April 16, 2018--Ann Coulter & Me

Tell me I'm hallucinating. 

I woke up Saturday morning to the news that overnight we had bombed a number of chemical weapons sites in Syria. Putting aside for the moment how I feel about that, I thought I heard that Ann Coulter, as well as numerous right-wingers, who I assumed, as hawks, would reflexively call for tough action wherever and whenever, staunchly opposed President Trump's decision to attack military assets of the Assad regime.

I woke up in a hurray and sure enough, with the exception of dead-ender Sean Hannity, pretty much all the talk-radio bloviators, conspiracy theorists, and Fox News hosts and guests were ranting about how Trump violated his campaign pledge to bring all troops home from overseas misadventures, especially those that were involved in "nation building." They reminded Trump about this, since they know he was watching and listening, citing our failed involvements in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region.  

The Hill reported that Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham both claimed that Friday night's attack was inconsistent with what Trump said during the campaign and that it could be "risky" for us, considering the country's experience with the Iraq War.

Well-named Michael Savage, host of the radio show, Savage Nation, tweeted--

"We lost. War machine bombs Syria. No evidence Assad did it. Sad warmongers hijacking our nation."

Warmongers, I assume, including Trump.

Ann Coulter showed her opposition to the missile strike by retweeting postings by other conservatives who condemned the move, citing Trump's past tweets in which he cautioned about military action in Syria.

Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, broke down in tears on his  talk show when grossly gasping out his opposition to the missile strikes. He said-- 

"If he [Trump] had been a piece of crap from the beginning, it wouldn't be so bad. We've made so many sacrifices [he did not list them] and now he's crapping all over us. It makes me sick."

Best of all, alt-right conspiracy theorist and social media personality, Mike Cernovich, on his men's empowerment website, Danger & Play, posted--

"At least I won't feel bad when he gets impeached."

About that, we agree. As I do with Ann Coulter. 

That is, unless I was hallucinating.

March 9, 2018--My 3,333rd Blog Posting: Suicide Is Painless

The one thing thus far missing from the Trump Show is a murder or suicide. 

In regard to that he's not keeping up with the Clintons who, according to the conspiracy-minded, as early as their first year in the White House, already had a few.

Vince Foster comes to mind.

He was a colleague of Hillary's in the Rose law firm in Little Rock and her suspected lover. He followed the Clintons to Washington and during the first six months of Bill's presidency served in the administration as deputy White House counsel.

One day, after not showing up for work, Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park, shot in the head. 

Many on the lunatic fringe claimed that the Clintons murdered him, though five separate investigations found that Foster, unhappy in Washington, had grown despondent and killed himself. 

For years afterward, Clinton haters did not accept that verdict, including Jerry Falwell, who, through the Arkansas Project, alleged that there were two witnesses who had incontrovertible evidence that Foster was murdered by Bill and Hillary. However, before they could testify, Falwell claimed they were killed in two separate plane crashes.

On late-night talk radio, along with a continuing drumbeat of accusation about Hillary's role in the death of our embassy workers in Benghazi, one can still hear ranting about the murder of Vince Foster.

Thus far with Trump, we hear about Playboy centerfolds and porn stars, but nothing yet about suicides or murders. 

Give them time. He's been in office only 14 months.

As things close in tighter and tighter on Trump and his inner circles, I anticipate there will be a few. 

Would one be surprised if Trump's so-called "outside" lawyer, Michael Cohen, who has created a fiasco out of attempting to obscure and silence talk about Trump's longterm extra-marital affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, took a handful of pills? 

He is clearly one of those Trump enablers who has been with him for years, cleaning up his messes, who feels as if he would take a bullet for Trump. Barring that, killing himself would serve. 

And, of course, this would have the additional benefit of Sean Hannity blaming it on Hillary. 

Then there is the strange case of Sam Nunberg, another Trump hanger-on, who until recently was also available to take a bullet for the big guy and who became a household name earlier this week among cable news devotees as he made the rounds of talk shows, muttering semi-coherently about being subpoenaed by one of Robert Mueller's grand juries. On the Ari Melber show, for example, he was so agitated that Melber and his panelists suspended normal interviewing and tried to talk him down from the ledge. 

