Monthly Archives: February 2021

How a Possum Stopped Radicalization 

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We’ve seen something such as this before:

A political party seized by a charismatic leader with radicalized followers at a time of national division sees voter suppression as one of the keys to maintaining its power and threatens to drive the other party into oblivion.  But the party develops an internal fracture between the radical wing and the more traditional element and there are fears that IT will be the party going into oblivion.

From this contentious time there emerges a possum and over time, it rescues both parties.

This was the political situation in Missouri fifteen decades ago.

During the Civil War, the interim government—Governor Price and several members of the legislature had fled to Arkansas to set up a government in exile that finished the war headquartered in Texas—Radical Republicans left in control in Missouri adopted a loyalty oath to make sure Missouri would have only Union-loyal officials in charge.  The Radical movement had begun about the time the Republican Party began in the mid-1850s, their name coming from their demand for immediate end to slavery. During the war, they were opposed by the moderate wing of the party led by Abraham Lincoln, who had run fourth in the 1860 election in this state, as well as by Democrats, who were more oriented toward southern sympathies.

The Radicals confirmed their control of Missouri government with the election of Governor Thomas Fletcher in 1864, thanks in part to the organizational skills of St. Louis lawyer Charles D. Drake who in 1863 argued for a new state constitution and disenfranchisement of all Confederate sympathizers. Carl Schurz, a future U.S. Senator and a leader of Missouri’s German citizens, called him “inexorable” and said Republicans “especially in the country districts, stood much in awe of him,” which might sound familiar today.

Radical Republicans pushed through The Drake Constitution, named because of his influence, in 1865. It contained a harsh loyalty oath that basically denied citizenship rights to anyone who would not pledge that they had given no support to the rebellion. Regardless of loyalty during the war, even if a person were a Union General, citizens could not vote, practice a profession, or serve in positions of public trust unless they swore to that oath. Drake and his Radical Republicans produced a list of 81 actions that defined disloyalty. For six years the Drake-led Radicals controlled politics in Missouri and Drake became a United States Senator.

Missouri’s moderate Republicans were reeling during those years and Democrats feared for their own party’s existence.  And this is when the possum was born that saved both political groups.

Drake’s Radicals began to see rising opposition from those who called themselves Liberal Republicans—remember this was 1870 and the two words, “liberal” and “Republican” were not an oxymoron.

The Liberals had had enough of Drake and his Radicals by the time the State Republican Convention was held in Jefferson City on August 31, 1870.  The Committee on Platforms filed two reports, a majority report from the Liberals favored immediate re-enfranchisement of former Confederates.  The Radical, minority, report favored a statewide vote on the question. With former Confederate supporters banned from voting, the outcome of the election pretty clearly would have maintained Radical Control.  When the convention adopted the Radical position, about 250 Liberals walked out and nominated their own ticket with Benjamin Gratz Brown its candidate for Governor.  The Radicals nominated Joseph McClurg for a second two-year term.

Democrats, still weak shortly after the U. S. Supreme Court threw out part of the loyalty oath, decided not to put up a statewide ticket.  William Hyde, the editor of The St. Louis Republican, a Democratic newspaper despite its name, is credited with creating what became known as “The Possum Policy.”  Instead of running its own slate, the Democrats threw their support behind the Liberal Republican candidate, Brown.

Walter B. Stevens, in Missouri, the Center State, 1821-1915, records an exchange of telegrams after the State Democratic Convention decided to support Liberal Republicans in which former U. S. Senator John Brooks Henderson—who did not run for re-election after voting against convicting President Johnson of impeachment charges—told Brown, “The negroes of this state are free. White men only are now enslaved. The people look to you and your friends to deliver them from this great wrong. Shall they look in vain?”

Brown wired back, “The confidence of the people of this State shall not be disappointed. I will carry out this canvass to its ultimate consequence so that no freeman not convicted of crime shall   henceforth be deprived on an equal voice in our government.”

The Democrats’ “Possum Policy” helped Brown defeated McClurg by about 40,000 votes, effectively ending the Radical Republican reign in Missouri.

The Liberal Republicans, created for the sole purpose of ending radicalism within the party, could not survive on their own. Governor Brown’s Secretary, Frederick N. Judson, reflected, “A party based upon a single issue, called into being to meet a single emergency, could not in the nature of things become permanent…and though its party life was short, it is entitled to the imperishable glory of having destroyed the last vestige of the Civil War in Missouri. A nobler record no party could have.”

National Democrats failed to follow the Missouri party’s “Possum Policy” and in 1872 nominated a presidential ticket of Horace Greeley, the New York newspaper publisher then in failing physical and mental health, and Benjamin Brown of Missouri—-a move that antagonized the national Liberal Republican movement and led to a crushing defeat for Democrats as Liberal Republicans opposed to the Grant administration had no place to go and so supported it anyway. With that, Liberal Republican movement died nationally.

In Missouri, the re-enfranchised Democrats elected Silas Woodson to succeed Brown as Governor, beginning Democratic control of the governorship until Republican Herbert Hadley was elected in 1908.

Missourians adopted a new constitution in 1875, throwing out the punitive Drake Constitution.  It lasted until our present State Constitution was adopted in 1945, the longest-standing constitution in state history.

