It’s not the news that’s fake, Donald...

Yesterday, in all caps, the man who occupies the White House tweeted out seven words: “FAKE NEWS…THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.” I’ve been trying to ignore this person as much as possible in recent days but I can’t allow that pronouncement to go unchallenged.

First off, Mr. Tweeter-in-Chief, I was a journalist for 13 years. In all that time, I never wrote anything that was fake, phony, fictitious, inflammatory or knowingly untrue. I was a reporter and editor for a long time and I did it for very little money because I loved the work and I was good at it…two character traits you could use yourself.

Second, Donald (may I call you Donald, because I can’t call you Mr. President?), I worked with and have known a lot of other journalists at four different newspapers and not a single one of them was an enemy of the people. They were some of the best people I have ever known and many of them are still my friends today – more than 30 years after I left the profession.

And finally, sir, I want to talk about my friend John.

John – we’ll just call him John and leave it at that – was an excellent reporter and sports writer, one of the best ever in the business in the opinion of many, including myself. He worked very hard and he did his job with skill and grace and without complaint. The stories he wrote were about real events and real people doing real things out here in the real world. There was nothing fake about my friend John and he was – most assuredly – not an enemy of the people.

My friend John is dead now, Donald. He was shot and killed inside the newspaper office where he worked by a man with a gun who may or may not have been emboldened by the hateful rhetoric that falls from your lips and bounces off your Twitter fingers with frightening consistency.

“FAKE NEWS…THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.”     

It matters not whether your years-long attack on the news media inspired this man to kill my friend John and four of his co-workers, because John is still dead and he’s not coming back. You, meanwhile, are still out there feeding raw, red meat to the sycophantic, low-information, poorly educated lemmings who support you without condition by blaming your own failures, inadequacies, character flaws and criminal tendencies on the journalists who have the audacity to look for them, find them and report them back to the rest of us nearly every day.

I don’t know if my friend John ever met you or had any occasion to write about you, but if he had, I feel certain he would have treated you with dignity and respect. At least he would have treated the office you hold that way. He didn’t have to invent fake news because to John, the real news was interesting enough to keep him reporting it for more than 30 years.

On June 28, I was watching TV when a crawler went across the screen about a shooting at a newspaper office in Annapolis, Maryland. I immediately ran to my office and sent a Facebook message to my friend John. It read, simply, “Hey man, are you OK?” He wasn’t, of course, and there was never a reply.

I’m saving that message right where it sits to remind me of what was lost that day, and I’m hoping with all the hope I can muster than no other journalist is ever the victim of such violence – and that their friends don’t have to feel what John’s friends and family still feel to this day – because the man who was elected president of the United States keeps telling his base that the news is fake and the media is the enemy of the people.

You see, Donald, it’s not the news that’s fake. It’s your counterfeit personality, your supposed beliefs that seem to change by the hour, marked by your lack of empathy and compassion, your mountain of lies, your con man antics before you became president and your narcissistic delusion of grandeur that followed your election and continues unabated today.

It's your presidency that's fake, Donald. The seed was planted with your ride down the escalator, reached full bloom when you lied about the crowd at your inauguration on Day 1 and will no doubt continue until -- one way or another -- you are forced to vacate the office you currently hold and the bitter weed that is the phony presidency of Donald J. Trump dries up and blows away.   

And finally, it’s not the news media who is the true enemy of the people, Donald. BREAKING NEWS: IT’S YOU.

Baby, it’s stupid outside

I just finished reading a 3,000-word essay in Vox debating whether the Christmas song “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is a romantic ballad about two consenting adults or a date rape anthem about a man who won’t take “no” for an answer. I hate myself for even reading the article and I feel stupider for the experience.

Listen. The song in question was written in 1944 by someone I never heard of before. I don’t know what the author intended and I really don’t care. Liking or not liking this song (I don’t) does not determine whether I sanction or condone sexual misconduct. I don’t do that, either.

So I’ve been struck with an idea: If the song offends you, don't listen to it. If it doesn't, then knock yourself out. Why does someone else have to tell us what to think and do? Can't we think for ourselves? Why does everything have to be analyzed, inspected, scrutinized and debated until there’s nothing left but ashes and dust?

That said, if you really want to explore this song in depth -- and I don’t know why you would -- ask yourself these questions:

* If it's so freakin’ bad outside, why did he invite her on such a terrible night and why did she agree to the date?

* Did she drive herself, get dropped off by someone or take a cab? If she drove, does she have good snow tires?  

* If she took a cab, was she planning to stay? If not, what was her plan for getting home?

* Did it only get cold after she arrived? What was it, a fast-moving arctic front that moved down suddenly from Canada?

* Seriously, how long has she been there already, and why were they so distracted they didn’t notice the changing weather? (Wink wink, nod nod.)

* If he’s so concerned about her, why doesn't he offer to drive her home, call for a taxi or at least go out and warm up her car?

* If she’s so worried about her mother, her brother, her sister, her maiden aunt, grandma, grandpa, Cousin Maude, Uncle Louie and the neighbors next door, maybe visiting a man at his place on a cold, wintry night wasn’t her best idea.

* And if he has to beg and plead just to get a kiss, maybe dating isn’t his thing, either.

See? You could debate the merits of this stupid song from now until the weather improves but what would you have when the sun came out? A colossal waste of time...and probably a headache to boot.

As for me, I find the song to be woefully outdated and a little bit silly, and I think the timing of the current controversy over it is extremely odd. I mean, even as I write these words, we are in the process of canonizing a former president who liked to grab women on the ass at a funeral attended by one who liked cigars with his sex and the current president who likes to grab them in an even more private place.

And this kind of behavior has been normalized in a world where Megan Kelly thinks Santa Claus and Jesus Christ were white men, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas are Supreme Court justices and Christian extremists think Donald Trump was sent to us by God, but we’re worried about whether a man from 1944 is trying to sleep with a woman who showed up at his house without a chaperone during a storm.

Is this really what should be top of the page?

Republicans (or anybody), please answer this one simple question

I have a serious question for my Republican friends (yes, I have a few) or anybody else who knows the answer.

Question: Other than the insanity, the stupidity, the narcissism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the criminal history, the Fascist tendencies, the racism, the total disregard for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, the abuse of the government to make money for himself and his family and the utter lack of understanding about how the world actually works, what do you get from Donald Trump that you couldn’t get from, say, Mike Pence?

I’m serious. I really want to know, because it baffles me that this babbling baby, this petulant prevaricator, this tweeting twit, this juvenile jerk-off and this heartless, brainless, spineless, soulless shabby excuse for a human being has stayed in office as long as he has, with no definitive end in sight.

I mean, look. You already got your tax cut and your two Supreme Court justices, raped Obamacare as much as possible, stonewalled the Congressional investigation into Russian election meddling, screwed up immigration policy (while putting babies in cages) and blew up the federal deficit as an excuse to start whacking away at Social Security and Medicare. What else do you need?

Meanwhile, we have sucked up to Russia, China, North Korea, Turkey, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia – some of the most despicable violators of human rights on the planet – and legitimized murder while alienating our allies, disrespecting our military, mocking women and minorities and manufacturing an “alien invasion” to try to frighten people into voting red.

And that’s just off the top of my head. Don’t you think it’s time to pull the plug on this failed authoritarian experiment and turn over the reins to someone who actually knows how to run a government?

Now don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see Mike Pence sharing a cell along with Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Trump Junior, Jared Kushner and Devin Nunes, to name a few. As for Pence, I don’t like that smug, self-righteous religious nut bag weirdo as much as I like a bad case of the flu, but if I were a Republican, I’d see Pence as basically Donald Trump without the crazy.

