Tag John Kennedy

Reality checkers

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

obfuscate: to throw into shadow; to make obscure; confuse; to be evasive, unclear, or confusing (Merriam-Webster)

We — all of us, I think — we need more people in our world with clear vision about things that are happening plus both the ability and the commitment to speak plainly and honestly about those things. Today I come to praise the deobfuscators.

Have you heard, there were people in the White House during the last term who tried to cover up the president’s physical and mental decline? I know, such a shock, right? Or, as the great Charles P. Pierce puts it in Esquire, the hysteria over Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s revelation “that a White House will withhold adverse health information from the public…is, of course, news to those people who remember Grover Cleveland’s secret cancer operation, the unspoken agreement not to photograph FDR in his wheelchair, the relative severity of Eisenhower’s heart problems, the staggering medical record of John F. Kennedy, Nixon’s manic boozing during the height of the Watergate crisis, and, in the closest parallel we have, Reagan’s staff’s successful concealment of the fact that he was a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient for most of his second term.”

It’s not to say that what is reported in this book is not true; it is to say, rather, “duh.” The diminishment of public dialogue in our time, to a focus on what is shiny and new to the exclusion of all else, makes it easy for us to lose sight of the things that should really matter to our country, to our children’s future. Of course, there are those who prefer it this way:

Life will go back to normal for the elite political media and their useful idiots in the Democratic party. They won’t have to think much about assaults on habeas corpus, deportation of tiny cancer patients, destruction of the regulatory safeguards of the federal government, or clear-cutting of American democracy. Game on!

Earlier this month we all learned that Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, decided to lift the “permanent” ban from baseball issued in 1989 to Pete Rose, which makes Rose eligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Columnist Mike Finger at the San Antonio Express-News elegantly gives voice to the clear reading of events which corporate Baseball would prefer you ignore: MLB dishonestly re-defined “permanent” to mean “lifetime” and cravenly capitulated to a president who can’t keep his tiny tiny hands off of other people’s business.

In one view of America, apparently shared by Manfred, character counts, but it doesn’t count that much. Some sins are unforgivable, but only for a while. History should be honored, but the parts that make us uncomfortable can be omitted.

And above all, principles are what matter, right up until the day someone in power asks you to abandon them.

Within three years, baseball’s all-time leader in hits might be enshrined at last in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Thanks to Manfred’s decision, Rose is eligible to be considered by the veteran’s committee, even though he repeatedly broke the game’s most hallowed rule, even though he denied it for more than a decade, even though he never apologized, and even though the ban he accepted in 1989 was supposed to be “permanent.”

None of those facts changed after Rose died last September at age 83. The only big development since then was that Rose received a public show of support from the president of the United States.

If your consideration is limited to Rose’s career as a player, there’s no doubt he deserves the honor of being in the Hall, starting with the fact the had more hits than any other player, ever. But he was banned because he broke the rule that no player is allowed to bet on baseball, ever. Period.

Rose had his chances to atone for his misdeeds while he was alive, and he never did. He applied for reinstatement in 2015, initially claimed he didn’t bet on sports anymore, then admitted he still did. He kept making appearances in casinos, even after then-commissioner Bud Selig suggested that staying away could provide a path to removing the ban.

(snip)

And now is the time that Manfred chooses to ease off the most notorious betting rule-breaker of his generation?

Apparently, now is indeed the time. Now is the time, even though betting wasn’t the worst of Rose’s alleged transgressions. In 2017, Rose was accused in federal court documents by a woman who claimed to have had a sexual relationship with him when she was 14 or 15 years old in 1973, when Rose was in his 30s. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rose issued a response acknowledging he had sex with the accuser, but “said he believed she was 16 at the time, old enough to legally consent in Ohio.”

In 2022, when an Inquirer reporter asked him about the incident, Rose responded, “It was 55 years ago, babe.”

That, of course, is not an admission of guilt. It’s also probably not a line likely to be included on Rose’s Cooperstown plaque, if he gets one.

It is, however, a reflection of one version of America. As long as the right man is vouching for you, any source of shame can be overlooked, if not outright ignored.

We need people who are on the lookout for attempts to warp the facts of the reality we share, and I’m pleased to have found two more.