As of this morning Nunberg says he will cooperate with Mueller, his is not off the wagon, and though he's still alive, he's on my watch list. 

And, of course, if he does do himself in, Rush Limbaugh can always blame it on Obama.

Would anyone be surprised if Paul Manafort was found dead soon after imbibing some exotic Russian potion? Either administered by the same operative who poisoned the Russian defector and his daughter earlier this week in London (he could have had an open-jaw plane ticket from Moscow to London to Washington to Moscow) or the polonium-210 could have been self-administered by Manafort who at age 68 is looking at 80 years in federal prison. That would make him even older than my 107-year-old mother if he managed to serve his entire sentence.

What with his literal million-dollar custom wardrobe, which he paid for with Ukrainian money, living the rest of his life in a 50 square foot jail in an orange jumpsuit with no belt or shoelaces is not that GQ. 

But again, if Manafort is no more, his demise can be blamed on Huma Abedin or Susan Rice or Eric Holder. 

And, finally, there is Trump himself. From the current look of him it appears as if he is eating himself to death. A few more supersized Big Macs, with his clogged arteries, who knows. 

On the other hand he'll have no one to blame but himself.

December 27, 2017--Lock Them Up

I know in advance that I'm going to get into trouble for this one. Therefore let me approach it carefully--

Unless you were checked into a hotel yesterday you probably didn't see USA Today. Therefore you would have missed the lead story, "Justice Probe Looms As Possible Landmine for Mueller."

The probe is not the Mueller investigation but one underway concurrently, largely out of the headlines, being conducted by the Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz, to investigate the government's contentious handling of the Hillary Clinton email inquiry. 

Theoretically these two investigations could proceed on separate tracks. But daily they are being conflated. In part because Donald Trump, his lawyers, Trump flacks in Congress, and especially Fox News are using what the inspector general is turning up (the FBI investigation of Clinton's emails, it must be admitted, was botched) to beat up on the independence of the Mueller probe.

Most damaging to the credibility of the investigation of Trump and his inner circle is the case of two members of Mueller's staff--FBI senior counter-intelligence agent Peter Strzok and bureau lawyer Lisa Page, who worked for both investigations and, here's the looming problem, Strzok and Page are a couple and exchanged personal emails on government servers that disparaged President Trump, thus calling into question aspects of Mueller's emerging findings.

Fox folks like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and the preposterous hosts of Fox & Friends (Trump's favorite morning TV program) are all over this as have been the bloviating rightwing radio talkshow hosts. Some have been calling for Mueller to be taken out in handcuffs. "Lock him up."

In truth, this is troubling to the Mueller investigation as it calls its fair-mindedness into question. Even though Mueller himself is a Republican that does not inure him from semi-legitimate charges that (some of) the work of his team is tainted.

So, here's my thought--

Rather than resisting the investigation of Hillary Clinton and, more broadly the Clintons, Democrats and liberals should support it. 

There is enough credible concern about her tenure as secretary of state and of the Clinton Foundation that any independent-minded person could responsibly call for all of that to be looked into.

It also would be politically smart to want this investigation to proceed. It is hypocritical to call for a close examination of Trump and his people while calling the Clinton probe political persecution.

We need to keep an eye on the big picture--the investigation of Trump and ultimately holding him and his enablers responsible for a host of offenses. 

Just as Al Franken needed to be pressed to resign in order to, with a straight face, demand that Roy Moore in Alabama be held accountable for his offenses--even though they were not morally equivalent--Trump and Hillary Clinton should be held to the same standard.

September 8, 2017--Audiologist In Search of An Author (Part 2 of 2)

The evening, after talking with Dr. Schwartzberg earlier in the day, even without a glass of wine with dinner and a sliver of Klonopin at bedtime, I was soundly asleep by 9:30. I had as usual with ear buds plugged myself into my radio but was so deep in sleep that I didn't even hear how the Yankees fared against the Orioles.

But things soon resumed their puzzling course. 

