Egon Schiele

The painter Egon Schiele was born on this day in 1890 in Tulln, Austria.

Schiele’s father was the manager of the railway station in Tulln and the family lived in an apartment above the platform. Egon spent much of his childhood obsessively sketching the trains. Some of these sketches survive, but most were burned by his father, who gradually lapsed into insanity due to syphilis and who died when Egon was 14. In 1909 Schiele was accepted as a student at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. (Another applicant that year, Adolf Hitler, was rejected.)

His genius was undeniable, but Schiele chafed under the conservative artistic teachings of the Academy. He created a series of ambitious drawings that were radically different from his school exercises and boldly introduced himself to Gustav Klimt, a popular Viennese painter who Schiele especially admired. “Do I have talent?” he asked Klimt. “Much too much,” was Klimt’s response, and the older painter introduced Schiele to the Viennese art world, referred models to him, and arranged his first commissions and exhibitions.

Schiele was certainly profoundly influenced by Klimt’s art nouveau style and sexual imagery, and early in his career he was seen as a lightweight Klimt imitator. But Schiele soon settled on a highly personal style in which Klimt’s penchant for draughtsmanship and beautifully decorative and erotic portraiture was replaced by a complete focus on bold lines at the expense of colorization and ornamentation and the depiction of isolated human figures, often caught in the throes of extremely raw sexual tension and posed in grotesquely vulnerable postures. Klimt kept his robust sex life discreet and never painted a self portrait, but Schiele created hundreds of self portraits and was determined, as a citizen of Freud’s Vienna, to go much further than his mentor in exploring the dark side of lust. “Have adults forgotten how corrupted, that is, how sexually driven and exposed they themselves were as children?,” Schiele once wrote. “I have not forgotten, for I suffered excruciatingly from it.”

Schiele’s work was widely condemned as pornographic, but wealthy clients began to purchase his erotic sketches and paintings. At the same time Schiele continued to cement his reputation as a serious artist as the star of exhibitions staged by the Vienna Secessionists, a group of artists who promoted modern art. Schiele lived openly with his mistress and model, and the pair decided to get away from Vienna and move to the country. Schiele’s notorious lifestyle and the nature of the art he was producing caused a firestorm of public disapproval in his new home, the village of Nuelengbach, and Schiele was arrested for “immorality” and “seduction.” After a month in jail, Schiele was released, but not after the judge burned one of his drawings during a public court proceeding.

The start of the First World War found Schiele back in Vienna and newly married to Edith Harms, a bourgeois girl who was probably in no way prepared for life with her maverick husband. Schiele was drafted into the Austrian army, but he was given a clerkship and allowed to live at home. Schiele’s creative output during the war years was phenomenal. Perhaps due to an improving marriage and domestic stability, Schiele began to move away from his voyeuristic sexual psychodramas to paint tender portraits of Edith, large allegorical and religious scenes, and a remarkable series of landscapes.

Gustav Klimt died in February, 1918, a victim of the worldwide flu epidemic, which killed 40 million people. Schiele sketched his mentor on his deathbed. The following month brought professional and personal triumphs for Schiele. The 49th Secessionist exhibit included 25 of his paintings, and Schiele was deluged with recognition, money, commissions, and a new studio. His wife became pregnant with their first child.

Schiele had been spared the dangers of the battlefield in the war, but he would not be saved from the epidemic that was decimating Europe. On October 26th, 1918, his wife came down with influenza. Schiele refused to isolate himself and Edith died in his arms two days later. Schiele’s own lifeless body was discovered in his studio by a friend on October 31st. He was twenty-eight years old.

Happy birthday to Isaac Scott, a Big Time Bluesman if there ever was one.

Isaac owned the Seattle blues scene for several decades. He didn’t like to travel and he never had the management to acquire an international reputation, but he certainly had all the musical prerequisites necessary to make it big. Isaac taught himself piano and the guitar as a boy and by the time he was in his early twenties he was touring with the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. He left that experience as the owner of a surpassingly gorgeous, church-infused voice. It was passion for the guitar playing of Albert Collins that drew him closer and closer to the blues. Collins was based in California in the 1970s and played Seattle often, and he and Isaac became thick as thieves. Isaac adopted Collins’ technique of relying solely on an insanely heavy thumb—no picks or other digits for those two guys. Isaac was always searching for new sounds, so he related to Jimi Hendrix right away. At any rate, Isaac’s gospel vocal style and his rocket-propelled approach to the guitar made him an absolutely unique kind of blues musician.

I met Isaac through drummer Twist Turner, who was playing with Scott at the time, in 1975 and joined his band for the next couple of years. In those days were only two clubs in Seattle that regularly booked blues bands—the Boulder Lounge on First Avenue, and the Place Pigalle (“Pig Alley”) right around the corner in the back of the Pike Place Market. Pig Alley was a classic waterfront dive favored by an eclectic clientele that included local degenerates, sailors on shore leave, aging beatniks, and young hipsters. Isaac had the house gig there. The Boulder was much more upscale with its padded black-and-red leather booths and go-go dancers in cages. Tom McFarland had the regular slot there.

Most of my memories of playing with Isaac revolve around Pig Alley. Isaac would often indulge himself in endless shuffles or slow blues workouts with acres of guitar solos. Isaac had copped Albert Collins’ 60-foot-guitar-cord trick and would often stroll through the club while he was playing. The Pig had a phone booth at the end of the bar, and Isaac would squeeze himself in there with his guitar (no small feat, as Isaac weighed about 300 pounds in those days). Once inside the booth, he would snap the door shut with his elbow and the light inside the booth would pop on, bathing him in a heavenly light from above.

Isaac was a very sweet guy by nature, but he could get hard core when the situation called for it. Once some young hippie “promoters” booked us on a Tuesday night at a local bar for surprisingly big money. Such surprisingly big money that we all grilled Isaac about whether this was a real gig or not. He assured us that he had made a solid deal. We played the entire night for about four people and the promoters didn’t show up until closing time at 1 a.m. They approached Isaac and asked him to step outside for a consultation. This didn’t look promising, and we watched through the windows as the two hippies huddled with Isaac on the sidewalk. Isaac listened to each man in turn as they obviously pleaded with him, gesturing nervously all the while. Isaac’s face became more solemn by the second, finally settling into a frightening scowl as he began to shake his head: "No, no, no…” One of the booking agents made what would prove be a final attempt to placate the big man; it was cut short by Isaac’s big right hand making contact with the side of his head. This initial victim instantly took the form of a crumpled heap on the sidewalk. Isaac turned toward the other promoter, who, in a desperate surge of adrenalin driven by fear of impending doom, bolted up Second Avenue. We all piled out onto the sidewalk just in time to watch Isaac, in a grisly, big-city version of a cheetah running down a defenseless gazelle on "Wild Kingdom," take off at an incredible velocity for a man of his size and make quick work of his second prey. But Isaac wasn’t done yet. He grabbed a hand truck out of the van, rolled it into the bar and proceeded to unplug the club’s expensive new jukebox from the wall, heave it onto the hand truck, and head for the door. He was stopped by the bar owner, and we got our money. Now THAT’S how a real band leader does it, people!

