Category: National

As a card-carrying (and even lanyard-encasing) member of the Fourth Estate, I take more than professional umbrage at being part of a presidential-scapegoat, target strategy. For being a de facto “fake news” foot soldier in some Oval Office “witch hunt.”

This is beyond partisan politics; beyond anti-elite populism; beyond “House of Cards” perfidy.

This is an outrageous, democratic dagger. Much more is at stake than just the hurt feelings of those who don’t like it when they themselves are in the rhetorical cross hairs.

Having a proven pathological liar who belongs in tabloids–not mainstream media–casting aspersions on those who hold him accountable is not business as usual in a media-intense democracy. This is not thin-skinned over-reaction from a vain press that criticizes and satirizes for a living.

What we are living through now is a right-wing, press-demonizing threat with precedents that are typically associated with authoritarians and dictators. The Reich Stuff should not be an American presidential theme.

And how ironic that in the midst of presidential prevarication, there comes an acknowledgement from Trump himself as to why he actually does what he does. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all,” he admitted. “So when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

Out of the mouths of knaves.

* Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un couldn’t be more different, with one exception–the impulsive one that worries the world.

* Apparently Vice President Mike Pence and his Libya reference played a major role in souring summit relations with North Korea. The “Libya model” doesn’t play well in Pyongyang; something about regime change and the bullet-riddled corpse of Muammar Gaddafi is off-putting to Kim Jong-un. We get that.

What we don’t get is Pence weighing in on a critical foreign policy decision. It’s well beyond his pay grade even in the chaotic Trump Administration. Pence needs to remember why he was put on the ticket in the first place: Because he looked–and acted–normal and played well in hypocritical evangelical circles. That’s it.

* Trump, as only he can, has stressed that he wants “transparency” on the Russian “witch-hunt” probe. But transparency, we have been reminded, isn’t remotely applicable when it comes to tax returns and this president’s potential conflict-of- interest scenarios.

The words “icon” and “legend” are routinely overused and undervalued these days. Especially when applied to pop culture which, by definition, doesn’t have to stand the test of time. Then there are those whose credentials predate yesterday and remain resonant. To wit: the late, alas, Tom Wolfe.

He had the right writer stuff. He chronicled this country as a newspaper reporter, as an essayist, as a magazine feature writer and as a novelist. He was a pop sociologist, a dapper, societal presence, a national treasure and an absolute American icon.

If you were a journalism student in the 1970s, he was in your instructor’s wheelhouse. And then in yours. Wolf introduced us to the concept of literary journalist. Where a reporter with an eye for absorbing detail, an ear for compelling dialogue and an ethic for background research could carve out a niche without feeling inferior to novelists. That niche was writing journalism that read like a novel. Tone and mood mattered.

Take that Norman Mailer. William Saroyan. John O’Hara. James Baldwin. No laurel resting allowed.

Back in the day I read “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” the tale of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters who only did road trips if they were tripping on hallucinogens. It was a fun read, even if it did constantly remind you that you were only wired on caffeine.

Then came “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers.” It was Wolfe at his insightful, inciting best. Where news–as in Leonard Bernstein’s high-society, New York fund-raiser for the Black Panthers and the practiced approach of San Francisco activists to intimidate government bureaucrats–met politics met best media forum for capturing the confrontations and their quirky characters.

When I read a recent news item about Publix contributions to Adam Putnam’s gubernatorial campaign and how it would equal the cost of 74,527 chicken tender subs, I thought of Wolfe. These kind of over-the-top equivalences are common today. They weren’t when Wolfe was doing his often hilarious pioneering analogies.

On the occasion of Wolfe’s passing, I re-read “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.” It still holds up, even in paperback. The former is devastatingly funny. The latter, a probing exercise in orchestrated militant theatrics. Reliving the experience was like re-watching “The Graduate.” It still transcends generations as it trenchantly dissects societal subcultures.

You don’t just read Wolfe. You re-read passages, marvel at lengthy quotes chronicled without a tape recorder, savor it all and read parts out loud to your wife.

After “The Right Stuff,” Wolfe became renowned for “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full,” most notably the former. It was fitting, final-chapter testimony to his outrageous versatility as he morphed from culture-capturing, hybrid journalist to one of his generation’s finest novelists.

But nothing beats “New Journalism”: Wolfe’s uncanny eye for lifestyles, his biting social commentary, his mimicry of speech patterns. Also his sense of what was happening in–and to–America was profound. He was an iconic game changer.

