The Six Commandments

Posted on August 2, 2019 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 2, 2019

In 2016, the Democratic National Committee effectively tilted the Primary playing field to Hillary Clinton’s advantage by controlling the so-called super-delegates. While I would hate to see that misguided abuse of power repeated, the five hours of debates on CNN this week left me hoping current DNC Chairman Thom Perez can control this bunch and set them on the right track. Unless someone does, we’ll wind up with four more years of Donald Trump.

The Democrats need a Moses to rescue them from wandering endlessly in the desert. Get out your stone tablet, hammer and chisel, Thom. It’s time for some new Commandments:

Do not forget who the enemy is. The enemy is Donald Trump, a malignant tumor that is steadily replacing American values with his own sick vision of male white supremacy and privilege. His unique combination of bullying and submissive adoration of adversarial autocrats weakens our country and leaves our allies floundering.

Yesterday alone, he offered tacit approval to Kim Jung Un’s latest round of ballistic missile tests and Xi Jin Ping’s suppression of freedom in Hong Kong. What’s next? Inviting Vladimir Putin to stage a full-scale invasion of Ukraine?

Tell voters why they should vote for you, rather than tearing each other apart. Except for their opening and closing remarks, the candidates spent almost all their time shooting holes in each other, and creating video sound bites that Trump will use against them in the general election.

A few cases in point: Kirsten Gillibrand badgered Joe Biden over the meaning of a thirty-eight year old Op-Ed, implying that he thinks women should stay home and raise children. Has she met Jill Biden? Cory Booker’s cute Kool-Aid remark suggested that Biden is clueless about crime and urban problems. He knows better. And not to be ignored, the very nasty exchange between Tulsi Gabbard and Kamala Harris helped no one.

Rein in your self-interest in pursuit of the greater good. Donald Trump pulled off a shocking primary upset by running the most appallingly negative campaign we’ve ever seen. His lies, insults, and bullying, and his successful appeals to racists and hate groups wrecked the Republican establishment. Trump, the ultimate narcissist, for whom nothing matters but winning, succeeded because he understood that in their own desperate need to win, none of his opponents would support anyone he attacked.

The Democrats will not succeed by emulating Trump. When this week’s debates ended, Americans were sick of the carnage and dismayed by what it portends for the future. A couple of candidates took a step back and said any of the twenty debaters would be better than Trump, but it came off as lip service, as the debates quickly degenerated back into carving each other up. It’s always been fair game in politics to attack the front-runner, but this is a new game. Anyone whose ambition blinds him or herself to the reality that a bloodied primary winner will likely lose to Trump is as bad as Trump.

Do not attack your strongest assets. Among potential Democratic voters, Barack and Michelle Obama are the two most admired individuals in the country, notably in critical battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. They will be formidable assets when the general election campaign heats up. Yet the Democrats spent more time attacking the Obama administration than Trump, because the front-runner they were chasing was Obama’s VP. Anyone who can’t convince voters that they’re the better choice on their own merits, they should drop out.

End the impeachment debate now. Let the Congress do its oversight and investigation. It’s their constitutional responsibility to gather evidence of Donald Trump’s crimes and post it where every voter can see it. But a candidate’s job is to defeat him at the ballot box. Continuing to call for impeachment is a dangerous distraction. There’s virtually no chance of a conviction in the Senate, and even if it were achieved, what’s the point? By the time Trump was impeached, his term would be over.

Don’t be afraid of being right. Listen to Elizabeth Warren and Jay Inslee, neither of whom spent their energy attacking other Democrats. Warren asked why anyone would go to the trouble and expense of running for president and reaching the debate stage only to argue about what can’t be accomplished. Jay Inslee argued for nothing less than the habitability of our planet, and the risks posed by Trump’s ignorance and self-serving denials.

Warren and Inslee are both right. We need big ideas to fix our system, and we can’t be afraid to fight established paradigms. Donald Trump isn’t afraid to, and the Democrats can’t afford not to.

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Maryland’s 7th Congressional District and Elijah Cummings

Posted on July 28, 2019 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 28, 2019

Context is everything. To be clear, I’m writing this as a white voter from an affluent, racially diverse county in central Maryland. Our median household income is nearly twice the national average. Our population is 51% white, 19% Asian (primarily Korean, Indian, and Chinese) and 18% African American. We have over 100 churches, many of which are inter-denominational, eight synagogues, and a mosque. While Maryland is generally considered a blue state, it has a two-term Republican governor who gave serious consideration to challenging Donald Trump’s re-election. My county is as purple as it can be.

