A strong Republican citizen asked me the other day, “What do you know about John Wood?” And at the end of our discussion, he made an interesting suggestion about him.
John Wood is running for Roy Blunt’s Senate seat as an Independent. It’s far too late for him to file as a Republican but he’s the kind of moderate Republican that former Senator John Danforth has been hoping would give GOP voters an alternative to the crowd of candidates that Danforth considers so closely tied to ex-President Trump that the GOP could lose that seat in November.
My friend thinks Wood would pull votes away from candidates of both parties but would hurt the Republican nominee the most, especially if it’s Eric Greitens.
Here’s a thumbnail description of John Wood.
(This entire discussion becomes academic if he cannot gather 10-thousand signatures of Missouri voters and present them to the Secretary of State by the close of business on August 1. Barely meeting the minimum might say something about his candidacy. Getting thousands more than necessary might say something, too.)
He’s a 52-year old lawyer and is the latest product of the “Danforth incubator.” John Danforth used his election as Missouri Attorney General in 1968 to begin cultivating bright and young Republican assistants whose success in statewide office broke the Democratic hold on Missouri politics and produced the Republican control. Before he was a lawyer, he worked for Danforth. He clerked for U. S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who had been an Assistant Attorney General under Danforth. He also has worked at the United States Court of Appeals.
President George W. Bush appointed him the federal prosecutor for western Missouri in 2007. He served into 2009. After leaving that job he was chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. When John Ashcroft was United States Attorney General, Wood was the deputy associate general counsel in that office. He also filled that job in the Bush Administration’s Office of Management and Budget.
For a time he was the Senior Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel for the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. He joined the January 6th Committee as a senior investigator at the invitation of Representative Liz Cheney.
He calls himself “a lifelong Republican” who has told the Post-Dispatch he is not interested in being part of “a race to the bottom” and an effort “to see who can be the most divisive and the most extreme.”
He thinks Greitens will win the Republican primary on August 2 but he thinks he can win in November behind “a coalition of common-sense voters,” most particularly Republicans who won’t back Greitens as well as moderate and conservative Democrats—and independents, of course.
We won’t delve into his positions on issues in this entry except to say they are distinctly mainline Republican. He has said he would support Mitch McConnell remaining leader of the party in the Senate and that he wants to be part of a “governing coalition,” an indication that he might work better across the aisle than many other Republicans (or Democrats) in Washington.
He says he’s not a spoiler, that he’s running to win.
Simply put, he’s a wild card in a race that needs one. He’ll have Danforth money and muscle behind him. But it doesn’t take much searching to realize that John Danforth doesn’t set the philosophical tone for the party that he once did.
All of that might be true, maintains my friend. However—-
Is he really running to gain statewide name recognition so that he can challenge Josh Hawley in 2024? After all, Danforth says supporting Hawley four years ago was the biggest political mistake he’s ever made.
John Wesley had a birthday last week. He would have been 219 years old.
He was the founder of the Methodist Church.
Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac” commemorated his birth by passing along “John Wesley’s Rule,” noting that there’s no evidence he actually wrote it. But it’s a good thing to remember as we breathe the increasingly toxic political air that is being generated in these times.
You might want to print it out and post it in several places in your home.
Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.
Sounds like a good platform for a candidate. A candidate adopting this standard as part of the campaign platform could certainly stand out in today’s political climate. Certainly wouldn’t hurt to see somebody try it.
We’ve had several days now to hear the reactions to Eric Greitens’ commercial for hunting RINOS.
He seems to be the only one who thinks it’s funny. “Every normal person around the state of Missouri saw that is clearly a metaphor,” he is quoted as saying, a remark that is reminiscent of the story of a man who gets a call from his wife who says, “Be careful on your way to work this morning, The radio says there’s a driver going the wrong way on the highway,” and the husband replies, “One guy? There are hundreds of them!”
Greitens says the abnormal people expressing strong misgivings about his video are expressing “faux outrage.” No, Eric, in this campaign where voters have to determine who is a friend or a faux, we know who the leader of the faux brigade is.
His primary election opponents, most of them experiencing a moment of clarity instead of telling us how much they worship at the Trump Temple, are aghast.
Aghast!! Eric Greitens is still the lovable fellow who convinced voters six years ago that he knew how to be governor by firing an automatic military-style weapon with a large magazine (necessary in case the aim isn’t too good) at something that eventually exploded.
I went back and looked at that commercial last week. I think he fired ten shots before hitting the exploding target.
Perhaps showing his sensitive side in 2022, he’s carrying a shotgun instead of that military-style automatic weapon when he humorously knocks down the door of an empty house and joins his storm trooper friends amidst the smoke of a flash-bang grenade that apparently not only has scared all of the RINOS out of the house but has scared out all of the furniture, too.
This is an impressive example of the kind of leadership we need in Washington.
—somebody willing to round up a bunch of guys pretending to be soldiers of some kind to launch an attack on an empty house. And to suggest that anyone who opposes him needs to be “bagged” and there are no limits on numbers.