There were other memorable nights (like the time when Albert Collins pulled a knife on Isaac in the back room at a Pioneer Square club) and better venues (like a memorable opening slot at the San Francisco Blues Festival in Golden Gate Park), and I always enjoyed not only playing with Isaac but just being around him. He loved to play and he liked to have a good time. Unfortunately, even when I was in the band he was beginning to suffer from health issues that would take him from us far too early at the very young age of 56.

Isaac was justly famous for his six-string pyrotechnics, but my favorite recording of his is his brilliant and reworking of the Beatles’ tune “Help,” which I never get tired of because it shows off Isaac’s skill, his soulfulness, and his creativity. He probably had more musicality in his little finger than any other talent I’ve ever worked with. RIP, Isaac. None of us have forgotten.

"Is Everybody Okay?"

Bobby Kennedy was complex, to say the least.

As a boy, he watched his father shower his attention and praise on his older brothers and drew closer to his pious mother. Bobby was the fragile, devoutly religious son who was devoted to his mother and seemed to be the antithesis of his hard-driving, callous father, who openly called him a ”runt.” Bobby’s brothers found his brooding prudishness tiresome and dubbed him "Black Robert."

When his brother Joe Kennedy Jr. was killed in World War II, Joe Senior began to pay more attention to Bobby, who focused on winning his father’s respect by toughening both his body and his image. Bobby made the varsity football team at Harvard. He scored a touchdown in his first game but soon after broke his leg in practice. To qualify Kennedy for a letter that season, his coach had him play the final minutes of the last game wearing a cast on his leg.

Kennedy enlisted in the Naval Reserve and worked as a journalist for the Boston Post. He made his first foray into politics by working on his brother John’s Senate campaign in 1952. He worked for six months for his father’s pal, Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, as assistant counsel to McCarthy before joining the staff of the Democratic minority on various committees. Kennedy’s newfound pugnaciousness was at its height in the 1950s; his combativeness made him lifelong enemies in Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s notorious aide, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Teamster chief Jimmy Hoffa, and Senator Lyndon Johnson. After Bobby’s aggressive, win-at-any-cost management of JFK's presidential campaign, Joe Senior declared that Bobby was the toughest of his sons and the one most like him—seemingly a total turnaround inside the family.

But after his brother appointed him attorney general, the side of Bobby Kennedy that genuinely valued public service began to re-emerge. In the early days of the Kennedy administration Bobby authorized wiretaps on Martin Luther King’s phone, urged King to dismiss aides who suspected of being communists, worked to cut short the protests of the Freedom Riders, and failed to take up civil rights complaints. Civil rights leaders mistrusted him. But over time his commitment to that cause—and his determination to use his power to help it—deepened. Bobby convinced his brother to make an address to the nation in support of civil rights. He sent U.S. marshals to Alabama to protect James Meredith when he became the first black to enroll at Ole Miss. He oversaw a huge expansion of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division, including the hiring of its first black lawyers, and undertook to desegregate the administration, criticizing Vice President Johnson for not hiring blacks to his staff. Bobby saw voting rights as being critical to racial progress, and he had a major hand in crafting what became the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.

His brother’s assassination in 1963 shattered him. It also forced him to confront his own dark side and where it had led him. Bobby Kennedy had fought with the FBI. He had tangled with the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He had aggressively prosecuted the Mafia. He had let it known to the U.S. intelligence agencies that he was interested in getting rid of Fidel Castro. Bobby Kennedy wondered whether all of these murky threads had somehow come together in Dallas--whether the CIA or the mob had partnered with Castro to engineer his own brother’s death. Literally within minutes of learning that the President had died, Bobby Kennedy had the White House taping systems dismantled, ordered that the locks to the President’s files changed, and scheduled a meeting with the CIA director to ask him point blank whether the CIA had any role in the assassination. (He was told no.) Bobby stayed clear of the Warren Commission and never publicly questioned its findings.

Bobby started over, with a new fatalism. He read Aeschylus and Shakespeare, both of whom he could quote at length from memory. He struggled with depression and with the pressure of maintaining the short Kennedy legacy during the era of Johnson, a man he viscerally despised. He resigned as attorney general and, pushing aside prominent Democratic politicians in New York, was elected Senator from that state in 1964.

Kennedy’s commitment to civil rights and to making progress against poverty and social injustice surged again after a tour of rural areas in Mississippi in 1967. His daughter Kathleen remember him returning from that trip and lecturing his children on what he had seen in the Delta and their responsibility to assist people in need. He reached out to California labor activist Cesar Chavez and lent credibility and financial support to the efforts of the United Farm Workers union. He gave a speech advocating for new healthcare programs for the poor and was heckled by white medical students who wanted to know where the money would come from. “From you,” Kennedy told them. "I look around this room and I don't see many black faces who will become doctors. I don't see many people coming here from slums, or off the Indian reservations. You are the privileged ones here. You sit here as a white medical student, while black people carry the burden of the fighting in Vietnam."

Kennedy avoided criticizing Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War before the 1966, but the next year he proposed his own three-point solution and was lobbying Johnson to suspend his bombing of North Vietnam. He privately told Johnson that he would not challenge the President for the 1968 nomination if Johnson would admit publicly that he had been wrong on Vietnam; Johnson turned down his offer. But Kennedy was far more equivocal on the war than Eugene McCarthy, who launched an insurgency against Johnson. Kennedy’s more vague position was that he would not summarily withdraw or “surrender” in Vietnam but would seek an “honorable peace.”

March of 1968 was a cyclone of political events. Although he had supposedly decided to challenge Johnson the month before, when he was helping Cesar Chavez break a long hunger strike, Kennedy decided to announce after the March 12 New Hampshire primary. McCarthy’s strong showing, achieved by his army of student volunteers and antiwar activists, showed that the war had fatally weakened Johnson with voters. Four days later, Kennedy announced his candidacy and was immediately denounced as a crass opportunist by McCarthy and his supporters, who justifiably felt that he was trying to profit from the hard work they had done to turn the tide against the President. On March 31, President Johnson stunned the world by announcing that he would not seek re-election. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had made his reputation as a firebrand for social justice but had been reduced to a pitiful apologist for the Vietnam War, entered the race.

The next three months were a dog fight for the future of the Democratic Party. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April. Kennedy, who was campaigning in Indianapolis, Indiana, spoke to a predominantly black crowd in that city. In one of the most remarkable, extemporaneous addresses in political history, Kennedy broke the news to them that King had been killed and made the case against a violent reaction. McCarthy had the young antiwar activists and the intellectuals, who had already been working for him for a year. Kennedy’s coalition consisted mainly of the poor, Catholics, keepers of the Camelot flame, African Americans and other minorities. Humphrey was counting on his coalition of the Democratic Party establishment, big-city bosses, conservative and southern Democrats who couldn’t go for George Wallace, labor unions, and the understanding that Johnson would end the war before the election.

Humphrey did not compete in the 1968 primaries, focusing on the states where the party leaders chose the nominee and quickly taking the delegate lead. In the primaries where they did not directly compete with each other, McCarthy won in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Illinois while Kennedy got the nod in South Dakota. In the states where they did go toe to toe, Kennedy carried two (Indiana and Nebraska) and McCarthy beat Kennedy in Oregon.

The June 5th primary in California was critical to Kennedy. His chance for the nomination was to win there and beyond and convince McCarthy to drop out so that Kennedy could go one on one against Humphrey without the antiwar vote being split. California matched up well with Kennedy’s coalition of the disenfranchised. His longshot campaign hung on winning there and beyond and somehow convincing McCarthy to drop out so that he could go one on one against Humphrey at the convention in Chicago.