I am in Elijah Cummings’ Congressional district, and I proudly support and vote for him. He has represented most of Baltimore and its western suburbs since 1996, a black man known for his folksy, laid back style who rarely raises his voice, and never resorts to insulting invective or divisive tactics. As such he is the perfect foil for Donald Trump’s hateful racist rhetoric, but if Trump expects to intimidate Cummings he picked the wrong opponent.

By now the entire world has seen Trump’s Twitter attack: “Cummings’ district is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous and filthy place…No human being would want to live there.”

In typical Trump fashion, every word of that tweet is either false or gross hyperbole. Cummings has devoted his entire career as an attorney and politician to improving the lives of his constituents. Like most large American cities, Baltimore has suffered greatly from poverty, drug trafficking, and gun violence, and has neighborhoods that I wouldn’t walk through without body armor. But handicapped by the loss of much of its tax base and the laughable incompetence of its local government, it has still made massive strides in transforming itself.

I spent several hours in Baltimore, yesterday with my wife and some friends. We drove across a large segment of the city, actually marveling at how impressive the new development is. We saw thousands of people, mostly diverse groups of families waiting in line to see the Ravens practice, a thriving tourist area teeming with people, and neat, older, well-maintained neighborhoods. No rats, no infestation of any kind, no garbage in the streets, no filth, and no violence. And the human beings who live there, among whom are several of my friends, seem very happy to be there.

What our president did yesterday was another despicable example of how unfit he is to serve and represent us, much less lead. And make no mistake. As inarticulate as Trump is, he knows exactly what he’s saying. As CNN’s Victor Blackwell said in his emotional defense of the city he loves, it was the word “infested,” carefully chosen by Trump that tells us what goes on in our President’s sick mind.

As Blackwell points out, even with his embarrassingly limited vocabulary, Trump is an eloquent hate-monger. He knows how to get inside the guts of people, and he understands how one word can convey the kind of racist horror much of his base responds to. Blackwell correctly and tearfully noted that infested is one of Trump’s favorite words – crime infested, rat infested, disease infested. What do you picture when you hear that? It’s what spews repeatedly from our president’s mouth, and it has nothing at all to do with leadership or trying to improve the lives of Americans.

Trump himself represents the worst possible kind of infestation, a viral corruption of soul, of intellect, of common decency and morality that diminishes everything it touches with his unique brand of hate. I believe it’s a sign of desperation by a man who wants nothing less than absolute power to transform the country in his image of white supremacy and privilege. It tells me that he knows he will never expand his base unless he can denigrate everyone else in the minds of voters, and if he continues to lose support from independent voters who now see him for what he is, he will lose.

Except for exaggerated and made up self-adulation, when was the last time we heard anything positive from our president? Does he not understand how he is destroying the fabric that made our country great? Or is it simply that in his lust for power and wealth he doesn’t care?

Donald Trump is a cancer that must be removed before it kills us.

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Customer Service

Posted on July 26, 2019 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 26, 2019

As we watch our treasured institutions – truth, civility, respect for law – continue to recede in the rear view mirror of the Trump presidency and we cling to what remains, it’s easy to become cynical. Especially today, as every Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee when faced with genuine integrity, turned into a simpering sycophant .

The spectacle of the Mueller hearing was so unpleasant, even a trip to the Verizon store seemed preferable. I’d put it off for days after the WIFI extender I purchased from Verizon, (the house I lived in until last year wasn’t WIFI friendly) failed. I’d hard-wired it directly into a smart TV, and voila! We could stream Netflix and Amazon Prime again.

When we changed houses, the movers cabled the extender back to the TV, and streaming continued until the extender gave up the ghost. I bit the bullet and called Verizon Customer Service, then put the phone on speaker as their robot call system cheerfully informed me that due to the unusually high call volume…in Verizon-speak, that translates to “we keep laying off customer service staff because their salaries and benefits cut into our profits.”

My expected wait time was between 47 and 116 minutes, or I could ask them to call me back at my convenience. That is, I could pick a time for them to call and clear my calendar for the ensuing four hours in case their convenience didn’t coincide with mine. The price of my $75 extender was now $120, but at least I reviewed an entire manuscript while listening to the godawful music they play for customers waiting on hold.

I finally placed the order, but since I was about to leave on vacation, they shipped it to my friendly neighborhood Verizon store, where I could pick it up when I got back. Last night, I called Verizon to verify that the store had my extender but their call volume had grown so unusually large, the call robot could only offer me a next day call back.

I had no desire to sit around waiting for Verizon to call while I watched the Mueller hearing, interspersed with Trump Tweets. Instead, I went to the store, where I was greeted by a tablet instructing me to sign in and take a seat, while various Verizon employees called out greetings, reading from their welcoming scripts. Over by the seating wall, nine customers were already waiting. I counted eight Verizon employees and six customer service work stations, no more than three of which were active at any time. Over the next hour, four customers were served.

