A threat of war with Venezuela huh? Know where that came from? From cable TV reports today (Aug. 11) about Venezuelan dictator Maduro addressing Trump.

Really, all the commentary, all the media examination, all the politicians parsing answers avoids the obvious doesn’t it?

People with the megaphone of media access have to start saying out loud what they know is by now clear to most sensible people.

The president of the United States is a seriously disturbed man. Will, in the end, this result in his removal from the office? There is of course impeachment for what the Constitution calls “high crimes and misdemeanors”, which would appear for the moment to be in the hands of the special prosecutor. Then, there is the 25th Amendment.

Supposedly on vacation Trump spends his days drawing the world’s attention to himself because he cannot live without it. How is he doing this on his “vacation” out there in Bedminister in one of his agoraphobic castles or on his agoraphobia pathways moving between them? By saying a lot of really stupid things, by demonstrating ignorance of the most fundamental facts of history, foreign affairs and domestic governance, by boasting, bragging, lying as ever and always, and for a clincher implicitly threatening nuclear war.

There’s no duck and cover from crazy.

Fact is, according to a little research the U.S. has 6,800 nuclear warheads of which 1,800 are said to be actively deployed.

A president does not talk like this, does not refer explicitly or implicitly to our nation’s arsenal of destruction except to assure us of its stability and protection and responsibly examine ways with Russia for bilateral reductions (they have 7,000). Never can a president suggest nuclear weapons use. Never, not once — much less three days running.

It’s hardly amusing even from this source, it’s beyond stupid, beyond out of bounds. It is  crazy — and everyone in Washington knows it: All of them, no matter their own politics know this. Even some of his hatted haters must know it.

We are supposed to know, indeed everything we know about the traditions of our military leadership tell us the answer — that if ordered to do so by the president they would carry out a nuclear use order. But can anyone really known what the Joint Chiefs of Staff would say or do if  he actually orders the use of one or more of those 1,800 available nuclear warheads in the present circumstance?

Would they actually carry out such an order? Or would they report the fact of the order to the vice president and the leadership of the House and Senate, triggering  that constitutional crisis so many have warned we may be heading for?

If they so acted, it would become the kind of constitutional crisis for which the 25th Amendment provides an exit presently guarded by Utah Senator and President Pro Tempore of the Senate Orin Hatch and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (see text below).

Still, any remote chance it would trigger much less succeed would require agreement by at least one quarter of the Republicans in Congress. Chances of that? Mainly though it would be in the hands of Senate Majority Leader McConnell.

Well, what does the 25th Amendments say, what are its instructions to remove, temporarily or permanently, a deranged president. The 25th Amendment has four sections of which, as the lawyers say, the pertinent part is Section 4. Here it is — a thick forest of the unknown except that in the present moment at the end of its use, it could put Pence in the presidency.

“Section 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

Section 2. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Section 3. Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”

Actually, it’s not time to make America great again. It’s time to remake America.

There are three principal Hudson River crossings connecting New York City to New Jersey and the nation. They are of course the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. They were all built before 1940. Similarly the rail tunnels that connect New York to New Jersey and the rest of the nation west and south of the city opened nearly 110 years ago. Replacing them has been called the most important U.S. infrastructure need. Continue reading “Remake America”

Yes, we are back to basics. In fact we are about to get down to the most basic of all basics, paying for what we’ve already bought.

I know, I haven’t been here for a while. But, as I am sitting here recovering/healing from a fractured knee it seemed to me a way to fill some time (thanks for all the well wishes I know you are thinking and some will send): And then  it seemed to me there is a subject that needs to be revisited because if you thought the several failed votes to deform health care were a circus and a nightmare, not to mention a defilement of basic decency, then wait because there is worse to come with one difference.

The difference is this: The worse to come has a deadline, an inescapable deadline.

