The odd man out is no shocker

 

The odd man out is no shocker

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

TimesNewsOnline

December 17, 2017

 

Scrooge, the Grinch or Donald Trump. If determining which of the three is the odd man on his way out were a multiple choice test, I suspect most of you would correctly guess what’s coming.

You’re right, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In addition to the Gospel of Matthew, my Christmas favorites are “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” by Dr. Seuss and “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. In their very different ways, they enable us to know the true meaning of Christmas.

The child in me still treasures the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Other than its unconscionable and repetitive self-promotion of NBC television programming, it remains a heartwarming tradition.

And this year it had something new, and for me, something special. Not only was there a new helium balloon, it was the one that I’ve been waiting for ever since I first read Dr. Seuss’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” to our sons back in the ’70s.

As the Grinch came into view on 34th Street on Thanksgiving morning, the key thing for me was the Grinch’s grin. Would it be a faithful rendering of Dr. Seuss’ illustrations in the original?

It was, and that meant that the Grinch’s expression conveyed two mutually opposing thoughts. That signature grin tells us that he’s up to no good, but that he’s not evil.

And, while the Grinch successfully steals what he wrongly believes is Whoville’s entire Christmas, Christmas survives, and the Grinch is profoundly transformed when he hears Cindy Lou and Whos down in Whoville singing on Christmas morning. That’s when he realizes that the “stuff” he grabbed is only meaningless “stuff.” That’s when his heart grows three sizes.

In Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” Ebenezer Scrooge’s countenance is nothing but foreboding. For him, Christmas is humbug. For him, life is only about the acquisition of wealth — his own. Unless we look very carefully, there is no evidence that Scrooge is redeemable.

But there is one sliver of hope. However grudgingly, Scrooge is willing to grant his beleaguered employee, Bob Cratchit, a paid day off work on Christmas Day so that he can spend it with his family and his dying son, Tiny Tim.

Transforming Scrooge is going to take much more than the joyous singing in Whoville that the Grinch heard on Christmas morning. It’s going to require confronting Scrooge with the fear of God.

As Scrooge sleeps on Christmas Eve, that fear arrives in the form of spirits who take Scrooge back to his desolate and lonely childhood, then to Bob Cratchit’s family and two emaciated children named Ignorance and Want, and finally to an unattended grave, Scrooge’s grave.

Shock and terror produce Scrooge’s epiphany. He awakens on Christmas morning a changed man, a man who becomes Tiny Tim’s second father.

No, the Grinch and Scrooge and are not the odd men out, but President Trump is. Perhaps he believes he’s America’s savior. His campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, suggests such a glorious role for his presidency.

But his campaign and his first year in office are in fact the mirror opposite of his promises. They foretell his doom.

The truth is that President Trump is unfit to serve. He is incapable of fulfilling the oath of office he took last January that requires him to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Trump’s behavior is an ongoing assault on the pillars of our Constitution. He has attacked free speech, a free press and freedom of religion. He has attacked the independence of the federal judiciary. He has demonstrated ignorance of the Constitution’s doctrine of separation of powers.

He has surrounded himself with sycophants. He has undercut the nation’s intelligence and national security apparatus. He has insulted and disparaged America’s allies while giving a pass to undemocratic oligarchs like Vladimir Putin.

He has soiled his unique bully pulpit by disparaging women, African-Americans and Hispanics.

And worse, he can’t help it. Late last month, the New York Daily News editorialized, “The president of the United States is profoundly unstable. He is mad. He is, by any honest layman’s definition, mentally unwell and viciously lashing out.”

It’s simply a matter of time before Robert Mueller presents a compelling case of obstruction of justice and/or abuse of power against the president. At its heart will be the spoken words, tweets and actions of Trump himself.

All of this reminds me of President Richard Nixon’s prophetic words the night before he resigned: “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

In 2016, the American people were forced to choose between two thoroughly corrupt and despicable candidates. Unbelievably and thankfully, Donald Trump’s legacy will be that he successfully destroyed both of them.

Merry Christmas.

Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at tks12no12@gmail.com.

Perhaps a Thanksgiving miracle?

Perhaps a Thanksgiving miracle?

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Tines-News Online

November 19, 2017

Perhaps a quarter-century of deadlock in Washington is ending. And amazingly, the issue that now gives hope is one that has been at the center of Washington’s descent into recrimination and paralysis — health care. Maybe it’s the key that unlocks what has shackled and crippled presidents and Congresses since Bill Clinton took office.

President Clinton asked his wife to take the lead on health care reform in 1993. She failed miserably. She devised a plan so complex that no one could understand it. It was a sitting duck for the devastatingly effective Harry and Louise television ads that the health insurance industry ran against Hillarycare.