Vigilantes, they are. No badges. No authority. No warrant. But they’re going to protect us from Republicans in Name Only. At least RINOS as Eric the Seal defines them. If he does this to protect us from RINOS, can we expect tactical nukes in November against DEMS?
He begins the attack with a lie within the first ten seconds. “I’m Eric Greitens, Navy Seal,” he says.
No he isn’t. He’s not even in the Navy.
He WAS a Navy Seal once. He’s not now. In fact when he fell back on the Navy after quitting his state job under a giant cloud, the Navy wouldn’t let him become a Seal again. And judging from Phil Klay’s article in The New Yorker of May 17, 2018, there were good reasons. Klay wrote:
seals have traditionally embraced a culture of quiet professionalism. Part of the seal credo reads, “I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my actions.” In the last two weeks, I spoke to more than half a dozen current and former seals about the spectacular implosion of Greitens’s public image. Most chose not go on the record, but all expressed frustration that a peripheral and contentious figure in their community, one who served overseas but never served with seals in combat, became a public face of the seal community. Many complained to me that it tends to be those who are least representative of seal core values, such as Greitens, who end up trading on the group’s reputation and representing it in public, earning respect from American citizens but contempt from other seals.
Not only is he not a SEAL, as he identifies himself in the video, he’s not even in the Navy. Or even in the Navy Reserve. The Kansas City Star says he resigned his commission on May 1, 2021 after deciding to seek glory in the U. S. Senate alongside Josh Hawley.
When he fled from the governorship, he asked the Navy to be reinstated to active duty. The Navy, not jumping at the chance to do that, did nothing until Vice President Pence, who is admired by Greitens, put in a good word for him. The Navy decided he could come back as a reserve office and No, he could not be a Seal again. So he got a desk job of some kind while he lobbied to be assigned to Washington, D.C., to work with the National Security Council. That didn’t work either. Then he resigned.
As if all of this isn’t enough, he’s locked in a bitter dispute with his ex-wife who seemingly is accusing him of being all of the things a husband should not be.
He still has a loyal following although several people in his party, are trying to find a way to beat him in August. But anybody who thinks a person of his qualities doesn’t represent what the Republican Party is supposed to be about is probably just a RINO and they might want to duck.
There are a lot of Republicans in that primary election and it won’t take many votes to make Greitens the winner in August, especially if some D’s cross over in hopes that he’ll be the candidate easier for a Democrat to beat in November. And that scares the socks off the party he claims.
We haven’t figured out what his solutions to the nation’s problems are. Haven’t seen or heard specifics about what policies he will advocate if he’s elected. What does he think should be national policy on inflation? What would he advocate to bring down gas prices? How would he improve healthcare? How would he end the shortage of people in the workplace? How would he solve supply line problems?
Most obviously: What does he think of the gun control legislation rushed through Congress after the Uvalde school shooting (and other mass shootings before and since)? The mere fact that he saw fit to release his video in the midst of so much national anger at firearms violence shows, if nothing else, a dismaying lack of serious concern for anything outside of himself.
He’s shooting blanks on those issues. As The Kansas City Star put it bluntly a few days ago, “He’s also a coward. He’s a tough guy with a gun on TV, but ducks every debate and every legitimate press interview.”
If he wants to show us how truly committed he is to democracy and freedom more than he is committed to himself, maybe he can find a flight to Ukraine where there’s nothing faux about doors—and everything else—being knocked down.
In early August, we’ll learn if this video SEALED his fate.
” All my life, I have said (as to myself, and at times, by way of sarcastic prescription for others) that I never . . . talk . . . any . . . faster . . . than . . . my . . . mind . . . can . . . think.”
—Judge Michael Luttig. June 16, 2022 before the January 6th Committee.
Nancy and I had the same reaction as we listened to Judge Luttig’s testimony. We both recalled a routine by the comedy duo of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, Bob & Ray, in which Ray interviewed the President of the Slow Talkers of America.
Sometimes we talk too rapidly. We are so accustomed to talking rapidly, even before we have understood a question or a discussion point, ignoring the admonition from the Gospel of James: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires”
The most underrated part of speech is the pause.
—-because pauses give listeners the chance to process what we say.
As we watched, it became apparent to us that Judge Luttig realized the gravity of his appearance before the committee, and wanted to so carefully respond to questions that there could be no lack of clarity in his responses or misunderstandings of what he said. His pauses made us listen more closely.
We were drawn into his answers not only by the pauses but by the exactness of his words. And it was because his pauses caused us to listen so carefully that one line had an impact (at least to this listener) greater than all of the others. It came as the committee was discussing the erroneous advice given President Trump that history and law establish a precedent for the Vice-President to overturn a presidential election. Judge Luttig, after refuting that claim, told the committee: “I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the Vice President overturn the 2020 election on the basis of that historical precedent.”
He didn’t say that as the written transcript preserves it. Without raising his voice, the pacing of his statement carried an unmistakable power and a passion as he carefully formed his thoughts, pausing as he did so, knowing that his words became history a soon as he spoke them.*
Near the end, his carefully-delivered words carried a warning:
Today, almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021, that still Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.
