The High Road? Right.

Take the high road? Really?

That's what Mika and Morning Joe want us to do. They're disappointed about the raucous reception 45 got at the World Series game last night (10/28). Massive booing and shouts of "Lock him up!" got the two of them riled up.

Back to a John McEnroe moment: You cannot be serious.

Want us to treat him like a real president? Then let's wait for him to act like one.

Most recently: When the U.S. nails an ISIS leader and eliminates him, don't droll on about how wonderful you are. Don't describe his last moments of panic and fear, as if you actually know about them. Another set of lies.

Besides, a leader of a great country (or one that used to be great until he took over) doesn't do that. He doesn't need to. He should have, as usual, taken a cue from his predecessor, whose report and description of Osama bin Laden's death was understated, matter-of-fact, and completely free from any braggadocio or jolting or exaggerated (probably) details. I'm guessing that, as Obama himself noted, the families of those killed on 9/11 deserved to hear it and know that their loved ones' deaths had been answered with that of the planner of the attack. It doesn't bring back the ones who died that day, which would be a good reason why he left the bragging out of the report: It just didn't fit.

Trying to bring the country back together again will have nothing, and I do mean nothing, to do with rallying around the monster we have in the White House. Au contraire: It will mean that enough of us have decided to rally around decency, diplomacy, and determination to get ourselves back off the rails and on the right road. But first, righteous anger must be addressed.

To their credit, Mika and Morning Joe have used decent, civilized words to describe a very uncivilized president's commentaries about both them and others. I'm sure they want everyone else to do the same. But they are a slim minority indeed.

How they wish to forget his minions shouting "Lock her up!" about Hillary Clinton's e-mails, which after an incredible waste of time (three years!) and money have finally been determined to be about no big deal whatsoever. How they wish to forget his trashing of people of great dignity such as John McCain and Elijah Cummings, not to mention the Obamas, the quintessence of class, who have every right to lash back out at him and other irrational, non-sensical attacks but don't.

The rest of us can't reach that standard. We are way, way too far down the road to suggest that 45 not hear the same kinds of words he has used toward undeserving others. That ship has sailed long ago; it's as far as Magellan around the Cape of Good Hope by now. Besides, he has it coming. It's all been building for far too long.

What did 45 think was going to happen if he appeared in public? Was he really so full of himself that he believed that everybody would be filled with congratulatory fervor upon al-Baghdadi's demise? Did he really think that we all would believe that he was primarily responsible for it? Did he really think that we wouldn't discover that he'd been playing golf when it all went down?

Probably. So removed from reality is this awful person that he believes he can guide reality itself, not only to the 38 percent who have already caved into it, but a majority of the entire country. The time for that is passing.

And as Jennifer Warner put it in the New York Times, the massive booing was clear evidence that resistance to 45 is real, abiding, and formidable--not just the media that twists or Democrats who don't work hard. On the other hand, D.C. carried more than 90 percent of the popular vote for Clinton in 2016. All the more reason, though, that expecting anything but what he got was a pipe dream at best.

Maybe it was a jolt to Mika and Morning Joe to hear thousands of citizens gathered for another purpose to catch 45 trying to get away with another lie through action--as if he could pose as the Great Leader amidst an American tradition and wear that for a day or two, then lie about how much the crowd loved him. Maybe they thought it would be better for complete silence to register with him.

Yeah, that would work. Not.

It was refreshing, even bracing, to hear their collective disdain for our terrible president. I'm not sure I could put it into the category of inspirational, but it sounded damn good. Promising, in fact.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi keeps the impeachment train a-rollin'. The rules for proceedings will hit the House floor Thursday (10/31). 45 will need a whole lot more unexpected victories in a field of any kind to obscure the effects of the wrongs he has done. And we'll see whether members of Congress can hold themselves back as we approach the vital moment. I'm guessing they will exactly reflect the pent-up attitudes they saw at Nationals Park. It won't be pretty. Either.

Modify my feelings toward this name-calling, cruel, evil, nihilistic, empty blowhard? No. Hell, no. Lock him up. Someday I'll be more rational and measured, I promise.

I'll do the best I can, Mika and Joe. But not until we're past all this. And that may take a while. Until then, they will reap the whirlwind like they've never seen it.

Let's start with "human scum." May I interject?

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

They'll Try Anything. They Could Try This, Too: Very Risky Business

Jill Lepore is one of our great present-day historians. Her latest book, a one-volume history of the United States called These Truths, is a masterpiece, proving that great history can also be the basis of great writing.

Excellent historians also unearth things we haven't thought about thinking about. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, she wrote a succinct but quirky (because it is, no other word fits) early history of our first impeachment trials. The third such trial, of a Supreme Court justice named Samuel Chase, provided what we've come to expect from impeachment: A stretching of, and challenge to, the Constitution itself. By definition, impeachment means a Constitutional crisis because there's a general feeling that someone has overstepped his boundaries proscribed, or those we thought were proscribed, by it.

But like other impeachments, it also involved a questionable law passed by a shameless, pouting Congress. In 1798, amidst a squabble between the first two major political parties--Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, most commonly known as Republicans--the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by a Federalist-controlled Congress which had grown tired of Republican attacks on Federalist President John Adams, known for being quite sensitive to any criticism, and their support of the French in the spirit of their own revolution, bloody and counterproductive though it had become. The Sedition Act, in particular, made it unlawful to openly criticize the president, striking at the heart of the First Amendment, then just seven years old.

In those days, Supreme Court justices "rode circuit," or served as district court judges as well. Chase, a fierce defender of Adams, had enforced the Sedition Act against Republican newspaper printers (in those days, objective journalism was largely unheard of), in a exercise of an unfair, repressive law unfairly applied. The act expired the day before the next President, Thomas Jefferson, was inaugurated, but Adams, with a gaggle of last-minute, "midnight" appointments, had saddled Jefferson with a Supreme Court loaded with Federalists (Court-packing, you mean, between great former revolutionaries turned bitter enemies? Who'd-a thunk it? See--it goes back to the start of the republic. Politics, politics....). One of the first things Jefferson did was to send notice to House Republicans that he wanted Chase out of there. Impeach him! he said in so many words in a letter to House leaders.

But for what? "High crimes and misdemeanors" is, of course, the operative phrase by which the House can bring impeachment charges to the Senate. So what high crime or misdemeanor did Chase commit? Being a partisan hack?

Well, yes. This trial would be a nice, neat little way of counteracting one of the, if not the, landmark Supreme Court rulings of all time: Marbury v. Madison. Written by Federalist-appointed Chief Justice John Marshall (by Adams), it established that the Supreme Court has the authority to determine what the Constitution actually means as applied to various situations--the power of judicial review. But a closer look would reveal a loophole in that decision.

Marshall was actually writing on those abovementioned "midnight appointments," which Adams and the Federalists sneaked into the back door at the last possible minute to give a sour grapes nose-wriggling at the Republicans because of the bitterly contested election of 1800, won by Jefferson over Adams, who had been trying to get re-elected. The Republicans gained control of the House and the Senate after the Federalists had enjoyed that advantage from the very moment the present Constitution became the new law of the land. William Marbury, one of those federal court appointees approved by the outgoing Federalist Senate, never did have his certificate processed by Republican Secretary of State James Madison, so he never was allowed to take his position. He sued.

That put Marshall into a precarious position. If he ruled against President Jefferson, it would be criticized as maximum sour grapes. If he ruled against Marbury, he'd be taking the side opposite of the party which gave him his own position. So he went for a process ruling instead of one on the merits: Marbury, he wrote in his majority opinion, should have taken his suit to federal district court first, not the Supreme Court, so he was out of luck. He did not comment on the propriety of Jefferson's attempt at manipulation.

It allowed Marshall to take the backdoor out of the situation: Jefferson still won, but Marshall declared victory in the war if not the battle. By further explaining that the Supreme Court had the power of judicial review, he was telling Jefferson not to try that kind of stuff again, that the Court would allow itself to rise above the political frays and rule according to the law regardless of who had passed or enforced it--"a government of laws, not men," as earlier declared by none other than Jefferson's defeated opponent, Adams. It created, in effect, an independent federal judiciary, at least in concept, and deepened the system of checks and balances which we keep saying we have today.

What the Senate was doing with Justice Chase, though, was in fact challenging that ruling. The Republicans were basically saying that, if Chase should be removed from office, the President had the implicit right to appoint whomever he could get the Senate to approve of--and that justice would be bound to do the President's bidding. So instead of three independent branches, we would have one legislative, one executive, and one which enforced the executive's will by rubber stamp, thus pretty much rendering the legislature pointless. It's the part of the Marbury legacy no one remembers (and that I never realized). It's as if everyone simply accepted the effects of it so we could go on putting the nice diagrams into our textbooks. How often we forget that history is never pre-ordained: People had and have choices and things might have turned out very, very differently.

(If you're thinking that the federal court justices were always appointed for life and thus might be independent of the executive anyhow, you might also consider that at that point in our history, the president could be re-elected endlessly as well, never mind George Washington's so-called establishment of an unofficial two-term limit, broken only by Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. So Supreme Court justices couldn't necessarily outrun a president's term of office. Yet.)

So far more was at stake than an unhappy president dealing with a recalcitrant, ornery justice. The whole system of governance could be turned topsy-turvy if the now Republican-controlled Senate played along with Jefferson's gambit at a power grab. As it was, the House, similarly controlled, impeached Chase. The trial began in February, 1805.

Because Chase was actually a justice and a member of that branch, the Vice-President, as President of the Senate, would have to preside over the Senate for Chase's impeachment trial. That happened to be one Aaron Burr, presently wanted for murder in two states. Whose murder? Why, Alexander Hamilton, whom Burr shot to death in their famous duel the previous year (for which he was never convicted). But Burr was still the duly elected Veep, so he ran the trial and did, says Lepore, a decent job of doing so (Burr was also later tried for treason, demonstrating that, although political success is admirable, being a basically bad guy isn't, and can still catch up with you. Whether that fate will befall 45 is yet to be seen. And Burr got away with that, too.).

The overriding question, though, was: Could a Supreme Court justice be removed for political reasons? What were "high crimes and misdemeanors," anyhow? On a straight party-line vote, Chase was doomed: with 17 states in the Union, Republicans held a 25-9 advantage in the Senate. In fact, two Republican Senators could cross over and vote with the Federalists and Chase could still be removed with a two-thirds majority.

But Chase skated. The closest any vote got on any of the eight articles was 19-15. So a few Republican Senators had second thoughts about a political coup, the system was preserved and we all went on--except for this: 19 Republicans, a majority, did say that a Supreme Court justice could be removed for largely political reasons. "High crimes and misdemeanors," applied here, meant nothing about legality or the rule of law but everything about political attitudes, changeable at a moment's notice, with far too many adherents to be ignored or easily dismissed.

It's like the film Risky Business, where Tom Cruise's character manages against incredible odds and breaking all kinds of rules and norms to return his parents' really cool sports car that he originally ruined before they return from a weekend jaunt, never mind how he did it and who he had to deal with to get it. The surface realm returns to normal, but a brand new normal it is. It gives the impression that all have acted with great dignity, but in fact very few have, and certainly not enough to establish a decent ethical boundary. The character's parents, ever so trustworthy and proud of their little monster, won't think of challenging what looks to be an unfettered home life.

And the next morning, you don't see what he's now thinking: I got away with it. Think he won't try it again?

So it will be with the current fiasco. 45 won't be convicted on impeachment charges, that's clear. It's not even obvious that the Republicans will suffer politically because of it. From the time of Jefferson's first inauguration through Andrew Jackson's 1828 election, the Republicans surged to nearly complete control of national politics--in fact, James Monroe's presidency (1817-25) came to be known as the Era of Good Feelings because the Federalist Party had basically disappeared by then. So the Republicans didn't really get the political backlash they deserved. In fact, they thrived from it.

In the meantime, 45's legal weasels will stop at nothing to twist his efforts to wriggle out of his awful acts and illegalities. Here's one that I think they'll try, and if they do, they'll be at the eleventh hour with nowhere else to go: They will claim that, since John Marshall alone merely proclaimed the Supreme Court's power of judicial review without challenge and the Republicans of 1805 basically snubbed their nose at judicial review, winning the point but losing on a technicality, so can they. That means that after 45 tries to take impeachment to the Supreme Court and will be found wanting, he will claim that the Supreme Court isn't actually supreme but just that one guy claimed it to be so, winning a political conflict, which is really what this is all about, now isn't it?

Which would mean that the Supreme Court's legitimacy--and that of other, lower courts--would be called into question, and once questioned, then disrespected by at least 38 percent of our body politic (see earlier blog). But then, Jackson himself also did that when he forced Native tribes to be removed several hundred miles west (the infamous Trail of Tears), defying the Court to enforce the ruling it had made that that abomination was in fact unconstitutional. So there's a precedent for that, too. And he got away with it.

This is very risky business. The legitimacy of our courts represents respect for laws fairly made by majorities fairly elected; the essence of democracy itself. 45 wants nothing to do with either. Yet here we are hurtling toward that moment. Where this all goes no one can yet know. In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore took pains to observe, "To believe that Presidents can do anything they like is to give up on self-government." Meanwhile, the showdown builds.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Somewhere, Somehow, the Anger Must Subside. But Then, There's the 38 Percent.

Suppose, as a miracle, that Republicans cross over and support impeachment charges that have a much better chance of coming.

That side's base would go wild. Charges of treason would cascade out of evening commentary. The person they cling to would be dismissed with an emotional outcry that would be devastating, at least to them. Victimization would swell to biblical proportions, both literally and figuratively.

Suppose now that Congressional Republicans continue to be intimidated by their minions and refuse to go along with clear and convincing evidence, out there for all to see already, that 45 has violated and completely abused whatever the Constitution has ever meant. Democrats who now seeth with contempt would ratchet up that attitude. Shouting matches, a few of which have already happened, might take over the halls of Congress. Indeed, just the other day (10/23), some House Republicans stormed a committee room in which a testimony was about to being behind closed doors, claiming a lack of access although at least 45 of them were allowed to sit in. They delayed it, but did not cancel it.

Both sides claim the corner on their anger. But we aren't getting anywhere, either. It's creating a tension that I haven't seen for at least 50 years.

God hasn't saved us, as the fundamentalists insist (see below). Rationality hasn't, either, as liberals also do. We continue to tumble down the ugly stairs. What the hell's left?

For one, I would certainly like to stop being angry at 45, but I can't. He has ruined far too much. I've already written that he must go, and not one day too soon.

Beyond that, though, there are those who stand by him regardless of what he does and why. I want to shake them and say, Who are you? How can you do this? They will remain behind when this has ended, whatever glorious day it does. They will be hung over the bar on Friday nights, bemoaning the 'deep state' or whatever chimera they believe haunts them, instead of stepping up and taking responsibility for being citizens.

Above all, they will insist on being victims. 45 plays into their mentality perfectly. It's but a single step from being victims to being vengeful, pseudo-righteous defenders of a cause they can't even articulate. A major league umpire, one who's used to enforcing the rules of a great game, just sent out a tweet saying that he's getting AR-15 (oh, goody) and raged that a 'cival (sic) war' was about to break out. And you're going to do what with that weapon, then, buddy? And do you have friends who are similarly armed (answer: of course)?

I'm not sure if we can scale people down from this. There are numbers that bother me. I saw recently that a Gallup poll found that 38% of the adult population believes that humankind has been around for less than 10,000 years--except by then, peoples had already been mobile enough to have crossed the Bering Strait into North America and had settled a significant part of it. Anthropologists have proven it long ago.

Nonetheless, it's a reaction that would confirm the literal biblical interpretation of our origins. 38% is a heck of a lot of people; over a hundred million of this country's population. It is also a reasonable measurement of 45's support base. Very few polls taken during his awful, disgusting presidency have ever put his support beneath that number.

Coincidence? I think not. Our public educational system has been sufficiently attacked and modified in recent decades so that creationism has been given a berth too wide to be ignored, even though it is directly at odds with what science has decisively discovered and re-discovered. People learn and establish as fact what they're comfortable with and nicely dispose of that which makes them uncomfortable. There have been well-ballyhooed court cases in which the secular state and science have been reinforced, but for each of those, there have been a hundred (guessing here) other situations and local decisions in which no one has brought enough resources to challenge a religiously-based theory of the world's beginning.

This is the slow, steady mission creep at work. How slow? How determined? The well-celebrated Scopes 'monkey trial' took place in 1925, over ninety years ago now. I remember teaching it. It was with an attitude of 'I don't want to tell you what to think, but we're nowhere near such a mentality now.' How silly, how naive, was that? How much in denial was I?

Has it been that the 38% number has grown from that base moment, with the religious fundamentalists staging an nine-decade comeback that now rages? Or has that number always been about that much, in a concrete basement, and the rest of us have hovered nearby in our own little worlds?

Here's the kicker question, then: Either way, can democracy work in the same geographic area for two kinds of peoples for whom these mentalities exist? William Lloyd Garrison was reviled in the 1840s for his insistence that non-slaveholders should live in a different country than that of slaveholders for largely moral reasons. Are we returning to that today? Are the fundamentalists saying as much? Does their constitution have the same far-reaching effects to include them under the same roof as the rest of us, or shall we just shake hands (not shoot each other) and dismiss the whole idea of one country from now on--the rearrangement of which would take decades?

Thing is: After thorough and incessant polling, 38% is just about the base of the base. I've seen few support polls for 45 that go lower than that line. Coincidence? I very much doubt it. It's also been well-established that the fundamentalist, evangelical base for 45 is immutable and insistent. Regardless of whatever evidence is being unearthed by dutiful Democrats in the House of Representatives, that 38% will stand by him.

When 45 is gone, regardless of whether he survives impeachment hearings, they will be left over to support the next charismatic, illogical, bullying, self-possessed rogue that comes along, as long as he/she mouths holy dog-whistles. That also means that certain churches, especially mega-churches, may become the centers of political organization, even though they aren't supposed to be since they've been given a break against paying taxes.

I don't know of many liberal mega-churches. The ones which utilize their pulpit for political reasons are nearly all supportive of 45, and threaten rumblings of the firmament should he be removed before his time. And their adherents believe in the preachers, are sucked into the vortex of politics connected to religion, can't separate themselves to be independent thinkers, and subvert the meaning of the secular state as our constitutional culture has legally developed it.

In other words, they want a theocracy in which they don't need to consider anything besides what they're being told on Sundays, allowing a small group of religious oligarchs to shape their thinking, as long as they tithe regularly. And if their children have 'textbooks' that describe the beginnings of the universe in terms of Genesis (developed by a separate, disingenuous, self-justifying pseudo-intellectual culture), well, who would they be to question it?

That this greatly graced process is being interrupted by those of us who think that religion should have little if anything to do with the determination of governmental activities (which is almost always true, by the way) is the source of their anger and exasperation because, after all, God is waiting for justice, not only them, and who are we to stand up to that? So it all justifies itself and around the roulette table we go, waiting for the ball to land in someone's Christian church.

The table's rigged, of course. No other religion could possibly be valid. No other slots are open. And the house always wins. It's not the way Christianity's supposed to work. But if Republicans can win while using it, it's fair game to them, too. Their claims of upholding sacredness are empty if the means by which they do it, to manipulate democracy, are utilized. But they don't care.

I'm a member of an organized religion. But the members of my congregation, by and large, do not subscribe to this pre-empting of developmental thought at the cost of yielding to their concept of the almighty and everlasting life. It's why I joined.

For the rest, though, this maddening firewall remains. And it's also why the most important sycophant in 45's collection of them may not be Rudy Giuliani or Mike Pompeo or Lindsay Graham or someone else not in jail yet. No, no. It's Secretary of Education Betsy DuVos, who's been pretty much assigned to round up these folks who have stopped thinking and mold them into a charter-bound political force that will be around for Election '20 when this smoke clears. Count on it.

38 percent is a big number if all of them come out to vote. Whole states can be carried with such a number if the other side gives up and lets them have it. We only count those who show up on Election Day. Please remember that. It's the only way we have to hold back bad thinking. The anger is a tougher issue; it will last far longer.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

It Will Come Back to Us. Be Very Afraid.

Remember the question posed to 45 after the Planet Hollywood fiasco was revealed, only a month before the 2016 election? Someone during one of the infamous debates, I can't recall whom, wanted him to confirm or deny that he had told Billy Bush that men who are famous could grab women by the "pussy" and, basically, get away with it.

Within a few words, 45 denied it, continuing an all-too-familiar pattern of blatantly denying what he had said on tape. He did so with just a few words--smart move; don't dwell--and then also with a typical ploy, shifted the focus. He shifted it to ISIS. "We've got to get rid of ISIS," he said, then went on a meaningless riff on that topic, as meaningless as it is right now.

No one shouted 'liar.' No one made him repeat the lie. ISIS was his way out of the dilemma. ISIS bailed 45 out of the impossible situation. (Actually, the same media whom he's been blaming for all his troubles allowed him to do so, as it has been doing now for some four years.)

It says here that ISIS will now put him into an impossible situation, one that will guarantee his removal from office, either by election loss or by impeachment. For he has done it to himself. Again.

He has ordered American troops to withdraw from the Syrian border, removing their support of Kurdish forces and giving Turkey carte blanche to invade Syria, establish a buffer zone, and wipe out Kurds pretty much at their leisure. In a futile attempt at face-saving (only for himself, never for the country), he announced after the invasion had begun that Turkey had better not hurt the Kurds or the U.S. would ruin Turkey's economy.

Which is to say: He will stop trying to build hotels in Turkey. So enormous is his ego and so vacuous is his sense of reality that he genuinely believes, or believes he can make someone in Turkey believe, that a withdrawal of his investments in Turkey will ruin it.

For this, he has unleashed ISIS once again. If it's possible for an organization to be more backwards or amoral than 45 is, ISIS is it. Having been penned up and reduced significantly by gradual U.S. support efforts--efforts for which he could take credit--you know very well that the one thing they haven't done yet is the thing they will begin doing once again: undermining the U.S. wherever it can. This time, though, they won't stop in Europe.

Nope. They'll attack the U.S. directly, inside our shores. There will be suicide bombings. There will be suicidal mass murders. There will be attempts at killing significant public officials. And it won't need to happen by invasion, either. It will wreak a chaos that will make 9-11 look like the minor leagues. Think Boston Marathon, several times, coordinated.

They've already been proven to have brainwashed young people here and get them to join up with them there. It'll be far simpler now. With access to automatic weapons rampant, all ISIS will have to do is get some easily influenced American teenagers or twenty-somethings to buy into the gaining of eternal paradise by violent fealty to Allah, and bingo! you have the recipe for disaster after disaster.

What's to stop them from, say, shooting up parking lots with tailgaters before college or pro football games? Okay, some good old boys may have their own weapons inside their own SUVs. Great: A shootout among the Weber grills. Best of luck to the police trying to sort that out.

All because 45 got out of bed one morning, probably not before 8, and decided to decide something to make himself appear decisive, so he released ISIS to do its worst to whomever it chooses. It's all that casual, that mindless, that narrow, that stupid.

Do not use the word policy, either, when discussing any decision-making he's done or might do. Policy would be a word used to describe a carefully measured series of evaluations that have the effect of positioning the nation where it might be best. 45 has no idea of what that means, and worse, he doesn't care. Please do not give him the benefit of actual strategic thinking.

His goal is actually rather simple: Create so much disorder that the country is forced to rely on him alone as its savior. He really thinks he can do it. Remember his claim from the 2016 campaign: I alone can fix. He truly believes it. He's truly ready to try. And there are plenty who would not only let him do it, but stand by him while he does.

It's why he has to go. He has to go. This isn't even dealing with Ukraine, for which he'll most likely be impeached, now that Bill Taylor and Laura Cooper, patriots that they are, have stepped forward to clarify the true situation.

I'm not fond of pretense, so I'm not going to try to assuage you with the usual comment like, I don't mean to scare you. Because I do. I want you to be very scared about this. I believe it's going to happen if we don't move on this right now. Explain it later to those 38% or so who will stand behind him regardless: The nation's at stake now more than ever. There's nothing vague or nebulous about it. This is the real thing. Without it, we can only hope not to be in the path of destruction when it keeps happening, but like other domestically-based shootings, the odds get better by the day.

They won't say it on TV. Not yet, anyhow. But if I'm thinking it, so is someone else: I claim no corner on brilliance. At least twenty years before Columbine, people in my teachers' lounge were discussing the possibility that the wrong kid could walk into the school and start shooting--and nobody could do a thing about it. If we could surmise that back then (late '70s), any logical person could do so now.

I wish only to be logical. I'm just trying to make sense of it all. And it leads here. Michael Beschloss, renowned historian, has been recently quoted as saying that to force the Senate to convict 45 of impeachment charges that are surely coming might take major street demonstrations. I believe he's right. Get ready.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

The Lineup As I Now See It

Four debates later, here's how I call it for the twelve candidates who had enough support to show up last night, in alphabetical order:

• Biden--The conundrum is the pushback made by 45 and his minions about his son Beau's dealings in Ukraine and China. It's all just pushback, and of course 45 should talk with all the millions that his family members have made off of his name and presidency so far, but it looks like all that has rubbed off on him poorly--which is to say, 45's spin may cause his downfall. I don't think it will. I think Biden's own inability to remain focused during the debate is undoing himself, and I can't imagine a new surge of support because of it. 45 will brag on that and then brag that the Democrats have no one else nearly as good.
• Booker--I'm having a tough time, still, trying to figure out what he stands for. What he wants to do is preach Democratic unity, not bad at all, since if anything will serve to unseat 45 it's that. But other than inserting responses, some of them quite good, to other candidates' musings, it has looked for some time like he believes that image-building constitutes a great campaign strategy than any policy initiatives. For the life of me, I can't think of a single significant policy proposal he's put forth. I don't think that bodes well for him. He needs better numbers soon.
• Buttigieg--We saw his claws when he flashed them at Beto O'Rourke, telling him that to suggest that the candidates show up with some courage now and then fell flat when directed toward him. His oratorical skills seem to be getting better as he's leaning into the role. Yet, I'm not inclined to back the top of the ticket with someone who's merely accomplished the mayorhood of a town the size of Green Bay. Sorry, but there it is. Would he have had the chops of, say, even a Julian Castro, he might even be the frontrunner right now. Veeply, though, he has my attention.
• Castro--Smarting from the bad-guy role he played in torching Biden the last time around, he seemed to back away last night. He also did not help himself by using the same states as examples as Klobuchar did right after she spoke; it was as if he couldn't think of any other battleground state where unemployment has been an issue. I was impressed with him early on and could sense his passion about border issues, which come to him quite naturally. But he's oddly down-shifted on that, and the effects aren't doing what he planned. He's veep material at best now (and I think he might be really good there). I don't think he'll get past Iowa.
• Gabbard--Is this lady a Democrat? I'm not comfortable with her. She continues to downplay the importance of impeachment, as if that ship hasn't already sailed. Is she waiting for it to fail to tell everyone I-told-you-so, in which case that won't be a winning commentary anyhow? In trashing Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" comment of the previous campaign (deplorable in and of itself, actually), she seems to be trying to reach out to disaffected Republicans to get them to cross over and support her, that being the magic combination that will get a Democrat, namely her, elected. I have news: They are what they are, and someone like her won't be able to suddenly create the a-ha moment that fuses the country back together. She's Debbie Downer personified: always bitter, perpetually edgy, almost snarky. Maybe I've missed something, but I've never heard her actually upbeat. That attitude alone will get her beat. Unless my tea leaves are telling me something weird, she'll be gone after Iowa, too.
• Harris--She's in that tweener place, where in any other campaign she'd likely be in at least second place if not the frontrunner. She's got it all: Senatorial status, bright mind, quick wit, excellent knowledge of policy, and a genuine talent for noting what hasn't been there and needs to be, a.k.a. reproductive rights. With her grilling of Brett Kavanaugh, too, she has displayed a fearlessness in the moment that the Democrats are going to need on the podium with the chief insulter and shameless cheap-shot artist running for the other side. But the numbers aren't there. I'm not sure if the media's to blame for focusing on the Big Three of Biden, Sanders and Warren, or that they're doing so because of the numbers that are already there. Either way, she's getting muscled out and I'm not sure what can help her besides the sudden withdrawal of one of the aforementioned three. I lean toward her, but Iowa will be her gauntlet. I don't like her as a veep candidate; I'd rather save her for Attorney General or the Supreme Court.
• Klobuchar--In much the same place as Harris. Her sly sarcasm's starting to emerge, and I'm not sure it will raise her status. She's waiting for the party to return to the center, not its center, and I think she may be waiting instead for Godot. She seems to have a long needle, which may come in handy against 45's insults and innuendoes. But she has to show well in Iowa; she's been talking about the vital Midwest since the get-go, and thus must finish at least 3rd, it says here. I doubt that that will happen.
• O'Rourke--Trying too hard to be decisive and significant. His speechifying has been matched by Buttigieg now, so that's no longer setting him apart. I'll say it again: He should stop the effort and go get John Cornyn out of his Senate seat. The fallback position for the Democrats must be to retake the Senate. Having the House has certainly been helpful, especially now that impeachment inquiries are lurching forward like a train, but having only one-fourth of the power (House, Senate, President, Supreme Court) will, too, run its course. O'Rourke would help a lot, and perhaps pave the way to the presidency later, if he took one for the team here. He now has excellent experience in a Senate race. Tomorrow is another day and 2024 or 2028 aren't far away.
• Sanders--78 plus a very recent heart attack. Seen clearly, this should be a no-brainer. He should step aside. But he has his own passionate following and now AOC has thrown her support behind him. I question the wisdom of that, even with good health, at this early date, but there it is. The party will not win with him as the nominee. Will. Not. 45 will throw "socialist" at him until it sticks, which won't be very long. Sanders' goal will therefore be to keep the party together and convince the fence-sitters that socialism isn't the least bit dangerous. I know that, and probably you do, too, if you're reading this. But we're not average voters, and our political backgrounds and attention spans are a great deal deeper. He knows what he wants, he can articulate it well, but he can't pull it off nationally. It didn't work four years ago, and it wasn't just because of the wishers surrounding Hillary. His presence, and that of Biden, are a real problem now.
• Steyer--For the first time out, I was impressed. He said a few things others haven't, and appeared to be more than a one-trick, impeachment-obsessed pony. But it's already late, and he also appears amateurish with not a lot of time to catch up. History will note him as one of the major leaders in impeachment, though, and that's not a bad thing. I don't see him surviving Iowa. We still owe him thanks for being prescient about 45; his energy has helped move that mountain.
• Warren--I like her positive approach about all things, but her schoolteacher persona also strikes as being a bit ivory towerish. Her tax-the-rich's-stuff plan has been called out to some success by Andrew Yang (see below), and feels like something the Republicans can take apart loophole-by-loophole with fuzzy definitions and complicated phraseology--tomayto, tomahto, and the like. It's potentially mockable by more than just 45, too. We don't need any more opportunities to deflect from the real problem here. She also needs to walk herself back from Medicare for All. It's way, way too easy to mock, and to give 45 any chance to sound legitimate about anything will allow him to retake the high ground and regain attention. Let me say this again: She belongs on the Supreme Court, but Treasury doesn't sound bad, either.
• Yang--He was right to call out Warren on her tax plan, but his $1200-per-person scheme reeks with socialistic flavor. It'll turn into red meat for 45 to reply that all Democrats want to do is throw money at everything, as ridiculous as that now sounds with bottomless Republican borrowing, and continue by saying that Democrats don't believe in working for one's money (harking to the Puritan work ethic, as if he's worked a day in his life). That would be low-hanging fruit with Yang up there. This kind of thinking won't get him the White House, but Council of Economic Advisors? Maybe.

Who are we left with? That's a poser. As awful as 45 is, it will take someone with an unusual combination of skills and ability to expand the moment on the stage to keep recalling his massive lies and hypocritical stances, to stay calm and avoid paralyzing shock at new and even more terrible accusations, and also to point out general Republican weaknesses. I'm still not sure who can do that. One more mass debate probably won't produce that person. It's no time to panic, for the primaries will shake the tree well. But with 45's continued plunge toward complete irrationality and his grab-bag decision-making, we haven't a minute to waste.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

He's Just Happy to be Here. In the End, So Was I.

One of the first things Gary said to me when I dropped into his pub in what constitutes downtown Grafton, NE, was: "I'm just happy to be here."

Ostensibly, the topic of the interview was supposed to be focused on the development and later demise of Grafton, population 126 as of 2010 (no larger now) for a book I'm doing on all the Graftons I can find. My stay to that point had been challenging to dredge up meaningful stories of what appeared to be a small, sad place, like so many other rural towns gradually fading away. There were quirky accounts of things like three drunken guys stealing a railroad depot and removing an entire town's significance at the behest of another's.

I didn't know what I was going to get from Gary, a long-time veteran of Grafton. I chuckled when he told me that his bar was the first place along U.S. Highway 6 between Lincoln and Denver where liquor was sold by the individual drink, not just the whole bottle--and that didn't happen until well after World War II.

At times, though, interviews can drift. Sometimes it's better that way.

When I entered, the St. Louis Cardinals were in the first inning with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the fifth and deciding game of the National League Division Series. It was on screens within easy eyesight of either of us. An amazing first inning it was, too, as the Cards got ten runs.

I'm a baseball guy from age seven, so such a game would be of interest. I missed the whole inning, though, because Gary, the Grafton veteran, began talking about his other time as a veteran, in Vietnam. He was involved in a battle which he nearly did not survive. It was a harbinger, too, of worse battles to come. I didn't arrive expecting such a story. But he just kept providing details.

It was January 5, 1968. The war was accelerating to a point beyond which no one could have predicted in 1965, when the U.S. began sending combat troops to South Vietnam to help that government rid itself of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army regulars. But as we know, it became a quagmire of diminishing expectations. Thousands of our soldiers had died by the time Gary got there in October, 1967. He was a draftee out of the University of Nebraska, a business major. The draft lottery had not yet been devised. I came along later, a 1969 graduate of Grafton (WI) High. My draft number, to which I had been assigned in the summer of 1970, was 310. The lower the number, the more likely you'd be drafted. By that time, though, the withdrawal had begun. Being called to fight a dubious war that far down the list was quite impossible.

Gary's unit was "in country", as the Americans called it, looking for the North Vietnamese on that January 1968 afternoon. He was part of a fairly large unit operating in what was then the prescribed way: getting dropped off by helicopters, patrolling a certain defined area in which the NVA had been reported or were suspected, and then engaging the enemy, if it was still there, and attempting to clear it out of the area. Either way, they would be picked up again by helicopter at the end of the operation, successful or not. If they were victorious, they would never stay, and the enemy would gradually seize the area again.

Body counts were the point: the U.S. Army could usually report more killed in action than we had, by far, thus reinforcing the concept that the war was going well. It became an endless, nearly pointless meat grinder of death designed to support a government that was endlessly dependent and increasingly corrupt, attempting to rule a people who appeared to be lukewarm, at best, about maintaining their sovereignty within a divided nation.

The press knew the strategy had been yielding diminishing results; it named the Pentagon's daily briefing "The Five O'Clock Follies" for its obvious efforts to hide the increasing futility of emptying a glass that would nearly automatically refill itself. As opposed to World War II and subsequent wars after Vietnam, reporters were allowed to go with outfits "into the bush", giving very dangerous but very accurate accounts of the daily fighting, including the maddening efforts to tell friend from enemy Vietcong. Dedicated to unbiased journalism, not allowed to interject the actual truth of the matter, reporters were unable to communicate exactly how precarious the situation was. In the meantime, much like 45 and his sycophants do so blatantly, the government was happy to utilize a free resource to spread its propaganda.

Gary was a Specialist 4th Grade, a "spec-4" in the terminology, the rough equivalent of a corporal. This particular operation was close to the Cambodian border. The Americans had received information which indicated that there was a significant build-up of NVA there. It drove our guys crazy: The enemy could strike and run back across the border, and not only would Americans have to wait to be fired on before shooting back, but they couldn't engage in hot pursuit for fear of unintentionally involving a supposedly "neutral" government, even though it was providing safe havens for ambushes, knowingly or not.

Back home, the protests against the war were accelerating, too. As President Lyndon Johnson would put it, he found himself caught in the way it could get in a Texas thunderstorm, walking along a lonesome highway: "I can't run, I can't hide, and I can't make it stop."

Thirty Americans, "grunts" as they called themselves, were about to find themselves in exactly that situation. The operation ended about three in the afternoon of the 5th, but all the soldiers could not be picked up on the first sweep, or the second, or the third; the helicopters assigned to do so had all been shot down. Those left behind, including Gary, were about to enter hell in a very small place. It would be called The Hourglass. I had taught the subject of the Vietnam War for about a quarter-century and thought I had read up on the topic pretty well. But I had never heard of this battle.

As often happened, there were far more North Vietnamese regulars in the area than the Americans could dredge up. About 250 of them descended upon the 30 Americans for a firefight. We sat in Gary's bar that afternoon as he recalled it, chicken wings cooking away to be soon sold and eaten as they were on most Wednesday nights to mostly younger adults from the surrounding area of this now shell of a town. A post-season baseball game became quite irrelevant.

Among the first Americans to die, Gary said, was the company medic while working on one of the wounded. That left the others to tend with basic first aid techniques, giving them morphine to ease pain and resist death by shock. The rest formed a perimeter and fought for their lives. It would be four hours before another helicopter managed to make it to the ground intact.

Nearly a third of the Americans would not make it back alive that afternoon. Every single soldier there received at least the Bronze Star for what the army calls "heroic or meritorious achievement or service while engaged in military operations." You might want to file this under "meritorious." Few who have been in battle buy into heroics. It's left to people like us, the secondary storytellers, to add words like "gallantry" or "fortitude" to a bunch of grunts down on their luck. But meritorious? You bet. After all, they weren't overrun by a force completely surrounding them, eight times their size after engaging them for four hours.

Lt. Hector Colon, the commanding officer of Company B, 4th Battalion of the 9th Infantry, 25th Division U.S. Army , moved swiftly from soldier to soldier, providing ammunition, inspiration and hope. "He was standing up, too," said Gary, marveling at the moment, amazed that he wasn't shot even once, adding "but that's war." I thought about George Washington in his first battle with the French and Indians in western Virginia colony in 1754. Upon meeting them in dense woods, he had four bullets rip through his clothing, but none actually touched his skin. The father of our country benefited from war's often complete randomness. So did we.

Gary, too, found the CO's good fortune remarkable, but did not back away from its significance or genuine heroism. He could have put his head down and crawled around like everybody else, but he didn't. "I have no idea," Gary said, "why he didn't win the Medal of Honor." He did win the Distinguished Service Medal, one step from a soldier's highest honor. I suggested that, with more research, sometimes greater honors are justified and awarded.

But it is also war when someone isn't quite as lucky but survives half a century later. Gary was wounded three times, including once in the back and once when a rocket whizzed between his arm and his side. When I mentioned that he must have lost a lot of blood, he said, "You're operating on pure adrenalin there." When a chopper finally managed to land to get the beleaguered thirty, he ran the length of a city block under fire to get to the door with a round in his back. "I laid down on the floor and said to myself, 'Please, please, let's take off,'" he said. But he had to wait, because Americans never leave their dead on the battlefield.

The toll was devastating: nine dead, twelve wounded, seventy percent casualties. But all managed to get aboard. "The chopper was so overloaded that we barely got up above the treetops," Gary said.

I listened as ravenously as I consumed half a dozen wings with great sauce and threw down a couple of beers. He treated, but I didn't feel bought off to report something in an exaggerated or excessively positive way. That isn't how true soldiers talk, anyhow, and it certainly wasn't the way in which he discussed it. "I won't talk about it [on my own]," he said, "But I'll answer questions." And there he was, answering questions from a history teacher-now-journalist who had taught the subject as best he could but at a level nowhere near the real people doing the real thing. They've seen buddies die in front of them. They've suffered during and after battles from wounds, some of which are visible. They are later introduced to the more opaque but very real hell of post-traumatic stress. Someone takes them away from sudden death in the field, but the brain doesn't withdraw quite as decisively. Above all, they don't brag like politicians and other apologists love to do. They just tell their stories if they are capable.

My late uncle Jim fought hand-to-hand with a German in another war far more glorified and victorious but no less horrifying. He didn't discuss the event for 33 years, and then all he said in explanation was, "I'm here, aren't I?" I didn't ask Gary about it, but he had to have taken lives to preserve his. As always in war, it's one or the other. Perhaps he had had that moment of truth as in All Quiet on the Western Front, when Paul the storyteller realizes that the Frenchman he had just stabbed and was slowly dying had a real family and a real home, and he had just arranged it so he would never see them again. Perhaps it had hit Gary in a way not quite so dramatically, but with just as much devastation. It would take me another visit, I figured, to bring that up. To approach on that level would take more trust.

I wanted to know more in detail about the particulars of the battle. Were they fired upon as they loaded the chopper? Were any other grunts hit at that last moment? Was there any other air support called in? But we headed toward six p.m. with the expected wave of younger adults about to arrive. We had been talking for about 90 minutes. I decided to stop.

At first, when returning home to a country that not only didn't appreciate the grunts but sometimes mocked and discredited them in an odd and horrible attitude of immaturity connected to its politics and just as disappointing in its hypocrisy, Gary didn't care to discuss the battle for years. He did some internet research, though, and found not only reference to it, but a reunion that he had been missing. He re-bonded with his buddies, and connected with the CO one last time. Colon died of Alzheimer's disease in 2017.

Those reunions helped Gary cope with the effects of that battle and others. As he recovered from his wounds, he was shipped to Japan where he served out the rest of his two-year hitch. He returned to Grafton, NE, where he first worked at what was then known as the Grafton State Bank, right next door to the pub that would eventually bear his name.

I gave him my card, took a picture of him, and left. It had to be a long journey from the deadly jungles of Vietnam to home, where if five cars passed in an hour, it would make big news. The battle in which he nearly lost his life might have been an important one, making bigger news, if the Defense Department and the commander of the U.S. troops in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, had considered that it might be a forerunner to a more sweeping and devastating invasion that would follow in just another three and a half weeks. Westmoreland had information to that effect, but he had sat on it to keep satisfying, it would seem, Johnson's need for news that the war was going well, and maybe to secure his own position.

The Tet Offensive would change the political calculus in the U.S. forever, including the withdrawal of Johnson from the 1968 presidential race, the start of negotiations to withdraw from Vietnam, and the surreptitious undermining of those negotiations by Richard Nixon, whose subversion of the process to gain credit for himself as the one who ended the war would keep the U.S. there for another five years and cost more than twenty thousand additional American dead. CBS had learned about Westmoreland's coverup in the early 80s, made a broadcast called A Vietnam Deception, and stood off Westmoreland's lawsuit against it.

All of which made the tragedy of this battle even greater. Had Westmoreland made a successful adjustment to the indication that the North Vietnamese were preparing a strike against the major South Vietnam cities, it could have been defended far better at the outset, instead of waiting weeks for a counterattack. As it was, Hue, a provincial capital which had major psychological significance to the South Vietnamese, "had to be destroyed in order to save it," as an officer later remarked; and the American embassy in Saigon, the capital, had been pockmarked with shells and bullet holes.

The irony is that The Hourglass, fought less than a month beforehand, might have shown the futility of the intention of good appearances, instead of maintaining them long enough to invite a major ambush which at the outstart appeared to make the U.S. effort in Vietnam look weaker and more futile than it actually had been. After the initial NVA thrust, Allied counterattacks killed a thousand NVA per week, but the initial image of our powerful forces being overrun, seen on the evening news, could not be shaken. On Jan. 5, 1968, the U.S. strategy in the Vietnam War looked great but was at the edge of its greatest challenge; after Jan. 31, the start of the Tet Offensive, it looked ineffectual but it actually proved that Americans could fight back very successfully. Either way, it denied the fighting's results.

After things had calmed down a little, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, one of the most trusted people in the press, decided to take a look on his own. He came back with a report featuring, for then, an unusual personal commentary: The war couldn't be won. It was an endless stalemate. Shaken, Lyndon Johnson began peace talks and withdrew from the 1968 presidential race.

With perspective, Gary's view of the war has changed. I mentioned that I was a war protester and that our efforts were meant to help them. "Well, I didn't agree with it at the time," he said, echoing many grunts who felt they had been betrayed back home. (I've just recently seen, for the first time, "The War at Home," the documentary made mostly about the protests at the University of Wisconsin, shown in Madison where it debuted in 1979. It's easy to forget, too, the violence with which some protestors were treated.)

Now, though, he sees things differently. Vietnam was "the worst idea we ever had," he said. We came at it from two entirely different directions, but we could at least agree on that. Left perhaps for eternity was a consideration of the value of The Hourglass and those it had sent to eternity as well. That someone had not only survived the onslaught but could still speak of it might be of its own value. Even someone running a pub in an eyeblink of a Nebraska town was still bearing witness to a war's madness, regardless of result or any lessons learned from it at all, half a century later.

He was just happy to be there on a quiet night, telling the story to an amazed journalist who'd come for an entirely different kind of conversation. In the end, so was I.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Bob West: Underemployed but Larger Than Life

You always got the impression that Bob West was underemployed. I bet he knew that, too. But so many of us gained from it.

Bob, who passed away October 1, was a major organizer and negotiator for the Wisconsin Education Association Council during much of its heyday, which ended when the Republicans, laying for it, finally got enough power to take away just about any meaning behind collective bargaining with Act 10 in 2011. Bob West was a major reason they thought they had to.

West bargained for WEAC members first in NUE, Northern United Educators, going back to the 1960s. Partly because of his leadership in some of the first strikes in Wisconsin education history, he became one of the major players in the famous Hortonville school district strike of 1974-76, a nasty, brutish showdown that made national headlines and couldn't be settled until the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled upon it.

His talents were enormous. At his "celebration of life," held yesterday, October 13, in Verona, it was revealed to those who didn't already know it that West initially wanted to be an actor. Not unlike Ronald Reagan, who was an actor first and politician second, West put his skills to work in persuading and inspiring thousands of Wisconsin educators to utilize collective bargaining as a deserved tool to stand up for themselves.

Yes, he could act. But in the world of collective bargaining, the support of those one represents is essential. Without it, you can't walk into a room and command the high ground. With it, you can get it, hold it, make the other side understand and get somewhere close to where you needed to go (which is always the point of bargaining). To do that, you have to bring forward something inside of you that you didn't even know was there at times. But it has to sound genuine and heartfelt.

And nobody could jack you up like Bob West. He was a blond-haired lion. His voice was resonant and strong. His long needle reached pretentious school board members and their lawyers with rapier wit and endless challenge. If you weren't already on fire with resentment about the treatment you were receiving, he lit it and poured on gallons of gasoline. An underemployed, brilliant actor, he knew which lines would work.

Then he'd smile and crack some outrageous joke with great timing. Rage together, laugh together through crisis: That was what a union could be.

Beyond that, his preparation for bargaining was terrific and simply gained with experience. He was nearly always a step ahead of the other side, rarely thrown off by some unusual strategy. So in command of such situations was he that, as again revealed on Sunday, he would actually consult with a school board to slow down a bargaining process because, though it was obvious that all knew where things were going, both sides' members might get upset about potentially leaving something else on the table.

Such is the essence of bargaining: Not just to arrange for agreements that while disagreeable in part were reasonably satisfactory, but to look ahead far enough to understand that the process had to have enough integrity for all to accept it as what democracy means, and submit to it as legitimate. For in all things, tomorrow is another day and another set of negotiations is just around the next corner. It takes passion to bargain, yes, but it also takes wisdom. Bob West had plenty of both.

Bob could get under your skin, though. Such it is with negotiators. It's their nature. If you took him on, you'd better bring your best game, though, because he had the facts at his fingertips and probably had more than you did.

At Hortonville, though, the irresistible force met the immovable object. WEAC was well-rehearsed in resistance tactics, having honed them by seven previous strikes, many of which were in locals of NUE: no surprise there. But Hortonville's school board was ready. It pushed back with massive firings, and the members, led by warriors such as Bob West, took to the streets. Old NUE members took busses during spring break to assist. The town blanched under the pressure; it has not been forgotten. Such a small place became the stage for such an enormous showdown.

I discussed it with him some time ago for a book I began that's way too long awaiting on the subject. The phrase that he kept repeating, the one that made the entire situation unique in the annals of Wisconsin collective bargaining, has traveled with me to this day: It was a war. Not like a war: It was one.

WEAC lost that battle but won great advances in the larger war concerning representation of public employees. Weary and drained from the strife caused by Hortonville, the earlier strikes, and an even larger one in Racine (which should not be overlooked), in 1979 the state legislature passed a mediation-arbitration law that remained the basis for collective bargaining for public school employees until the Qualified Economic Offer diminished it and Act 10 destroyed it.

Despite the longed-for departure of Mr. F. Gow and the election of a reasonable person to be governor, the Republicans are in control of public schools: Their growth has been stunted, powerless teachers are leaving in droves, and mindless privatization afflicts them. About 1970, Playboy magazine (yeah, it had good articles, too) ran a Gahan Wilson cartoon mocking the nuclear world we've been in. A singular soldier with a torn uniform walks through ruins with a stunned, wild-eyed gaze and says, "I think I won." That's Act 10. The Republicans won, but they leave utter devastation behind. They don't care about public employees other than regarding them as the hired help--unless, of course, they vote Republican. Act 10 nakedly reveals that.

Bob West did his best to stave that off for more than a generation. Grateful staff and members who loved him gathered yesterday to salute a legend: An underemployed legend, but one larger than life. He could have been anything he wanted to be; he had the drive, the determination, the great talent. Instead, he devoted himself to helping WEAC members stand proud. He was an enormous gift.

The passage of a great man sometimes signals the passage of a great time. Thus it was Sunday. I tore over from Milwaukee right after church to make it just barely in time. It was good to see old warriors again. Made you proud of all that devotion and of a time when fair battles could be fought.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Really? It's All A Joke? All the More Reason.

The height of Republican snarkiness may just be the desperation with which they're trying to spin 45's. To wit: He's kidding, of course. Don't you get it?

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, among the leading 45 apologists, tried this out on George Stephanopoulos of ABC last Sunday. It was as if Jordan couldn't believe that Stephanopoulos, a veteran of the White House staff himself, was soooooo naive about 45's actual, deeper knowledge of well, practically everything. It's as if he was saying: He's hiding things. There's so much he knows that you don't. He's just giving the media a hard time because he likes to do that. That's why he says all that outrageous stuff about Ukraine and China: He just wants you to think that. He doesn't really. He's just having fun.

Just another putdown. Just another snark. You can't handle the truth.

Just another reason he has to go. He's the president, for the love of heaven. People still, amazingly, hang on his every word. He has to have an attitude of importance about everything he says and does. But the whole thing's a joke to him. He thinks it should be so to us as well. Just go along with the joke. Leave it up to me. We'll be fine.

You'll excuse me if I'm losing my sense of humor about this. I don't think it's funny that he doesn't know how to act among foreign leaders, doesn't know how to act in public, can't talk about anything else but himself in ridiculous, glowing terms, has no empathy toward anyone, and it reflects in his policies--about the rich, about immigrants, about military allies, about Social Security and Medicare, about health care in general.

So I don't think Republicans should be all that snarky. I caught a little of that attitude when I went door-to-door for Democrats during the 2016 election campaign. It came from those we thought were friends, but decided all of a sudden that it wasn't anybody's business who they were voting for. We're voting for him and we don't want to talk about it. We want to tell off the world. We'll do it our own disingenuous way: With the pretension of privacy.

Well, they did. And this is what they're getting: a clueless, obnoxious, naive (himself), arrogant, blowhard who truly believes, and has always believed, that the world revolves around him. Before, of course, it never did. But he bluffed his way into the one position where it really does now, and he can't handle any of it: the responsibility, the criticism, the need for leadership. He makes knee-jerk decisions to make himself look bold and decisive, and then withdraws them because he sees far too late that he's goofed. It's happened again and again.

A president's statements are policy. Let me say that again: They're policy. It isn't just talk. Again, he doesn't get that. I'm right and everyone else is wrong. That childish. That stupid.

It's starting to build now. It may get to a certain point and level off, but it's difficult to see how the numbers will revert more favorably from this point on. He's even more unhinged. His endless anger isn't leg-pulling, it's a temper tantrum. His sarcasm, his cynicism, his insults, his endless lies, his endless scores to settle, his rants don't make people feel better. They wear people out. They repel us.

It isn't going to happen because she has far too much propriety and style, but--wouldn't it be great if Nancy Pelosi announced that 45 is being impeached and then pivoted and added: Don't you get it? It's just a joke. Where's your sense of humor?

Wonder who would laugh then.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Image Matters. America Matters. WE Matter. That's Why He Has To Go.

Imagine, if you can, being the president of Finland yesterday. Imagine having to put up with a joke of an American president ranting about his likely impeachment in front of reporters.

Imagine what a waste of your time--and your country's time--you've just made. And a resolve, if you have half a brain: Uh-uh. I'm not coming back here while this clown is in the White House.

I'm wondering how many other foreign leaders are saying the same thing, if not to others, then to themselves. Why in blue blazes would they bother? I'm wondering how they are shaking their heads about the once mighty, prestigious, all-affecting USA has fallen into this disrepute.

Because it has. Consider:

• Russia and all that has been compromised because of it, including the 2016 election, for the betrayal of a bromance with a vicious and horribly driven de facto dictator.
• Ukraine and the betrayal of our positioning and policy there for internal political purposes.
• NATO and the embarrassment from that fiasco.
• The horrible relationship we now have with Mexico.
• The "shithouse" countries (apparently, that's the precise word) to which 45 referred, run by people of color.
• North Korea and the "very beautiful" relationship with a despotic dictator.
• The completely unnecessary and ongoing confrontation with Iran.
• The very damaging tariffs levied against China, which have hurt American farmers despite the blind support of some of them.
• Congratulating China on 70 years of communist rule, and not saying a single word about the courageous stand that Hong Kong is taking against it.

Altogether, the dismantling of something we could all be proud of: The image of America being the defender of freedom, the great moral leader of the world.

Gone. Destroyed. All because of one person who just stands there and shouts nonsense. Everyone makes fun of us now. If they don't, they should, since we've produced this mockery of governance and statesmanship. What a shameful embarrassment. How far we have fallen.

This isn't just a publicity issue. The Constitution pretty much makes the president the purveyor of our foreign policy, through his treaty-making permission and his appointment of ambassadors and, by implication, the conduct of our policy through our embassies and State Department. 

The rest is history, and quite a history it is: Foreign intervention and involvement that no one could have foreseen upon the creation of the republic, but which has not only been inevitable but absolutely necessary. Our revolution would probably not have been a success without individual help from foreigners from France, Prussia, and Poland; without financial and direct military aid from France; without economic assistance from Spain and the Netherlands. Our international trade, including that of slaves, had been well-established as colonies even before the break with Britain.

First we needed protection, then we felt we were great enough to spread our influence elsewhere. Either way, justifiable or not, relationships with other nations have been at times turbulent, at times genuinely warlike, at times marvelous and helpful--think Peace Corps, which continues to this day; think Marshall Plan, think Alliance for Progress. Yes, it also advanced economic imperialism, and that has left scars. Yes, it caused CIA interference and overreach. But in the end, it established America as a force to be reckoned with.

Make America great again? He has done completely the opposite. The damage he has done to our foreign policy and influence will be far-reaching and decisive for decades to come: wait and see.

It is an abuse of his constitutional powers. That, alone, is a decisive and compelling reason for impeachment, at least. Add to that the compromising plotting of preserving political power in such a desperate and despotic manner by getting foreign leaders in on undermining political opponents for its own sake, setting the country up to be undermined itself with potential if not actual extortion, and the evidence is clear: He has to go, and soon.

This disgusting excuse as a peer of Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt? You can't be serious. He certainly isn't. He mocks his system and thinks he's dominating it. He can't be allowed to get away with that. If so, others will follow with similar intent and claim justification based on precedent.

If this were a "shithouse" country, few would be paying attention. But this is America. This is us. This matters. We matter. I don't want to visit somewhere overseas and make excuses for us. I've already done that, in Turkey, right after Bush-43's re-election, where in a gathering of other, foreign teacher union representatives, a Spaniard looked at me with clawed hand and said, "Mark, how could you (meaning the country) have been so stuuupid?"

I did my best to explain, somewhat sheepishly, how it could have happened. In the shadow of 9-11, it was a bit easier. But it still hurt some. 

Now? Now there's no excuse other than to say: We screwed up. This guy's awful. I'm sad to be an American right now.

I have disagreed with policies of other Republican presidents, too. But at least they did their best to preserve the dignity of the office. They never made me feel genuinely humiliated about being an American, anywhere, everywhere.

I don't want to feel that way anymore. Dump him. Be quick about it. 

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

They Are Relevant. He Shouldn't Be. Hence the Challenge.

The challenge for us, as we attempt to move forward, is to severe a connection: That between 45, who shouldn't be relevant, and those who are--the ones he's bamboozled into believing in him.

That will be his last stand: To go back out on the campaign trail--he's never left it--and get the minions to feel so sorry for him and thus themselves.

It's the same strategy that got him where we wound up, in the exact wrong place. He doesn't govern; he doesn't know how. He remains completely disconnected with any reality but his own.

All he can do successfully is complain about how things used to be as opposed to the way they are. Oh, and bully: That he can do quite well.

He's like some of those kids I used to teach: Mostly male, lacking self-esteem, perpetually tied to self-pity, suspicious of anyone who thinks they're smart or thinks they have to be so, making sure to make fun of them so they can hear it--hence his endless picking on California Congressman Adam Schiff, the nerd-turned heat-seeking missile who happens to be the chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence--and refusing to engage in anything remotely indicative of utilizing the development of one's brain.

Instead of high school hallways, they're in bars now, usually after work, grousing about how unfair the world has always been. They're the ones 45 feasts upon, goading them as they do likewise.

Teachers never could reach them, because they're both jealous and dismissive of them. Teachers, after all, have to enforce the rules of the school and their classrooms and try to persuade kids that their particular subjects are worth reading, listening and talking about. Nobody in this roving cabal would be caught dead raising their hands in class to volunteer anything but the utmost cynicism. Teachers are the people on whom they take out their frustration.

This is not new. There was an excellent analysis written about this right after 45's election that was spot-on. But it bears repeating. They're still there. They either remain grousers or get worse and become alt-right apologists and/or ersatz defenders, with or without automatic weapons.

They never got over themselves. They keep snarling. What they need is someone to reach out to them somehow, not to humiliate but to enlighten, if they would and could but allow it. All teaching and learning was, and always will be, a two-way street, after all. If you just listen to one source that reinforces everything you ever wanted to think about yourself, well, that will be your reality whether or not it has anything to do with actual reality.

They'll remain, too, far after 45 is gone, regardless of the manner in which it's done. Truly, they deserve an audience, but not an audience alone: One, au contraire, that engages in a conversation that might begin thus: Okay, then, what can be done about it? And will you help us figure that out? Remember: You're living in this country, now, not the one that once was. It's not the same place. It will never be, either.

They're the ones, too, who will mourn their speeding tickets when "everybody else was speeding, too, they just caught poor me," and put out on Facebook those compilation of prices for every-day groceries back in the 1950s. It's a classic mentality: Don't you wish you had the money you have now and the prices that were being charged back then? But how silly is that? How productive? What purpose does it do besides keep us from thinking about how to move forward in the best possible way?

That's what 45's doing, though. Every time he says something about "back then," he's appealing to that mentality. It's tempting for all of us, true. But we literally get nowhere if we rely on it.

That's 45's thinking in a nutshell: He wants us to get nowhere--nowhere but to rely completely on whatever he says and double-down on his reality his way: Only I can fix. That's getting to be a very tired approach, one that's completely skewed from actual reality. That, too, will be exposed during this unfortunate but necessary impeachment process.

After it ends, there will be a clear and ongoing challenge: To get the cynics to believe in this country again--the country that is, not the one that once was. The former really can be better than the latter. But we will need their help, not their wistful thinking. Too.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark