Month: July 2018

Seeing through the Mud

Yesterday, in a series of seemingly incoherent interviews, Trump attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani put forth the next defense of the President in the Russiagate saga. Giuliani dropped a bomb, stating that there was, or may have been, or was rumored to be (depending on the interview) a second meeting in Trump Tower before the meeting with the Russians on June 9^th, 2016. This was a planning session for the actual Russian encounter, with most of the same Trump principals:  Don Jr., Kushner, Manafort, Gates and an unknown fifth. To many, Giuliani seems unhinged or demented, pulling theories and events out of thin air.  He isn’t.  He is performing an important function for the Trump defense.

Watching the Trump Administration deal with the growing Russia crisis, one thing has been consistent. In the past they have denied, denied, denied; then admitted to some things; then finally, when the facts were obvious, say it happened but it didn’t matter.  The June 9^th meeting is the case in point:  it never happened, then it kind of happened, then a letter was written about it misrepresenting what happened, then finally, the emails were released about it and claimed to be “nothing.”  This strategy hasn’t served them well.

Giuliani is attempting a different tack:  he’s trying to get ahead of the story instead of constantly trying to catch-up.  In all likelihood there was a “planning session” before the June 9^thmeeting.  The Trump lawyers think that information is going to come out, likely through Gates’ statements in cooperation with the Mueller team. Rather than be blindsided with a meeting highlighting the Trump Campaign seriousness about the Russian connection, they feel it would be better to get it out now than later.

The Trump defense strategy shift is clear.  Now instead of waiting for the trickle of bad news, they are the ones controlling the release, and getting the “first draft” of the story.  Should the candidate, now President, end up being the “unknown” fifth man at the meeting the groundwork has already been laid:  Giuliani’s almost incoherent ramblings about not finding collusion in the Federal code creates the basis for the “next reality” of Trump’s personal involvement in the Russian meeting.

The President from the outset of the crisis has stated over and over that there was no “collusion.” Now that it is obvious there was, his team is building a case to claim that “collusion” isn’t against the law, so even though the Trump team (having lied for almost two years) “colluded” it doesn’t matter.  They have even gotten the “stamp of approval” from noted Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.

And for those who accept “collusion” as the only definition for their actions, the Trump lawyers are probably correct.  However, if what the Trump campaign did was a “conspiracy to defraud the United States” (a Mueller charge in multiple indictments) then Federal law has been violated.  Giuliani muddying the terms is simply one more means of confusing the issue.

The third prong of the Trump strategy is to argue that “collusion” with foreigners is a common campaign practice.  They draw an “apples to apples” comparison with the Clinton campaign:  Trump had his Russians, Clinton had her British former MI-6 Agent in Christopher Steele.  If what he did was illegal, then so did she.  This angle of the story is being pushed by Trump-friendly media, including the Washington Times.

And on first glance it does sound persuasive.  If Hillary did it, why shouldn’t Trump?  However, even conceding that the Clinton campaign used the Steele Dossier, a fact still not fully documented; this is not “apples to apples.”   Christopher Steele was an independent contractor, working for another US contractor, Fusion GPS, who had been contracted by attorneys for the Clinton campaign to do opposition research.  Steele was not an arm of any national intelligence service, nor was he operating for a rival nation.

The most recent Mueller indictments have made it apparent what we all already knew:  the Russian government, through their intelligence services, were directly interfering in the 2016 election.  The evidence is growing clear that the Trump campaign anticipated getting high-grade opposition information from the June 9^thmeeting, and were aware this information was coming from the Russian government.  Trump said as much in a speech that week.  That’s a long way from Clinton reading the Steele reports (if her campaign did.) It’s not “apples to apples,” it more like “apples to hot dogs:” not much similarity.

But suppose you give the Trump lawyers their comparison, allowing that both Trump and Clinton committed a crime.  As many drivers pulled over for speeding have discovered:  just because others were breaking the law too doesn’t make you any less guilty.

And finally, Giuliani is participating in the “Democratizing” of the Mueller team, the “seventeen angry Democrats” investigating the President.  If he can damage the creditability of the Mueller investigation, then he hopes to invalidate their outcomes.

All of these machinations will have little bearing on the legal actions the Mueller investigation will take.  Their arena is the Federal Courts, not Fox and Friends or CNN.  And there are other lawyers on the Trump team who are better suited for that, including the newest addition, Emmet Flood, known for helping Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial.

But Giuliani isn’t worried about a case in Federal Court.  He anticipates, probably correctly, that Mueller won’t indict a serving American President.  Mueller will take the traditional approach, producing a report for the House of Representatives outlining the actions of the President, and leaving it up to the House to determine if those actions reach the standards for impeachment.

And, if the Democrats take control of the House as expected in November, it will be a Democratic Judiciary Committee Chairman who will make that determination.  Should they impeach the President, a simple majority vote of the House, then the final outcome will be in control of the Senate.

Here’s where Giuliani’s strategy comes into play:  to remove the President from office requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate.  Even if Democrats should gain control, it would likely only be by a one or two vote margin, far from the sixty-seven required. So Giuliani’s long-term strategy is to muddy the issue so much, that a significant part of the American people, Trump’s base, won’t buy anything the Mueller investigation shows.  That way, vulnerable Republican Senators can vote “with their constituents” and against removing the President.

It’s not demented, or addled.  It’s a realistic view of what could happen in the next year.  The one thing the Giuliani depends on is that politicians will be politicians.

In John F. Kennedy’s book, Profiles in Courage, one of the chapters is about Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas.  Ross cast the deciding vote that prevented President Andrew Johnson from being removed.  That vote went against his own Radical Republican faction, and cost him his Senate seat.  It was a time in our history when a politician wasn’t a politician.

We may be arriving at that time again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Movies

This weekend we took an afternoon and caught a movie.  Politics are never far from our lives, so we watched the newest Rob Reiner film, Shock and Awe.  Starring Woody Harrelson and James Marsden as well as Reiner, the movie follows two reporters of the Knight-Ridder News Agency, as they tried to unlock the secrets leading the United States to invade Iraq in 2002.  Their dramatic discovery:  the “official” reason for invading Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, was not only untrue, but a falsehood created by the leadership of the US government.

It is a story of investigative journalism, and of the Executive Branch manipulating the media to get what they wanted.  While Knight-Ridder got the story right, the “big” media; the New York Times and the Washington Post and NBC, ABC and CBS all fell for the story told by Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, and President Bush.  After the invasion when US troops were mired in Iraq and no weapons of mass destruction found, the New York Times apologized on their front page.  They had been fooled.

The Bush Administration refused to respond to the Knight-Ridder stories, letting them “swing in the wind” while the rest of the media marched along to war.  It is a story with consequences today.  Not only does it tell us not to blindly trust the Executive Branch, but it also reminds us not to blindly trust the media as well. And finally, it tells us to listen to some of the “voices in the wilderness;” sometimes they’re right.

The second movie was a few weeks ago: Stephen Spielberg’s The Post.  Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep star in the story of a powerful woman, Katherine Graham (Streep), taking charge of the Washington Post and making it a national force.  The editor, Ben Bradlee (Hanks), published the Pentagon Papers, classified documents outlining the Pentagon foundation for America’s continued involvement in the Vietnam War.  The Post, and the New York Times, risked legal catastrophe to tell Americans that their government was lying about Vietnam.  It was the beginning of the end of the war, and of American’s trust in their leadership.

Leading us to last night’s movie, one of my favorites:  All the President’s Men.  It is the well-known story of two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) who lead the Washington Post to break the Watergate scandal of President Nixon.  I remember first seeing this movie in the theatre while I was living in Washington, only three years after Nixon’s resignation.  It made my nervous walking in parking garages.

While we all now know what Nixon did, how he conspired to commit crimes, break-ins and buggings, then spent two years of his Presidency personally orchestrating the cover-up:  when Woodward and Bernstein began their work his actions were a close kept secret.  Their dogged reporting, and the willingness of the honest among the “President’s men and women” to tell the truth, is the story of my generation’s biggest political crisis.  The Nixon White House did everything they could to attack the Washington Post (and the New York Times, just as involved in the story) and drive them out of business.

The rhetoric of the Nixon Administration sounds eerily familiar today; attacking the media as biased, claiming some great “silent majority” of support, demanding that only their facts were the “real news.”  The difference today:  we may be so horribly divided, that even evidence as convincing as the Nixon tapes might not be enough to unify us in a conclusion.  Or perhaps even worse, as Rudy Giuliani would have us believe:  that crimes are really not crimes, just “regular business.”

All three movies have the common theme:  that truth may ultimately overcome power.  The Post and All the President’s Men present courageous government insiders, Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt, who believed the truth was so important that they were willing to risk their careers, and perhaps their lives, to make it public. They show reporters who ignore the risks to get their story in print.

But Shock and Awe gives us a warning:  that sometimes the corruption of power can overcome the truth. We should be prepared for that as well, as the we deal with the ultimate political crisis we face today.

 

 

 

 

It’s Not on the Form

So a second grade teacher is taking their class of six year olds to the museum.  There are several demonstrations there, and the teacher is unsure what time the kids will come back to the school.  The parents fill out the following form:

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My child ________________ has permission to go with Ms. Smith to the museum.  I am aware that the time schedule is not determined, and I will be available to pick up my child when they return and the teacher calls me. 

___________________ (parent)  ________ (date). 

---

Most parents when filling out the form will realize the flaw in the system.  How will Ms. Smith call, when they haven’t listed a phone number. The United States Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol division, didn’t.

When children were separated from their parents at the border as part of President Trump’s “zero tolerance” program, the names of the children were entered on a database. Along with their country of origin, gender, age, and other information about the child, the names of the parents, who were being held by BCP, were also entered.

But in the database, there was no place, column or data cell for the location of the parents to be entered. It was a one-way form, a form designed to follow the kids into the Department of Health and Human Services care, but not to return them to their parents.  It was a reasonable system for the “last” crisis at the border, when unaccompanied minors were crossing.  But,when the San Diego Federal Court judge ordered the children to be returned to their parents, there was no electronic way to find them.

Let’s be charitable. Let’s make the assumption, for the moment, that the US Government under President Trump was not callous and uncaring about the children.  And let’s agree that there wasn’t a dark secret plan to kidnap the children.  So what happened?

According to the Washington Post, the “zero tolerance” policy had strong support on the ground on the Southern Border with the Customs and Border Protection service.  The way they saw it:  the border smugglers knew that CBP wouldn’t hold parents with children in custody while awaiting a hearing on a claim of asylum.  CBP believed that smugglers were encouraging adults to use children to avoid detention, and CBP wanted to send a message that this strategy wouldn’t work.

That message resonated among senior officials in the Trump Administration, particularly Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Senior Advisor Stephen Miller.  They could make a strong statement about illegal immigration (and the need for the “wall”) and then use it as a negotiating chip in the immigration reform law debate.  And, when word got back to Central America that children were being taken, it might reduce the number of families that attempted to make the trip.

So the “zero tolerance” policy was implemented.  While there isn’t much question about both the immorality and “optics” of taking children from their parents, the Administration didn’t consider those things to be a problem.  Their base would be in favor of it, and perhaps they could achieve their immigration goals.

But no one thought the process through.  No one was prepared for the wave of children that would need to be cared for. Facilities near the border were already filled with the unaccompanied children, Health and Human Services (who were given custody of the border children) was forced to scatter them throughout the country.  It was a “seat of your pants” operation, no one seems to have planned it out.

In the “old days,” parents would pin the name, address and phone number of a child on their jacket. Now in the digital age, we all depend on electronic information to track and trace our lives.  From knowing when packages arrive, to depending on our phones for our spouse’s number (me for sure – sorry) we depend on the information being available.

So the absence of a data location in the HHS program meant there was no electronic means of finding a child’s parents.  Even now we have hundreds of children that we are unable to return to their parents. It was a one-way system.

We often argue about the morality and ideology driving the Trump Administration.  But what we see in this operation, just as we saw in the Puerto Rican hurricane disaster, is an even more devastating charge:  incompetency.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does Anything Matter?

Last night the breaking news slipped out:  Michael Cohen was in a meeting with Donald Trump when Trump was informed and gave approval to the June 9^th meeting between Trump Campaign officials and known Russian Government representatives to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.  He knew and approved before it happened.

OK – I have to do this:

COLLUSION – COLLUSION – COLLUSION – COLLUSION – COLLUSION – COLLUSION – COLLUSION – COLLUSION – COLLUSION – COLLUSION!!!!!

And even better:

CONSPIRACY – CONSPIRACY – CONSPIRACY – CONSPIRACY – CONSPIRACY.

There, I feel better. I’ve waited almost two years to say that.

Michael Cohen, who was the trusted personal lawyer for Donald Trump, is looking for an “exit strategy” to avoid jail.  He is either cooperating, or going to cooperate, with Federal Prosecutors both in his own case in the Southern District of New York and with the Mueller Team. As former Federal Prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg said, “…he’s joining Team USA.”

Cohen was, to quote Hamilton,“…in the room where it happened…”  And, after hearing the tape of Cohen withTrump  discussing the shell LLC to pay off former lovers, we now know that Cohen had no problem bugging himself and his clients.  So there might even be a tape; there are at least one hundred of them.

The spin has already begun. Rudy Giulani, representing President Trump, has called Cohen a “…known liar that cannot be trusted…”  Trump tweeted that he didn’t know about the meeting.  The odd thing though, is that Cohen isn’t the one who released the information about “the meeting.”  The best we can currently figure, it was the Trump side that slipped it to the media, in fact, to their favorite media – CNN.  After over a year and a half of denials, of lies, of possible perjury (Donald Jr’s testimony to Congress that he never informed his father) what’s their strategy?

In the language of nuclear war, this is called a pre-emptive strike.  The logic goes this way:  Cohen has the information, possibly on tape, and that information will ultimately be revealed, perhaps during a trial.  To take the “surprise” value out of the information, and to allow for a concerted effort to destroy Cohen’s reputation and therefore the value of his information, the Trump team decision was to get it out now.

That this strategy implies destroying a trusted employee (Cohen) and throwing both Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner under the “Mueller” bus, shows the absolutely desperate situation of the Trump Team.   If the President really did have knowledge and gave approval to this meeting, he probably has committed conspiracy with the Russian government to illegally interfere with the 2016 election.  He also may well have engaged in a conspiracy of theft from the DNC and the Clinton campaign, using the stolen emails.  If there’s a tape of this meeting, it would be as powerful as the Nixon conversations in the days after the Watergate break-in.

We will soon hear the excuses:  every political campaign would do the same thing, or, we didn’t know this was against the law, we were novice politicians, or, we didn’t get anything out of the meeting anyway.  This meeting has been characterized as a “bust,” where no information, legal or illegal, was presented.  Of course, we only have the word of the participants, Donald Jr and Jared Kushner.  Others aren’t talking, yet.

But if the President knew and approved a meeting, with the intent of receiving Clinton dirt from the Russians, it really doesn’t matter what the outcome of the meeting was.  If you walk into a bank, pull a gun, and say this is a robbery, whether you get the money or not you have committed a crime.

There’s a great Saturday Night Live sketch of the Lester Holt interview with the President, where Trump says he fired FBI Director Comey because of Russia.  Michael Che, playing Holt, stops, looks at the camera, and says “…did I get him, is this all over?”

The answer was that nothing matters.

This isn’t over.  It will take months, perhaps years to play out. But if this piece of information is true, then the President will be forced to ask Congress, and the American people if they are willing to accept his actions; actions that are illegal.  And  then we will  find out if anything really does matter.

 

 

 

 

Finally, Impeachment

Congressman Mark Meadows, Republican from North Carolina and the current Chairman of the “Freedom Caucus” introduced a Bill of Impeachment yesterday to the House of Representatives. It is not the impeachment the Resistance has been waiting for:  Meadows, Ohio’s Jim Jordan and nine other Congressmen are trying to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

A technical note:  impeachment is the legislative process of bringing charges against a member of the executive branch.  Impeachment begins in the House of Representatives, with a majority of the House having to vote to Impeach.  The removal “trial” is then held in the Senate, with Senators acting as the jury. Two thirds of the Senate must agree to remove the executive branch member.

The Freedom Caucus has been the leading defender of President Trump.  Ohio’s Congressman Jim Jordan, despite being under a cloud himself, has made it his “cause” to try to shift the focus of the Russia Investigation away from the President, and onto the investigators.  His interrogation of Rosenstein in the House Judiciary Committee a few weeks ago showed how far Jordan would go.  He charged Rosenstein with threatening the Committee staff by subpoenaing their phone calls.

The Freedom Caucus has demanded millions of documents from the Department of Justice regarding the Russia investigation.  The Department has provided over 800,000; but has refused to give the “scope and sequence” documents laying out the path and progress of the Mueller Investigation. The Caucus has used the released material to attack the investigation, putting them in the public domain, and forced the Department to make public documents that show most secret practices and methods.

The latest example of this is the FISA warrant for the surveillance of former Trump advisor Carter Page.  While significant portions of the public warrant were redacted, it shows, contrary to the Caucus talking point, that the Steele Dossier was not the sole foundation of the Russia investigation. It also revealed more about the FISA process than the intelligence community deemed safe.

Speaker Ryan has not shown support for the impeachment resolution.  However, Ryan’s imminent departure (he has chosen not to run for re-election) has weakened his hold on the Republican caucus.  Congressman Trey Gowdy, Chairman of the Government Oversight Committee and best known for the interminable Benghazi investigation of Hillary Clinton, also has noted his disapproval of the resolution.  He too has chosen not to run again, but in all likelihood; if the resolution reaches the floor of the House for a vote it would fail dramatically.

But that’s not the point.

Two weeks ago, the Mueller team indicted twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking emails and other electronic interference in the 2016 election.  It is clear that the next set of indictments from Mueller will include Americans who conspired in some way with Russian intelligence to alter the election outcome.  Those Americans likely will be associated in some way with the Trump Campaign.

This week, President Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen has made it clear that he will “flip” and cooperate with Federal Prosecutors in their investigation of the actions of the Trump Campaign.  It has also been revealed that he has over one hundred tapes of conversations he had, some with the President (then candidate) himself.  Even the Fox News lawyers are saying the President is facing legal jeopardy in a possible conspiracy to evade campaign finance laws.

Next week the trial of Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort begins.  And while Manafort isn’t charged with any violations from the Trump Campaign itself, the greater the risk of Manafort going to jail for an extended time, the greater the risk that he will cooperate with Federal investigations into the Trump Campaign.  In addition, the intriguing charges against a Russian woman, who seemingly was sent by Russian Intelligence to infiltrate and compromise the NRA and through them, the Republican Party, is just beginning to come to light.

The President has had a rough week in the news, with the fallout from the Helsinki meeting with Putin, followed by the failed invitation to Putin to meet again, followed by the US Government having to bailout farmers as the result of the new tariff policies.    And all of this is under the specter of the November elections, the results of which may put the Democrats in power in at least the House of Representatives.

The clock is ticking, and the pressure is growing on the President.  The mission of the President’s defenders has been to undercut the investigators; the FBI, the intelligence community and the Department of Justice.  Attacking Rosenstein, the ultimate “boss” of the Mueller investigation, is just one more step in the process.

Buckle up – things will get worse before they get better.

 

 

Kidnapped

The Government of the United States, acting in the name of the American people (our name) implemented a policy of removing children from their parents at the Southern border. This “child separation” policy was prosecuted mostly on families crossing the border illegally (a misdemeanor offense) though some legal crossers were separated as well.  The children were removed from the parents, sometimes forcibly, and transported across the country, often thousands of miles to far-away locations.  At the time of the implementation, there was no procedure established to eventually return the children to their parents.

This policy was implemented to “make a statement” to potential migrants from Central America: come to the border and you might lose your children.  When the policy was actually enforced there was a national outcry, and a Federal Court in San Diego intervened, instructing the US government to return the children to their parents.

Whatever your view of the policy, or the legality of the government’s actions, or the entire immigration issue; most reasonable people would agree that the children belong with their parents.  This is not just an emotional response; it’s the best for the mental and physical health of the children.  It also is the least expensive outcome, with the United States currently paying as much as $700/day/child for food, housing and care.  It is literally costing US (that’s you and me, us) billions of dollars to prosecute, and now try to undo, this policy.

While the numbers still are vague, approximately 2600 kids were separated, ranging in age from eight months to seventeen years.  The Federal Judge in San Diego has given the government until Thursday, July 26^th to return the children to their parents.  The US Government has established two “classes” of children: those eligible to be returned, and those not.  The first class, about 1500 kids, are on track to be returned.

This leaves about one thousand kids who are still in government custody.

There are several reasons why the Government says these children are not eligible to be returned at this time.  One is that the parents are in some way not qualified.  This includes parents who have committed felony offenses, and adults who are not readily identifiable as the parents. This seems shaky, it fits in too well with the political view of the current Administration, that the migrants are somehow MS-13 members and rapists, rather than families fleeing violence. But in all fairness, the US Government should NOT return kids to folks that can’t by determined to be their parents.

But the second class of ineligible kids is the one that raises the most concern.  The Immigration Agency (ICE) was desperate to move adults out of the country, often disregarding their legal right to request asylum and have that request adjudicated.  This wasn’t just a policy determination, getting the migrants out, but also a practical one.  As ICE was holding all illegal crossers, they were placing a whole lot of adults in jail, as well as taking the children.  The sooner they could get those adults out of the country, the less they were spending in custodial fees.

So there is a group of children, probably in the hundreds, whose parents have already been deported from the US.  The US government has shown no willingness to develop a process of returning children to parents out of the country (in fact, they are charging huge fees to return children to parents still in the country.)  As things stand right now, WE are keeping these kids.

Spread throughout the country, subject to the foster and adoption codes of various states; these kids are slowly being absorbed into “the system.”  In many states, kids are fostered out to families within six months, and as soon as twelve months they may be considered “abandoned” and eligible for adoption.  Our government is on the road to taking those children from their parents, forever.

The legal definition of kidnapping includes two elements:  the unlawful taking of a victim, and, a “nefarious” motive (such as for ransom.)   When the Trump Administration is finally done, will they be accountable for their actions?  If Courts find that the “child separation policy” was unlawful, and that the motive of setting “an example” so other migrants wouldn’t come as nefarious:  who in the Administration will be going to jail?

And meanwhile, what happens to the stolen kids?

 

 

 

 

 

Thug Life

I was the Dean of Students, the discipline guy, for a 1200 kid high school for several years.  Our public school had a vast majority of great kids, but we also had our share of bullies, wannabe tough kids, and, a few hardcore thugs.  Over the years I got to know the thugs, as the Dean they were “my job,” and I learned a few of their rules.

I learned that while we were on opposite sides, there could still be respect.  Respect was based on a kind of trust:  they trusted that I would do whatever I could do to end their “thugdom,” but I wouldn’t “cheat.”  If they made a mistake and broke the student conduct code, I came down on them, but I couldn’t just make up violations to get them.  It had to be “fair.”

Their rules also said that they wouldn’t make a threat they couldn’t carry out, and I couldn’t either. There was nothing more empty or weak, than threatening to do something you wouldn’t, or couldn’t do.  If you’re going to be a thug, then you better know the rules, and you better be willing to do what you say.  You better be able to actually do it, too.  If not, you were a “wannabe,” not deserving of respect. And, as the Dean of Students, not having respect meant not having control.

There is a new “play” going on in Washington today.  It started out with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is colluding with the White House to try to act like “thugs.”  Paul started by calling for the removal of former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance, because he criticized the President.  It’s disappointing that Paul, who has earned some respect for his independence, has fallen into this little conspiracy.  Like his losing golf game with the President, he must be trying to get something.

Press Secretary Sarah Sanders conveniently was all set for questions about Paul’s suggestion in the Monday press conference.  She expanded on his plan, adding a full six former intelligence leaders to the list. Brennan, former National Security Director Susan Rice, former DNI James Clapper, former NSA Director Mike Hayden, former FBI Director James Comey, and former FBI Assistant Director Andrew McCabe all are targets. All of them have been critical of the President’s actions, with Brennan being outspoken in his description of Trump’s actions in Helsinki as “treasonous.”

So by “thug rules” you need to threaten something you can do, and you need to carry it out.  The President, Sanders and Paul are trying to silence and punish critics, and at the same time they are again attacking the reputation of the intelligence community.  If these leaders no longer “deserve” a security clearance their story goes, then clearly they made bad decisions about Russian involvement in the 2016 election and the possible conspiracy of the Trump Campaign with Russian intelligence to alter the outcome.

Thug Rules – you better be able to do what you threaten.  Well, McCabe and Comey already had their security clearances ended, that’s standard procedure when you leave the FBI.  They were fired, as if the Trump White House didn’t know it, and removing the security clearance is part of the process.  So here’s a good look for a “thug,” doing something that’s already done.  Looking foolish is not a good “thug” look.

Rice, Clapper, Hayden and Brennan all still have clearances.  This is not just a courtesy; they represent the institutional history of their agencies.  With clearances, they can be “read into” current situations to gain their knowledge and experience.  None of them receives current classified briefings, they only remain as resources for current decision makers.  Removing their clearances, other than being an insult, doesn’t hurt them.  It hurts our current leaders.

Thug rule – don’t do something that makes you look foolish, and don’t do something that hurts you more than hurts them.

And finally, Sanders presented as one of the reason for the clearance removal was that some of the targets were “monetizing” their clearances.  That means, they are making money from their security status.

And it’s certainly true that they are “experts” for the media, and they are making money doing it. Their current security clearance has nothing to do with that, they are experts because of their experiences as government leaders.  They will stay on CNN and MSNBC and other critical media outlets with or without a clearance.

My mother had an expression, “the pot calling the kettle black.”   It meant, don’t complain about what someone else is doing, when you’re doing it yourself.  Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and senior advisor, made millions of dollars while on a “temporary” security clearance, while the President himself continues to make millions from the government by staying at his owned properties (over $70000 alone for his weekend at the Scottish golf course.)  Aren’t they “monetizing” their security clearances?

The President, his press secretary and Senator Paul are trying to be “thugs,” to scare critics and further attack the intelligence agencies.  But their “play” looks foolish:  at best they are “wannabes.”  If they want to learn how to be thugs, they need to look to their friend Putin.  He’s got it down – go find some Novichok if that’s the goal.  Then they can be real thugs.

Don Dahlman

Don Dahlman – 1942

My Dad would have turned 100 tomorrow.  He left us in 2016,  two days before his 98^th birthday. 

“Don Dahlman” — that was how my Dad answered his business phone for forty years.  The phone was pivotal to my Dad’s career; when I think about him at work (as I write sitting at his “executive desk”) I think about Dad with a phone at his ear, getting facts, making decisions, and encouraging, directing and sometimes swearing at his employees (that’s where I learned that particular “art”.)

Don Dahlman was a child of the Great Depression.  Born and raised in Cincinnati, his father was the Sports Editor for the Cincinnati Post. His mother went to work as a real estate agent when the stock market crashed, and while the family lost a lot of their income, they were able to weather the economic storms without too much disruption.

Don was a product of Cincinnati; of Walnut Hills High School and the University of Cincinnati.  He co-opted in the UC Bookstore, and graduated from college in 1941 with a Business Administration Degree. He took a job in advertising with Beau Brummel Ties, but the clouds of World War II were already swirling.  By November he was enlisted in the Army; the December 7^thattack on Pearl Harbor found him on leave in a bar in Atlanta.

The Army got it right – they put Don in finance, making sure the troops were paid.  He was sent to London, running an office in the middle of the Nazi bombing attack called the Blitz.  There, he went on a blind date with an English girl.   They quickly went from strangers to lovers; that’s when Don and his English girl Babs started a lifelong love affair, walking the blacked-out streets of London.

As Don made sure the Army was paid, Babs was a secret operative going in and out of Occupied Europe. Her code name was “Virginia;” Don really never got used to high-level officers coming up to “his girl,” calling her Virginia, and having secretive conversations.  He wasn’t allowed to know.  It wasn’t until years later, when the Official Secrets Act expired, the Babs was able to tell him the extent of her secret life.  Despite this, Don and Babs got married in 1944, moving the wedding date up to avoid the D-Day Invasion.  Their honeymoon was still cut short, Don to go to join the invasion Army, Babs to land in France to work with the Resistance.

After a year of missing each other in France as the war in Europe concluded, Don and Babs were back together in London again.  The decision was made:  Babs would come to America, to Cincinnati, to start a new life with Don.  She would leave the nation of her birth, the nation she defended, for the man she loved.

But she was not “following” Don home.  It was a partnership from the beginning.  When they arrived in Cincinnati, they decided to start a bottling company.  Babs made the “pop,” pouring sugar and syrup into giant mixing vats.  Don marketed, going store-to-store in the truck, stocking them with the “US Bottling Company” product.  A flood of the Ohio River damaged the “plant,” and they soon sold out to bigger bottlers.