In the days since his testimony an unusual thing has happened. The judge has explained why he spoke as he did. Several organizations have reported his explanation. It began with praise from a writer for Vanity Fair, Joe Hagan, who wrote on Twitter:
“I like how this guy treats every line of his testimony like he’s engraving it on a national monument. And frankly, he really *is* engraving it for history. And he seems to know it. I also respect, despite how halting he may sound, that Luttig is not setting himself up to be a mere soundbite maker. He’s speaking to history, not TV. His sobriety, his graveness, his hallowedness, is so foreign to our modern sensibilities — but that’s the point. That is the precise point.”
Judge Luttig saw what Hagan had written and responded that Hagan “almost presciently understood precisely what I was at least attempting to do…”
What you could not know, and did not know, but I will tell you now, is that I believed I had an obligation to the Select Committee and to the country, first to formulate . . . then to measure . . . and then . . . to meter out . . .every . . . single . . . word . . . that I spoke . . . , carefully . . . exactingly . . . and . . . deliberately, so that the words I spoke were pristine clear and would be heard, and therefore understood, as such.
I believed Thursday that I had that high responsibility and obligation — to myself, even if to no other. Also please bear in mind that Thursday was the first time in 68 years, to my knowledge, I had ever been on national television, let alone national television like that. And though not scared, I was concerned that I do my very best and not embarrass myself, as I think anyone who found themselves in that frightening circumstance would be.
I decided to respond to your at once astute and understanding tweet finally this afternoon, because I have been watching the tweets all day suggesting that I am recovering from a severe stroke, and my friends, out of their concern for me and my family, have been earnestly forwarding me these tweets, asking me if I am alright. Such is social media, I understand. But I profoundly believe in social media’s foundational, in fact revolutionary, value and contribution to Free Speech in our country, and for that reason I willingly accept the occasional bad that comes from social media, in return for the much more frequent good that comes from it — at least from the vastly more responsible, respectful speech on those media.
That is why, 16 years after my retirement from the Bench, even then as a very skeptical, curmudgeonly old federal judge, I created a Facebook account and then a Twitter account — slowly . . . very slowly . . . one account first . . . and then . . . followed . . . by the other. All of this said, I am not recovering from a stroke or any other malady, I promise…
I was more ready, prepared and intellectually focused (I had thought) during Thursday’s hearing than I have ever been for anything in my life. I gather my face appeared ‘too red’ for some on Twitter, betraying to them serious illness. The explanation was more innocent than that. At the last minute, I had been able during the weekend preceding my testimony to help my daughter get settled into her new home, where the temperatures were in the upper 90s, and where I was appreciatively, though unwittingly, to get just a little bit of needed suntan!
What I will say, though, is this. And I think it explains it all. All my life, I have said (as to myself, and at times, by way of sarcastic prescription for others) that I never . . . talk . . . any . . . faster . . . than . . . my . . . mind . . . can . . . think. I will proudly assure everyone on Twitter that I was riveted, laser-like as never before, on that promise to myself… beginning promptly at the hour of 1:00 pm Thursday afternoon.
What is more, as consciously as one can be aware of something subconsciously, I was…supremely conscious that, if I were chiseling words in stone that day, it was imperative that I chisel the exact words that I would want to be chiseled in stone, were I chiseling words in stone for history.
He concluded, “I can assure you that on last Thursday, June 16, I had never felt, or been, better in my life.”
Judge Luttig, in addition to contacting Politico to explain his careful presentation, shared with the political news site a reflection he wrote in February about those who were heroes on January 6. He called the piece “the most important words to him that he has ever written” and said they are the words “that he wants remembered.” You can find it at:
Writing has no pauses. We, and many others, will remember Judge Luttig not for those words he wrote in February but the words and the pauses that he gave us on June 16, 2022.
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*National Public Radio (and others, probably) has been publishing transcripts of each day’s hearings. We have edited the NPR transcript for that hearing to highlight Judge Luttig’s testimony. For the full transcript, please go to https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105683634/transcript-jan-6-committee
The transcript (excerpted)
LIZ CHENEY:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Judge Luttig, thank you as well for being here with us today. You issued a very important statement earlier today, which I urge all Americans to read. And I’d like to ask you, Judge, about one of the sentences in your statement and ask if you could explain to us the significance of it. You say, had the Vice President of the United States obeyed the President of the United States America would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis.
Could you elaborate on that for us, Judge?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
Thank you, Madam Vice Chairman. That — that passage in my statement this morning referenced the — the most foundational concept in America, which is the rule of law. Thus, as I interpret your question, you are asking about that foundational truth of these United States, which we call America. The foundational truth is the rule of law.
That foundational truth is, for the United States of America, the profound truth, but it’s not merely the profound truth for the United States, it’s also the simple truth, the simple foundational truth of the American republic. Thus, in my view, the hearings being conducted by this select committee are examining that profound truth, namely the rule of law, in the United States of America.