Alone after breakfast, with Rona in the garden weeding and repairing damage to her perennial garden from the heavy rain of the day before, I again thought back over my experiences with hearing aids and how good they have been for me--how I feel more connected to the world--and also how they, with Dr. Schwartzberg leading the way, have led me into an unexpected and ongoing adventure.

As I sometimes do, late in the morning, I retrieved my hand-sized portable radio to check the local news and gather the late-night sports results. The signal was strong from New York City so I was able to pull in WFAN and learned that the Yankees had been rained out and would play a double header with the Orioles and that it was looking as if at the U.S. Open tennis tournament there was a strong likelihood that the final four women would all be Americans. I made a note to find out when the semifinals were scheduled to be sure not to miss them.

There is also a local Maine all-news radio station, WGAN, 560 on the dial, that I routinely check in with for the latest weather news. I turned to it since I was feeling hurricane anxiety as I aways do this time of year. My nervousness, though, was not unfounded as Texas had already been battered by Hurricane Harvey and Irma was bearing down on South Florida. 

Unable to control my fears I began to obsess about where Irma might turn after making landfall in the southeast and what would become of Jose, roaring across the Caribbean right behind Irma. Was the Gulf of Maine in any way a possible place where either would make initial or secondary landfall? Our rickety, 90-year-old cottage is not more than twenty yards from the Gulf. Thankfully, Rona recently renewed our flood insurance. But insurance doesn't assure peace of mind. I was anything but feeling peaceful.

I caught myself at this--getting all riled up well in advance of when it might be appropriate to think about boarding up the windows and retreating inland to avoid the worst of one storm or another. Or, worse, both.

I thought I need to stop all this worrying. I need to overcome my addiction--because that's what it is--to news and talk radio. Sports I can handle, but not all the other breaking and dire news. I found myself again fretting about my dependence on news radio, and the print and TV variety as well, as if they offer the kind of distraction for me that I am seeking. In fact, they offer the opposite. Their relentless and repetitive reporting for me make things worse.

Agitated as I was, listening to news about North Korea on WCBS--880, also out of New York City, that broadcasts news, sports, and weather 24 hours a day, the signal, which had been strong suddenly went dead. Not unusual considering the distance and the rapidly rising sun affecting the atmosphere, I switched quickly to 1010AM where WINS Radio, which also covers the news 24/7, was also in the middle of a report about China and North Korea. After not more than a minute or two, the station too went silent.

Again, this was not entirely a surprise--the very same thing over the years had happened--so I ventured again to WGAM, Portland Maine's all-news station. They focus on local news, mainly drownings, boat accidents, fires, and occasional fatal accidents and murders. The usual mix of bad news. So it is not my go-to source for news unless I want the latest local weather forecast.

But, for the first time in my experience, though the signal emanates from less than 100 miles away, I lost that signal as well.

Maybe I need new batteries, I thought, and so I popped two double-As into the battery compartment. But still there was nothing from WGAN, 1010, or WCBS.

I couldn't find any news at all. Could it be that the North Koreans had hacked into our broadcast system? In my agitated state even that seemed possible.

Alone, shaken, and shaking I let the radio slip from my hands and collapsed back into my pillow.

I really need to do something about my dependence on the news media, I thought. As I age, my inability to handle what is now routinely reported is not being offset by being so wired up. It is not working to shield me from my anxieties. Again, I was coming to conclude that this dependence was only making matters worse. I needed other forms of escape. I needed . . .

As these thoughts were crystalizing, from my radio, dialed to what I was sure was still one of my news stations, I faintly heard music. Classical music. Chamber music. Bach I was certain. From his Unaccompanied Cello Suites. Among my favorites.

From WINS? From WGAM? Impossible! But when I checked the dial I saw that I was in fact tuned to WCBS, my first choice of all-news stations.

Quaking, I in turn checked the other two news stations and, incredible as it may seem, both also were broadcasting Bach! All three the same Suite!

Frantic, I thought of John Allan. He's about the most knowledgeable person I know. About virtually everything. He is also understanding and empathetic. If I called him to ask what he thought was happening and what he would recommend I do, I felt certain he would take me seriously, not judge or make fun of me, and would undoubtedly have any number of sound insights about what might be going on as well how I might think about what was happening and what to do.