More importantly, its collapse set the stage for the Republican tidal wave in the 1994 election that put Newt Gingrich and the GOP in control of the House for the first time in 40 years. By the end of the Clinton presidency, the House had impeached him.

Immediately following his historic victory, President Barack Obama unwisely decided to make health care reform his top priority and to do so on a partisan basis. In 2009, the Democrats had a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the Senate. Thus Obamacare was rammed through Congress without any Republican support, assuring the upheaval that followed.

Upheaval’s name was “Repeal and Replace.” During the Obama presidency, two consequential things occurred: partisan stalemate at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and a series of Republican election victories that has brought the GOP to its high-water mark not only in Washington but also in the states.

In 2010, the Republicans recaptured the House. In 2014, they took the Senate. They also defeated about 1,000 Democrats in state legislative chambers and won numerous governorships. And to almost everyone’s surprise, they won the presidency last year. Voter opposition to Obamacare fueled the meteoric rise of the GOP.

But delivering on their promise to repeal and replace Obamacare has been an unmitigated disaster for the Republicans. So much of a disaster that the election results earlier this month make evident that it now threatens their control of Congress in 2018 and the White House in 2020. Without a major course correction, the GOP is headed into oblivion.

However, that the course correction now appears possible. And we can thank Sen. John McCain for that.

Recall that McCain returned to the Senate in late July after having had surgery for brain cancer. His return occurred just as Senate Republicans were attempting to pass their version of the legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. However, like the House version of the same measure, it was deeply unpopular, principally because its enactment would result in millions of Americans losing their health insurance.

On July 25, McCain took the Senate floor and delivered a stinging rebuke to both Republicans and Democrats. In it, he said:

“The Obama administration and congressional Democrats shouldn’t have forced through Congress without any opposition support a social and economic change as massive as Obamacare. And we shouldn’t do the same with ours. ...

“Let’s trust each other. Let’s return to regular order. We’ve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle. ...

“I will not vote for the bill as it is today. It’s a shell of a bill right now. ...

“Let the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee under Chairman (Lamar) Alexander, and Ranking Member (Patty) Murray hold hearings, try to report a bill out of committee with contributions from both sides.”

At 1:29 a.m. on July 28, McCain voted against the Republican bill, known as Skinny Repeal, thus killing it. An hour later, a petulant President Donald Trump tweeted, “3 Republicans and 48 Democrats let the American people down. As I said from the beginning, let Obamacare implode, then deal. Watch!”

Thanks to McCain’s courage and then Alexander and Murray’s willingness to work together, regular order has broken out. Their committee has held hearings, workshops attended by more than 60 senators, and executive sessions on a bipartisan bill to stabilize the collapsing individual insurance market in Obamacare.

Their bill would also extend cost-sharing subsidies to insurance companies through 2019, thus enabling millions of Americans to retain their health insurance. In addition, it would enable states to obtain waivers to shape their own health insurance programs.

Their bill has two dozen co-sponsors equally divided among Republicans and Democrats. That means the bill is filibuster-proof!

The enactment of this bipartisan fix is the necessary precondition to the larger bipartisan overhaul that must follow. However, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell will not bring the bill up unless the White House signals that Trump will sign it.

That signal would be worthy of Thanksgiving.

Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at tks12no12@gmail.com.

Has gerrymandering met its match?

How the Supreme Court decides this case is a very big deal.

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow Online

Times-News

October 15, 2017

Has gerrymandering met its match?

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments on a gerrymandering case out of Wisconsin, Gill v. Whitford. On first blush, it would appear this case is no big deal. At one level, it’s simply a matter of whether Republicans went too far drawing the district maps in 2011 for the Wisconsin Legislature. But how the court decides this case is a very big deal.

Not only might the decision break new ground with respect to cases involving partisan gerrymandering, it is also possible that it might eventually break new ground with respect to how the Supreme Court has ruled in cases involving racial gerrymandering. It’s important to know that the court has rigorously avoided deciding cases of partisan gerrymandering but has shown no reluctance to rule on gerrymandering cases involving race.

Although the court has made a clear dichotomy between partisan and racial gerrymandering, the two are deeply intertwined. Together they are responsible for significant and deleterious gerrymandering in virtually every state. Pervasive gerrymandering has brought the U.S. House of Representatives to its knees. In fact, most House seats are so gerrymandered that only one party can win them.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been interpreted to require the creation of majority-minority congressional districts. Most of these many districts are represented by African-Americans or Hispanics, and virtually all of them are Democrats. The underlying premise for such districts was that it was the only way to circumvent racial discrimination. Happily that circumstance no longer obtains.

However, and surprisingly, the systematic creation of these majority-minority districts has enabled the Republicans to win more districts than would have otherwise been the case in many states, as minorities are packed into fewer districts. The net effect is that more and more seats are gerrymandered by both parties. Members from these districts, both Republicans and Democrats, have no incentive to reach across the aisle. What they do worry about is an even more extreme primary opponent.