The specific question of course before you and before the nation, not before me, is whether that foundational rule of law was supremely violated on January 6, 2021. Now, to the question specifically that you asked, Madam Vice Chair, I believe that had Vice President Pence obeyed the orders from his President and the President of the United States of America during the joint session of the Congress of the United States on January 6, 2021 and declared Donald Trump the next President of the United States, notwithstanding that then President Trump had lost the Electoral College vote as well as the popular vote in the 2020 Presidential election, that declaration of Donald Trump as the next President would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America, which in my view, and I’m only one man, would have been the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic.
LIZ CHENEY:
Judge Luttig, did the Trump electors in those seven states who were not certified by any state authority have any legal significance?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
Congresswoman, there — there was no support whatsoever and either the Constitution of the United States nor the laws of the United States for the Vice President frankly ever to count alternative electoral slates from the states that had not been officially certified by the designated state official in the Electoral Count Act of 1887. I did notice in the passage from Mr. Eastman’s memorandum and I took a note on it, and correct me if I’m wrong, but he said in that passage that there was both legal authority as well as historical precedent.
I do know what Mr. Eastman was referring to when he said that there was historical precedent for doing so. He was incorrect. There was no historical precedent from the beginning of the founding in 1789 that even as mere historical precedent as distinguished from legal precedent would support the possibility of the Vice President of the United States quote, “Counting alternative electoral slates that had not been officially certified to the Congress pursuant to the Electoral Count Act of 1887.” I would be glad to explain that historical precedent if the committee wanted, but it — it would be a digression.
JOHN WOOD:
Judge Luttig, I had the incredible honor of serving as one of your law clerks. Another person who did was John Eastman. And you’ve written that Dr. Eastman’s theory that the Vice President could determine who the next President of the United States is in your words incorrect at every turn.
Could you please explain briefly your analysis?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
It was my honor, Mr. Wood, to have you serve as my law clerk. I — I could answer that question perfectly if I had at my disposal either Mr. Eastman’s tweet or my own analytical tweet of September 21st. But I don’t. But that said, let me try to remember the analysis of — of Mr. Eastman’s analysis.
JOHN WOOD:
And — and Judge, I can read to you and to the audience I think what was a really key passage from your very insightful analysis when you wrote, “I believed that Professor Eastman was incorrect at every turn of the analysis in his January 2nd memorandum beginning with his claim that there were legitimate competing slate of electors presented from seven states.”
You’ve already addressed that issue. But your next sentence said, “Continuing to his conclusion that the Vice President could unilaterally decide not to count the votes from the seven states from which competing slates were allegedly presented.” So what was your basis for concluding that Dr. Eastman was incorrect in his conclusion that the Vice President could unilaterally decide not to count the votes from these disputed states?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
I understand. As I previously stated in response to Congresswoman Cheney, the — there was no basis in the Constitution or laws of the United States at all for the theory espoused by Mr. Eastman at all. None. With all respect to my co-panelist, he said I believe in partial response to one of the select committee questions that the single sentence in the 12th Amendment was he thought [unartfully] written.
That single sentence is not [unartfully] written. It was pristine clear that the President of the Senate on January 6th, the incumbent Vice President of the United States, had little substantive constitutional authority if any at all. The 12th Amendment, the single sentence that Mr. Jacob refers to, says in substance that following the transmission of the certificates to the Congress of the United States and under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the archivist of the United States that the presiding officer shall open the certificates in the presence of the Congress of the United States in joint session.
It then says unmistakably not even that the Vice President himself shall count the electoral votes. It clearly says merely that the electoral count votes shall then be counted. It was the Electoral Count Act of — of 1887 that — that filled in, if you will, the simple words of — of the 12th Amendment in order to construct for the country a process for the counting of the — the — the sacred process for the counting of the electoral votes from the states that neither our original Constitution nor even the 12th Amendment had done.
The irony, if you will, is that, from its founding until 1887 in — when Congress passed the Electoral Count Act, the nation had been in considerable turmoil during at least five of its presidential elections, beginning as soon thereafter from the founding as 1800. So, it wasn’t for — almost 100 years later until the Electoral Count Act was passed.
So, that’s why, in my view, that piece of legislation is not only a work in progress for the country, but at this moment in history an important work in progress that needs to take place. That was long winded. I understand.
JOHN WOOD:
Well, Judge Luttig, at the risk of oversimplifying for the non-lawyers who are watching, is it fair to say that the 12th Amendment basically says two things happen, the vice president opens the — the certificates and the electoral votes are counted. Is it that straightforward?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
I would not want that to be my testimony before the Congress of the United States. The language of the 12th Amendment is that simple.
JOHN WOOD:
Thank you, Judge.
PETE AGUILAR:
I appreciate that. In our investigation, the select committee has obtained evidence suggesting that Dr. Eastman never really believed his own theory. Let me explain. On the screen, you can see a draft letter to the President from October 2020. In this letter, an idea was proposed that the Vice President could determine which electors to count at the joint session of Congress.