Fight the normalization of Trumpism

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

A year ago the Republican establishment felt pretty good about its prospects, crowed about the outstanding group of people who were running for president, and acted confident about the party’s chances of winning back control of the executive branch of the national government.  Today we see party leaders trudge to the microphone with all the cheer of a condemned man on the way to the gallows to endorse He Who Has All But Won the Party’s Presidential Nomination, while a growing Greek chorus is warming up a “not so fast” refrain for an electorate faced with two bad choices.

Stepping out from the chorus today, in National Review, Charles Murray issues an important challenge to what he calls the conservative establishment: go on the record—now; right now—with your view of Donald Trump.  It’s not good enough for Republicans or conservatives to shrug their shoulders and side with Trump because they disagree with Hillary Clinton on the issues and think she’d make a worse, or much worse, president, he argues.  Although voters often have to pick from among two or more bad choices, Murray calls on those who make politics their livelihood to assess Trump as a candidate for president without comparing him to the presumed Democratic nominee or any other particular candidate.  Tell us, does the man meet your standards as a potential president; what’s your real opinion.

Murray answers his own challenge: “Donald Trump is unfit to be president in ways that apply to no other candidate of the two major political parties throughout American history.”  OK.  It is not, he says, just that Trump is greedy and venal and narcissistic, or even that he’s a liar…anyone could miss a few facts:

Then it gets a little more important, as when [Trump] says Paul Ryan called to congratulate him after his victory in the New York primary, announcing a significant political event that in fact did not happen. Then the fictions touch on facts about policy. No, Wisconsin does not have an effective unemployment rate of 20 percent, nor does the federal government impose Common Core standards on the states — to take just two examples plucked at random from among his continual misrepresentations of reality. That he deals so heedlessly in those misrepresentations makes it impossible for an opponent to conduct an authentic policy debate with him.

It’s one thing when a candidate knowingly deceives the public on a few specific topics. Hillary Clinton has knowingly tried to deceive the public about her flip-flop on gay marriage and her misuse of her e-mail server. That’s bad. It should be condemned. This aspect of her character should affect one’s deliberations about whether to vote for her. It’s another thing entirely when a candidate blithely rejects Pat Moynihan’s (attributed) dictum, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.”

Murray links to other writers who have made their own contributions to the growing collection of reasons why Trump is unfit, and it turns out they are some of the very same pieces I’ve been saving for future reference: Ross Douthat, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, among others.  They have identified aspects of the candidate’s character that should make any reasonable person nervous at the prospect of a President Trump: the bullying, the unreconstructed pandering to voter fear and racial prejudice, the threats against journalists who dare ask pointed questions, the unrealistic view of the modern world and America’s place in it.

I am told that it is unfair to speak in such harsh terms of a person I don’t know personally: Look how nice his kids seem to be. Look at all his friends who say that he’s really a pleasant fellow in private. Sorry. I don’t need any secondary sources. Donald Trump makes the case for David Brooks’s assessment in every public appearance. When a man deliberately inflames the antagonism of one American ethnic group toward another, takes pleasure in labeling people “losers,” and openly promises to use the powers of the presidency to punish people who get in his way, there is nothing that person can do or say in private that should alter my opinion of whether he is fit to be the president of the United States.

I know that I am unlikely to persuade any of my fellow Establishmentarians to change their minds. But I cannot end without urging you to resist that sin to which people with high IQs (which most of you have) are unusually prone: Using your intellectual powers to convince yourself of something despite the evidence plainly before you. Just watch and listen to the man. Don’t concoct elaborate rationalizations. Just watch and listen. [emphasis added]

That’s important.  His ability to (apparently) win the nomination of one of the two major political parties for president of our country, as stunning as it is, shouldn’t be our excuse to relax and think, well, if the GOP thinks he’s fine then I guess he must be; I must’ve misunderstood some of what he said (or the media reported it wrong!).  It will be tough to do, but don’t let the sheer lunacy of what he says wear off—don’t just get used to the outrageousness and let it become normal, become just another opinion.

And, one more thing from Murray:

…contemplate this fact about history: We have had presidents whose competence once in office was better than we could have anticipated. Truman, for example. We have had presidents whose characters were subsequently revealed to be worse than they had seemed during the campaign. Kennedy, for example. We have never had a president whose character proved to be more admirable once he was in office than it had appeared during the campaign. What you see on your television screen every day from Donald Trump the candidate is the best that you can expect from Donald Trump the president. “Hillary is even worse” doesn’t cut it.