Think of it this way: Wouldn’t Pence sign the same bills that Trump would sign? Wouldn’t he issue the same executive orders? Wouldn’t he appoint the same conservative judges? Wouldn’t he espouse the same pro-life, pro-business, pro-fossil fuels, anti-climate change agenda that Trump promotes?

I think he would.

Plus, he was governor of Indiana for four years and a member of the House of Representatives from 2001 to 2013, so he should have some idea of how government is supposed to operate. He actually ran a state, for crying out loud. He didn’t do it very well, of course, but he held the office all the same.

What he wouldn’t do, I suspect, is:

* Spend all day during the "work week" watching Fox News to get his foreign and domestic policy advice, then play golf at one of his own properties all weekend;

* Waste the rest of his time tweeting out insults, garbage, incomplete sentences and political nonsense, sometimes starting as early as 3:00 in the morning;

* Assign schoolyard nicknames to people he didn’t like while acting like some teenage girl who didn’t get invited to the dance;

* And threaten the very democratic principles on which this country was founded.

Let me recap: Trump signs bills, issues orders, appoints judges and fights climate change. If Pence were president, he'd sign bills, issue orders, appoint judges and fight climate change. Hell, all the Republicans actually need in the White House is a hand to hold the pen. It’s so easy, a caveman could do it.

So I ask again: What do you get with Trump that you couldn’t get from Pence…and why didn’t you “25th” this dangerous yet pathetic clown of a president and ship him back to his gold-plated penthouse a long, long time ago?   

C’mon, somebody, help me out here. This is a serious question. I really want to know.

Raking leaves and seeking truth with ‘happy holidays’ ahead

I had a few thoughts as we roll full steam into the so-called “holiday season.”

First, I couldn’t help laughing out loud when I heard Donald Trump say we could prevent forest fires in California by simply raking up the leaves. My first thought was, “Does Smokey Bear know about this?”

Then, when he said Finland doesn’t have forest fires because they rake up the forest floor, I googled Finland and learned that much of the country is covered by evergreen trees. Specifically, “The landscape is covered mostly by coniferous taiga forests and fens. The forest consists of pine, spruce, birch and other species.” For you non-tree experts, “coniferous” refers to evergreen trees and shrubs that grow needles and sprout cones, like pine cones.

And what do coniferous trees have in common? They don’t have leaves. No leaves to fall, nothing to rake. Fire problem solved.

Never mind that about 25% of Finland is above the Arctic Circle, where they don’t even have trees, or that the climate of Finland is nothing like California, where hot, dry Santa Ana winds blow across rain-deprived forests and any kind of spark can ignite the kind of fires that are currently ravaging the state.

Then I looked out back, where my small yard sits at the base of a forest and saw many brown and orange leaves lying on the forest “floor.” I guess that means I’ll be a forest fire risk if it ever stops raining and the Santa Anas blow this far east. I’ll be sure to ask Trump what he thinks.

But wait!

Do you suppose Donald Trump has ever actually raked a leaf? Does he even know what a rake looks like? Does he know there are claw rakes with three prongs and garden rakes with 16 or more? Does he know there are leaf rakes, lawn rakes, hay rakes, bamboo, plastic and steel rakes? Could he pick a rake out of a police lineup if it was in there with a hoe, a shovel, a spade, a pick-axe, a post hole digger and some pruning shears?

I mean, if the president of the United States thinks the solution to forest fires is raking leaves, as opposed to, say, addressing global climate change, then he ought to be an expert on rakes, don’t you think?

*     *     *

Next, I want to know what happened to all of Trump’s paychecks since he became president. It’s been almost two years, right? He was supposed to work for free and donate his pay to some worthy charity, but after the first few months, we haven’t heard anything about that. Since some of it is my money, I want to know if he’s still doing that or if it was just another Trumpian lie.

And, I have an idea for the president: How about giving some of that taxpayer money to California fire victims and people in Puerto Rico who still haven’t reclaimed their lives after Hurricane Maria. Maybe you could adopt a family or two. I’m serious. Think of the public relations value. Some people might even start to believe the man has a heart and a soul. (I wouldn’t, but some people might.)

If that's too much for you, Mr. Trump, then at least drop a check or two into a bell-ringer's kettle. At least someone needy would benefit from your public relations generosity. 

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Third, I have decided that Michael Avenatti is either the target of a very well coordinated, Trump-inspired, right-wing smear campaign to ruin his reputation or he’s a slimeball of the highest order. Just this week he’s been arrested for sexual assault – although the alleged victim says he didn’t do it – and evicted from an office building for back rent, even though he claims he was moving out of it anyway.

Somebody isn’t telling the truth and I don’t know who it is.

It’s not that I care that much about Avenatti either way, because I don’t. Here’s what I do care about: I could live two more years, five years, 10 years or 20 minutes. There is no way to know. But what I do know is, for the remainder of my life, however long it may be, I’m not sure I will ever again know what is true…and that’s a frightening way to live.

*     *     *

Finally, I want to wish all of my friends and readers a happy holiday season. That’s right. I said “happy holidays.” If I see you on the street, I might say “merry Christmas” to you and truly hope that you have a good one. I like saying that when Christmas gets near, but there are people I know who also observe Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and celebrate the Winter Solstice, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner and New Year’s Day will bring up the rear, so to me, “happy holidays” covers it all.

And don’t forget Three Kings Day, St. Lucia Day and St. Nicholas Day. I don’t really know what any of those three are, but I hope you have a happy one all the same.

So hear me exclaim as I blog out of sight, "Happy holidays to all, and to all a good night."

Nixon and Trump 2.0

In 1972, Richard M. Nixon committed crimes while serving as President of the United States. He launched a massive cover-up to conceal his crimes, but when they were discovered, a special prosecutor was hired to investigate them.

When the prosecutor issued subpoenas for critical tape recordings of Nixon’s conversations in the White House, Nixon had the prosecutor fired in what became known as “The Saturday Night Massacre.”

Congress conducted hearings into the so-called “Watergate Affair” and, eventually, reacted to Nixon’s firing of the prosecutor by drafting three articles of impeachment alleging obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress.

Before he could be impeached, Nixon resigned.

Fast-forward 46 years. Donald J. Trump is alleged to have committed crimes while serving as President of the United States. He has spent two years denying the allegations and attempting to conceal his crimes, but a special counsel has been appointed to investigate them.

Now that the investigation is getting close to the president, Trump has taken the first steps toward getting the special counsel fired. It started yesterday when Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replaced him with a man loyal to Trump who has publicly called the investigation a “witch hunt.”

In a normal world, Congress would react to this “Wednesday Afternoon Massacre” by conducting hearings into Trump’s actions which, presumably, would result in the drafting of articles of impeachment alleging, say, such things as obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress.

But wait!

I just used the words “normal” and “Trump” in the same sentence. Nothing about Trump is normal, certainly nothing about his presidency or his twisted ideas of how the world works or what it means to sit in the Oval Office. Nothing is normal about our Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which launched a sham investigation into Trump’s conspiracy with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election, then called it off when Trump objected by saying it didn’t find any evidence of anything.

Nothing to see here, right?

As a side note, after a press conference yesterday, Trump banned a CNN reporter from the White House because the journalist dared to challenge Trump to answer difficult questions. For the record, Nixon had threatened to ban The Washington Post because it refused to stop investigating Watergate. Banning the free press from doing its job? There’s nothing normal about that, either.

So tick, tock…the saga continues. Today is another day and no doubt there are more surprises ahead. It’s impossible to know what will happen next, especially when the pathological liar we elected president stands before the media after losing control of the House and declares the election a major Republican victory, and when a man who completely lacks any semblance of morals declares himself to be a “great moral leader.”