The entire setup screamed a single arrogant message: “You need us more than we need you, and we couldn’t care less about how much of your time we waste.” In contrast, the average time it took to service a customer who finally reached a live workstation was nearly fifty minutes, as the staff happily conversed about how the kids were doing, how hot the weather was…indulging every whim of the people they had just been pointedly ignoring. They were in suck-up mode trying to convince customers to commit to spend $5,000 over the next two years.

During the ninety minutes I waited, two customers left, angrily informing the staff that they were never coming back. A third, who was sitting next to me said, “That’s it. I’m done. I’m canceling all my Verizon services and switching to Sling TV.” There were still three customers ahead of me and I’d had enough. I collared one of the Verizon people whose job was to wander around looking not very busy and explained that I was only there to replace my WIFI extender which was waiting in their stockroom.

He said he couldn’t give me one without an order number and the one I received on the phone had expired. He expected me to start the process again by phone. The damn thing was sitting in the next room with my name on it and after all the crap they’d put me through he wouldn’t sell it to me. With his Verizon façade withering, he said he couldn’t sell it to me. Only customer service phone staff could and I needed a new order number.

Looking conflicted, he went into their storeroom and came out with a box. “Here, you can have this, but you still have to call Customer Service to get it activated and pay for it.” I went home, realizing along the way that this guy had been selling phones too long. There was no reason a simple amplifier had to be activated. All I had to do was attach the cables and it would work.

But first, (why not?) I switched the TV’s WIFI setting from Wired to Wireless and brought up Netflix. Everything worked fine. It turned out that my new house doesn’t need my free, unactivated extender after all.

I’m going to take it back and ask for a refund.

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Time Out

Posted on July 21, 2019 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 21, 2019

As despicable as Donald Trump’s latest round of racist tweets were, and even more so the sound of 45,000 people at his North Carolina rally parroting his “send them back” chant, it’s Sunday, and I’d rather write about something that’s more fun. So I’m officially calling a time out, which segues nicely into today’s subject.

The proliferation of nuclear weapons and the rise of terrorism gave birth to the modern sub-genre of Dystopian fiction. My 2012 novel, The Portal, was one such, set a hundred years from now in an America hurt by reckless economic policies, misguided military adventures, and isolationism. But unlike the future I fear Trumpism portends, all is not misery and desolation in The Portal. Boys and girls still fall in love, (it’s basically a love story,) and America’s pastime is healthier than ever, serving as a welcome distraction for the downtrodden masses.

22nd century baseball would have evolved considerably from what we know today, and I predicted that robot umpires would be calling balls and strikes. Yesterday, my dream came to fruition. For the first time, a professional baseball game used a robot equipped with 3-D Doppler Radar instead of a live umpire to police the strike zone. I wish I were as successful at predicting political outcomes.

I didn’t get it exactly right, but close enough. In The Portal, a “thin, rubberized home plate lies atop the umpire, an inset metal box with identical dimensions. It works by scanning a batter to create a three-dimensional strike zone as a hologram shimmering in the air. Microchips embedded in the artificial rawhide that covers the ball emit cold sparks whenever the ball intersects the strike zone.” I thought that was pretty cool. You can’t argue with sparks flying through the air, and they’re not easily offended.

The robot umpire that called balls and strikes in the Atlantic League All-Star game in York, PA also used an electronic box to track the paths of pitched balls. But rather than being embedded beneath home plate, it was attached to the roof of the stadium. It’s part of the same Trackman radar system that has been tracking home runs, pitch speeds, and batted ball speeds for the last few seasons.

In York, a human umpire with an iPod earbud stood behind home plate calling each pitch based on what the Trackman system whispered in his ear. Remarkably, in the opinion of players and coaches on both sides, the robot umpire was nearly perfect except for one called third strike. Counter to my expectation, despite the futility of arguing with a robot, one of the coaches, former New York Mets pitcher Frank Viola, got into a donnybrook over the close call and was ejected from the game. No, not by the robot.

The human umpire said he’d have called it a ball, but acknowledged that based on its programming, the robot umpire technically got it right, which raises an interesting question that will have to be resolved before Major League Baseball adopts the robot umpire. But there’s no doubt that if you’re looking for something optimistic to look forward to, baseball’s future will be faster games with consistent strike zones – a win-win for everyone.

It will require some adaptation by players, because a “perfect” umpire raises as many questions as it resolves. A robot umpire uses geometric algorithms to evaluate pitches. Its strike zone is a rectangular prism (a three-dimensional rectangle) customized for each batter’s physical characteristics. And therein lies the potential problem, because the robot umpire calls a pitch a strike if it barely grazes one corner of its virtual strike zone, even if it bounces before it reaches the catcher. A human umpire moderates the physical evidence with a sense of whether the pitch is hittable.

