Like Nobody’s Ever Seen

Not so long ago President Donald Trump was plausibly bragging about the best economy, and hoping that would carry him to reelection despite everything else. The latest economic figures suggest we’re now in the worst economy ever, however, and Trump is struggling to find another argument.

The jobs and gross domestic product numbers are undeniably gruesome. Another 1.4 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits in the past week, bringing the overall unemployment rate to 14.7, which is higher than in any previous post-war recession. Over the past three months the GDP shrank at an annualized rate of 32.9 percent, which is even worse than the worst quarter of the Great Depression.

The cause of all this the coronavirus epidemic, which is unlikely to away by Election Day, and is currently getting worse in many parts of the country. Trump does his best to defend his administration’s response, but but he’s not convincing any skeptics and even losing some supporters. He’s peddling a cure that most scientists believe would do more harm than good, relying on the advice of some very dubious doctors, and has resisted public health measures a consensus of medial opinion are urging. Some of his die-hard supporters will appreciate his defiance, but the rest of the country won’t.

Lacking a boast-worthy record to run on, Trump is instead pursuing two related strategies. One is o claim that his expected loss in the election will be due only to massive fraud by mail-in ballots, and the other is to argue that his Democratic opponents “sick people” bent on destroying everything good about America. Trump will have a hard-time arguing that the man he’s nicknamed “Sleepy” Joe Biden is up to such a gargantuan task, and there’s nothing in Biden’s 40 year record that suggests he want to do it.

Trump “tweeted” a suggestion that the election be delayed, but his most loyal allies in the Senate shot that down, and a few extra weeks of a deadly epidemic currently killing an American every minute and a continued Great Depression economy wouldn’t do him much good.

— Bud Norman

What’s in a Name?

The sports pages of the news used to be a temporary refuge from politics, but since early spring there have been not heroic feats to marvel at and no box scores to pore over, and the only sports news has been drearily political. After a big fuss about the NASCAR stock racing league banning the Confederate battle flag, the big story on Monday was about the National Football League’s Washington Redskins agreeing to change the team name.

The team has been called the Redskins since it first entered the then-fledgling NFL back in 1932, and for the first few decades nobody thought much about it. Starting around the late ’60s, though, there some grumbling from the emerging cultural left about a team using a term coined as a racial slur against Indians as its name, and over time the grumbling few louder. For the past couple of decades the controversy has festered, with occasional protests outside the stadium and the federal patent office denying the team trademark protections for all the products they put their name and logo and some newspapers refusing to refer to the Washington, D.C., franchise by its given name.

Team owner Daniel Snyder long resisted the protestors, saying the name and the Indian head logo on the fifty yard line and on all those licensed products were meant to honor America’s original inhabitants. there’s something to be said for time-honored traditions. There’s something to it, as most people have long thought that “Redskins” was just a colloquial term for Indians like “Yankees” is a term for northeastern Americans and “Cannucks” is slang for Canadians, and the University of Oklahoma Sooners and the University of Kansas Jayhawks and Indiana University Hoosiers have all embraced names that were coined as slurs. America’s varied Indians mostly didn’t give it much thought, having more pressing problems to deal with, and Snyder didn’t see any reason to spend millions of dollars on changing the team’s uniforms and signage and stationery and mailing address.

Halfway into a long, hot summer of demonstrations and debates about racial justice, however, Snyder finally relented. The giant FedEx company and other huge corporations threatened to withdraw from deals to help him finance a fancy new stadium, and the District of Columbia’s municipal government threatened to withhold the necessary permits, and Snyder apparently concluded that would be worse for his bottom line than the few measly million dollars he’d spend to make a change of name and logo. Call it a victory for capitalism or for social justice, or just another capitulation to “political correctness,” but when football eventually resumes the Redskins will no longer be the Redskins.

Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves are being similarly pressured to change names, as are our beloved Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL, along with the few remaining collegiate sports programs with Indian-themed monikers. We’d let the Cleveland ball club pass, as Indians is a neutrally descriptive term, much like the Bethany College Swedes in the charming Swedish-Kansas town of Lindsborg, but they might want to reconsider their grinning mascot “Chief Knock-a-Homa.” The Braves arguably honor the bravery of America’s Indians, but it would be a gesture of respect if the stopped the “Tomahawk Chop” gestures and war cries in the stands. The Chiefs were actually named after machine boss mayor who lured the Dallas Texans to Kansas City, as everyone in town called him “Chief,” but then they added an arrowhead logo to the helmets and fifty-yard line to what is called Arrowhead Stadium, so given the current cultural climate they probably should have gone with the Kansas City Mayors.

A few blocks away from us, just across the Minisa Bridge over the Little Arkansas River, is Wichita North High School, a gorgeous work of architecture adorned with terra cotta decorations depicting Indians. which has been known since its long ago opening as the “Home of the Redskins.” The local board of education has scheduled a public hearing about that, and it should prove interesting. There’s no clamor to change the Indian motifs of either the school or the bridge, which everyone agrees are beautiful and quite respectful, so people are already-talking about something Indian-themed but not at all offensive. One possible name that’s already gaining favor is the North High Keepers, an allusion to the locally beloved “Keeper of the Plains” statue by locally revered artist Blackbear Bosin, which is just downstream at the confluence of the Little Arkansas and Arkansas rivers, where the plains tribes used to meet for pow-wows and political dealing and commerce.