So, here we are in early August and if you recall back in the Spring I did a couple of pieces about that pesky thing called the debt ceiling coming around again. Well it took a little longer than I thought it would or estimated perhaps though not by much and here it is, just upon us. Continue reading “Back to Basics”

Struck tonight, June 7, 2017, by this thought: That the three most memorable things I have heard in federal proceedings in my life, literally heard — and known on hearing them that they represented  historic watershed moments — that those three most memorable things are now these:

Attorney Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy in 1954 (yes, I was a kid but I was watching that afternoon, live because oh for sure it mattered in the home I grew up in): “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Sen. Howard Baker in 1974: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

Sen. Angus King 2017: “What you feel isn’t relevant, admiral. What you feel is not the answer. The answer is, why are you not answering the questions? Is it an invocation of executive privilege. If there is, let’s hear about it. If there isn’t, answer the questions.”

There were until now two American legislative proceedings moments in sound.

The first pretty much stripped any shred of legitimacy from McCarthy, unmasked him as a brutal fraud  (and we know now a dependent drunk) and began the end of his rampant tyranny (but not the end of that of his chief henchman, Roy Cohn,  a virus in the body politic who schooled a young Donald Trump in the art of demagoguery.)

The second signaled the beginning of the end for Richard M. Nixon and, sure enough, a year later he became the first and — so far — only occupant of the American presidency to resign that august office in disgrace.

From today there are three defining American federal proceedings moments. We know where the first two took us and their impact in and on our nation’s history.

We will see where the third takes the nation and how it is remembered in and by history.

But there’s a fair chance that “What you feel, Admiral, isn’t relevant…” will take its place  as a defining moment.

 

For the Republican Party – being a woman is a pre-existing condition.

‘Nough said.

If you remember the film “Lawrence of Arabia” then you remember the cataclysmic scene in Damascus in which feuding Arab tribes squabble over who had responsibility for what as they attempted to take control of the city and lands taken form the Ottoman Turks in their joint campaign with the British.

This is an imaginative depiction of what actually occurred when the Hussein family of the Hashemite clan attempted to create a monarchy in Syria, placing Prince Faisal on the throne. The French did not appreciate this and ejected the prince from his purported kingdom.

In fact, the British, came up with another role for the dethroned king in meetings with him in London presided over by the new British Colonial Secretary, none other than Winston Churchill. Yes, Churchill was back for another of his many second acts, his place in politics and government reclaimed from the disastrous defeat at Gallipoli, a military catastrophe history  deservedly places at Churchill’s feet.

With T.E. Lawrence – “Lawrence of Arabia” – one of his key advisors, Churchill moved forward with a plan to make a new Kingdom of Iraq and to crown Faisal its first monarch.

There were minor details to overcome, like a revolt in the territory now incorporated in Iraq, the expense of tens of millions of pounds to suppress it, several hundred dead British soldiers and thousands of dead Iraqis. Does any of this sound familiar?

But, all of that aside, Churchill efficiently next gathered around him in Cairo a group familiar with the entire mess in the Middle East — the mess of competing colonial and native interests, the emerging problem of Zionist claims and ambitions in what were then called Palestine and Transjordan, tribal rivalries, nascent kingly ambitions and ancient and historic grievances.

Among those summoned to join Churchill, Lawrence and the others came only one woman, Gertrude Bell.

Miss Bell, as noted in a first part of this brief exposition, was born in 1868 so that by the time of the Cairo Conference she was 53 years old, a graduate of Oxford University at a time when few women attended. She had traveled for decades throughout the Middle East, first in Persia and then over and over again through Arab lands including Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine. She spoke at least six languages besides English, including Turkish and Arabic. She became an archaeologist, wrote and contributed to books about Syria and antiquity.

Then came WWI. In 1915, she was called to Cairo to become part of a new British agency, the Arab Bureau, where she renewed acquaintance with Lawrence. Her assignments led to her being sent, essentially as England’s plenipotentiary there, to Basra in what is now southern Iraq and contributed mightily to the British taking Baghdad from the Turks early in 1917. Think of her as having had a job akin to that of American Paul Bremer 90 years later, except she brought encyclopedic knowledge about the place and spoke the language.