Gerrymandering has turned democracy on its head. Instead of us picking our congressman, the members of Congress and their allies in the state legislatures draw the district maps so that they pick who gets to anoint them.

North Carolina is a perfect example of this undemocratic stranglehold. North Carolina is a swing state, evenly balanced between Democrats and Republicans. In 2016, Donald Trump carried it narrowly, by 3 percent, and Roy Cooper ousted Republican Gov. Pat McCrory by less than 1 percent. Yet the incumbent party won in every congressional district, and the margins of victory ranged from an insurmountable 56 percent to an eye-popping 69 percent. All 13 of the districts are the product of either partisan or racial gerrymandering.

If the Supreme Court were to find the map drawn by the Republicans in Wisconsin to be unconstitutional, the stage would be set to reverse partisan gerrymandering, and surprisingly it might revive efforts to strike down racial gerrymandering, too. Putting the matter right requires both steps.

At the oral arguments on Gill v. Whitford, all eyes were on Justice Anthony Kennedy. Unfortunately, that’s because the other eight justices appear to have closed minds on the issue. The four conservatives appear to have no interest in permitting the court to involve itself in partisan gerrymandering, while the four liberals appear to stand in opposition.

Justice Kennedy, however, based on an extension of his thinking in a similar case in 2004, Vieth v. Jubelirer, may be ready to join the liberals and enable the court to begin to curb partisan gerrymandering. That would be the first of the two necessary steps to begin stuffing the gerrymandering genie back in the bottle.

The necessary second step would have to await another case that would challenge the constitutionality of racial gerrymandering. The arrival of such a case is not far-fetched. About 20 years ago, the Supreme Court decided three cases alleging that North Carolina’s two majority-minority districts were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander driven by the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.

The challenge was brought by an improbable individual, Robinson Everett, a Duke law professor and a moderate Democrat. Everett deeply opposed discrimination against blacks, but he was just as deeply opposed to race-conscious policies that were designed to benefit one race over another. More importantly, he believed the majority-minority districts violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Robinson lost 5-4 when then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had previously voted to end racial gerrymandering, switched her vote.

If Justice Kennedy has decided the time has come to join the liberals and turn the corner on partisan gerrymandering, it’s just possible that in the not-too-distant future he might join the conservatives and turn the corner on racial gerrymandering. Hopefully he’s a switch hitter!

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:  

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Mushroom clouds over North Korea?

Mushroom clouds over North Korea?

By

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow.com

September 17, 2017

North Korea has been known as the “Hermit Kingdom” since the 17th century. But under the rule of Kim Jong-un since 2011, and his father and grandfather before him, North Korea’s isolation, brutality and quest for weapons of mass destruction have come to dominate its existence.

North Korea has the world’s fourth-largest army. Much of its military might is located just north of the 38th parallel and within 35 miles of Seoul, where there are about 150,000 Americans, including about 25,000 American troops.

The North Korean military arsenal massed near Seoul is protected by a vast labyrinth of underground caves and bunkers that house artillery and rocket launchers. It also houses immense quantities of chemical weapons such as nerve gas. An assault by North Korea against the South would be devastating.

North Korea is the most repressive nation in the world. Freedom is forbidden. Kim’s regime makes extensive use of political prison camps.

North Korea derives several billion dollars of hard currency annually from abroad to fund its development of nuclear weapons and ICBMs by exporting hundreds of thousands of its citizens as slave laborers to dozens of countries around the world. Additional hard currency to fuel the regime’s aggressive nuclear and long-range ballistic missile program comes from illicit arms sales to nations such as Syria and terrorist groups such as Hezbollah.

And now, after years of failure by the U.S. to prevent North Korea from having the ability to threaten the American homeland with nuclear missiles, Kim has ballistic missiles that can reach us, has almost certainly detonated a hydrogen bomb, and will soon be on the verge of arming his ICBMs with hydrogen warheads.

When one listens to American military and diplomatic experts opine on North Korea, their refrain frequently suggests the U.S. has few, if any, good options to prevent Kim from acquiring nuclear first-strike technology. In code, many of them are saying, therefore, that we should do nothing. James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, recently told CNN, “I don’t think a denuclearized North Korea is in the cards.” That’s music to Kim’s ears.

A logic that suggests we can’t prevent an adversary from acquiring nuclear capability that threatens us, and that we can’t take action once such an adversary has that capability, is perverted and dangerous.

A careful analysis of this nation’s prosecution of war, since the Korean War in 1950, leaves way too much to be desired. Our intelligence community missed totally the entry of nearly 300,000 Chinese troops in the Korean War. Many regard that as the most colossal intelligence blunder in this nation’s history.

In Vietnam, what our experts believed was Soviet and Chinese communist expansion was in fact a civil war that, even with more than a half-million troops, we lost.