Don entered a new industry that would shape all of our lives:  television.  He went to work as a salesman for Crosley Broadcasting’s WLW-T.  In those early television days everything was live, and Don (and Babs from time to time) worked beside future stars like Rod Serling and Ruth Lyons.  When Don wasn’t moving up as quickly as he liked he jumped to a new phase of the industry, syndication.

Syndication is marketing television shows station by station, without using a “network.” While the big three, CBS, NBC and ABC offered a package of programming, syndicators offered individual shows for sale. The biggest innovator of the time was Fred Ziv in Cincinnati.  Ziv developed, and Don sold, iconic shows of the 1950’s and early 60’s: Highway Patrol, Ripcord, Sea Hunt, the Everglades and the Cisco Kid.

Meanwhile, Babs and Don started a family, with three children by 1956.  Don was “on the road” Monday through Friday, and after moving to Detroit in 1961, wanted to find a job that kept him closer to the family.  In 1963 he returned to Crosley, this time as the sales manager and soon station manager of WLW-D in Dayton, Ohio.

Dayton was a booming town in the 1960’s, with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, National Cash Register, Frigidaire and Delco all providing full employment.  As Manager of one of the two TV stations in Dayton, Don and Babs played a major social role in town, even representing Dayton to the fiftieth anniversary of the Wright Brothers flight in Le Mans, France in 1968.

Don believed in “live” television.  When Johnny Gilbert (“tell them what they won, Johnny”) left the mid-day entertainment show for Hollywood, Don and his staff developed a new talk show format. They hired a young newscaster away from the competitor station, Phil Donahue.  They set up a show where Phil would have a studio audience, mostly women (the “homemakers”) and then bring in the newsmakers of the time.  Phil soon discovered that the audience had great questions, and added a phone (“Is the caller there?”)  The Phil Donahue Show was born.

The Donahue Show brought controversy to Dayton, Ohio.  Whether it was atheist Madeline Murray O’Hare, radical anti-war protestor Abbie Hoffman, or the anatomically correct doll, Little Baby Brother; Phil took on issues of the 1960’s.  Don soon got the show on the “sister stations” in Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis and San Antonio; and with his experience in syndication began to push Donahue sales beyond the Midwest.

The Donahue Show was exciting, not only for Don, Babs and the station, but for my sisters and me as well. In the evenings before the morning show, our family room became the place to be.  For example:  one night, late, Mom woke me up, and told me to “bartend” (I was twelve and talented at mixology, they fired me at fourteen when they thought I might try the product) for Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers.  He was a hero of the young; the Brothers had a comedy show on CBS that dared to speak out against the Vietnam War.  The show was ultimately cancelled because of their outspoken opposition.  Tommy spent the evening at our house, and Dad’s sales manager Chuck McFadden and I spent the evening behind the bar, listening to Tommy’s dirty jokes and wondering how his girlfriend’s dress was staying up.

By the early 1970’s, Donahue was bigger than the station.  The show was moved to production in Chicago, and Don and Babs returned to Cincinnati with Don becoming the President of Syndication for the new owner, Multimedia Broadcasting.  Ultimately Dad got the show into 225 markets in the US, and it ran for twenty-six years.   Multimedia Syndications also created and marketed the Sally Jesse Raphael Show, Young People’s Specials, and originated the Jerry Springer Show.

Back in Cincinnati, Don and Babs led a busy social life, with an eclectic group of friends.  Some were Don’s old Cincinnati friends and some were business friends from companies like Proctor and Gamble, but others were from England, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, India, Brazil, and other places around the globe.  Dinners at the Dahlman’s were always interesting, with conversations around the table going on until late at night.  All of the issues of the world were up for discussion – except for religion and “the Queen” (Babs wouldn’t have that.)  And the kids, who had grown up taking part in the discussion, were able to get a world perspective.

Those friends, many younger than Don and Babs, regarded them as a second family.  For some, the Dahlman’s became their surrogate parents.

It was always a partnership, Don and Babs.  It was always a love affair as well, as they lived an active life into their nineties. Mom and Dad taught us how to live and how to love.  And when Mom passed away, five years before Dad, he continued to teach us how to live by his example. Dad began to lose his memories; life has a way of cushioning some of the worst losses.  But while in his business life no one would have described him as “soft;” Dad, even to his last hours, never lost his kindness and courtesy and love.

Two years ago I had the privilege of being able to have a last conversation with my father.  We were able to say we loved each other one last time.  While I was saddened to see him go, it was his time.  And they, Mom and Dad, aren’t really gone at all.  They live on in the memories and lessons and love they taught us all.

Babs and Don Dahlman – 2006

Not a Single Vote

I heard it again on TV this morning:  not a single vote was altered by the Russian attack on the US election in 2016, not a single outcome was changed.  While we were attacked, the attack was unsuccessful.

This is the current mantra of those who support the President.  After the terrifying and embarrassing episode in Helsinki last week, the “logic” goes:  well, even if the President is ignoring his intelligence agencies for the Russian President, and even if the Russians did attack us; it really doesn’t matter because it didn’t change anything.  So don’t sweat Helsinki.

While there are multiple problems with this logic, the base point, Russian failure to change the election, is untrue.

The Russians did impact the 2016 election.  They did it through a multi-pronged attack on the US electoral system.  It started with attacks through social media, using Facebook, Twitter and other opinion makers to drive pivotal electoral groups. Ardent Sanders supporters, African-Americans, white male blue-collar workers, and others were specifically targeted with messages aimed to change their vote to Trump, vote for a third party candidate, or keep them from going to the polls.  This targeting information may well have been provided by Cambridge-Analytica, a contractor for the Trump Campaign. Towards the conclusion of the campaign, voters were specifically targeted in key electoral districts in pivotal states.

The Russians stole the Democratic plan, the DNC analytics providing a map to the Democratic strategy.  Either by themselves, or with direction (conspiracy) from some other source, this further tuned their social media strategy to have maximum impact on voting behavior.

Concurrently, the Russians released a series of targeted stolen emails to discredit first the Democratic Party leadership, and then specifically the leadership of the Hillary Clinton campaign.  Using Wikileaks as their “unbiased source,” those releases were timed to forward the Trump campaign agenda.  The release of DNC Chairman Wasserman-Schultz email’s immediately before the Democratic Convention is one example.  Even more pointed was the use of those emails to counter the Trump disaster of the Access Hollywood tapes.  We know it worked; they were able to “change the subject” almost immediately with the leaked emails from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta.

Many of my more conservative friends argue that the emails were true, therefore their source doesn’t matter.  If the New York Times would have found and released these same emails, the “liberals” wouldn’t have complained.  They have a valid point; the Democratic leaders were callous, careless, and dimwitted both in putting their thoughts in a “digital record” (that’s why there are phones) and for thinking that way in the first place.  But if the Russians hadn’t hacked the DNC (and there is now evidence that they hacked the RNC as well) and orchestrated the release, it would certainly have changed the course of the campaign.  To say it didn’t have an impact on the outcome is simply ignorant.

And finally, and perhaps more insidiously, is the Russian attack on the actual voting process.  We slowly are hearing evidence that Russians attacked multiple, at least twenty-one, state electoral processes.  We only now are hearing that they stole hundreds of thousands of voter registration data, the data that identifies a voter in the voting process allowing them to actually cast a ballot.

The US voting system is incredibly fragmented.   Each state has it’s own system, and within many states, each county may have it’s own system as well.  It has been argued that our greatest defense against massive election fraud is the diversity of our process.  However, that same diversity makes it very difficult to determine when fraud has occurred. There have been statistical analyses that seem to show selective voting fraud, but counties and states are unwilling to follow that evidence to any conclusion.  Many jurisdictions simply refused to recount the votes:  in Michigan, one of Mr. Trump’s key electoral victories, hundred of Detroit precincts were NOT recounted due to a legal technicality.

For those who want to immerse themselves in the data:  http://www.unhackthevote.com.   There is a simple future “fix,” paper ballot backups that can be recounted in case of controversy.  Many jurisdictions have this backup, but still more do not.

In March of 2017 I wrote an essay about this same subject:  77744.  Now more than a year later, we are still arguing about the Russian impact.  And it’s not just questioning the legitimacy of the Trump Presidency, though frankly, once the conclusion is reached that the Russians were successful, whether Trump should be President is the next logical question.

We have an election in November.  We have done little to change the “battlefield.”  There is little reason to believe that Russia, or China, or some other actor won’t “put their thumb on the scale” of American decision making once again.  It’s not just about the past, it’s about the future.

Advice

Dan Coats, seventy-five, has been in public service his entire adult life.  He served in the Army right out of college, followed by law school.  He went to work for Congressman Dan Quayle in 1976, and ran and won Quayle’s vacant seat in 1980.  A Congressman until 1989, he then ran for the Senate, and served twice, first until 1999, then a second term from 2011 to last year. In between he served as President Bush’s ambassador to Germany.

He now serves President Trump as the Cabinet level Director of National Intelligence.  The DNI is the chief of the United States intelligence gathering agencies and heads the sixteen-member US Intelligence Community. He, along with National Security Advisor John Bolton, is a key advisor to the President on intelligence matters, and responsible for the President’s daily intelligence brief.

Coats with his vast government experience is considered one of the “veterans” in the White House, along with Chief of Staff John Kelly and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.  I intend no disrespect by the term “veteran;” it’s simply that these Presidential advisors are among the most experienced in a White House where few, including the President, have government or political expertise.

The President of the United States is under no obligation to listen to his advisors.  They are not elected by the people:  only the President has placed his name on the national ballot.  They serve, “…at the pleasure of the President.”  There is a famous Abraham Lincoln story, where at a cabinet meeting discussing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln took a vote.  The “vote” was the entire cabinet against the Proclamation, “nay,” and Lincoln for it, “aye.”  The “aye’s” have it was Lincoln’s response.

