolutely astonished that the vast majority of Republicans could still vote against conviction.  Indeed, shortly after the final vote was tallied, Minority Leader McConnell gave —what at least for him - was the harshest and most scathing assessment of Donald J. Trump that any Republican outside of those affiliated with “The Lincoln Project” could give. He excoriated the former president for his legal, moral and political deficiencies, and went so far as to accuse him of violating the very oath he took on January 20, 2017 - the one in which he solemnly pledged that “. . . to the best of my ability,” he would “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. . . so help me God.” With his speech of extreme disapprobation (“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day . . .”), Senator McConnell hit the nail squarely on the head. And yet, he still voted against conviction on the scantiest and most sophistical of grounds (“We have no power to convict and disqualify a former officeholder who is now a private citizen.”)

To my way of thinking the Senate Minority Leader and the overwhelming majority of his (Trump’s?) party, are “dancing in the dark;” bumping into the political furniture, incapable of keeping up with the rhythm, “waltzing in the wonder of why we’re here,” to quote a line from Howard Dietz’s original lyric. Is it fear of Donald Trump that kept Senate Republicans in line? Could it be earth-bred hatred for progressives or the steadfast need to be reelected at any cost?  Or is it something else?  Let’s take a look at a handful of possibilities:

1. The fear of Donald Trump: Let’s face it: the first rule of politics is “get thyself reelected . . . no matter what the price or cost.”  A vote to convict (on the part of Republican office-holders up for future reelection - especially in 2022) could mean drawing an even more ardently doctrinaire Trumpeter in the next primary.  Simply stated, discovering that one is likely going to be challenged in the Republican primary by a Marjorie Taylor Greene or a Matt Gaetz just because they opposed Donald Trump has got to be a conservative politician’s worst nightmare . . . and biggest motivator. 

2. An earth-bred hatred for anything and everything that smacks of “progressivism”: Due to the nature of modern talk-radio and hyper-partisan cable news, social media politics and the often wacky views of donors with deep pockets, a politician must not only work against people from “the other side:” one must publicly abhor them with a passion. They are not just “the enemy:’’ they are the servants of Satin.  (It must be said that this goes for elected officials on both sides of the aisle, but far more so for followers of Donald J.) Do Republicans really, truly believe this about Democrats?  In private, possibly no; in public undoubtedly yes. One must not get in trouble or draw the ire of the Donald’s base. 

3. Cowardice: By and large, successful politicians like people - at least those who vote for them.  It’s nearly impossible for a misanthrope to make a go of it in the peculiar three-ring circus known as  politics.  There are so many people who want to grab your ear for a brief chat, take a picture, or tell you either how wonderful or woeful you are. Then there are those above you who, with a snap of the fingers, can start you on an upward trajectory or fill your socks with cement. As a result, not wishing to be offensive, many politicians take the coward’s way out.  I have to believe that many of the 43 Republican votes against conviction were the result of base cowardice.  Whatever happened to “profiles in courage?”

4. Something else: It has long been my belief that one of the smartest, most essential (though ultimately most difficult) things we could do to tone down - if not rid us of - all the fiery political partisanship and misfeasance would be overturning the  Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. In this atrocious decision, the court held that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political communications by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations. In a sense, this court decision turned politicians and their campaigns into the willing slaves of the אוֹגעשטאַפט מיט געלט (ongeschtupt mit gelt: Yiddish for “stuffed with money) class; always willing to do, vote or espouse that which their hyper-wealthy patrons and matrons command.  Although not an absolute cure-all, overturning this decision, which in my estimation was “Worse Than Dred Scott,” could be as powerful a curative as Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Although I’m sure that a sizeable percentage of the American public would have greatly preferred that the Senate had summoned up the political Stones to convict this mumzer, we can take consolation (without delving into the netherworld of schadenfreude) that Donald J. Trump is going to be attacked on all fronts; some legal and many financial. He will pay a steep price for being . . . well, Donald J. Trump.  And as for the Republican Party?  They are in need of a serious overhaul; no longer will they be able to bill themselves as the party of values, patriotism and law & order.

And who knows? Maybe in between depositions, future bankruptcies and growing isolation, the former president will hopefully come to understand just how difficult and painful it is to dance in the dark.

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

What's Good For the Goose . . .

                                                   Will Rogers

Back in the late nineteen teens through the mid-nineteen thirties, one of the most beloved people in the United States was vaudevillian-turned movie star-turned down home philosopher Will Rogers. Rogers (1879-1935) was at one time the world’s highest-paid movie star ($35K a week) the honorary mayor of Beverly Hills, and easily the most quotable wit of the day. His aphorisms, frequently couched in humorous terms, were widely quoted: "I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat," one of his wittier jibes went. Without question, his best-known quote was "I never met a man I didn't like." Despite all the humor, Rogers “hizzoner” the honorary mayor was also a serious political player with a keen eye for what was right and/or wrong with the two-party system. Will senior died in a plane crash in a plane piloted by daredevil Wiley Post in 1935.  The nation was devastated. His son, Will Rogers Jr., served a single term in Congress in the early 1940s as a representative from California’s 16th district.

One has to believe that were Will Rogers - or someone like him - alive today, he would have plenty to say about the current state of partisan politics in the United States. He would have despised the fact that national Republicans, fearing the politics of such ethnic progressives as Reps. Ilhan Omar (D.MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Talib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D.MA) - (collectively known as “The Squad”) - had become the name and face (the brand) of the entire National Democratic Party. Through cherry-picking the loudest, boldest and brashest of their quotes and political proposals, Republicans have sought to make these four progressives - plus 2020 freshmen Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush (both of whom are black) - the end-all and be-all of Democratic Party politics. What the national Republican Party has done its best to convince their loyalists of is that because of “The Squad,” the entire Democratic Party establishment is made up of nothing but anti-Semitic, anti-Israel Socialists and anti-Christian immoralists, whose major political goal is nothing more destroying white Christian America.

Of course, the real fear besetting post-Trump Republicans is that soon, white Christian Americans will “achieve” minority status in America. And truth to tell, we really aren’t all that far removed from what they fear. Indeed, the number of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and other people of foreign parentage is close to overtaking WASP America. Which brings us back to Will Rogers, who suggested that what Democrats most seriously lacked was organization.  I have to believe that were Will alive at the beginning of the Biden Administration, he would seriously urge his party to make such newly-elected people as Marjorie Taylor Greene (R. GA), Lauren Boebert (R.- CO), Matt Gaetz(R. FL) and Nicole Malliotakis (R. NY) the face and figure of the National Republican Party. I’m fairly well convinced that Hizzoner would say that “What’s good for the (Republican) goose, is just as good for the (Democratic) gander.

Consider that 199 members of the Congressional Republican caucus voted in favor of the Georgia anti-Semite (MTG) keeping her committee assignments . . . finding little or no problem backing a colleague who believes that Jews are responsible for burning forests in California, that Democrats are pedophiles and are are largely responsible for the deaths of both President John F. Kennedy and his son JFK. Jr., and that Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be assassinated.  What bothers me the most is that the two Jewish Republicans serving in the House (New York’s Lee Zeldin and David Kustoff of Tennessee) found no problem supporting Ms. Taylor-Greene’s remaining on the House Education Committee – despite her statement that the  mass murders at  Parkland, Florida’s Marjorie  Stoneman Douglas High School were “false flags.” 

 The fact that these 199 Republicans gave an electoral thumbs-up to a vile, unlettered anti-Semitic bigot who never met a conspiracy she didn’t love, is far more than a GOP problem: it’s an American problem. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote just the other day, “You don’t have to be a scholar of 20th-century Europe to know what happens when the elected leaders of a democracy condone violence as a political tool and blame the country’s ills on the Jews and Zionists.

To my way of thinking, it’s high time that Democrats take a page from the Republican political playbook and brand the G.O.P. the party of not Lincoln, but rather of MTG, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz and North Carolina’s Ted Budd.

For those who don’t yet know him, Rep. Budd is the fellow who, during the vote on whether to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments told his colleagues that “today is really about one party single-handedly canceling a member of the other party because of something said before that member was even elected.” How droll! From his words, it is clear that Budd knows nothing about 20th century American political history. If he did, he might know that for more than sixty years, Republicans reminded anyone who would listen that West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd (1917-2010) was once (depending on who was doing the telling) either a member of - or exalted ruler of - the K.K.K. back in the 1940s, and that therefore, all Democrats were virulent racists. And while it is true that as a young man, Byrd was a short-timer in that noxious organization, he later wrote that he was a KKK member because he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision—a jejune and immature outlook—seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions." Byrd also said in 2005, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized for a thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."

Indeed, if what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, then both Democrats and Republicans should never forget that MTG and her colleagues are just as vile and stupidly hateful today as they were even before they were first elected to congress.

In the eyes of most Republicans, Democrats are under the spell of a feminine “squad.” Perhaps it is time for Democrats to accuse Republicans of being in thrall to a brigade of bigots.

Hizzoner, Will Rogers, knew all about this a long, long time ago, when he wrote ““The problem ain’t what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so that’s the problem.”

Copyright©2021, Kurt F. Stone

A World Without Alice

Our mother Alice and her mother Anne had a lot in common: in their latter life they both had beautiful snow-white hair. Mom actually let her hair go a luxurious grey back in her thirties but just as easily could have the color changed to pink, blue or fire engine red. (My sister Erica and I would long remember the days when we wondered just what color she would be sporting when she picked us up from school.) Like Granny, Mom was theatrical to the max (which is, of course, terribly important for an actor); merely entering a room made the room seem and feel quite a bit smaller. Both were married to the loves of their lives for precisely 59 years and outlived them for nearly two decades. Both were highly literate (Granny could recite dozens upon dozens of poems by heart right up to the end of her life), terribly funny and just beneath the surface a bit naughty. They were both quite political. They were both true ladies; at the same time, they were also true broads. Of both, it was said by family and friends alike, “Ah she’ll outlive us all.” They both lived active lives of privilege and passion, and are still the topic of almost daily remembrance. They both died of what one might refer to as “terminal longevity.”

                                Alice K. Stone (1924-2021)

The biggest difference, of course, is that the reminiscences of Alice (a.k.a. Mom, Grandma, Grandmere, Allie, Gussy and Madame) began in earnest this past shabbat, when she passed away at 7:36 a.m., just one week before her 97th birthday. For Mom, the whole world, in Shakespeare’s lucid prose, was “a stage . . . and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” (Spoken by the melancholy Jacque in Act II Scene VII of As You Like It.)

A Chicago native who was raised partly in Kansas City, Missouri, Mom was both a student at the Chicago Art Institute and a member of a theatre troupe called the “Chase Street Players.”  She found her way out to Hollywood after a chance backstage encounter with  the fabled Lillian Gish, convinced her that her future lay in the town that dreams built.  There, she met our father Henry at a party given by her cousin Mitzi . . . and the rest was history.  He was her Ronald Coleman  to her Carole Lombard.  Anything he could break (which was most everything) she could repair.  Despite (or perhaps because of) their many dissimilarities, they made a spectacular couple.  They traveled the world, had several beautiful homes (for which Mom did the interior decoration) and were the envy of most everyone who ever met them.  Erica (Riki) and I have heard from countless friends who over the years remembered wishing that Alice and Henry could have been their parents!  One thing that this family never was and never shall be is boring . . .

As a singer, Mom was what we call a “belter.”  As a dancer, she was as lithe as Ginger Rogers (and at one time, like Ginger, was a platinum blond); she had a strong lower-range speaking voice and utterly perfect diction and didn’t need a microphone; as a writer, she excelled. Mom taught me all I ever needed to know with precisely three bits of advice:

1. “If you want to write you’ve got to read . . . everything.”

2. “Once you put pen to paper, keep asking  yourself “What do I want to say?”

3. Writing is no different than speaking; just have your pen speak to the paper.”

I remember once, many years ago, when Mom volunteered to direct and produce a grand Confirmation ceremony at our synagogue.  She sat in the back of a cavernous sanctuary, watching each of the 60-odd students speak their parts and learn their staging.  Now mind you, the majority of these 16-year olds were “Hollywood Brats,” know more than most about how to put speak before an audience and put on a performance.  It so happens that I was appointed to give the valedictory address . . . an essay entitled The Hippy in the Grey Flannel Suit.  Mom was very strict with me and kept shouting out instructions and having  me repeat phrases again and again until I got it to her satisfaction.  Truth to tell, I felt more than a little bit of humiliation.  Afterword, I asked her why she hadn’t been so fussy with any of my classmates.  Her answer?  “You have a gift for writing and speaking that none of the others possess.  I simply want you to be a star!”  Mom was always a hard act to follow.

Did she have an ego? Oh my yes! But then again, show me an actor without one and I will introduce you to an abject failure. But as with most thespians, Alice was, at root, shy. It’s only when the houselights go down and the spot light begins performing its magic that shyness gives way to performance. That was Alice . . . as it was with Granny.

Over the past couple of decades, Mom has had a wonderful, wonderful companion named Fred Kaplan. Fred (we refer to him as either “California Fwed” or “Two-Legged Fwed”) so as not to confuse anyone with our pooch, who’s name is “Fwed Astair Stone . . . some day I’ll let you in on how “Fred” became “Fwed”) is easily a dozen or more years younger than Alice. I remember when we were first about to meet. Just before he arrived, Mom told me how much younger he was than she. “And how old am I supposed to be?” I asked her. She started laughing to beat the band. “Oh, I finally told him my age just the other day.” Well, we were still laughing when Fred arrived. “What’s so funny?” he asked, beginning to chuckle himself although he knew not why. Mom explained the dido and concluded by saying “You do realize that until the other day, I never told you my age?” Fred smiled, took her hand and said “Madam, you do realize that I’ve never asked you your age!” With that I had no choice but to tell “Madam” that I thoroughly approved of her gentleman caller; we’ve been like older brother/younger brother ever since. He has been her constant companion, worrier and hand-holder for many years . . . as much a part of the family as anyone.

More than anyone in her latter life, it is my Slightly Older Sister (MSOS) Erica who must receive the greatest number of plaudits.  She has been mom’s chief worrier, banker, accountant, shopper and “bestest of best friends.”  And she, unlike almost anyone I’ve ever known and loved, keeps getting smarter and wiser with every passing year.  How is it possible?  Well, I guess its just part of being a Stone.

There is an old Jewish belief that when a person passes away on the Sabbath, it is akin to ha-Shem (G-d) placing a celestial exclamation point in the heavens declaring that the deceased was very, very special. And the kicker is that should one ask “So what was so special about Alice?” the only possible answer would be “If you need ask, you obviously didn’t know her.

And so shortly, with every hair in place, her prepossessing punim made up for a coronation (or an opening night) and a ring on every finger (though not the real ones), she shall be laid to rest next to our father Henry (“Hen”) and just down the hill from Granny Annie and Grandpa Doc. For myself and Anna, Erica and Bob, grandchildren Adam and Mariella, Julie and Jimmy, Nurit and Scott, Ilan and Amanda and Ilana, as well as great grandchildren Emily, Claire, Jacob, Mia and Lucas, we know that we have been blessed far more than most, and have a glorious heritage and tons of stories to hang on to.