In Afghanistan, we are now in the 17th year of attempting to do what Alexander the Great, the British Empire and the Soviet Union failed to do. Like them, we will fail.

In Iraq, we thumped our chests at the outset of war by proclaiming “shock and awe” and left years later with a failed nation ripe for international terrorists.

So let’s give these experts in the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and academia their due, a grain of salt.

There are two paths forward. There is no doubt that China can oust Kim. It could do so in many different ways. For example, turning off the flow of oil from China to Pyongyang would be checkmate for Kim.

President Donald Trump should send Jon Huntsman, former ambassador to China, to Beijing. He speaks Mandarin, and the Chinese leadership knows and respects him.

Huntsman’s message to them should be unmistakably clear: Kim and his regime must be replaced immediately or it will be annihilated by the U.S. If Huntsman can convince Beijing that its choices are either unpalatable or horrific, they may see the light.

If China rebuffs the offer, this nation should employ sufficient military might, including the use of nuclear weapons, to do what Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said is possible: the “total annihilation” of North Korea.

Such an assault cannot simply be restricted to Kim’s nuclear facilities. Doing only that assures a devastating counter response against South Korea by Kim. No, the assault must necessarily destroy the entirety of Kim’s regime and his ability to make war.

The U.S. waited to respond until after Pearl Harbor and after 9/11. Waiting until after Chicago and Los Angeles amounts to criminal negligence.

The eradication of Kim would have additional beneficial consequences. It would change totally the working assumptions in places such as Teheran, Damascus, Raqqa, Kabul, Islamabad, Beijing and Moscow. How nice is that?

Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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They’re like three fools in a tub

They’re like three fools in a tub

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Times-News 

BlueRidgeNow Online

August 20, 2017

At 34 percent, President Donald Trump’s approval rating has cratered. After only six months in office, he has managed to turn everyone against him except his hard-core supporters.

Similarly, approval of the Republican-controlled Congress hovers around 10 percent. House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell can take little solace from the fact that the public does prefer Congress to North Korea. Trump, Ryan and McConnell’s self-inflicted sorry state reminds me of the three fools or knaves in James Halliwell’s 1842 nursery rhyme, “Rub-A-Dub-Dub.”

It is now clear that the GOP has failed to govern effectively from either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The GOP is at war with itself and is losing. This is what happens when you combine ignorance, arrogance and blind partisanship.

The three fools’ first move on the legislative chessboard was their botched attempt to turn their oft-repeated cry to repeal and replace Obamacare into reality. What was supposed to be a blitzkrieg sputtered out in complete failure after months of intraparty feuding and recrimination. The die was cast in the House when Ryan foolishly attempted to unify his ranks behind a bill that would have denied health care coverage to more than 20 million Americans, many of whom were Trump supporters. It was a bill that Trump first hailed in a White House Rose Garden ceremony and then later called “mean” when it moved to the Senate.

Once the ill-fated bill passed the House by the narrowest of margins, it was up to the Senate to rewrite it. But McConnell, who wrote the Senate bill behind closed doors with a few of his colleagues and insurance lobbyists, doubled down on Ryan’s fatal error. He produced a bill that would have denied coverage to millions, and one that split his caucus between the hard-liners who would have been satisfied with simply repealing Obamacare and the moderates who would not countenance such a mean-spirited approach.

In the end, McConnell faced the humiliation of being unable to muster the 51 votes necessary to pass his bill.

Trump then poured gasoline on the failed effort by blaming McConnell and by threatening to let Obamacare implode.

And that brings us to the knave-in-chief. Hardly a day has gone by since Trump took the oath of office in which he has not been his own worst enemy. Trump won the election because he promised America that he would drain the swamp. But bringing the Washington leviathan to heel is far easier said than done. No president in modern times, until Trump, has been willing to take on what all of them believed was a war that either should not be waged or could not be won.

Trump should have known that the magnitude of such an endeavor would require skills, smarts and strategy that went far beyond his lack of understanding of what he was up against and how to vanquish it. Instead of staffing his inner circle with savvy individuals who understood how Washington could be brought to heel, he staffed it with a crazy quilt collection of amateurs from whom Trump demanded loyalty to him above all else. Instead of a staff of heavyweights all committed to driving the diverse components of Trump’s breathtaking agenda, he created a staff of sycophants who are now at one another’s throats.

Even if the Russians had never attempted to influence our election, there is abundant evidence that the Trump administration is in state of disintegration. But, of course, the Russians did meddle in the election.

We don’t yet know where independent counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will lead, what it will conclude, and who, if anyone, will pay the legal or political price for wrongdoing. In the fullness of time, we will. But we know Mueller is no fool or knave, and we can connect the dots that are starkly clear.