Whatever happens today, tomorrow and the days after that, one thing is certain: It will not be normal. I’ve been watching a series of History channel documentaries on all of our American presidents. When History gets around to covering No. 45 some day, I’m predicting they’ll open the episode with the words, “It was the most abnormal administration in the history of the United States.”

And even that will be an understatement.

Nixon, Trump and their ‘wars on America’

I finished watching the six-hour “Watergate” docu-drama on the History channel last night and was starkly reminded of the stunning similarities between the scandal-ridden presidencies of Richard M. Nixon and Donald J. Trump.

For the record, I was a young newspaper reporter in 1972 when the so-called “plumbers” entered the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, so I already knew a lot of what was covered in History’s three-part series, but seeing it acted out brought back the details of the bungled break-in, Nixon’s initial denials, his subsequent cover-up, his impending impeachment and finally his resignation on August 9, 1974.

I’m not going to recount the whole Watergate story here (Google it if you want; it’s a fascinating tale) but I am going to make two points that the television series made abundantly clear:   

(1) First, toward the end of the final episode, Bob Woodward – who along with Carl Bernstein reported the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post – described what he called the “five wars of Richard Nixon.”

The first was against the anti-war movement and the millions of people who were protesting America’s years-long war in Vietnam. The second was Nixon’s war against the free press, which he detested, and the third was a war against the Democratic Party which had threatened to deny him a second term -- what led to the Watergate break-in in the first place.

The fourth war was “a war against justice” marked by the administration’s all-out effort to cover up the scandal and obstruct justice by hindering the investigation by a special counsel named Archibald Cox, which came to a conclusion with the infamous “Saturday night massacre.”

Facing a subpoena to produce tape recordings of Oval Office conversations, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson and then Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire the special prosecutor, but they both resigned in protest rather than carry out the order. Nixon finally ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork to fire the special counsel, and Bork complied.

Nixon’s fifth war, Woodward said, was “a war on history itself,” with Nixon telling Americans not to believe what they were seeing and hearing, even as evidence was presented and witnesses testified during Congressional hearings on the Watergate scandal. He even suggested we shouldn’t believe the words that flowed from his own Oval Office tape recordings.

(2) My second point is this: Take out the Vietnam War protests and you could easily describe the “four wars of Donald Trump.” For the two years of his presidency, Trump has waged a non-stop war against the news media, which he calls “fake news” and “the enemy of the people.” He has also gone to war against the Democratic Party, which he blames for his own flaws and mistakes, and against his own Justice Department for allowing and overseeing a special counsel investigation into an alleged conspiracy to rig the 2016 election.

He has attempted to obstruct the investigation at every turn and is widely believed to be on the verge of attempting to dismantle the investigation after the mid-term election tomorrow. If he should do that on a Saturday night, well…you get the idea.

Finally, Trump has also told us not to believe what we see and hear from those who dare to question his presidency. Call it his very own war on history.

So yeah, you could watch a documentary on Watergate, close your eyes and pretend you heard the name “Trump” every time they said “Nixon” and at times it kinda worked. Before Donald Trump was elected, I always thought the Watergate scandal was about the worst thing a president could ever do, but now I’m convinced that Trump is doing much worse.

I mean, think about it. Nixon’s crimes were committed because he wanted so badly to be re-elected that he parked his ethics and his morality at the curb. He didn’t use the presidency as a profit center to get rich while promoting his own golf courses and hotels, he didn’t fill his cabinet with incompetent cronies and former Fox News commentators bent on deconstructing the government, he didn’t alienate our allies while sucking up to tin-pot dictators around the world and he didn’t conspire with a foreign government to get himself elected.

Even Nixon didn’t lie six times a day every day of his presidency, he didn’t openly embrace white nationalism (Nixon was a quiet racist) and he never put migrating children from Central America into cages.

It took Nixon about six years to face impeachment before he resigned from the White House in disgrace. When you consider what he’s done in less than two years, Trump’s presidency is far worse than Nixon’s. In my mind, it’s not even close. 

Anti-human rights ad full of lies, distortions and ludicrous propositions

Three days before the upcoming election, Keep Fairmont Safe (KFS) ran a very long ad in today's local newspaper opposing Fairmont’s proposed new human rights ordinance, which will be on the ballot for a vote by city residents.

KFS is a "local" organization spawned by the Family Policy Council of West Virginia, an openly anti-gay hate group that travels around the state fighting against basic human rights for all people. If you don't believe me, google their web site or find them on Facebook.

Back to the newspaper ad. There are so many things wrong it would take too much space to recount them all, but here are just a few:

1. While declaring that KFS is “not opposed to human rights,” the ad states that sexual orientation and gender identity should not be considered protected classes as the ordinance states because they are “variable” conditions, unlike other classes such as race, religion, gender and national origin which are “fixed.”

Two things are wrong here: In no universe is religion a “fixed” condition. No one has ever come out of the womb a Presbyterian or a Methodist or even a Christian, and certainly no child has ever been born an angry, anti-gay, far right religious extremist. Those are learned or adaptive behaviors and therefore must also be considered “variable.” So if gays and transgenders must be excluded as "variable" classes, maybe religion should be excluded as well. I mean, "variable" is "variable," right?

Also, there is nothing more anti-gay than the idea that homosexuality and human biology are lifestyle choices. This notion denies the science and all other evidence to the contrary. If you’re anti-gay you are by definition opposed to human rights for everyone, so that claim is also a lie.

2. Next, KFS makes a claim that is so ludicrous as to be laughable if it weren’t so desperate and so sad. The ad claims that transgenders will identify as a man on Monday and a woman on Tuesday to get lower premiums on their car insurance. I’m not making that up. It really says that. I’m not sure words have been invented yet to adequately describe how ridiculous that comment is.

Now I know what KFS would say: "This happened one time in Alberta, Canada." Yes, that's true (I used the google, too), but one con man in Canada trying to cheat an insurance company does not translate into a worldwide threat. Besides, I'm pretty sure you can conjure up any kind of bizarre or aberrant behavior and use the internet to find at least one time when it happened somewhere in the world, and then turn that into an anti-gay talking point.

There are more than 6 billion people on earth and a lot of them are badly screwed up, but implying that any or all of them involve only gay and transgender people is bigotry of the highest order, and suggesting that such perversions were made possible because someone passed an ordinance granting human rights is too stupid to even merit a comment.

Finally, suggesting for one second that these behaviors will start to occur in Fairmont soon after the election is an unrealistic scare tactic at best and a blatant lie at worst. I don't really care that one guy in Canada tried to lie his way into cheap car insurance. Give me the names of insurance agencies in Fairmont where this has become a problem, and then we can talk.

3. Third, KFS says Fairmont doesn’t need a human rights ordinance to force its citizens to use “kindergarten manners” and be "nice and kind" to its fellow man. Really? Maybe the ad should have said “be nice and kind to our straight, white, Conservative Christian fellow man” because nothing in KFS’s literature or tactics or their internet comments suggests the organization is nice and kind to everyone or even that its members actually do have kindergarten manners.

4. And finally, the city is criticized for removing the words “public accommodations” from its new ordinance. Breaking news: KFS likes to call this ordinance a "bathroom bill" even though it never mentions public accommodations in any way. They want followers to think the ordinance will allow transgender men to legally enter women's restrooms and flash or fondle little girls.