It’s not nearly as earth-shaking a problem as pondering a future that includes four more years of Trump, but it’s a lot more fun to contemplate. The issue, as the visionary author Neal Stephenson discusses in his latest novel, Fall, is that any artificial intelligence (as opposed to Fake News) system makes some decisions better and faster than a human brain, but there are many things humans do better. AI systems and robot umpires both need a way to simulate the subjective inputs that only a human is capable of.

Stephenson imagines using realistic video games to crowd source how real humans would make the kinds of close calls an umpire will have to make, to teach the robot what it can’t learn on its own. Isn’t that a lot more fun than anticipating a possible Trump victory in 2020?

I’m tempted to withdraw inside my baseball cocoon every day, but I still have a pressing question. How do you ask a robot to call time out?

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You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

Posted on July 16, 2019 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 16, 2019

Forty-five years ago, when Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s hit single said, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, here’s something that you’re never gonna forget,” they were talking about love. Today, with the specter of nearly sixteen months of election campaigns still to go (does this madness ever end?) those words have taken on a different, more sinister meaning. If you thought Donald Trump was a divisive spewer of hate and bigotry before, just wait. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Trump made it clear this week that nothing is too outrageous, too hateful, or too lacking in class in his win-at-any-cost approach to life. He elevated his rhetoric to outright lynch mob proportions, sounding even more like 1933 Adolph Hitler than he did in 2016. I don’t care which side you’re on politically. This is so far beyond politics, it has become an existential question of the survival of our national identity.

As we continue to struggle to put the aftereffects of our legacy of slavery and genocide (remember the native tribes that used to inhabit America?) behind us, Trump would usher in a new era of hate. In a transparent appeal to the Alt-Right and those who still subscribe to the Nazi-like mentality of the last century, he has thrown down the gauntlet to anyone who is not white enough, male enough, or American enough to suit his taste.

If you’re not the kind of American he believes in, you don’t belong in Trump’s America. He said so over the weekend in unambiguous, coherent (for him) terms. His rabid base heard him loud and clear. Did the rest of the country get the message? The rest of the world surely did, and not just countries where millions live in poverty and fear for their families. It’s become clearer every day to our erstwhile allies that the America Trump would build is not the country they tied their hopes to in the past.

Our (perhaps false) national image of openness, generosity, and commitment to democratic ideals has become one of selfishness, callous disregard, and lack of compassion. Not surprisingly, those qualities perfectly describe Trump himself. By attempting to change the country to look just like him, Trump, who views himself as godlike, makes a sick mockery of the Judeo-Christian tradition that men and women were created in God’s image.

Last week, I singled out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for risking the party unity that is essential to defeating Trump in 2020 with her unbridled rhetoric. But I did not criticize her for being non-white, female, or progressive. I love what she represents. She is her generation’s embodiment of the American ideal of immigrants growing and strengthening our country. I didn’t call her anti-American, anti-Semitic, or a Communist, as Trump referred to her and the other members of the so-called Squad.

The Squad is four members of the US House of Representatives: AOC of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ayasha Pressly of Massachusetts, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. They are all American citizens and women of color who hold strong beliefs and ideals and who are not afraid to speak their minds. They are anathema to Donald Trump who would banish them to the nonexistent places they came from that he conjured up in his sick mind.

Like many Americans, I am sometimes troubled by the things they say. They remind me of the deep divisions that still exist in America, and their sometimes exaggerated claims scare me, because they could deepen the racial and gender chasms that separate us. That said, they don’t scare me nearly as much as Donald Trump’s hate-mongering, which is made worse by the unwillingness of anyone in his party to call him out for it.

I’m angry as hell at the millions of Americans who buy Trump’s lies and bury their heads in their tax returns to avoid seeing and smelling the putrid corpse of America’s prestige in the world. I don’t blame the far right for Trump’s success – there aren’t enough of them to re-elect him. If he wins in 2020, it will be because of the indolence and intellectual laziness of Americans who won’t get involved. The real crisis in America isn’t at the Mexican Border. It’s the gradual erosion of what most of us believe in.

I normally don’t quote television personalities, but Stephen Colbert got it right last night. Commenting on Trump’s statement that if the Squad doesn’t like it here they should leave, Colbert suggested that Trump apply that to himself. He even suggested a place for him to go.