In the early morning of June 6, after he was declared the winner in California by four percentage points, Kennedy was leaving his campaign center at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by improvising a route through the kitchen to avoid the press. As he paused to shake hands with Juan Romero, a busboy, several shots rang out. As onlookers frantically wrestled with gunman Sirhan Sirhan, Kennedy fell sprawled on the floor. Romero knelt down and placed a rosary in Kennedy’s hand.

The writer Pete Hamill, who had been standing behind Kennedy when the shooting happened, looked down at his friend. “There was a kind of look on his face that was, ‘I knew this was gonna happen.’”

Whatever realizations were surging through Kennedy’s mortally wounded brain at that precise moment about his own condition, Kennedy’s reaction was to look to Romero.

“Is everybody okay?” he asked.

The Guilty Playbook

If I were Trump and I knew that I was innocent, I would let the Mueller investigation finish and absolve me, and I would instruct my Cabinet, my White House organization, the Republican Party, and my family in no uncertain terms to do cooperate fully, keep their mouths shut, and do NOTHING to interfere with that investigation, because I would know that the only way to screw up my future absolution would be some kind of cover-up activity like Nixon engaged in.

If, however, I were Donald Trump and I knew I that I was guilty, I would:

* Not waste time making the case that I am innocent
* Constantly call the investigation a "witch hunt"
* Try to fire the people who are investigating me
* Tell my recused attorney general to un-recuse himself and regain control of the investigation
* Publicly shame the government officials who support the investigation in order to get them to resign
* Attack and smear any politician or government employee who supports the investigation
* Ensure that GOP Congressional leaders don't allow a vote on bills designed to protect the special counsel
* Work relentlessly to undermine the public's faith in the investigation and reduce the potential backlash from a Saturday Night Massacre Trump-style soften by:
  **Smearing the investigation as a partisan effort
  ** Smearing the Department of Justice as a partisan, anti-Trump department
  ** Smearing the FBI as a partisan, anti-Trump organization
  ** Smearing the intelligence community and their unanimous finding that Russia interfered with the 2016 election
* Politicize the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee by conspiring with its chairman to:
  ** Promote false theories that point to the Democrats
  ** Cut short its own investigation and quickly issue a premature committee finding that I was innocent
  ** Smear the DOJ and the FBI as corrupt agencies
  ** Demand classified or secret information from the assistant attorney general who is directing the special counsel to justify a contempt of Congress charge against him
* Use Congressional Republicans, Fox News and my lawyers to spread the smears and the bogus alternative conspiracy theories
* Refuse all requests to sit for a deposition with the special counsel
* Issue a flurry of pardons to send a message my co-conspirators that I will save their asses
* Hire a prominent lawyer with experience with impeachment
* Claim that much of the information requested by the investigation is covered by attorney-client privilege
* Personally review and if necessary dictate official White House statements about the investigation
* Convince the public that completely unconstitutional or abnormal practices are completely legal by:
  ** Making the case that under the Constitution I cannot be indicted
  ** Making the case that under the Constitution I can pardon myself
  ** Issuing a flurry of pardons to demonstrate that it is not at all unusual for Presidents to issue pardons that are politically motivated

Clarence Fountain

In 1939, at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talledega, Mississippi, six boys, all about the age of nine, sang together for the first time as members of the school’s boys choir. Their families had given them up to the school so that they could get a nominal education and be trained in the primary vocation available to blind African Americans: making brooms and mops.

But Clarence Fountain, Jimmy Carter, Johnny Fields, George Scott, Olice Thomas, and Vel Bozman, had a different idea. They formed a gospel singing group, the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, and started practicing in earnest and performing for soldiers at a nearby military training camp. By 1944, they were confident enough in their ability to leave school and start touring. In 1948 they conquered the gospel charts with their Vee Jay release, “I Can See Everybody’s Mother (But I Can’t See Mine),” a tune written by Fountain and featuring his searing vocals. A concert that year with the Jackson Harmoneers was billed as a battle between “the five blind boys of Alabama and the five blind boys of Mississippi,” and those names stuck for both groups.

The Blind Boys of Alabama were trailblazers in the “hard gospel” sound, where the smooth harmonies of the jubilee style were replaced by a shouting and preaching front man accompanied by a group that focused on singing powerful chords. Fountain and the Blind Boys created almost unbearable tension--and beauty--as Fountain sang ecstatically over the musical drama created by the other members. In the 1950s, Fountain and the Blind Boys were the premier house wreckers on the gospel circuit; they became legendary for their ability to emotionally destroy audiences. As Fountain said, "You have to feel the spirit deep in your gut, and you have to know how to make someone else feel it."
The group was offered countless opportunities in the 1950s and 1960s to join fellow gospel stars like Sam Cooke and move to popular music, but Fountain firmly resisted: “There was no way we were going to go pop or rock. Who needed it? Our bellies were full, we had no headaches, we were happy. When you promise God something, you don’t go back on that.” In the 1960s the Blind Boys were solidly identified with the civil rights movement, singing at many benefits for Martin Luther King’s campaign for social justice.

In 1983, on a flight from Seattle to New York City to visit a friend there, I thumbed through a Time magazine and noticed an article about a musical production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that sounded too interesting to be believable—a musical version of Sophocles’ Oedipus tragedy featuring the Five Blind Boys and the Pilgrim Travelers, Sam Cooke’s former gospel group. When I got into Manhattan I told my friend about it, and she told me that she had just been to see the show, that it was completely fantastic, and that she would genuinely love to see it again. So we got tickets.

The show, “The Gospel at Colonus,” was even more spectacular than I could have hoped for. TWO black gospel choirs, sitting facing each other on opposite sides of the stage. The most soulful pit band I have ever heard. Morgan Freeman was the interlocutor—he basically took the place of the chorus in traditional Greek tragedy. As the show began, the mostly white audience was a little unsure of how to respond to the powerful production.

Then Freeman stepped up to the lectern and intoned: “Behold, Oedipus.”

A curtain at the top of a ramp on the side of the stage parted to reveal Clarence Fountain in a gorgeous cream suit and shades, and the blind singer was led down the ramp to center stage. The choirs and the pit band tore into an uptempo gospel two-beat groove and Fountain began to do his thing—singing, and shouting, and singing, and screaming, and singing again, his arms flapping at his sides, building to an emotional breaking point, at which precise moment the singers and the band stopped suddenly and Fountain screamed and leaped backwards, his knees up against his chest, only to be caught and held in midair by a cast member standing behind him.

That was it. The audience lost its mind and from that point on just let the show take them away. The production culminated with an unforgettable tableau depicting the death of Oedipus: Fountain draped across a white piano that slowly sank into a stage bubbling with artificial smoke while the rest of the Blind Boys sang a funereal ode to the dead king. Now that’s a finish!

Fountain and the Blind Boys toured international with “Colonus.” They won their first Grammy—for best traditional gospel album—in 2001 and then they won the same award for three more years in a row. Fountain had to quit the road in 2007 due to his struggles with diabetes but continued to record with the group when his health allowed. In 2017 the two last surviving original members—Fountain and Jimmy Carter, who had started singing together sixty-nine years earlier—participated in the album “Almost Home.” As Fountain once remarked, “My theory is to do something good in the end and that will close out your longevity. After that, you can go home and sit down.”