Republicans paid a price to overcome the radicalization of their party 150 years ago but paying that price made sure that the rights of thousands of people were no longer endangered or no longer remained limited.

Being out of power did not and does not mean being without influence. History tells us we became a better nation because political courage manifested itself at the right time within the Republican Party.  In the long term both parties saved themselves.

We are not advocating that the Republican National Committee adopt a “possum policy” in 2022 or in 2024 to stamp out radicalization within the party nor are we saying splitting the party will be the solution now that it was then. But history reminds us of the dangers of radical politics and the sacrifices that have to be made, sometimes on both sides of the aisle, to make sure it does not overwhelm us.

An Antidote to Uncertainty

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(We might forgive ourselves for feeling uncertain about so many things these days—our political system, our health in a time of pandemic, our personal relationships, our employment future, the uncertainty of our climate, the instability of governments throughout the world—

But Dr. Frank Crane encourage us not to be consumed by uncertainty. He warns against —-)

THE POSTPONEMENT OF LIFE

Many of us are like the boy taking a “run and jump” who ran so far that he couldn’t jump. We spend so much time and strength getting ready to enjoy ourselves that we never enjoy ourselves at all.

We are like businessmen who break down brain, nerves, and body accumulating a fortune to wherewith to take their ease, and when they are at last ready to play they have lost the knack of it.

With too many of us, Today is a fevered compromise, a make-shift something we’ve got to get through with we known not how, something to be forgotten as soon as possible. It is “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” We have no joy but for a sort of reaching for joy, no satisfaction but expectance, no comfort but hope.

Would it not be better to give each day some kind of finish as a good workman perfects each ornament of a temple? Every day has possibilities for the perfect exercise of life’s functions. Emerson said, “Every day is a day of doom.” Here are a few hints.

First, remember that the one thing that has most to do with making life worth living is love. Let no day pass without some expression of affection.

Don’t postpone play. No day ought to go by without some moments of diversion. Play a game. Have a bit of a chat with your neighbor. Do something useless each day lest you become an enemy of the human race.

Don’t postpone physical exercise.

It is not the occasional sport that counts in buttressing health and avoiding flabbiness.

Don’t postpone mental gymnastics. No mind should go a whole day without sweating over some knotty problem, some book hard to read, some genuine, solid thinking.

Don’t postpone beauty. The best-known soul food is admiration. Find today some cloud or flower or picture that warms you. Drop in at the picture gallery, or at least pause a moment at the art dealer’s window. Never go to sleep without having seen some beautiful thing since the last sleep.

Don’t postpone work. Produce something useful, something of distinct value to the world, and if possible, something the world is willing to pay for. The sanest thing a person can do is work, and for wages.

Don’t postpone laughter. A day without one good laugh is a bad day. No drug you can take, and no belief you can embrace will do as much good for the health of your soul and body as a real hearty laugh, from the boots up.

Now, isn’t one day with a dash of all those ingredients a pretty good affair in itself? Think of it! A little love, a little play, a little bodily and mental exertion, a little work, a little laughter, a ltitle wonder; what is that but a whole life in a nutshell?

Love, as the carpenter might say, by the day and not by the job. For after all, life is too much for any one of us, but a day, well, we might manage that perhaps, if we would.

Having Fun With Snowplows

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Having fun?

We aren’t likely to look at snowplows humorously and the people who have spent hours in bitter cold and snow driving them recently probably don’t find much about their work that is funny.

But in Scotland—-snowplows are funny. They call them “Trunk Road Gritters” there, perhaps because—as with our snowplows the trucks have blades on the front and grit-spreaders on the back.

Scotland is a nation almost as large as South Carolina. It is less than half the size of Missouri but has almost as many people (5.454 million there, about 6.1 million here).

The gritters in Scotland have names. Punny names.

Salt Disney

Blizzard of Oz

Lord Coldemort

You’re a Blizzard, Harry

Mary Queen of Salt

Tam O’Salter

Ice Destroyer

Salty

Rumble

Sprinkle

William Wall-Ice  (William Wallace was a Scottish patriot. Mel Gibson played him in a movie)

Gonna Snow Dae That

Oor Chilly

Sled Zeppelin

Traffic Scotland has an interactive map that tracks each of them and records where they’ve been for the last couple of hours. You can check their locations  on the Traffic Scotland map: https://scotgov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=2de764a9303848ffb9a4cac0bd0b1aab

Perhaps the Missouri Department of Transportation can add a little glamour to our hardworking snowplow crews by giving Missouri names to its snowplows.  One is a Kansas City journalist who covered China for decades. His name really was E. C. Snow.

Maybe Thomas Hart Bensalt

Snow Faurot

John J. Persnow

Harry Ice Truman

Slusch Lite

Sam Salton (for the Columbia native who founded WalMart)

Slush Limbaugh

Charles Cinderbergh

(stealing from the Scots): Salt Disney

Or more generically:

Where Have All the Plowers Gone?

Windchill Wills (for the old movie star)

Snowchilly Distanced

The Boone Slick

Cold County

Chillycothe

Monsandco

Political Slush Fun

Skid More

Slide-dalia

Snow Daze

Okay, this is getting sillier and siller. But that doesn’t mean you can’t join the merriment by adding better suggested snowplow names in our “comments” below. Who knows? Maybe MODOT will try to lighten the mood in the next big snowstorm by send out plows with names.