But the person writing in blue eviscerates that argument. The person who wrote the comments in blue wrote, quote, “The 12th Amendment only says that the President of the Senate opens the ballots in the joint session. And then in the passive voice that the votes shall then be counted”. The comments in blue further state, “nowhere does it suggest that the President of the Senate gets to make the determination on his own”. Judge Luttig, does it surprise you that the author of those comments in blue was in fact John Eastman?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
Yes, it does Congressman. But let me — watching this unfold, let me try to unpack what was at the root of what I have called the blueprint to overturn the 2020 election. And it is this.
And I had foreshadowed this answer in my earlier testimony to Congresswoman Cheney.
Mr. Eastman, from the beginning, said to the President that there was both legal as well as historical precedent for the Vice President to overturn the election.
And what we’ve heard today, I believe is — is what happened within the White House and elsewhere as all of the players, led by Mr. Eastman, got wrapped around the axle by the historical evidence claim by Mr. Eastman. Let me explain very simply, this is what I said would require a digression, that I would be glad to undertake if you wished, in short, if I had been advising the Vice President of the United States on January 6th, and even if then Vice President Jefferson, and even then Vice President John Adams, and even then Vice President Richard Nixon had done exactly what the President of the United States wanted his Vice President to do, I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the Vice President overturn the 2020 election on the basis of that historical precedent.
But what this body needs to know, and now America needs to know, is that that was the centerpiece of the plan to overturn the 2020 election. It was the historical precedent in the years — and with the Vice Presidents that I named, as Congressman Raskin understands well, and the — the effort by Mr. Eastman and others was to — to drive that historical precedent up to and under that single sentence — single pristine sentence in the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Taking advantage of, if you will, what many have said is the inartful wording of that sentence in the 12th Amendment. Scholars before 2020 would have used that historical precedent to argue, not that Vice President Pence could overturn the 2020 election by accepting non-certified state electoral votes, but they would have made arguments as to some substantive, not merely procedural, authority possessed by the Vice President of the United States on — on the statutorily prescribed day for counting the Electoral College votes.
This is — this is constitutional mischief.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
The gentlelady yields back…
Judge Luttig, I want to give you an opportunity to share your thoughts on the ongoing threat. You’ve written the clear and present danger to our democracy now is that former President Donald Trump and other political allies appear prepared to seize the presidency in 2024 if Mr. Trump or one of his anointed candidates is not elected by the American people.
What do you mean by this?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
Mr. Chairman, I’m honored beyond words by your words. I was honored on January 6th, 2021, and also honored beyond words to have been able to come to the aid of Vice President Mike Pence. I prayed that day just like the vice president prayed that day. I believe we may have prayed the — the same prayer to the same God. I prayed that same prayer with my wife this morning before I came into these hearings.
I have written, as you said, Chairman Thompson, that today, almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021, that still Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. That’s not because of what happened on January 6th. It’s because, to this very day, the former president, his allies, and supporters pledge that, in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. I don’t speak those words lightly.
I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that’s what the former president and his allies are telling us. As I said in that New York Times op-ed, wherein I was speaking about the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the former president and his allies are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open, in plain view of the American public.
I repeat, I would have never uttered one single one of those words unless the former president and his allies were candidly and proudly speaking those exact words to America. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to appear here today for these proceedings.
Our ex-President has been raging on his personal social media platform about the January 6th Committee hearings and their discoveries. Last Thursday, after the third hearing explored the physical danger faced by the Vice-President during the Trump-inspired riot, Trump took to his own personal platform to complain, “It is a one-sided, highly partisan Witch Hunt, the likes of which has never been seen in Congress before. Therefore, I am demanding EQUAL TIME to spell out the massive Voter Fraud & Dem Security Breach!”
Your faithful correspondent suggests the ex-President make a minor change in his characterizations of the committee. It’s a small thing but precision in language is important in times of great personal and national stress. The committee hearings do not constitute a witch hunt. Witches are females. Males are Warlocks. It would improve his credibility as an intelligent individual if he referred to the perceived attacks on him with the proper term.
It’s a Warlock Hunt.
Your faithful correspondent also agrees with the ex-President that he should be allowed equal time to respond to statements made by numerous associates and advisers and played back during the hearings.
We believe his most equal time should be spent under oath.
Before the committee.
And the committee should extend to him the privilege of speaking in an open, public, widely-broadcast hearing in which he could explain at great length his thoughts, actions, and words—unlike the way the committee has handled his associates, with closed hearings and excerpts of their testimony played in the public hearings. After all he WAS the President of the United States and he deserves that special courtesy.
He’s correct in observing that these hearings are something “which has never been seen in Congress before.” It would REALLY be something that has never been seen before if he would explain to the committee under penalty of perjury—-as so many of his associates have done—his justifications for his words and his actions or his lack of actions.
But maybe his request should be refused because—
actually, the hearings are Democracy’s equal time to lies he told at all of the rallies he held before and after the 2020 elections.
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There’s another observation we have, uh, observed in the months since those events.
Some members of Congress deny the events constituted a violent uprising or insurrection or riot or whatever. The people who came into the Capitol that day, they say, were just peaceful tourists.