But we would hope that any leader would try to get the best advice available before making a momentous decision.  Lincoln may have gone against his cabinet’s advice, but he asked their views. Particularly with the current President, who’s skill sets are in business and finance rather than the nuances of foreign policy, we hope he would turn to the “old hands” he has chosen.

Donald Trump had a very difficult week as President.  His meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday followed a rough NATO meeting. As tough as Mr. Trump was on the NATO leaders, our allies, he appeared weak and vacillating in front of the Russian leader.  He agreed that Putin was right and the US Intelligence agencies were wrong about Russian involvement in the 2016 election, and he seriously considered turning former US diplomats over to Russia for questioning.  It is unknown what informal agreements he made during his two-hour private discussion with Putin.  When he returned to the US, he spent the next few days trying to put out the fires he started.

After this fiasco, it would be reasonable for the President to regroup, get advice from his counselors, and prepare a new strategy.  He obviously did not.

Over the past few years, it has become tradition for the US leaders of national security  to meet with reporters, industry, and others at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado.  This serves as a way to informally communicate US intelligence goals, and as a think-tank for future choices.   US intelligence leaders often go, both to get their ideas out, and also to make informal contacts with industry and the media.  And, Aspen is nice this time of year.

Former leaders this year include Michael Chertoff (Homeland Security), Tony Blinken and Wendy Sherman (State Department), and John McLaughlin (CIA).  Current serving leaders include Vincent Brooks (US Forces Commander, Korea), Mark Esper (Army Secretary), and Adam Schiff (US Congress). The “headliners” from the Trump Administration were:  Director Coats, FBI Director Chris Wray, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

Dan Coats was on the hot seat.  He had made it clear that the US Intelligence Agencies stood by their conclusion that Russia had attacked the US electoral system in 2016, despite the President’s denial in Helsinki.  As Mr. Trump tried to walk back his statement on Tuesday and Wednesday, he and Coats supposedly communicated about the conflicting views.  Trump tried to agree with the Intelligence conclusion, though he was unable to make that firm commitment in public.

On Thursday, in a public interview with veteran NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Coats made it clear that his current job “wasn’t fun.”  It was a huge challenge, one that he gave him great satisfaction, he said. The DNI allowed him to serve his country,  and try to accomplish the daily mission of keeping us safe.

It was with utter surprise then that the DNI was informed by Mitchell of the Trump Administration  invitation to Vladimir Putin to meet in Washington in the fall.  His reaction was clear:  he was completely in the dark about the plan.

President Trump doesn’t have to take anyone’s advice.  He has made a reputation of leading with “his gut,” and it told him to get the Putin invitation out in the middle of the Coats’ interview.  But would it be too much for him to at least get the opinions of the leaders he chose for their wisdom?  In the highest stakes game of international relations, there is nothing as dangerous as an “all-knowing rookie,” especially one who refuses to even ask.

It made for another bad day for the President.

 

 

Building Bridges

Last night I went to a candle light vigil “against corruption” in the Trump Administration. It was a small affair in Columbus, Ohio; less than one hundred, holding candles, listening to speeches, chanting and singing songs in the plaza outside the Republican Senator’s offices.  I posted pictures on social media, and they ignited the usual back and forth among my “Radical Leftist” (though not really very radical) and my more “Trumpian” friends.

Some of the comments were predictable.  The conversation trended down to the most polarized, bringing up all of the old complaints and stories.  They come from both sides, but the real problem is that there is no agreement on “the facts.”  What is a factual statement by one side is regarded as a complete lie on the other. It goes both ways.

This national crisis is going to get worse before it gets better.  Inevitably there will be a segment of our political population who feel they have been betrayed by the rest of the country.  That segment (whichever side) will burn with animosity, reminiscent of the “lost cause” Confederates of the Civil War.  It has taken more than one hundred and fifty years to begin to get over that, though the battles over the “flag” still go on.

So while we will still “burn bridges” to reach a conclusion to our current catastrophe, perhaps we can lay the foundations for some new ones as we do.  That will depend on developing a common truth based in real facts. So here are some of them.

Collusion is not a crime, but conspiracy is.  The Mueller investigation has charged some with “Conspiracy Against the United States (18 USC § 371).”  This is committed “…when two or more people work to either defraud the government…or to interfere or obstruct with a lawful government function.”  Interfering with elections, using foreign money or foreign aid illegally in a federal election, or hacking into the election process all are under this provision of law.  When President Trump says there’s been “no collusion” it really doesn’t mean much.

By the way, in the recent indictment of twelve Russians for interference in the US elections, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein made it clear that no US citizens were included.  What was left out was the word “yet.”  More indictments are expected.   Rosenstein also emphasized that in the indictments the stated goal of Russia was to confuse and divide the American public.  He did not mention, but the indictment states in several places, that the Russian’s were also acting in support of the Trump candidacy.

President Obama was NOT perfect.  While many of us supported and worked for him, we recognize that we were not all in agreement with everything he did.  His actions at the Southern border, while in no way as inhumane as our current policy, did little to resolve the migration crisis. His failure to enforce the “red line” in Syria showed weakness.  But, he did do his best to make the world safer, with one of his most controversial actions the Iran Nuclear Deal.

The Iran deal did nothing to reduce Iran’s support of terrorism.  And it DID transfer cash from the US to Iran.  That cash was NOT a payment from the US government, it was Iranian cash seized when the Iranian revolution took place in 1979.  It was, essentially, Iranian money being returned to them.  It had to be a cash transfer, because US sanctions kept Iran from using the world banking system.  What the deal did do was to stop Iran’s nuclear program for a number of years.  It was a starting point, buying time, not a final solution to Iran’s behavior in the world.

The Obama administration, including Hillary Clinton, did NOT hand over 20% of our uranium to Russia.  They did allow a sale to go through, where a Canadian company, Uranium One, owned by a Russian company, Rosatom; gained ownership in 20% of US uranium mines.  This deal went through a rigorous screening process, in which then Secretary of State Clinton had one vote out of many.  In the end, it was allowed, with the provision that NO uranium was to leave the US or Canada without permission of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The Clinton Foundation donations during that time look shaky as Hell.  In the midst of the mine purchase by Uranium One, a total of $2.35 million was donated of Rosatom, the Russian owners, to the Foundation.  While there has been no direct connection made between the purchase and Hillary Clinton, who played a small role in US actions, it still looks terrible.  And while the Foundation has done amazing work throughout the world, there was an ongoing ethical question of the husband of the Secretary of State running a foundation worth $250 million based on domestic and foreign donations.

There is an amazing amount of Russian money floating around the US.  The NRA got some, the GOP got some, and the Trump Organization may well be financed by some (Russians certainly have bought a great deal of Trump properties.)  But when Vladimir Putin claimed that Bill Browder gave $400 million to Hillary Clinton, later reduced to $400000, it was “fake news.” Browder actually donated $17,700 to Clinton, and his associates donated $297000 to the Democratic National Committee.

But with the Supreme Court opinion in Citizen’s United, there is very little control and limitation on the donation of money to political committees.  The Court decided that money is equal to speech, and the voices of most Americans are drowned out in a tide of cash, American and foreign.  It makes the appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice even more important.

These are the facts.  While the far-right will dispute some, and while the left doesn’t want to hear others, it’s the truth.  And maybe, maybe, if we could just agree on some of them, we could begin to rebuild.

Imaginary Friends

When I was a small child I had an imaginary friend.  We talked a lot, we played together, we had fun.  I had real friends too, but early on, my imaginary friend was my best.  I don’t remember his name, and I don’t remember when my imaginary friend left me.  I just know that somewhere before I went to school, I left my imaginary friend behind.

It was with some concern then, that I discovered President Trump seems to have “imaginary friends.” I discovered it yesterday, when I listened to him at the White House, trying to roll back his faux-pas at the Helsinki press conference. Vladimir Putin said that the Russians hadn’t hacked into American politics, the US intelligence agencies said he did.  Trump said;  …”I didn’t see any reason why it “would” be Russia…” Clearly his staff had written a statement for him to read at the White House, stating that he mistakenly said “…’would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’”

The White House statement was meant to chill the crisis of confidence even Republicans were having after US agencies were tossed under the bus.  But then the President ad-libbed an addition, saying the Russians did it – “or other people.”

“Or other people:” maybe the four hundred pound guy in the basement that Trump mentioned in a debate with Hillary Clinton.  Maybe the Chinese, or the North Koreans, or the “rogue” Russians that Putin first mentioned. Those three words “took back the take back” of his statement.  And today he went on a Twitter storm defending his performance in Helsinki.

Maybe those “other people” are some of the very nice racists who marched in Charlottesville.  Maybe “other people” are related to the “many people” who agree with the President on issues like no global warming or MS-13 swarming the nation.  They must be the “many people of higher intelligence” he claims think he did a great job in Helsinki.

In normal American politics, leaders find groups that agree with their policies, then use those groups for support.  President Trump does this as well, with the Congressional Freedom Caucus fighting for him against the Mueller investigation, and political luminaries like Newt Gingrich standing for many of his plans.  But when the President gets far out on a limb, he looks to his “imaginary friends” for backing.

Ultimately, the President’s “imaginary friends” must be those who believe he can do no wrong, his loyal followers:  the “Trumpers.”   Mr. Trump believes that they are highly underrated.  This is based on the election of 2016, when early polling showed that Mrs. Clinton should win easily.  Basically, the Trump theory is that many of his supporters wouldn’t publicly admit to their support, but became “Trumpers” in the voting booth.  No MAGA hats, on Trump signs or banners, no Facebook posts: they quietly support his views without fanfare.

Much like the Nixon “silent majority” of the 1960’s, there is some truth to Trump “imaginary friends.” Nixon tapped into a cultural backlash against the upheaval of the civil rights and anti-war movements that represented major change. He was able to eek out an election victory, winning by less than a million votes over Democrat Hubert Humphrey (seventy one million votes were cast.)