The great Oscar Wilde (whom Mom first introduced me to when I was quite young), once wrote: “I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”

He may well have had Mom in mind.

But a world without Alice? That’s impossible.

You shall always be loved.  

It is time to dim the theatre lights . . .

  Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

Rechanneling C.J. Cregg

Who remembers Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s first official appearance before the world’s media? Anyone recall what the major issue was? Well, it fell to the perpetually angrified Mr. Spicer to tell the assembled journalists in no uncertain terms that the Trump inauguration was the best-attended in all American history . . . notwithstanding video and print captures which proved how sparsely attended it actually had been. Spicer’s noisome presentation pretty much set the stage for all future Trump Press Secretaries, and made many long for the days of the fictional C.J. Cregg, as superbly portrayed by actress Allison Janney on the best political drama in television history: The West Wing.

Janney’s C.J. Cregg was loosely based on Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, who was hired to be a show consultant. (n.b.: MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell was one of The West Wing’s consulting/executive producers from 2001-2006).  As portrayed by Janney (who is currently starring in the 8th season of the comedy Mom) C.J. Cregg was brash and beautiful, maximally politically literate and mordantly humorous.  And, despite being the smartest person in the presidential press room (except when President Josiah “Jed” Bartlett happened to be present)  C.J. treated her colleagues as equals.  How unlike the aforementioned Sean Spicer whose stint as Presidential Press Secretary lasted a mere 182 days, only to be replaced by Sarah Sanders (who served 1 year, 345 days), who was in turn replaced by Stephanie Grisham (281 days), who was finally replaced by Kayleigh McEnany (288 days).  (BTW: Steve Early, FDR’s Press Secretary, holds the record for service: he held his position for virtually the entire 3+ terms FDR served March 3, 1933 - March 29, 1945).

Without question, this past Wednesday, January 20, 2021, was a most compelling and uplifting day. For in addition to the swearing in of Kamala Harris as America’s first female - and first African American of Indian/Jamaican descent - as Vice President, President Joseph R. Biden’s stirring message of hope and unity, and the breathtaking talents of 3 young women - singers Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez and 22-year old Amanda Gorman’s spine tingling poetry, there was also the a return of normality to the White House Press Room. As one writer noted, “No stranger to the media glare from her considerable experience with the Obama White House, Jen Psaki embraced a refreshingly dignified approach to reporters, free of the dishonesty, dissembling and derision that had punctuated the previous four years.”

"I have deep respect for the role of a free and independent press in our democracy, and for the role all of you play," she said in response to the very first question. "As I noted earlier, there will be moments when we disagree, and there will certainly be days where we disagree for extensive parts of the briefing . . . . But we have a common goal, which is sharing accurate information with the American people."

“Rebuilding trust with the American people will be central to our focus in the press office and in the White House every single day," added Psaki, who vowed to bring "truth and transparency back to the briefing room.” She committed to "sharing information even when it is hard to hear", amid a rampant infodemic that has divided society and fueled Covid-19's horrific toll.

During her initial conference - in which she fielded questions with all the grace and ease of a Hall of Fame shortstop like Ozzie Smith or Cal Ripken - Jen Psaki told her colleagues “There will be times where we see things differently in this room … that’s OK. That’s part of our democracy, and rebuilding trust with the American people will be central to our focus in the press office and in the White House every single day.”

The contrast between Jen Ptaki and any - every one? - of Donald Trump’s Press Secretaries is like that between night and day,  or the members of Mensa and the Hawaiian shirt-wearing Boogaloo Bois. Civility, respect and a measure of mature calm - such as we have not experienced for the past several years - already seem to be hallmarks of both the nascent administration and the woman who is already the voice and face of that administration. 

It is all quite reminiscent of the fictional President Josiah Barlet (played by Martin Sheen), Secretary of State Lewis Berryhill (Wm. Devane), Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer) and of course Press Secretary (and future Chief of Staff C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney).  

For those who were, are and always shall be fans of The West Wing - and there are millions - you will remember the very last words spoken by President Barlet at the end of the pilot episode: “What’s next?”  Anyone notice that the final two words spoken by Jen Psaki at the end of her first presidential press conference were the same: “What’s next?”

A coincidence?

I think not . . . just Joe Biden’s press secretary channeling C.J. Cregg . . . the best two words I’ve heard in long, long time.

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

The Living Embodiment of Irony

ironic //īˈränik: happening in the opposite way to what is expected, and typically causing wry amusement because of this.

Anyone notice the extreme irony of Donald Trump’s last days as POTUS as compared to his first? Throughout the fateful 2016 campaign against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “Boss Tweet” spent a great deal of time promising to build a “big beautiful wall” between the U.S. and Mexico. He promised it would solve most, if not all our immigration problems by keeping out the violent, job stealing dregs of humanity stealing across our southern border. And the price? No object; Mexico was going to pay for it. He was so serious about this wall that beginning in late December 2018, he actually shut down the federal government for well over a month unless and until Congress gave him all the money he wanted in order to complete it. At one point, he even famously said he would be “proud” to own the governmental closure required to secure the funding . . . and then put the blame on Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats. (BTW: when asked about what happened to the Mexican payment, he simply denied ever having said a word about it and, true to form, blamed the “lame stream” media. about it.  

Four years later, as President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris are about to shed their respective title adjectives, we find that during his four years in office, Donald Trump has built precisely 15 miles of wall along our southern border.  And here’s where the irony comes in:  In the final days of the Trump/Pence administration, a virtually impregnable fence has been constructed all around the Capitol grounds to keep the very symbol of our Democratic Republic safe not from illegal immigrants, but rather from home-grown, home-sewn domestic terrorists.  In other words, Donald Trump accomplished what he promised . . . but in the most ironic way imaginable. 

The first blog I posted after Donald Trump’s inauguration came out on January 23, 2017 and was entitled Can Knowledge Be More Dangerous Than Ignorance? That was blog #629, and already evinced a weary, jaundiced feeling about the new administration and its leader. Today’s blog, which posts 3 days before the next inauguration, is #826. This post carries a degree of hope and energy a vast number of us have not felt for a long, long time. Ever since November 3, 2020, the Biden/Harris team has shown a greater degree of humanity, organizational smarts and political professionalism than anything we have experienced since the end of the Obama/Biden years. But let’s not kid ourselves: the country faces formidable challenges in such diverse - though ultimately, interlocking and tangible - areas as public health, economy, racial justice and international relations, not to mention such abstract necessities as empathy, civility, and trustworthiness. We as a nation must together relearn that just because the law does not forbid something, doesn’t mean that it should be done.

I for one have been both heartened and thoroughly impressed by the caliber, competence and experience of the people named to join the incoming administration. Unlike those they are replacing from the previous administration, these men and women are capable of hitting the ground running; they have no need to introduce themselves to their institutional constituency. Let us both hope and work for their acceptance by the United States Senate.  Now controlling the barest of majorities in the Senate, the Democrats should be able to manage this feat without undo exhaustion or political horse trading.  Then too, I urge senatorial Republicans to give the Biden/Harris team an opportunity to lead.  Try hard not to claim before your constituency that the Biden/Harris folks are “a bunch of  ultra left-wing communists and socialists.”  You know that’s not true, so why lie to them?  For the sake of an election in 2022 or 2024?  

Let us also urge the opposition not to waste time and precious energy pointing out each and every one of the incoming President and Vice President’s shortcomings, character flaws or supposed past vices.  They are both good and honorable people . . . who also happen to be human beings. By now, you should know that they consider themselves to be servants of the people.  After what we’ve experienced these past four years in terms of what one might call “private cupidity as public policy,” it will be next to impossible for anyone with an ounce of honesty or reason to accuse Joe Biden or Kamala Harris of being corrupt. Woodrow Wilson, likely the most academically sagacious of all presidents once said, “the difference between the two parties is that the Republicans are the party of property; Democrats the party of the people.”  For Republicans to support Donald Trump even after all he has done for himself and then turn around and accuse Joe Biden of essentially being the head of a crime syndicate is not only deeply ironic; it is the height of madness.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and a Democratic Congress are not going to bring clear skies overnight. They will, I believe, do their very best to bring honesty, civility and morality back into politics. It’s not going to be easy. President Biden is facing the most divided nation since Abraham Lincoln . . . and he knows it. But unlike his predecessor, he has lived a real life devoted to making the lives and dreams of real people manifest. If ever a POTUS/VPOTUS need prayers said on their behalf, this would be it. Were I to have been honored with delivering the opening prayer (which I was not . . . no problem) I would quote the angriest, most insightful of all the prophets: Isaiah (61:1):                                          

        ר֛וּחַ אֲדֹנָ֥י יְהֶוִֹ֖ה עָלָ֑י יַ֡עַן מָשַׁח֩ יְהֹוָ֨ה אֹתִ֜י לְבַשֵּׂ֣ר עֲנָוִ֗ים שְׁלָחַ֨נִי֙ לַֽחֲבֹ֣שׁ לְנִשְׁבְּרֵי־לֵ֔ב לִקְרֹ֤א לִשְׁבוּיִם֙ דְּר֔וֹר וְלַֽאֲסוּרִ֖ים פְּקַח־קֽוֹחַ

(Ruach adonai eh’loheem ah-lye: ya’ahn mashakh adonai oh-tee l’va-sayr ah-na-veem sh’lakhani , l’ckhavosh l’nee’b’ray-layv, leekro l’ishvuyim d’ror, v’la-ahsureem p’kakh ko-akh.”

Namely, “The spirit of the Lord God was upon me, since the Lord anointed me to bring tidings to the humble, He sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to declare freedom for the captives, and for the prisoners to free from captivity.”

Of a certainty, this is a tall, tall order; but one I feel resolutely certain President Biden and Vice President Harris will carry out with every fiber of their being.

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

For What It's Worth . . .

                          The Buffalo Springfield, c. 1966

According to an urban legend, rocker Stephen Stills wrote the 1966 classic protest song “For What It’s Worth” as a response to the Vietnam War. As with many such legends, it’s simply not true. Rather, that which provided the motivation for his writing one of Rock’s all-time legendary protest songs was the long-forgotten Sunset Strip Curfew riots in 1966 - a classic countercultural clash between the L.A.P.D. and young people on the Sunset Strip in my hometown, Hollywood, California. This song, as recorded by the then 21-year old Stills and his band, The Buffalo Springfield, became an instant classic.  So much so that here in 2021 - 55 years after it was first recorded - it is just as vibrant and meaningful - even if misunderstood - as during the Capitol Hill invasion by President Donald Trump’s militant crazies just this past week.

There's something happening here

But what it is ain't exactly clear

There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

 I think it's time we stop
 Children, what's that sound?
 Everybody look, what's going down?

Many of you reading this blog will remember various marches on Washington, in which we came together in the late 1960s and early 1970s to protest the war in Vietnam.  I myself attended many . . . not as an angry protester, but rather as an “insider,” whose task it was to teach the many, many protesters coming largely from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago and Berkeley, to teach them the basics of decorum when meeting up with members of the Cabinet and elected officials in Congress.  (While they stayed on the floors of youth hostels, I had the great fortune of being put up at Averill Harriman’s home in Georgetown.)  We wanted to make sure that these largely teenage protesters,  regardless of their political pique, and addiction to both pot and Country Joe and the Fish, acted like civilized adults.  It must have worked; shortly after our “attack” on the nation’s capitol, LBJ announced that he would not run for reelection. 

There's battle lines being drawn
 Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
 Young people speaking their minds
  Getting so much resistance from behind

  It's time we stop
  Hey, what's that sound?
  Everybody look, what's going down?

Mind you, we did not storm the Capitol bearing weapons of harm and hurt;  we were content to have our presence duly noted, our voices and lyrics heard.  For the most part, we were a pretty literate, well-educated mass . . . so totally unlike the mob of right-wing insurgents who acted far more like criminal cultists than engaged citizens. We - yesteryear’s mass gathering of anti-war, anti-draft protesters - were just as angry back then as the largely White Supremacist, racist criminals who shot an arrow into the heart of democracy this past Wednesday.  We were against what a tone-deaf administration was engaged in; this new gathering - ironically made up largely of people  (mostly males) the age of our eldest children - were attacking and attempting to bring down an entire society.  We were armed with tons of facts, blamed LBJ for the war and General Hershey for the Selective Service System and had a lot of negative feelings about what was then collectively known as “The Establishment”; we were accused of being immoral Communists and Socialists. Today’s insurrectionists are motivated mostly by lies they believe to be the utter truth;  lies perpetrated  by their cult leader, the President of the United States.  The one thing that remains the  same is that we, the protesters of yore are still being called immoral Communists and Socialists.  One major  difference is that back during the “Days of Rage,” many of us actually knew what the difference between Marxists, Maoists, Trotskyites and Titoists were, whereas to today’s Trumpian seditionists, a lower-case “communist” is simply someone who has not bought into the lies, the fears, the conspiracies or stereotypes spread about by their beloved leader.

 What a field day for the heat (Ooh ooh ooh)
  A thousand people in the street (Ooh ooh ooh)
  Singing songs and they carrying signs (Ooh ooh ooh)
  Mostly say hooray for our side

It's time we stop
Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what’s going down?

With each passing day, we are learning more and more about what this horrifying event: 

• About how it was all planned in plain sight;

• About how much culpability Donald Trump and  his many cowardly Congressional enablers possess;

• About what these craven thousands brought with them to Washington, D.C in terms of weaponry;

• About how far they were willing to go in their attempt to overturn the  2020 election;

• About the conspiratorial nature of the event;

• About just how lucky that things were not worse.

Without question, what  Donald  Trump and his hypnotized hooligans carried off was the absolute low-water mark in all American history. Drawing upon his childhood in post-World War II Austria, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, compared Wednesday's riot at the Capitol to Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, the rampage of violence by the Nazi regime against Jewish communities, synagogues and businesses in Germany and Austria in 1938. "Wednesday was the day of broken glass right here in the United States," he said, referring to broken windows in the Capitol building. But the mob also "shattered the ideas we took for granted" and "trampled the very principles on which our country was founded."  Not a particularly successful governor of the nation’s largest state, the “Governator” firmly placed the blame on Donald Trump for continuing to make baseless claims of election fraud and "misleading people with lies." 

"My father and our neighbors were misled also with lies and I know where such lies lead," the  former actor said. "President Trump is a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst President ever." 

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
 It starts when you're always afraid
 Step out of line, the men come and take you away

 We better stop
  Hey, what's that sound?
  Everybody look, what's going down?

