Tag: well

If you are a member of the attentive audience in the United States, you must be teetering on the edge of exhaustion by now, driven thither by the diurnal circulation of President Trump’s twitter tantrums, reports from the Special Counsel’s investigation of the Trump Campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential election and related shenanigans.

This news this past week featured, among other riveting developments, wall-to-wall television coverage of confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second pick in two years, to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, the so-called swing associate justice, whom Trump hustled out of the Court to make way for a more conservative judge.

Trump’s first pick was a brazen theft.  The death of the arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and exponent of a soulless legal doctrine called originalism, threw up a vacancy in the final year of the Obama Presidency.  Obama nominated the courtly Merrick Garland to fill the slot.

The Republican majority in the U. S. Senate, per the dour Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, would have none of it.  They would not even accord the nominee the courtesy visits that usually preface confirmation hearings.  The nomination was killed on arrival.

On being elected president, Trump moved swiftly to nominate Neil Gorsuch, a judge whose conservative bona fides had been established to his complete satisfaction to fill the vacancy that had been Obama’s to fill.  The Senate dutifully steamrollered the confirmation through.  It is an indication of Trump’s brand of politics that he lustily advertises this heist as one of the signal achievements of his Administration.

With the not-so-voluntary resignation of Justice Kennedy less than four months to an election that is likely to change the architecture of Congress, Trump is set to pull off another heist.

In justification of the earlier heist, Senate Republicans majority Leader McConnell had insisted that confirmation hearings must await the outcome of the presidential election – some nine months away — to give “the American people” a chance to participate in the process.

But they would not apply the same reasoning to a judicial nomination made four months    to an election that could upset their applecart.  Now, “the American people” no longer deserve a chance to participate in the selection of a justice of the Supreme Court who can be relied on to harbor little consideration for organised labour, consumers rights, voting rights, human rights, and women rights, while tightening the corporatist grip on America.

Few surprises there. The Republicans don’t do logic and they don’t play nice.  Theirs is a brass-knuckle approach to politics, and was on full display at hearings for Kavanaugh last week.

Then there were in the news cycle the excerpts from Bob Woodward’s  — he of Watergate fame, with Carl Bernstein – book chronicling the chaos and dysfunction in the White House, the erratic and often alarming behavior of its occupant, and the abysmal disesteem in which he is held by key aides and senior staffers.

The attentive public was still digesting the snippets from Woodward’s book and the shady manner in which Republican majority in the Senate was conducting the confirmation hearings for the dissembling Supreme Court nominee when The New York Times, which no one has ever accused of recklessness, came out with an unsigned Op-Ed piece that raised anew, and with insider knowledge, grave doubts about Trump’s mental, moral and intellectual fitness for his high office.

The writer, identified simply as a “senior official” of the Trump Administration, identified himself or  herself as part of a “resistance” within the White House laboring behind the scenes to save America from Trump and thwarting Trump’s “more misguided impulses” until he is out of office.

“The root of the problem,” the writer declared, “is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision-making.”

He described Trump’s style as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.”  He spoke of Trump’s “preferences” for autocrats and dictators, and of his “anti-democratic impulses.

He spoke of how senior officials from the White House to executive branch departments and agencies,  “would privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander-in -chief’s comments and actions,” and how “most (of them) are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”

Meetings with Trump “veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back,” the writer added.

Given this instability, the writer said, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment that spells out how to remove a president from office.  But rather than precipitate what was sure to be a long-drawn constitutional crisis, he and the resisters within would do everything to steer the Administration in the right direction “until – one way or another – it’s over.”

He indicted American society of complicity in Trump’s desecration of the nation’s values.  “The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility,” he wrote.

Since its publication in what Trump reflexively calls “the failing New York Times, the article has been the talk among the political class.

As might be expected, Trump almost blew his top.  He said it amounted to treason pure and simple, and demanded that the author be turned in immediately for prosecution under security laws.  Trump’s volcanic rage confirmed virtually everything the writer and many others had said about him.

The White House launched an internal search for the author, leading virtually all members of the Cabinet to declare publicly that none of them was the author.  Even Vice President Mike Pence and First Lady Melania Trump felt obliged to distance themselves from the article.

In recent memory, The New York Times has been known to grant anonymity to Op-Ed contributors in only two instances.  In both cases, publication of their identities would have gravely imperilled the contributors.

Anonymity was granted in this instance, the paper explained, because the writer would face certain dismissal and other reprisals if identified.  The writer had approached the paper through a person known to the house, and the paper had satisfied itself and the intermediary and the writer’s good faith.  Besides, the article contained important insider knowledge that might not otherwise reach a public that had the right to know – the public Trump took an oath to serve diligently, honestly and faithfully.

What good faith, some have sniggered.  If the writer was not a showboat and a coward to boot, what was he still doing in the Trump White House?  If he had the courage of his conviction, why did he not resign, and then publish the piece under his name?  How senior was the “senior official” anyway?

The New York Times would not tell, saying merely that the writer’s identify was known only to the Editor of the Editorial Page and a few staffers of the Op-Ed section.

The paper has this bifurcated existence whereby the Editorial Page is separate from the newsroom and  The Editorial Board represents the opinions of its members, its editor and the publisher.

So, even the executive editor of the larger paper does not know the identity of the writer.  But the larger paper, not being privy to the confidentiality agreement between the Op-Ed section and the writer of the explosive article, is not obliged to respect it.  Nothing in the set-up of the paper precludes it from seeking and revealing the identity of the writer.

I will not be surprised therefore, if it is The New York Times that finally reveals in its news pages the identity that its Editorial Page has vowed to keep secret.

Meanwhile, a frenzied search continues for the writer.  The suspects have been narrowed to twelve. One desperate Republican senator has nevertheless suggested that the entire corps of White House “senior officials” be rounded up and given a lie detector test.

Even at its best, that is an unreliable method of ascertaining truth.  It is unscientific.  Military and intelligence operatives who might fall into enemy hands know how to beat it.

I have a better idea, from one of the entities Donald Trump dismissed with accustomed vulgarity as “shit-hole countries.”

Make all your “senior officials,” not forgetting Vice President Pence and the First Lady Melania, swear  by Soponno or Amadioha.

But get the caskets ready first.