September 5, 2018--Boooooring

Mika got it right yesterday morning.

I dosed off Morning Joe for a couple of weeks, needing respite from all-Trump-all-the-time, but with the onset of the new season (the "year" starts up again the day after Labor Day) I felt the atavistic compulsion to reconnect to what is going on. Including trolling for subjects to write about that do not have anything to do with Trump.

Lots of luck with that I realized on Tuesday as early as five-after-six, with the first five minutes of MJ devoted to Joe and Willie exchanging barbs about the crumbling fate of the Yankees and the Red Sox's historic run.

Just two minutes into their joshing you could see Mika cringing. Up to their old schtick. If looks could wound her look would draw blood.

"Can we get on with things?" exasperated, she said. They ignored her. "There's lots going on and we need to talk about that."

"Yes, John McCain. His funeral," Joe said without enthusiasm, still more interested in baseball gossip.

"It's over," Mika said, cryptically.

"Not until it's over," Joe said, he thought slyly, quoting Yogi Berra, winking at Wille, with baseball still more on his mind than McCain.

"Not the funeral, but the presidency."

"Over?" Joe said, paying attention to his cohost and fiancée for a rare moment. 

"This show is so boring," she said. 

I grew excited, expecting a family spat. Mika pops off a few times a year and videos of her meltdowns usually go viral. I thought--what an inventive way for her to launch the year. Trashing her own show.

Having the floor she pressed on. "Nothing is new. In fact, nothing can be new. Everything is predictable. We know exactly what he is going to say. Or tweet. His whole presidency depends on a steady stream of surprises. In there own way, excitements. Engaging outrages. He's the producer of his own reality TV presidency and it's about to be cancelled."

"You know, Mika's half right," one of their panelists, off camera, said. You could sense he was worried that the "half right" could be misinterpreted, come off as patronizing. Which it did. Though smacking of enough truth that she and the others let it go. She was happy just being paid attention to.

As a result there was no more sports talk. They were off and running, making being boring interesting. 

"If his people start to get bored with him," Sam Stein of the Daily Beast said, "he's cooked. Don't mishear me, they believe him, more important they believe in him. They are also there for the show. If you live in some, forgive me, godforsaken place like Fargo, North Dakota, where the most exciting thing is the Charley Pride concert, it doesn't get any better than going to one of his rallies after standing in line for hours to get a seat for his political standup spritz. But before we get giddy about this, at the Fargo rally Trump people claimed 6,000 turned out, though the local press had the number much less than that."

"Like the ongoing numbers game about the size of the crowd at his inauguration," MSNBC's Kasie Hunt chimed in.

"One thing Trump knows for certain," this from WAPO columnist and editor Eugene Robinson, "Is how to pay attention to ratings. The Apprentice didn't go off the air because Trump was running for president but because the ratings were heading south. If the ratings and demographics had continued to be strong NBC would probably still have it on the air. I don't believe the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution forbids that. Making money from a TV show. Look, he's still getting away with making a killing from his hotels and resorts. I'm not hearing about anyone giving up their Mar-a-Lago membership or the Trump hotel in Washington offering weekend discounts."

Willie said, "There are reports that attendance at his rallies is declining. It's not such a hot ticket anymore. And more than a few who show up appear to filter out before his act is over."

"You're right," Joe jumped in,"politics is all about numbers. And enthusiasm. He could be slipping in both realms. If he is, as Mika said, it's all over."

"Well," Mika said, now all smiles, "at the beginning of being over."

Glancing at the clock, also smiling, Joe said, "We made it to six-thirty without being boring. I think we're off to a good start for the year."

December 4, 2017--Déjà Vu All Over Again

This Yogism rings true as the Mueller investigation closes in on the upper reaches of the Trump White House. 

To anyone old enough to remember the unraveling of the Watergate scandal more than 40 years ago, the recent defections from members of the Trump team will feel familiar---déjà vu all over again.

What eventually brought down the Nixon administration and led to the indictment or jailing of 40 of his associates was the squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, drip, drip, drip strategy. Just what we're seeing now.

In the case of Watergate, a smalltime player, former CIA agent James McCord, was caught with other burglars when breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex.

He was the first of the buglers to be convicted--on eight counts--and was facing many years of hard time in a federal prison. Just as he was to be sentenced, he informed the presiding judge that he and a story to tell. 

So a deal was stuck--McCord received a modest sentence in return for agreeing to blow the whistle on those above him in the Nixon administration hierarchy. Among them, White House counsel John Dean, who in turn made a deal to implicate those above him in the organization chart, also in return for a reduced sentence.

The special prosecutor continued to work his way up the food chain and many senior aides were successfully prosecuted. Nixon himself was listed as "an unindicted co-conspirator" and was forced to reign the presidency. And the rest was history.

Squeeze, squeeze, drip, drip.

Now we have exactly the same thing unfolding within the Trump administration.