We know Trump has gone easy on Russia. We know he has refused to support the unanimous findings of this nation’s intelligence agencies that Russia attempted to undermine our election. We know he’s called the investigation a “total fabrication.”

We know he fired FBI Director James Comey because of the Russia investigation. We know he attempted to force the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he recused himself from the Russia investigation. And we know that the investigation is looking deeply into the activities of Trump and his confidants, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Donald Trump Jr.

Perhaps there is no fire, but the smoke is suffocatingly thick.

In their own unique ways, Trump, Ryan and McConnell have given a disturbingly new meaning to Halliwell’s nursery rhyme about fools and knaves. Rub-a-dub-dub.

Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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The tweet that ends the logjam

The tweet that ends the logjam

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow.com

Times-News Online

July 16, 2017

On June 30, President Donald Trump tweeted, “If Republican senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!”

Most saw the president’s tweet as either terribly harmful to the GOP legislative effort, or irrelevant. Many also saw it as simply another example of the president putting his mouth in front of his brain. Regardless of whether or not you think the president has a brain, there’s a chance he might just have stumbled into a way to end Washington’s logjam.

One would think politicians would have learned by now that health care legislation is a lethal third rail. Touch it and perish.

Repeal is easy. Replace isn’t, and thus the Republican replacement effort over the past few months has been a joke and a self-inflicted disaster.

Recall the blunders made in the House by Speaker Paul Ryan. First, he doubled down on the Democrats’ fatal mistake in 2009. He decided to bring profound change to one-sixth of the American economy on a totally partisan basis. That never works. Then, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, he crafted legislation that would transfer billions of dollars of tax cuts to wealthy Americans, while at the same time eventually resulting in a predicted 23 million fewer Americans having insurance coverage.

In the process, Ryan created a lose-lose dynamic within the GOP in that the Freedom Caucus opposed the bill because it wasn’t radical enough and the moderates opposed it because it went too far.

In the end, it squeaked through the House by a couple of votes. President Trump immediately held a pyrrhic victory celebration with House Republicans in the Rose Garden for a bill that everyone knew was dead on arrival in the Senate, and one that the president himself would soon describe as “mean.”

In the Senate, the story has been the same. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doubled down on Ryan’s fatal error of judgment by refusing to bring the Democrats into the process of crafting the Senate bill. With “Ryan Lite,” he has run into the same paralyzing dynamic. Conservative senators like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee refuse to support a bill that does not gut Obamacare and Medicaid, while moderate Republicans senators like Susan Collins, Rob Portman and Shelley Moore Capito refuse to support a bill that eviscerates Medicaid.

McConnell’s bill would also transfer huge amounts of wealth to the nation’s richest, eventually reduce the number of insured by a predicted 22 million, and, unbelievably, do much of its damage in states that elected Trump. Only about 20 percent of the American people approve of Ryan and McConnell’s legislative legerdemain. What else do you need to know?

McConnell’s perfectly predictable dilemma is that he can’t corral the 50 votes he needs from among the Senate’s 52 Republicans as long as hard-liners like Paul and/or moderates like Collins refuse to play ball. McConnell has created his own Catch-22. For a man whose reputation is built upon his skill of playing “inside baseball” in the Senate, McConnell comes across as a masochist and a fool.

Soon we will know how this plays out. There are two basic options. If McConnell can scrape together 50 suicidal Republicans and pass his monstrosity of a bill, the House will approve it, and Trump will sign it into law. That will trigger swift and certain voter retribution, which will drive the GOP from power in 2018 and 2020.

But if McConnell’s bill flames out, Trump has an historic opening. He should then urge the GOP to pass a repeal bill, which they would do. But at the same time, he should reach out to the only person who can help him craft a bipartisan replacement bill that serves the nation — President Barack Obama. That move would change everything!

If he makes a genuine offer to Obama, Obama can’t and won’t refuse. Such an offer can easily be based on the health care promises Trump made repeatedly during the 2016 campaign. Trump and Obama could then create a set of legislative specifications that would retain the best of Obamacare, while at the same time making most of the necessary reforms the GOP has long advocated.

Such a move would isolate the radicals of both the right and the left in both chambers of Congress and would enable a bipartisan majority of more than 60 Republicans and Democrats to pass sustainable legislation.

When this approach works for health care, even the village idiot will be able to figure out that it can work for things such as tax reform, the infrastructure rebuild, the budget and trade. And who will get the credit for ending Washington’s logjam? The president of the United States!

It’s called Making America Great Again — TOGETHER.

Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at :

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Comey may get the last laugh

Comey may get the last laugh

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow.Com

Times-News Online

June 18, 2017

Today Washington is paralyzed at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue by uncompromising zealots in both parties. And worse, they hold sway because there has been an analogous shift among voters. The political center has been systematically hollowed out as the ranks of uncompromising zealots have swelled in both parties.