It has long been clear that Donald Trump is a psychological train wreck; a person who never should have been elected president. Some of the harshest, most on the money criticism of him was voiced more than 5 years ago by people like Senators Rubio (FL), Cruz (TX) and Graham (SC) who of course are still in his enabling corner. In all, it turns out that 8 senators and 139 representatives voted to overturn the 2020 election results. And despite the fact that there were and are a tremendous number of anti-Semites among the most fanatic and delusional of Trump supporters, all three Jewish Republican members of Congress (Tennessee’s David Kustoff and New York’s Elissa Slotkin and Lee Zeldin) voted to decertify the electoral college returns. To my way of thinking not only these three - but indeed all 147 members of Congress should be held accountable in the next election.

As I write these words, Vice President Mike Pence - who is currently in his boss’s dog house - is visiting the White House.  Whether he’s there to convince Donald Trump to resign (in exchange, perhaps for a pardon), submit to being replaced by his #2 under terms of the25th  Amendment, or be impeached for the second time is anyone’s guess.  Two  things which are reasonably certain:

1. Donald Trump is in a very, very dark place; scared to death of what’s going to happen to him the moment he leaves the White House, and

2. He’s going to known throughout the rest of history as America’s biggest loser; the  man who, ironically is going to hear the words “YOU’RE FIRED!” every hour of every day for the rest of his life.

Then too, it is possible  that the movement he and his enablers have created is going to suffer a tremendous loss of political potency.  Historically, cults begin to fade once the leader leaves the stage . . . whether through imprisonment, mortality or suffering from the  “Wizard of Oz syndrome.”  President-elect Biden  and Vice President-elect Harris are going to have their hands full bringing America back from the brink and reintroducing what is best about this  country  to not  only our friends and allies, but our enemies  as well.  

We better stop
 Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down?

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

For What It's Worth lyrics © Cotillion Music Inc., Ten-east Music, Springalo Toones, Ten East Music, Richie Furay Music, Cotillion Music, Inc.

Charles Dickens Said It Best

In paying close attention to what all has been going on these past several hours - both the terrible, Trump-inspired insurrection at the Capitol and the Democrats taking back the Senate with the election of both an African-American preacher and a 33-year old Jewish political activist, I am reminded of what is without question the greatest opening paragraph in all English literature:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ("A Tale of Two Cities" by Chas. Dickens.)

This just about says it all . . .

Politics As a Poorly Played Chess Match

Anyone who has ever been a student in any of my “All Politics All the Time” courses at Florida International University (now beginning their 23rd year), knows that I liken big-league, big-time politics not to a game of Texas Hold-em Poker, but rather to a chess match. Why? Because the former, as I understand it, is pretty freewheeling, while in chess, participants, in the main, have two different possible strategies by which to play: either ascertain your opponent’s next 4, 5, or 6 moves (in an effort to get you to play their game), or to force your opponent to unknowingly play your game. Either plan can lead to victory . . . or defeat. To my way of thinking, that’s the essence of hard-core politics . . . if played with intelligence, foresight and a first-rate crystal ball. My preference is to get my opponent to play my game . . . to fall into my trap.

The same goes with politics. Played correctly, few things happen accidentally or out of sheer luck. That’s probably why world-class campaign managers and political strategists are in such high demand; they know what they’re doing. Or at least that‘s the way things are supposed to go. In the age of Donald Trump - where the candidate/incumbent is also his own master strategist and chief political bottle-washer, things can be unbelievably confusing and tending to suffer from high levels of incomprehensible anomie (a term invented by Emile Durkheim, the French father of Sociology meaning “a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals”. Unlike with previous presidents and presidential candidates, Boss Tweet listens to almost no one but himself, rejects and dismisses those who disagree, and only uses the narcissist’s pronoun: the first person singular. 

Well before the November 3, 2020 election, Donald Trump was already telling his favorite entertainers at Fox, News Max and One America News that the only thing that could keep him from being reelected would be a massive act of fraud. More than 2 months after his defeat at the hands of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and California Senator Kamala Harris, he is still performing from the same script.  Whether or not he and his pigeon-hearted acolytes (whether on Capitol Hill, Fox News, or out in the American hinterlands) really, truly believe there was a massive conspiratorial fraud which  led to his defeat is absolutely irrelevant.  Each group has its reason for continuing to back his lunacy.  For  those in office, there is the constant dread that to oppose him - to call him out - would be tantamount to political suicide.  Take Texas Senator Ted Cruz as but one  example.  I mean, here is a guy who, despite his Harvard law degree and the fact that then-presidential candidate Trump accused his father, Rafael Cruz of being part of the conspiracy to assassinate JFK in 1963 and referred to his wife Heidi as “ugly,” is nonetheless  at the forefront of those looking to overthrow the Electoral College come January 6. Then there’s Missouri Senator Josh  Hawley who, despite his Yale Law School degree, was the first member of the Upper Chamber to support what The Atlantic’s  Eric Wehner called “an act of civil vandalism.” 

As of today (Monday, January 4, 2021) along with Cruz and Hawley, there are an additional 10 Republican Senators who will support overturning the Electoral College:  Sens. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), Mike Braun (Ind.), Steve Daines (Mont.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), John Kennedy (La.) and James Lankford (Okla.), as well four who were just sworn in yesterday (Sens. Bill Hagerty (Tenn.), Cynthia Lummis (Wyo.), Roger Marshall (Kan.) and Tommy Tuberville (Ala.).  Over on the House side, there are close to 12 dozen Republicans who have declared themselves in favor of overriding the already certified electoral votes from upwards of 6 different states. In other words, when faced with a choice between supporting Donald Trump’s quixotic quest for what at best would be a pyrrhic victory and protecting the Constitution (specifically Amendment 12) which each of them has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend,” they are bigger fans of Mussolini than James Madison.

Back in the late 1920s, Will Rogers - vaudevillian, movie star, essayist, humorist and honorary mayor of Beverly Hills - wrote “I am not a member of any organized  political party; I am a Democrat.” Had he an ounce of wit about him, I’ve got to believe that the (hopefully soon-to-be former) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might turn Rogers’ bon mot on its head and sadly proclaim “I am not a member of any organized political party; I am a Republican.”  And he might be correct. For indeed, over the past couple of years, the G.O.P has begun splintering like a piece of old weather-worn balsa. The issues which have brought about this disorganization are not about their leader’s inability to lead, tell the  truth, or show concern for anyone but himself; no, they are more strategic . . . like spending every waking hour bellyaching about the vast conspiracy which denied him reelection, or threatening those who do not bow before him with political annihilation.  Indeed, as I finish writing this paragraph, it has just been reported that ‘45 has  targeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) a day after the senator said he would not join Wednesday’s effort to object to the certification of Electoral College votes affirming Joe Biden as the next president.

"How can you certify an election when the numbers being certified are verifiably WRONG,” Trump tweeted, suggesting he would falsely claim during his rally in Georgia later this evening that he was a true winner of the election despite multiple audits and court cases confirming Biden had won and that Trump claims lacked standing.  At one point, the deeply conservative 43 year old Cotton (who is a graduate of both Harvard and Harvard Law) was thought to be a possible presidential candidate in either 2024 or 2028.  Through his tweets, Donald Trump has done his best to put an end to Cotton’s presidential aspirations: "@SenTomCotton” Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!” 

But the balsa is beginning to creak.  

Just the other day, the Republican-controlled Senate handed ‘45 the first veto override of his presidency.  More and more GOP institutionalists (including Leader McConnell, Utah’s Mitt Romney, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Nebraska’s Ben Sasse [who called those who refused to override the veto “institutional arsonists”]) have admitted that Joe Biden did win the 2020 election.  Now under normal circumstances this would be neither especially newsworthy nor a brilliant bit of political strategy.  But these are not normal times.  It’s not just one election that is being called into question.  The endgame here is not so much the reelection of Donald Trump (which no one - and I mean no one) believes for one second is going to happen.  Rather, it is the trashing and ultimate destruction of our representative democracy; it is the willful replacing of Trump with Putin and small-d democracy with capital-A autocracy. 

Just yesterday, ‘45 began his endgame.  The strategy?  Engaging in an hour-long phone conversation with Georgia’s Secretary of State in which he told the Republican Brad Raffensperger "All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state." The phone call featured Trump, just days before he is set to leave office, pleading with Raffensperger to alter the vote total and launching into a barrage of discredited conspiracy theories about the election. He even suggested that Raffensperger may face criminal consequences should he refuse to intervene in accordance with Trump's wishes. During the conversation, Trump floated fragments of several baseless conspiracy theories that were primarily pushed by QAnon followers over the last two months, including a widely debunked theory about voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems.  Once a printed transcript of the phone call (accompanied by a full audio file) of what Trump had said became available, Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking him to “open an immediate criminal investigation into the President,” citing statements from the call that suggest Trump was illegally “soliciting election fraud.”

Trump’s endgame strategy is so unbelievably warped that nobody seems to have asked themselves “Who would ever support such a fatally flawed creature again?  People like Senators Cruz and Hawley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis  (a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law) are clinging as tight as they can to their mentor in the hopes of becoming the G.O.P.’s 2024 nominee for POTUS.  That is probably the worst opening move anyone could ever play . . . short of pulling out a gun and shooting their opponent.  

Polls open in Georgia in just about 12 hours.

2 weeks and 1 day until the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

 Might I suggest beginning the match with 1e-4, the “King’s Pawn Opening?” It immediately stakes a claim in the center, and frees two pieces (the queen and the king’s bishop) for action.  Try it: it’s been known to work!

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

How Low Can You Go?

                                Charles Kushner: Trump’s Mechutan

Unlike a majority of Jewish  people (especially rabbis) residing here in South Florida, I was neither born nor raised in a Lower East Side family where the parents spoke Yiddish whenever they did not want the children to understand what they were saying.  Both I and my slightly older sister Erica (Riki) are 100% Californian. Neither our grandparents nor great-grandparents for that matter were Eastern-European immigrants who came through Eliis Island or Castle Garden and then settled a short distance from their  place of disembarkation. Rather, the earliest generations of Hymans, Greenbergs and Schimbergs were born in 19th century Virginia, Maryland and Minnesota. Their children - our great-grandparents - were native English speakers about as far removed from “Tevya,  Golda and the girls” as can be imagined. The next generation - our great grandparents - raised their families in places like Baltimore, Richmond, Virginia, Chicago and Kansas City. (Granny Annie, my mother’s mother, was born in 1896 in the same St. Paul neighborhood  where just a few days earlier, F(rancis) Scott Key Fitzgerald (F. Scott) had entered the world - not exactly a Yiddishe shetl). As such, neither our great grandparents, grandparents nor parents understood more than 5 words of Yiddish. (I myself did learn a bit of Yiddish with the late Professor Herb Paper out of an urge to be able to read Sholem Aleichem in the original) Indeed, today, whenever we want to speak in front of “Madame” (our soon-to-be 97 year old matriarch) in a language she won’t understand, we (meaning me and Annie) chatter away in Hebrew. (Unlike most America-born, Hollywoodish Jewish great-grandmothers of her generation, she does do reasonably well in French and Italian.) So what in the world does any of this have to do with “Politics & a Whole Lot More,” as the subtitle of this blog has proclaimed for going on 17 years? 

To wit: our purpose is to introduce a Yiddish word that takes a paragraph to explain - a word that soon may become as well known as schmuck, mazal tov, meshuggah, chutzpah, glitch, mensch, shtick and yente - all of which likewise take a brief  sentence or two to explain.  And that word is מחותן (pronounced m’chut’n for a male,  מחותנתטע (pronounced m’chutn’steh for a female, or מחותונים (pronounced m’chutonim in the plural.  Let’s, for the moment, pay attention to the male version (מחותן) of the term.  Derived from the Hebrew word for “groom,” a mchut’n is how one describes the relationship between you and your child’s father-in-law.  A simple example (and getting ever closer to the purpose of this little linguistic exercise) would be to explain the relationship between Donald Trump and Charles Kushner - Jared Kusher’s father . . . the one just given a presidential pardon.  Charles Kushner is Donald and Melania Trump’s m’chut’n, while Seryl Kushner (née Stadtmauer), Jared’s mother and Charles’ wife, is the Trump’s m’chutn’steh; together, they are Donald and Melania’s m’chutonim. (BTW: For those who speak/understand Spanish, the word consuegro/consuegra is pretty close  . . . “the father-in-law/mother-in-law of one’s son or daughter.”). In issuing a pardon to his m’chutan just days before he (please G-d) heads for the exit, Donald Trump has done something which has never happened before in American history and undoubtedly will never happen again.  

Ever since George Washington issued the first presidential pardon in 1795 (forgiving two Pennsylvania men sentenced to death for treason after participating in protests known as "The Whiskey Rebellion”) there have been some forgotten doozies. How many recall that in 1868, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, fully pardoned every soldier who fought for the Confederate Army? Or that in 1989, Ronald Reagan pardoned George Steinbrenner, the loud-mouthed owner of the New York Yankees, who had been convicted in 1974 on 14 criminal counts for making illegal financial contributions to Nixon's reelection campaign two years earlier? 

Of course, up until just the other day, President Gerald R. Ford’s pardoning of his predecessor Richard Nixon had been the most notorious such act in all American history. Now mind you, ‘45 isn’t the only president to pardon a family member: Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger (who had pleaded guilty to cocaine distribution charges and served a year in prison). Roger’s pardon was one of 147 issued by the outgoing president on his very last day in office.  45’s pre-Christmas pardons were far, far more than mere gifts to loyalists such as Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and his m’chutan Charles Kushner; they were knockout punches aimed directly at core American principles.  For in addition to these particularly noxious characters, there were three former Republican members of the House of Representatives -  Chris Collins of New York, Duncan Hunter of California and Steve Stockman of Texas — who were guilty of, respectively, insider trading, stealing hundreds of thousands in campaign money and robbing a charity.  These pardons, in the words of columnist/constitutional law professor/professional whistleblower Harry Litman “. . . delivered an especially brutal kick in the teeth to the DOJ.” Generally speaking, in order to receive a presidential pardon, petitioners are supposed to have served their sentences, demonstrated genuine remorse for their crimes and led a productive life afterward. Such requirements are just one more joke to Trump — by a conservative estimate, more than half of his pre-Christmas pardons went to people who did not meet Justice Department criteria.

Ivanka Trump’s billionaire father-in-law Charles Kushner had pleaded guilty in 2004 to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign donations. Moreover, he had confessed to retaliating against his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with federal authorities, by hiring a prostitute to seduce him. He filmed the encounter and sent it to his sister, the man’s wife. Prosecuted by then U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, Kushner served 14 months of a two-year sentence in federal prison.  Christie, who recently referred to Kushner’s crimes as “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S. attorney,” gained enough notoriety and positive publicity that he was eventually elected governor of New Jersey. His involvement in prosecuting the case also got him kicked off the Trump political jet.  I guess what they say is true: קיין גוטע מעשה ווערט נישט באשטראפט (keyn gute meshh vert nisht bashtraft - viz. “No good deed goes unpunished”) Prior to 2016, Charles Kushner was a major donor to Democrats in New York.  Once Donald Trump started his race for the White House, Kushner switched his allegiance - and donations - to the G.O.P.  And yes it is true, he has long been a major contributor to Chabad and other Jewish educational institutions.  

