November 23, 2016--Trump Tacking

I have many friends who have already given up on the Trump presidency even though there are nearly two whole months to go before he actually becomes president.

I share their concern but haven't as yet given up on him. Like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I remain skeptical but am attempting to keep an open mind.

I have also tried to persuade these friends to do likewise.

But in general with that I am getting nowhere. They remain furious and even resentful about his election and what they have concluded he is about. Some acknowledge that the situation is literally making them physically sick. I've even had a few share their list of gastric and neurological symptoms.

Trying to be helpful, I've suggested we wait to see what he actually does. Will he choose Rudy or Mitt to be secretary of state? Perhaps that will be a litmus test for where he is and where he is headed.

It is a little strange, I admit, to be hanging my hopes on Mitt Romney. But so it goes.

Here, though, are a few things to keep in mind when deciding if it is or isn't time to give up on Trump.

As I write this--late afternoon Tuesday--this is what was being heard today from Donald Trump and his spokespeople--

He voluntarily acknowledged that his foundation has been involved in "self-dealing," including inappropriately spending foundation money to pay for an enormous portrait of himself. This fessing up likely to effectively end the investigation of the way it operates.

At his meeting with New York Times reporters and executives, Trump acknowledged that he is concluding that humans are contributing to global warming and that he will "take a look" at the Paris climate accords.

He announced that he will not call for further investigations of either Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server or the operations of the Clinton Foundation. "They have gone through enough," he declared. It was also learned that he has spoken further with Barack Obama about transition and policy matters.

And, influenced by his apparent pick to run the Pentagon, General "Mad Dog" Mattis, he expressed doubt about "the value of torturing terrorists."

In a video tape, in which he spoke about his agenda for the first 100 days, Trump did not mention Obamacare, the Wall, or immigration.

And he "disavowed" support from the alt-right white supremacists, expressing regret that he in any way has contributed to their "energizing."

Then, toward the end of the afternoon, before heading to Florida for Thanksgiving, word leaked that Mitt Romany was likely to be his choice for secretary of state.

Considering what else is at issue, this is not enough to change most of my friends' minds. But I would argue that it is a promising start.

November 1, 2016--Ode to J. Edgar

With the current flap about FBI director James Comey making an even bigger mess of the already-messiest presidential election in history, reading recently about the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, during this politically perverse year I've been asking where is J. Edgar when we need him?

Hoover was all the terrible things you know about him and then some. And I'm not talking about his penchant for black sheath dresses and extra-high heels. By today's standards that makes him more interesting and even amusing.

What I am missing in Hoover is his ability to get things done and to keep certain kinds of high-level matters where they belong--under control and out of the public eye.

For example, he had the goods on John F. Kennedy both before and after he assumed the presidency. He told brother Bobby, who was JFK's Attorney General, that he, Hoover, would keep the lid on Kennedy's womanizing (now there's a word for you), philandering that makes Bill Clinton seem celibate, as long as Kennedy let him remain FBI director and cooled his fooling around with Mafia mistresses. In other words, Hoover was devoted to his own prerogatives and to keeping things running on a version of even keel.

Comey, in contrast, whatever the email denouement, is nothing if not totally disruptive.

When in July he issued his report on the first swatch of Hillary emails, finding that she had been "extremely careless" but not indictable, Democrats raced to praise him while Republicans saw a pro-Hillary conspiracy involving Comey, attorney general Roberta Lynch, and Bill Clinton who, now famously, had a tarmac tete-a-tete with Lynch during which he allegedly promised her that she could continue as AG after Hillary is elected if she squelched the FBI probe.

And now, when on Friday Comey sent his incoherent letter to the congressional committee investigating Clinton's emails, just 10 days before Election Day, Democrats are excoriating him (Harry Reid says he may have committed a crime) for supposedly sandbagging Hillary.

And though Comey is a registered Republican and was an appointee of George W. Bush's, the same Republicans (i.e. Donald Trump) who lambasted him for his initial findings, this time around are praising him for going rogue with the now renewed investigation.

About this resumed scrutiny, here is one paranoid scenario about what is unfolding.

(Note--during this literally psychotic election season nothing one might imagine happening is paranoid since the craziest behaviors have become the norm--at least once of day in Trump's case.)

Though he is a Republican, Comey is of the old school of Republicans--a rare moderate--and thus he despises Donald Trump and wants to see him soundly defeated.

So he issues this seemingly inappropriate letter even before anyone in his office has looked at any of the emails recently found on Anthony Weiner's laptop (talk about psychotic) and then, after being massacred in the mainstream media, appears to backpedal, saying that FBI agents will fast track an analysis of these emails and report to the public perhaps even before Election Day if there are (or aren't) any emails that haven't been seen before that might convince him that Clinton is indictable.

The fact that nothing remotely like this has ever happened in all of American history aside, we are where are and, for sanity's sake, here's what might really be going on--

• Agents using metadata search methods will quickly review the Weiner emails and Comey will report by the end of this week, three days before the election, that there is nothing new and Hillary is finally and fully in the clear.
• The voting public goes crazy. 
• The Trump people cry foul and claim this shows once again that the election is rigged.
• The Hillary people are ecstatic and rush to the polls in record numbers.
• She wins in both a popular vote and Electoral vote landslide--52-45% in the vote count and 450-90 in Electoral votes.
• Comey sees the results he wants and goes down as a footnote to history.
• Two years from now, when his FBI job ends, Comey secures a $5.0 million advance to write his memoirs. He makes the rounds of all the talkshows. This is the last time he is ever heard from.
• Hillary doesn't take Huma Abedin with her to the White House. She hires a replacement "body woman." So Huma, after finally dumping Weiner, joins CNN as a political commentator. On the side, she resumes her no-show job at the Clinton Foundation.
• Anthony Weiner is convicted of sexting a minor and gets 3-5 in the slammer.
• And, yes, the Trump disaffiliates do not march on Washington with pitchforks and torches. They retreat to their finished basements more devoted than ever to six-packs of Bud.