We were peaceful tourists at the Capitol once when we took our children to Washington, D.C. So we know about these things.
We didn’t see any of the Congressmen who say the people on January 6 were like our family greet us at their offices, as ours did. (Our Congressman even took the children down on the House floor with him during debate that day; our son wanted to go back the next day but we told him the only way he could ever do that would be to get elected).
One of our previous Congressmen once invited us to visit him in Washington and even told us he’d take us to the House cafeteria for some of the famous bean soup that’s served there.
We didn’t see any of those Congressmen go out on the front steps of the Capitol and get their pictures taken with their peaceful constituents that day. Ours did. He even signed the picture.
We’re sure the peaceful visitors would have enjoyed seeing their representatives and senators. They probably had worked up a pretty good appetite by then, too, and might have enjoyed some bean soup.
What a bummer of a day that was for those visitors. They go to all the trouble they went to to travel to Washington, to gather at the Capitol, to make a special effort to get in to see their Congress people only to find there would be no family picture and no bean soup.
It’s clear that too much of our political dialogue in this country has lost any semblance of courtesy.
I trace much of that loss to the medium that was my life for more than fifty years and to a slight degree still is. Radio.
Radio had been consigned to insignificance (again) by the early 1980s. But satellite-delivered content became more practical and with it voices that were no longer local and often no longer respective of listeners, guests or callers came into our radios. After all, the show was about them, not about the community and the residents radio stations lived with. Nationally-distributed talk radio is considered the savior of the AM band.
Now look at where we are. Not just in radio but in our political circles and even in our daily verbal intercourse with one another, even among family members. And it’s less than two months before the August primary elections and—-Oh, Lord! The flood of thirty-seconds of irrationality that will assault our eyes and ears and insult our intelligences.
The other day we found a concert by Glen Campbell with the South Dakota Symphony on YouTube. It showcased his great voice, his incredible guitar-playing, and even a solo with bagpipes.
He closed the concert, as he often did, with a song by Bobby Austin and Carl Sapaugh: Try a Little Kindness—
If you see your brother standing by the road
With a heavy load from the seeds he sowed
And if you see your sister falling by the way
Just stop and say, “You’re going the wrong way”
You’ve got to try a little kindness
Yes, show a little kindness
Just shine your light for everyone to see
And if you try a little kindness
Then you’ll overlook the blindness
Of narrow-minded people on the narrow-minded streets
Don’t walk around the down and out
Lend a helping hand instead of doubt
And the kindness that you show every day
Will help someone along their way
You got to try a little kindness
Yes, show a little kindness
Just shine your light for everyone to see
And if you try a little kindness
Then you’ll overlook the blindness
Of narrow-minded people on the narrow-minded streets
You got to try a little kindness
Yes, show a little kindness
Just shine your light for everyone to see
And if you try a little kindness
Then you’ll overlook the blindness
Of narrow-minded people on the narrow-minded streets
T.A.L.K. Kindly. We really need it these days. It’s time we got smart enough to ignore the self-centered lousy examples we have all around us and rise above them.
They don’t want us to do that. They profit if we continue to dwell in blindness, narrow-mindedness and narrow-minded streets. But we know we can be better than their examples.
The regular consumers of these eloquent literary effusions might have noticed nothing was posted in its usual place on Monday. That is because your loyal correspondent, in the springtime of his senility, posted the intended Monday meditation on Thursday. He apparently was too eager to get to St. Louis for an automobile race later in the weekend that he mis-dated the time the material should be exposed to the waiting public.
The column that suggested no place is safe from a “loon with a gun and a grudge” and we should expect a mass shooting to happen wherever we are elicited two responses, nonetheless. One suggested just doing away with the Second Amendment.
To be clear, for any who felt the column advocated such a thing:
If we did away with the Second Amendment I would have no right to own my Daisy BB gun! Or my father’s J. C. Whitney .22 rifle or the antique 12-gauge shotgun with the crossover stock. I’m not advocating eliminating the Second Amendment although some of the (to me) irrational defense of it might need to be dismissed—and polls indicate large numbers of Americans agree with the assessment that it is time for some social and legal parameters to be established within the amendment’s framework.
The problem is the difference made by one letter. The letter is “L.”
Pols versus polls.
Sometimes our political figures love polls. If they’re winning.
Sometimes our political figures hate polls. If they’re losing.
But polls seem to mean nothing to our Pols who are deafened by an adequate number of dollar bills that they allow to be inserted into their ears.
It’s not just this issue, either.
While individual political leaders and/or candidates steadfastly deny that currency-filled campaign coffers affect their votes; that they only buy access—the additional “access” seems often to be convincing of the rightness of the donor’s position.
The dollar value of political courage has never been calculated, but in this issue there seems to be some kind of a threshold that tips the recipient away from the popular will. And there seems to be an organization among many organizations that has the biggest thumb on the scales because it has the greatest concentration of paper ear plugs. .
As long as courage is cheap and access is for sale, the polls on mass shootings will mean enough Pols will keep any significant parameters from being established within the Second Amendment.