This ignores the fact that no ordinance legalizes criminal behavior, and that with or without an ordinance, any man – including those who are not gay or transgender – could dress up like a woman and walk into a restroom anywhere and any time to commit an illegal act, and no handout or web site or newspaper ad from KFS is going to stop them if that’s what they’re determined to do. This is a straw man argument employed to frighten uninformed citizens and camouflage an over-arching anti-gay agenda that drives KFS and its backers.  

There is more, but you get the idea.

We’re going to vote in a couple of days and I hope that the people of Fairmont will vote in favor of the human rights ordinance and against the hatred and bigotry espoused by Keep Fairmont Safe, an organization that should change its name to Keep Fairmonters Segregated, because that’s what its followers truly believe. Everyone should go vote "yes" on the ordinance so that bigotry doesn't win. 

Swat those Bees! Sting those Bears!

Last night was the 98^th renewal of the annual football game between my alma mater, the Fairmont Senior High School Polar Bears of West Fairmont and the East Fairmont High School Bees. In a small town like Fairmont, this game is one of the highlights of the year, as it has been since the two schools started playing each other in 1921.

For a kid growing up here, the East-West football game was a really big deal. For about 40 years, the game was played on Veterans Day, November 11, at 1:00 in the afternoon. It didn’t matter if that date was a Monday, a Tuesday or a Friday. That’s when they played the game. (Sundays may have been an exception. I forget.) There was no school because of the holiday and people who had to work would take the day off to attend.  

The celebration started with the Veterans Day parade in the morning, say, around 10 a.m. or so. As I remember it, both schools would be well represented in the parade with their bands and floats and marchers and the like, making their way from Sixth Street Pharmacy through downtown Fairmont and across the Nickel Bridge to East Side where it dispersed on Merchant Street.

After the parade ended, we would walk a mile or so from downtown to 12^th Street where the East-West stadium is located and settle in for the game. My memory is a little fuzzy on the timing of this, but either before or after the game (or possibly both times) we diverted to the Poky Dot restaurant two blocks from the stadium to eat pizza and get jazzed up for the game.  

I participated in the parade twice. Once, as a freshman, I wore a beret and rode a bicycle as a member of the French Club. This was the year I discovered that the low level bridge across the Monongahela River did not have a solid floor. “Sacre bleu.” The bridge deck was a metal grid and you could see through it to the river below. I’m acrophobic and when I hit that bridge on a bicycle and looked down, I froze. I couldn’t move forward or backward. Fortunately, the sidewalk was made of solid material, so I was able to muster up enough courage to carry my bike over there and walk it the rest of the way across.

The second time, as a senior, I drove a friend’s Mustang convertible carrying the two East-West mascots sitting on the boot. In addition to the regular Polar Bear mascot, there was always someone dressed like an injured Bee with her arm in a sling, a crutch and bandages on her head. Chants of “Swat those Bees” from one side of the street were met with “Sting those Bears” from the other side as the parade made its way through town.

“East is least,” we shouted. “West is best.” We also had some crude cheers I’ll keep to myself and a mock alma mater that we’d rise and sing before the game. The trick was to get everyone from the other side to stand up with us, thinking it was the real thing…at least until we got to the part about the “old abandoned outhouse known as East Side High.” The song went downhill from there.

Other memories:

* On the negative side, my graduating class of 1967 was the first one in history to lose the East-West game all four years we were in school. I'm still mad about that. I believe the class of 1968 suffered the same fate the following year.

* On the plus side, there was always a big dance after the game called the “Bee-Bear Tear.” It was supposed to promote harmony between the schools, but I don’t remember it being all that harmonious. Our compensatory boast was, “We always lose the game but we always win the fight.” I was never in “the fight” – if it even took place – so I can’t speak to the veracity of that claim.

* The local newspaper would run story after story on game day with photos of the teams and the seniors and the cheerleaders and the bands and a roster for each team you could take with you to the stadium. It was the small town version of the Super Bowl and everybody who was anybody got involved.

Sadly, that all changed a few years ago when the state high school football calendar changed. Games start earlier now and the regular season ends before Veterans Day so the playoffs can start, which means the East-West game has to be played before then.

It’s too bad, too, because the East-West/Veterans Day celebration was one of the best things about living in this burg. When it ended, it made us all realize that nothing stays the same forever, and sometimes you just have to move on. I mean, the Poky Dot restaurant is still in business after all these years, but they don’t make that pizza any longer.

The newspaper isn't even printed here now. It's shipped down to Beckley, printed and sent back. That means there won't even be a story about the game until tomorrow, when most people will have ceased to care. Moving along. Next. Man. Up. And so it goes.

*     *     *          

For the record, Fairmont Senior leads the all-time series 63-28-7 and has won the past 11 contests in a row. Last night, we kicked their bumble bee asses to the tune of 64-7 (sweet!) and it could have been even worse if they hadn’t shortened the game and eventually let the clock run without any stoppages in the second half. I wish we had beaten them 164-7...or worse.

Also for the record, West Fairmont is now 10-0 and ranked first in the state heading into the Class AA playoffs while East Fairmont goes home with a record of 0-10. It doesn’t get any better than that, as far as I’m concerned. You see, when it comes to sports, I still think of East Siders as those bad guys who live on the wrong side of the river. "Swat those Bees. East is least."

And I guess I always will.

After all these years, I’m still trying to reason with racism, prejudice and bigotry

The older I get, the more I learn, but with all of that accrued knowledge, I still don’t fully understand racism, prejudice and bigotry.

I have seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears and I pretty much know where it happens (everywhere) and when it happens (all of the time) and to some extent I know why it happens (someone claims superiority over someone else), but the origins of it still escape me and probably always will. I don’t know who started it or what they intended to accomplish. I can’t identify the first racist or explain why he or she looked at another person, called him a derogatory name, took him into slavery and started beating him with whips.

If you know, please feel free to share.

This being the internet age, of course, you can google “the origins of racism” and read entry after entry until your eyes start to bleed. There are plenty of words written on the subject, but after reading all of them you still may not find the answer to why racism exists in your particular universe.

You will find terms like “ethnocentrism,” “tribalism” and “proto-racism” and stories about the Greeks and their slaves and a lot of other philosophical concepts that are beyond my meager ability to comprehend, but in the real world, in 2018 in the United States of America, I’m still not sure why some stupid backwoods white person with five omni-directional teeth, no job, a fourth grade education and zero critical thinking skills can look at someone like Barack Obama or Michael Bloomberg or any African American or Jew and think, “I’m better’n ’ey are.”

Or why someone goes to a supermarket and shoots two black people he doesn’t know just for the hell of it, or why a guy walks into a synagogue and murders 11 elderly Jews, most of whom were too old to even run away.

For the record, Wikipedia says racism stems from the idea that “humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different due to their social behavior and their innate capacities as well as the idea that they can be ranked as inferior or superior.” Historical examples of institutional racism include the Holocaust, the apartheid regime in South Africa and slavery in America, it says.

So yeah, I get all of that, but I can better relate to what I’ve seen for myself, up close and personal, such as these few examples from my own life:

* In the mid-1970s, when I was a reporter in Parkersburg, West Virginia, I went with two other reporters to investigate a complaint that a private club was refusing to admit African Americans. When we got there, two of us (the Anglo-looking white guys) were admitted without question but our other friend, a Jew whose last name ended in “-stein,” was refused.

* Another time in the 1970s, an African American friend of mine was denied entry into a Charleston, West Virginia, nightclub, but the five white people who were with him – including me – were told we were welcome to come on in. Instead, we all left together.

* Some years later, at my daughter’s wedding reception, a bartender refused to serve one of her guests – an African American man – telling me it was “against club policy” to even let him into the bar. When I told her I wasn’t going to pay for the reception, as I recall, my friend got his drink.

