Democrats are making the same mistakes Republicans made when they inhabited their own house of outrage, back in 1998.
.. 3.3 percent, last quarter’s annual growth rate, the highest in three years... , 24 percent, which is the rise in the Dow Jones industrial average since Trump became president.. What if Mueller comes up short in finding evidence of collusion? What if the worst Mueller’s got is one bad tweet that, maybe, constitutes evidence of obstruction? And what if further doubts are raised about the impartiality of the investigation?.. The president’s opponents have made a huge political bet on an outcome that’s far from clear. Anything less than complete vindication for our side may wind up as utter humiliation.
Thanksgiving Gratitude for a Father’s Lesson
Many years ago, I committed an offense for which famous men are now being publicly, and rightly, shamed. I patted an office secretary on her behind. I won’t offer the usual lame defense that I didn’t know my advance was unwanted or that social attitudes were different back then.
My only excuse is that at the time of the incident I was about 7 years old.
I remember the moment because of what happened immediately afterward. The secretary, who worked at my father’s business in Mexico City, turned around and slammed a heavy stack of papers on my head. I marched indignantly over to my dad’s office to report her behavior — only so that he could march me over to her desk and have me apologize. He followed that up with a stern warning never to do anything of the sort again.
I don’t remember the secretary’s name. But what a service she did me by giving me a knock I’ll never forget, one that took courage and self-respect considering I was her boss’s son. What a service, too, that my dad defended her and gave me the talking-to that he did. It’s a lesson every boy should get — loud, clear, and early — from a male role model.
.. Oh, and be tender. Most kids endure a sex talk with a parent. Mine with him, on a winter’s evening drive when I was 12, was light on the mechanical issues but heavy on the subjects of gentleness, respect and love. I sat through it in mortified silence.
..How do men steer a path between the anachronistic prudery of a Mike Pence (who will not dine alone with a woman other than his wife) and the naked lechery of a Louis C.K., both of which share the premise that the central consideration in any interaction between a man and a woman must involve the prospect of sex?
.. There’s a long history for such ideas, dating at least to the 16th century with Baldassare Castiglione’s “Book of the Courtier.” But most books published today on the subject of gentlemanliness are about how to dress, not how to behave.
.. Other than the advice columnists at Maxim magazine, who are today’s male authorities on the subjects of consideration, modesty and respect? Who, in the age of Trump, is teaching boys why not to grope — even when they can, even when “you can do anything”?
.. The good news is that, thanks to some brave women, we are at a moment when a great many men are privately re-examining past behavior and wondering how to do better. In other words, we’re thinking about how we might act as gentlemen. For now, it’s an impulse based largely on fear. In time, it should become one based on hope — the hope of real romantic fulfillment through the creation of trust, the practice of courtship, the intimacy of love and genuine partnership.
The Sleazy Case Against Mueller’s Probe
In the matter of Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump-Russia connection, administration apologists make three significant claims in an effort to discredit the former F.B.I. director’s work. Let’s have a look at them:
- First, they insist that the intelligence dossier compiled by British ex-spook Christopher Steele that’s one basis for the F.B.I.’s own investigation has been discredited or is at best uncorroborated. In the same vein, they claimthat Fusion GPS, the research firm that helped pay Steele for the dossier, is little more than a “sleazy operator.”
- Fusion’s credibility, client list or aggressive tactics are irrelevant. Fusion brokered the dossier but Steele produced it. What’s relevant is his credibility, the reliability of his sources and the truthfulness of their claims.
- Bill Browder, the anti-Putin campaigner who is an outspoken critic of Fusion, calls Steele “a top-class person whose reputation is beyond reproach.”
- At least one of Steele’s possible Russian sources was found dead and three others were charged with treason, suggesting, as one Wall Street Journal news account noted, that the Kremlin was cleaning out the moles who had betrayed its hand in last year’s election meddling
- After this column went to print, The Times reported that Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page met with Russian government officials in a July 2016 trip to Moscow, something he has long denied. This further confirms another claim made in the Steele dossier
This brings us to the second anti-Mueller contention, which is that his indictment of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort for tax fraud connected to his political work in Ukraine, along with news of the guilty plea entered by Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos for lying to the F.B.I., is merely evidence of the slimness of the special counsel’s case.
The nonchalance about Manafort’s illicit ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine is almost funny, coming from the same people who went berserk over China’s alleged meddling on behalf of Democrats in the 1996 presidential campaign.
But if nothing else, the Manafort indictment underscores the Trump campaign’s astonishing vulnerability to Russian blackmail.
Did that vulnerability explain the campaign’s bizarre intervention (denied by Manafort) to soften the Republican Party platform’s language on providing help to Ukraine?
Since when did conservatives suddenly become conveniently bored with getting to the bottom of Russian conspiracies?
- .. Yet how else was Steele supposed to investigate allegations of Russia’s ties to the Trump campaign except by talking to Russian sources with insight into the Kremlin? If Clinton was the beneficiary of the Kremlin’s designs, why did it leak her emails? And why would Putin favor the candidate most hostile to him in last year’s election but undermine the one who kept offering improved relations?
I Believe Some of Your Best Friends Are Jewish
I believe the A.S.A. will one day get around to boycotting the academic institutions of China for its occupation of Tibet, or of Russia for its occupation of Ukraine, or of India for its alleged occupation of Kashmir. I believe there’s nothing discriminatory in singling out the Jewish state for behavior the A.S.A. accepts from other states.
.. I believe the Jewish lobby must be uniquely intimidating to American lawmakers, unlike, say, the National Rifle Association or the agriculture lobby.