But Roger Stone?  Paul Manafort?  Michael Flynn? Have they shown or voiced any contrition?  What have they done to indicate any rehabilitation?  Former general Michael Flynn, who served about 2 weeks as Donald Trump’s first National Security Advisor, has, of late, been appearing on News Max and OAN urging his former boss to put the country under martial law in order to get the 2020 election overturned!  This is how one earns a presidential pardon?  Or, have the Stones, Manaforts and Flynns done something far more important: put cash into the Trump coffers?  Although there is as yet no hard proof that a crime has been committed by Donald Trump, the history is both clear and ever-present: the man has consistently used his office as a personal ATM. 

There will undoubtedly be more pardons between today and 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2021.  And who knows, perhaps the  final pardons - which easily could be issued to many Trumps (Donald, Don, Jr., Eric, Ivanka and Jared certainly come to mind) won’t be signed by the man who, up until he left for Mar-a-Lago just other day, sat behind the Resolute Desk . . . but by Mike Pence who may well become “President for a day” just so he can pardon his former boss. Only time will tell.  (BTW: Anyone seeking to purchase a handsome replica of the Resolute Desk, it will set you back $6,118.49.  Ironically, the best venue for purchase is Overstock.com, whose former C.E.O., Patrick Byrne, plays a significant role in the conspiracy to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.  And by the way, the Resolute replica is made not in the United States, but rather Indonesia.)

In pardoning his m’chut’n - another billionaire real estate tycoon who got his start because his father was very, very rich - Donald Trump has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt the truth of two things:

1. דאָס עפּעלע פֿאַלט ניט װײַט פֿון בײמעלע (Dos epele falt nit vayt fun beymele - “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” and

2. When it comes to Donald Trump, the answer to the question “How low can you go?” is נידעריקער ווי די נייַנט קרייַז פון גענעם (nideriker vi di naynt krayz fun genem) . . . “Lower than the ninth circle of hell!”

8 days until the Georgia election;

23 days until Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are inaugurated.

Be safe . . . See you next year!

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

The Politics of Pandemics: a Primer

                                    The Black Death Hits Venice

In October, 1347, the Black Death, a variant of bubonic plague, arrived in Europe and began killing about half the population, thus changing the social order and transforming the European continent forevermore. Although it was no means the world’s first pandemic, it did carry with it the most memorable of all history's fatal taglines: “The Black Death.”

Despite being largely discredited by the vast majority of medical historians like the Swiss-born Iris Ritzmann, millions of central Europeans fervently believed that Jews were to blame for the plague, and as such gruesomely killed them off by the hundreds of thousands. Hey, if you’ve got to blame someone for being the cause of an otherwise inexplicable disease which wound up killing off more than 200 million men, women and children, why not make it the Jews?

The first of history’s horrific pandemics was known as The Plague of Justinian (541 C.E.). It was caused by a single bacterium known as Yersinia pestis, and hung around most of the inhabited world for more than a thousand years. The Plague of Justinian arrived in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 541 CE. It was then carried over the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt, a recently conquered land paying tribute to Emperor Justinian in grain. Plague-ridden fleas hitched a ride on the black rats that snacked on the grain. This plague decimated Constantinople and spread like wildfire across Europe, Asia, North Africa and Arabia killing an estimated 30 to 50 million people, perhaps half the world’s population.

When the Black Death finally made its way to Venice in 1347 the Doges (city fathers), although possessing no scientific understanding of contagion, were able to fathom that it had something to do with proximity. As a result, forward-thinking officials in the Venetian-controlled port city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) decided to keep newly arrived sailors in isolation until they could prove they weren’t sick. At first, sailors were held on their ships for 30 days, which became known in Venetian law as a trentino. As time went on, the Venetians increased the forced isolation to 40 days or a quarantino, the origin of the word “quarantine,” and the start of its practice in the Western world.

In England, the Black Death kept popping up every decade from 1348 and 1665; each decade found nearly 20% of the population succumbing to this plague. Then there was smallpox, which wiped out entire populations in Mexico, North Africa and parts of Asia. In 1801. British doctor Edward Jenner famously inoculated his gardener’s 9-year-old son with cowpox and then exposed him to the smallpox virus with no ill effect. Jenner’s vaccine was right on the money, but wouldn’t totally eradicate the disease until 1980.

The 1918-1920 “Spanish Flu,” the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide —about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million men, women and children, including some 675,000 Americans. Here in the United States there were 2 waves; the first wasn’t nearly as lethal as the second, which saw the Wilson administration ordering U.S. citizens to wear masks, close and shutter schools, theaters and businesses; bodies piled up in makeshift morgues before the virus ended its deadly global march. There is little evidence that people declared these steps to be illegal obstacles to freedom . . . unlike what we see and hear today during our current COVID-19 crisis.

In brief, the history of pandemics has shown progress on many fronts including the superstitious, the social, the scientific and today, something rather new: the political. The progress with which biochemists, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists have created, tested and vetted innumerable vaccines (two of which have just this past week received FDA emergency approval) is nothing short of the miraculous. In my work with the medical and scientific experts at Advarra (for which, by law, our primary mandate is to protect the rights and safety of participants in clinical trials), it has never ceased to amaze me how much distance there is between pharmaceuticals, procedures and just plain politics. From our side of the aisle, it has been both deeply tragic and utterly laughable to observe the countless roadblocks and phantasmagoric pronouncements of politicians who haven’t got the slightest idea of what they’re talking about. They have placed an altogether psychotic roadblock on the pathway to cure.

More and more, we read or hear the declarations of so-called community leaders who aver that COVID-19 is a “hoax” nefariously created and funded by the likes of the late Hugo Chavez, Bill Gates and George Soros; that vaccines created by the likes of Pfizer and Moderna have not been created to stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic but rather to implant microchips into those receiving vaccinations for the express purpose of tracking every human being on the planet. Further, these same people claim that the wearing of masks, observing social distancing and other sensible precautions represent nothing less than the death of liberty.

Then there are those who are scaring the daylights out of people by telling them that these vaccines are purposefully made to inflict lethal harm, not healing.

A couple of examples might be useful. Just the other day, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro criticized Pfizer, bizarrely warning that their BioNTech vaccine could result in such strange side-effects as women growing beards and people turning into crocodiles. He also announced that under no circumstances would he submit to being vaccinated.  And by the way, Bolsonaro is one of the autocrats that our current POTUS most admires.

Closer to home, just this past Friday, Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto that he will not be taking the coronavirus vaccine, explaining that he is “more concerned about the safety of the vaccine” than the “side effects of the disease.” “It is my choice,” Rep. Buck told Cavuto: “I’m an American and I have the freedom to decide if I’m going to take a vaccine or not and, in this case, I’m not going to take the vaccine.” Then there are all those “super spreader” gatherings we see covered on the nightly news in which hardly anyone is wearing a mask or keeping their distance. It seems that for a troubling minority, refusing to wear a mask or keep six-foot distances are marks of all-American machismo or marianismo. (Do note, being a hardcore anti-vaxxer is by no means the exclusive purview of conservative Republicans and political lunatics; If you look at some of the places where opposition to vaccinations for children is highest, it’s places like Santa Monica, Marin County (just across the Golden Gate Bridge) and Seattle, none of which are part of the right wing.

Here in Florida (which, with a few exceptions is the reddest part of the Deep South)-, Governor Ron DeSantis (a.k.a. in umbra Trump (Latin for “In the Shadow of Trump”) has made it next to impossible for counties or municipalities to initiate their own pro-mask, pro-social distancing ordinances and has further mandated that restaurants, bars, gyms, nail parlors and other such businesses remain open so as not to interfere with the state’s supposedly reemerging economy. (It should be noted that DeSantis is giving serious thought to running for POTUS in 2024 should his revered leader not. As such, he is doing everything in his power to keep on the good side of Trump’s right-wing, Libertarian base.) DeSantis has also managed to distort both COVID-19 and COD (Cause of Death) stats so as to make it seem that deaths attributable to the pandemic are much lower than the more trustworthy stats provided by the Johns Hopkins Corona Virus Resource Center.

While the scientific/medical progress made in the pursuit of corralling COVID-19 has been nothing short of a breathtaking miracle, the politics behind it all have been as terrifying as any Wes Craven-directed slasher film. On the science/medical side of the pandemic, researchers and ethicists have done their jobs with tireless alacrity, going through tens of dozens of clinical trials in order to develop vaccines which are both relatively safe and more than reasonably effective. Are these vaccines perfect? No . . . no drug, vaccine or medical procedure is 100% safe. There is always the possibility of “adverse events” (side effects) depending on a host of issues like “comorbidities” (other medical conditions like HIV, diabetes, immune system deficits or advanced age). And of course, any medicine or vaccine must by law include the majority of these possible known side effects. Anyone who has ever watched drug ads on television knows that the majority of a 60-second spot is consumed with telling you all the possible things that could go wrong. Although both the legal and ethical thing to do, it’s nonetheless enough to keep many people from telling their physician to try the drug - although why a patient should be telling the doctor what to try has always seemed to me a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

Knowing that I have been working on COVID-19 protocols for most of 2020 (along with the “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot Project” for the past 5), I am frequently asked if I will be taking one of the various anti-COVID-19 vaccines. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes,” I tell them. “I will be doing it for me, for my family and friends, my students, neighbors, coworkers and congregants . . . for anyone and everyone I may come into contact with.”

I always conclude my answer with: “And always remember:  the acronym for “United States” is “U.S.,” as in “us.”

We are all in this together.

15 days until the Georgia Senate elections

30 days until the beginning of the Biden/Harris administration.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Where’s Smedley Now That We Need Him?

Back in 1852, Karl Marx published an essay entitled The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. The genesis for this brief essay was an event which occurred on December 2 1851 when followers of French President Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) broke up the Legislative Assembly and established a dictatorship. A year later, Louis Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III.

    General Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940)

In this minor - though fascinating - work Marx traced how the conflict of different social interests manifests itself in the complex web of political struggles. In other words, as is stated in the Hebrew Bible (Koheleth [Ecclesiastes] 1:9), ““There’s nothing new under the sun.”

Unquestionably, the most famous (though frequently misquoted) statement found in The 18th Brumaire is still regarded as one heck of a truism even during the waning days of the Trump Presidency in 2020: that historical entities appear twice, "the first as tragedy, then as farce." Marx, of course, knew nothing of Donald Trump the man; he did, however, know tons and tons about autocrats like Donald Trump. In the 18th Brumaire, Marx was aiming his pen at - respectively - Napoleon I and then to his nephew Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III).

The haunting truth of Marx’s old chestnut came to mind yesterday, when SCOTUS (the Supreme Court of the United States) gave the shortest of shrifts to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s legal brief (along with amicus briefs from 17 other states’ attorneys general and a majority of Congressional Republicans) to overturn - and thus invalidate - the 2020 presidential election. This legal kick in the privates came just days after the Roberts’ Court took all of one sentence to tell Trump et al to take a long hike on a short pier in their case against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Ever since it has been understood that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and Senator Kamala Harris will be the next President and Vice President of the United States of America, Donald Trump and his [il[legal team have filed more than 4 dozen cases in state and federal courts, seeking to have the 2020 presidential election overturned.  Their batting average has been near zero.  For this we can offer prayers of thanksgiving to the American judiciary which, for the most part, refuse to be drawn into any conspiratorial coup.  Come tomorrow, December 14, the 2020 presidential election will have become part of American history; Donald Trump will be a loser,  Joseph Biden a winner and the attempted coup will begin melting into the scummy slag of history. 

“So where,” you may well ask, “is the tragedy and the farce?”  The farce, to put second things first, is the attempted coup created by Donald Trump, his autocratic billionaire buddies, a gaggle of different Nationalist, Racist, White Supremacist, uber-libertarian and conspiratorial groups; and all those who wish nothing more than to  dismantle virtually everything ever done or dreamed by former President Barack Obama and his administration. These coup-masters are a frightening cult made up of folks who disdain Ivy League graduates, progressives, immigrants, scientists, most Jews, environmentalists and feminists; they are, for the most part, made up of all those Second Amendment-loving Americans who seek a return to the days of the Cold War when political correctness was unheard of, Ozzie And Harriet were the typical American family, and moms stayed at home in order to raise a family.  It is a “farce,” precisely because it is a misguided dream of yesteryear.  

So far as “tragedy” goes, let’s hop into the “Wayback Machine” and alight on the earliest days of the FDR administration. Shortly after his inauguration in March, 1933, a group of the wealthiest men in America started putting together and funding a campaign which they hoped and prayed would punish - and eventually remove from office - the most aristocratic of all American presidents. Their reason?  Because, as the most blue-blooded member of the Mayflower-Groton-Harvard-patrician breed, he turned out to be very much on the side of the working middle class; a progressive with deep ties to the Jewish/immigrant/rural community. To his classmates and club mates, he became nothing short of an anathema – a traitor to his class and culture. And that is why that group made up of the richest of the American rich sought to overthrow him through a coup in early 1933. They were also deeply afraid that he might raise their taxes. Although not necessarily widely reported in history texts, this group was at the epicenter of what historians have called either “The Business Plot,” or “The Wall Street Putsch.”

It was a dangerous time in America . . . much like the times we have been living through of late. Then along came FDR who soundly thrashed incumbent President Hoover in the 1932 election and then embarked upon an ambitious legislative program aimed at easing some of the troubles. But he faced vitriolic opposition from both sides of the political spectrum. During FDR’s historic “first hundred days,” West Virginia Republican Senator Henry Hatfield (a member of the “Hatfields v McCoys” clan) worriedly wrote a colleague that:  "This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom."

Times were extraordinarily tense.  According to historian Sally Denton in her excellent 2012 book The Plots Against the President, “. . . fascism, communism, even Nazism seemed like possible solutions to the country's ills. . . . Some people even called for a dictator to pull America out of the Great Depression.”  In addition to the bankers who underwrote the “putsch” (one of whom, Brown Brothers/Harriman partner Prescott Bush would eventually become a U.S. Senator from Connecticut and the father of future President George H.W. Bush) thought that they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to a basically fascist, military-type government.  It was, in the words of historian Denton, “a cockamamie concept.” The conspirators had several million dollars (and this was in 1933!), a stockpile of weapons and had even reached out to a retired Marine general, Smedley Darlington Butler, to lead their forces.