Who comes to exploit America’s vulnerability? Russia with its sophisticated, substantial, and clandestine effort to undermine our free elections. Make no mistake about it, the Russian attack on our election is right up there with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in terms of its malevolent, destructive purpose.

And what about the 2016 election and its stunning result and surreal aftermath? The good thing about the election is that it got rid of one of the two horrible candidates. The bad news is that it it put the other horrible candidate in the White House.

The FBI counterintelligence investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in our 2016 election began last July. In March of this year then FBI Director Comey confirmed that the investigation included an effort to determine if there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. He also said that such an investigation would necessarily require, “a credible allegation of wrongdoing or reasonable basis to believe that an American may be acting as an agent of a foreign power.”

Since then, thanks to leaks, Trump’s tweets, his interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, hearings before Congressional committees, and the sworn testimony of private citizen James Comey, we know much more.

We know the President was obsessed with two, and apparently only two, aspects of the FBI investigation, whether he was under investigation and whether he could convince Director Comey to lay off his former National Security Adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn.

According to Comey’s recent sworn testimony we know that the president urged Comey repeatedly to state publicly that he was not under investigation, and to lay off Flynn because he was a “good guy.” We also know that he implied that failure to comply would cost Comey his job. When Comey didn’t comply Trump fired him on May 9. The next day in the White House he told the Russian ambassador and the Russian foreign minister, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job.” And the following day he said, “You know this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.”

Is it reasonable to assume that Trump went to bat for Flynn out of loyalty? I doubt it. Trump’s loyalty begins and ends with himself. Much more plausible is that Trump wanted to prevent the investigators from “squeezing” Flynn to see if he would incriminate bigger fish.

We also know that the president attempted to divert attention from the investigation by claiming that the real scandal was an effort by President Obama to wiretap the Trump campaign, a claim wholly without merit and flatly denied by intelligence officials from both administrations.

We know that there are credible reports that the president urged the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, and the Director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, to push back against the FBI inquiry into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Both refused, but would not further discuss the matter in recent open testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Their silence will not stand.

We know that former FBI Director Comey has testified that he leaked the notes of his meetings and phone calls with the President. Comey has testified that he believed the release of their contents would lead to the appointment of a special counsel to lead the investigation. Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed two days after the leak.

The incredible irony here is that Comey told Trump several times that he was not under investigation. But Trump’s firing of Comey and the way he both did it and described it have now almost certainly caused the special counsel to open an investigation of the president. At issue will be whether or not the President obstructed justice. Comey’s notes and testimony lay a trail of crumbs from Mueller’s office to the Oval Office. If Mueller makes that case, Trump’s a goner. In the meantime Trump has emasculated his ability to govern.

If Mueller charges the president with obstruction, the delicious irony will be that Jim Comey may well have brought down both Clinton and Trump, not a bad day’s work!

If you want a clue concerning the public’s reaction to of all this, watch the special House election in Georgia this Tuesday. It’s a heavily Republican district where the outcome Tuesday is uncertain. It shouldn’t be.

Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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The problem is the president

By

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow Online

May 21, 2017

I’ve got this feeling I can’t shake. For me, that feeling goes back to late 1972, about six months after burglars were arrested in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Complex in Washington.

I believed that what appeared to be an insignificant burglary was in fact something much more sinister that reached into the White House. At that time, I was staff director of the Senate Health Subcommittee. I shared my belief with colleagues in the Senate. Every one of them had basically the same reaction: “Dream on, Lee.”

You know the rest. On Aug. 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned to avert impeachment. Happily, that ended a constitutional crisis.

Today we face another constitutional crisis. How and when it will end isn’t clear. But there is no doubt that, only four months into the Trump presidency, the White House is in self-inflicted disarray.

The chaos is now to the point that the president is reported to be considering a wholesale restructuring of his White House staff. That won’t solve the problem because, although the staff is a joke, the problem is the president.

Philip Rucker reported in The Washington Post on May 13 that a GOP figure close to the White House “mused privately about whether Trump was in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.” Panelists on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” have reported alleged occasions in which the president is overheard screaming at the television. There are now legitimate questions concerning the president’s emotional stability.

With the exception of Trump’s successful nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the rest of the past four months has been an unfolding nightmare. But now the president’s firing of FBI Director James Comey has taken him beyond the point of no return. It’s the straw that’s going to break the camel’s back. The straw will be called obstruction of justice.

The unfolding saga of Trump’s firing of Comey is nothing but bizarre. Inexplicable doesn’t even come close. The president summoned Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to the Oval Office and requested a document that laid out the basis for Comey’s dismissal. Rosenstein complied and drafted a document that asserted Comey had done serious damage to the FBI’s reputation by violating Department of Justice policies concerning the 2016 Clinton email investigation.