Essentially, Gertrude Bell employed her knowledge of the region and particularly of Mesopotamia to draw — literally – to draw boundaries around what then became the new nation of Iraq. In doing so she combined in this pretend new country  Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south. Bell and the British knew the risks in putting this combination under one flag, but believed it could be managed from a center commanded by a king with their support.

The Cairo conference confirmed Faisal as King and Bell spend most of the next four years in Iraq as a sort of British overlord/viceroy. She returned to England in 1925 and died in 1926, whether by accident or design, of too many sleeping pills, nine years before Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash.

In 1933, King Faisal I of Iraq died. His son Ghazi reigned to 1939 when he died in the crash of a sports car he was driving and was in turn succeeded by his 3-year-old son Faisal II, who assumed the powers and duties of monarch in 1953 when he ended the regency of an uncle

In 1958 the Iraqi Army overthrew the monarchy. Faisal II, with his entire family, was machine gunned to death. Afterward his body was put on public display, hung from a lamppost, a scene some will recall repeated nearly 50 years later in Fallujah during the American occupation of Iraq.

Suffice it to say that after the Army mutiny by 1968, out of a stew of intrigue, shifting allegiances and power alignments, one man emerged in control of all of Iraq and all levers of power in the country — Saddam Hussein, who notwithstanding the name was no relation to the former royal family.

We know the rest: How we blundered out way into Iraq in 2002/2003, how we discovered that if you invade another country you own it and that if you own it you have to figure out what to do with it.

We also learned something the British could have told us and that their then prime minister, Tony Blair, leading cheerleader for President George W. Bush’s apparently uninformed campaign to invade Iraq, could have told his American friends.

Blair after all only had to know his own country’s role in creating the modern Middle East to have known enough to warn the United States never to send an army there.

Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush were some pair.

Tony Blair should have known what George W. Bush did not. He should have known that the Middle East is a tar pit — that once you become stuck in it no matter how you try to pull yourself out you are pulled in deeper to get stuck again and again and again – all the while making enemies of people about whose past, histories, hatreds, feuds and virulent relationships you know hardly anything or possibly even nothing.

Joe Biden traveled back and forth to Iraq for eight years as President Obama’s special messenger as they attempted to reduce and extricate the United States from the mess we had made of Iraq.

They mostly succeeded though fools scoffed at the vice president when he said the best solution might be to separate Iraq into three nations, a Kurdish one in the north, a Sunni one in the center and a Shiite one in the south. That is effectively what has happened and probably should have happened in 1920.

But then to create an actual Kurdish Republic would be to invite war with Turkey and make a mess of our already fraught relationship with that country, which is now caught up in its own cathartic remaking from the secular democracy bequeathed by its modern founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, into a theocratic autocracy. That would be another battle with low percentages for success, because there is no length that Turkey will not go to, to stop a Kurdish nation from forming.

Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence have now each been dead nearly a century yet the Middle East that they and some of their friends constructed then seethes with rivalries, hatreds and mistrust that their empire’s ambitions sowed there from 1917 to 1921.

But now the Middle East is not a war spoil shared by France and England, but a place spoiled by chaotic wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen: By the perpetual threat of war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and/or between Hamas and Israel in Jordan and the ever-rising tensions from Israeli occupation of the West Bank; and more and worse — always more and worse.

Into all this, President Trump has sent real estate developer Jared Kushner to walk in the deep furrows of the historic paths of Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence.

President Trump’s anointed Middle East viceroy would do well to read a lot of history before he travels there again and perhaps ought to try to explain some small part of it to his father-in-law.

 

Born into a wealthy industrialist’s family in 1864 in England, Gertrude Bell’s decisions and actions 100 years ago in the Middle East shape the region to this day, including the turmoil in Iraq and Syria and their impacts  in Lebanon, Iran, Jordan and the United States.

When he sat down this month with the prime minister of Iraq had Jared Kushner ever heard of Gertrude Bell (although incidental to and coincidental with this writing a new biopic about her just opened)?

