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?

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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.

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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.

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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.