Nancy and I are hoping to go to Scotland later this year, Covid willing. We hope we don’t need to witness Sled Zeppelin at work but we’ll be on some of the roads where these gritters operate. Nancy is a property owner in Scotland and thus is entitled to the title of “Lady.”  A few years ago I gave her a Christmas present of one square foot of land in a nature refuge. She has the title to the land and everything.   I doubt that we’ll visit her property and we probably won’t spend any money making improvements to it.

On those bitter, nasty winter days when your car is progressing at seven miles an hour behind a snowplow, the time might pass a little faster if you try to think up a good name for the plow.

No, it’s not what you call it.  It’s what you would name it.

‘Snow big deal.  You can do it.

Notes From A Quiet Street—Winter of Our Usual Discontent Edition

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This is one of the best days of the entire year.  It might be colder than Hell (actually the weather in Hell, Michigan last night was quite similar to ours—zero with 2-4 inches of snow expected) but today PITCHERS AND CATCHERS report for spring training in Florida and Arizona for the Cardinals and the Royals!

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In my previous life I would have gotten up at 4, put on a coat and a tie and my best winter coat, gone out in the 6-below darkness, swept about four or five inches of snow off of my car, backed out of my snowy driveway, and hoped a snowplow had cleared the way to the Missourinet newsroom.

I have a friend at the Y who used to deliver the mail.

Don’t tell us retirement isn’t great.

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Shot number one is in the arm. It’s February.  By the time of the second shot, there will be baseball. And racing.  Soon after that, there will be color in the back yard grass. And a green a haze will be seena few weeks later in the trees.  This is the season known as Ulocking (see an earlier entry).  In so many ways, it feels as if a cell door has been unlocked—or did until the coldest week of the year hit. Your faithful observer who despises winter almost had to whip himelf to force a trip to the end of the driveway for the morning paper and the afternoon mail.

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Years ago I heard the story of an old farmer who had just endured a drought year and the snow brought little relief.  “The snow was so dry,” he said, “that I just pushed it into a ditch and burned it.”   It kind of seemed like that when I trudge out to get the morning newspaper—snow so cold it crunched underfoot  and even seemed to squeak a little bit, and lacked enough moisture to hold it to gether and make a snowman.

But at least it’s not January.  That’s kind of a glass only half-full-of-snow optimism speaking.

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Congratulations to our General Assembly for proving me wrong.  Recommended pay raises for elected officials have been approved, their first raises since 2008. Enough of our State Representatives refused to disapprove  of the recommendation that it has gone into effect. The House needed a two-thirds vote to reject the recommendation and it came up about ten votes short of disapproval.

Good for them!  The legislators won’t benefit until their next terms, if they get them.  The statewide officials will get 2.5% hikes in each of the next two years.

Your faithful observer can’t be correct all the time.  Our forecast a few weeks ago that the raises would be refused again was wrong.  And that’s okay.

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Late-night talk show hosts are facing a grim reality now that we have a new president.  They need to do a lot of new shows because re-runs of the shows of the past four years that have featured Trump-based humor, or what they hope was Trump-based humor,  are terribly dated. Donald Trump’s exit from the Oval Office must place enormous strain on the writing staffs because, well, Joe Biden is so relatively bland. Where’s the humor in somebody who puts fighting the COVID pandemic at the top of his to-do list?  HAVING a to-do list, at least one that is not self-centered, is a poor match for what they’ve been writing about for four years.

The low-hanging humor fruit has fallen off the tree and rolled to Mar-A-Lago.

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Speaking of the aforesaid ex-chief executive—-we watched the town hall gathering last night with the current chief executive. We thought he wandered more than necessary, interrupted himself too often, talked around some questions and went on excessively to the point that some of the answers to particpants’ questions got lost in the talk.  But we also thought, “Can we imagine his predecessor doing this?  Just talking to folks about the concerns they have?  Would he ever have reassured a child she shouldn’t live in fear of the virus?” Some people care about other people. Some people care about themselves. We think we know which one we saw last night.

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A bill in the legislature would bar any state law enforcement officer, or other state officers or employees, from serving as a law enforcement officer or sheriff or community police officer if they enforce, or try to enforce, any federal firearms law the act defines as illegal in Missouri, the Constitution notwithstanding.

Unfortunatley, this proposal doesn’t go far enough.

During the recent political campaign, one party accused another party of advocating a “defund the police” policy.  This proposal simplifies the process.  Just “de-police” the policy instead.  And let me be the first to suggest that after de-policing the federal law, the funds used for the police could be given back to taxpayers—who could use them to buy guns.

Genius!

As long as we are forbidding Missouri law enforcement officers from enforcing federal gun laws, let’s think of other things our Missouri peace officers should be banned from doing. How about taking away a Highway Patrolman’s badge and banning him or her from any other law enforcement job if they write a ticket for speeding on a federal highway? Funds saved under that program could be used to buy more ambulances and pay for more EMTs who could be stationed on those roads.

You might be inspired to suggest other amendments that would extend this idea to other areas where state officials have no business enforcing federal laws. You may suggest them in the comments box at the end of this entry.

Let the fun begin.