If nothing significant results from the tragic mass shooting in Sante Fe, Texas, we will have doubled down on tragedy. This is what we have become.

Santa Fe was the fourth deadliest mass shooting at a U.S. public school in history. Ten innocent people, on campus to teach and learn, were instead singled out and gunned down. A few months ago it was 17 murdered in Parkland, Fla.

It’s been nearly 20 years since the shockingly heinous prototype. That’s when 13 were shot and killed at Columbine High in Colorado. Two trench-coated students with hidden weapons opened up. Sante Fe eerily mirrored Columbine.

We have, in effect, learned nothing other than more familiarity with “thoughts-and-prayers” clichés, mourning optics and official pledges to make schools safer while still venerating the usual suspects’ 21st century take on what Second Amendment militia context means. Articulate Parkland students can only do so much.

What’s particularly disheartening and disillusioning is that Santa Fe’s school district had an “active shooter” plan that included two armed officers on duty at the school. Santa Fe High was considered a “hardened target”–with more hardening on the way when it would ultimately arm teachers and staff under Texas’ school marshal program. They were doing everything they could.

But they were not doing everything that should be done. Sante Fe, nearly two decades removed from Columbine and three months after Parkland, is merely a murderous microcosm of where we still are. Today’s Exhibit A-wful. It’s a product of these politically dysfunctional, NRA-fealty times.

This country has to get away from the zero-sum approach to serious problems such as gun rights and wrongs and the bumper-sticker memes that pass for debate arguments. As in: “Yeah, raising the legal age to buy a gun is really going to prevent mass shootings. Yeah, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines will totally solve the problem. Yeah, more background checks will work wonders. Enforce the laws we have. Next question.”

Here’s the rationale that should carry the day. No single measure will solve this existential fault line–or any other societal problem. But collectively they can at the very least mitigate matters. They can make it more difficult for more unhinged people to get their hands on murder weapons. They can save some lives. Isn’t that a worthwhile goal? But, yes, banning assault weapons for anyone who’s not a cop or a soldier should still be a no-brainer.

But let’s not forget this. None of these school murderers, including Sandy Hooks’ Adam Lanza, operated in a vacuum. They lived at home. They sent signals. Some wore trench coats to school regardless of the weather. They planted red flags with their internet searches and social media postings. Parental oversight–including the foster variety–can’t be an oxymoron.

“If you see something, say something.” It has to be more than a New York subway reminder.

So the NRA’s incoming president is Oliver North. He of Iran-Contra and right-wing-opportunist ill fame. Did Ted Nugent, Joe Arpaio and George Zimmerman turn it down?

* One obvious upshot of the formal opening of the American embassy in JerUSAlem: The peace process is comatose.

* When it comes to North Korea, we should still be willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt. Granted, timing is, of course, critically important, and the North Koreans had been gaming the world for a couple of generations until it had nuclear leverage. It’s there now under Kim Jong-un. It also has an open-minded partner in South Korean president Moon Jae-in. And it has, of course, an American president who would love to flaunt that the “Art of the Deal” also applies on the nuclear stage.

But it can’t be discounted that the very nature of Trump–a scary, impulsively unpredictable, threatening bully–has had an impact, however ironic, that could conceivably help. I liken it to a cartoon that was around during the Cold War, nuclear standoff between the U.S and the U.S.S.R. It was a riff on popular teen movies that featured two punks playing “chicken” in their cars. They would head directly at each other until one “chickened out” and turned away to avoid certain fatality. Think early James Dean. Think latter day Kim and Trump.

Well, the cartoon showed one of the drivers getting into his car with a well-noted bottle of booze next to him. It sent an alarmingly existential message to his rival: “I can’t be trusted. I may be drunk. You think I’ll be the one to turn off and avoid a nuclear showdown?”

I never thought that would still be resonating.

* “Make America Great Again” is more than a strategically self-serving, populist meme. It’s also a legitimate challenge.

Here’s a sobering revelation: The International Monetary Fund, not to be confused with a “fake news” partisan, projects that the United States will account for only 13.7 percent of global economic output by 2023. That’s not far away: either Donald Trump’s penultimate lame-duck year or the third year of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris Administration. For comparison, the U.S. accounted for approximately 50 percent of global output at the end of World War II. By 1985, that figure was 22.5 percent. Today it’s 15 percent.

Arguably, a retreat from global commitments, including base-pandering protectionism and a culture of international unreliability, won’t help. At all.