Clarence Fountain, one of the greatest singers and performers that America has ever produced, died this morning in Baton Rouge at the age of 88.

Dick Tuck

Dick Tuck, the bane of Richard Nixon's political existence, has pulled his last prank. Unless, that is, the announcement of his death today at 94 is just his latest stunt.

Tuck was a serious professional Democrat who worked for Adlai Stevenson, Pat Brown, and both John and Bobby Kennedy. (He was standing just behind RFK when Kennedy was assassinated.)

But Tuck achieved political immortality as a political prankster, and his favorite target was Nixon. Tuck haunted Nixon for twenty-five years. His campaign of psychological warfare began in 1950 when Tuck, a committed Democrat and a student at UC Santa Barbara, volunteered to work for the Republicans on campus. He arranged for Nixon, who was running for the Senate, to give a speech on campus, rented the largest auditorium at the school, and did no publicity for the event. Twenty-three students up and were treated to an interminable--and deadly dull--introduction by Tuck, who finally ended his oration by announcing--much to the surprise of Nixon--that "Congressman Nixon will now speak about the international monetary crisis."

It's impossible to know for sure if all the legendary stories about Tuck's shenanigans are true. There was the time when Nixon was doing a whistlestop campaign tour by train. Nixon was in the middle of his speech to a crowd behind his train car when Tuck, dressed as a brakeman, gave a signal and the train pulled away from the station--and Nixon's bewildered crowd. The morning after the first Kennedy/Nixon television debate in 1960, Tuck hired an elderly woman wearing a Nixon button to go up to Nixon in front of the press and tell him, "It's too bad that you lost to Senator Kennedy last night, but don't worry, you'll get him next time." It was Tuck who hired a pregnant black woman to stand in front of Nixon's hotel during the 1972 Republican convention holding a "Nixon's The One" sign.

Tuck had an interesting life and career. Hunter S. Thompson was a close friend. (I remember watching Tuck and Thompson make an appearance on Tom Snyder's late-night television show. The clueless Snyder didn't even catch half their jokes.) Tuck worked for a time as an editor of the National Lampoon humor magazine. Tuck was in that job during the Watergate scandal. He somehow got his hands on copies of some of Nixon's secret Oval Office tape recordings and gave them their first public airing in a session for reporters at the bar in the Hotel Jerome in Aspen.

Those tapes must have been a career high point for Tuck, for they reveal just how completely Tuck had entered Nixon's head. Tuck is mentioned often, and the tapes make clear that the Dirty Tricks squad in the RNC was Nixon's attempt to create his own Dick Tuck.

He failed. Nixon's team quickly strayed into illegality--burgling offices, secretly bugging opponents, forging fake diplomatic cables--whereas Tuck stuck with humorous pranks.

Tuck bumped into Bob Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, during the height of the Watergate scandal.

"It's all your fault, Dick," said Haldeman as the two men passed each other.

"Yeah, but you guys drove it into the ground," replied Tuck.

Comedian, Know Thy Boss

This is Channing Dungey, the President of Entertainment for ABC. She is the executive who made the decision to fire Roseanne Barr this morning. If you are not sure why corporate boardrooms should reflect the diversity of their customer base, here's the case that proves the point.Write here…

Dead People Love Me: Marketing Memorial Day, Trump Style

Only seven words today from Trump about the fallen. And they weren't "Thank you all for your ultimate sacrifice."

Because Memorial Day--at least to this mocking, preening, cowardly weasel that we elected as the leader of the free world--is just another opportunity to market his brand. The tragedy of these men and women is not that they gave their lives in service to their country, but that they aren't around to see the shimmering miracle that is the Trump regime.

I'm not sure why he would want the fallen to be part of his glory. If he doesn't appreciate our service men and women who were captured by the enemy (his words), then from his craven perspective he must view those who were killed as total losers. He is, after all, the man who received four student deferments during his time to serve and then, after graduating as "the best baseball player in New York" (his words) somehow got another convenient deferment for bone spurs. (He can't recall now which foot was affected.) While his peers were dying and being captured and tortured, his "personal Vietnam" (his words) was avoiding venereal disease while playing the field in Manhattan. (Which certainly had to be dangerous duty for a man who screws porn stars without using a condom.)

He could spared us the nauseating marketing Tweet and just quietly visited Arlington to spit on a few graves. That's what we'll be doing if we re-elect him.

Memorial Day 2018

Soka gakkai, Christian, Buddhist, Wiccan, Muslim, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, Jew, atheist, native born and immigrant--we honor them not because they died to promote their creeds but because they made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve our collective equality.

Lo, The Brave Coward

A Republican Senator who decided to retire rather than face the opposition from Trump and his base lashes out at Republican Senators for being afraid of Trump and his base.

If you think that the heighth of hypocrisy is a GOP politician who knows better but refuses to call Trump on his un-American bullshit, consider the GOP politician who knows better but votes for 98% of Trump's racist/fascist agenda, decides to quit before a tough primary instead of fighting for his party's soul, and then proceeds to call Trump on his un-American bullshit (that he voted for) and constantly lecture his GOP colleagues in media appearances for practicing exactly the same kind of political cowardice that he himself displayed by quitting without a fight--all in order to position himself for his own future run for President.

The Worst of the Worst

Every day millions of people point to Donald Trump as the worst person in politics.

It’s not true. There are at least fifty people in Washington, D.C. alone who are unquestionably more loathsome than Donald Trump.

That’s the number of Senate Republicans who met with Donald Trump yesterday at the White House. One of their colleagues did not attend. He is home in Arizona fighting a brain tumor. Six days ago these fifty Americans learned that a member of the White House communications team, when the subject of their esteemed colleague’s opposition to Trump’s nominee for CIA director was raised in a meeting, had joked that McCain didn’t matter because he “was dying anyway.”

This used to be the kind of juncture where our politicians would come together regardless of politics, at least in public, and condemn a shocking comment about a legitimate American hero, much less one who may not live out the month.

Not any more. A small minority of these fifty Republican Senators expressed their disgust in public. An even smaller number demanded an apology. You can count the ones who asked that this person be fired from her job on the fingers on one hand. Over the next five days, as it became clear that their leader was not going to allow any such apology or any such firing, their puny protests devolved to “I am not going to say anything further about this” statements.

These were the people who were ushered into the White House yesterday for a face to face meeting with Donald Trump. Not a single one of them brought up this disgraceful and defining moment in the Trump presidency and in the history of their party. Not one.

There are literally no words in the English language—perhaps in any language—to convey the loathsomeness of these craven invertebrates. Trump was raised in privilege to be the penultimate shitheel. He never served in the military. He never knew John McCain. He was never a Republican. He has never respected the military, our institutions of government, or their stated codes of conduct and behavior. He has no morality. He will never apologize. He will never change.

These fifty other reptiles posing as human beings are, like John McCain, Republicans. They all know John McCain personally. They all know his profound personal history of sacrifice and service—his military service, his five years as a prisoner of war, his broken body that is the permanent record of the physical torture he endured, the more than three decades in government—and they all know that he is in the fight of his life. They all campaigned for him when he crisscrossed the country as their Presidential nominee in 2008. They have all honored him as a true American hero. One of those fifty is his fellow Senator from Arizona, who has praised McCain to the skies and who, after announcing that he was quitting politics without fighting for his Senate seat, has shown a penchant for making ringing speeches about political courage and moral conduct to an empty Senate Chamber. Another is, by McCain’s own account, his closest friend. Many in this group served in the military; they all can’t talk enough about how they honor our veterans. They all know that their President sneered at McCain’s war record during the 2016 campaign.

Trump doesn’t apologize because his world is divided into “winners” and “losers,” and people who apologize are in the latter category because you get no credit for saying that you’re sorry. This sociopathic view of morality is the new normal in the Republican Party. The ONLY thing that counts is the winning, whether it is ratings, polls, elections, or the size of your crowds. McCain is a loser not only because he was captured but because he lost to Obama. All the Americans who voted against Trump are losers.

This is no small shift. By buying wholeheartedly into Trump, the GOP has turned its back on the Constitution and the institutions created to defend it in favor of a personality cult where winners are defined as those most loyal—not to the country, but to Trump. The only people worse than an odious tyrant are the people who should know better but who support him anyway.

What is going through John McCain’s mind today? He has spoken eloquently about how he survived his horrific ordeal in the prison camp because he focused on his fellow prisoners and of one day returning home. McCain refused an offer of early release by the North Vietnamese, telling them that he would not allow himself to be freed until his fellow prisoners were also liberated. Now he discovers that he lived through that ordeal and spent thirty years serving his country and his party only to find that he doesn't have a single true friend among his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill. No doubt he has also reminded himself that he has the respect of millions of others, the love of his family, and his own self esteem. That last quality is something his Republican colleagues will never experience. Or deserve. Or even understand.

Professor Longhair

There aren’t many things more enjoyable (or more rare) than stumbling on a music or a musician when you are in no way prepared for it—when you have no context or frame of reference for it--and having it or them carry you away.

When I was a college student in New York City in the ‘70s a club on the East Side of Manhattan sponsored a month-long blues piano festival. Each weekend a different lion of the blues piano was featured. At the first installment, I was able to sit ten feet from Little Brother Montgomery (an unassuming, pleasant looking guy who began his career playing in the turpentine camps and whorehouses of Louisiana and who made his first records in 1930) as he played his signature song, “Vicksburg Blues,” the tune of which later became “44 Blues” for Howlin’ Wolf. A week later I was there for a rollicking 90-minute set by the legendary Roosevelt Sykes, the Original Honeydripper, who was just as animated as Montgomery was shy. Sykes was a born entertainer, a monster on the piano, and a great singer who turned and faced and mugged for the audience when he played, a cigar jammed defiantly into the side of his mouth.

On the last weekend of the festival the headliner was a performer with a strange name who I had never heard of or listened to. I never thought about skipping that finale, as the rest of the festival had been so phenomenal, but I didn’t both to prepare for it by checking that unfamiliar player out.

When I got to the club the band was finishing setting up. It was an unusual trio—a Fender bass player, a conga player, and the featured piano player. He was a rail-thin man clad in denim who sported a large, gold front tooth, sunglasses, and longish hair capped by a wide-brimmed hat. I was just finishing my first drink when the group kicked into their show.

This was no blues trio. And this was no blues piano player, although there was a lot of that in there. These three guys were filling the room with some kind of unreal blend of New Orleans r&b, tango, barrelhouse blues, rhumba, and calypso. Whatever it was, I had never heard anything like it, and it was as exciting and funky as hell. After a few minutes of keyboard wizardry, the piano player leaned forward into the microphone and started whistling a slippery horn riff. Then he started singing about a some “big chief” in a wild, croaky kind of voice. Whoever this guy was, he was a trip and half!

This was the great Professor Longhair, aka Roy Byrd, from New Orleans, who once explained his approach this way: “You notice I never play anything straight. Anything I do I put a little pep in it, a little bounce—something to make you know that it’s not a love song.”

Professor Longhair would have turned 100 this year. This week I got a copy of “Fess Up,” a new booklet and DVD that celebrates the awesome uniqueness, talent, and wisdom of Professor Longhair. The context is a concert scheduled in 1980 in New Orleans that would feature three legendary piano players from that city: the elder statesman, Tuts Washington, his protégé, Professor Longhair, and Longhair’s student, Allen Toussaint. The concert never happened—Longhair died in his sleep two days before the show. But the promoters had the good sense to film the three pianists rehearsing for the show, which was later released as a television special called “Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together.” We learn a lot about each of the men in the film and get to observe the fascinating process by which they work together to figure out how to blend their different styles into a coherent musical program.

“Fess Up” includes a complete version of this film as well as a second DVD containing a 90-minute interview with Professor Longhair, clips of which were used in “Piano Players.” Longhair, who proves to be a savvy character and a humble person (“Those people who play sheet music, they think our stuff is crap”) who nonetheless understood how unique his music was, describes his musical beginnings, the music scene and the music business in postwar New Orleans, his brief period of retirement, and his eventual rediscovery and comeback. “Fess Up,” which comes in a handsome hard-cover booklet full of intriguing photographs and reminiscences of Longhair, is a fitting tribute to one of the great, had-to-be-seen-to-be-believed giants of American music.

Roy Cohn's latest comeback

There are multiple generations of American voters who either never heard of Joseph McCarthy or have only a vague notion of who he was and what he did.

The junior Senator from Wisconsin during the 1950s is who he was. What he did was prey on American fears of outside threats, dominate the headlines by issuing blatant lies about those threats, blackmail government employees, and systematically assassinate the character of anyone who dared to oppose him. Despite his repellant personality, the obvious phoniness of his claims, and his odious smear tactics, McCarthy ran roughshod over American politics for years. His own Republican Party, including President Eisenhower, refused to stand up to him. Eventually the press and his own overreaching brought him disgrace, a premature death from alcoholism, and this entry in Webster’s Dictionary:

“McCarthyism: a mid-20th century political attitude characterized chiefly by opposition to elements held to be subversive and by the use of tactics involving personal attacks on individuals by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations, especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.”

If this sounds vaguely familiar, we can thank Roy Cohn, the brains behind both McCarthyism and Trumpism.

Cohn was a freakish piece of work. He grew up in the New York Democratic political machine but became notorious as the chief counsel for the ultra-right Republican McCarthy and joined the John Birch Society. He was a Jewish legal phenom who helped send the Rosenbergs to the gas chamber. Cohn was a homosexual who despised gays as weak and made his early career blackmailing closeted public servants and purging them from the government. He found himself exiled in disgrace after McCarthy’s implosion and then remade himself, with the help of many powerful liberal New York City Democrats and media celebrities, into one of the richest lawyers in Manhattan before being disbarred in 1986. Cohn, who never publicly admitted his homosexuality, died of AIDs that same year, contending up to the end that he had liver cancer.

Cohn took the blood sport of American politics and created a truly hellish, bare-knuckled version of it that is still winning 60 years later. Of all the countless shitheels who have careened through the political history of our republic, Cohn stands out as the most reptilian. Tony Kushner, who made Cohn a major figure in his play “Angels in America,” has another character in that work call Cohn “the worst human being who ever lived…the most twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54.” (For an excellent profile of Cohn, see the great Frank Rich’s recent article in New York Magazine.)

Cohn’s McCarthyism was vicious blitzkrieg of false charges labeling Americans (especially those who were political foes) as communist traitors driven by a simple set of rules: “Attack, attack attack—never defend—admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattacks.”