 

If I Were a Lawyer–

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—in the District of Columbia, I would have been at work for a more than a month signing up as clients Capitol and District police officers and their families for a gigantic personal injury lawsuit against Donald J. Trump. I imagine there have been some pretty busy attorneys already.

I also might be signing up the families of the men and women now in custody and facing prison time because they believed Trump summoned them to Washington to do his bidding and upend the 2020 election results by stopping the certification of the Electoral College votes.  These families are facing economic damage caused by the loss of a wage-earner and might face a certain level of social ostracism because a family member took part in January 6th (there is no need to say “the January 6th insurrection” or “riot,” because this is a specific date that will mean something, as 9-11 means something without further definition). A massive class action civil lawsuit featuring dozens of hours of powerful witness-stand testimony will be difficult to counter by defense counsel saying, “He didn’t really mean it to turn out that way” or calling the damage lawsuits violations of his First Amendment free speech rights.

One might be able to say many things and escape penalty for saying them. But there is a penalty for the damage those words produce.

The creativity of the legal profession is likely to produce other clients with other claims of other kinds.  It would not be surprising that Mr. Trump’s financial empire, such as it is, to be placed in incredible jeopardy.  It will take legal representation of epic brilliance to defend him from devastating financial liability.

In every lawsuit, in every argument, Trump’s involvement in the worst assault on our system of government since the secession of southern states if not in all national history will be recalled. Every case will batter him personally as well as financially and likely will undermine his political credibility further.

But civil court proceedings are not the only difficulty facing the former president. Criminal investigations of the financial dealings of Trump and his family as well as investigations into his efforts to change election results—and who knows what other possibilities exist—appear to be lurking in the offices of federal and state prosecutors.

The chutzpah displayed in his post-trial claim that he will be a significant influence in the 2022 elections or a viable presidential candidate for 2024 will become more questionable as each of these possible civil and criminal cases moves forward.

The aftermath of his second impeachment trial could be worse for him than the week just past.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s post-trial speech scathingly rejecting Trump’s presidency can be seen, might be seen, by many as the first significant step by the Republican Party to be a party it used to be—a party greater than Donald Trump.

Some see McConnell’s speech as duplicitous, pointing to his former role as Majority Leader when he suggested the House impeachment charges should not be delivered to the Senate while Trump was still in office and then claiming the Senate could not convict Trump because the charges had not been filed before Trump left Washington.

Although McConnell’s statement is unlikely to lessen public cynicism toward government, his direct post-trial attack on Trump is something on which the party can build—if it will.

In his own post-trial statement, Trump never mentioned January 6.  He never mentioned the assault on the capitol.  He never mentioned any regrets that his mob imperiled the people who voted to acquit him. He never extended any sympathies to the people injured in the assault or who died that day and in succeeding days because of those events. He still has not admitted that he lost the election, continuing to emphasize his 75-million votes, still refusing to acknowledge that somebody else got seven-million more through the same processes that gave him 75-million. He promised to reveal a new “vision” soon for American greatness. Let us hope his new definition is better than his old one.

Having survived the latest political questions about his actions that day, perhaps he should spend some time developing a vision for dealing with the legal problems likely to come.  No beautiful wall around Mar-A-Lago will keep the lawyers out.

Those in the Middle

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Abraham Lincoln was born 212 years ago today.  He was the second Republican to run for President and the first to win. A lot can happen to a political party, and has, in the 160 years since he entered the White House.

The party made a critical decision about its future when it nominated him, a moderate in a time of rising radicalism, to run for President of the United States. Today’s Republicans might be facing a decision about their party’s future that is no less serious than the party’s decision in 1860. There is concern, however, about who are the people who will make that decision or who will take it in its future direction.

Sarah Longwell runs a conservative website, The Bulwark, and does a conservative podcast.

She made an interesting point this week about some people who have, by and large, escaped the spotlight that is shining on our ex-president and on the insurrectionists he is accused of spending months motivating to take actions that will put many of them in prison.

“Hold Them All Accountable,” says the headline on her website entry last Tuesday.  She asks, “What of the elected officials whose months of lies agitated and radicalized the crowd, even before it was incited to insurrection?”

And who are these people she thinks are running under the radar?

“Finding 17 Republican senators to convict Trump is a Herculean task, not least because many of them joined him in feeding the lie that brought these people to the Capitol in the first place. In this regard, this trial is unique for having members of the jury who are not just not impartial, but are both witnesses and accomplices to the crime.”

Longwell reminds us to remember that more than one-fourth of Republicans in the Senate were on-record objecting to certifying the Electoral College results. She calls their demands for investigations into Trump-claimed extensive voter fraud “nothing less than hype-man interjections meant to bolster Trump’s claims that he ‘won in a landslide’ and that the election was being stolen.”

She especially targets our own Josh Hawley along with colleagues Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham who “were happy to jump in front of every available television camera to discuss the unprecedented allegations of voter fraud no matter how discredited those allegations were.”

She also scorns some house members: Louis Gohmert who suggested “violence in the streets” was the only thing left after a federal court refused to order Vice President Mike Pence to reverse the results; Madison Cawthorn, who suggested people call their congressmen and “lightly threaten” them if they didn’t reverse the results; Mo Brooks, who said just before the insurrection, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”

She recalls 126 House Republicans joined the Texas Attorney General’s lawsuit questioning the results in four swing states.