August 15, 2016--No Daylight

With Donald Trump searching desperately to remain in the media spotlight and as a result of that and his proclivities descending deeper and deeper into political trouble; with the drip, drip, drip of Republican defections (Maine Senator Susan Collins is the most recent GOP leader to announce that she will not vote for Trump); with his candidacy in free fall and Hillary Clinton opening up an unprecedented 10-or-more-point lead, it is time to call for expanded press scrutiny of Clinton to learn more (if that's possible) about her character and fitness to be president, since it seems virtually certain now that she will in November be elected to serve as the United States' 45th chief executive--for these reasons it is imperative that media resources such as the New York Times pause in their daily assault on everything Trump and turn the same investigative energy to things Clinton.

Case in point the blasé way in which the Times has been dealing with the dump of thousands of new Hillary Clinton emails which this time move beyond exposing the "extremely careless," at best quasi-legal way in which she used her personal email account and server to conduct top secret State Department business, to now peeling back the veil that has obscured the ways in which she abandoned her pledge to President Obama in 2009 to sever all ties to the work (read, raising up to $3.0 billion) of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and Global Initiative while serving as his Secretary of State.

The Clinton Times story, "New Questions About Overlap Between Clinton State Dept. and Charity" gets buried on page A10 while stories about Trump "topping out" among registered Republican voters or how his "camp is falling to tame his tongue" becomes the lead story on the front page.

His, political process stories; hers, about fitness to assume the presidency. Not by any measure of equal consequence.

The Clinton story is not new. It has rattled around for years.

Here's how it appears things worked while she was Secretary of State--major donors to the Clinton "charity" were given expedited access to State Department officials when they had matters of personal advantage to bring to the attention of the right people or received favorable fast-tracked decisions and exemptions if one of Clinton's deputies winked in the right direction.

These deputies included Cheryl Mills and the ubiquitous Huma Abedin, both of whom somehow managed to be on both the Clinton Foundation and State Department payrolls. Or perhaps as Mills claims, in one assignment or another, they did Clinton bidding as "volunteers." At least, so they say.

The conservative but credible advocacy group, Judicial Watch, through the Freedom of Information Act, secured this latter cache of emails which, they demonstrated by quoting, reveal that between the State Department and the foundation, "there was no daylight."

As texts of the emails attest, JW got that right. And now it is passed time for the New York Times to also get things right.

April 24, 2016--Someone Other than Hillary

The about-to-be-published Clinton Cash, Peter Schweizer's critical examination of the nexus between the cash pouring into the Clinton Foundation; their out-of-sight speakers fees; and, the politically most damaging allegation--that by contributing to the foundation big donors could not only "buy" access to Bill and Hillary but could also influence her official behavior when secretary of state, what is revealed in the book may wind up destroying her campaign for the presidency.

As my grandmother used to say, with yesterday's detailed disclosure in the New York Times that major Canadian donors to the foundation were able, with Hillary's support, to sell their uranium company to Russia even though that gave them control of 20 percent of America's access to enriched uranium, as she would say, "Something about this stinks to the high heavens."

Hillary may still manage to win the nomination (more about this in a moment) but with detractors such as the Koch Brothers willing to spend many hundreds of millions to tear her down and support their current favorite, Scott Walker, she may be seriously vulnerable.

Vulnerable because many of the allegations may be true, vulnerable because even if only half-true they support the narrative that the Clintons play by their own rules, are secretive about things that the public has a right to know, and that they have only self-interest at heart while posing as public servants and concerned citizens of the world.

Recall, when leaving the White House after eight years, they were "caught" loading moving vans with furniture that belonged to the American people. It was a metaphor at the time about what they at essence were. And perhaps continue to be.

Clinton Cash is no Whitewater (an insignificant though phony Arkansas real estate deal) or cattle-futures scandal (where Hillary netted $100,000 with a $1,000 "investment"). It's not Travelgate (where the Clintons purged the White House travel office staff so they could install cronies in the vacant jobs). It is not even Benghazi or e-mail-gate. It may turn out to be much more serious than any or all of these small tempests. What is apparently about to be revealed in the Schweizer book goes to the heart of the Clinton problem and may have enough smoking guns to bring her down.

So rather than Democrats waiting around to see where all this may lead, isn't it time for someone to step forward to challenge her for the nomination? Someone like a Eugene McCarthy who challenged Lyndon Johnson for the 1968 nomination. And ultimately drew Bobby Kennedy into the race. For Democrats then, they offered an alternative to LBJ who otherwise would have secured the nomination without a struggle, without any opposition, and then would have gone on to be defeated because of the public's disenchantment and lack of support for his Vietnam policies.

Democrats not ready for Hillary need a place to register their dissent from yet another Clinton, especially a Clinton who could realistically be defeated by Scott Walker or Jeb Bush.

Those disaffiliated Democrats include me. My problem, our problem is as always the who. Joe Biden? A certain loser. Elizabeth Warren? Plausible but timid. Jim Webb? Who's he? Andrew Cuomo? No chance. Bernie Sanders? Dream on.

Get the point? That's why, help us, I continue to predict Walker in 2016.