If you’re already nauseated by what politics has turned into in America, look closely at who is the chief purveyor of hate. Between now and November of 2020 it’s only going to get worse. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

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The Evolution of AOC

Posted on July 12, 2019 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 12, 2019

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sprang onto the national scene in 2018 I cheered. She seemed to be exactly what the country needed in Congress – a young, intelligent, self-assured woman with a strong belief in social and racial equality, women’s rights, and the urgency of saving our environment. She also spoke about the need to defeat Donald Trump, which should have resolved any doubts I had about her. But even in my enthusiasm, fueled somewhat by the coincidence that she represented a district I lived in for many years, I had reservations.

Her youthful idealism reminded me of my own fifty years earlier, and her charisma made her delightfully attractive, especially her viral dancing videos on a New York City rooftop and entering her Congressional office for the first time. And in response to criticisms from the right and from within her own party she simply smiled and carried on, ignoring it. Very impressive!

But in the fifty years since I might have marched alongside her, oblivious of the collateral damage I might be causing, I grew up. I learned that sometimes goals have to be prioritized. Sometimes we have to reign in our passionately held ideals and recognize that in politics timing is everything. Sometimes fighting for something we believe in can undermine other, more fundamental ones, and we need to choose our battles carefully.

Perhaps the most important growing up lesson was that loners who never learn the value of being part of a team usually fail in the end. After watching her during her first six months in Congress, it’s clear that the evolution of AOC still has a long way to go. In her current incarnation, she is as much a danger to our future as a potential savior.

Today, a coworker said AOC’s behavior and overall demeanor reminded him of Trump’s. That startled me until I thought about it. I’d have said they couldn’t be more different, but if you disregard AOC’s words and focus only her brashness and her commitment to the promises she made to her base their similarity is striking. They both carved their own path through the jungle of politics. They both totally disregarded the establishment wing of their party and won upset victories that surprised everyone.

In Trump’s case, his victory left a horrifying trail of debris, the remnants of the former Republican Party. He not only trashed everything the legitimate Conservative movement stood for, but he has been on a thirty-month rampage that sought to redefine the rules of behavior and decency we live by and undermine the respect for law that has been the strength of our democracy. In doing so, he shined a spotlight on the fundamental weakness of what the Republican party had become prior to his campaign. What might once have been seen a strongly principled bloc of people turned out to be a bunch of self-absorbed sniveling cowards who trembled in the face of a far-right bigoted base that no one realized still existed in this country.

Given all that I have two concerns. One is that despite the skilled, strong leadership of Nancy Pelosi, AOC and her “Squad” may ultimately have a similar effect on the Democrats. Big tents contain disparate interests that don’t always get along. If she continues to create wide schisms among Democrats she can make her party as dysfunctional as Trump made the Republicans, and that would be a tragedy for the country.

The other is that since there is enough dissatisfaction with Trump as president (by a roughly three-to-two margin in every poll taken since he took office) to assure his defeat in 2020, the most likely path for his re-election is a fractured opposition. Trump understood that in 2015, and he proceeded to dismantle the party he shanghaied and remodel it to suit his base of support. He could never have won otherwise.

There is only one priority over the next sixteen months. Donald Trump must be defeated for the good of the country. To those who criticize Pelosi for marginalizing AOC and a few other young Turks, I say you should be thanking her, because the divisiveness they create runs parallel to Trump’s route to victory in 2016. The difference is that while the fissures that already existed in the Republican Party ultimately enabled Trump’s victory, exacerbating differences among Democrats can only result in their defeat.

It’s possible that both Trump and AOC will prove me wrong. Trump the narcissistic loner might survive 2020, and AOC could wind up heading her own wing of a splintered Democratic Party. But they’re possibilities that must be averted at all costs, like nuclear war and making our planet uninhabitable for our grandchildren.

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Hijacking The Fourth

Posted on July 4, 2019 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 4, 2019

I loved parades. Every year I waited for Memorial Day, Independence Day, even Labor Day, so I could see soldiers, bands, artillery batteries – you name it – marching down Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, with my father, a purple heart World War II veteran beside me. Of course, I was a child, then. All I knew was that we’d won that horrible war and we were all so proud and grateful that our fathers and uncles were safe at home.

It didn’t take long to outgrow the lure of military parades, notwithstanding Blue Angel flyovers at football games. Not too many years later, government sponsored military parades were uniformly seen as bluster by other nations putting on a show for their people. We saw May Day parades in the Soviet Union and China, replete with soldiers, tanks, and ICBMs on truck beds. It was always a chilling sight, but we were told they were merely signs of weakness, an inferior military puffing out its collective chest showing the rest of the world how tough they were. After that, we still honored our war veterans when they marched in Veterans’ Day parades, but we stopped waving our weapons under the noses of the rest of the world.

Until now.