So my BB gun is safe.
But the question is: When will things become so disastrous that “access” cannot be bought?
Underlining that rhetorical question is the results from this weekend.
People at a graduation party in Summerton, SC (a town that previously had never made any national headlines your correspondent has noticed) didn’t think it could happen there. Nor did people at a bar in Chattanooga, TN. Or people living their lives in the moment on a busy street in Philadelphia. The 100 people at a party at a Phoenix strip mall probably hadn’t given a mass shooting a thought—until they were the middle of one. The same likely is true of a similar crowd at a graduation party at a private home in Socorro, TX. Or the people at a bar in Mesa, AZ. And a gas station parking lot fight in Macon, GA leaves one dead and three others hurt.
The news aggregation site AXIOS* calculates the total at 11 dead and 54 others hurt, just this weekend.
Just another weekend in America where, as The Onion has observed more than 20 times:
‘NO WAY TO PREVENT THIS,’
SAYS ONLY NATION WHERE
THIS REGUARLY HAPPENS
The Quick.
And the Dead.
The Pols.
The Polls.
And the dollars keep going into the ears of those who find it beneficial to be deaf.
-0-
*The AXIOS weekend scorecard:
Summerton: Two cars stop at a house where a graduation party is being held and shots are fired into the house. One dead. Seven wounded.
Chattanooga: Shooting near a bar. Fourteen wounded by gunshots. Three others hit by cars. Two dead by gunshot wounds. One dead when run over by a car fleeing the scene.
Philadelphia: Three dead and at least eleven others hurt when three shooters open fire on a busy street.
Phoenix: One dead, eight others hurt in altercation at a party led to shooting. The dead person is a 14-year old girl. Two of the wounded have life-threatening injuries.
Socorro: A fight at a high school graduation party turns into a shooting. Five teenagers wounded.
Macon: Argument in gas station parking lot leaves one dead and three hurt.
Wherever you are when you read this you should resign yourself to the fact that somebody is going to kill a bunch of people in your town. Just pray you are not in the church, school, hospital, shopping mall, business, office—nowhere is safe from the loon with a gun and a grudge.
So just get ready to mourn. Maybe you should get ready to die.
You just never know.
This is being written on Thursday, June 2, 2022. Education Week calculates the Uvalde, Texas school shooting was the 27th school shooting this year, the 119th school shooting since 2018.
That’s just schools.
The Gun Violence Archive has counted 212 mass shootings in this country this year—incidents in which four or more people were killed or wounded, not counting the shooter.
Thoughts and prayers offered, or maybe somebody just thinks about thoughts and prayers because it’s easy to say.
But nothing seems likely to change.
We hear the same demands for SOMEBODY to do SOMETHING after every incident. We hear the same claims that doing SOMETHING won’t solve ANYTHING—every time.
Truth is, our policy making system is paralyzed by fear that doing something will antagonize the most rabid supporters of gun rights, that elections might be lost, campaign funding might be switched to others, will violate the sacredness of the Second Amendment (and, by the way, spare me the BS about the First Amendment existing only because there is a Second Amendment, not after 19 children and two adults will no longer experience First Amendment rights because somebody decided to exercise his Second Amendment right.).
No part of the United States Constitution is immune from interpretation and no law is absolute. The Second Amendment is not above limits.
It is easy to be pessimistic about any kind of political effort to reduce these tragedies because there is a sickness within a political system that seems to think it proper for candidates to campaign by showing us their prowess with the kinds of weapons used to kill students and shoppers and hospital personnel, among others.
The irony of those who think they can show their defense of American values with commercials showing them shooting weapons of mass murder is that their commercials tacitly endorse phrase first uttered in 1927 by Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong: “Political Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
This kind of appeal for political support is abhorrent.
Unfortunately, it seems to work.
And that’s sick.
Is there a legitimate use for a weapon, or its replica, designed specifically to fire large quantities of bullets except in the military services the weapons were designed for in the first place?
Self-defense you say. Let’s see. A character in Buffalo, NY was defending himself against dangerous shoppers at a mall. Another character was defending himself against threatening fourth graders in Uvalde, Texas. And a third was defending himself against his doctor.
And those are only the latest examples as we write this.
Do you feel safer knowing that dangerous shoppers, threatening fourth graders, and a doctor widely respected for his volunteer service are no longer threatening the peace and dignity of society?
THE ONION, a satirical newspaper that often looks at the absurdities of life, has published the same story 21 times after 21 mass shootings. It re-published all 21 of them on its web page last week. The headline is always the same:
‘NO WAY TO PREVENT THIS,’
SAYS ONLY NATION WHERE
THIS REGUARLY HAPPENS
The text is always the same except for the dateline:
TULSA—In the days following a violent rampage in Oklahoma in which a lone attacker killed four individuals in addition to himself, and seriously injured several others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said New Mexico resident Ellen Robinson, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”
The shame of it is that the article is true.
And that’s why all of us need to be rehearsing our statements of shock and sorrow, or our survivors should be rehearsing statements of shock and sorrow, because these incidents will not stop on their own.