“So now, while those arrested for the Capitol attack are—rightly—facing hard time, the Republicans and members of Conservatism Inc., who filled these thugs’ heads with poison and pointed them toward the Capitol are ‘moving on,’ their campaign fund flush with the millions they raised claiming they were going to ‘stop the steal.’”

She quotes former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s observation that, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by their president and other powerful people.”

Longwell says that means that ‘the elected officials who fed these people lies should be held accountable in some way, too.”

Sarah Longwell finishes, “Call witnesses. Prosecute the case. And never forget who the enemies of democracy were.”

She was interviewed on NPR”s Morning Edition earlier this week and host Sacha Pfeifer asked her how penalties could be exacted against those in Congress who supported The Big Lie. She answered, “Unfortunately, the electoral process is going to take a long time to play out…So it has to be the rest of our culture. It has to be with the process of shame.  You need the business community to stand up and say we draw a bright line for people who objected to this election, that that is disqualifying to hold public office for people whotold lies to voters. Fifty million people believing that the election was stolen is an existential threat to our democracy.”  More specifically for the business community, “Withholding their donations, saying we are not going to donate to politicians who objected to a free and fair election.”

She thinks newspapers have a role with “editorial boards calling relentlessly for the resignations…We’ve got billboards up through our Republican Accountability Project calling for a lot of these foficials to resign. There is—needs to be a relentless public pressure that says what they did was wrong and be very clear about that becuae it was wrong.”

Longwell thinks it will be difficult for government to have a Biblical “physician, heal thyself” attitude because “so many Republicans participated in this problem that they’re not really going to hold each other accountable…Democrats essentially have to do it (but) then it looks entirely political, which is why the rest of the culture sort of has to step in here.”

She urged “as many Republican senators as possible (to) stand up and do the right thing now because it’s really going to matter, showing people that there is come accountability even within your own party.”

The entire article is at: https://thebulwark.com/hold-them-all-accountable/

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Sarah Longwell might not set well with the Trump true believers.  She has a background as a Republican strategist and is a former Senior Vice-President and Communications Director for noted GOP lobbyist Richard Berman.  She now runs her own communications company in DC. She was the first woman to sit on the board of Log Cabin Republicans, a Republican organization that refused to endorse Donald Trump in 2016.  She resigned as chairman of the board when the organization endorsed him in 2019.  Now a Never-Trumper, she leads a group called Republicans for the Rule of Law, an organization she founded with noted conservative writer Bill Kristol.  The organization advocated for Trump’s impeachment and removal two years ago.

Impeachment Rides Again

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The second Senate trial of Donald Trump begins today with Trump’s same threatening shadow over those who might personally and intellectually believe he deserves no sympathy but who are unable to resist his politically-threatening presence. .

If it is improper to impeach and convict someone whose behavior in office so strongly breaches all bounds of propriety after he or she vacates the office, how then can that person be held accountable for his direct or indirect actions?  How is justice to be exacted on behalf of the Republic?

Is Lady Justice to be stripped of her scales by the calendar or does she carry them into his or her political afterlife ?

The Senate voted 56-44 yesterday afternoon that Lady Justice is mobile.

We encourage you to watch these events on C-SPAN as much as you can. Stay away from partisan sources.  Watch, listen, be informed by an organization that lets you watch, form your own opinions, and decide if justice is done.

There is considerable doubt that enough Republicans will join with Democrats to reach the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump. Based on the vote that the proceeding is constitutional, Democrats need to pick up eleven Republican votes to convict.

In truth, conviction would appear to be more likely if these proceedings were done in secret as we observe the strong secret caucus vote of confidence for Representative Lynne Cheney who was facing party punishment for voting to impeach.  But the public vote to take away committee appointments from Marjorie Taylor Greene for her outlandish advocacy of numerous debunked conspiracies found few Republicans willing to step up.  It is easy to be courageous if those who seek to intimidate you do not know who you are. But courage in public despite a penalty that might be threatened or imposed is rare no matter how much it is justified.

Honor is achieved in the light, not in the darkness.

Should the Senate fail to generate the needed two-thirds vote to convict, the former president might once again proclaim victory.  It is a mistake for others to respect that proclamation.

Even if the final vote is 51-50, with the Vice President breaking a tie, the Senate will achieve a majority that Trump never achieved in either of his presidential elections.  In 2016 he achieved only 46.1%.  In 2020, he achieved only 46.9%.

Forget all of the pap about getting 74-million votes.  He lost. By millions of votes. Chris Kobach, whose investigation failed to turn up all the fraudulent votes Trump claimed were against him in 20-16 won’t be able to find fraudulent votes in 2020 either.  God knows Rudi Giuliani tried even harder last year than Kobach did in ’16, tried so hard he’s being sued for billions by the companies that made the voting machines.

Let all of the senators regardless of whose side they are on (willingly or fearfully) and all of us listen to and see the evidence from both sides.  Our Senators and 98 of their colleagues eventually will vote and we hope they will vote their conscience, not their fear of retribution.

And as we noted in observing Trump’s first trial, a verdict of “not guilty” is not the same as finding him “innocent.”   By whatever gauge anyone might use to consider Trump’s behavior, the word “innocent’ cannot be used with validity.