So, I called, told him what I had been experiencing, and asked if he would try his radio to see what he might discover and since he, I was certain, would have similar experiences to mine, it would help calm and assure me that stranger things have happened. That nothing untoward was going on. North Korea was not engaged in cyberwarfare with us and that the loss of normal radio signals was simply a temporary technological aberration.

But all three news stations on John's radio were broadcasting normally. My radio alone was affected.

I was shattered. Sensing that, John said, "Look, you've been under a lot of stress lately. Family issues. Some heath scares. Exhaustion. You told me you haven't been sleeping. That you've been up all night listening to the radio. Maybe . . ."

"Yeah, maybe I'm going crazy. That's one kind of maybe."

"First," John unflappable said, "take a deep breath and perhaps take one of those pills of yours. Klono something  And then why not call Dr. Schwartzberg, your audiologist? He knows a lot about broadcast signals. After all, hearing aids are kind of like radio stations. They take in and then in a sense broadcast sounds to listeners. In this case to you. I of course don't literally mean they are radio stations, but they do have things in common with them. Hearing aids of course don't broadcast radio shows, but rather they transmit sounds from around where you are at any given time. In the house, or a car, and even the sounds in the diner. But, I think . . ."

"As usual, brilliant!" I said, feeling hopeful, "I'm hanging up and will call Schwartzberg right now. It's about the time he takes a brief break for lunch. I'm sure he'll answer the phone."

And he did on the second ring.

"Am I bothering you?" I asked, "I know at most you have only a minute so if OK, can I run something by you?" I didn't give him a chance to say no, I needed help, and thus raced ahead.

Breathlessly, I told him what had been going on and what John said about hearing aids being like radio stations--at that he chuckled--and therefore there's nothing for me to be concerned about. It's just that I haven't been sleeping and as a result I'm exhausted and susceptible to . . .

"You need to slow down," Gary said, in his calmest doctor voice, "You're overwrought. Even in danger of going over the edge. I mean, I don't want to unduly frighten you or make you feel even more anxious than you are, but as your doctor and friend I urge you to back off. Stop reading about politics, stop watching the Weather Channel, stop staying up all night for the latest news from Pyongyang or Kim Yong-un. There's nothing you can do about any of this. If I were you, rather than tuning in to talk radio in the middle of the night I would look for stations that broadcast music. Not rock and roll but something classical. Or, get yourself an iPod and load it up with Bach or . . ."

"Sorry to cut you off," I said, "But did you just say something about Bach? Johann Sebastian Bach?"

"I did," Gary said.

"I hadn't mentioned him, right? About that I'm not crazy, right?" I was screaming.

"That's right. You didn't . . ."

"And so, it's just a coincidence that you referred to Bach? Any particular work of his you think I should be listening to?" He didn't respond. "Like maybe some of his pieces for solo instruments? For violin? Especially for cello?" I was taunting him.

Not dealing with that directly, he said, "That's my best advice. You need to have different sounds in your head. I'm an audiologist. What do you expect me to say? Go to the gym? Walk along the water? Read a trashy novel? I'm not principally about that. I'm about sound. About hearing sound as naturally as possible. And about how certain kinds of sounds can cause alarm, or anxiety, or contribute to serenity and peace of mind. And so . . ."

*   *   *

I took his advice and spent the rest of the day listening to Bach on any one of my three all-news radio stations. And then, later that night, where on the dial the old WINS would have been, the sounds I heard through the night were of the woodlands coming alive as dawn approached.

I slept like a baby.

Pablo Casals

July 12, 2107--Smoking Cannon

Some wag said, "It's not a smoking gun, it's a smoking cannon."

He was talking, of course, about the most recent bombshell about Donald Junior's dealings with the Russians. His pathetic attempt to give his daddy a present--the presidency.

Present delivered, but at what an ultimate cost.

Anyone with the last name Trump (or Kushner) needs more than a squadron of lawyers--he needs medication and a get-out-of-jail-free-card.

I'm not sure any of that will help.