Smedley Darlington who?  General Butler (nicknamed “Old Gimlet Eye” due to his feverish, bloodshot eyes) was, in 1933, the most highly decorated Marine in American history - the only one to be awarded the Brevet Medal (awarded for “Extreme gallantry and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force”) and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions. Following “The Great War,” Butler quickly became a household name in America. People trusted him; his name and fame were right up there with Charles Lindbergh and General John J. Pershing. Butler would meet on quite a few occasions with the principles of this plot - including the aforementioned Prescott Bush, bond salesman extraordinaire Gerald MacGuire, Bob Doyle of the American Legion, members of the DuPont family and Singer Sewing Machine heir Robert Sterling Clark.  Their topic was, of course about overthrowing FDR and instituting a Fascist form of government. They then sent Butler out across the country, making speech after speech about the absolute necessity of getting rid of Roosevelt and his band of “communists, socialists, Jewish Marxists and anti-capitalists.”  They would eventually coalesce into “The America First” committee

But somewhere along the way, Butler became convinced that these bankers, heirs and white-shoe, blue-blooded Wall Street attorneys represented a vile danger to our form of government. When he finally got around to asking bond-broker MacGuire what specifically was wanted of him from the group, Butler was told he would be the ideal leader of a vast army of veterans, promising him an army of 500,000 men and all but limitless financial backing, so long as he would be willing to lead a march on the White House to displace Roosevelt.

With time, General Butler moved further and further to the political left, and actually became so anti war that he picked up a new nickname: “The Fighting Quaker.” Finally, unable to remain a part of the crowd of conspirators - let alone leading an anti-Democratic, anti-Semitic putsch - Butler decided he had to do something about it.  But who, he thought, would ever believe what he  had to report?  It was such an outlandish plot as to sound like a story-line from Mark Twain at his fabulist best. Increasingly troubled by MacGuire’s plans, Butler knew he would need someone to corroborate his story if he was going to stop the intended coup. Having previously worked as a police captain in Philadelphia, Butler reached out to a reporter from the Philadelphia Record named Paul Comly French, who agreed to meet with MacGuire as well.  (French, by the way, had gained fame for covering the Lindbergh baby kidnapping - one of the most sensational stories of the early 1930s). During this meeting, MacGuire told French that he believed a fascist state was the only answer for America, and that Smedley Butler was the “ideal leader” because he “could organize one million men overnight.”

Armed with French’s mutual testimony, Butler appeared before the McCormack-Dickstein congressional committee, also known as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, to reveal what he knew about the plot to seize the presidency in November 1934. (The committee’s co-chairs were Massachusetts Democrat John McCormick [1891-1980], an Irish Catholic who would serve as Speaker of the House from 1962-1971 and New York Democrat Sam Dickstein [1885-1954], the Lithuanian-born son of an Orthodox rabbi who would eventually serve 9 years as a Justice of the New York Supreme Court.  The two men did not get along with one another at all.  Whenever McCormack wielded the gavel, Dickstein absented himself; whenever Dickstein led the committee, McCormack was nowhere to be seen.)  

Listening to General Butler, along with the testimony of both French, and the erratic MacGuire, the committee began to further investigate the plot. The final reports of the committee sang a different tune, finding that all of Butler’s claims could be corroborated as factual. However, they also stressed that the plot was far from being enacted, and it was not clear if the plans would have ever truly come to fruition.

Quickly becoming known as the “White House Coup” and the “Wall Street Putsch,” many major news sources derided Butler’s claims, as the committee’s final report was not made available publicly. Those implicated, ranging from the DuPont family to Prescott Bush, laughed off Butler’s claims; they believed that they were “above the law.” Evidence of the validity of Butler’s testimony was not released until the 21st century, when the committee’s papers were published in the Public Domain. No one was ever prosecuted in connection with the plot.  And yet, without General Butler, there is every reason to believe that some sort of coup would have occurred and likely succeeded.  When America needed what today we would refer to as a “whistle blower,” Smedley D. Butler was there, doing what he did best: being a hero.  (BTW: General Butler wrote a brief book in 1935 [still in print] that for years, was taught in American public schools: War is a Racket.  It is one of the most profound antiwar essays in all American history.

Despite the fact that Donald Trump will no longer be occupying the White House after this coming January 20, (fingers crossed, lucky Dodger socks pulled tight), he is likely not going to be leaving the American political scene.  He and his henchmen (which include Ivanka, Jared, Eric and Donald, Jr.) have already amassed more than a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in their own PAC - ostensibly to keep paying their attorney fees for cases they cannot win . . . let alone get on any court’s docket.  Mostly, the money will be used to fund the Trump lifestyle as well as keeping him on the campaign circuit supporting those who bow before him and destroying those who have seen through or had the chutzpah to criticize him.  He is by no means finished with his task of destroying America while selling the Trump brand and - who knows - creating his own media empire.  There are dire consequences for both America and indeed, the world - in having an unhinged, amoral narcissist go unchallenged.  The fact that a clear majority of all elected Republicans are either incapable of - or afraid to - stand up like Smedley Butler and tell the truth about this miscreant from Manhattan (actually Queens) is both a curse and a stain on the fabric of civil society.

To all those Senate Republicans who are hinting that they won’t be holding hearings for any of Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees until they are 100% convinced that Trump’s loss wasn’t a case of fraud (i.e. never), I have one thing to say: don’t ever refer to yourself a patriot. You are cultists driven to do whatever your dictatorial master commands - even if it will bring down the American political system. You actually see no danger in declaring the next POTUS illegitimate in the eyes of nearly half the American people. Do you have any idea of how foolish and robotically puerile you look to the rest of the world? Are you that feverishly  fearful of Donald Trump that you would eviscerate the body politic in the hopes that he won’t find someone to challenge you in the next Republican primary?  Where is your spine?

And so, permit me to issue a call for any and all true American patriots (in the real sense of the word) to step into the shoes of General Smedley D. Butler and tell it like it is.

Goodness knows, we need each and every one of you. NOW!

23 days until the Georgia elections.

38 days until the Biden/Harris administration gets to work.

Here’s wishing our Jewish friends a chag chanukah s’maycha! May your latkes (and/or sufgan’yot be delicious and calorie-free . . . And do remember: this is the season for miracles!

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Of Soiled Doves and Yiddishe Nazis

155 years ago today (December 6, 1865), the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution became the law of the land. Simply stated, it formally abolished slavery. It provided that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Without question, its enactment has long been a high point in American history. All it took was a war between the North and South which nearly wrecked a nation and cost more than 600,000 deaths. Sadly, there are still those who, despite being unable to identify precisely what the Constitution’s 13th Amendment outlaws, act as if it never came into existence. Sadly, the words of Irish statesman Edmund Burke (or Winston Churchill or Spanish Philosopher George Santayana) still ring true: “Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

I begin this week’s post in this manner because today, the 6th of December 2020, Colorado Governor Jared Polis chose to recognize this anniversary on his Facebook page. Governor Polis, who is a friend of mine (I wrote a lengthy biographic essay of him in my 2010 work The Jews of Capitol Hill), reprinted the Amendment’s 32 words and succinctly noted that “With these words, the single greatest change wrought by the Civil War was officially noted in the Constitution.” Unsurprisingly, the Governor’s post received as many nasty putdowns as warm-hearted accolades. One nasty respondent wrote: “Great post, Jared. Now maybe you should read the parts about Freedom of Religion and the Freedom to Bear Arms. Might do you good to brush up on the First, Second, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments considering you've violated all of those being the good little Nazi that you are.”  

I rarely answer these Facebook tirades; responding to the diatribes of moral/political albinos is not my idea of a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.  In this case, however, I made an exception due to both my anger and disbelief.  I wrote back to this fellow “I cannot imagine anything more vile or less civil than accusing a practicing Jew of being a Nazi. Shame on you, Mr. . . .” Thank G-d my response elicited dozens upon dozens of replies which backed up my pique, and agreed with my analysis. Another civic cretin stated with great certainty that Governor Polis was nothing short of being a communist conspirator being paid by George Soros!  (It should be noted that Jared, who along with his family founded such online behemoths as Pro Flowers and Blue Mountain Greeting cards is easily worth more than $300 million.) To this right-wing automaton I wrote “What planet do you come from? Do you really, truly believe the tripe you just posted?”  My response received lots and lots of “thumbs up” and heart emojis.  Nonetheless, despite all these very supportive reactions, I still found myself burning up inside.

Another online thread has been going on and on about President-Elect Biden’s having suffered a broken foot while playing with one of his future “first dogs.”  Through a bit of simple photoshopping, there are tons of pictures of him wearing a boot on either his right or left foot - which leads hundreds of thousands of cyber simpletons to conclude that he is either: a) faking it, or b) “a moron who needs his filthy wh*re of a wife to label his shoes right foot or left foot because he is both feeble and stupid.”  To this one, who turned out to be so utterly simpleminded as to get my obvious sarcasm, I wrote: “I never knew these things about the Bidens.  Please, could you provide me with the link to this information so I can share it with my online posse?”  Of course, I never received a reply . . .

Dr. Jill Biden a strumpet? (or “soiled dove,” “victim of frail sisterhood,” “pavement princess” “demimondane” or “skank” - there are tons of synonyms); The President-Elect a mental midget?  Governor Polis a Nazi?  Where in the world do so many people come up with such noxious tripe?  Do they really, truly believe that Dr. Biden is a woman of loose morals but that Melania Trump is a vestal virgin?  Do they really truly believe that “According to everyone in Joe Biden’s law school class, he was the dumbest student at the school” but that  “Donald Trump is a genius!” or that “QAnon people are true patriots,” but that Jared Polis is “a murderous Nazi?” Also, which would be worse? That they really, truly do believe these things or that they do not? What kind of world do they wish to live in? One in which assailing, threatening and browbeating those who have different backgrounds constitutes the gold (or in this case, the pyrite) standard of society? One in which fear is the fuel and ignorance the ideal? How did we ever wind up with so many cynical, shallow and utterly graceless citizens?

Over the past several weeks I’ve communicated with an awful lot  of people who I will lovingly refer to as “the political pompom brigade”; folks who, like the Munchkins of Oz, cannot wait to sing out “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead!” Sorry gang, as much as I share your joy and elation at the elevation of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the devolution of Trump and Pence, I do not believe that things are suddenly going to be doing a political 180. There are simply too many politically-charged incendiary devices buried beneath the nation’s surface. Need proof? As of 48 hours ago, there were a mere 27 of 249 Congressional Republicans who had found the courage to publicly admit that Joe Biden actually defeated Donald Trump. According to interviews with all the GOP members of Congress conducted by the Washington Post, two Republicans consider Trump the winner despite all evidence to the contrary. And another 220 GOP members of the House and Senate — about 88 percent of all Republicans serving in Congress — will simply not say who won the election. How shocking; how depressing; they might as well believe that Sandy Koufax was a right-handed reliever for the Yankees! And of course, there are other buried I.E.D.s . . . such as last-minute stacking of the Pentagon and Intel agencies with Trump/Pompeo loyalists . . . to what end, not even the good Lord knows.

And while it is indeed true that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and those they have named to staff and lead the incoming administration are far more competent, worldly and professional than those we’ve be putting up with these past 4 years, undoing what they have done (or doing what they have undone) isn’t going to happen in the first 100 or even 1,000 days. We’re still going to be dealing with the many interminable roadblocks which have been strewn across the path of progress, not to mention all those who are more than willing to sit on their hands until 2022 or 2024, and the Trump base which will continue believing that the new administration is illegitimate, the first Lady a "soiled dove,” and anyone who disagrees with them a Communist, a Nazi or a  traitor.  

Do keep in mind the (slightly altered) words of Bette Davis in All About Eve: “Fasten on your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy flight.”  

Let’s keep our chins up, our eyes on the prize and our collective energy level at full bore.  Together, we will make it!

29 days until the Senate elections in Georgia;

43 days until the Inauguration. 

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Pardon Me?

At the outset, let me be clear: I am not an attorney, never attended law school and didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn last night. Nonetheless, I do have both a stepson and a son-in-law who are practicing attorneys and did take two challenging courses in Constitutional Law taught by a visiting faculty member of the Harvard Law School. Even after a half-century, I well remember such landmark cases as Marbury v .Madison, McCullough v. Maryland, Schenck v. United States, Plessy v. Ferguson and Schechter v. United States, not to mention the worst decision of all time (with the possible exception of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford. And it is possible - just possible - that before too long, there may be yet another infamous case brought before the nation’s highest court: that of Trump v. United States. The issue? Whether or not it’s legal for the President of the United States to grant him/herself a pardon.

Before getting to the issue at hand and predicting whether or not the outgoing POTUS - along with his family and most loyal toadies -  will, in fact receive pardons, let’s clear up one thing: I for one couldn’t care less whether or not he pardons himself, gets someone else to do it for him, gets Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked Supreme Majority to throw him a legal lifesaver,  or constructs a  piranha-infested moat around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. No matter how the scenario  plays out, it’s going to ultimately be a lose-lose situation for him and his family.

First things first: according to the U.S. Constitution (article II, Section 2, Clause 1 the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” While the president’s power to pardon seems unlimited, a presidential pardon can only be issued for a federal crime, and pardons cannot be issued for impeachment cases tried and convicted by Congress. The way things work these days under this particular Department of Justice, Trump enjoys broad immunity from federal probes as president; there are currently no known federal investigations being conducted into possible crimes by him. That could all change at 1:00 on January 20, 2021, when he is no long POTUS. In any event, there are also a minimum of 9 state cases on the drawing board up in New York for which only Governor Andrew Cuomo could issue a pardon. And the way things stand, there are precisely 2 chances of that ever happening: absolutely none and a heck of a lot less than that.

So what choices does Boss Tweet have?

1. Pardon himself. (Trump recently retweeted a post from ultra-out-of-it GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz which said that the he should pardon "everyone from himself, to his administration, to Joe Exotic if he has to.”) From the point of view of legal logic, pardoning himself would be a clear admission that he, Donald Trump, had committed crimes. Let’s face it: one cannot be pardoned for a crime one has not committed. There is precedent for people receiving a presidential pardon even before they have been convicted. But in the case of Donald Trump, he has long insisted that he has never done anything wrong or illegal; it has all been the product of a vast conspiracy created by his enemies in the “lamestream media,” or the entire Democratic Party or all those who are just plain jealous of his success.

2. Another possibility would be for him to his Cabinet to institute the 25th Amendment, thereby having him resign from office, thus turning the presidency over to Mike Pence, thus giving him the constitutional authority to pardon his former boss. One “huuuge” problem with this is that were Pence to pardon Trump, it would thrust a lethal political dagger into the heart of the Hoosier Hero, who has already expressed interest in running for president in 2024. Remember what pardoning Richard Nixon in 1974 did for President Gerald Ford in 1976?

President-elect Joseph Biden has, to date, made it fairly clear that he will not seek to use his Department of Justice to pursue federal investigations about his predecessor.  Whether or not this remains the last word remains to be seen.  It is more than likely that ‘45  still has a few things up his sleeve for his final 50 days in office; these may serve to change the new president’s and his DOD’s mind.  Without question, Biden and Harris are already receiving advice and pressure from a fractionated party as to what they should do.  