Full disclosure: Throughout my younger years, I lived in an all-white neighborhood, had all-white friends and went to mostly all-white schools. One of them, ironically, was even named White School. The only people of color I knew were one black student in one of my classes and the woman who cleaned our house. (I don't remember if I knew any Jews.) If that amounts to “white privilege,” then I guess I had my share.

It wasn’t until junior high when several of the city’s elementary schools were merged into one that I began to meet, socialize with and get to know a few people who were racially and ethnically different from myself. Later, when I was in college, I worked in a supermarket where the students hired as cashiers and bag boys were a diverse blend of men and women, whites and blacks and people of various ethnicities and maybe even sexual preferences. We all became good friends, and looking back, I realize the hiring practices of that particular store were way ahead of their time.

The point is, I’ve been fortunate enough to associate with people of varying stripes in schools and in my various jobs since I was roughly 12 years old. I say “fortunate” because once I got out of the all-white bubble, I learned that people are either good or bad or smart or dumb or friendly or cold or happy or sad because of who they are, without regard to the color of their skin or the church they choose to attend.

I suspect that the supermarket shooter and the synagogue murderer and all of the other racists and bigots and white supremacists have never spent five minutes actually talking to people who look different than they do to find out who they are or what they think or what they want out of their lives. If they had, they might have found out they weren’t so different after all. (Or maybe not.)

I have said frequently that the most dangerous racists are the ones who don’t know they’re racists or try to deny it, like the people who say “I have black friends” as though it excuses their racist behavior. On the other hand, show me a guy wearing a white sheet and hood and I may be repulsed by him, but at least I know that he knows what he is and he’s being up front about it, for whatever that is worth.

I see the white man who kills blacks or Jews because he hates them and I know what he is, too. The problem is, I still don’t know exactly why he is what he is or how he got to be that way…or what anyone can do to fix it, because chances are, he doesn’t know how he got that way either.

Maybe he just did.

Fool me four times, I deserve what I get

In the year 2000, most rational people considered George W. Bush to be too stupid to be president of the United States, yet the Democratic Party and others who opposed him were unable to muster the support needed to keep him out of the White House.

Bush hadn’t gotten any smarter by 2004, but he still managed to get himself re-elected to the job. I remember saying both times, “How bad do you have to be to lose to someone as supremely unqualified as George W. Bush? If you can’t beat him, who can you beat?”

Imagine our shock when those of us who thought Bush was the worst president in our lifetimes – and possibly forever – went to bed on November 8, 2016, and awoke to find that a make-believe real estate mogul, snake oil salesman and reality TV star with the knowledge of a cinder block and the attention span of a door knob had been elected president over a highly-educated former first lady, senator and secretary of state.

Fool me once, as the saying goes, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But fool me three times, well….

Unless he gets impeached, resigns or dies, Donald Trump is going to be president for at least two more years. We won’t get another shot at him until November 2020, but there is a mid-term election coming up in one week, and it presents a secondary opportunity to correct part of our past mistakes. We can do that by going to the polls and electing senators, congressmen and governors who will throw a leash around this narcissistic president who thinks he was elected “king” and would like to hang on to that title for life.

For roughly three years, Liberals and some Conservatives, Democrats and some Republicans and rational Independents have complained bitterly – and daily – about the policies, practices, partisanship and public persona of the country’s first Twitter president who once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, and has spent every day since then trying his best to prove it.

I saved a paragraph that I wrote some time ago and have used frequently to describe Donald Trump:

      

Donald J. Trump is a shallow, childish, vacuous, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist con man tax evading sexual predator who’s also a pathological liar with dangerous, Fascist-inspired ideas and a probable mental illness. He has admitted to sexual assault and at one time was facing court proceedings related to alleged rape, fraud and bribery.

In light of more recent events, I’d like to add the following:

Since early in his campaign, Trump has incited his followers to violence more times than I care to write about today, but now he has refused to back down an inch, even after one of his followers mailed pipe bombs to a long list of prominent Democrats and an anti-Semite upset over a migrant caravan that Trump rails against walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa., and murdered 11 elderly Jews. Trump’s answer to this new wave of violence is to blame the news media for not being nicer to him while he rolls along on his pre-election “caravans and Kavanaugh” campaign.

     

Even though he’s not on the ballot this year, Trump has been crisscrossing America for weeks, projecting his administration’s failures, fantasies and flaws onto Democrats, the news media and any other political opponent who happens to be downwind, while also telling his angry rally mobs that a vote for any Republican “is a vote for me,” so in effect this election is a referendum on him.

Meanwhile, the rest of us keep telling ourselves that a “blue wave” is coming to wash these bigots and racists and spineless demagogues out of office and restore order to America. We keep telling ourselves that we own the moral high ground and that America “is better than this,” but none of that matters if we can’t come together in one week and meet at the ballot box.

    

If we can’t do that, we’ll be waking up one more time on November 7 and asking ourselves, “If you can’t defeat the disciples of Donald Trump, who the hell can you beat?”

And I’ll hear myself saying, “If you fool us four times, we're getting what we deserve.”

The Russians are reading! The Russians are reading!

The dashboard for my blog the shieldWALL includes a feature that allows me to track my audience using a variety of statistics such as type of browser, operating system and the home country of my readers.

For you non-bloggers, the “dashboard” is like home base where I go to post new entries; edit my content; change the layout, theme, style or appearance; read any comments my readers leave; check my earnings (if I had any, which I don’t); and view my audience by the day, week, month, year or all-time.

As of this morning, the shieldWALL has been viewed more than 16,000 times since I started it in 2016. This is only a partial count, because the dashboard shows only the top 10 countries where people are reading what I write. Here’s what’s interesting about my audience:

* As you might expect, the largest number of readers – 14,001 – are in the United States.

* In second place, remarkably, is Russia, with 917 page views, followed by Ukraine with 305.

At first I was taken aback by the fact that so many Russians and Ukranians are reading my political essays and other social and environmental commentary, but then I started to think about it and it makes perfect sense to me.

First off, these statistics do not show that 917 individual Russians wake up every morning and eagerly run to their devices to find out what former journalist Scott Shields has to say about the U.S. government, Fairmont City Council, the state of West Virginia or even the Major League All-Star Game or how much my dog likes Christmas.

What it does suggest to me is that someone – maybe one person or five people or a whole room full of Russian hackers, bot-creators and Putin-endorsed trolls – have software programs that send them a notification every time any American posts the name “Donald Trump” on Facebook or in an internet blog. I can’t prove this, but I’d bet a proper sum of money that it’s true.

If I’m right, this is scary stuff. I mean, if the Russians are diving deep enough into the American political swamp to get all the way down to me – a lowly part-time blogger in tiny Fairmont, West Virginia – just imagine the volume of information they must be collecting from every American with a political agenda and a Facebook account.

We know the Russians hacked into the 2016 election and are doing it again for the mid-terms, and we know they are creating bogus “people” with actual accounts so they can plant bogus comments on Facebook, Twitter and probably every other social media platform where they can distort reality, cause anger and hatred among various groups of people and chip away at our democracy by sowing the seeds of discontent.

And now I know if they are reading what I write, it must be so much easier for them than any of us imagined. I’m sure they aren’t just reading my blog but also every comment I make – and everyone else makes – in any public Facebook forum. I almost always make my Timeline comments “public” on the off chance that some Trumpaloon will read them, see the wisdom of my logic and come to his or her senses, but deep down I know that will never happen, so I think I’ll stop doing that today, switch to “friends only” and see what effect that has on my Russian readership statistics going forward.