Yesterday, when Little Donny was forced to release his e-mail stream about the meeting in June at the Trump Tower, no less, regarding a deal to secure Russian help in getting "dirt" about Hillary ("I love it!" Junior chirped), as of yesterday, a week short of the six-month anniversary of the Trump presidency, was the official beginning of the end of the Don's reign.

The Don is not an inappropriate moniker for him as Trump is more the boss of a political crime family than a credible commander in chief.

What to them is most worrisome (and if you have been following my scribbling on the subject I have said this many times) is the drip, drip, drip fear. In this case that Paul Manafort, who at the time of the meeting was still Trump's campaign manager, Manafort, the playmaker in the dirty dealmaking, who was at the meeting and I'm sure others equally damaging which will soon come to the light of day, will throw Donald Junior and Jared under the bus rather than spend the rest of his adult life in the slammer, while the two boys, tempted like Oedipus to blow the whistle and worse on their father/father-in-law, will have to suck it up and get ready for incarceration.

Unless Daddy pardons them, which I predict he will do within a year as he moves toward resigning.

To see how this is playing in TrumpLand I spent a lot of time last night, late last night, tuned in to talk radio, particularly Red Eye Radio, where the two hosts did their best to chuckle their way through the damning news, making as light of it as possible. To laugh it off, it seemed, was their idea of the best way to trivialize it and make it go away.

But since even they knew that wouldn't work, they turned to the Rush Limbaugh talking-points-of-the-day memo--if all else fails, blame Hillary.

So, I heard a lot again about her server, her e-mails, her own Russian connection (remember the uranium business?), and of course, the chart-topper, Benghazi. Resurrecting Benghazi more than anything else tells you how desperate they are.

As I said, drip, drip, drip.

December 13, 2016--Heap of Trouble

There's more than a month to go before Donald Trump assumes the presidency (though he jump-started his reign by sucking up all the oxygen at Saturday's Army-Navy football game) and already the Democratic field for 2020 is getting crowded.

At least in the eyes of people calling in to late-night radio talk shows.

Here's what I've been hearing--

The front runner for the nomination is Elizabeth Warren. Her closest challenger is former Newark mayor and current New Jersey senator Cory Booker. Lurking is New York governor Andrew Cuomo and of course Bernie is running around the country in quasi-campaign mode--again not showing up for his $174,000 per senatorial taxpayer-funded job, which alone puts him in the top 5 percent of earners. And then there's Joe Biden making noises that he is not ruling out yet one more run at the brass ring.

Just what we need to take the White House back from Donald Trump--two white guys who in 2020 will be nearly 80 years old, one a socialist, a Stanford-Yale-educated former mayor who in seven years as mayor accomplished almost nothing, and a Harvard professor who misrepresented herself as partly Native American so she could get a scholarship set aside for actual American Indians. Then there is Cuomo whose closest aides are likely to wind up in jail soon for bribery and bid-rigging and as part of a plea-bargaining deal could bring the governor down in tandem to what is happening just across the Hudson to fellow governor Chris Christie.

Late night-talk show folks refer to Cuomo as "a heap of trouble." And they're being kind.

These aspirants share one thing in common--a disdainful style of the sort that got Hillary Clinton in trouble with working people all across the middle of the country.

The Democratic Party is tearing itself apart after losing the presidency to someone with orange hair who lives in a gold-plated New York City condo triplex surrounded by buildings literally bearing his name.

They seem to think they had the "wrong message," while the real problem is the unspoken contempt they showed for average people. People with less education and inferior genetics. Ironically, while expressing concern about the plight of middle-of-the-country Americans they more fundamentally believe in a form of Social Darwinism (yes they do, as another mark of superiority, believe in Evolution) in which the meritocratically blessed advance while everyone else--the less fortunate--lag behind. Scatter food stamps for them, they say, and that will take care of the inequality problem. Anything other than looking within themselves in search of their own forms of narcissism and how that and the role they have been playing props up and helps rationalize the system.

Heap of trouble, indeed. And I'm not talking just about Andrew Cuomo.

Andrew Cuomo

October 14, 2015--Talk Radio

I'm a notoriously poor sleeper.