President Trump tapped into a similar backlash in 2016, in an America that elected our first African-American President, was trying to provide healthcare to everyone, and looked forward to a nation where white people are no longer the majority.   While the Trump’s election margin was not the majority, the strategic breakdown by state won him the Electoral College and the Presidency.

The Democratic party of 1968 was fractured, with the liberal Hubert Humphrey facing a party where many felt he was not liberal enough. The Democratic party of 2016 was faced with a similar crisis, with the Sanders-wing not finding Hillary Clinton’s views to their liking. The hacked emails showing the National Committee support for Clinton over Sanders didn’t help either.

While President Trump’s “imaginary friends” are definitely out there, it will be interesting to see if they are willing to accept an economy where the income divide is increasing, a US policy supporting Russia against the European Union, and children torn from their parents.  And will Democrats continue their self-destructive division over the details of a Progressive agenda, instead of agreeing to disagree and working together.

Those factors will determine whether Mr. Trump’s “imaginary friends” are as powerful as he thinks.

 

 

 

 

Pre-cooked Deliverables

In the past, when the President of the United States met in a “summit” with another world leader, teams from the two nations would negotiate for months before the meeting.  Their goal was to reach a few agreements that the two national leaders would claim as a result of the successful summit. Those agreements were called “pre-cooked deliverables.”

 

 On the official American side, there was no agenda.  There were no “pre-cooked deliverables” agreed upon in advance, there were no concessions made before the meeting began.  Yesterday in Helsinki, President Trump met with Vladimir Putin without a topic beyond the “relationship” between the US and Russia.  This left the field open to the Russians, who were able to manipulate the outcome to achieve many of their clear purposes.

The Russians didn’t get sanctions lifted (though Putin did offer up a “trade” of sorts, election hackers for Bill Browder and lifting of the Magnitsky Act.)  They didn’t get US recognition of the takeover of Crimea from Ukraine.  Other than those, the Russians achieved what had to be a long laundry lists of items. President Trump dumped his own intelligence agencies in favor of the Russian leader, he took the Russian side of disputes with the European Union, he spent a large portion of the press conference attacking the American media, and Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party. After the “summit” Russian officials called the outcomes  “fabulous…better than super.”

And the United States really gained nothing but embarrassment.  Putin was able to once again deny the Russian involvement in the 2016 American elections, denied the poisonings in the United Kingdom, and received what sounded like major concessions in the Middle East.

Almost unanimously (with the notable exception of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the lead story on Fox News) American officials outside the Administration were shocked and dismayed at the President’s actions.  Republican Senators McCain, Flake, Corker, Graham and Speaker Ryan, all spoke out against the statements made by the President, as well as the full lineup of Democratic leaders.

Commentators looked back at the great “summit failures” of the past:  Kennedy’s ill-fated meeting with Khrushchev in 1961 (leading to the Soviets putting nuclear weapons in Cuba) or Obama’s 2013 G-20 stare down with Putin (ending the “reset” with Russia.)  But Trump’s performance yesterday brought back the specter of the greatest of all summit failures:  Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich meeting with Hitler in 1938.

Hitler demanded that Chamberlain allow Germany to take over Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain bought time for Great Britain to prepare for war by giving in to him.  Chamberlain returned to Britain holding the agreement and touting “peace in our time.” World War II started a year later.

President Trump’s performance is not the beginning of World War III.  But it, along with the President’s actions at the NATO meetings and in the United Kingdom before the summit, have led our real allies to question our commitment.  Germany today begins to evaluate whether the United States is an ally or adversary; the Eastern European nations formerly part of the Soviet Union are re-evaluating US defense promises.  But the greatest shock was the President NOT defending his own government in an international forum.

There are three possibilities for the President’s actions.  The first:  he was not prepared.  There was no preparation for the meeting, there were no “pre-cooked deliverables” or scripted agendas.  President Trump walked into a meeting with Vladimir Putin “cold,” and got taken. Trump was maneuvered into defending himself instead of pressuring Russia, and Putin got to look “Presidential” and equal.

The second:  the President can’t get beyond himself.  Mr. Trump fed his base with the same lines as his rallies; from investigating Hillary Clinton to Fake News to “no collusion.” And perhaps, there is that deal for “Trump Tower – Moscow” still in the works, the one the President denied throughout his campaign.

The third, and most ominous, is that Putin really does have “the goods” on Trump.  Whether it’s unsavory video tapes, the Trump Organization’s dependence on Russian financing to stay in business, or the proof of the Trump campaign’s conspiring with Russian Intelligence; it would place our President in the role of an “agent” of Russia.

Whichever the case, the actions of President Trump should be questioned by every American.  We expect our President to stand up for American institutions, we expect him to stand up for our traditional alliances, we expect him to be a strong leader.  What happened yesterday brings all of that into question.

Perhaps these are the “pre-cooked deliverables” the Russians prepared.

 

 

 

I See Brown People

In 1999 M. Night Shamalyan directed his breakthrough classic, the Sixth Sense.  The story was of a young man who could see “dead people” and the psychologist who tried to help him, played by Bruce Willis.   From the movie came an iconic line, in a high child’s voice:  “… I see dead people.”

Listening to President Trump’s press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May this weekend, I reached a realization.  With almost every action, it seems clear that President Trump “sees brown people.”  In the press conference, Mr. Trump praised the United Kingdom exit from the European Union, stressing that they would regain “cultural control” (sounding perilously close to ethnic purity) by ending the EU immigration policies.  Those policies allow an immigrant admitted to one EU nation to move to another.  The President spoke of Brexit, the UK’s plan to leave the EU, as Britain regaining independence.

This plays to some in Britain who claim that the immigration policies have made Britain “browner” mixing and  damaging their culture.  This is not very different from the President’s own base here in the United States; who believe that US immigration policy is making it the same. From the “Mexican Rapist” line of Mr. Trump’s candidacy announcement, to the current government legal argument that they cannot return some of the children they have in custody because their parents’ may not “…be fit;” all demonstrates a view of “brown people” as being different.

President Trump is presenting a remarkable world-view, one that sees the existential threat of a “north-south” world conflict.  The North is the ( (white) European and North American nations, including Russia.  The South is the overwhelming (brown) Muslim, Hindu, and Oriental world, growing in population, and migrating to provide labor to the north. The view sees this migration, particularly of Islam, as a direct challenge to “Western” culture and power.

In the US this view has also turned against immigration from Central and South America, for many of the same reasons.  It has resonated among some Americans; uncomfortable with a land where Spanish is the native language for some, and with the increasingly different appearances and cultures.

And, of course, many are being told that the Hispanic immigrants, legal or not, are criminals, or freeloaders, or here to take jobs.  This somewhat contradictory message is complicated even more by an exceptionally low unemployment rate, combined with an exceptionally high divide between the wealthy and the poor.  People have jobs but still feel “poor,” and a racial/cultural reason may be easier to understand than the economics of a society that has shown little real income growth for the many, while the few grow richer.

President Trump is not exporting this message; he’s simply tapping into an existing pattern.  What he is doing is normalizing a view that has always been seen as racist or extremist.  And he’s gotten help from the Russian government, who for their own reasons intervened in the US, Brexit and other European elections on the side of this extremism. They were not always successful, but they did end up on the winning side of many of these contests.

All of this is happening at the same time that those same Russian actions are being brought to the fore in American courts.  The Mueller investigation indicted twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking into political party emails and state election systems on Friday.  The impact of the email hacks were clearly to divide the Democratic Party, to the advantage of the Republican candidate, Mr. Trump.  What happened in the state election systems hacks is still unclear, and while no one is stating that actual voting was effected or changed, it would seem a realistic goal for Russian Intelligence.  Why hack in if not to do something?

So President Trump goes to see Mr. Putin tomorrow, for a one-on-one meeting in Helsinki.  And while we should worry about our next elections, the Western Alliance, Russian imperialism and autocracy, and other issues:  Trump and Putin do have one thing in common, one thing we know for sure.  They see brown people, and they don’t like it.

I am writing this from a friend’s home alongside the Muskingum River.  There are several folks here, and while we all assuredly don’t agree on politics, we can still be friends and enjoy each other’s company.  Hopefully it’s an attitude we can return to  in America, as we struggle with the politics of division today.

Traitor or Hero

I spent yesterday with Peter Strzok and Members of Congress.  Yes, I did clean the awning on the camper, buy parts for my Jeep, and run some errands; but I watched or listened to Strzok’s questioning through most of ten hours.  The neighborhood got to listen too.

What was the result of all of the questioning, showboating, insults, and posturing?  Either Strzok is a traitor, attempting to stage a coup to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President, or Strzok is a flawed hero, fighting to prevent Russian influence in our elections.  There isn’t really any middle ground.

Peter Strzok was FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counter-Intelligence.  To use intelligence specialist Malcolm Nance’s description:  “Strzok was our foremost spy-catcher.”  For those who watched the series “The Americans,” Strzok led the FBI investigation that broke that Russian spy ring.  He was the front line leader of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, and, when information was found showing Russian intervention in the 2016 Presidential election, he led that as well.

It might seem like a lot of responsibility for one man, but as Strzok said yesterday, he had hundreds of counter-intelligence cases on his desk, and he was managing multiple levels of the agency in dealing with them.  He was one of our best.

And clearly, Strzok was a man of strong political views.  We know that because he was having an affair with Lisa Page, a Department of Justice attorney working on some of the same cases.  Since they were both married to others, they kept their communication secret by using their DOJ phones to talk.  Oh, and they sent texts, thousands and thousands of texts.

In those texts were insults towards Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, but the worst were directed toward Donald Trump.  And some of those texts made it sound like Strzok could actually do something to alter the election results.