In the meantime, I want to add that Donald Trump has been prone to give the Russians a pass on their election interference while also blaming the Chinese and Koreans and some 400-pound man in his mother’s basement. For the record, neither China nor Korea made the Top 10 list of shieldWALL readers, and if there’s a 400-pound hacker out there, odds are he’s in one of these 10 places:

United States, 14,001

Russia, 917

Ukraine, 305

Germany, 257

France, 147

Poland, 143

Unknown Region, 140

Portugal, 139

United Kingdom, 112

Canada, 110.

That’s my complete audience list as it appears on the dashboard. Most of it is no real surprise, but I never knew I was so popular in Portugal. Now that I do, let me close this essay by saying, “Hello, Lisbon. Thanks for reading. Gotta say I love your water dogs, but your Man of War…not so much. Say hi to Spain for me.”

Over and out.

Oh Democrat, where art thou?

I watch a fair amount of television news, mostly on the 24-hour cable channels including MSNBC and CNN. I try to watch a little Fox News now and then to establish some sense of political equilibrium, but honestly, looking at and listening to people like Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham tends to make me physically ill.

I mean, it really does.

What I’ve noticed over the past couple of years is a movement – seemingly growing stronger every day – of loud, clear voices who are outraged by the antics of Donald John Trump and the Republican sycophants who support, endorse, enable and empower him in his systematic destruction of everything good about America.

These are voices who coherently call on the American people to rise up against the authoritarian Trump regime and refuse to accept his version of America as the “new normal” – or any kind of normal, for that matter. What’s surprising about these anti-Trump voices is who they belong to.

Here’s a partial list off the top of my head:

* Nicolle Wallace, former press secretary to Florida Governor Jeb Bush, White House Communications Director for George W. Bush and senior advisor for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.

* Steve Schmidt, former strategist who worked on the political campaigns of President George W. Bush, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator McCain.

* Joe Scarborough, a lawyer and politician who served in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001 from Florida’s 1st congressional district.

* David Jolly, attorney, lobbyist and former representative from Florida's 13th congressional district.

* Elise Jordan, who has worked as a columnist for Time magazine and The Daily Beast and was former communications director for the National Security Council and a speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

* Bill Kristol, neoconservative political analyst and founder of the political magazine The Weekly Standard.

* Jennifer Reuben, op-ed writer and “Right Turn” blogger for The Washington Post.

* Bret Stephens, opinion writer for The New York Times and former foreign affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

* And Michael Steele, one-time Lieutenant Governor of Maryland and former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

What do all of these people have in common? They all are – or were until recently – Republicans.

Now I’m not suggesting that there aren’t Democrats (or Independents) in print and broadcast news who aren’t equally appalled and disgusted by Trump’s two-year reign of terror against the moral and ethical values of America, because there are. But when I listen to them these days, I’m getting a confusingly consistent, repetitive message that combines “go low/go high” with a mixture of “Trump bad/Democrats good,” “here comes the blue wave” and “we have to be better than this.”

The aforementioned Republicans, on the other hand, because they are or once were Republicans, have developed a network of solid contacts within the party who are much better at peeking behind the curtain to tell us what the Wizard of Ooze is really up to. Nicolle Wallace, for example, and the guests she invites to her show have the best sources and ask the right questions to get the information that I want to hear.

These one-time GOP operatives know what the Republican Party is supposed to be, so they excel at seeing through the fog of Trump and reading beyond the tweets, the rants, the rallies and the rage of the current administration for the inside story on where we’re going, where we’ve been and what we need to do to keep from staggering any further down the Orange Brick Road.

It makes me ponder two things:

(1) Why there isn’t anybody among the 240 Republicans in the House of Representatives or the 52 Republicans in the Senate who can see what’s happening with the same clear vision of these Republican analysts and commentators…and has the stones to do something about it? The answer to that, I believe, is they are all afraid of the tweeter-in-chief and consider getting re-elected to be more important than actually trying to govern the country.

(2) If we woke up tomorrow morning and Donald Trump was no longer the president, would we still think Wallace, Schmidt, Kristol, Scarborough and the others were the good guys we have come to respect for putting country ahead of party, or would they retreat back into Republicanism and become the same people who promoted the likes of Mitt Romney, John McCain, Sarah Palin and much of the Bush family as potential leaders of the free world?

For that one, I don’t have the answer. At least, I don't have it yet.

I rest my case on ‘psychological projection’

Yesterday I wrote a long Facebook post explaining the phenomenon of “psychological projection,” in which a person’s ego defends itself against its own character flaws by first denying they exist and then attributing them to other people. Frequently, this involves shifting the blame for your own mistakes or shortcomings to someone you want to mock, degrade, disparage, diminish, denigrate, ridicule or defame.

Today, ironically, I read the following words in the Morgantown Dominion Post. See if you can guess who the author is writing about:

“(He) is firing up (his party) before the midterms with his signature rallying cries: I, I, I, I! Me, me, me! My, my, my!

“According to a tally by The American Mirror’s Kyle Olson, (his) campaign speech Monday for (a Congressional candidate) referred to himself 92 times in 38 minutes — or an average self-allusion every 24.7 seconds.

“When he wasn’t 'I'-ing, the former narcissist-in-chief was lying.”

Oh, wait…I guess that last paragraph kind of gave it away when the writer called her subject our “former” narcissist-in-chief.

Yes, that’s right, boys and girls. Believe it or not, Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin – who I once believed to be the Anti-Christ – was referring not to faux-president Donald J. Trump, the most deplorable narcissistic liar ever to occupy the Oval Office, but to former president Barack Obama. She projected onto Obama those exact Trumpian traits, calling him a liar and a self-consumed narcissist, among other things…and that was all in the first three paragraphs of her column.

God only knows what the rest of the story said. I had to stop reading so I could alternate between laughing, crying, shouting at my computer monitor, shaking my head and finally composing myself long enough to write this shieldWALL essay. Halfway through, I stopped writing to look up “psychological projection” again in the dictionary and what do you know? This time, I found Michelle Malkin’s photo there.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have never liked Michelle Malkin. I was watching her smirk and sneer and spew snarky slander about Democrats and Liberals long before her man Donald Trump oozed down the golden escalator to run for president. [CHALLENGE: Try to say "spew snarky slander" three times fast.]

I’ve always believed she was evil, nasty, chronically mean-spirited and under the egomaniacal delusion that she was the smartest person in the room. By that I mean any room and every room. I'm talking about any room in any time and any place. Narcissism? Seriously? Michelle Malkin ought to know it when she sees it, because it stares back at her every time she looks into a mirror.

Having said all that, I have also come to the conclusion that the air inside Malkin's bubble must be getting pretty thin, preventing the synapses in her brain from firing properly. Either that, or all of her computers, hand-held electronic devices, radios and television sets are broken and she’s been cut off from the daily news for weeks, because while she was writing a column that called Barack Obama a lying narcissist, Donald Trump was flying around to every red state in the country saying things like this:

“A vote for Patrick Morrisey is a vote for me.”

“A vote for Dean Heller is a vote for me.”

“A vote for Ted Cruz is a vote for me.”

“A vote for [insert any Republican name here] is a vote for me.”

Or, as Malkin likes to put it, "I, I, I, me, me, me, my, my, my." If I didn’t know better, I’d swear the lying narcissist with the “me” complex was none other than Trump himself.

According to Everyday Health, the theory of psychological projection was developed by Sigmund Freud, who noticed that his patients would occasionally accuse others of having the same feelings they themselves were demonstrating. (Click here to read more about the condition.) The classic example of Freudian projection is a woman who has been unfaithful to her husband and accuses her husband of cheating on her. 