Disgusting and obscene as it is to see tanks on flatbeds moving down Pennsylvania Avenue, is anyone really surprised at the way Donald Trump hijacked our holiday of national pride and turned it into a personal ego trip to bolster his base? He must be nervous as hell seeing polls that say he’d lose to almost every one of the Democrats who have declared their candidacy, were the election tomorrow. So he’s rattling our sabers again and sending ICE storm troopers out to round up all the hard-working people who have been doing the jobs Americans see as beneath them, all the while paying taxes, going to school, and serving in our military. That’ll show the rest of the world what bad-asses we are.

I’m writing this from Canada, Banff to be specific. I didn’t plan it this way, but having been here for Canada Day last Monday and for the Fourth, today, I couldn’t be happier that I’m not home to see the latest desecration of our treasured traditions and values. The contrast with Canada Day was impossible to ignore. To my eyes, it was a happy, proud celebration of Canada’s 152nd anniversary as an independent nation. Happy, friendly people, public cutting of giant birthday cakes, everyone wishing everyone he came in contact with Happy Canada Day. It’s the busiest weekend of the year in Canada, and it doesn’t offend anyone.

There are thousands of people here enjoying the Rockies, British Columbia, and Alberta from every English-speaking country in the world. From several non-English-speaking ones too, but I wasn’t able to interact much with them. From the others, Canadians, Brits, Australians, Kiwis, there was a shockingly consistent outpouring of negative comments every time Trump and the USA were mentioned. And that came up a lot, as all the American news channels are available everywhere, here.

All we saw and heard this week was headshaking dismay. How could you let your country come to such a pass? It was never said with malice or in a mocking tone. It sounded like the compassionate comforting you might offer a friend who just lost a loved one. My server at dinner last night, a young woman from Montreal, actually hugged me when I told her how glad we were to be far from Trump’s latest embarrassing spectacle.

It’s never clear what’s going on in Trump’s head, but if it’s true that the only reason he backed off on having tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue under their own power was the cost of having to repair the streets afterward, that speaks volumes about how he thinks. It apparently never occurred to him that a military parade in Washington would conjure memories of Soviet tanks putting down uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, of Nazi armies occupying Paris, Antwerp, Warsaw, and Amsterdam. Or of Chinese troops and tanks facing off against civilian protestors in Tiananmen Square. My guess is he wouldn’t care.

It was both mildly surprising and refreshing to hear all those well-meaning foreigners lament with us. The most commonly heard comment was that Trump adores dictators and autocrats and does everything possible to imitate them. Note that the people expressing that are from all over our planet, far from the clutches of fake news.

This new development is more than disturbing. Except for those in Trump’s base who find the idea of American forces bombing everyone Trump dislikes sexually arousing, for the rest of us, it’s another reminder of how desperately we need to be rid of him.

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Bye Bye Sarah

Posted on June 15, 2019 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 15, 2019

In an administration that has come to be known for lies, alternative facts, and fake news, there has been no better poster child for the Trump brand than Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. It was apparent in her statement immediately following the announcement of her resignation last Thursday. Sanders proudly proclaimed her legacy was one of openness and transparency, while the world, excluding the president’s hard core base was issuing good riddances.

Representative of those who were happy to see Sanders go was David Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Barrack Obama. Upon hearing of Sanders’ resignation, Axelrod said her legacy as White House press secretary will be one of “defending the indefensible, and not being truthful with the American people.” While Axelrod is clearly partisan, he has never been a political attack dog, and he has freely criticized Democrats as well as Donald Trump and his staff. Most notably, he recently took Joe Biden to task, seriously questioning the viability of the Democratic frontrunner for the 2020 nomination for President.

White House Press Secretary is a tough job. With someone like Donald Trump in the White House, the degree of difficulty soars by orders of magnitude. To be successful, a press secretary needs to be tough and self-confident. She needs to stand up to the aggressive White House press corps, but balance her strength with civility and at least the appearance of openness. In the opinion of most observers, Sanders did neither. As Axelrod put it, “In this job, she was called upon to choose between her fidelity to Trump and her fidelity to the truth, and she chose Trump.”

She did so not only with her words, even adopting the president’s own pugnacious, in-your-face style. She seemed to have a perpetual sneer on her face whenever the cameras were on her, and to my ears at least, she always spoke with whiny disdain. Unlike her predecessor, Sean Spicer, who was clearly not up to the job and often seemed uncertain and uncomfortable in the role, Sanders always appeared to relish it. Her unquestioned loyalty to the president, while admirable from one point of view, knew no limits in terms of partisanship and lying in his defense.

VICE News recently documented the most flagrant of Sanders’ failures to tell the truth. As we have all seen in recent years, every media outlet is guilty of some degree of bias, but the website “mediabiasfactcheck.com” rates VICE Media as center-left leaning (the lowest level of bias on their seven point scale) and very high in factual reporting.

In case you’ve either given up listening months ago or you just don’t remember, VICE recounted some of Sanders’ most flagrant distortions of the truth. Concerning the firing of James Comey, she asserted that he had completely lost the confidence of the  rank and file of the FBI, a lie made up in what she referred to as “the heat of the moment” that was later refuted by the Mueller report. Then she lied, first about whether Trump had paid hush money to a porn star, and later about whether he knew about the payments. When Trump fired Omarosa Manigault-Newman, Sanders claimed that the Trump administration had created more than three times as many jobs for African Americans as the Obama administration. The truth is that more than four times as many African-American jobs were attributed to Obama than to Trump.

The list goes on. Sanders tweeted a video of CNN reporter Jim Acosta that had been altered to make it look like he had assaulted a White House aide. She claimed that 4,000 suspected terrorists had been apprehended trying to enter the United States from Mexico when in fact the number of migrants who appeared on law enforcement watch lists was six (6). She claimed that the Obama administration had wire-tapped the Trump campaign and that Trump had never encouraged political violence at his rallies.

If you view Sarah Sanders as an employee of the President, she did her job impeccably. Trump was her boss, but I would argue that she was first and foremost an employee of the American people whose taxes paid her salary. From that perspective, she was nothing but a shill for Trump, and her obvious antagonism for the press and the First Amendment may have done more to widen the partisan divide in our country than anyone in the Administration except Trump himself.

I happily join those who wish Sarah goodbye and good riddance. Will her successor be any better? Not likely, considering that the only qualification for the job in the Trump White House is unflinching loyalty to the president.

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A 3-M Week

Posted on June 11, 2019 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 11, 2019

This is not an attempt to convince anyone to buy or sell 3M stock. Rather, it’s a mildly depressing look at the way Donald Trump massacred the thirteenth letter of our alphabet this week.

The first M is for Mexico, which is also the M in the agreed to but as yet unratified USMCA, the trade agreement that is supposed to replace NAFTA. According to the president, USMCA was needed because NAFTA was the worst deal ever negotiated in the history of the United States. Of course, Trump has also described the Iran nuclear deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Paris Accords on Climate Change as the worse deals his predecessors ever made, though he has offered nothing to replace them.

A quick read of the US Trade Representative’s summary of the USMCA offers no specifics to prove that it actually improves the US position in trade with Mexico and Canada, and most observers describe USMCA as NAFTA on an allegedly more level playing field (though the USTR summary offers no specific evidence of that) with a couple of “new chapters covering Digital Trade, Anticorruption, Good Regulatory Practices, [and how] Small and Medium Sized Enterprises benefit from the Agreement.”

Since the Office of the Trade Representative is essentially a shill for the White House, this description is about the rosiest spin anyone could put on USMCA, which using Trump’s own words would make it only a marginal improvement over an agreement that is in a four-way tie as the worst in our history. The whole USMCA thing was quintessential Trump: lies, exaggerations, bullying threats, and a thinly veiled cloak of xenophobia and racism. In May, his administration came full circle by lifting the tariffs on steel and aluminum with which he started his little heroic operetta of phony crisis followed by fearless leader rushing in to save the day.

That’s the kind of alternate reality Trump lives in, and this week he added a layer of absurdity worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan as he announced he’d “reached a deal” with Mexico that averted his latest round of bullying tariff threats. Trump proudly proclaimed that he had brought Mexico to its knees, forcing them to control the flow of migrants through their country to our southern border. The centerpiece of the intimidation/extortion deal was Mexico’s agreement to send thousands of its national guard troops to police its own southern border with Guatemala…but wait, wasn’t that the same agreement that had been made months earlier before Trump announced new tariffs?

By now we’re all familiar with the Trump playbook. It’s pretty short since he only knows one play. Trump up (the phrase may have been coined for him) a fake crisis, create chaos among his own Congress and business communities, revel in how his actions make the stock market dance, and then pull out a meaningless victory that accomplishes nothing that didn’t already exist. Are you as tired of all this as I am?

This brings us to M number 2 – the Moon. Trump had bragged for months that he was revitalizing NASA and increasing its budget to restore its former greatness. We were going back to the Moon, and would land astronauts there, including the first Selenian woman, by 2024. He touted the Moon effort loudly for weeks until it suddenly occurred to him that the Moon was fifty-year old news.

So he changed his tune. Why spend all that money doing something we’ve already done, which gets us to M number 3 – Mars. Apparently, we’re finally going to Mars because Trump said so, though there was none of the inspiration in the announcement that we felt when John Kennedy told us about Project Apollo. Just more of Trump’s brash, uninformed brags. You see, Trump forgot that the plan all along had been to establish a base on the Moon first and then use it as a jumping off point to Mars.

In his uniquely inarticulate way, he managed to conflate the two efforts in one huge gaffe when he tweeted that “the Moon is part of Mars” over the weekend. As much as I consider Trump a dangerous embarrassment and a horrible excuse for a leader, I don’t believe he actually thinks the Moon is part of Mars. But that doesn’t excuse making all of us cringe at his ludicrous tweet. I don’t know whether it would be worse if our president was dumb enough to believe the Moon was part of Mars, or that he’s simply content to sound like a moron whenever he sees television lights or a computer keyboard.

I said at the outset that this would be only mildly depressing. That’s because we’ve heard this stuff so much we’re becoming dulled to it.

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Defeating Donald Trump

Posted on June 2, 2019 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 2, 2019

To listen to the pundits with their prediction models, defeating Donald Trump in 2020 will be a monumental task which is made worse by our outmoded Electoral College. Those same pundits told us Trump would never win the Republican nomination, and up until a few days before the 2016 election, assured us that he had little chance of beating Hillary Clinton.

Almost every House and Senate Republican seems to be telling us that Trump’s base is so strong, it makes a mockery of integrity. They fear his base so much that they never speak up and tell the truth about the president when the cameras are rolling, as many of them do in private, off-the-record remarks. Trump’s shameless pandering and bullying, his willingness to do anything to win, regardless of how venal and immoral has made them forget why they were elected.

While it’s true that short of a smoking gun proving Trump committed felonies, the core of his base is immovable, Republican cowardice in the face of existential necessity is actually an affront to the other two-thirds of the electorate. Those people who voted for Trump hoping he would grow into the office, those who didn’t vote because they disliked both candidates, and those who bought into the right wing’s twenty-year long hate-Hillary campaign couldn’t care less about who Trump’s base supports.

Beyond that, we can at least hope that those Americans who were willing to believe anything they read on Facebook last time have learned something. Far too many people in this country displayed a frightening level of intellectual laziness combined with a herd mentality that made them easy to manipulate by fake news and Russian bots. Those who realize they were suckered in 2016 are angry now, angrier than they’ve been since they were lied to about Vietnam and the misguided decision to fight in Iraq.

There have been many times when we doubted Americans’ ability to get it right when things looked bad. In the 1970’s I was among the millions of people who feared that our system was being undermined and it might collapse. But American voters have always shown great resiliency when it mattered most, and they will this time, too. Forget all the nonsense about how difficult it will be to defeat Trump. Ignore the people who are paid handsomely by the media to get it wrong, as long as they stir up controversy and increase ratings. Think for yourself. It’s not that complicated.

Despite all the factors working against her, including Russian interference and James Comey inexplicably and irresponsibly inserting himself into the campaign weeks before the election, Hillary Clinton still won the popular vote in 2016 by more than three million. She ran an abysmal campaign that was rife with tactical mistakes, she was abandoned by many Bernie Sanders supporters who felt the Party had rigged the primary, and her strategists completely missed what was happening in the rust belt states. It was a perfect storm of incompetence and unanticipated events.

The fact is, Trump’s base hasn’t grown since he took office – it’s still barely more than a third of the country. Trump only wins again if all the things that went wrong for Clinton in 2016 happen again. But of the Democratic candidates with enough name recognition to matter this time, none has a disapproval rating remotely as negative as Clinton’s was. With Trump’s continued attacks on women’s rights, immigrants, and refugees, it should be child’s play to energize voters sympathetic to those issues. 2020 is the Democrats’ election to lose, which they might do if they fail to heed the wise counsel of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and keep trying to sell Socialism to an electorate too ignorant to even know what it is.

Given the 2016 debacle, 2020 should be easy. As James Carville might say, it’s the Electoral College, Stupid. 2016 was lost in the rust belt states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Democrats should easily be able to take at least three of those states back, and possibly all four, given former Ohio governor Kasich’s disdain for Trump. How? By showing voters how they’ve been hurt by Trump’s trade war, and how Trump’s tax bill will not help working people as their temporary benefits are sunsetted. By asking rust belters, as Ronald Reagan did successfully, if they’re better off today than they were four years ago, and tellling them how Democrats will do better..

If Democrats want to win the rust belt back, their best hope is a team of Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar. They’re both popular in those states, and they’re centrists who avoid the extreme positions that marginalize large segments of the electorate. Priority number one is defeating Donald Trump. Democrats should save their policy debates for after they win.

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