* Alas, John McCain’s days are sadly numbered as the 81-year-old senator struggles against brain cancer and the aggressive treatment it necessitates. We know his family–with his inimitable input–is already making funeral-service plans for Washington’s National Cathedral. To wit: George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been invited to give eulogies. Donald Trump did not make the cut. Mike Pence will represent the White House.

Bush and Obama, with whom McCain had a few high-profile disagreements, symbolize respect and reconciliation. Trump embodies everything McCain distains about polarizing political partisanship and international disloyalty.

* Speaking of McCain, it’s too bad his legacy of reconciliation and aisle-crossing hasn’t gone unfettered. That legacy, unfortunately, also includes the political sell-out that put Sarah Palin on his 2008 presidential ticket. It wasn’t just an expedient, feminist-insulting, long-shot gambit to win the presidency in a given year. It also enabled the Trump presidency. It proved what can happen when you normalize the unconscionably unprepared and vain  as viable enough to be on a presidential ticket. Candidate Palin presaged President Trump.

Sorry about that, senator, but I’m sorrier for America.

* Between now and the summit hook-up between Trump and Kim Jong Un, there will be no lack of media speculation about what Kim, in particular, really has in mind. Is this really the Korean Peninsula game-changer it appears to be? Will that armistice morph into a peace treaty?

Frankly, it’s encouraging that Kim cares so much about symbolism and optics as we saw with his Olympic overtures and historic handshake and border two-step with South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in. And this just in: North Korea has readjusted its time zone to match South Korea’s and dismantled those gigantic loudspeakers that used to spew propaganda across the DMZ.

The signs are more than manifest that this is now, and the Cold War was then. But for media that speculates and overanalyzes for a living, there’s still the ultimate sign that Kim is serious about wanting back into the civilized world. If he shows up for his Trump summit looking like he’s worked in a salad, sports a CEO haircut and no longer dresses in Mao pajamas, he’ll signal that he’s really ready for the world stage with a message that will resonate credibility,

* Many in America’s media, political parties and military establishment have been looking askance at the rumored possibility that Kim might part with his nukes if the U.S. agrees to sign that peace treaty and pledges not to attack the North. Some historical perspective: Less than a decade after the 1953 Korean armistice, the U.S. was faced with an existential showdown with the Soviet Union over nuclear missiles in Cuba. A key component for defusing the global threat was President John F. Kennedy’s pledge not to invade Cuba. Sure, it was a concession but to common sense and common cause. Nobody wanted Armageddon.

Such a pledge should still be on the table. It speaks incongruous volumes that we would need to even debate–or defend it.

* It’s hard to take a pathological liar at his word, but let’s cut Trump some non-witch-hunting, sincerity slack when he said during the campaign that “The mob takes the Fifth Amendment. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” Let’s assume he meant it. Let’s then assume, Rudy Giuliani equivocations notwithstanding, that Trump will not plead the Fifth against self-incrimination in the Russia investigation, because, truth be told, he has nothing to hide.

* Two recent, instant-classic headlines:

>MSNBC’s Hardball: “The Trump & Rudy Show.”

>”Vanity Fair” magazine: “Trump Assures Reporters He’ll Make Giuliani a Better Liar.”

* These are indeed, unprecedented, stormy political times. Imagine, we live in an era where a porn actress can credibly sue for defamation.

* You have to wonder what French President Emmanuel Macron really thinks of Donald Trump.

Macron seems too smart, too savvy, too informed, too young, too short to be Trump’s best, non-authoritarian, geo-political bosom buddy. But how else do you get the U.S. to not abandon the cause of climate change and to not pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal without giving it your best bromantic shot? Making science-based, existential points is an obvious non-starter.

You can imagine what was going through Macron’s mind as photographers gathered for their historic handshakes and air kisses. Maybe: “I don’t mind taking one for the team, but–sacre bleu. He won’t hug Merkel. What would de Gaulle do?”

* It has now been confirmed that there will be further delay in releasing the rest of the JFK assassination records. They’ll remain classified for national security reasons until at least 2021. At least that’s what Trump has been told. Actually, it’s more out of scandalous embarrassment for reprehensible incompetence and rogue government elements involved in the assassination.

Hell, you would think Trump would actually like the distraction–even if there’s no confirmation that Ted Cruz’s father was involved.

* Trump is now set to meet with British Prime Minister Theresa May in July. But it won’t be an “official” state visit by Trump. That’s a polite way of saying he won’t have to endure some awkward optics over a royal family visit.

* Amid the Nobel Peace Prize conjecture, let’s keep this in mind about the rapprochement now  under way on the Korean Peninsula. There was a critically important move involving a key player that has led to what we’re now seeing. No, not by Trump. Not Kim Jong Un. Not Moon Jae-in.