In looking back at my texts the months before the election, it is very possible that I would have sent a text that said:  “we can stop Trump,” or “what are you doing to stop Trump.” In context it would be about going door to door for Clinton, but out of context, what could it sound like?

Strzok took the “traitor” scenario apart with a simple fact:  if he wanted to stop the Trump candidacy, he could have leaked the fact of the investigation to the media before the election.  What happened to Clinton, with the final Comey letter killing the momentum of her campaign in the last ten days, could have happened to Trump.  Strzok didn’t do that, he said it never crossed his mind.

Strzok and Page not only cheated on their spouses, but they left a record that became public.  It was a stupid mistake by smart people.  It has opened the door for the Republican House Members to make Strzok the bête noire who started the Russia investigation out of his animus for Trump.  Their argument returns to the “fruit of the poisonous tree” defense:  that since Strzok started the investigation out of “bias,” then the entire effort is illegitimate.

Strzok responded by admitting the obvious:  he didn’t want Donald Trump to become President.  He then stated, that he did what we hope every FBI Agent can do, leave their personal bias at the door, and go into the office and do their job without fear or favor.  After ten hours of testimony, most Republicans didn’t believe him, and most Democrats did.

IF, for a moment, we can take Strzok at his word, then what would this investigation look like?  FBI and DOJ procedures call for investigations to be secret until final.  This way the prosecutors can get evidence without “tainting” it with media attention, and the innocent don’t get their reputations smeared.  When the prosecutors bring their case, they do it in the court, not in the media.  That’s not what happened with the Clinton email server investigation.  As one Democratic Congresswoman said, the FBI didn’t leak the Trump investigation, but they were so afraid of leaks that they cost Hillary the election.

But so far the Mueller investigation is doing exactly that.  There hasn’t been a leak; the only information from Mueller has been in Court documents.  Leaks and rumors about what Mueller is doing comes mostly from defense attorneys, or speculation in the media.  The Republican claim that there “…is no evidence…” is mostly true – Mueller is holding the evidence until he is ready to go to Court.  Just like we should expect him to do.

So what about Peter Strzok? He made a huge mistake.  But he came across as a dedicated agent, who stood between America and our enemies.  His mistake cost him his career, but the loss is both his and ours.

 

I watched advertising executive Donnie Deutsch this morning and he made a good point about today’s America.  He noted that those who support the Mueller investigation will think that Democrats “won” the hearings yesterday, and Trump supporters will think Republicans “won.”  Not many minds changed.  A sign of the times –

 

 

America First

President Trump has made “America First” a prime pass-phrase of his Administration.  The term has come to mean that America will do what benefits America, regardless of the history or the long-term consequences.  “America First,” in President Trump’s terms, means “every other country second.”  It means that the United States will take advantage of other nations to our benefit, even if it means to others’ detriment.

The US actions at this week’s NATO meetings are a prime example of “America First.”  The world is faced by a rising tide of racism and nationalism.  Italy, Germany, France, Turkey, the United States and the United Kingdom all have growing political movements that echo the nationalist/fascist movements of the 1920’s and 30’s.  NATO has been the counter-balance to this kind of nationalism for the past seventy years.

Fascism and nationalism led the world to both world wars.  Before both of those, the United States took a similar position to President Trump’s: the view that America was being taken advantage of by “foreigners;” and that the US can do better one-on-one with the world rather than through multi-national organizations.  After World War I, the US walked away from the League of Nations (proposed by Woodrow Wilson, the US President) and tried to hide behind the oceans in “Fortress America.”

Just prior to the US involvement in World War II, the “America First Committee” played a prominent role in politics.  Well known figures such as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford called for America to stay out of the war in Europe (started by Hitler in 1939.)  And, like today, the America First Committee had vague undertones of racism and anti-immigration, particularly Jewish immigrants trying to escape the Holocaust.

The America First Committee disbanded on December 10^th, 1941, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

It was the alliance of nations, led by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, that led the world to victory over German Nazism and Japanese Imperialism. And when the Soviet Union became the next threat to world stability, the United States organized NATO to counter-balance the Soviet bloc.  For seventy years the NATO allies have cooperated and shared; preventing Soviet aggression and nuclear conflagration.

We now have a new “America First” movement.  Like the old, it sees the US as being more powerful by itself, unrestricted by the “encumbrance” of alliance.  This Steve Bannon produced philosophy sees America as the ultimate “bully,” able to use its strength to demand what it wants from other nations without need of cooperation. It is now national policy. We see it in the trade wars the US has started, we see it in US strong-arming at the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the G-7, and we see it in the personally insulting treatment President Trump has for our allies at this week’s NATO summit.

And what of the concern that NATO is being “…carried on the backs of US taxpayers (Senator John Kennedy, Rep- LA)?”  NATO has always been an extension of US foreign policy.  There is no “NATO ARMY,” there is cooperation among the various armed forces of NATO members.  The US has by far the largest military in the organization.  Member nations have agreed to support THEIR OWN FORCES with 2% of their gross domestic product.  This is not money owed, it is money to be spent.

And if there wasn’t NATO, then the United States would still have to execute its foreign policy without that assistance.  For example, the United States invaded Afghanistan after the 9-11 attack.  The NATO allies not only supported the US invasion, but over twenty-seven nations fought alongside US forces there. Could the US have done it alone?  The answer is yes, but at an even higher cost in lives as well as money.

President Trump sees the United States as a “world leader.”  He clearly sees Vladimir Putin as an “equal” world leader, and in Mr. Trump’s bilateral view someone worthy of praise.  He clearly sees the NATO alliance leaders at somehow inferior, eligible for criticism and disdain.  This is his personal style of leadership:  if you work for him you are liable for attack and insult.  He clearly sees the Chancellor of Germany, and the Prime Ministers of Canada and the United Kingdom, as “employees” rather than equals.

But when Putin’s Russia begins to attack the national sovereignty of the Eastern European nations, as they already have in Ukraine, will the US stand by its policy of defending NATO members, or will we step back and say it’s not our concern?  Will “America First” once again lead us to world conflict?

In World War II, we waited for a direct attack on our nation to respond.  It was only with tremendous effort and sacrifice that we defeated aggression.  With this new version of America First, are we doomed to repeat history?

The US is Against Breast Feeding

The nations of the world gathered together in Geneva for the World Health Assembly this spring.  The Assembly is the driving force behind the United Nation’s World Health Organization, the leading agency involving in improving life expectancy and battling disease, particularly in the under-developed nations.

The Assembly was preparing to pass a resolution endorsing mothers breast feeding their babies.  The resolution didn’t say that mothers shouldn’t use formula, it simply said that all of the scientific evidence showed that breast feeding was the best, if possible.  It was a “no brainer” to pass, and Ecuador sponsored the resolution.

The United States opposed it.  The US delegation tried to water down the language, ignoring the science.  And when they couldn’t get that done, the US threatened Ecuador with removing military aid and adding punishing trade measures. Ecuador, of course, backed down.

There is a lot of concern that the current President is “ignorant” of science; willing to discount scientific facts.  To many of its opponents, the Trump Administration flies in the face of common sense when it comes to issues like climate change, pollution, and now, breast feeding.  But the Administration isn’t working from ignorance.

It’s about money.

It’s about Nestle (that’s Gerber) and Abbott Labs and Bristol-Myers Squibb.   These are the formula manufacturers who saw the World Health Assembly resolution as a threat to their world markets.  Regardless of the science, the US delegation to the Assembly was more interested in sales, then in the health of the world.  And it wasn’t just a “good fight” effort, the US threatened and bullied Ecuador into dropping the resolution (ironically, picked up and pushed through by Russia – they didn’t like to see little countries bullied. The US didn’t threaten them.)

The same can be said for many of the changes the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to make to pollution regulations.  From allowing greater emissions from chemical plants to automobiles; the Trump Administration is making sure oil, chemical and car companies can maximize profits. The theory:  if business is doing well, the economy will do well.  It worked in the 1950’s.

In the 1950’s the US expanded manufacturing at the expense of the environment.  While the 1950’s are now looked back (by some) with nostalgia; forgotten are the smog alerts, the burning rivers, the dying lake and streams and the abandoned towns.  We traded those things for a “better economy,” and paid the price with two generations of cleanup.  That work still is not complete.

We are well on the way to creating that environmental damage again.  The Trump Administration is taking the short-term profits against the long-term damage.  But it’s not out of ignorance.  It’s the groups like the Koch Brothers, millions of dollars in political support, that has bought this policy.  Koch Industries, a major petro-chemical company, gets what it wants by buying politicians.  They aren’t the only one, the car industry, the chemical industry, the petroleum industry and the baby formula industry are all putting their money on the line.

There’s not a lot of political money coming from the “environmental” side of the equation. There’s not a lot of support to be had  from the “breast feeding lobby.”  So the current Administration has no problem aggressively trading the future for the present.  Ask Ecuador.

What are the long-term consequences?  The United States is now ignoring global warming, having scrubbed the term from many government websites.  There is no scientific argument:  human pollution is a direct contributor to warming.  Warming is changing our environment, from more powerful storms and droughts, to rising ocean levels that threaten our coasts.  We are losing the opportunity to deflect even greater changes by allowing greater pollution.  But that doesn’t matter.

And it doesn’t matter that third-world nations won’t receive support to encourage women to breast feed their children, even if it will make those children healthier.  The Trump Administration has made it clear – short-term profit is much more important.

 

Small Town  – America

Pataskala Town Hall

My wife hated to go to Kroger’s (our local supermarket) with me.  I was a school teacher, coach, and administrator in the local high school for forty years.  When I first began, I made a choice to live where I taught.  It was a conscious decision:  to be a part of the community more than just the 7:00 am to 3:00 pm “teaching shift.”

