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?