A lot of people who are in jail or are out on bond facing tough charges and hard time will not connect “innocent” to him.

(Incidentally, has anyone heard of Trump calling the families of those who are facing those charges, or calling the families of any of those who were hurt or who have died because of the onsurrection to offer any comfort or, in the case of police officers injured in protecting the building and the people who work in it, any sympathy?)

We shall wait for honor and courage to be displayed by those who sit in judgment of Donald J. Trump.

Fifty

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Pardon us if there is a certain self-congratulatory feeling to our story today. It’s not intended. I’m just going to tell a story.

Listeners to a Jefferson City radio station at 7:35 a.m. fifty years ago today heard a young radio announcer tell them a story about the famous prohibition terrorist Carrie Nation, who started her national tour that made her a household name in the fight against demon rum on February 8, 1901.

It was Missouri’s Sesquicentennial year, just a few days after Governor Hearnes had kicked off the observance by dedicating the restored first State Capitol in St. Charles.

A few days ago, Governor Parson kicked off the state’s Bicentennial with his inaugural speech at our present Capitol.

And the radio program is still on the air.

It was called “Missouri in Retrospect” when it debuted on one station, KLIK, in 1971. It’s known as “Across Our Wide Missouri” in numerous communities throughout the state and, we suppose, in all corners of the world through the Missourinet web page.

It began with a couple of old books on the shelf in the newsroom that I turned to when I thought there needed to be a better way to celebrate the sesquicentennial than to do stories about the latest sign or the latest old building that had been rescued from the wreckers.  The longtime head of the State Historical Society of Missouri, Floyd Shoemaker, had written a series of newspaper columns decades earlier outlining something that happened on a particular day in a particular year. There were some dates not covered in the two volumes of Missouri Day-by-Day, and some topics not covered—sports and crime in particular.

We thought it would be good for people to be a little better-educated about their state’s history and, by extension, Missouri’s part of ournation’s history.

KLIK continued to run the programs for a few years after I left late in 1974 to become news director of the Missourinet, founded by my former assistant news director Clyde Lear and our former farm director, Derry Brownfield. Clyde and I had to help a lawyer make a boat payment or two before we got an out-of-court settlement of a lawsuit that the manager of the radio station filed trying to keep Across Our Wide Missouri from being on the network.

One other voice has been heard doing these programs on the Missourinet.  Missourinet reporter Ron Medin voiced the stories for several days in 1983, I think it was, while I was out of work after taking a line drive in the left eye while pitching in a softball game.

As this entry is written, a stack of envelopes is sitting within arms reach, potential new stories waiting to be written.  Ernest Hemingway is there.  The story of his time as a reporter for the Kansas City Star is waiting to be written.  So is the story of Fred Harvey, whose railroad-station restaurants before 1900 made long-distance travel a little more civilized. And Clarence Earl Gideon, a “no-account punk” from Hannibal whose lawsuit guaranteed to poor people could get a court-appointed lawyer if they couldn’t affird one. There’s a fat envelope with the story of St. Louis native Butch O’Hare—for whom O’Hair International Airport in Chicago is named. Bob Ford, the killer of Jesse James is there, as is Fred Harmon, the St. Joseph artist who created the cartoons strip of years gone by called “Red Ryder,” the character for whom a b-b gun was named.  There’s Tom Mix, the silent movie cowboy star who made his first feature film in Missouri, and Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, who lived his last several years in St. Charles after creating a trading post that became Chicago.

All waiting to be written.  Stories to be told.

And there are about eight file drawers of similar envelopes in the basement.

One day my assistant news director at KLIK, the afore mentioned Clyde Lear, looked across the table between our desks and said, “Priddy, you ought to put this stuff in a book.”

A few years later an editor at Independence Press (in Independence, Missouri of course) named Margaret Baldwin decided the stories were worth publishing.  They became three books, the proceeds of which made a big dent in our children’s college expenses.

I suppose I am better-recognized for telling those stories of Missouri’s past than I am for all my years of reporting the news in a career that has lasted long enough that what once was just another story one day is now Missouri history.

If I live forever, I’ll never write all of these stories.  It doesn’t help that Missourians keep making history.

Independence Press printed the last of the three books several years ago. I have the only remaining inventory in our storage locker or in our garage and sometimes in the trunk of my car. But when they’re gone, they’ll be out of print.

There are two things about becoming an author—

Somebody, I don’t recall how, once said that writing a book is a former of eternal life. I wasn’t real sure about that until the way I was at the Library of Congress in Washington and filled out a call slip for volume one just the grins and a few minutes later, a library employee emerged from the bowels and laid the book on the desk in front of me.

The other comment came from former Missouri Treasurer Jim Spainhower who, in addition to being a politician was an ordained minister in our denomination who had written a book called Pulpit, Pew, and Politics.  He told me when the first volume came out that I was now entitled to begin my prayers, “O Thou who also hast written a book….”

There are now five books with my name on them on a nearby shelf, soon to be joined by a sixth—about the history of the Missouri Capitol.  And there are files for two more in boxes behind me.

It all began on this date, February 8, 1971.

-0-

 

Hal

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Let me tell you about meeting Mark Twain.

Well—-Hal Holbrook, actually.