According to various anonymous sources within the Trump camp, the president has been seeking advice recently as to whether pardoning himself is even legal in the first place. There was a legal memo written by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel just days before Nixon's resignation in 1974 that argued a president could not self-pardon. The DOJ’s position was quite simple: "Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, it would seem that the question should be answered in the negative." That was, of course, a legal opinion, not law; but much like the opinion that a sitting president can't be charged with a crime, these things take on the feel of precedent. Instead, Nixon's successor and former vice president, Gerald Ford, as previously mentioned, gave his old boss an unconditional pardon a month later, thereby scuttling his own ambition of being elected President of the United States.

Of course, at the moment, Trump’s questions are largely academic (despite the fact that he is likely our least academic president since Warren G. Harding); as mentioned above, he has yet to be charged with a federal crime for which it would take a presidential pardon in order to keep him from being sentenced to living out his years at Club Fed. As things now stand, so long as he is POTUS, there is every reason to believe that he is incapable of being in this position: after all, attorney general, Bill Barr, has made very clear he'd follow existing Department of Justice guidance which prevents a sitting President from being charged with a crime. If Trump gets creative, perhaps he could a try to use a preemptive self-pardon to deal with a potential future federal tax judgment against him. The IRS, for instance, says he incorrectly claimed a $72.9 million tax write-off, according to the New York Times reporting on his tax returns.

But once again, a pardon - whether granted by a succeeding president (like Mike Pence) or the president himself, is, at base, an admission of guilt. And that sort of guilt can neither be lived down nor denied by calling it a hoax. A pardon would make a 2024 presidential redux next to impossible . . . no matter how many apostles still believe he walks on water and makes Abraham Lincoln look like an also-ran.

As I stated at the outset, no matter which path Trump chooses to take, he will find himself in the middle of a lose-lose predicament. Let’s pray for him like the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof prayed for the Tsar:

May G-d bless and keep Donald Trump . . . far away from us.

36 days until the Georgia election.

51 days until Biden and Harris are inaugurated.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

"Not With a Bang But a Whimper"

Poet T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature, was one of the twentieth century’s truly great literary downers. Among his best-known downers were The Waste Land (“April is the cruelest [sic]  month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land . . .), The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock (“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be . . .”), and above all, The Hollow Men with its soul-stirring last lines:

This is how the world ends

This is how the world ends

This is how the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

To be perfectly honest, I‘ve never been all that enamored with Eliot’s poetry; it is too dark, too disheartening and goyish for my tastes.  And yet, The Hollow Men has been crawling up my spine for the past several days . . . ever since former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani made a hair-dyed fool of himself at a nearly two-hour press conference, only to then be followed by Sidney Powell - another member of the Trump “illegal team” - who crazily insisted that her boss’s “overwhelming victory” was ruined by the worst, nastiest, most bestial political crime/conspiracy in all American history. Against all sanity and logic, Ms. Powell, while somehow maintaining a straight face, accused Republican officials of being involved in a payoff scheme to manipulate voting machines. Her ramblings also included a mishmash of lunacy involving Venezuelan Socialists, German Communists and, of course, financial bogeyman George Soros. And all the while, Rudy’s hair-dye continued its drip-drip-dripping from temple to zygomatic arch.  If this had been classic cinema, it no doubt would have starred Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester.

By day’s end, the Trump legal team (including Giuliani himself) issued a tweet stating “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own.  She is not part of the Trump Legal Team.  [sic] She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”  Talk about one’s world coming to an end “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Within 48 hours, things got even worse in Trumpland: Federal Judge Matthew Brann (a former conservative Republican and member in good standing of the Federalist Society who nonetheless was nominated by President Barack Obama to the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in 2012) issued a scathing order dismissing the Trump campaign’s futile effort to block the certification of votes in Pennsylvania, shooting down claims of widespread irregularities with mail-in ballots. 

Brann wrote in his order that the Trump legal team had asked the court to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters. “One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann wrote, so much that the court would have no option but to stop the certification even though it would impact so many people. “That has not happened,” he concluded. Having been legally mauled by Judge Brann in Pennsylvania, Trump decided to turn attention towards Michigan, and issued an invitation to Republican leaders of the Wolverine State legislature to come visit him at the White House, hoping against hope that he could convince them to “take one for the team” by invalidating hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes. Another foray into Never Never Land, another failure; the Michiganders refused to beckon to their leader’s call and announced that they would certify Biden’s victory.  The same thing happened with Georgia.

And that’s when the whimpering began in earnest . . . 

For the past 4+ years, a heck of a lot of political practitioners, writers and geeks have wondered aloud how and why the vast majority of Republican offer holders have stood mutely by while their beloved leader has trashed, humiliated and torn asunder the very fabric of American democracy.  How, we have queried, how is it possible for so many supposedly intelligent, patriotic people to let him get away with all the lies, the mindless dismantling of the America we know and love?  Isn’t there, we have cried out, even a single heroic voice on the other side of the aisle that is capable of shouting out “You have done enough! Have you left no sense of decency?” like Joseph Welch of old? Those who know their political history will remember that Welch’s words (which he delivered on June 9, 1954) were aimed at then-Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, who had turned the nation upside down and inside out with his paranoid conspiracy theories about the Communist takeover of America. Within 6 months of Welch’s rhetorical joust, the senate would censure McCarthy; within another 2 1/2 years, the disgraced “Tailgunner Joe,” long an alcoholic, died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 48.  (n.b. It should be noted that back in the 1950s, McCarthy’s chief political advisor/amanuensis was a young New York attorney named Roy Marcus Cohn; a generation later, this same Roy Cohn would become chief political advisor/groomer for one Donald John Trump.)

As the whimpering grows ever louder, we now learn from Watergate journalist and CNN analyst Carl Bernstein that there has long been a sizeable number of Republican officeholders who privately despise Trump, even as they have remained faithful to him in public.  Bernstein has now published a partial list of 21 Republican senators who have “privately expressed their disdain” for the president: the list includes Senators Rob Portman, Lamar Alexander, Ben Sasse, Roy Blunt, Lisa Murkowski, John Cornyn, Mitt Romney, Mike Braun, Todd Young, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Martha McSally, Jerry Moran, Pat Roberts, and Richard Shelby. In an interview with Vanity Fair staff writer Eric Lutz, Bernstein said: “We are witnessing the mad king in the final days of his reign, willing to scorch the Earth of his country and bring down the whole system . . . They know what's going on.” '

Finally, yesterday the whimper became manifest; the world as Donald Trump and his legions have known it, began its final descent into oblivion. Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, announced that the transition from Trump to Biden could finally commence. In a memorandum sent to White House employees late last night, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, wrote that Ms. Murphy had made an “ascertainment” about the results of the 2020 election “to allow the start of a presidential transition.” (Interestingly, Trump tweeted that he - and he alone - was responsible for passing along the transitional key card to the Biden team.  This, of course, is yet another lie; federal law assigns this task to the GSA administrator alone . . . not the POTUS).

Almost immediately, the Biden transition team opened up their first “.gov” website: https://buildbackbetter.gov/ - and started announcing nominees for the new Cabinet. If you get a chance, follow this link and see who the President Elect has already nominated.  Unlike with the Trump administration, these nominees (Secretary of State [Anthony Blinken], Treasury [Janet Yellen], Homeland Security [Alejandro Mayorkas], Ambassador to the United Nations [Linda Thomas-Greenfield] (back to being a Cabinet-level appointment), National Security Advisor [Jake Sullivan] Director of National Intelligence [Avril Haines] and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate [Former Secretary of State John Kerry] as well as his first appointment, Chief of Staff Ron Klain, . . . these nominees are a highly impressive group. The caliber of these men and women, the diversity of their experience, and the fact that expertise - not loyalty - is the bedrock of their collective appeal is the bipolar opposite of what we’ve been experiencing since January 2017.

Indeed, the whimper with which the Trump years are ending, will no doubt continue to be heard for years and years to come.  The whimper of a loser who now, for perhaps the first time in his life, must face up the consequences of his actions. 

For as T.S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, the fourth and final poem of his Four Quartets: 

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

42 days until the senate elections in Georgia;

57 days until the inauguration of the nation’s 46th President.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F Stone

There's Still a Lot of Work to Be Done

Last week’s theme song was “Dancing in the Streets” as immortalized by Martha and the Vandellas. And while people of a certain age undoubtedly remember Martha Reeves and her sisters (Lois and Delphine) for such classics as “Heatwave,” “Nowhere to Run,” “Jimmy Mack” (written by Phil Collins) and, “Quicksand,” very few are aware of the fact that Martha was also a “Motor City” political activist and an elected member of the Detroit City Council from 2005-2009.  Strong, proud and highly intelligent, Martha Reeves (who as of today is nearing 80 and still performing year round), always felt that there was more to life than simply entertaining . . . that “there’s still a lot of work to  be done.”

Yesterday’s “MAGA March” on D.C. didn’t come close to the million-man figure predicted by the White House or claimed by Presidential Press Secretary Kaleigh McEnany.  While the gathering was taking place, their once-and-always POTUS was playing golf in Virginia.  He has yet to concede defeat, grant the incoming administration key cards so that they continue the serious work of transition, and no doubt hasn’t given thought to whether or not he will attend Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021.  Let us all presume that he will not . . . and for any number of reasons.  His absence from the inauguration will put him in a most select and historic crowd: In all American history, only 3 other presidents have absented themselves from their successor’s oath-taking: John Adams (1801) who left town for Massachusetts at 4:00 a.m. rather than smile upon Thomas Jefferson; his son John Quincy Adams (1829) who absolutely despised his successor, Andrew Jackson, and Andrew Johnson, the first “accidental president” (following the much beloved Abraham Lincoln’s assassination) and couldn’t even get his party’s nomination for a full term, and was thus succeeded by another much beloved figure: General U.S. Grant. (I for one find it fascinating that these three had the same initials: J.A., J.Q.A. and A.J.  Soon we will add another set of initials: D.J.T.)

(n.b. The fact that the incoming Biden administration is being denied access to the reins of government, while incredibly nasty and utterly amateurish, is not the end of the world.  Joe Biden is likely the best-prepared future President in American history.  His staff is equally ready and able to hit the ground running . . . and, he has every world leader’s home phone number . . .)

One has to believe that the main reason why DJT will never concede to President-elect Biden is that to do so would represent a double Trumpian first: the first time he has admitted defeat and the first time the spotlight will no longer be shining directly upon his pancaked punim . . . his face.  In a matter of weeks, he will have to face the daunting prospect of being without an income, a shield of legal invulnerability, and the very real prospect of being under multi indictments without a legal team to help protect him.  (Legal talent the likes of which he will no doubt require does not work pro bono, and the once-and-future ex POTUS has a long, long history of not paying his bills).

But just as President-elect Biden, Vice President-elect Harris and their blended staffs are already hard at work preparing to hit the ground running, so too must we - the nearly 79 million (as of this morning) people who voted for the Democratic ticket get back to work so as to insure that the United States Senate will be controlled by the party of Biden and Harris. If this does not occur - if Mitch McConnel continues on as Majority Leader, there is every reason to believe that he will spend at least the next 2 years making life miserable for the 46th POTUS. I can actually see him ordering his fellow Republicans to vote against virtually every Biden Cabinet nominee . . . perhaps not even calendaring them for committee hearings or visits (remember what he did to Federal Judge Merrick Garland during the last year of the Obama Administration?) What does McConnell care if he looks like a colossal horse’s rear end? It’s not as if he’s going to be running for reelection in 2026 when he’ll be 84 years old. He simply does not care what happens to the United States; he’s played his role to the hilt by paving the federal court system for the next 3-4 decades with judicial luddites . . .

No, we need to roll up our sleeves and get back to work; we need to fill the 2 remaining senate seats with Georgia Democrats Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff. Then the senate will be 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris providing the tie-breaking 51st vote, and turning majority leadership over to New York Senator Chuck Schumer (or whomsoever the Democrats wish to elect).

Can Warnock defeat Kelly Loeffler and Ossoff defeat David Perdue?  Considering that the Biden/Harris ticket defeated Trump/Pence by slightly more than 14,000 votes (49.5%-49.2%) and that Trump/Pence will not be on the ballot January 5, 2021, there is a reasonable chance that  the Democrats can take back the Senate.  However, hoping is not nearly enough.  Contributions certainly help.  Both incumbents, Loeffler (likely the wealthiest member of the U.S. Senate) and Perdue, can raise vast sums of money from their billionaire backers.  But so can Reverend Warnock and Mr. Ossoff . . . although their funding comes mostly from members of America’s middle class.  

Republican strategists have already attempted to block contributions from potential Jewish donors by claiming that the two Democratic candidates are both devout “tax and spend Marxists,” are anti-Israel (if not anti-Semitic) and will thus do everything in their power to destroy American Democracy. In other words, they are using the Trump playbook.  In one of her first ads, Senator Loeffler painted the Black pastor of the Atlanta church once led by Martin Luther King Jr, as a police-hating, Castro-loving Marxist. "This is America, her ad ran; “Will it still be if the radical left controls the Senate?" the narrator asks, while images show street riots.

Warnock has made climate change and environmental justice an important part of his campaign. Loeffler avoids talking about climate and boasts of being the senator most loyal to President Trump, who has led the nation out of the Paris climate accord and pursued energy policies that champion the fossil fuel industry. 

On Election day, Nov. 3, Warnock topped a field of 20 candidates running in a "jungle primary" special election that included Loeffler, who Gov. Brian Kemp appointed to fill the Senate seat vacated by Johnny Isakson in late 2019. Warnock received 32.9 percent of the vote, while Loeffler got 25.9 percent. Her main Republican challenger, Rep. Doug Collins, received 19.9 percent.

Warnock has already begun attempting to preemptively inoculate himself from Loeffler's attacks in ads of his own. In one, he says: "Get ready Georgia. The negative ads are coming. Kelly Loeffler doesn't want to talk about why she's for getting rid of healthcare in the middle of a pandemic. So she's going to try to scare you with lies about me." 

He also told voters on election night that he plans to "lean in" to his biography—that he is one of 12 children; the product of public housing and federal programs that helped him become the first member of his family to graduate from college.

"If you need somebody who will stand up for ordinary people, here I am. Send me," Warnock said.

Loeffler and her strategists have also done their utmost to paint Warnock as being an anti-Israel and anti-Semite. They did this by repeatedly bringing up a May 2018 sermon Warnock gave at the time Trump moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in which he flatly asserted that the move was meant mostly to please the president’s evangelical supporters. Additionally, Warnock has been accused of being in favor of the BDS (“Boycott, Divest, Sanction”) movement and supports a two-state solution (as do a majority of Jewish Americans). In recent polling, Warnock is a clear favorite of Jewish voters in Georgia.

Warnock has the endorsement of Georgia’s only Jewish state senator, Democrat Mike Wilensky, as well as several Jewish US senators and the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a progressive pro-Israel group. This past Tuesday, he tweeted its support for Warnock.