On its face, the document doesn’t pass the smell test because candidate Trump heaped praise on Comey’s handling of the Clinton email matter several times last year. Nonetheless, that was the basis that the White House press secretary and the vice president used to defend Trump and describe why he had fired Comey. But within 24 hours, they were all made to look like fools by President Trump.

n an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, the president linked Comey’s firing to the ongoing FBI investigation of Russia and possible Trump campaign collusion. He stated, “I said, you know this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.” He also called Comey a “showboat” and said that he had on three occasions asked Comey if he, Trump, was under investigation.

Finally, Trump said Comey told him he was not under investigation, and he tweeted that Comey needed to be careful by suggesting that their discussions may have been taped by the White House.

The day after firing Comey, Trump met with the Russian foreign minister and its ambassador to the United States. In that meeting, according to The Washington Post, Trump gave the Russians “code-word” information, our highest level of classified information, concerning intelligence on the Islamic State.

It’s inconceivable that Comey would have answered the president’s inappropriate questions respecting whether he was under investigation. The president has trapped himself. It was only a matter of time before the deputy attorney general appointed a special prosecutor (he named former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel on Wednesday). It’s now only a matter of time before Comey tells us his version of his discussions with the president. And it’s only a matter of time before Congress will be forced to initiate impeachment proceedings.

In a piece in The Atlantic on May 12, James Fallows, who began his career writing about Watergate, details the reasons the Comey affair is worse than Watergate. In it, he states that Trump “is impulsive, and ignorant, and apparently beyond the reach of any control, even his own.”

The only way I can comprehend the president’s behavior is to assume that when he goes to sleep every night, he erases all memory of what happened that day. Thus the president awakes with no knowledge of what he did the day before, and no way to learn from his past behavior.

It’s a new Groundhog Day in the Oval Office every day!

Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at :

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Trump: Puppet master or puppet?

Trump: Puppet master or puppet?

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Times-News

BlueRidgeNow.com

April 16, 2017

In case you haven’t looked, America is a nation in peril. Its manifestation is everywhere, evident in the self-destructive actions of the Trump administration.

Unfortunately we now face an apparently insoluble problem, a nation so polarized that compromise and accommodation are beyond our reach. We arrive at this sorry and dangerous point in our nation’s history the old fashioned way. We’ve earned it.

The wellspring of national polarization dates back to the utterly unexpected and stunning Republican victory in 1994 when the Republicans gained 63 seats and took control of the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. Their victory was the electoral culmination of the Gingrich Revolution.

Gingrich and his revolutionaries came to power with a mission to dismantle the sprawling Washington leviathan. But they had no idea how to accomplish their mission. They soon learned that such profound change was beyond their grasp. However, the seeds of discord, distrust and deadlock had been planted.

Since then, the seeds have flourished, nourished by a body politic that is now so separated into warring camps of red and blue that the only acceptable strategy for each of them is a war of annihilation aimed at the other.

On Dec. 1, 1862, one month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln sent a long message to Congress. In it, he stated, “We can succeed only by concert. It is not ‘can any of us imagine better?’ but, ‘can we all do better?’ ”

Today, however, the reds, the blues and their elected slaves at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington lack the imagination and the will to act in concert with one another. Lincoln knew that was a recipe for disaster, but Donald Trump, his sycophants on the Hill, the Democrats and most of us don’t.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that last year’s presidential election gave the American people two unacceptable choices. Poll after poll showed that most voters had little use for either Hillary Clinton or Trump. Throughout the bitter campaign, Trump managed to disparage women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, the media and elites. Nonetheless, he managed to win by a whisker.

Once the campaign was over, many of us hoped Trump would at long last pivot and demonstrate that he understood the only path to a successful presidency was one that demonstrated he was obligated to be president of all of us, not just some of us. Equally important was the need for him to demonstrate that he was up to the job of being leader of the free world in a time of international turmoil and danger.

He’s had more than five months to make that pivot. It hasn’t happened, and it’s clear it’s not going to happen. With Trump, what you see is what you get, a thin-skinned bully who’s incapable of faithfully discharging the duties of the presidency. In fact, it’s worse than that. Instead of surrounding himself with a White House team that could help him grow, he’s packed the White House with political hacks.

Look at the results. For openers, we had Trump’s dystopian inaugural address that sounded like it was drafted by an FSB inquisitor deep within the Kremlin’s Lubyanka prison. That was followed by the sloppily drafted Muslim travel ban that predictably flamed out in federal court. When it did, Trump defaulted to his preferred form of fury and tweeted an entirely unwarranted assault on the constitutionally guaranteed independence of the judiciary. Has he ever read the Constitution? No, it’s more than 140 characters.