* Or, as I noted in my Facebook post, someone who represents a political party that wants to deny health care coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and blames it on the other political party.

* Or encourages his followers to form an angry mob by telling them the other side is an angry mob.

* Or denies that he is the enemy of the people by calling the news media the enemy of the people.

* Or denies conspiring with a foreign government to rig an election while accusing his opponent of conspiring with a foreign government to rig an election.

* Or promises people he will never lie to them while telling an average of 5 or 6 lies every day of his life.

It also applies to a narcissistic liar who ignores the fact that Donald Trump is a narcissistic liar and writes a newspaper column calling Barack Obama a narcissistic liar. As I frequently say, some things are difficult to explain.

What’s the Republican Party afraid of? Could it possibly be the truth?

The Republican Party in West Virginia – and those who are supporting it – apparently have developed a statewide strategy for grabbing and keeping power during this mid-term election cycle built around three simple words: “I support Trump.”

While their Democratic opponents are actively campaigning out in the open where everyone can see and hear them, the Republicans for Congressional office have so far been willing to stay in Trump's shadow while their political action committees and out-of-state backers run hours of negative advertising on their behalf.

It reminds me of another set of three words made famous in an old Three Stooges skit. Those three words are “duck,” “dodge” and “hide.”

Consider this:

* Election Day is less than two weeks away and all three Republicans running for the House of Representatives have refused to debate their Democratic opponents, and no debates are scheduled. Their excuses for refusing to debate would almost be humorous if they weren’t so pathetic.

“Honestly, when you look at every issue between her and I, she kinda takes the liberal Democrat position and I'm a conservative Republican,” said incumbent Alex Mooney about his 2nd District challenger, Talley Sergent. “It's like Hillary Clinton's views versus Donald Trump's. I think that voters are pretty clear on the differences between us.”

For her part, Sergent thinks Mooney “needs to man up and talk to the people of West Virginia instead of continuing to phone it in.... You have politicians that are so entrenched in the partisan divide that they refuse to hold open conversations.”

In the 1st District, Democrat Kendra Fershee says she wants to debate her opponent, incumbent Rep. David McKinley, but the seated Republican has also refused. He claimed that “no credible third party had offered to host a debate,” even though MetroNews offered to do just that.

“It's truly a shame we've come to a time in West Virginia that our elected officials hide from their constituents and expect to just waltz into a seat as if they own it,” Fershee said. “I suspect the voters will have something to say about his total lack of regard for them on Election Day.”

Maybe yes, Kendra, and sadly, maybe no.

* On the Senate side, a debate between incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin and his Republican challenger, Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, was canceled when Morrisey refused to confirm his participation. The debate sponsored by several media outlets was supposed to take place on October 14 in Wheeling, and sponsors sent an invitation to the Morrisey campaign on August 16 – nearly two months in advance of the debate – but he never said he would attend.

“Obviously we’re disappointed that Patrick Morrisey didn’t accept the request to meet with the top journalists in West Virginia to debate issues…of importance to West Virginians,” Andy Kniceley, publisher of NCWV Media, said at the time.

*     *     *

In the same vein and closer to home, a story appeared in today’s local newspaper concerning an ordinance passed by Fairmont City Council last year establishing a Human Rights Commission for the city. After passage of the ordinance, an out-of-town organization that opposes equal rights for gay and transgender individuals petitioned to have the issue placed on the November election ballot.

Not coincidentally, this organization known as “Keep Fairmont Safe” also supports and endorses Republican and conservative candidates and causes.  

So when the newspaper attempted to present an objective story about the upcoming vote, Keep Fairmont Safe declined to provide a spokesperson to represent its views, even after an advocate in favor of the ordinance had provided the newspaper with contact information for members of the opposition group. Instead, the organization supplied the reporter with dubious internet memes and statements of propaganda from its Facebook page, which, by the way, blocks comments from anyone who disagrees with its position.

So to recap, while the Republicans and their minions play “duck and cover,” Democratic candidates and pro-human rights advocates continue to open their campaigns for media interviews, platform statements, social media commentary and position papers which are frequently twisted into false or misleading negative advertising by the very opponents who refuse to debate them face-to-face.

When the good guys go high, you might say, the bad guys go lower and lower…and then they duck, dodge and hide.

It makes me wonder what secrets they’re concealing and why they’re afraid to come out from behind their rocks. Could it be they’re afraid of the truth? Or do they just believe that “I support Trump” is enough to get them elected and nothing else is required?

I’d like to believe that the refusal by Republicans to stand on a debate stage and tell us who they are, what they want and what they believe would make a difference to the voters in West Virginia, but unfortunately, it probably won’t. Not in a country where the president of the United States refuses to be interviewed by a special counsel investigating his alleged crimes because his lawyers know he can’t tell the truth.

That same president – afraid of losing control of Congress – is spending the month of October flying from one campaign rally to the next and telling some of the most outrageous lies that ever fell out of a sitting president’s mouth. When this is the tone set by the leader of the party, why should we expect anything better from the underlings who kneel and kiss his ring?

It makes me want to stand up and scream

Six candidates are running for three seats in the West Virginia House of Delegates – three Democrats, two Republicans and one with “no party affiliation.” The following are excerpts from their comments at a candidate forum held in Fairmont last night. See if you can spot the Republicans:

Candidate 1: “If you care about working folks and you care about unions, (the other party) weakened unions by passing Right to Work in the state of West Virginia. If you have someone that earns their living in the construction industry, they have repealed a prevailing wage…to lower the standard of living for those families. I work for you. I will never ever forget where I came from, and you will always be my boss.”

Candidate 2: “I’m a veteran of the United States Army. I gave an oath to my country and…I also gave an oath as a public servant to protect the state constitution and the United States Constitution. That’s our responsibility. We have a lot of health issues. We have women and children’s health issues. We have a health care crisis in the state along with the opioid crisis. We’re setting up plans” to deal with them.

Candidate 3:  “I was taught at a very young age about public service. I was taught that you help people…and nothing could be more rewarding. I walked into the Soup Opera to deliver some supplies and it was around lunchtime, and I was expecting to see four or five or six people. The room was packed. There were families, children, seniors, and it was heartbreaking because for most of those people that was going to be the only meal of the day.”

Candidate 4: “I want to represent all West Virginians; Democrats, Republicans, independents – I’m not running against any of these guys…. I also believe that partisan political gridlock is out of control and a majority of people I talk to are kind of fed up with that. In order to fix this state, we’ve got to have services to do it. We can’t expect people to stay in this state, taxpayers to move into this state, unless we can provide them services.”

Candidate 5: “I’m the only candidate in the race to be endorsed by the National Rifle Association. I’ve been endorsed by the West Virginians for Life (and) the West Virginia Coal Association. I also support the policies of President Donald Trump, which have made a big difference in our nation, especially here in West Virginia.”

Candidate 6: “I’m pro-God, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-coal, pro-jobs, and I was a Trump Delegate to the national convention. Unlike the people that I’m running against, I didn’t vote against coal in 2009. I didn’t vote against voter ID, I didn’t vote against mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients. I never suggested that our state needed gun control, I never failed to support your Second Amendment rights, and I’ve never ever supported dismemberment abortion.”       

If you guessed that Candidates 5 and 6 are Republicans, congratulations. You are definitely not a low-information voter and you apparently know how to read. You also have noticed, like I have, that Republicans can’t compose a sentence these days without the word “Trump” in it somewhere. I was waiting for one or both of them to say, “A vote for me is a vote for Trump.” Neither one did, but that message came through loud and clear.

While the Democrats and even the Independent were talking – without notes, by the way – about real people and real problems, both Republican candidates were reading from sheets of paper and tossing out lots of numbers and questionable statistics of unknown origin that I can’t verify and won’t repeat here. Let’s just say they were using these numbers to try and take credit for every good thing that ever happened in West Virginia while claiming that the Democrats controlled the state for 84 years and basically did nothing good during that time.

So my takeaway from this event is clear: the Democrats (and the independent) recognize and can identify the issues facing West Virginians – income inequality, health care, poverty, drug addiction, women’s rights, lack of opportunity, the need for economic diversification and the mass exodus of citizens who have given up and moved elsewhere -- and they want to do something about them. Collectively, they spoke about public service for the public good.

The Republicans, on the other hand, like to read numbers out loud and believe that because some businesses are making money again and revenue estimates from our Republi-cratic governor have been manipulated upward, as governors are wont to do in an election year, West Virginia is suddenly doing well under Donald Trump and the GOP. Every time a Republican opened his mouth last night, an economic talking point spilled out.

Every time I attend one of these events, I get to a point where I just want to stand up and scream. I want to shout, “How dare you! How dare you stand before me and extol the virtues of a man who has no virtue. How dare you idolize the most vile, despicable, deplorable sub-human being who ever crossed the threshold of the White House.

“How dare you adopt the president’s penchant for lying out in public. How dare you come to a public forum and take credit for giving school teachers a raise when last spring you told them there was no money, and then tried to have them kicked out of the State Capitol when they went to Charleston to protest.

“How dare you throw Trumpian word salads at intelligent people who are doing their best to survive in a state where the major industry is in decline, and how dare you continue to lie to them and tell them that coal is coming back and everything is going to be okay. How dare you come here and insult my intelligence, my morals and my sense of right and wrong.”

At one point Republican Candidate #5 was rambling on about something no one could understand, so I turned to the woman on my right and asked her, “What the hell is he talking about? Do you understand any of this?” She said she didn’t. Neither did the man on my left. It was argle bargle of the highest order, or as the woman beside me said, “Wah-wah-wah.”

When it was time for closing comments, I had had enough. Closing comments started sounding a whole lot like opening comments, and hearing them once was all I could take without hurling up my lunch, so I put on my jacket and started to get up out of my chair when I heard one of the Republicans telling us how good everything is now that they have control of the entire state.

I said, out loud, “Oh, yeah, everything’s great,” and the people sitting beside me were all laughing as I walked out through the door.

Hey, Democrats…who are you and want do you want to be?

When I registered to vote in 1968, in West Virginia, you had to pick a party if you wanted to vote in primary elections. I registered with the Democrats because they offered more choices than Republicans. As near as I can remember, that was the only reason. It wasn’t a philosophical choice at the time because at age 18, I had no political philosophy to speak of.

The voter registration differential back then was at least 2-1 Democratic and as a result, Republicans didn’t even offer candidates for a lot of state and local offices. I mean, why should a Republican spend the money to run for office in a state where he couldn’t win, and why should I want to vote on a ballot with blank spaces where candidates ought to be?

We didn’t have red and blue states in 1968, but if we had, none would have been bluer than West Virginia.

It was my first election since becoming eligible and I probably voted for Democrat Jim Sprouse in the primary governor’s race, but I’m pretty sure I voted for Republican Arch Moore in the general. My parents thought Arch Moore walked on water, and I was just a stupid kid who didn’t know politics from shinola. (I can’t remember voting for any other Republican in any other general election.)

Anyhow, I remained a Democrat until two things happened: (1) I started working as a journalist, sometimes covering political news, and I thought that party affiliation could give the appearance of bias on my part, and (2) the law was changed to allow Independents to vote in primaries. So I became an Independent.

(Where is this going, you ask? Trust me, I’m getting there. Just hang on a minute.)

Somewhere along the line, after leaving the news business, I became a Democrat again for what must have seemed like a good reason at the time, but that all changed in 2008-2009, when Barack Obama was elected president and took office with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. I wasn’t satisfied with the leadership of Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate and I didn’t think the party was taking full advantage of its opportunity to make real progress during Obama’s first two years.

For example, we wanted universal health care but got the B-side Affordable Care Act instead. We wanted same-sex marriage but only got benefits for domestic partners. We wanted a coherent energy policy that would also address climate change, but couldn’t get it through. I felt the Democrats could do better, but more than that, I felt they didn’t know who they were or what they wanted to be. The result was a middle-of-the-road approach that really didn’t make anybody happy. We asked for peanut butter and jelly on wheat but settled for jelly on white...and pretended that was what we had wanted all along.

I decided then I could no longer identify with the Democratic Party or its lack of focus on a winnable agenda, so I became an Independent again. Yes, I'm a liberal Independent, to be sure, and I still don't vote for Republicans, but I'm an Independent all the same.

Fast forward a decade. It’s now 2018 and I still don’t know what the Democratic Party wants.  (I told you I’d get here.) We’re less than three weeks away from the most important election in my lifetime and I can’t tell you the Democrats’ message. Other than “we’re not Trump” and “women are pissed,” I don’t know what they want me to support. I don’t even know who the leaders are or who is really in charge.

In the last two weeks alone, the party’s most recent presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has defended her husband’s sexual promiscuity and claimed it did not constitute an abuse of power, and Elizabeth Warren, one of the most outspoken members of the Senate, decided to soft launch her presidential campaign for 2020 by getting down in the mud and rolling around with Donald J. Trump, the all-time champion mud roller among presidents of the United States, about her dubious claim to Native American heritage. Real Native Americans were not amused.

It's almost like #MeToo has become #ExceptForMeAndHer.

That they’re doing this is bad enough, but they’re doing it at a time when Democrats are counting on women voters to parlay outrage over Trump’s misogyny to cast Republicans out of office and sweep them into Congress atop a supposed blue wave. Having two prominent Democratic women say such stupid things at this critical time in the election cycle is not helpful to the party. I wish they would both go away until at least next year, and maybe longer than that.

On top of that, if someone came to my door this morning and asked me to describe the Democrats’ message, I don’t know what I’d say. I mean, which message do you want? The Bernie Sanders message? The Elizabeth Warren message? The Cory Booker and Kamala Harris message? Chuck Shumer’s? Nancy Pelosi’s? That young Kennedy? Or old Joe Biden? Listening to Democrats is like hearing the dissonant sound an orchestra makes when it’s tuning up. Just call me when the concert is ready to start.

In the meantime, Trump is more than happy to share his version of the Democratic platform, calling them traitors and an angry mob bent on stealing your money, inviting terrorists into the country, threatening your national security, killing puppies and kittens and starting World War III. The fact that he’s lying through his teeth to the gullible low-information crowd who attends his pep rallies is irrelevant when this is the only messaging that people hear.

I realize that in House races and even the Senate to some extent, the message differs from location to location. Conor Lamb, who won a House seat in a red Pennsylvania district, and Doug Jones, who beat Roy Moore in Alabama, are both more conservative than I am by far, but they appealed to the voters in their districts and states and got themselves elected. I hope that continues through November 6 and beyond.

Still, as a friend of mine said, Democrats need a platform to stand on that doesn’t start with “Trump bad” and end with “not Trump good.” It’s going to take more than that to win back our country from a party that cares about money and the consolidation of power and doesn’t give a flying fig for the normal people they are supposed to represent. I hope they find one soon.

Meanwhile, don’t even get me started on probable 2020 presidential candidates because it’s way too soon for that. (I’m looking at you, Elizabeth Warren.) I’ll just say one thing now and leave it at this: Please nominate someone who won’t be an octogenarian before the end of their second term. You need to do better than that.