So trips to Kroger’s were often more than picking up bread and coffee beans.  Somewhere in the store, there always lurked a parent, or an old student, or a fellow teacher.  The five-minute “grab the eggs and get home” would become a forty-five minute parent conference; from how “my kid’s” grades were to why he got suspended. I considered it part of the job, and the fact that I hadn’t had enough coffee to think, or had just got off the mower, really didn’t matter.

It happened at Kroger’s, at the local restaurants, even in the restroom at the local bar.  I was a teacher in a small town, and I expected that I was “on duty” whenever necessary.  It wasn’t always positive, parents who were angry at school were still angry in the bread aisle.  But it was part of the job, and a choice I made.

So I guess I don’t feel too bad that Stephen Miller got yelled at by the bartender at the Sushi place, or Scott Pruitt was lectured by a Mom at a restaurant, or Sarah Sanders was refused service at the Red Hen.  They have chosen a public life, they make their living “at the public trough;” and they have acted in a manner that raises public ire.  There is no way to openly discuss their actions with them, no “parent-teacher conference.”  They are public employees who are seemingly without restriction in their thoughts and actions.  It’s no wonder that “the public” feels it’s acceptable to approach them and speak their minds.

Many feel that they have gone beyond the bounds of decency. Perhaps they are even trying to provoke public reaction. When Homeland Security Secretary Neilsen and Stephen Miller chose Mexican restaurants in the middle of the “child separation” crisis: they were either being provocative or oblivious.

It is the new nature of our current political divide.  While in the past there was always a common standard of  behavior (and a common set of facts) today we are divided beyond the “old rules.”  We see “the other side” as not just wrong, but inhumane and uncaring.  And it’s not just the border crisis; from the President’s new selection to the Supreme Court, to the EPA’s withdrawal of regulations protecting the environment, to the Consumer Protection Bureau moving to protect banks, our nation seems like  Orwell’s 1984, with the Ministry of Peace waging war and the Ministry of Truth telling lies.

We are a nation founded on the First Amendment.  We, the public, have the right to speak our minds, particularly when it comes to political views.  There are many who feel that some in our government have stepped beyond the norms and mores that have governed our collective actions:  they seem unreachable and uncaring.  So the public is approaching those leaders whenever it’s possible.  If that’s in a restaurant or outside of a public hall, then welcome to our small town: America.

 

In better news – here is another proof of what people can do when they have a common goal and a powerful motivation.  Twelve kids and a coach, trapped two miles in a cave, surrounded by water, left for seventeen days; were safely rescued today.  It was said you couldn’t save kids that couldn’t swim by diving them out of the flood, and that they were too weak, or would panic and die. They didn’t, they are safe and in a hospital.  And the hundreds of folks who risked their lives to achieve this miracle rescue did it without hesitation.  One retired Thai “Navy Seal” came back to add his expertise, and gave his life that the thirteen might live.  It was a powerful sacrifice.    Hoo-rah!!!

 

 

 

A Duty of Care

I was a high school coach for forty years, thirty-six of those as a head boys track coach.  My duties ranged from technical coaching to managing meets to painting lines on tracks to helping kids through the trials of life.  But one thing I knew for sure:  beyond how fast I could make kids run, or how high I could make them jump; my primary obligation was to protect them and act in their best interest. Their parents placed them in my care, whether we were practicing at home or travelling across the country for national competition.  I had a duty to protect them:  a duty of care.

Caring for athletes would include discipline as well as love.  It would include taking their side against other adults from time to time, even if it would be easier to step aside.  It was protecting them, but also demonstrating to them how to do what was right, even if it was hard.

Most of my athletes were minors, only a few eighteen or older, but it didn’t matter to their parents, the school, or to me.  They were in my care.  When many of them earned the opportunity to compete at the collegiate level, we recognized that they were now young adults of legal age.  But we still expected that their coaches, who would demand an enormous amount of time, dedication, and effort, would feel that same duty of care to protect them.

For several of those forty years, I coached wrestling as well.  It’s the hardest thing a kid can do in athletics, combining strength and stamina, putting it all in front of the world in one-on-one competition.  It demands intense dedication; a “take-home” sport of control at all times.  Wrestlers constantly focus on their body, from weighing in every day, to worrying about injuries and skin conditions.  They are also constantly “inspected” by coaches, officials and medical personnel, more than any other sport I know.

Whether it’s today, or in the 1980’s and 90’s, coaches in wrestling have a special “duty of care” to protect their athletes, who are more vulnerable to abuse than in other sports. This was just as true at the Division I collegiate level, where tremendously motivated and talented wrestlers are willing to do or endure almost anything to achieve their dreams.

You might well ask: why didn’t the gymnasts at Michigan State cry out against their abuse?  Why didn’t the Olympic swimmers tell their parents?  And why is it only now that the wrestlers from Ohio State are speaking out?

The answer is, they knew that to speak out was to risk their dreams.  They knew that to question the “powers” that were abusing them was to risk being sent away, ending their quest for achievement.  And while looking back it might not make much sense, to the young and dedicated athletes their abuse became part of the “price” to be paid.

It was up to the adults, the coaches in the case of Ohio State wrestling, to stand up for these athletes.  It is clear that everyone “knew” what the team doctor was doing; why didn’t the head coach Russ Hellickson, or his assistant, now Congressman, Jim Jordan, speak out.  The probable answer:  they didn’t feel empowered by the administration to take a stand, they would be risking their jobs.

That’s too bad.  It was their “duty of care” to speak out and protect their athletes.  It was a failure on their part.  And it is even more of a failure, now twenty-five years later, to not acknowledge that mistake.  Congressman Jordan has been “called out” by his wrestlers.  He might have said, “I was young, I made a mistake, I’m sorry.” He didn’t, he called them liars and the right wing media machine has gone to work to discredit them.  It is “ME TOO” again, this time, with forty-year old men.

Should Jordan’s actions disqualify him from his political office? He should have stood up for his athletes then, but he didn’t. He made a mistake twenty-five years ago.  That is forgivable.  What should disqualify him is his failure to acknowledge that mistake now, and his continuing failure to recognize that he stills owes those athletes, those kids of the 1990’s, a duty of care.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s About Elections

“The Caravan”

The White House has created a crisis in immigration.  It was foreseeable, preventable, and intentional.  It started with word that “caravans” were coming from Central America, large groups of immigrants trying to get themselves, and for many their children; away from the violence of the gangs of the cities of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.  While they crossed Mexico, the vast majority aren’t Mexicans.

This has happened before. The responses of previous Administrations was to increase the amount of judges and lawyers at the border crossing, in order to more efficiently judge the asylum claims of the border crossers. Legal crossers who passed the first, quick test determining the legitimacy of their claim, were placed out into the communities, often with ankle bands monitoring their location.  Illegal crossers claiming asylum were arrested, held for a short period of time, then bailed out as well, their misdemeanor illegal crossing offense punished by time served.  They were allowed to work, to try to support their families.  Surprisingly, almost all came back for the final adjudication hearing, even though for many it meant going back to their home country.

The Trump Administration determined not to do these things.  They did not send lawyers and judges to the border crossings.  They in fact, slowed legal crossings at the border, causing even greater pressure on immigrants, trapped in violent border towns, to come across illegally.  When most of those illegal crossers presented themselves to the border patrol, asking asylum, they were placed in custody.  Their children were taken from them.  The backlog of court appearances meant that the adults were held for extended periods of time.  Instead of being released into the community pending their asylum hearing, they were imprisoned, some shipped to Federal prisons throughout the country.  And those that were previously released, now are not allowed to legally work.

And, as we know, their children were imprisoned as well, all over the United States.  And a majority of the country asked the question: WHY? Why did “we” do this?

IT WAS ON PURPOSE.  The Trump Administration is convinced that being against immigrants is a winning political position.  They have good reason to think so.  When Donald Trump came down the “golden escalator” in Trump Tower and talked about Mexican rapists and criminals (and some good people) he tapped into a racist political energy that swept him into office.  But once he was elected President, it wasn’t enough to just rail against the Democrats for being soft on immigration. Mr. Trump was President of the United States; he had to show he was tough on immigration.  He had to create a “desperate situation” on the border to fan the flames of his base.  He engaged in “crisis creation.”

The moves at the border: no additional lawyers or judges, “zero tolerance” for misdemeanor illegal crossing, the separation of children and the incredibly incompetent (or intentionally) slow process of returning them; all were “crisis creation.”  From the millions of people who marched last Saturday to “return the children” to the “law and order” posts on Facebook (they broke the law they lose their kids); the President has our attention exactly where he wants it.

But there’s one more twist coming to this saga; another play for the Trump “team.”  The Trump Administration is well aware that the clock is running on the children.  A District Court in California has already set the deadline; the children must be released.  The Administration is doing very little to meet that deadline, and soon the Court will order an expedited process to get them back to their parents.

This will give the Trump camp another political bone to chew:  judges intervening and “making up” the law.  “President Trump will appoint judges who won’t do that,” they’ll say; “we started with Justice Gorsuch, and we will continue with ______” (fill in the blank on Monday at 9pm.)

The new Justice can now be debated on the grounds that energize Trump followers.  He can be portrayed as a Justice dedicated to judicial restraint, not prone to making laws like the “California judges” (the state that gave Hillary Clinton her majority in 2016) did in the case of the children, or the Muslim ban.  It reduces the impact of the new Justice’s views on abortion, or gay rights, or labor unions.  It is an attempt, and probably a successful one, to make the fall campaign about immigration; not the Mueller investigation, or the EPA Administrator (former), or the multiple other issues created by the President’s actions.

President Trump feels safe campaigning on immigration.  He has convinced a portion of America that MS-13 is streaming across the border; and that “Mexicans” threaten us all; neither of which is true.  It’s familiar ground for him.  It will be up to the Democrats to find ways to try to win this debate, but also to move the campaign to other topics.  After all, for both, it’s about elections – though it feels like the we’re deciding the fate of the free world.