More recently, Trump threw his gravitas as the supreme deal-maker behind Paul Ryan’s ill-fated health care replacement bill that flamed out in the House. Never mind that Trump campaigned on providing health insurance to all Americans and then failed in his effort to pass a bill that would have taken coverage away from 24 million Americans.

On the international front, Trump has offended NATO, the European Union and the leaders of American allies such as Australia, Great Britain and Germany. In contradistinction, his buddy is Vladimir Putin, the unreconstructed KGB operative who has threatened international order by his actions in the Crimea, Ukraine, Syria and the unprecedented Russian cyberattack on our election last fall.

Nonetheless, Trump unwaveringly coddles Putin. Why? We don’t yet know, but we can smell smoke. Thankfully the FBI is well into a criminal investigation of this matter, including possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. If there is evidence of such collusion, it’s curtains for Trump. And no stream of hyperbolic ejaculatory tweets will save him from that.

Comedian and puppet master Edgar Bergen and his more famous puppet, Charlie McCarthy, were nothing but hilarious together on radio and television. Puppet master Donald Trump and his puppet, Donald Trump, are not. Together they embarrass, enrage and endanger America.

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident and welcomes comments.  He can be reached at:

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Absurdly, GOP saves Obamacare

Absurdly, GOP saves Obamacare

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Times-News

BlueRidgeNow.com

March 29, 2017

Forget the Republican rallying cry of “Repeal and Replace Obamacare.” The Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, in an act of absurd stupidity, have rescued it!

Late last Friday afternoon, after President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan had no choice but to pull down their star-crossed bill that was headed for certain defeat on the House floor, Ryan admitted that “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

There’s abundant blame to go around. But at its heart are the three blind mice: Ryan, House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows and Trump. Have you ever seen such a sight in your life? Let’s see how they run.

In 2010, widespread public opposition to Obamacare enabled Republicans to win the House. In 2014, they captured the Senate. And last November, the election of Trump gave them the trifecta, which they have now squandered. It’s what happens when you combine incompetence, ideological zealotry and hubris.

Speaker Paul Ryan

Ryan became House speaker on Oct. 29, 2015. In an op-ed column published that day in another newspaper, I warned of the coming catastrophe: “He could have turned the tables on the House Freedom Caucus ... . Instead Ryan has trapped himself. ... Ryan blundered badly, sold himself short, and has set the stage for his own demise as speaker.”

Last week, Ryan’s Freedom Caucus chickens came home to roost.

But Ryan’s blunder goes way beyond not being able to bring the Freedom Caucus to heel. His bill was stillborn. Among its many flaws, the fatal ones were those that would take health insurance away from 24 million Americans and give the wealthy an enormous tax break. No competent policy wonk or congressional leader could ever expect such a proposal to pass in the House.

Although Ryan was correct in his postmortem on the failed bill by bleating that “governing is hard,” he missed the point. Governing isn’t possible when stupidity of this magnitude is at the center of one’s legislation.

Rep Mark Meadows

There are about three dozen members of the Freedom Caucus, all uncompromisingly rigid conservative Republicans. They exercise outsized power over all House Republicans by sticking together and thus denying the GOP the ability to move legislation when, as is too frequently the case, the caucus’ allies are all the Democrats.

This was the case with the health care bill and will likely be the case with much of the rest of Trump’s forthcoming legislative agenda. Think of members of the Freedom Caucus for what they really are and don’t realize: a front organization for Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats.

The caucus humbled and destroyed former Speaker John Boehner. Now they have emasculated Ryan. But to what end? Their uncompromising rigidity has rescued Obamacare.

The more House Freedom Caucus Chairman Meadows forced the bill to the right, the more mainstream Republicans jumped ship. If Meadows’ intention was to kill the bill, humiliate the speaker and save Obamacare, his strategy was as brilliant as it was destructive. That’s madness.

President Trump

The president promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. He failed. The tortured history of health care reform makes it starkly clear that it’s the third rail of domestic politics. Even a neophyte like Trump should have known this.

He should have led with something else, anything else. And he should have told Ryan not to talk to him about health care until he had a bill that enough Democrats would support so they would succeed on a bipartisan basis and not have to worry about the Freedom Caucus crazies. Such an accord would have been possible because Obamacare is imploding, and that’s sufficient motivation for Democrats to support a bipartisan effort to repair it.

Trump didn’t and thus revealed himself as the apprentice, not the deal-maker. Even worse, last week’s events underscore that Trump is the puppet of those who disembark from Clarabell (Reince) Priebus’ clown car that pulls up to the White House each day and from which the president’s pathetic White House staff tumbles out.

There may be a tiny silver lining in this fiasco. Perhaps Trump will realize the only way to fix health care is to call Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and open a genuinely bipartisan dialogue. That is, after all, how Washington is supposed to work!

Since these three blind mice don’t have tails, were I the butcher’s wife with a carving knife, I’d find something else of theirs to cut off

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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