August 27, 2018--As He Lay Dying

A day or two before the end, as his old best friend, John McCain, lay dying, as we have seen Lindsey do before, he couldn't keep his hands off his new best friend, Donald J. Trump. 

Senator Lindsey Graham is such a suck up for hunky men that when he encounters one, or one pretending to be one, he seemingly can't control himself.

This time, with Trump, the gift he brought was to clear a path that would enable him to fire the Attorney General with minimal political dissent or outrage. This he gift-wrapped for Trump, the one man John McCain clearly despised. At least he could have waited until after the funeral. We know Trump won't show up, isn't welcome, and now I wonder about jilted-by-death Lindsey. Will he have the cajones to show his face at the service. 

This gift about when and how to dump Sessions was hand delivered by the same swooning Lindsey who only a few months ago said that if Trump fires Sessions there will be "holy hell to pay."

Late last week Graham noted that Sessions has clearly lost Trump's confidence (this is news?) and that he, Lindsey, a leader in the Senate, did not necessarily object to Trump replacing him after the midterm elections. 

Presumably the congressional elections will result in deep loses among Republicans and, Graham suggested, as presidents in the past have done, Trump should "reshuffle" his cabinet mainly to deflect blame for the election results from himself to his hapless underlings. 

And by reshuffling Graham means dumping a few cabinet officers, not just Sessions, so he won't stick out so much. It would appear to be more a house cleaning than retribution because Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation and refused to see his job as protecting Trump from his own worst proclivities.

I suppose this advice constitutes something other than what Lindsey considers hell to pay.

Think Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, and Barack Obama in 2010. All of whom reshuffled their cabinets after off-cycle election results.

And think how President Lyndon Johnson got around being pressured to make Bobby Kennedy his running mate in 1964. LBJ despised RFK even more than McCain hated Trump or Trump hates Sessions. 

He announced that his choice would not be from anyone serving in his cabinet (Bobby was still Attorney General) because there was so much work to do that he couldn't spare anyone's full-time attention. 

Everyone at the time knew what he was really doing--jettisoning Kennedy--and before long Johnson had become so politically toxic that he little choice but to withdrew from the 1986 race.

If only history could in this case repeat itself.

Rona has another theory about what Lindsey Graham is up to--

She thinks he is too smart and weaselly to give into his infatuation and is trying to trick Trump into not firing Sessions until after the midterms. He believes that Trump firing Sessions before November would so inflame voters that the Republicans would do even worse than is currently predicted.

Interesting. 

In that case let's hope Trump fires Sessions at the end of  October. Let that be the October Surprise. That would be better than bombing North Korea.

Then we could begin to speculate who Trump will attempt to appoint (I say "attempt" because Democratic senators will filibuster).

Top of the list could be Rudy or Chris Christie (remember him?). Or perhaps from Trump's world of reality TV--Judge Judy, Judge Jeanine, Judge Nepolitano, or Laura Ingraham who is a lawyer.

Perhaps most confirmable by the Senate is, why not, Lindsey Graham.

October 27, 2016--Wisdom from Robert Kennedy

As we are within the last two weeks of one of the nastiest, most divisive presidential elections in history, it is not too soon to think about what kind of nation will remain after the ballots are cast, counted, and a new president is selected.

The day Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, against the best advice of his aides who feared for his life, Robert Kennedy, seeking the nomination of his party, on the night of April 4, 1968, ventured into the flaming ghetto in Indianapolis and delivered these words. Words that almost equally could stand for a statement about our divided circumstances and point to a future of reconciliation.

I have added the italics.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black . . . you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization -- black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. 

But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times. 

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote: 

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of god.

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.