Whatever they decide, we hope everyone will be agreeable about it. North High hasn’t had a good football team since future Hall of Fame running back Barry Sanders was in the backfield, and the basketball teams have been lousy since all-time City League scoring champ Conor Frankamp graduated, but it’s a beautiful school with dedicated teachers and mostly Latino and a mostly well-behaved student body, and it’s in the neighborhood, so we root for them when they’re not playing Wichita Heights.

We’d like to think that the rest of country will sort all this agreeably, but we’re not betting on it. There are still hold-outs for the Lost Cause out there, even as the Marines and NASCAR are banishing its most cherished symbol, and many Americans still resist anything that smacks of “political correctness.” We understand the impulse, as “political correctness” does indeed sometimes stifle free and open debate about the complexities of America’s history and its current events, but too many Americans resent any polite public opprobrium against using racial slurs and espousing explicitly racist beliefs.

By no means are all of President Donald Trump’s supporters those sorts of racists, but all of those sorts of racists are Trump supporters, and he did vow to liberate the country from the chains of political correctness. When he somehow got elected while flouting not only “political correctness” but also the most reasonable rules of politeness, it emboldened the worst of his supporters, but they’ve probably been disappointed by the results.

Trump is opposed to the Redskins changing their name, of course. Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the president believes most Indians will be “very angry” about it, Trump also “tweeted” that “They name teams out of STRENGTH, not weakness, but now the Washington Redskins & Cleveland Indians, two fabled sports franchises, look like they are going to be changing their names order to be politically correct. Indians, like Elizabeth Warren, must be very angry now.” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has nothing to do with this, of course, but he can never resist insulting her.

No matter how boldly he flouts both “political correctness” and basic politeness, though, Trump is clearly losing the culture wars. The Confederacy is still polling badly after all these years, with both NASCAR and the state of Missssiippi retiring the Stars and Bars, and most people don’t think that “black lives matter” is hate speech. If the NFL ever gets to play football again league policy will allow players to take a knee in protest against police brutality during the national anthem. Many of America’s top athletes and best teams have declined invitations to the White House, and they’re unafraid to express their opinions.

Deep in his wheeling-and-dealing real estate developer’s black ink heart Trump knows the bottom line reason that Snyder at last agreed to change the name of ‘Skins, and can’t hold it against him. Corporate America is currently aligned with social justice and racial equality and sensitivity to minority groups and all the the rest of that “political correctness,” and we’re sure it’s because their marketing departments have their fingers on the pulse of public opinion and are looking to their bottom lines. Trump would do well to keep that in mind, but he also needs to call of his base intact and enthused come Election Day.

— Bud Norman

We Kansans Is Officially Smart

The presumably fine folks at something called Safehome.org have ranked all the states according to their smartness, and our beloved Sunflower State came in a perfectly respectable seventh place. If we correctly remember what we learned about mathematics and civics in Kansas’ public schools that probably puts us in the top half of the 50 or so states, and we reckon that ain’t bad.

The Safehome.org folks based their rankings on a presumably scientific formula that takes into account the number of citizens with a bachelor’s degree, the high school graduation rate, the average score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and how many of the state’s students had least a passing score on the SAT’s various benchmarks, which strikes us as fair enough. Kansas might have fared better by some less hifalutin formula that takes common horse sense into account, but we suppose that is hard to objectively quantify, and given the snobbish disdain of the coastal elites we Kansans just know are laughing at us behind our backs with chips on the shoulder, seventh place seems almost comforting.

We were glad to see that New Jersey topped the list, as it’s the butt of far more jokes than Kansas will ever be. The state features some of America’s scariest ghettos, the ongoing storyline from “The Sopranos,” and frequently disgraced politicians, but much of it is quite nice, and every New Jerseyan or New Jerseyite or whatever you call them that we’ve ever met met have been very nice and very smart people. We’re not sure they’re smarter than Kansans, who spend less time in traffic on highways jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive, but we mean them no disrespect.

According to Safehome.org the second smartest state is Utah, which is not surprising, as those Mormons believe in all sorts of crazy things but are nonetheless very smart about many things. Massachusetts came in third and North Carolina fourth, which greatly annoyed us because we’ve known some very snobby and not all that smart people from both states. Montana finished fifth, and although we’e visited that very beautiful state we really don’t know enough Montanans or Montanians or what ever you call them to make a judgement about how smart they are relative to Kansans. Sixth place went to Virginia, a state that played an outsized role in American history since Washington and Jefferson, and we’ve been lucky to know many Virginians, as they like to be called, and although they’re a rather snooty bunch we have to admit we found several of them them smarter than the national average.

So seventh place ain’t bad, as we reckon it. We’re still ahead of another 43 or so states, according to our calculations, including all the neighbors we like to jibe about. Colorado and its legal marijuana came in 15th place. Missouri and its big league baseball teams came in 18th. Nebraska and whatever it has going for it was 20th. Oklahoma, a state we dearly love filled with some very smart family and friends we dearly love, came in 50th, just ahead of Idaho. The District of Columbia, which isn’t even a state so far as we can tell, came in 31st, which might account for any discrepancies you’ve noticed in our math.

Such populous and influential states as California and New York and California and Texas also lagged far behind Kansas in smartness, but as Kansans we are far too smart and refined to say “n’yah n’yah n’yah,” and will give due respect to our fellow Americans. The states have enough to quarrel about without some pseudoscientific rankings of their smartness, even if it does acknowledge how relatively smart us Kansans are, and it’s not the Kansas way to brag about such things..

Kansans have been smart enough to make vibrant cities and towns and far-flung farm houses out of this harsh and barren part of the country, and as imperfect as our state is we think it quite an accomplishment. We’ve travelled through 48 other states in our days, as well as the District of Columbia, and have found smart people and dumb people everywhere, and we hope they’ll prevail.

Our limited understanding of mathematics tell us that approximately half the people out there are below overage in smartness, though, which is a frightening thought given how often the brighter half of the population is wrong. For now the country seems to be doing a sufficient job of creating a great nation out of what was once a forbidding wilderness, even if neither of our political parties is currently helping out much with the chore, and we’ll hold out hope that the smartest people spread around the country somehow prevail.

— Bud Norman

Tempus Sure Does Fugit

Yesterday was the 60th birthday of our star writer and editor-in-chief and very unsatisfactory janitor, so we spent less than our usual amount of time poring over the news of the day. Sixty is one of those significantly round numbers one passes through on the surprisingly short journey from cradle to grave, and it brings to mind the admonition in Isaiah 22:13 to “eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

With such Biblical authority we guiltlessly slept well into the afternoon, then headed over to the ghetto toward Kirby’s Beer Store, where our pal Liz was unexpectedly tending bar. Liz is a very gorgeous and charming and intelligent and exceedingly eccentric young woman of about 30 years year of age, and if we were 30 years younger or she were 30 years older or we somehow met somewhere in between we’d be quite smitten, but the way things have turned out we’re well satisfied to have such a fine and uncomplicated friendship with her. She bought us a second can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in honor of our birthday, and we watched a corny old Hollywood flick on Turner Classic Movies together and had a good old time in an otherwise empty ghetto dive.

Our good pal Tom showed up after his day job as a workers’ compensation judge, just in time to wish us a happy birthday. Tom’s a lawyer who got that cushy judgeship as a former Democratic state legislature representative and loyal Democratic functionary, but he’s one of those sane centrist sorts of Democrats and he recognizes us as the sort of sane centrist Republicans he could do business with, and over our long friendship he’s gone out of his way to help at least three people we have cared about who screwed up and needed a lawyer at pro bono or cut-rate prices. We couldn’t accept his generous offer of a third Pabst Blue Ribbon, but his fulsome best birthday wishes were much appreciated.

The friends we usually find after work at Harry’s Uptown Bar and Grill weren’t there, so we headed home and logged onto the internet, where dozens of “Facebook friends” were wishing us a happy birthday. Despite our luddite grumblings we have to admit that’s pretty nice, and after that we had a lovely dinner at a fancy downtown restaurant with our our oldest and dearest friends, our beloved Mom and Dad. The conversation included two merlots and was delightful even when it veered into politics, as Dad agreed that Trump’s monetary policy is wrong, and we mostly talked about well things have relatively gone over the last 60 years.

After another Pabst Blue Ribbon paid for at Kirby’s Beer Store by an aging homosexual friend of ours we headed home to confront to the day’s news, but at that point it didn’t seem so formidable. There was talk of war and recession, but after 60 years we’ve been through a few recessions and deadly wars as well as the economic recoveries and desultory peace that has always followed. After 60 years and a few beers and a couple of glasses of merlot and a full meal of fancy-schmantzy mahi-mahi and mushroom buttons we’ll hope for the best, but admit that the worst is well within in the range of the possible. So long as friends and family somehow thrive, as they have for far longer than our 60 years, we’ll hold out hope they’ll survive the next inevitable economic downturn and war.

Maybe it’s the wisdom of 60 years, or just the beer and merlot, but we suggest you eat and drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. This daily news is likely to drag on forever.

The Latest News from the Trade War

The big story on Tuesday was another round of Democratic presidential primary debates, where the center-left types reportedly clashed with the more leftward types, but our brother and his wife are in town and the weather’s been far too nice to bother with that at the moment. When we got home we were more stuck by the latest on news on the ongoing trade war with China.

President Donald Trump has “tweeted” his assurance that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” but his trade war with China has thus far proved neither good nor easy to win. Trump and his die-hard fans have been telling us for at least a year that China is down on its knees begging for any trade agreement Trump might grant them, but the latest presidential “tweets” signal that the Chinese are willing to hold out for better terms until at least the next presidential election, when they might get the chance to negotiate with another administration. Naturally Trump is blaming the Democrats for daring to choose someone who might challenge him, and promising that if he gets reelected he’ll deliver the greatest trade deal the world has ever seen, a trade deal so great your head will spin.

We don’t have much faith any of these Democratic contenders will do any better, but neither do we worry our heads will fatefully spin with what Trump brings about. The trade war is is definitely harming China’s economy, as Trump triumphantly “tweets,” but only the most slack-jawed yokel in a red “Make America Great Again” ball cap believes that America is benefiting from all those billions of tariff dollars the Chinese are pouring into our best-ever economy. The tariffs are being paid by the MAGA-cap-wearing suckers lined up at Wal-Mart with a basketful of Chinese goods, the world’s two biggest economies are both taking a hit, the rest of the world’s economy are slowing as a result, and it all makes it somewhat more likely another administration will finish the negotiations. Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, described by Trump as a “close friend,” doesn’t have to worry about any upcoming election campaigns, and survive an economic slowdown more easily than any head of state from a more or less democratic nation.

Once upon a time in the Grand Old Party we could have imagined well-credentialed Republican experts dealing with China, and such establishment presidents as Eisenhower and Nixon and Reagan and a couple of Bushes guiding them along. China is indeed an unfair trading partner, stealing intellectual property and occasionally manipulating its currency and charging unfair tariffs, but they’re doing that to the rest of the world, too, and we think a unified world could convince them to stop. Trump has instead chosen to start trade wars with the rest of the world, but most of these Democrats are even more isolationist and protectionist than Trump, and those well-credentialed Republican experts who use to handle these matters in a way that furthered global peace and prosperity are sitting next to us on the political sidelines.

On such a sunny summer day as this,  and with our brother and  sister-in-law in town, we’ll hope for the best.

— Bud Norman

Robert Mueller’s Graceful Bow from the Public Stage, and Its Aftermath

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before two congressional committees on Wednesday was one of the most highly anticipated episodes in President Donald Trump’s long-running reality show, but it proved anticlimactic. No matter which side you’re rooting for in this tawdry spectacle, you probably didn’t get what you were hoping for.

Trump’s tormenters in the Democratic party were mostly disappointed that Mueller stubbornly refused to add anything juicy to what’s in the 480-page report his exhaustive investigation into the “Russia thing” provided. There’s plenty in the report that looks very, very bad for Trump, but it’s a long and tough read that most Americans haven’t perused, and much of the country is willing to go with Attorney General Robert Barr’s four-page summary that there’s nothing in it that looks at all bad for Trump, so the Democrats were hoping that Mueller would make it more vivid, which his very carefully chosen words didn’t do.

On the other hand, Trump and his die-hard supporters in the Republican party didn’t get what they wanted. They’ve been claiming that the report completely exonerates Trump of any wrongdoing, and Mueller reiterated the report’s carefully chosen and clearly stated words that it “does not exonerate the president.” Even as Trump and his die-hard supporters claim that Mueller did exonerate the president, they’re also claiming that Mueller is a “deep state” conspirator who launched a treasonous “witch hunt” into a “total hoax” about Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in the last presidential election, and they didn’t make much headway with that alternative argument.

On the whole, we’d say that Trump and his die-hard supporters got slightly the worst of it.

In his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee Mueller reiterated his investigation’s finding that Russia did indeed interfere on Trump’s behalf in various ways during the last election, a claim that all of America’s intelligence agencies confirm is not a hoax, with Trump’s Secretary of State and Central Intelligence Agency director and National Security and Director of National Security Director in agreement. Trump is still inclined to take Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s word for it that Russia would never think of doing any such thing, and has taken no action to prevent from doing so in the future, and any fair-minded American who’s still paying attention to Mueller’s carefully chosen words about this stuff should be concerned about that.

Mueller also reiterated his investigation’s conclusion that it could not charge Trump or his campaign with criminally conspiring with the Russians, which seems to be the “total exoneration” that Trump crows about, but of course it’s more complicated that. The investigation found Trump campaign officials were fully aware of Russia’s efforts and had numerous and Russian officials, proved that Trump was lying when he assured the Republican primary electorate he wasn’t pursuing any business deals in Russia, and has won indictments and guilty pleas and convictions against such high-ranking Trump associates as longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen and campaign manager Paul Manafort and national security advisor Mike Flynn. Another case against longtime Trump friend and advisor Roger Stone is currently being adjudicated, but Mueller carefully avoided commenting on that, or any of the other many criminal cases his investigation referred to other jurisdictions.

The House Judiciary Committee was naturally more interested in the part of Mueller’s report that outlined ten instances where Trump sought to thwart the investigation, but Mueller disappointed the Democrats by artfully dodging questions about whether he would have charged Trump with obstruction of justice if Trump weren’t the president of the United States. There’s a Watergate-era opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that says you can’t charge a sitting president for a felony, which the report seems to imply is the sole reason no charges were brought, and the seasoned Mueller was craftily coy in dodging questions about whether he’d meant to imply that, but we figure any fair-minded observer still paying attention to this arcane stuff could probably read between the lines.

The Republican attacks on the character and credibility of the man they simultaneously claim has completely exonerated Trump looked ridiculous, of course. If you’ve been following this soap opera on right wing talk radio and through Trump’s “tweets” you know that Mueller and the Hillary Clinton-loving and Trump-hating “13 Angry Democrats” he assembled for his investigation were intent on a coup d’tat against a duly elected American president, but despite their best efforts the Republican interrogators failed to make a convincing case. Trump has “tweeted” that Mueller only investigated him because Mueller was “best friends” with fired Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey, Trump didn’t appoint Mueller to a a third term as FBI director, and because of some long-ago dispute about greens fees at a Trump-owned golf course, but that was all the more ridiculous.

Mueller is a bona fide Eagle Scout, a veteran of the Vietnam War decorated with a Bronze Star and Purple Heart, a star student at three of America’s most elite universities, a longtime prosecutor against America’s most dangerous criminals whose reputation for by-the-book integrity earned him a nomination to head the FBI by a Republican president and a nomination to serve a rare second term by a Democratic president, with both appointments confirmed by landslide and bipartisan votes in the Senate. His reputation for honesty and integrity and patriotism is far better than Trump’s, by any fair-minded assessment, and it’s hard to believe he’d toss away his hard-earned fawning footnote in America’s history because of a collegial professional relationship with Comey or a third term at the FBI he swore under oath he did not apply for, much less some petty dispute over greens fees that only the likes of Trump would make a big deal about.

That Mueller disappointed by the Democrats by declining to sensationalize the more damning parts of his report makes the Republican arguments that he’s a treasonous “deep state” conspirator all the more unconvincing. So far as we can tell from our reading of Mueller’s report the Trump campaign cooperated with Russia’s interference in the election, and the Trump administration sought to prevent efforts to find out about it, and while it’s outside Mueller’s jurisdiction he stuck to rules as he reads them and he figures it’s up to Congress to decide if that amounts to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that are impeachable offenses. We’re sure Mueller has some private opinion about how Congress should proceed, but he’s a stickler for the rules ,and one of those rare Washington figures who doesn’t think everything’s all about him, and is still willing to let his private opinions remain private, so as disappointed as we are our old-school Republican souls admire his old-school reticence.

Which is more than we can say for Trump. At what he surely hopes is the end of a long and distinguished career of public service Mueller has once again provided the American public with the facts of the matter at hand, as best as he could, and according to the rules he has once again humbly and wisely decided to let the rest of us sort it all out. We’ll hold out hope, as we’re sure Mueller will do, that whatever the hell the truth is it will ultimately prevail.

— Bud Norman

An Ill-Fitted President in an Ill-Fitting Suit

On his first day of a state visit to the United Kingdom President Donald Trump committed his usual number of offenses against longstanding diplomatic protocol, continuing his “twitter” war against the mayor of the host city, offering opinions on British political affairs that are none of America’s business and he doesn’t seem to know much about, and taking the occasion to hurl insults and threats from abroad at perceived enemies back home. The worst of it, as far as we’re concerned, was the outfit he wore to a fancy dinner with the Queen of England.

He was wearing a white tie and tales, which is appropriate dress for state dinners with royalty and those other very rare occasions in life when a black tie and tuxedo is insufficiently highfalutin, but surely such a rich man as Trump claims to be could have found a more adept tailor. The suit made him look far fatter than he and his doctor swear he is, even more so than his golf gear, with the coat cut higher and showing conspicuously more white cummerbund than any of the more elegant-looking other male guests, and along with Trump’s behavior on the trip it put us in mind of Burgess Meredith’s portrayal of the “Penguin” on the old “Batman” television series.

To be fair we must admit that only Fred Astaire ever looked great in such a get-up, and that we are by no means fashion icons ourselves, but we couldn’t resist joining all the jibes that many of the commenters at various internet news sites were making. Our observation might seem one of those ad hominem attacks we routinely accuse Trump of making, but on his first day in London he making fun of the mayor’s diminutive height, and his fans seem to that sort of plain-spoken bluntness and cheap shots.

Also, it seemed yet another dispiriting example of how Trump just isn’t very good at this state visit and international diplomacy stuff.

All the past presidents of our by now very long recollection were obviously striving for a certain dignity and decorum and paying exquisitely careful attention to all the infinitesimal details of international diplomacy while abroad, but Trump seems to pride himself on demolishing even the most time-tested traditions. He shoved the prime minister of Montenegro aside to get to the front of a photo at a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, sided with brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin over the consensus of his intelligence agencies at a meeting in Helsinki, lavished unnecessary praise on the even more brutal North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during negotiations in Singapore, and went out of his way to insult the democratically-elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a G-7 summit north of the border.

Trump was on his best behavior during the dinner with the Queen and the rest of the royal family. He wisely refrained from reiterating his opinion that the recent biracial American member of the clan is “nasty,” which he now denies saying even there’s audio evidence that he did, and he seemed quite sincere in such over-the-top flattery of the Queen that she was probably embarrassed about it. Trump clearly loves pomp and circumstance, a tendency he has said he learned from his Scottish-born mother, who seems to have had a greater affection for the royals than your average Scot, and although he’s willing to wage petty and pointless feuds with all of the democratically-officials in the UK and the rest of the western world he clearly appreciates the red carpet treatment he routinely gets from the world’s hereditary monarchies and dictatorships.

The rest of Trump’s brief stay in England will include mass protests by a public that has about an 18 percent approval of him, including a blimp that portrays Trump as an obese and diapered baby holding a “twitter” machine, as well as outgoing and up-and-coming politicians who won’t be so polite as the royal family, and we expect that as usual he’ll want to punch back ten times harder. He’s got stops in France and other European locations where he’s also widely unpopular with both the public and their democratically-elected leaders, and we expect it will all play better with the fans back home than with our erstwhile crucial trading and military partners.

Trump fans love his bold willingness to disdain the longstanding traditions they believe has constrained America’s power, even though the past decades of business as usual have actually made America the economic and military and cultural leader of the free world in the post-World War II era, but we think there’s still something to be said for dignity and decorum and friendly relationships with the democratically-elected world leaders rather than its most brutal dictators. There’s also something to be said for hiring a tailor who won’t make you look so fat.

— Bud Norman

‘Crazy’ Bernie Sanders, Crazy Like on Fox

More pressing matters kept us from watching independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sander’s two-hour “town hall” on the Fox Network Monday night, but despite an infuriatingly busy day of play rehearsal and car troubles on Tuesday we couldn’t help hearing about it. President Donald Trump was apparently watching, as he “tweeted” quite a bit about it.

Trump is usually a big fan of Fox News’ programming, but was quite displeased about it giving Sanders two full hours to make the case for his presidential run. “So weird to watch Crazy Bernie on @FoxNews,” Trump “tweeted,” adding “Not surprisingly, @BretBaier and the ‘audience’ was so smiley and nice. Very strange, and now we have @Donnabrazile?”

In case you’re only a casual fan of the media game, the
@” thing with the missing spaces is newfangled internet lingo, “Crazy Bernie” is Trump’s usual nickname for the duly elected Senator, along with Chris Wallace Bret Baier is one of the few Fox News journalists who occasionally poses hard questions to the Trump administration, and Donna Brazile is the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman recently hired by Fox News to add some balance to its panel debates. The audience Fox News chose for the “town hall” reflected the mix of Republicans and Democrats and independents and right-wingers and left-wingers that make up the swing district in the swing state of Pennsylvania where the broadcast took place, and although it was hardly “so smiley and nice” we can see how it was a bit too civil and fair and balanced for Trump’s tastes.

As old-fashioned Republicans wer’e not at all fans of Sanders’ self-proclaimed socialism, but neither do we care much for Trump, and as old-school newspaper journalists we reckon that Sanders got the best of it.

The town hall was held in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, one of those de-industrialized Rust Belt towns that have been left behind in high-tech and service economy, and a majority of its citizens twice voted for President Barack Obama based on his promises of a futuristic revival, and when that predictably pan out a majority voted for President Donald Trump’s promises turn back time to the good old days of his steel-making and coal-mining and less-Mexican youth. Now that those promises are predictably proving hard to keep, the district and the state’s sizable and potentially crucial 20 electoral votes are one again up for grabs. Sanders’ unabashed tax-and-spend and even more-socialistic-than-Obama shtick almost certainly won’t work out well for the people of Bethlehem, but they’ve already fallen for both Obama’s pie-in-the-sky futurism and Trump’s for Technicolor promise to turn back the clock to the good old days of hard and sweaty and life-shortening labor in the steel mills and coal mines, and “Crazy Bernie” might well convince them he couldn’t do worse.

Sanders was shrewd enough to not describe those Rust Belt Obama-voters-turned-Trump-voters as racist “deplorables,” as the last Democratic presidential nominee stupidly did, and he emphasized his policy disagreements with Trump more than the president’s undeniable character flaws and countless scandals. Sanders has his own character questions and political scandals, including an out-of-wedlock son he recently declined to endorse in a Vermont political race, and a wife who runs a currently bankrupt college, but in an age when the sitting president is a boastfully adulterous womanizer who apparently cheated on his nude-model third wife a porn star, and an openly homosexual mid-sized city mayor is climbing in the Democratic primary polls, that sort of old-fashioned stuff doesn’t seem to matter much.

At times got Sanders got some big applause from all segments on the Bethlehem audience, at other times he got some boos and hisses, so we can well understand why Trump didn’t like what Fox News was doing. He’s come to rely on the highly-rated Fox News network for unceasing hosannas, is understandably perplexed why they should hand over two hours of prime time to someone who could very well beat him the crucial state of Pennsylvania, and why they should fine air time for that awful Brazile woman. As old-fashioned Republicans we can empathize, but as old-school newspaper journalists we have no problem with how Fox News handled it.

As crazy as he quite arguably is, Sanders is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination, and seems to have a good chance of knocking off Trump in Pennsylvania and the rest of the Electoral College next time around, so that’s a solid reason for Fox News or any other journalistic outlet to grant him a couple of hours to expound his crazy ideas. Bret Baier and his co-host did ask some pretty tough questions, and if they were civil if not quite “smiley and nice” about it, that doesn’t bother us a bit.

One of the other character questions about Sanders is that the self-proclaimed scourge of the millionaires and billionaire and 1 percent has learned more than a million dollars over the past two years, putting him well into hated 1 percent, so the self-proclaimed billionaire of course “tweeted” about that hypocrisy, given that Sanders got a huge break from Trump’s tax reform bill. Trump should have noticed that even Brett Baier asked about that, and that Sanders accurately responded he’d voted against the bill. We’re no fans of Sanders’ soak-the-rich socialism, nor Trump’s wildly overstated tax cuts that worked out best for the wealthy, but we have to admit that Sanders voted against the bill and his self-interests and seems to have the courage of his quite arguably crazy convictions, which is more than we can say for Trump and whatever convictions he’s espousing today.

There’s been some grumbling among the Democrats that Sanders would boostt ratings in two highly-rated hours for the hated Fox News, and the Democratic National Committee has determined that none of its primary debates will be aired on the network. Most Republican politicians these days are similarly wary of the Cable News Network and MSNBC and the rest of the widely-watched broadcast and cable and print media, but they’d probably do well to follow Sanders’ example and wade into enemy territory. They won’t find a nice and smiley audience, to be sure, and there are likely hard questions to be asked, but it will likely be at least civil, and we still hold out hope an old-fashioned Republican who doesn’t make grandiose promises should be able to make a persuasive case to at least some of those people in such crucial places as Bethlehem.

In an ideal world there’d be an old-fashioned Republican party telling the white underclass what its been telling the brown and black underclass for decades, that it needs to get off its lazy ass and relocate and reinvent itself for the modern economy, but that now seems unlikely, and the damned Democrats don’t have anything better to offer. For now we have little regard for either side of the political divide, but we still hold out hope that a free and open press might somehow hold the center.

— Bud Norman

The “Russia Thing” Comes to an End

The nearly two-year-long special counsel investigation into the “Russia thing with Trump and Russia” has come to an anticlimactic conclusion, with a four page summary of its findings issued by the Attorney General stating that it did not find President Donald Trump or his campaign guilty of conspiring with the Russian government to affect the last presidential election. That’s great news for Trump and his fans, who are claiming complete exoneration, even if the four page summary of the voluminous report issued by Trump’s own Attorney General says that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, “it also does not exonerate him.”

For now Trump and his fans can plausibly claim vindication, however, and we’re sure they will. The special counsel’s investigation concluded the Russian government did meddle in the past election on Trump’s behalf, and brought an indictment against 12 specific Russians, and it won indictments and guilty pleas and convictions against Trump’s campaign manager and deputy campaign manager and campaign foreign policy advisor and other campaign operatives for lying about their numerous contacts with Russians during the campaign, among other things, but it’s still a big deal that no one named Trump was indicted at the end of the investigation. For now it’s a huge disappointment to the Trump foes who had so dearly hoped the special counsel investigation would end the Trump presidency, but we’re sure they’ll keep trying.

There’s bound to be something embarrassing to Trump in the voluminous full report that didn’t make the four-page summary issued by his Attorney General, and in the coming days the big story will be the congressional Democrats’ efforts to make it all public, and the Trump administration’s effort to keep it out of view. Some of the report will surely be redacted so that the investigation’s counter-intelligence sources and methods aren’t revealed, but we expect that eventually the president’s foes will feast on the rest of it. Press reports indicate that the special counsel handed off a number of suspected crimes outside its scope to various jurisdictions of the Justice Department, mostly to the very aggressive Southern District of New York, and there will be no way of keeping that out of the news.

Trump and his supporters will continue to insist that it’s all a “witch hunt” and a “hoax” and “witch hoax,” but the fact that the “deep state conspiracy” declined to frame them for “collusion” somehow undermines their claims. Special counsel Robert Mueller remains a decorated Vietnam war hero and former Federal Bureau of Investigation director who earned bipartisan praise and appointments over his long and distinguished career of public service, and if Mueller’s conclusions disappoint his Democratic fans they also make his Republican critics’ slurs against his character look slanderous. The rest of Mueller’s work will play out in American courts of law, and we expect that in the end Mueller’s character will fare better than Trump’s.

Nothing in the Attorney General’s four-page summary of the special counsel investigation’s report exonerates him from the already proved charges that his campaign associates repeatedly lied under oath about contacts with Russian operatives, or that he himself lied to the public during the campaign about his business dealings with Russia, or that he broke federal campaign laws to cover up alleged affairs with a pornographic video performer and a Playboy playmate, or that his foreign policy has been unaccountably friendly to Russia and other authoritarian regimes. Nor does even the four-page summary of the report indicate that Trump isn’t a vulgar and dishonest and bullying and entirely self-interested fellow.

Nothing in even the four–page summary of the special counsel’s report indicates that Trump’s trade wars and budget deficits and feuds with longstanding allies are making America great again, and the latest economic data suggest they are not, and that’s what will probably decide the next election not matter what scandals beset Trump. For now the Democrats seem intent on nominating some some suicidally socialist candidate who could easily lose to Trump not matter what scandals might accrue, so for now we will glumly await that conclusion without any expectations.

— Bud Norman

No Hoorays for Hollywood

Way back in our younger days we used to take the same rooting interest in the Oscar contests as we did in the American League’s eastern division pennant races, but these days we don’t even know who or what the nominees are. There are still great movies being made from to time, we  assume, but it no longer seems worth the effort to sort through all the dreck to find them. One of Wichita’s premier musicians was giving a final jazz concert at Kirby’s Beer Store on Sunday night before heading off to Poland, of all places, so that’s what we did instead of watching the interminable Academy Awards ceremony on television.

Which is sad, as we always have and still truly do love the cinematic arts. We’re the perfect age for a movie buff, having grown up in the ’60s and ’70s when the still elegant movie houses were showing some very memorably innovative films, and all three channels on pre-cable television were broadcasting the best of the ’30s and ’40s Golden Age of Hollywood during the afternoon and late night hours that the networks didn’t fill, and as teenagers we frequented the art houses and university theaters where the arty and international and silent-era stuff was showing, so by now we’re admittedly hard to impress. Even so, and being as generous to the youngsters as we can muster, we have to say the movies these days seem to reflect the same civilizational decline as the rest of American culture.

So far as we can tell from our occasional perusals most of the movies these days are non-stop computer generated fight-scene action adventure flicks featuring mostly comic book super heroes, deliberately rude comedies starring former “Saturday Night Live” performers, and what have come to be called “chicks flicks.” Friends of ours have highly recommended much of it, with some of our geekier friends insisting that the comic superheroes have something serious to say about modern society, other low-brow types talking about how funny some of those supposedly anti-establishment comedies are, and some man-bashing women we know endorsing those “chick flicks.” As much as we like these friends, we think they’re too young and easily-impressed to know what they’re talking about. At this point in our grumpy middle age, we think the same about the Academy of Motion of Picture Arts and Sciences and its gaudy awards show.

One of the “best picture” nominees this year was a comic book superhero flick called “The Black Panther,” and it got such rave reviews from some of our friends and several of the supposedly more serious movie critics that that we gave it a try when it showed up on Netflix. It had some interesting ideas about a spiritual African culture possessed of highly advanced Western scientific knowledge, but it was mostly improbably buff actors and actresses staging prolonged fight scenes with help from computer generated images, and we quit watching about halfway through. We’ve nothing against action-adventure flicks, and can readily name “The Professionals” and “The Great Escape” and the silent-era “Thief of Baghdad”and the Sean Connery era of the James Bonds movies and countless other as masterpieces of the genre, but all those computer generated images can’t quite compensate for the characters and dialogue and plots and often valid points about the human condition that those movies had.

Some of those rude comedies with the “Saturday Night Live” performers do get a few much-appreciated laughs out of us, but we’ve seen “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World,” and enough of the Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder and W.C. Fields and Marx Brothers and Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton movies for that to satisfy our comedic tastes. We’ve also read Twain and Swift Perelman Jerome, and know all the most fatalistic jokes, and we’ve come to expect more than occasional laughs.

Back in the ’30s and ’40s Hollywood used to make what was called “women’s pictures,” and when we watched them with our Mom during the afternoon hours of our summer vacation we shared her love of the genre. Some of the of the “women’s pictures” were “screwball comedies,” about dynamic women wooing handsome yet innocent men, and they were the stuff of our earliest romantic fantasies. Other pictures of the genre featured aggressively heroic newspaperwomen and aviatrixes and businesswomen and nurses and nuns, which was also pretty fantastic to our formative selves. Most of the “women’s pictures” were melodramatic dramas about women making selfless sacrifices for themselves and the men and the children they loved, which now renders them politically incorrect, but we still find them more heroic than anything that today’s computer generated images can come up with. We’ll long remember Barbara Stanwyck as the working class single mother watching her daughter marry a nice rich guy from behind the window on a cold and snowy street in “Stella Dallas,” or that ending in “Imitation of Life” where Mahalia Jackson sings the funeral song for the selfless mother whose mixed-race daughter had abounded her selfish reasons, and we defy anyone to watch either flick without teary eyes.

Today’s “chick flicks” — and the term’s undeniably sexist devolution from “women’s picture” should offend our newfangled feminist friends as much as it does old-fashioned selves — seem mostly about women empowering themselves to abandon such inconvenient obligations of the human condition. We’re in no position to judge how any woman should handle the admittedly difficult situations we all find ourselves in our human condition, but we must admit a certain nostalgia for the days when “Casablanca” and other Hollywood movies celebrated both Bogie and Baccall’s selflessness in an even more troubled time in human history.

We stayed up late enough to read that “The Green Book” had won the “best picture” Oscar from the Academy, and as we have’t yet seen it we’ll offer no opinion about that. The entertainment press we still occasionally peruse tell us it’s about a working class white guy driving a talented black musician through the segregation-era south, sort of of the reverse of the the Academy-loved ’80s-era “Driving Miss Daisy,” about a working class black guy driving some rich old white woman around the same area of the human condition at the same time, and as far we can tell both are still controversial in these contentious times of political correctness. We’ll take a look when “The Green Book” eventually shows up on Netflix, but until then we’ll happily have nothing to with Hollywood’s race problems, and regret that Wichita’s most talented black musician is suddenly heading to Poland, and hope for the best for American popular culture.

— Bud Norman