Defenders of Warnock point to Loeffler’s affiliation with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the recently elected representative for Georgia’s 14th District who has advanced the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory. Loeffler campaigned with Greene just before Election Day.

“Reverend Warnock stands with the Jewish community, Jewish values, and stands with Israel; that’s why I support his candidacy to the United States Senate,” Biden organizer Ben Kanas tweeted on Tuesday. “His opponent stands against Jewish values and embraces those who favor the antisemitism of QAnon.”

During the other senate race - that between incumbent David Purdue and businessman/political activist/former/Congressional staffer Jon Ossoff, Perdue’s strategy centered around reminding George voters time and again that Ossoff is Jewish. During their one and only televised debate, Ossoff attacked his opponent, saying “First, you were lengthening my nose in attack ads to remind everybody that I’m Jewish; then when that didn’t work, you started calling me some kind of an Islamic terrorist And then, when then that didn’t work you started calling me a Chinese communist.”

“Instead of leading and inspiring, he stoops to mocking the heritage of his political opponents,” Ossoff, the Democratic nominee, said when sharing a clip from the debate on Twitter.

The video got a quarter of a million views within 48 hours. Another video grab from the debate, in which Ossoff accused Perdue of insider trading for buying stock in personal protective equipment after a private January briefing for senators on the potential for a coronavirus pandemic, has gotten more than 12 million views. Perdue denies insider trading accusations. That’s when he started referring to Ossoff as a “Chinese communist.”  He also announced that he  would no longer participate in any future debates.

In addition to contributing to Warnock’s and Ossoff’s campaign, we can assist by sending out postcards to potential Georgia voters. If you would like to take part in this simple yet highly effective campaign, please email Suzi Stoller (one of my ardent readers at suzi.stoller@gmail.com this is a postcard initiative. The postcards kits are supplied by Reclaim Our Vote (ROV). They are attention-getting fronts. ROV provides the words to be written. They ask that they be handwritten as sent. The scripts are put together by those familiar with what is comfortable and familiar to locals. If you choose to do this you will receive:

1. Postcards

2. The script-to be handwritten

3. A list of names and addresses-to be hand addressed

4. Last time (I assume this time, too) a sticker to be included which has specific information depending on the County it is going to.

You will be asked to put a postcard stamp on each and mail. I believe postcards should be mailed not later than Dec. 7. You will receive very specific information.

They ask that you also pay the postage for the packet that is mailed to you. If you do the work, just let me know, I will be happy to pick up the cost of the packets being mailed to you.

What follows is part of an email I received from Suzi Stoller.

If you would like to participate, please send me your name, addresses and the number of cards you would like. Packets are in sets of 30, so you request, 30, 60, 90, 120 or more, just always in packets of 30.

Let's all work together and turn the US Senate Blue.

Once I hear from you that you will participate I will order your packet. You should receive it in less than a week.

Last time my letter generated about 3500 postcards. Hoping to reach that goal again. If you know anyone who is interested, I'll order for them and send to them or you can order for you and your group.

Good Luck to ALL of US. Suzi Stoller suzi.stoller@gmail.com

Together, we can help change the world.

Remember, there’s still a lot of work to be done!

66 days until the inauguration.

51 days until the Georgia election!

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Biden and Harris: They Know Our Names

For the past 24 hours I’ve had an endless loop of the late Marvin Gaye’s Dancing in the Streets (as sung, of course, by the legendary “Martha and the Vandellas”) pounding out a beat in my head.  And to make matters even better, most cable and network stations are showing people doing precisely that: “Dancing in the Streets.”  The lyrics and televised actualities are in perfect sync:

They're dancing in Chicago (dancing in the street)
Down in New Orleans (dancing in the street)
In New York City (dancing in the street)

All we need is music, sweet music
There'll be music everywhere
There'll be swinging, swaying, and records playing
Dancing in the street . . .

It's an invitation across the nation
A chance for folks to meet
There'll be laughing, singing, and music swinging
Dancing in the street

Philadelphia, PA (dancing in the street)
Baltimore and D.C. now (dancing in the street)
Can't forget the Motor City (dancing in the street)

All we need is music, sweet music (sweet music)
There'll be music everywhere (everywhere)
There'll be swinging, swaying, and records playing
Dancing in the street

And of course, all the ‘dancing and singing’ is because of Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ victory in the presidential race.  As I write this, Biden and Harris have 279 electoral votes to Trump and Pence’s 214.  It seems likely that the Democratic ticket will wind up with 306 votes in the Electoral College; precisely the same number that Trump/Pence scored in 2016.  Of course, 4 years ago, Donald Trump declared that those 306 votes represented “a landslide victory of historic proportions.”  One wonders if the soon to become former POTUS will ever accord the Biden/Harris ticket the same accolade?  Will it be of any consolation that he did wind up receiving the 2nd largest number of votes in American history?  Probably not; coming in second is simply not part of his psychological make-up.

Whether or not the GOP ran the nastiest, least truthful campaign in American history should best be left to the historians.  Ever since Joe Biden became the official Democratic Party nominee, the opposition has accused him of being the “most corrupt, least successful of all presidential candidates.”  They have accused both him and Senator Harris of being “Socialists” and “Communists” who have made vast fortunes for themselves and their families.  I even read a piece which flatly stated that  the former Vice President and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, have squirreled away so  much money that today, they own “the biggest mansion in Delaware.”  This is of course so much twaddle.  Upon reading this scurrilous bit of bilge, I wrote the author a brief reply: “Are you aware that Delaware has long been home to the du Pont family, and that among their many, many mansions within that state one finds Nemours Mansions and Gardens?  It is a 47,000 sq. ft., 110 room estate sitting on more than 300 acres with a jardin à la française formal garden? By comparison, Joe and Dr. Jill’s main residence is a 6,850-square-foot home in an upscale suburb of Wilmington, the land for which they purchased in 1996.  Whatever wealth he possesses (c. $9 million as of this year) has been earned since he left public office in 2017 - mostly from lectures and a book contract . . . 

So far as I recall, at no  time during the brutal 2020 election, did the former Vice President attack the  President or his children for making vast sums by trading in on his name and connections.  It is interesting to note that  the total amount of money Hunter Biden has been accused  of making during his several years with Burisma (for which he was slammed for not knowing anything about the oil industry) equals approximately 1 month’s earnings for Ivanka and Jared Kushner.  And at no time, so far as I recall, did the former V.P. attack them for the absolute lack of knowledge or experience they brought to their many advisory positions in the Trump administration.

So what is it that not only caused more than 75,000,000 people to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but largely reject every charge laid against him/them by Trump and Pence?

First, there were the obvious differences in personal presentations: Trump is an angry man who only uses that one one-letter pronoun: “I.” By comparison, Joe Biden fully understands that our nation’s most important, most compelling document begins in the plural . . . “WE the people.” Joe Biden, although certainly no shrinking violet, is, by and large, a gentleman who embodies civility, empathy and a commoner’s sense of what is right and what is wrong . . . unlike Donald Trump, who comes off as some sort of multi-generational aristocrat. Remember all those times Trump claimed that Biden had “abandoned” Scranton, Pennsylvania and likely didn’t remember thing one about it?

In one campaign speech in Scranton, Trump, speaking before a largely unmasked crowd said “"And don't forget Biden deserted you. He's not from Pennsylvania. I guess he was born here, but he left you, folks. He left you for another state. Remember that, please. I meant to say that. This guy talks about oh, I know Scranton . . . . Well, I know the places better. He left you for another state and he didn't take care of you because he didn't take care of your jobs." Do remember: Joe Biden is the fellow who took the train every morning and night from Wilmington to Washington, D.C., so that he could tuck his children in every night and make their breakfast every morning. He was, like all the other commuters . . . just a guy with a job. By comparison, Donald Trump never mentioned his family roots in Jamaica Estates Queens . . . he would have us believe that he was always a man from 5th Avenue.

Much has been made about all the toil, trouble and tragedy Joe Biden has  gone  through in his life:

• The death his first wife and daughter as well as the serious injuring of his two sons in a car crash on the very day he was originally scheduled to take the oath of office as a newly-elected United States Senator (he had to wait because at the  time of his election he was only 29 years old, and the Constitution requires a senator to be a minimum of  30  years old); 

• In 1988 he suffered two life-threatening brain aneurisms, barely escaping death;

• The death of his beloved son Beau (who served 2 terms as Delaware Attorney General), from brain cancer (Glioblastoma) at age 46.  (n.b. With the assistance of then-President Obama, Joe Biden turned the ashes of this tragedy into a blaze of hopefulness: the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot Initiative, “An Act to accelerate the discovery, development, and delivery of 21st century cures.” I am honored to be a part of the board which reviews the ethical standards by which the various clinical trials are undertaken.  We are making progress!). 

From all these tragedies - which would lead most people down into the pit of destruction and despair - Joe Biden has learned and grown.  Mostly, he claims by relying on his faith (he is only the 2nd Catholic to be elected {POTUS) and an indomitable spirit which makes him board that train every morning and every evening  in order to continue doing the work of the people.

But most importantly of all, I think the main reason why more than 75,000,000 people voted for him is that they see themselves in this kid from Scranton.

At the passing of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945, tens of millions of Americans gathered along the railroad tracks which took his body from Warm Springs, Georgia back to Washington, D.C. FDR, easily the most aristocratic, “blue blooded,” of all American presidents was first and foremost, a man of the people.  The story is told by political historian Judah Ginsberg about that final trek:

In Washington’s Union Station, a reporter asked a mourner, “Why are you here? Did you know Franklin Roosevelt?” The mourner replied: “No, I did not know President Roosevelt, but he knew me.”

“He knew me.” The squire of Hudson Valley, the closet thing this nation has had to an aristocracy, knew the mourner at Union Station and the thousands who stood for hours in the rain, watching for the train to go by.

This was the secret of FDR’s political success. He knew, he understood, the hopes and fears, the aspirations, worries, and concerns of the common man. More than any particular policies of the New Deal, most of which did not work anyhow, Roosevelt eased the trauma of the Great Depression by conveying that he cared, that he understood the suffering of Americans in those dark days.

In so many ways, the same can be said of both President Elect Joe Biden and Vice President Elect Kamala Harris: they know our names just as we know theirs.

May G-d bless them and keep them . . .

It's an invitation across the nation
A chance for folks to meet
There'll be laughing, singing, and music swinging
Dancing in the street…

And I am now honored to finally, finally be able to end a weekly essay with these words: 73 days until the Inauguration of the next POTUS.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

O Mio Babbino Caro

Last week’s essay strongly suggested that Maalox and expensive single-malt scotch were essential to keeping one from going stark raving nuts during the final 168 hours of the presidential race. Today, with just 48 or so hours remaining, might I suggest an elixir of a different sort: opera. Few, except family and my closest friends, know of the great love I harbor for this most delightful artform. And when it comes to the Hall of Fame of operatic composers, none, in my humble estimation, ranks higher than Giacomo Puccini (that’s him on the left.) Puccini (1858-1924), like his countryman, Giuseppe Verdi, had the G-d-given ability to tap into human emotion far better than just about any artist who ever lived.  Even if one doesn’t know più di poche parole basilari di italiano (“more than a few basic words in Italian), the loves, torments and emotions of his characters are still readily understandable . . . not so much because of the words themselves, but because of the heaven-sent scores he created. 

Of all his operas, my favorite - bar none - is one of his trio of one-act operas (il tritico - “The tryptych’’): Gianni Schicchi debuted at the Metropolitan Opera on December 14, 1918, along with the other two one-act operas: Il tabarro (“The Cloak”) and Suor Angelica (“Sister Angelica”).  Gianni Schicchi (pronounced “Johnny SKI-kee.”is a comic opera derived from a passage in the 30th canto of Dante’s Inferno,. That canto mentions, in an unflattering fashion, one Gianni Schicchi—who was an actual Florentine—as having been consigned to the eighth circle of hell with other forgers and cheats for disguising himself as Buoso Donati, a recently deceased Florentine aristocrat, in order to obtain Donati’s wealth for himself.

The high-point of the opera is the aria O mio babbino caro (“O my dear father”), sung by Lauretta, Johnny’s young daughter.  In the aria, she pleads with her father that if he forbids her from marrying Rinuccio, her true love, she will drown herself in the Arno.  Perhaps the greatest aria in the soprano’s lexicon, it has, over the past century, been successfully conquered by the  likes of  Dame Joan Southerland,  Montserrat Caballé, Maria Callas, Victoria de Los Angeles and . . . a brilliant Dutch South African named Amira Willighagen.  Amira’s version came to international attention when she was but 9 years old (today she’s 16 and even better).  And for those who have seen and/or heard her O mil babbino caro, there are tears to be shed, emotions to be felt and possesses the miraculous ability banish ennui, dread and weltschmerz a German word meaning “world weariness.”

Please give this tour-de-force a watch and a listen.  If nothing else, it might convince you that  in a world filled with pain, uncertainty, and the lack of what might be called the “artistry of humanity,” Amira’s singing of O mio bammbino caro may just well renew our belief in the possibility of beauty and redemption.  

Here’s to Tuesday . . . 

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Pass the Maalox . . . and While You're At It, Get Me Three Fingers of Glenmorangie Spios

One week to go - 7 days, 168+ hours until the polls close everywhere from West Quoddy Head, Maine to Cape Wrangell, Alaska, and from Point Barrow (again, Alaska) to Pago Pago.  This is not to say that we will know the final results of the presidential race 168+ hours from now.  Only the good Lord knows when the contest will be called; when “30” will be affixed to the bottom of the story and most importantly who the POTUS will be beginning on January 20, 2021. Both sides have their hopes and dreams; both sides fear what the nation - let alone the  world - will be like should “the other guy” win.  Without question, none of us have ever lived through such a presidential race . . . one that seems to have been going on for at least half a century.  Oh, the sleepless nights; the nasty invective, outright lies, the anger and the utter churlishness of the incumbent.  I for one have a medicine cabinet filled with Maalox and a personal stash of Glenmorangie Spios on the barroom shelf.  It’s been that kind of a political dual.  

On the bright side, there is a fairly good possibility that things are going to change; that the asinine Tweetstorms will abate; the unabashed nastiness and playground catcalls will diminish; that we will stop being treated like a swarm of gullible morons.  I know that for me - should my prayers and hard work be answered - that which I will miss even more than the constant polling, the chance to once again hear the name “Hunter Biden” come from the lips of the worst president in American history or the vomitatious claim that he has “done more for Black Americans than than any other president, with the “possible exception” of Abraham Lincoln.

Many of us remember the election of 1980, when Ronald Reagan gave incumbent President Jimmy Carter a shellacking: The Gipper won 44 states to the peanut farmer’s 6 (including the District of Columbia) and a 489-49 pasting in the Electoral College.  Those with decent political memories will remember long gas lines, super-high inflation and a 444-day crisis where the entire American diplomatic corps was held hostage in the American Embassy in Teheran.  It seems to me that we moderns have been going through our own long “hostage crisis” since January 20, 2017; unlike 1980, all of America has been held in thrall to Donald Trump, his massive ego, his march-in-step loyalists and the billionaires who underwrite and make possible his every deranged whim.  Should Joe and Kamala win, I for one will be overjoyed to no longer have to see, hear or be concerned with the likes of D.J., Trump, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Rudy Guiliani, the Kushners and whoever is the latest Chief-of-Staff.  

Without question, former Vice President Biden has higher personal ratings than Clinton, which is good news, but Trump seems to be campaigning much harder than Biden in these last several days. And when I see a reputable poll that puts Biden neck and neck with Trump in Texas - where no Democrat has won, let alone campaigned since 1994 - , it can mean only two things: Either we are headed toward the biggest electoral landslide in a generation, or pollsters are once again clueless about who is really going to turn out to vote.

It’s at this point that I renew the request to pass the Maalox and get us those three fingers of Glenmorangie Spios. Once we’ve medicated, we would do well to keep our hopes and dreams in check, lest like in 2016, we put a jinx on Joe.  But even if our favorite uncle does win, can we count on a normal transfer of power?  In a recent op-ed by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat bluntly headlined “There Will Be No Trump Coup,” Mr. Douthout argued that, as aspiring autocrats go, Donald Trump is too incompetent to pull off anything so ambitious as stealing an election.  Oh how I pray that Ross knows of what he  writes!

Come to think of it, successful strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan spend years carefully laying the groundwork for autocracy by first gaining broad public support, then by getting their allies to control the mainstream media, then by appointing their toadies to key positions in the military, and so on. Trump, by contrast, is despised by more than half the country, most of the media and his own secretary of defense. If someone ever uncovers his college transcript, I’m guessing he got a C- in the class on dictatorship, which is better than the D’s and F’s that I’m guessing he got in his classes on business analytics, financial accounting and management essentials. 

Like you, I am lousy at predictions . . . despite all the polls, interviews, advertisements and news clips.  All I know is that I long for the day when I no longer have to fear turning on Morning Joe at 5:00 a.m.; fearful that ‘45 did, said or commanded something overnight which will make the day another bloated belly terrible case of dysgeusia (a bad taste in the mouth). 

And so while we’re waiting, please bring on some more Maalox and crack open a new bottle of Glenmorangie Spios.  Who knows? Perhaps it will be in celebration! 

c. 175 hours to go . . .

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

The Inevitable Law of Political Gravity

Could it possibly be true? Are we actually beginning to see Republican rats abandoning an inevitably sinking ship? Just the other day, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse - B.A. Harvard, Oxford University, M.A. St. Johns College, M.A., PhD Yale - unload on Donald Trump in a constituent call  saying a number of unflattering things about the President, including that he's "flirted with White supremacists" and "kisses dictators' butts.” The Republican senator went on to say “The United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership. The way he treats women and spends like a drunken sailor. The ways I criticized President Obama for that kind of spending I've criticized President Trump for as well. He mocks evangelicals behind closed doors. His family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity. He’s flirted with White Supremacists.” (As a response, POTUS has begun referring to the Nebraska senator as “Little Ben Sasse,” and has informed the world that “Sasse doesn’t have what it takes to be great.”

Ben Sasse isn’t the only Republican senator beginning to scurry down the gangplank. Just the other day, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he hasn't visited the White House in two months because of how it has responded to the coronavirus. Among other things, he explained to a gathering in Kentucky, "[I] personally didn't feel that they were approaching the protection from this illness in the same way that I thought was appropriate for the Senate." Texas Senator Ted Cruz has been warning about a “Republican blood bath of Watergate proportions;” even South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham one of the president’s most vocal allies, predicted the president could very well lose the White House. It should be noted that Senators Sasse, McConnell and Graham, none of whom supported Trump during the 2016 primaries, have something else in common: they’re all up for reelection, don’t want to go down to defeat, and sure as hell are frightened to their very marrow about seeing both the House and Senate - not to mention the White House - under Democratic control.  As a result, many Republican office-holders are finally becoming aware that they are being dragged down by what one former COP member of Congress (Carlos Curbelo of Florida) insightfully  termed “the laws of political gravity.” They are finally beginning to speak up publicly against ‘45’s spending mania, his love affair with QAnon and white supremacist conspiracy theories, his dismantling of American influence in the  world and his classless disparagement of anyone and everyone who will not march in lock-step with him.  Why now?  Because they are terrified of losing their positions of power.  Why not sooner?  Because up until they recognized that the law of political gravity works, they were afraid of him - afraid of their leader taking reprisals against them.  But that no longer seems to be the case.  They simply cannot see themselves sinking into the hellish political abyss with him.

So what can we the people do?  First and foremost, I believe that with whatever time we have left before November 3, we must contact every Republican senator and let them know that if they are to redeem themselves in the eyes of their constituents, they must announce their change of mind and heart about the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.  At the same time, we the people must make sure that video captures of these same senators firmly avowing that a presidential election year is the absolute worst  time to push through a Supreme Court appointment (as they did with Judge Merrick Garland back in 2016) - that these videos bloom like crocuses in the autumn.  Put their two-faced duplicity on public display and then let the voters decide.

It’s not just that Judge Barrett has refused to answer a single question posed by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee; we already know  where she stands on birth control, the repeal of Obamacare, same-sex marriage and a host of other significant issues.  It’s that she was nominated mostly to save POTUS’ political tuchas when political gravity drags him down to an inevitable defeat.  And she claims she has no knowledge about this! That’s about as believable as when POTUS claimed he really did not know Paul Manafort all that well or really didn’t know shinola about QAnon of the Proud Boys . . .

The public must be warned of precisely how much damage Judge Barrett will inflict on the people of this country.  Suddenly, millions of people with pre-existing conditions will be without access to health insurance - and in the middle of a pandemic which will be treated as a “pre-existing condition”; discrimination on the basis of religious scruple and who one loves will set us back at least a half century; ‘45’s filthy fingerprints will continue staining everything it touches for years and years to come through his hand-picked judiciary. . . even if  he is languishing in jail, living in exile or has shuffled off this mortal coil.

By now, after nearly 4 years in office, ‘45 has his base so well-trained that they seem totally ignorant of the fact that if he gets his way with Barrett and the American judiciary, that it will wreak havoc with real living, breathing human beings. Take, as but one example same-sex couples whose very status is likely to be endangered to the max. They are totally freaked out.

Mark Kallick and David Moore 2020

The other day, I received a brief email from Mark Kallick and David Moore, a loving couple I have known for more than 35 years.  Mark and David met on April 14, 1983 in Cincinnati, where David would spend 42 years (1972-2014) playing viola with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Mark teaching and selling real estate.  As happy and emotionally healthy a couple as anyone would choose to know or befriend, they have spent a lifetime working on behalf of progressive political causes; Mark especially, has never been one to merely sit back and permit discrimination, bigotry or outright stupidity to go unchallenged.  Even back in the early 1980s, we would hold “evening salons” in my rooms (we lived at the fabled “Rose Hill” in the North Avondale section of Cincinnati) and engage in heady political discussions with people of all stripes.  Some things never change: just this past February, Mark and David put together a panel discussion on the topic “Can Hate Ever Be Conquered?” up in Ormond Beach, Florida (where they winter) with the southern head of the ADL, former Ambassador Nancy Soderberg, leaders of the transgender and lesbian communities (among others) and yours truly.  By this time, Mark and David had finally become a legally married couple.

As Mark recounted in his recent email: “We had to wait for thirty years to become legally married on September 25, 2013. Additionally, we had to travel to the state of New York. The Federal Marriage Equality Act had still not been passed by the Supreme Court; there were still only a few states that had legalized same sex marriage . . . . During our first thirty years we celebrated many married couples anniversaries, went to countless weddings, sent endless cards and gifts...happily.”

“We were denied the opportunity to enjoy a marriage that was legally recognized by our fellow citizens.
We had to forego the family health insurance provided for us by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. I had to go out of my way to ingratiate myself to David’s doctors so that I could properly look after him during illness and surgeries; I could have been legally denied.”

I dedicated so many of my years working (even going door to door) for the betterment and furthering of the Nation’s LGBTQ community; being a founding board member of Equality Cincinnati, Fairness Kentucky, Carolcole House (an AIDS hospice) amongst many other endeavors; there were bitter setbacks and some hard fought victories.”

Mark concluded his missive with the following heartfelt thought: “On Tuesday I watched many hours of the senatorial hearings to replace the Supreme Court seat of the late Justice Ginsburg. The proposed nominee will render monumental decisions effecting profound facets of our private lives; including the fate of the marriage that David and I have been enjoying since September 25, 2013. One proposal is to make same sex marriage have less recognition and legal rights. I pray that we’ll be able to enjoy our legal marriage, in good health for all the years we have left together. This nominee will be confirmed and we will have to endure the challenges that will inevitably come before the United States Supreme Court, seeking to void our marriage. Other married couples may be wishing us well... but only same sex families will actually sit with baited breath... waiting and praying to G-d. I would not wish this indignity on another family.” 

When one puts real faces living real lives and telling real stories, it becomes far more  difficult to turn one’s back on them.  I heartily urge everyone reading this essay communicate with their senator (or someone else’s if yours isn’t up for reelection), and tell them in the strongest possible terms that their reelection hinges on standing with people like Mark and David . . . and those who are about to lose their healthcare, and those who are about to have their votes invalidated just so a racist, bigoted xenophobic homophobe with a penchant for lies and lucre can continue being president of a country whose citizens he cares not a fig for.

And  may the inevitable law of political gravity drag him and his colleagues down to Doggerland, the land beneath the sea.    

16 days to go until we change the future . . .
Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Nescience

Let us suppose - at least for the duration of this essay - that when all the votes are counted, the Biden-Harris ticket hands an electoral ass-whooping to Trump-Pence; that the Democrats maintain - and even expand - their majority in the House, and capture the Senate . . . as well as several more governorships and state legislatures. Although by no means a lead-pipe cinch, this outcome is within the realm of possibility. At the moment, no one knows what reaction to expect from ‘45 and his team should he succumb to a political bloodletting; will he reject it, lock the front, back and side doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and call out the American military to protect him? Will he, in his last days in office declare war on China, Iran and/or Russia? Or will the leaders (?) and office-holders of his own political party finally, finally locate their “big boy, big girl” pants and tell him to באַקומען די גענעם אויס פון דאָ (pronounced bakumen di genem fune dah: Yiddish for “Get the hell out of here!”)?

Yes I know, the very thought of dismantling the current administration - along with all its corruption, lack of direction and cult-like devotion to one man - gives much of the American public - and indeed our once and (hopefully) future allies cause for cheerful optimism . . . a kind of “Ding dong the witch is dead” moment. But truthfully, dear reader, replacing Trump with Biden and McConnell with Schumer (as well as showing Miller, Mnuchin, Pompeo and Barr the door) is a mere first step on the path to recovery. For the current gang that couldn’t shoot straight is going to be leaving most of us with tremendous fiscal, medical and civil deficits, as well as systemic weakness and and grave doubts about ever again trusting anyone in power. Then too, there will be those who continue clinging to the staunch belief that’45 is, was and will always be the greatest, smartest and most capable of all American Presidents. Oh, it’s easy to deride them as fools and poorly educated drones. But do remember, they are far better armed than we, and lug about portmanteaus stuffed with resentment, bigotry and the certain knowledge that anyone on the “other side” is assuredly a communist, socialist or globalist. Case in point: the day after the Harris/Pence debate, ‘45 repeatedly referred to the California senator as both “a monster” and “a Communist.” By evening, those two terms could be heard on virtually every conservative and ultra-right wing talk show in America.

Yes, Trump and his tribe are leaving America in the throes of a lethal pandemic that will not go away, a job picture uglier than anything we’ve experienced since the Great Depression and a hell of a lot of people who stand defiantly against the country and government they wish to engage in a new Civil War.

Which brings us to the one thing which holds so much of this dire diagnosis together: nescience . . . our title word. Although hardly known and rarely used, nescience is a most useful word, meaning “ignorant or unknowing.” In all my years of reading novels and essays, I’ve only found it 3 times: In James Joyce’s Ulysses (chapter 17, in which he writes of “the lethargy of nescient matter”); W. Somerset Maugham’s The Hero (wherein the novel’s protagonist, James, is described as having been “. . .thrown into a blind rage by the complacency with which from the depths of his nescience his father dogmatised). and G.K. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown (“In such a naked state of nescience, Valentin had a view and a method of his own”).

According to the great lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, “There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would no rather know it than not know it.” Dr. Johnson teaches us that nescience evolved from a combination of the Latin prefix ne-, meaning "not," and scire, a verb meaning "to know." Dr. Johnson likely knew that scire is an ancestor of science, a word whose original meaning in English was "knowledge."

What this word has to do with our current POTUS and many of his cronies and appointees should be clear: both he and they are nescient when it comes to science, economics, foreign policy, conservation and a host of other subjects which are critical for leaders to know something about. In my experience, the wisest, brightest and best educated people need never brag or boast about how smart they are. And while Jefferson, both Adams, Lincoln, both Roosevelts and Obama were quite likely “the smartest person in the room,” there is virtually no record of them ever proclaiming this fact in public. Their books, essays, speeches and actions proved their worth. And what is more, they not only appointed people who were experts in their various fields; they actually listened to their advice, frequently incorporating what they had learned into their final decisions.

Compare this to ‘45, who throughout his presidency appointed (and fired) people mostly on the basis of their personal loyalty, not their expertise or experience in a given field. It has never really mattered; their boss has had neither the patience nor need to listen to others. From all indications, he doesn’t read any material his assistants may provide, and frequently diverges into self-congratulatory asides. The nation has heard him proclaim that he knows more than anyone about nearly any or every subject on which he speaks. All this from a world-class nescient whose sciolism (superficial knowledge) is largely responsible for the deaths of 212,000 souls, the rise of China and Russia on the world stage and the fading away of American exceptionalism. Merely wearing a baseball cap with the letters MAGA emblazoned across its top, or calling leading Democrats by nasty nicknames given them by the president, or refusing to wear a mask or keep a proper social distance, does not make a nation or even a segment of its populace great. What it does do is to separate a nescient minority from the rest of the people; to begin thinking about rebellion, revolution - even resurrection.  That segment is, for the most part, politically naïve, profoundly gullible, possessing a striking desire for strong authoritarian leadership . . . and heavily armed.   

The changing of the political guard may occur sometime in November or early December. Should this happen it does not mean that all that which has pained and ailed us these past several years will suddenly fade from view, only to be replaced with a growing sense of civility, empathy and the desired return to seeing the good in one another.  Alas, that’s not the way things generally work. 

But it can’t hurt.

23 days until the election.

If you have yet to mail in your ballot . . . what’s your plan?

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone