This is another failed response to a news story, in this instance what historians will likely view as a milestone of the Trump regime, the sacking of FBI Director James Comey. The axing of Mr. Comey, for whom I have no great regard, is wedded in memory with a personal event. The news broke while I was killing time in a waiting room as My Beloved was undergoing laparoscopy on a knee. During her convalescence, the wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the Comey dismissal was our principal diversion.
The event afforded me another opportunity to take a swipe at the appalling Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. By acceding to the Mr. Comey’s banishment, the attorney general undid his lone virtuous act, his honoring of the Office of Legal Counsel’s advice to recuse himself from oversight of the Department of Justice’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. It seemed clear that canning the FBI director was intended to hobble the investigation by other means. It was becoming evident by this juncture that neither competence nor honesty nor respect for rule of law would be the métier of Trumpian governance.
The unpublished letter is a standard response to the situation. It does contain a misstep in form, an allusion to another letter that had been published. No one cares about that; however, it indicates how exercised I was by Mr. Sessions’ tenure as attorney general.
Ellen Nakashima and Matt Zapotosky, “Trump Fires FBI Director,” The Washington Post, 10 May 2017, A1, A4 (www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/comeys-removal-sparks-fears-about-future-of-russia-probe/2017/05/09/013d9ade-3507-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html).
My recent letter (“Mr. McCain’s Words and Actions,” Washington Post, February 2, 2017) implored Senator John McCain to match his fair criticism of President Trump with action by voting against the most troubling of the president’s cabinet nominees, among them former Senator Jeff Sessions.
Attorney General Sessions’ involvement in the dismissal of FBI Director James Comey – notwithstanding Mr. Session’s recusal of himself from the FBI’s examination of Russian meddling in the 2016 election – exposes the danger inherent in acceding to an unqualified, temperamentally unsuitable, and potentially compromised nominee.
It is imperative that Republicans resist Mr. Trump’s baldly transparent effort to hamstring the FBI probe and stand with Democrats in calling for a special prosecutor to investigate potential links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Statesmanship and defense of the constitutional system must outweigh partisanship and the Senate must defend the government’s balance of power against a disingenuous and unscrupulous chief executive. Senator McCain and his Republican senatorial colleagues can perform signal service to the nation by joining with their Democratic counterparts.
I am fond of The Richmond Free Press. Free weeklies give a city character and The Richmond Free Press is a quality weekly. Even better, it has a crusading spirit. It suffers no confusion about its mission or its readership. It doesn’t engage in journalistic triangulation. It also presents a vital counterpoint to Richmond’s daily print outlet. Now that the coronavirus is ebbing, I’m looking forward to pulling a pulp copy from the box every week. The paper has a good letters policy; it accepts more lengthy screeds.
In March 2017, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III slithered from the Potomac to the James to address a law-enforcement crowd. What is there to say about the man, other than that he’s a Trumpian sack of trash? Rarely has a cabinet official been more ill-suited for the position or for the moment. Integrity was evinced during his tenure by a lone, solitary act that was in fact a promise not to act; there will be more about that later. Mr. Sessions’ speech in Richmond was a signaling of nefarious intent, a probable expansion of the prison industrial complex by resurrecting practices likely to target Blacks and the poor disproportionately. Somehow it slipped his mind to invite The Richmond Free Press, the outlet most likely to speak to these communities. I do declare, how ever could that have happened?
Free Press Staff, wire reports, “Sessions Seeks to Revive Federal Anti-Crime Program that Targeted African-Americans,” The Richmond Free Press, 16-18 March 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/mar/17/sessions-seeks-revive-federal-anti-crime-program-t/).
“Exclusion ‘Appalling but Unsurprising,’” The Richmond Free Press, 23-25 March 2017, A7 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/mar/24/exclusion-appalling-unsurprising/).
On a Saturday in February 2017, The Better Half and I were observing a ritual: breakfast at Can Can in Carytown and a copy of The Washington Post. The paper contained an exasperating news story by Aaron Blake. John McCain at a conference overseas had assessed the potential damage The Tweeter in Chief could do. It was a fair critique but ultimately mere words.
Mr. McCain’s courage during his captivity in Vietnam was admirable but his reputation as a political maverick was more a carefully curated image than reality. With Mr. McCain, a chasm often separated word from deed. He had lambasted President Sharpie’s worldview while confirming cabinet members whose views were equally noxious.