It is reasonably certain, given that he did not know health care policy is complicated, that when Mr.Kushner’s father-in-law met this month with King Abdullah II of Jordan he had no idea the role Gertrude Bell played in the lives of the king’s family; no idea that history  and Islamic/Arab tradition deem the king a person in line of descent from Muhammad. The family in question, with its 1,500-year history, is the Hashemite. Continue reading “Jared of Arabia, Meet Gertrude: Part I”

When Sean Spicer talked of “Holocaust Centers” though not knowing it, because he seems to know little, he was within striking distance of historic fact.

Spicer, apparently as incurious a man as his boss, no doubt has yet to research the Holocaust notwithstanding that his comments about it became another cause célèbre in the exercise of parsing the Trump administration.

In fact there were killing centers during the Holocaust – not concentration camps but killing camps. Continue reading ““Holocaust Centers””

If you have been wondering if or whether President Trump has committed an impeachable offense then yesterday (April 5, 2017) may have been such a day or at least one of them.

He might have done it when he accused Susan Rice of committing a crime. Continue reading “Khizr Khan’s Offer”

“Julius Caesar” by William Shakespeare, Act III, Scene 2 from Marc Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral:
“…So are they all, all honorable men, “…

Benedict Arnold

Born in Connecticut Jan. 3, 1740, Benedict Arnold owned merchant ships when the American Revolution broke out at Concord and Lexington on April 19, 1775.

Arnold promptly enlisted in the Connecticut Militia with the rank of captain – men of means and/or education were appointed in the early days of the war by their fellows to lead them or were self-appointed. Continue reading “Honorable Men”

This is still about the debt ceiling. We’ll get to that but first there’s some historic scenery to set.

It is certain now that there are not two but three parties in the House of Representatives, probably the Senate too.

We know the two major parties. The Democratic Party, which currently has 193 members of the House, and the Republican Party, which ostensibly has 237 members (there are five vacancies since the start of this session of Congress).

But actually the highest number of votes in the Republican Caucus is 207 because 30 of the 237 call themselves the Freedom Caucus. President Trump is at war with them. But he’s late to the game.

They are not Republicans. Continue reading “The Next Complicated Thing: Part II”

The next big decision likely facing the United States Congress after the failure of legislation to undo the Affordable Care Act is probably not, as you have been reading, tax legislation or infrastructure program legislation. No, it is that nasty item called the debt ceiling.

It is not supposed to be a big hard decision but it could well be if the Republican Party again insists on making it so. Because it did that 17 months ago, the United States is in the proverbial pickle barrel.

And this time it is a big, big, big, big problem because since November 2, 2015 to right now, the U.S National debt has risen $1.41 trillion and it has not been acknowledged because of a really peculiar law that took effect that day. More about that as we go one. Continue reading “The Next Complicated Thing: Part I”

Herein is a short explanation of the very strange thing they do in the House of Representatives when they vote  whether to pass a law.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say anything about majorities. It says in every session the members of the House of Representatives and Senate shall choose their leadership.

Contrary to those like Judge Neal Gorsuch, who espouses belief in understanding and being able to divine “the original intent” of the drafters of the Constitution, the well and long established historic truth is they never imagined, envisioned, wanted or made room in that document for a two-party system. Continue reading “Committee of the Whole”

Otto von Bismarck, called “the Iron Chancellor” had a project, to unify Germany under the leadership of his homeland, Prussia, and its king, Wilhelm I.

He succeeded when in 1871 Wilhelm I was proclaimed Kaiser, (emperor). Bismarck through three carefully plotted and planned wars, by diplomacy, with cunning, threats, and political will and skill had forged a new German Empire, a second Reich, in the heart of Europe.

It united Prussia with 25 other German kingdoms, principalities, grand duchies and duchies under the forceful national leadership of Prussia and the Kaiser as the head of state with Bismarck as chancellor, the head of government. Continue reading “A Conservative’s Health Plan: Part I”