And as long as they go on, we might as well consider it inevitable that it’s going to happen here, wherever “here” is to you.
—-because there’s no way to prevent it.
And your town and my town are as likely candidates for this “distinction” as any place.
We saw a news account last weekend that our past president was suffering a severe case of the grumps. Not sure why that’s news anymore. We’ve never known a grumpier politician, a person who’s just plain sour about almost everything.
It must have rained a lot at Mar-a-Lago this weekend, so much that he couldn’t occupy his mind chasing his golf ball around and was thus left to ruminate on why the world is so unfair to him.
He loves to use a phrase to discount the legitimacy of anybody who suggests he’s not his self-proclaimed genius.
Because the Wall Street Journal had the temerity to differ with him about the voting process in the Pennsylvania race for the U. S. Senate seat, he announced that the WSJ is a…
RINO.
Oh, dear.
We are sure the Journal is worried about mass subscription cancellations now that its secret has been revealed.
Here’s a novel thought.
Maybe it’s Donald Trump who is the RINO.
Maybe there are a lot of Republicans out there who would like to see their party reclaim itself with that simple revelation.
The very election results in Pennsylvania might point to that.
Trump’s man, Mehmet Oz, has 31.2% of the vote, as we write this.
That means 68.8% of the Republican ballots were cast for someone else.
So who’s the outlier here? The two thirds of the voters who might consider themselves the real Republicans or the Oz supporter who is quick to call those he can’t convince by a name.
Sometimes we write stuff here that won’t move the public needle but we do it to get something off our chest and into whatever public discussion flows from these pieces. Truth be told, these columns have limited readership and since I don’t mess with Facebook or other social media platforms (I have a life and it is not lived between my thumbs), this wisdom reaches only a few feet from the mountaintop from which it is dispensed.
But today, we need to expose term limits for the hypocritical entity that they are. And the hypocrisy that voters showed in approving them thirty years ago this year.
We related some of the problems a few days ago. There are two major points today, one that can be made in just a few words and the second one that will take a little more. The point, however, is the same—term limits are voter apathy and voter hypocrisy at their worst:
The first point is one we’ve made before—that voters gave up their right to vote for the people who represent them in the legislative chambers when they adopted a law saying they did not want the right to vote their state representative a fifth term or their state senator a third term.
They just threw away their votes.
Voters said we must have term limits to get new, fresh blood into our governments—-and then immediately contradicted themselves.
The same voters who approved limiting Missouri House members to only four two-year terms voted in the same election to return 53 members to the House of Representatives for a fifth term.
Of that 53, four were returned for their ninth term, one for a tenth term, two for their eleventh term and one for his SEVENTEENTH term.
Two years later, Missourians voted for 36 of these same people for still another term and gave fourteen others a fifth term or more.
And in 1996 voters sent 22 of them back again! And they gave 13 representatives fifth terms.
The last person affected by term limits to serve in the House of Representatives, as far as we have been able to determine, was Chris Kelly of Columbia, who was elected to his ninth and last term in 2012 after having been away from the House for several years. He could have run for a tenth term but did not.
In all, Missouri voters who think term limits are good public policy have voted 263 times to elect state representatives to a fifth term (one was elected to a 19th during this time).
The Missouri Senate, a much smaller body, has seen voters send its members back for more than two terms 32 times.
That’s almost 300 times for both chambers of our legislature. .
And what does that say?
It says that if voters have a chance to vote for someone they like, they’ll do it. But those voters of 1992 decided you and I won’t have that opportunity.
The second point is that term limits miss the target. The real issue is POWER. Instead, term limits cripples SERVICE. The most dangerous people in our political system are the people in power. They set the agendas. They decide what legislation will be heard in committees or debated on the floors of the House and the Senate. They are in positions that attract financial support that hey might wish to share with a favored few.
Terms limits can be, should be, applied to those who can manipulate the system. Speakers and Presidents Pro Tem have the power. The Governor and the Treasurer have policy and financial power in state government and limiting that power is a safeguard as would be limiting the years a person can lead a legislative body.
There is no doubt that incumbency has its advantages at campaign times. But the answer to that advantage is not in taking away the right to vote for that person again instead of for an opponent. It is in making challengers more equal in presenting their cases. Reforming the way campaigns are financed is an answer. The challenge is in finding a constitutional way to do it.
One way to start is to change term limits laws to apply to those in power and to restore the citizens’ right to pick their public servants.
Will voters reclaim their right? In today’s political climate, it’s extremely doubtful regardless of how much we owe it to ourselves as voters and our system to do it.
There are people who are dying today to keep their version of democracy alive. We smug Americans who too readily wrap ourselves in our flag and use it to justify all kinds of dubious remarks and actions cannot fully appreciate how desperately millions of others want to hang on to something we regard so casually and irresponsibly and are willing to give away with so little thought.
But term limits are what we have and that’s what we are thirty years after Missourians gave away their right to vote for those speaking for them in the chambers where our laws are made.