I manage to fall asleep without trouble, but it's the staying asleep that's the problem.

I have found that one thing that interrupts my early morning obsessing and allows me to resume sleeping is listening to overnight talk radio. The shows tend to be so repetitive and inane that they literally bore me to unconsciousness.

Sports talk of the sort found on WFAN, where callers and hosts obsessively fret about the Jets, Giants, and Knicks gets me slumbering in less than half an hour.

And then there are the political shows. All right wing and full of hate (mostly directed toward Barack Obama) and paranoia (most fears and conspiracies attributed to Obama) and so predictable and repetitive that they too soon lull me back to dreamland.

Then there is Coast to Coast, a nationally syndicated show that is devoted to the paranormal. Guests and callers share stories about flying saucers and how they were abducted and poked in all their bodily cavities by Martians before being returned to Earth. The good news--no one on these shows seem much interested in the president. Though occasionally he is thought to be an alien.

Usually, if I manage to acquire a strong C to C signal, I'm snoring again in less than 15 minutes. There are just so many trips to Venus I can handle even when staring fretfully at the 3:00 a.m. ceiling.

It is interesting that with two exceptions, political talk radio is all so stridently conservative. The two exceptions are the Alan Colmes and Al Sharpton shows. The former has 1.75 million listeners while the Reverend typically attracts 1.0 million.

Compare this with the king of talk, Russ Limbaugh, who has 13.25 million followers; the prince of paranoia, Sean Hannity with 12.5 million; delusional Glenn Beck and Mark Levin with 7.0 million each; and the Michael Savage show that pitches to 5.25 mad-as-hell insomniacs.

All the latter specialize in savaging (pun intended) liberals and especially Obama, who, frequently, is thought to be the Antichrist or at the very least a Kenyan Muslim. Nothing he is doing or did in the past is without fault. The goal is to overturn everything he accomplished, especially Obamacare, and even to delegitimatize him. Yes, he was elected two times with majorities, but if he can be proven to be foreign born or the literal Devil, they can make him go away. It would be as if he never existed.

To give their assault on Obama and other liberals the patina of credibility, these hosts and their callers frequently make things up.

Since they cannot marshall facts to support most of their allegations and grievances, they create them, disproving Daniel Patrick Moynahan's oft-quoted assertion that we are entitled to our opinions but not our own facts.

One small example--On the well-named Red Eye Radio program the other night--a widely syndicated show pitched to truck drivers--they were ranting about Obama's intention to ignore the Second Amendment and to begin to confiscate everyone's guns. Even hunting rifles. That he was using the most recent campus slaughter in southern Utah as a "political opportunity" to justify his fascistic agenda.

"If he's in favor of more gun control," one of the hosts shouted, "why doesn't he come forward with detailed proposals? He talks in generalities but offers no specifics."

His cohost and a procession of folks called in agree.

In fact, three years ago, after the murders at the Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut, Obama proposed a full program of legislation to limit the size of ammunition magazines for automatic weapons, increased requirements for those who sell semi-automatic assault rifles at gun shows, and the like.

I thought, why aren't any people calling in to present these facts? Where are the liberals who care about these issues? Why are they, we, so passive when faced with the phenomenon of right-wing talk radio?

If we can't sustain shows that present a progressive perspective (including on television--MSNBC failed while Fox News is thriving) why not at least organize a campaign to flood the airwaves with callers who will take on the lies and vitriol of the Glenn Becks, Michael Savages, and Mark Levins?

Liberals recognize the influence and power of these shows on political life and their ability to articulate a vision for the extreme right. A segment of the activist population that is more and more influencing and even shaping the Republican agenda.

Why have we ceded this on-air ground to the untra-conservatives? Even if these shows' producers began to screen out liberal callers, that in itself would make quite a story when publicly exposed.

It is curious that progressives spend passive time tuning in to the Jon Stewarts, Steven Colberts, and Bill Mahers, but are not motivated enough to get up off the couch to take on the calumnies of Limbaugh and Hannity.

Sorry, but if we don't get mobilized, we will get what we deserve.