First to be successfully squeezed was George Papadopoulos, a relatively minor player in the Trump campaign and transition. But someone the year before Trump listed as one of two of his "foreign policy advisors." Later, we know, disavowing him, Trump said Papadopoulos was so insignificant that he mainly remembers him as the intern who brought coffee to the principals. 

The other foreign policy "expert" Trump listed was the now-indicted, soon to be squeezed, Paul Manafort.

And a few days after that, Michael Flynn, a key advisor to Trump and his National Security Advisor for 24 days, stepped forward with the story he has to tell. That story, it is already being leaked, includes his assertion that, in regard to working with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton, he reported to and worked with son-in-law Jared Kushner. 

(Don't be surprised if it turns out that Lieutenant General Flynn tape recorded his calls with Kushner and who knows who else. He comes from a military intelligence background.)

If true, this would be incendiary because we already know who Jared reports to.

Then there is beloved daughter, Ivanka, who like her husband Jared, has also in recent months been relatively invisible. She and her family were not even in Florida with Trump and Melania during Thanksgiving.

With Flynn pleading guilty in large part to protect his chief of staff son from prosecution, with Jared and Ivanka and probably a Trump son or two in peril, it is getting to be Shakespearean. 

I'm thinking Lear. 

Trump already seems to be wandering around in a storm of his own devising. That appears to include stealth bombers right now moving closer to North Korea.

Even Trump was reported to say, "This is very, very, very bad."

I'd say, "It's very, very, very, very bad."

Michael Flynn & Michael Flynn Jr.

April 2, 2014--Kill the Umpire!

After a funky start last week that saw the L.A. Dodgers play two games with the Arizona Diamondbacks in Australia, yesterday was the full launch of the official baseball season. For me, a lifelong Yankee fan, this means the Bronx Bombers got off to a bad start against, losing to the Houston Astros 6 to 2.

In addition to a year-long celebration of Derek Jeter's last season (he got one hit and scored a run in the season opener), Major League Baseball is expanding its instant-replay rules. In recent years, because of a number of controversies about whether or not home runs were fair or foul, they instituted replays so umpires could get it right.

Not everyone was happy with any rule changes in America's most traditional sport, but since home runs are so consequential, umpires were allowed to use technology.

For this season, there are new, much more dramatic options available to umpires and, most debated, managers.

As in football and tennis, they are being given a number of challenges.

Up to the 6th inning, managers will have one challenge and then after that two more.

Umpires will still use replay for home runs but managers can challenge if a ball hit down the left-field line is fair or foul, if a runner is or isn't tagged out when running the base paths or attempting to steal, if a fielder catches a ball cleanly or traps it; on a bang-bang play at first base if a runner beats the throw or not; or if a hit qualifies as a ground-rule double.

Though this will reduce umpiring errors, it will slow down even more a game that routinely moves along at a languorous pace. It can take five minutes to check every camera angle to adjudicate an especially close call. Baseball is often referred to as a "game of inches." With replay it will become a game of centimeters. And if all six challenges are used they will eat up another half hour of game time.

Much more concerning than slowing the game down, this new-fangled approach (from this phrase alone you can see I belong in the traditionalist camp) will result in eliminating from the game any lingering controversies.

One of the best things about baseball has been that it permits controversies to fester, especially during the long off season when blown plays and bad calls are topics for endless discussion over coffee in the Hot Stove League.

Did Reggie Jackson intentionally move his hip in order to be hit by a throw in the 4th game of the1978 World Series, thereby breaking up a potential double play? If he did, he would have been automatically out. The umpired ruled otherwise. Probably incorrectly. And the Yanks went on to win. But who knows.

Did Ed Armbrister interfere with Carlton Fisk's throw to second base in the 2005 American League Championship Series? Who knows.

Was Jackie Robinson safe or out when attempting to steal home in the 1955 World Series? The umpire called him safe but to this day, nearly 60 years later, Yankee catcher Yogi Berra still claims Jackie was out. I saw the play on TV and though I was half-blinded by the snowy black-and-white picture think Yogi's right. But then again, who knows.

Isn't that the point? Who knows indeed.

For certain things getting it exactly right is important, even essential. In triple-bypass surgery, for example, you want things to be exactly right. But for close plays at first or home, not being certain reflects the reality of life itself, where so little is certain.

It is for this reason, before they automate everything, including the calling of balls and strikes (and there is the technology to do so), that baseball endures as sports' most metaphoric game.

Where, as in life, there's a role for stealing; in baseball's judicial system, a place for "judgement calls" and "appeal plays"; and a place for getting something for nothing--bases on balls come to mind. Also, for "errors" as well as bottom-of-the-ninth heroics.

And in a world ruled more and more by time where in nanoseconds one can earn or lose millions, isn't it still nice to have something important going on that doesn't depend on the rule of time?

Best of all, there are 161 games to go before the playoffs.