It  actually involved Park Geun-hye, the former president of South Korea. She was disgraced in a corruption scandal, driven from office and sentenced to 24 years in prison. She and her hard-line views toward the North were replaced last year by Moon, who was well known for his conciliatory approach to the North. There would be, quite arguably, no serious warming of relations if Park were still in office. Moon was a game changer, if not a Nobel Prize candidate.

BTW, there’s still no U.S. ambassador to South Korea, although Adm. Harry Harris, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, will reportedly be Trump’s nominee.

* Trump will soon formally decide whether to keep the U.S. in the Iran nuclear deal. The ripple effects of a unilateral rejection are worrisome from Iran itself to U.S. credibility with the other Iran-deal signatories–England, France, Germany, China and Russia–to North Korea, as it takes notes on, ironically, U.S. reliability while prepping for the Trump-Kim summit.

* The White House Correspondents’ Dinner didn’t help the cause if your cause is celebrating viable, professional media and accountability-holding criticism in the era of Trump. The featured comedienne, Michelle Wolf , was, on balance, tasteless and off-putting and did, ironically, a disservice to journalism by dragging everyone into the mud with Trump. How do you criticize Trump, for example, for all of his Administration’s vetting failures when you don’t properly vet your annual dinner’s headline comic performer? She was a room-service talking point for the Trump pushback on mainstream media as a biased, “witch-hunting” enemy.

She did, however, telegraph her punch lines from the start: “Like a porn star says when she’s about to have sex with a Trump, let’s get this over with.” Not soon enough.

I miss Seth Meyers.

* The Senate just confirmed Trump’s 15th appeals court nominee. This is in addition to the 17 Trump-nominated judges on district courts. We know Neil Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court, and we can’t help second guessing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 85, for not retiring while Obama was still in position to choose a replacement and not worry about Mitch McConnell. Stay healthy and feisty, albeit frail, RBG.

* So the controversial Dr. Ronny Jackson has withdrawn as Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, after denying allegations involving the dispersals of meds, a hostile work environment within the White House medical team and possible over-imbibing while on duty. Imagine if he had been accused of what Trump did?

* Trump and Kanye West. It is what it is: two obnoxious, self-serving, pop culture celebrities. If only one were not president of the United States.

Bill Cosby is no longer the accused. He is now the convicted. For sexually assaulting much younger, vulnerable women, many of whom, unconscionably, were unconscious. That was his Quaalude M.O. for uninvited sex with unwitting, young females. Mentor as monster. Throw away the key.

However, what makes these crimes all the more harmful, is that there is also a potential broader victim: society at large. In an America that has always been rife with racism, Cosby in his prime appealed to both sides of the racial divide with universal humor. From Fat Albert to Noah’s Ark to the familial musings of Dr. Huxtable. We really needed that. He reminded us of what we had in common–not conflict.

Red Foxx, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy had their entertaining niches, which included raw language and bawdy routines. The family-friendly Cosby didn’t go there. In fact, he was even chided in activist circles for not being street-language hip and, not unlike Jackie Robinson, lulling white households into a false sense of civil rights success.

Cosby made no apologies. “A white person listens to my act and he laughs,” he once noted, “and he thinks, ‘Yeah, that’s the way I see it too.’ … And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are alike. Right? So I figure this way I’m doing as much for good race relations as the next guy.”

Arguably more. That approach, however, should not be written off along with his evil doppelganger, predatory ways in real life. His universal humor should prevail as a reminder of what we all, regardless of race, have in common. It would be criminal to not build on that.

Here’s what should be the ultimate bottom line when it comes to term limits, whether we’re talking FDR, Barack Obama, Sam Gibbons, Rick Scott or Bob Buckhorn. And, yes, this takes into consideration name-recognition advantages and fund-raising wherewithal. In short, we should let the electorate decide to limit terms by kicking out the self-serving and career-carving or retaining the hard-working and conscience-following.

Or don’t we, well, trust the electorate to do the right thing–because it requires voters to be, well, involved, informed and not easily pandered to by those always targeting the lowest common denominator? Especially in this era of “fake news” and validating, cherry-picked, partisan media. The challenges have never been more formidable to do, ironically, what’s in our own best interest.

Democracies shouldn’t accord “off-year”-election passes to rationalize embarrassingly low turnouts. They all matter–from mayor to governor to president. Don’t they?

Let’s limit laziness and gullibility–not incumbent terms.