He was Mark Twain longer than Mark Twain was Mark Twain. Actor Hal Holbrook died about two weeks ago although word of his death didn’t come out until this week. He was 95.

I saw “Mark Twain Tonight” the first time at the Stephens Playhouse in Columbia, as I recall, in the early 1960s and I think maybe a second time there.  Definitely a third time many years later at Jesse Hall at the University and a final time on May 16, 2014 at the Miller Performing Arts Center here in Jefferson City.  Nancy and I got to be part of the meet-and-greet bunch backstage after the show in Columbia and then again at the Miller Center.

There is an interesting, perhaps remarkable, story about his Jefferson City performance.

Mark Comley, my successor as president of the Community Concert Association, shared my enthusiasm for Holbrook as Twain.  The association decided to go for broke and bring him to the Miller Center even though he cost every penny of our annual budget.  But we thought a sell-out would justify the investment even if it didn’t quite cover the entire cost and we’d gain some recognition for the association that would pay off in the next season. I was disappointed that we didn’t sell every seat in the auditorium.  Big crowd, but it was disappointing to see that so many people in our city passed up a chance to see one of the great acts in the history of the American theatre.

It was the last day of the legislative session and as usual, the last week was exhausting.  I missed most of the first half of the show and didn’t have the energy for an after-show dinner at Madison’s (they kept their back room open so the concert board and guests could dine with Holbrook at midnight).

Holbrook was 89 then and showed plenty of energy in the show and in the post-show meet-and-greet afterward. He had removed his makeup (he told me in an interview in 2016 that he had to use less of it as he aged into the age of Twain, who he portrayed as being 70).

He stopped and spent time with each person. I told him I had hoped we’d be able to get him to the Capitol to see the various tributes to Twain (the Huck Finn art of the Benton mural, the bust of Twain in the rotunda’s Hall of Famous Missourians, and a—in my opinion— fairly undistinguished portrait of him) as well as a painting in the Senate of Francis Preston Blair Junior, the son of the man Holbrook played in the movie, Lincoln.

We took a couple of friends with us, Larry and Peggy Veatch who had lived in Hannibal for many years where Larry was the minister of the First Christian Church for a long time—and Holbrook had spent part of his performance on Twain’s ruminations on religion.  He and Larry had quite a conversation.

Mark (Comley) told me a remarkable story about midnight dinner the next time I saw him. It seems that Mark’s favorite routine is Twain’s recounting of the story of the skipper of little boat impressed of his own self-importance who crosses paths with another ship and its skipper who put him in his place.   Holbrook often used the story, originally told by Twain at a dinner in his honor in Liverpool, England on July 10, 1907 to close his shows. He hadn’t done it at the Miller Center and Mark mentioned it to Holbrook at the dinner.   Holbrook grew quiet for a time–And then did the entire routine. You can see it as Holbrook sometimes did it on stage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_rTMNnxwSE

Mark figured that Holbrook had gone quiet for a little while because he was sorting through the hundreds or thousands of Twain stories stored in his memory until he found the story of “The Mary Ann.”

The first half of his shows were filled with wry and humorous observation of Twain.  The second half of the show turned serious pretty soon when he did the reading from Huckelberry Finn when the boy has to decide if he’s going to lie to protect his friend Jim, the room was always absolutely still, the audience moving only so much as necessary to breathe.

He spent about an hour with me on the phone in 2004 when he was appearing at then-Central Missouri State, the University of Missouri-Columbia, then at Kansas University. That was his 50th year of being Mark Twain.

Somewhere, in a box of recordings of interviews and events we covered in forty years at the Missourinet is a CD of that interview.  I’ll find it someday and post it.  I do remember that he told me he often updates his show with new Twain material but he never went beyond Twain’s thoughts. He never thought, “What would Twain say” about contemporary issues.  But Twain’s social commentary covered such a wide range of topics that many of his observations of 19th century situations fit contemporary events.

Holbrook didn’t exactly invent the one-man show portraying a historic figure but as Mark Dawidziak at the Center for Mark Twain Studies  put it, “Holbrook not only unleased platoons of Mark Twain impersonators (several in almost every state), he popularized the one man show about American figures. He soon was followed by James Whitmore as Will Rogers, (then as Harry Truman, and Theodore Roosevelt), Henry Fonda as Clarence Darrow, Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson, and Robert Morse as Truman Capote, just to name a few.”

But, in truth, many of the Twain impersonators weren’t really impersonating Twain.  They were impersonating Holbrook.

Samuel Clemens started using the pen name of Mark Twain in 1863. He died in 1910 at the age of 75 after 47 years if being Twain.

Hal Holbrook retired his act, and himself, in 2017, his health no longer strong enough for tours and performances.  He had been Mark Twain (among other characters in numerous movies and TV shows) for seventy years.

Patriot

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I am a patriot.  And I do things patriots do.

I stand for the national anthem.

I put my hand over my heart, or somewhere near it, when the flag passes by or when I say the Pledge of Allegiance.

When I say the pledge, I say it as a pledge not as a rote statement poorly delivered:

I pledge allegiance (pause)

To the flag (pause)

Of the United States of American (pause)

And to the Republic for which it stands (pause)

One nation (pause)

Under God (pause)

With Liberty and Justice for All.