When I wrote the letter, I thought that Mr. McCain was yet to cast a no vote on cabinet confirmations. I was wrong. He had rejected Mick Mulvaney’s nomination as director of the Office of Management and Budget. I sent a note to apologize with no expectation of a reply since I’m not a constituent. None was forthcoming.
The apology merits retraction. Mr. McCain was defending no principle in giving Mr. Mulvaney a thumbs down. He was settling a personal score. The two, during Mr. Mulvaney’s Tea-Party-Freedom-Caucus congressional days, had butted heads over military appropriations. Mr. McCain nursed his grudge carefully.
Mr. McCain deserved credit for his other thumbs down, his scotching of the GOP’s attempted recission of the Affordable Care Act in July 2017. Yet one must wonder whether the diagnosis earlier that month of terminal brain cancer influenced this. Could his vote have been empirical proof of the efficacy of Michael Moore’s ironic “Prayer to Afflict the Comfortable,” his call for the Deity to rain misfortunes on conservatives, since, given their deficit in empathy, only experiential learning can lead them to sympathy? (Michael Moore, Stupid White Men. . .and other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! [New York: Regan Books, 2001], 234-5).
Mr. McCain’s legacy, moreover, cannot be measured in isolation from his elevation of Sarah Palin to national prominence, a cynical, self-serving calculation that pointed the way to the Trumpian flavor of political combat. Furthermore, the ascent of Meghan McCain to the punditocracy cannot be seen as other than nepotism run amuck. Rarely has anyone been afforded a platform with so little to offer. To paraphrase a gibe lobbed by a more lucid Joe Biden at Rudolph Giuliani: All Meghan McCain needs to construct a sentence is a noun, a verb, and “my daddy, John McCain.”
The letter people at The Washington Post are a pleasant lot. We had a brief editorial back and forth and that was that.
Aaron Blake, “McCain Delivers Takedown of Trump’s Worldview,” The Washington Post, 18 February 2017, A2 (www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/17/john-mccain-just-systematically-dismantled-donald-trumps-entire-worldview/).
“McCain’s Words and Actions on Trump,” The Washington Post, 22 February 2017, A12 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mccains-words-vs-actions-on-trump/2017/02/21/9c6e9264-f700-11e6-aa1e-5f735ee31334_story.html).
And then the Grey Lady struck out the side. Perhaps the next three entries should be called the “the David Brooks trilogy.” Over a few weeks in early 2017, three letters were sent to The New York Times in response to opinions by Mr. Brooks. Each was consigned to the epistolary boneyard.
David Brooks has long been a sad character. He’s what passes for an intellectual in conservative circles and this has left him the unenviable task of defending a political theology – it requires too much willing suspension of disbelief and magical thinking to be a philosophy – that is well beyond its expiry date. If Mr. Brooks has an admirable quality, it’s his devotion to this Sisyphean endeavor. His seemingly irresistible and inexhaustible impulse to hold movement conservatism blameless for the Trump phenomenon serves him well. The intellectual contortions this job demands are a sight to behold.
There’s a fair question to pose: If these three essays by Mr. Brooks and my three responses are placed cheek by jowl, whose views have been vindicated by the four years of the Trumpian rule?
In the first essay, David Brooks posits that a kumbaya moment will materialize in which The Orange Waddler’s cabinet appointees and GOP legislators will summon the integrity and forthrightness to enforce political and constitutional norms and place The Boy King on a leash. Right.
David Brooks, “The Internal Invasion,” The New York Times, 20 January 2017, A29 (www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/opinion/the-internal-invasion.html).
When David Brooks identifies gemeinschaft and gesellschaft as the wellspring of our political dysfunction, he offers a tattered fig leaf to the GOP to obscure its willful dumbing down of its electorate and Mr. Trump’s Svengali-like manipulation of these voters’ basest instincts. Is Mr. Brooks so naïve that the kabuki theater of the confirmation hearings portends for him an effective curtailing of Mr. Trump’s narcissistic, authoritarian impulses, when his cabinet selections mostly share his proclivities? Does Mr. Brooks believe that the GOP – long a power-obsessed, non-legislating party – will magically succumb to a quasi-Hegelian melding with a vanquished opposition to thwart Mr. Trump’s nascent corporate statism? Does Mr. Brooks foster confidence in his opinion when his crystal ball is a light British comedy of the early 1980s with dubious relevance to our troubling circumstance? Mr. Brooks should suppress his pseudo-intellectual maundering and offer a sober analysis of how best to navigate the Trump era.