Even after McCarthy’s downfall, Republicans sought out Cohn for advice. Cohn assisted Nixon (a kindred soul famous for his own ruthless smear tactics) with his highly successful “southern strategy,” in which Nixon wooed southern Democrats by making it clear that the Party of Lincoln would support white privilege and fight the Voting Rights Act. One of Cohn’s protégés was Roger Stone, who began his career as a Watergate dirty trickster for Nixon and Jeb Magruder. Stone and Stone met in 1976, when Stone was the youth director for Ronald Reagan’s first run at the Presidency. Cohn hosted Stone’s 30th birthday party.

Cohn also advised Ronald Reagan. Cohn met Paul Manafort in 1980 when Manafort was the southern campaign director for Reagan’s first run at the Presidency. Lee Atwater was Reagan’s political director, and he and Manafort resurrected Nixon’s southern strategy. Here is how Atwater described that strategy in a 1981 interview:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can't say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger.’”

By the time George Herbert Walker Bush came around, Roy Cohn’s pupils were big political wheels in their own right. Stone, Manafort, and Atwater formed a Washington consulting firm that designed the racist Willie Horton ads that helped take down Michael Dukakis.

Roy Cohn and Donald Trump first intersected in the early 1970s, when Cohn represented Trump when Trump and his father were sued by the government for racists real estate practices. Predictably, Cohn accused the government of “Gestapo-like tactics.” Trump loved Cohn’s brawling combativeness, and the two became tight friends, lunching at the Four Seasons and partying at Studio 54. Trump has often called Cohn his most influential mentor. It was Roy Cohn introduced Roger Stone and Paul Manafort to Trump. Trump hired Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater to help him with his casino business. According to Roger Stone, Cohn admirer Richard Nixon was the first to propose that Donald Trump should run for President.

You can hear the ventriloquial influence of Roy Cohn every day in Trump’s endless blizzard of blatant lies. Democrats who don’t applaud him are “traitorous.” Obama spied on him. Lifelong Republicans Robert Mueller, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Rob Rosenstein are actually treasonous Democratic operatives. “There are thirteen known Democrats on the Mueller team,” brays Trump in classic McCarthy fashion, who promises to expose them “very, very soon.” (This is classic McCarthyish grandstanding.) Trump has constantly called for his political opponents to be imprisoned. And Trump’s continued refinement--with campaign manager Manafort’s help--of the “southern strategy” worked brilliantly in 2016. (If you want to know why Trump coddles white supremacists, take a look at where half of his Electoral College votes came from.)

This week the press revealed the latest example of Roy Cohn crawling out of The Great Sewer Below to once again guide Donald Trump’s hand. Instead of spending time determining what would replace the Iran nuclear deal once we exited it, it turns out that Trump aides were focused on hiring Black Cube, an Israeli private intelligence agency, to covertly dig up dirt on Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the deal. Harvey Weinstein hired Black Cube to similarly smear the women who came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment.

The reign of terror enjoyed by Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn made them feared and powerful. But neither managed to become President of the United States and the leader of the party that controls both houses of Congress. Trumpism is McCarthyism on steroids.

Mob war

It's been pointed out countless times that anyone who enters the Trump orbit ends up being permanently sullied and having their reputations forever tarnished. That would be the appropriate perspective if the Trump administration was anything like a standard-issue government team.

But Trumpworld is not a tribe of bureaucrats or politicians. It's a mob of gangsters, a pit of slithering vipers who are perpetually poked, prodded, and pitted against each other by a twisted, brutish handler. These hoodlums are not the pick of the racketeer litter, for they have been recruited by the worst Don in the history of mobsterdom. They couldn't shake down an undersized third grader for his lunch money.

The only skill possessed by their boss is the ability to sacrifice even the most slavishly devoted of his gang members in the blink of an evil eye when they are no longer useful to him. Trump's henchmen don't end up sullied--they end up in prison or as clinically dead ex-professionals.

The bodies have been piling up for months. Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, foreign policy advisor George Papadopolous, and deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates are headed to prison. Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is headed to the big house. Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen will have to cooperate with Mueller and the Justice Department if he wants to be around to watch his children grow up.

This week saw the public slaughter of several members of the Trump gang.

Trump's personal doctor of 35 years, who went so far as to allow his patient to dictate his medical reports, found himself met at the back door of his office in the early morning hours by three thugs who ransacked his office.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was roasted by the Washington press corps for her latest blatant misstatements about the Stormy Daniels debacle--Trump has used her so often to spread so many lies that he has reduced her to a dead woman talking.

Rudy Guiliani warned the Mueller team in a Fox News appearance not to go after Ivanka Trump. But when asked about Jared Kushner's future, Guiliani declared him "disposable." Jared is family, which in most mobs would mean that he would be safe, but this is the "kiss of death" in Trumpworld.

And in a classic "hire a hit man to hit the other hit man" move, Don Trumpleone turned on Guilani this morning, just 24 hours after Rudy doomed Kushner. Looks like Rudy has one more day to pull together a memo answering all of the questions about Stormy Daniels and bagman Michael Cohen before he is buried at midnight in a New Jersey landfill.

A lawyer! A lawyer! My administration for a lawyer!

As any billionaire President under the threat of indictment will tell you, it's hard to find a good lawyer these days.

One of Trump's lawyers claimed publicly that he used a personal home equity loan to pay off porn star who was threatening Trump, and that he made this legal decision without bothering to tell his client, the President, about it despite legal ethics guidelines. Trump denies to the press any knowledge about any payment. That Trump lawyer drew up a nondisclosure agreement under the President's pseudonym and then forgot to have the President sign it. That lawyer has his home, office, and apartment raided by the FBI, who found that the lawyer had kept 16 of his old cell phones lying around waiting to be confiscated. It also turns out that that Trump lawyer was in cahoots with the porn star's lawyer, unbeknownst to her, despite legal ethics guidelines. So the porn star is suing that Trump lawyer, who has announced that he will plead the Fifth in that case.

So Donald Trump/David Dennison hires ANOTHER lawyer to do a better job defending him on television. That new lawyer tells the nation two weeks ago that he will end the Mueller investigation in two weeks. Last night, in his first national television interview, this new lawyer completely contradicts the other Trump lawyer and says that the other Trump lawyer used a slush fund funded by Trump to the tune of $35,000 a month (12 x $35,000 = $420,00 a year) to pay off the porn star and that Trump knew about this but that this was in no way was a campaign finance law violation because it was about saving the personal reputation of a man who just happened to be on the Presidential election ballot two weeks after the payment was made. This new Trump lawyer also says in the interview that "all the crimes [being investigated by Mueller] were committed by the government," meaning Trump's own Justice Department and FBI.

A bunch of other Trump lawyers jump into action overnight to try to limit the legal damage from the new Trump lawyer's comments, which contradicted earlier statements by both Trump and his other lawyer. These lawyers draft a three-part tweet and send it out under Trump's name this morning admitting that there was a slush fund and repeating the claim that the payment to the porn star two weeks before the election was in no way a campaign finance violation.

The new Trump lawyer goes on national television this morning to try to limit the damage from his interview the night before and muses on the air: "Can you imagine if that[payment] came out on October 15, in the middle of, you know, the last debate with Hillary Clinton?" The new Trump lawyer says that Trump knew he would make these revelations on national television, and so he was pretty sure that he wouldn't be fired today.

The White House announces that a ANOTHER new lawyer has been added to the Trump legal team. This lawyer has experience defending Presidents from impeachment, which Trump will certainly need--thanks to the outstanding work of his legal team.

Hope and Justice

He was a powerful man admired by millions. He believed that he could assault women with impunity because he was a star. He faulted others about their moral behavior while regularly abusing women and cheating on his wife and lying about it. When more than a dozen of his victims came forward to publicly accuse him, he called them liars and unleashed his lawyers and his spokespeople to intimidate them, destroy their reputations, and attempt to settle with them privately.

That man is the President of the United States. But today another of his kind was finally brought to justice. There is hope. And there is justice.

Albert King

Happy birthday to the Velvet Bulldozer, Albert King, my introduction to live blues.

I first saw Albert live when I was seventeen, when everything was new to me. A couple of weeks before I saw Albert I had gone to my first real rock concert, a Byrds show at Seattle’s Eagles Auditorium. Eagles was a revelation. An old fraternal hall in the middle of downtown, it boasted a cavernous auditorium up on the third floor that a local rock promoter was using every weekend to showcase the latest rock acts. There were no chairs, just a hardwood floor. We were teenagers from the suburbs and we learned the Eagles drill at that first concert. You stood in line to pay your $3.00 and then you went in and claimed your spot on the floor by unrolling your Army surplus cotton sleeping bag, inside of which you had smuggled in a gallon of cheap wine, some kind of food stash, and a bag of cheap Mexican weed. There were always three bands: a local group as the opener, an up-and-coming national act, and then the headliner. All three bands would then play a complete second set, so the music went on from 8 pm until the wee hours. I remember seeing an occasional fire department official at those Eagles shows, but the police were conveniently absent. Seattle was still a very conservative town in those days, so those weekend nights at Eagles were a picture window into another world. My friends and I thought we had died and gone to heaven.

I had already been listening to Paul Butterfield and Muddy Waters, but when I walked into Albert’s show that night I was a live-blues virgin. Albert was touring behind his latest record, a live recording from the Fillmore in San Francisco called “Livewire Blues Power,” and he pretty much replicated that killer set the night I saw him.

The band opened up with an up-tempo, funky version of “Watermelon Man,” and after a few minutes of groove Albert strode onstage, plugged into a monstrous amplifier, and turned to face us. He was a sight to behold—a huge man in a gorgeous, maroon pinstripe suit with a red Flying V strapped to his massive chest and a pipe clenched between his teeth. He was a lefty like me and played guitar upside down. And what a player! King had more than enough volume to satisfy the deafest rock fans, but he wasn’t serving up the psychedelic wash of masturbatory sonic slurry favored by most of the guitar idols of that day. Albert stung and squeezed and dropped bombs and whispered. He built up unbearable musical tension and then released it and then built it back up again. One verse of King’s guitar playing held more raw emotion than I had gotten from listening to all of those rock and roll albums. And he had a gorgeous, supremely soulful singing voice, too.

I pushed my way through the standing-room-only crowd until I was near the front of the six-foot-high stage. The only person between me and Albert was a stoned twenty-something who was ecstatically convulsing to the music. King broke a string and the music stopped briefly while Albert put on a new one. All the gyrating stoner knew was that someone had suddenly pulled the plug on his musical magic carpet ride, and he became hysterical. I carefully made some extra room between us as I watched him beat his forehead against the stage, shouting “Music! Don’t stop! Music! Don’t stop!” This blues stuff, whatever it was, was clearly something else--it had the power to drive men mad. What a blues baptism Albert gave me that night!

Many years later I did a gig at Jazz Alley in Seattle with some horn players I had never met. During the break I chatted with the trumpet player, and somehow that Albert King show at Eagles came up.

“Man, I was on that show!” he told me. “Albert used a pick-up horn section on that gig and I got hired. Those were the days, man. I dropped acid that night. The first set was pretty wild. We were reading charts with no rehearsal and I slipped up a time or two, but I was feeling no pain, you understand. We were all in the back room between shows having a sweet time when the door slammed open and there was Albert. Albert was a big dude, man—he filled up the entire doorway. He looked really mad. The party stopped and everything got really quiet. Albert looked around, spotted me, and went right for me. He grabbed me by the front of my shirt and just slid me two feet up the wall and pinned me there. My feet were just dangling, man. Remember, I’m on acid. ‘You’re fucking up my show,’ he said, 'and that’s gonna stop.’”

I asked him if he had been scared.

“Scared?” he answered. “I almost swallowed my own heart, man!”

We have met our savior, and it is us

Elections have consequences.

Nothing has brought that reality home like Donald Trump’s nightmarish reign. He has to be stopped. It is not hyperbole to wonder what, if anything, will be left of our American system after three more years, much less eight, of Trumpism.

Millions of us understand this. But we also need to understand and embrace the most important lessons from the past two years:

• Under our Constitutional system, most of the consequences of Trump’s election can only be altered by future elections.
• There is very little in the current law that ensures that the Chief Executive will always put the country before him or herself.
• The Republican party has become a radical, far-right, white-supremacist party that favors authoritarianism if not full-blown fascism.
• Donald Trump has the unwavering support of the vast majority of Republican voters, and they will continue to support him—no matter what he does.
• Republican voters have embraced an alternate reality that makes their political choices seem illogical and at times suicidal to us. But it doesn’t seem that way to them.
• Republicans currently serving in Congress will not turn against Trump, no matter what he does, even if this makes their reelection less likely. To be reelected they first need to be renominated, and any Republican who turns against Trump will face a vicious primary challenge that they will likely lose.
• Fox News is a full-blown propaganda outlet—not for the Republican Party, but for Trump--that still has enormous influence. Sinclair Media is headed in that direction.

And we all need to understand the realities underlying the Mueller investigation:

• Mueller cannot remove Trump from office. Only Congress can do that.
• We don’t know whether Mueller believes that he can indict a sitting President. The last ruling on this by the DOJ held that this is not possible. Mueller may give that decision over to his superiors in the DOJ. Sources say that the Mueller team plans on sending Rod Rosenstein several reports over the next year summarizing their findings in the different areas of their investigation. Those reports may be designed to give guidance to Rosenstein on whether or not there is a case for indicting Trump and others. Rosenstein would own the decision on what to do with these reports, including on whether or not they should be published or kept secret, and whether Trump could be indicted.
• Mueller is partnering with other DOJ teams and the attorneys general of at least two states.
• If Rosenstein is fired, Trump can replace him with a Trump loyalist and order that person to end or impede Mueller’s investigation.
• There is no statute, as there was during Watergate, requiring that if Mueller is fired he must be replaced by another special counsel.
• If Mueller and/or Rosenstein are fired, the state attorneys general who they have been partnering with can continue to prosecute crimes committed in their states, such as money laundering, bank fraud, and so forth.
• If Mueller and/or Rosenstein are fired, a DOJ run by Trump loyalists could quash Mueller’s investigations into Federal crimes by Trump that could serve as the compelling basis for impeachment (specifically, the obstruction of justice probe) and decide not to publish any of Mueller’s reports.

That brings us to what our national politics will look like over the next two and half years. I have been proven to be a very poor political prognosticator, but I don't believe that the next two years will resemble the Watergate era:

• Trump will fire Rosenstein and/or Mueller, and soon. Rosenstein is telling friends that he is at peace with the likelihood that he will be fired, and there are reports that the White House is preparing a rationale for that firing. Mueller is working hard to finish his report on the obstruction of justice issue as soon as possible. Trump will not want that report falling into the hands of Rosenstein, so he will replace him ASAP with a Trump loyalist who will ensure that the report is never published and who he can order to shut down the investigation.
• The Republicans in Congress will do NOTHING about the firing of Rosenstein and/or Mueller. It’s possible that the Senate Intelligence committee will continue to investigate, but that is not at all comparable to the charter or expertise of Mueller’s team.
• Some patriots in Mueller’s office, the DOJ, and the FBI will protest and attempt to preserve records, but without the support of the Republican administration and the Republican Congress they will not be successful in keeping the investigation going and will instead leak those documents and records to the press.
• Trump, the Republicans, and Fox News will step up their efforts to completely destroy the credibility of the DOJ and the FBI. (Those efforts, only a year old, have already been extremely successful. Seventy percent of Republicans feel that Mueller has not been fair, and only fifty-two percent of all American feel that the investigation has been even handed.)
• Trump will issue blanket pardons for his family members, faithful supporters, those already indicted by Mueller, and, if necessary, for himself. The Scooter Libby pardon is a dress rehearsal for a standard in which anyone convicted of lying to the FBI will be pardoned based on the claim that the FBI is an unlawful, rogue agency. The members of the Trump gang who actually go to prison will be those already indicted by Mueller and those convicted of state crimes, for which Trump can’t issue pardons.
• The Democrats will win back the House by a solid margin in the November midterms, but they will not win the Senate.
• The new Democratic House will impeach Trump and send him to the Senate for trial. This only requires a majority vote.
• Trump will not be convicted and removed from office by the Senate. That requires 67 yes votes, which is an impossibility. If all Senate Democrats and the independents vote for impeachment (which is no sure thing—it would require actual political courage for Tester, Manchin, McCaskill, Heitkamp, and Jones to vote yes), 15 Republicans would have to vote yes as well. Congress will never remove Trump from office during his first term.
• Trump will likewise never be removed via Article 25, which would require that his Cabinet will turn on him--another political impossibility.
• Trump will be renominated by the Republican Party in 2020.
• Trump should never be underestimated. Conversely, the Democratic Party should never be overestimated. It’s possible that Trump could win reelection in 2020.

We have met our savior. It’s not our current laws regulating President power and behavior. It’s not the stellar work of Robert Mueller. It’s not the leadership of the Department of Justice or the FBI—the independents in those agencies will soon be gone, and there is no rule of law when there is no enforcement. It’s not the Republican Party. It’s not the Democratic Party. It’s not the news media, although they will help. It’s not the religious community.

It’s us, and only us. To paraphrase Trump, we alone can fix it.

Getting rid of Trump will not be easy and will require, but it is definitely possible, and it’s essential to the survival of our Constitutional system. Our success in destroying Trumpism is in no way assured. To be successful we will have to focus on the 2018 and 2020 elections and stop living vicariously through MSNBC, put aside the seductive opium dreams about Robert Mueller, Article 25, and impeachment with the help of the nonexistent moderate Republicans, and step up and do the hard work, for over two years, by ourselves:

• The day that Trump fires Rosenstein or Miller, we need to take our millions of bodies and voices and put them in the streets and in the legislative offices. We need to show our strength by marching, demonstrating, and sitting in---peacefully but loudly—until the 2020 elections.
• We need to work hard on behalf of progressive Democrats at every level in every state in the primaries this year and complete the takeover of that party that Sanders nearly achieved in 2016.
• We need to apply the methodology and tactics of the Indivisible movement to our work in the elections to ensure that all politics is local in 2018 and that we don’t blindly accept candidates anointed by the Democratic National Committee and so our candidates can generate their own funding independent of the DNC.
• After the primaries, we need to work tirelessly to elect Democrats to Congress and state and local offices—top to bottom—in November. If you think the best thing to do in 2018 is to stay home because your candidate didn’t win the primary or to vote for a third party, you are helping Trump. This may be the election that determines whether we still have a republic to debate about, so please spare us your obscene, sanctimonious bullshit about the Democrats being just as bad as the Republicans, or at least get the hell out of the way while the rest of us focus on destroying Trumpism.
• When the Democrats regain control of the House, we need to ensure that progressives are appointed to leadership positions, that progressive legislation is brought forward, and that Democratic Congressional committee chairs use their subpoena and investigative power to expose the corruption of the Trump gang, defeat their agenda, and restore the rule of law in this country.

If we rise to this challenge and do the work, like our parents and grandparents did during their time, the payoff will be profound. We will remove Trump and his gang from power and end their nightmare reign. We will effectively destroy the racist, authoritarian version of the Republican Party and reinvent the Democratic Party as the face of progressivism. We will all have the life-changing experience of working successfully together with millions of other Americans to save our system of government, which will in turn inject new life into that system.

The alternative is unthinkable.

Speaking Truth

America has gone through dark times before. Fifty years ago this evening, Robert F. Kennedy stood in front of a largely black crowd in Indianapolis to break the news to them that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed.

Over the next five minutes, RFK made what is perhaps the most eloquent extemporaneous political speech ever delivered. It is certainly the most powerful such address delivered under enormous pressure and with such high stakes attached. Kennedy was calm, somber, and straightforward. He spoke simply. He quoted the poetry of Aeschylus from memory in a way that was absolutely appropriate and over no one's head. He shared his own family tragedy without losing his focus on the fresh horror of King's murder. He was brief, and he connected. There were no riots in Indianapolis that night.

I still believe--even in the middle of this grotesque, hate-filled Pandora's box of brutishness that we unlocked last November--that RFK was right: that most of us embrace the path of love and peaceful coexistence. And Bobby Kennedy, who spent a decade as his brother's designated mean bastard, certainly knew the dark side and where that road leads. But what politician on the scene today could rise to such an occasion with such a perfect response? The landscape seems so devoid of wisdom and compassion these days.

Sixty-eight days after his Indianapolis speech, Robert Kennedy was himself gunned down after what seemed like an historical victory in the California presidential primary.

Innocence Lost

Standing in the crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue on Saturday at the March For Our Lives, listening to so many incredible young people who have had their lives upended by gun violence calling bullshit on the national paralysis around the ongoing slaughter, and seeing them in the flesh, they began to take shape for me as human beings who have taken on a heavy load in the midst of their own trauma. It brought home that their dead classmates are still very real to them and that their refusal to accept their absence is fuel for their righteous fire. I have to believe them when they say that they wouldn't have it any other way and that committing to saving future lives is the best response to what they went through. And we all can see clearly the change that they are driving by speaking up so eloquently and acting so courageously. But the innocence lost is heartbreaking. There were many unforgettable moments on Saturday. The sight of Parkland survivor Samantha Fuentes vomiting on stage during her impassioned speech brought home the terrible reality that these are teenaged human beings who have been profoundly traumatized by an experience that no one should ever have and who, due to the inability of us adults to protect them, have taken on an enormous burden far too early in life. That's the undebatable reality they are forcing us to confront that makes thoughts and prayers without action, and the smearing of them as brainwashed puppets, so obscene and that has made their movement so powerful and the students the personification of courage. We not only owe them the change they are seeking but the prolonged help, love, and support that their long-term recovery from their personal nightmares requires.