After which I sometimes mutter, “Play Ball,” because it just seems like the right thing to do.

But I say the pledge the way it ought to be said:

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America (comma) and to the republic for which it stands—One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  I usually finish and drop my hand while other about me are saying “Under God.”

I don’t rush through it. It is my personal pledge, said as one not said as a group rote.  I confess that the phrase “under God” is bothersome because it assumes something we might believe but cannot know. Perhaps someday it will permissible to say, “One nation, hopefully under God….”

That position is heavily influenced by Abraham Lincoln, whose family lived in the town where I was born, and who practiced law as a circuit-riding attorney in the two towns where I was raised. He once supposedly said, “My concern is not whether God is on our side; My greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”  Scholars have not been able to confirm that Lincoln actually said that and the statement might be distilled from part of the oration given at Lincoln’s funeral in Springfield Illinois on May 4, 1865 by Reverend Matthew Simpson of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who had a “long and intimate friendship” with Lincoln:

“To a minister who said he hoped the Lord was on our side, he replied that it gave him no concern whether the Lord was on our side or not, “For,” he added, “I know the Lord is always on the side of right;” and with deep feeling added, “But God is my witness that it is my constant anxiety and prayer that both myself and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”  

I stand for the flag, but I respect others who do not see the symbolism in our flag that I see. I have not walked in their shoes or in the shoes of their ancestors. I cannot be confident that I am on God’s side in such circumstances because to do so would be to assume that God is not on the side of others or wished others to be less free than me.  While others might be comfortable in assuming they know the mind of God and are therefore entitled to a definition of patriotism that allows them to judge others from their sacred viewpoint, I cannot reach that level of confidence. I prefer the other approach—hoping that I should be on God’s side rather than assuming that God is on mine.

It is a liberating rather than a confining position for it leaves me free to accept others and to see their possibilities, which I believe is the direction a great nation must go if it is to be even greater.

It enables me to suggest to those who cite early American naval hero Stephen Decatur’s after-dinner toast (“Our  Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!”) that adhering to such a sentiment requires no consideration of the narrowness of it.

English philosopher, lay theologian, critic, and writer G. K. Chesterton was more abrupt in dismissing the idea by saying it is equivalent to saying, “My Mother, drunk or sober.” His comment is drawn from his first book of essays, The Defendant, published in 1901.  The sixteenth chapter is “A Defence of Patriotism”

Better, I find, are words from Missouri Senator Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who became a Civil War General, St. Louis newspaper publisher, and later Secretary of the Interior, from the Senate Floor on February 29, 1872:

“The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, ‘My country, right or wrong.’ In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” 

He elaborated on those thoughts on October 17, 1899 at the Anti-Imperialistic Conference in Chicago:

“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”

We recently came across an article by Noah Millman in The American Conservative from 2017 about teaching children about patriotism, “if you want them to understand their country’s crimes and failures as well as its achievements.”  Love of country, he suggests, cannot be narrow because love, if true love, cannot ignore differences. He cited Chesterton’s comment as he outlined why patriotism cannot be selfish but must involve responsibility for others, just as love grows from an awareness of, and acceptance of, and a responsibility for another.

People feel an attachment, and a willingness to fight to protect, their homes, and their communities. That can take noble and ignoble forms — sometimes fighting to defend your community means committing injustice (as, for example, if you band together with your neighbors to prevent someone from a disfavored ethnic group from moving to the neighborhood). But the feeling is rooted in a direct experience, not an abstract attachment.

For any political community larger than a city, though, that attachment necessarily becomes abstract. So you need to teach your children why they should care about that larger community, be proud of it, and treat it as constituent of their identity…

Chesterton famously quipped that the sentiment, “my country, right or wrong” is like the sentiment, “my mother, drunk or sober.” But the thing about the latter is that she is your mother whether she’s drunk or sober — it’s just that your obligations change based on her condition. If she’s drunk, you won’t let her drive — instead, you’ll make sure she gets home safely.

The question, then, is how you teach your children to see their country as, in some sense, like a mother when their relationship is necessarily abstract rather than directly felt. A love of country based on the lie that your mother is never drunk will be too brittle to survive any kind of honest encounter with reality. But it seems to me equally problematic to say that you should love your country because it is on-balance a good one. Does anyone say about their mother that they love them because on-balance they are sober?

Filial love is first and foremost rooted in gratitude for existence itself. That applies to adopted children as well; we are not born able to fend for ourselves, but radically dependent on others’ love and care, and however imperfectly it was provided if we survived at all then it was provided in some measure. And that gratitude extends to the larger society. None of us were raised in the wilderness; whoever we are, we are because of the world that shaped us, and we are grateful to be ourselves even if we are not always happy being ourselves.

In this time when the word “patriot” has been abused and has been turned into a term of narrowness, when love of country has been defined as fear or hatred of those who are different and therefore unacceptable, when violence has become a sanctioned way of expressing patriotism, it is time to learn what love is.

Paul defined it for us in one of his letters to the believers at Corinth: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs.”

Sounds like an outstanding definition of what a Patriot is, or should be. This is a time to be a Paulist Patriot. But being a Paulist Patriot will require a stern unwillingness to let Chesterton’s drunk mothers prevail.

I stand with Paul. And Schurz. And Lincoln.

I am a Patriot.