Welcome To The Nation Of NOTUS

The Apocalypse by Hieronymus Bosch

Three years ago, while still writing my Huffington Post column, I made reference to an April, 2015 article in the Washington Post, by Michael Gerson, “If our heroism is hopeless.” Gerson asked us to consider the long-term prospects for humanity in light of the creeping expansion of nuclear proliferation, the second law of thermodynamics (entropy), globally-devastating asteroids as written in the fossil record, the Sun’s pre-ordained world-cindering expansion far beyond Earth’s orbit, the possibility of artificially-intelligent systems deciding humans are simply not worth keeping around and the ultimate hopelessness of heroism.

In his article, Gerson delivers a dour sermon, with just a bit of light at the end of his otherwise dark tunnel, when he concludes,

“Perhaps, it has been said, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience. It is an unlikely, even outlandish, hope. But it reaches, on good authority, “even unto the end of the world.”

Gerson had me at entropy, a word I’ve mulled over since my earliest days as a junior scientist, mixing chemicals from my little Christmas gift laboratory, learning about the equality of energy and mass in my physics books and diving deeply (as deep as any amateur can dive) into the Big Bang literature to try to understand why things run down, and why, no matter how hard you try, you will never get the toothpaste back into the tube, or the broken egg back into its shell. So it is true in the macro sense for the world at large: we are not getting out of it alive, either as a species or as a globe.

In my own Huffington column, I wrote, “But there is a more present death awaiting Americans, and it, too, involves entropy and ultimate hopelessness.”

I noted that, when America was a true melting pot of people and cultures, we were a relatively small cooking kettle, geographically and demographically speaking. At the start of the 18th century, we were a loosely-linked collection of colonies spread along the Atlantic shoreline with our backs to the Adirondacks, the Alleghenies, the Blue Ridge, the Appalachians and the Smoky Mountains. A political fire fueled by outrage over taxes, unjust import and export laws and a distant royal governance heated our little pot of civilization and it did not take long to bring our blood to a boil. And boil we did.

The steam from that roiling cauldron of conflict distilled into clouds of freedom, and as the fires of revolution were banked, the cool rain of independence fell from those clouds and began to wash over the mountains and across the continent. It was not, however, a soothing, healing flood of righteousness.

We were a nation on the move, growing and exploring, building, advancing relentlessly with a selfish sense of divine destiny driving our wheels along ever-lengthening tracks. In the process, we overwhelmed and nearly obliterated another culture—the First Americans—and we abused millions of newcomers—Chinese, Italians, the Irish, Slavs and, slaves—who were nothing more to the sons and daughters of the Founders and their descendants than cheap labor, good for little more than cotton-picking and pick-and-shovel duty. Their discarded bodies enriched the soil along every railroad track, and in every plantation field. The feet of the grandchildren of those men and women who stepped off the Mayflower, were destined to press down on the necks of the unfortunate millions who arrived on lesser vessels.

Some say the Civil War was about slavery, others say it was all politics and still others say it was about economics. There are solid cases to be made for all three—and more. But in the end, the Civil War was about brute force and which side could bring it to bear first, fastest, and with finality. The goal of that war was punishment, pure and simple. And out of the acrid smoke of victory, the North sought to castigate the South by the worst possible punishment: abandonment. You lost; you are shunned. You will wither on your twisted vines of discontent and treachery, and we will pick over what is left of your vision until even that is gone.

I don’t believe America ever recovered from the Civil War; the conflict continues to this day in forms not always recognizable to those who wear blinders of political narrow-mindedness, but they are forms with patterns that cannot be denied. The secessionist family of states that was left to die at Appomattox 153 years ago managed to bear new generations whose ignorance-fueled hate and bitterness bubble up among us like the flame-fed roiling waters in that first pot of revolution.

When I first wrote the Huffington piece three years ago, I said the Congress was a sadly divided, no-compromise, winner-take-all body of some of the most selfish politicians this nation has ever raised. I said, “With every bill that is fought over partisan ties, America slips further and further away from the fixes we so desperately need.” I was sickened to see the trio of McConnell, Ryan, and Pence—who rarely, if ever, had a genuinely kind word to say about Senator McCain—mouthing pure hypocrisy beneath the Capitol dome under which rested McCain’s casket, elevated on Lincoln’s catafalque, no less. So much for our 16th President’s “better angels.”

In this, the 21st century, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published a century-and-a-half ago, is still unacceptable to the White House and a staggering percent of members of Congress, many of whom are proud deniers not only of climate change, but of the basic sciences that underpin the functioning of everything. 

Bible-thumping adherence to the strict interpretation of your god’s word is fine in its place, but not in the halls of Congress, not where reason and open-minded inquiry are in such desperate need. If that is how you truly feel, take to the pulpit, don’t take to the floor of the House or Senate.

At the small hands of our illegitimate president, our national budget is a farce; our debt is deplorable; some of the most basic institutions set in place to help the poor, sick and homeless are held hostage by Trump tweets and Capitol Hill hysterics and shut-down threats. Our national leadership no longer enjoys the trust of our allies—though I believe Americans, apart from their government, are still welcome beyond our shores. And, of course, the men and women who wear our nation’s uniform are still fighting and dying in a war that seems eternal, unwinnable, and always deadly.

The White House is being held hostage by a no-nothing, do-nothing president who is openly or tacitly supported by Republicans and Democrats incapable, apparently, of recognizing the real threats to our national security: a failing education system and racial and economic divides that are tearing us apart faster and faster each day. When I think of the money that was wasted in creating the Department of Homeland Security, I weep.

Back in 2015, I wrote, “The Supreme Court, in its Citizens United vs. FEC ruling dealt the coup de grâce to any hope of fairly-financed elections, and virtually ran the average American out of democracy’s picture. I have not changed my opinion on that. Now, we are but a page-turn away from becoming an oligarchy financed by a heartless fraction-of-a-percent of alleged Americans who have little use for the little guy.

• Witness the Congressional silence over the border child-detention scandal; witness the Congressional silence over the lies, prevarications, schemes, and thuggish-plots that ooze out of the White House almost minute-by-minute. 
• Witness the bizarre (and never possible), Kim-Trump deal, or the Putin-Trump behind-closed-doors confab. 
• Witness the now-well-trodden road of Cabinet departures due to blatant mismanagement, greed, corruption, and hubris. 
• Witness the spur-of-the-moment decision to cancel the 2019 cost-of-living pay increase for millions of federal workers, none of whom live the stratospheric heights of the one-percent of Americans who don’t give a rat’s ass about federal employees and the bills they must pay. 
• Witness the countless golf trips and government-paid journeys to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, New Jersey that are transparent attempts to flee responsibility in a town and from a White House the president relieves himself on every day. 
• Witness a man who gets his daily intelligence briefings from Fox News. 
• Witness the pathetic audiences of “supporters” who turn out in airport hangars and small arenas to hear the bombasts and lies of a would-be-Mussolini whose petulant sneers and tightly-crossed arms are the tells of a man who could not care less for the crowds around him or the nation beneath his feet. 
• And witness the attempts by the president and his toadying party—abetted by the silence of too many Democrats—to convince the public that the media is “the enemy of the people.” 

In his image, Trump, the POTUS, has created the anti-Constitutional nation of NOTUS. Its motto, “You are Not Us.” If you are not white, affluent, and comfortable, you are NOTUS. If you are Black, Hispanic, Muslim, Asian, and poor, you are NOTUS. If you are fleeing oppression, you are NOTUS. If you choose your partner out of love, not gender, you are NOTUS. If you care for the future of the planet, you are NOTUS. If you speak truth to power, you are NOTUS. If you believe in the rights of humanity, you are NOTUS. If you do not worship the golden calf of Trump, you are most certainly NOTUS.

Down the road of NOTUS lies the end of our Republic.

What has happened over the years since the Civil War is a dilution of the original spirit of the Revolution—national entropy has set in and all our institutions are slowly winding down, no longer able to address the needs of a burgeoning, racist, dumbed-down society. There were the occasional glimmers of our prior greatness—but I cannot name one right now because the last one, Senator John S. McCain, is no longer with us.

In his stirring tribute to John McCain, Joe Biden said, 

“John's story is an American story. It's not hyperbole. it's the American story. grounded in respect and decency. basic fairness. the intolerance through the abuse of power. Many of you travel the world, look how the rest of the world looks at us. They look at us a little naive, so fair, so decent. We are the naive Americans. that's who we are. That's who John was. He could not stand the abuse of power. wherever he saw it, in whatever form, in whatever ways. He loved basic values, fairness, honesty, dignity, respect, giving hate no safe harbor, leaving no one behind and understanding Americans were part of something much bigger than ourselves.”

And then, a bit later, he said, reflecting on the 1990s in the Senate, 

“That's when things began to change for the worse in America in the Senate. That's when it changed. What happened was, at those times, it was always appropriate to challenge another Senator's judgment, but never appropriate to challenge their motive. When you challenge their motive, it's impossible to get to go. If I say you are doing this because you are being paid off or you are doing it because you are not a good Christian or this, that, or the other thing, it's impossible to reach consensus. Think about in your personal lives. All we do today is attack the oppositions of both parties, their motives, not the substance of their argument. This is the mid-'90s. it began to go downhill from there. The last day John was on the Senate floor, what was he fighting to do? He was fighting to restore what you call regular order, just start to treat one another again, like we used to.”

“…it began to go downhill from there.” Yes, it did. I was on the Hill in the 70s and 80s. I remember what it was like to hear Republican and Democrat members of the House and Senate laugh together. I saw them have lunches and dinners together. I watched in the House and Senate galleries as they debated with passion underpinned by comity, compromise, and courage. It was not perfect, but it was not vile. It was not without some pain, but it was not vicious. It was not without some losses, but it was not spiteful.

Now, it is all unrecognizable to me. The White House, the Congress, even the Supreme Court. We are led by a tyrant who deals in fear, who stalks and abuses women, who imprisons children and banishes their parents, who lies to the poor and vulnerable, who gifts his loyalists and gaffs his enemies, who would sell our nation out to the highest bidder if he could figure out how to do it, a history-ignorant cretin who does not see how he is being played by despots and tin-pot dictators and murderers.

The Congress is incapable of acting to right the ship of state that is fast approaching a list to starboard from which we will not recover. No Republican is willing to wrest the tiller away from Trump and give commands to rig our ship for the storm that is bearing down on us with ever-increasing winds of economic and humanitarian destruction. And no Democrat capable of changing our course away from the headland of Hell is either on deck, down below, or in some yet-to-be-reached harbor.

Michael Gerson’s 2015 column almost got it right: we are in peril. But not from without, but from within. When I first wrote my Huffington piece, I said I’d give America 75 years...maybe 100 if we’re lucky. Today, I doubt we have 25.

Fair Winds and Following Seas, John McCain

America lost someone, and something, precious today. We lost John McCain, and we lost the last vestige of honor and decency that ever walked the halls of Congress. I cannot say I knew him; in my 35 years of government service on the House and Senate Veterans Committees, in my short stay on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and during my 12 years at the Department of Veterans Affairs, my relationship with Senator McCain was never more than tangential. But his effect on my political outlook—my own pride in service—and my feeling at being a citizen of John McCain’s America, are due in great part to Senator McCain’s indefatigable sense of honor and duty not to a party, not to an institution, but to all Americans. Like his father and his grandfather, John McCain stood for, fought for, believed in, something greater than himself, and he reveled in his role as a citizen of the greatest democracy the world has ever known. 

I will keep this entry short; there are not words adequate to convey the depths of my sorrow and sense of loss at John McCain’s passing. There will be eloquent tributes to Senator McCain’s life and duty, tributes offered by his friends and colleagues—President Obama and Mrs. Obama offered a fitting letter of praise and glory reflecting their sadness at our national loss, and other tributes from around the country and around the world are like a rising tide of gratitude and love that I hope fills some of the deep void now in the lives of the McCain family.

Let me just say two things: the first is that with John McCain’s passing, there is a national void that cannot be filled by mere tributes, thoughts and prayers. We stand on the crumbling edge of an existential precipice; behind us, forcing us toward the abyss of a Constitutional crisis, are characters of ill will, thuggish means, and failed values. They wish nothing more for us than to see our country take that final step into the depths of anarchy, leaving behind a morally barren and ethically sterile landscape on which they will build their cities of supremacy and their towers of gold. These were just the sort of men, means, and motives that John McCain, and his father and grandfather fought to defeat and extinguish. 

If we are to give John McCain’s life any meaning beyond the hallowed ground of his final resting place at the Naval Academy, even beyond the bounds of our own lives, we must do the hard things the McCain’s did; we must turn away from the abyss and fight with everything the Constitution has given us to defy, deflate, and destroy the forces now seeking to burn America to the ground.

It is a sad day for democracy and free people everywhere. The man who, with his father and grandfather, fought against tyranny, injustice, and hatred, who suffered inhumane treatment yet refused to take an easy out, left us today as the most dignified man on the planet.

Fair winds and followings seas, John McCain. You lived a life of honor and respect. Thank you for your courage and sacrifice and for your selfless service to your country. We will do our level best to right the ship of state, and sail on to a safer, more bountiful harbor for all.

The second thing I want to offer is a poem, Sea Fever, written by John Masefield, also here, read by the poet.

Dedicated to John S. McCain

Sea Fever by John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Rudy Giuliani And The Rashomon-Trumpomon Effect

Rashomon Poster

Sometime in the morning of August 19, 2018, on the set of a news program, America was inadvertently cast into a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s groundbreaking 1950 film Rashomon, in which the account of the murder of a samurai is told by several witnesses, including the dead samurai himself. The plot is from a 1922 classic Japanese short story, In a Grove, by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. This is a must-see movie for any true motion picture student or aficionado, and I recommend it as a study in what happens when the bright beam truth is projected through the prism of confusion, the three sides of which are denial, self-protection, and ulterior motive. The resulting spectrum has no rainbow color spread; it is only shades of gray cast between the purity of truth, and the deep black of the unknowable.

Rudy Giuliani’s assertion and follow-on defense of, “Truth isn’t truth,” serves well as the forest in which the samurai was murdered, but by whom we are not ever certain to know. According to the witnesses—a woodcutter who found the body, the samurai’s wife who may or may not have killed her husband, a recently-released criminal who confesses he killed the samurai in self-defense after raping the samurai’s wife, the young woman’s mother who testifies as to her daughter’s purity, a Buddhist priest who saw the criminal before the murder, and the samurai himself (as his ghost), who claims he committed suicide as a result of the dishonor cast upon him after his wife’s rape. 

The film is much deeper, of course, and to know more, you simply should see it. I guarantee you will not look at the truth behind anything with the same eyes. You may walk away from the book or the movie convinced that “truth isn’t truth.” Don't be deceived by your own conclusion...in the end, truth is not so easily pigeonholed.

This passage from the story, a conversation among the commoner, woodcutter, and the priest, says much about where we are today: 

Priest: If men don't trust each other, this earth might as well be hell.

Commoner: Right. The world's a kind of hell.

Priest: No! I don't want to believe that!

Commoner: No one will hear you, no matter how loud you shout. Just think. Which one of these stories do you believe?

Woodcutter: None makes any sense.

Commoner: Don't worry about it. It isn't as if men were reasonable.

The brilliance of the film and book as metaphors for the confusion that surrounds any horrific or inexplicable event cannot be overstated. When Rudy’s bizarre assertion first projected on the multi-screen walls of social media, network news, cable news, and print papers, I began to look for the samurai’s avatar, and found it soon enough in the combined tally of lies, innuendo, obfuscation, dissembling, distraction, and the contents of Trump’s closet of shiny objects awaiting only Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ word to be thrown out to the news media.

Imperfect witnesses abound in the White House’s Rashomon—maybe we’ll call it Trumpomon. As the 21st century story will be studied and re-written, we will have witness statements from myriad players in this Trumpian tragedy. There will be facts. Hard, ineluctable, incontrovertible, damning facts. And there is your truth. The facts are truth and you are not entitled to your version of the facts, and you are not entitled to your version of the truth based on those facts. Trump and Rudy and Sarah and Kellyanne and all the White House minions who wish us to believe their “truths” or alternate facts, cannot, in the end, escape the facts that are collecting in Mr. Mueller’s office. And those are the only facts that count; his is the only truth that will, in the end, condemn or vindicate the president. Sorry, Rudy, the truth is the truth; you may believe your version of events constitutes your truth, but the events happened, and, therefore, there are facts to be gleaned from everything Trump, his sons, his extended family, his circle of enablers have done, and those facts are not versions of the truth, they are the truth.

Ultimately, the facts will tell us a riveting story, I’m sure. Even for his supporters, there will be no assurance of Trump’s reliability, and by the end of the tale (should there ever be one) what we glean from all the accounts may help shift our national perception of the events toward the light of truth. The sad fact is, even though the President himself has tainted the paper upon which the truth of this White House’s Rashomon will be written, a certain portion of the American public will believe nothing of whatever truth is revealed. For Trump’s supporters, all is Rashomon as told by the Deep State.

Unlike Rashomon and In a Grove, in which the audience or reader is left with questions to ponder on their own, coming to terms with the nuances of multi-witness accounts that vary widely, and have their own subtexts unknown to other witnesses (and even the audience or readers), the story of Trumpomon is already being grossly misinterpreted by non-participants in the story, people who have no idea what any witness saw, or what any witness will recount. There is a national outpouring of comment about Trumpomon, and the story hasn’t even been published. So typical of our “story-first, truth-later” culture today.

The news media was not in Trump Tower during that crucial meeting with the Russian lawyer, Mueller was not in Trump Tower, you and I weren’t in Trump Tower, and yet opinions abound about the event, everyone seems to have their own “truth” about it. Every talking head, every expert, every lawyer who can be dragged to a cable news “Breaking News” studio, has an opinion about the Trump Tower meeting, and about the plethora of events before and after. What did Trump say to Kim, what did Trump say to Putin, and so on. And yet, there still are no revelations of the facts, no dumps of the truth to look at and examine under the public’s microscope. But do we care for such an examination? 

Commoner: Well, men are only men. That's why they lie. They can't tell the truth, even to themselves.

Priest: That may be true. Because men are weak, they lie to deceive themselves.

Commoner: Not another sermon! I don't mind a lie if it's interesting.

I have a friend who was in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam…a respected war correspondent…and even today, 50 years later neither he nor any of the Ia Drang survivors or anyone in the chain of command can completely describe what happened there…for each man, it was Rashomon times a thousand. Their only common truth was that something horrible happened to them. And that truth is a hard and fast truth.

So how can any of us offer opinions or any certainties about what did or did not happened in Trump Tower, or Helsinki, or in Singapore or anywhere else Donald Trump hides his conversations and spreads his tweets? We can’t. And we must stop doing so. In reality, we weren’t there. All we know is something horrible is happening to America. Everything else is Rashomon. And that’s the truth.

John Brennan, Communist? Oh For Crying Out Loud, No.

On July 16, Republican U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, appearing on Fox News said, "John Brennan was a disaster as CIA director. He was a disaster as the counterterrorism official. He was a member of the Communist Party during the Cold War." [Italics mine]

DeSantis added: "…this is not exactly the guy I would listen to about Russia."

So, this poison pill of nasty innuendo—that Brennan was a member of the communist party--close-to-the-edge slander (if it is not true)—made its way into the social media’s sewer pipe and has gone largely unchallenged for more than a month. It is not, by the way, the first time “deep state” accusations have been leveled against Brennan. One need only to refer to Snopes’ discrediting the bizarre claim that Brennan was a converted Muslim after his tour of duty in the Middle East.

If one reads or watches videos from Fox (most recently a Fox host referred to “communist Japan”), or peruses the Daily Intelligencer, The America Spectator, or subscribes to any number of conservative journals or cable news outlets, there is no dearth to the Brennan-as-communist storyline. My favorite for sheer headline boldness, has to be FrontPage Magazine’s JOHN BRENNAN VOTED FOR A COMMUNIST, A PARTY RUN BY THE RUSSIANS, WHY DON'T RUSSIAGATERS CARE?

I think I went through a dozen or so pubs and videos excoriating Brennan for his Marxist-sympathizer, dear-comrade, fellow-traveler activities, and those sources just confirmed my observation that today’s polarized world has no middle ground on such matters. I sought out books, magazine, and national and international newspapers for even the faintest glimmers of editorial revelation about Mr. Brennan’s communist ties. Either I’ve lost my touch as a researcher (unlikely), or the evidence is simply not there. But that is never enough for some folks who just want to believe what they are told to believe.

Some people are going to believe the sky is just a crystal dome over a 6,000-year-old earth around which the sun revolves. They believe the moon landings and pictures of Jupiter are just typical examples of the NASA-Disney collaboration to produce computer generated images. They believe our current president about the size of his…inauguration. These are the same people who have no idea what the lyrics to “A Fool on the Hill,” really mean. So, of course they believe John Brennan is a commie. After all, haven’t so many important people like DeSantis and retired Brigadier General Anthony Tata said it is so on Fox News Insider?

Let’s bring out the full list of all notable public figures who not only have worked with Brennan, but who have been a part of his confirmation hearings, and who employed him in the highest positions of trust and who have publicly stated Mr. Brennan is or was a communist: there is no such list. 

Now, let’s bring out a list of all the intelligence community leaders and senior staff who just signed a letter to president Trump denouncing his stripping of Brennan’s security clearance, including, William H. Webster​, former Director of Central Intelligence (1987-1991), George J. Tenet​, former Director of Central Intelligence (1997-2004), Porter J. Goss​, former Director of Central Intelligence, (2005-2006), General Michael V. Hayden, ​USAF, Ret., former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006-2009), Leon E. Panetta​, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2009-2011), General David H. Petraeus​, USA, Ret., former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2011-2012), James R. Clapper, ​former Director of National Intelligence (2010-2017), John E. McLaughlin​, former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (2000-2004), Stephen R. Kappes​, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006-2010), Michael J. Morell​, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2010-2013), Avril Haines​, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2013-2015), David S. Cohen,​ former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2015-2017).

So far the list is 75 intelligence professionals long, and very, very public/ There are at least two on the list I know well and worked with. Do you think all those people like Mr. Brennan? No, not all of them do. I’m sure some think he is a hot-headed SOB or worse. Was he the best possible CIA director? No, probably not, in the eyes of a lot of professionals. But do any of the men and women on the list think Brennan is or was a communist? Perhaps down the road some will right books in which they say so, but for now, not one of them has publicly supported Mr. DeSantis’s or BGen. Tata’s claims.

Is there any scintilla of truth to the communist allegation? I wanted to know. So, putting my old professional researcher’s hat back on, I went digging. Bear in mind, I have no informed personal or professional opinion on Brennan; I don’t know him, never worked for him, never saw him up close, was never personally or professional affected by his duties, and, therefore, I’m not entitled to an opinion about his character. But I can be curious.

My first (and easiest stop was at Politifact, which, while some may not always take as gospel, I do use as a starting point for fact-finding. Here is Politifact’s take:

“We found Brennan has acknowledged voting for a communist presidential candidate [Gus Hall] in 1976. That does not mean he was a member of the Communist Party.”

“Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and pundit Sebastian Gorka are examples of Republicans who framed similar criticism of Brennan more accurately, singling out the vote but not going as far as saying he belonged to the party itself.”

The Politifact’s decision: the claim that Brennan was a member of the communist party is “mostly false.”

On September 15, 2016, a CNN story reported, “John Brennan on Thursday recalled being asked a standard question for a top security clearance at his early CIA lie detector test: Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?

"I froze," Brennan said during a panel discussion about diversity in the intelligence community at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's annual conference. "This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate,"

Brennan was responding to a question about barriers to recruiting diverse candidates for the intelligence fields, including whether past records of activism could hurt someone applying for a clearance later in life.”

Brennan said of his CIA polygraph interview: "I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I'm not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, 'OK,' and when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, 'Well, I'm screwed.'"

But he soon got his admission notice to the CIA and was relieved, he said, saying that though the agency still had long strides to make in accepting gay recruits and minorities, even then it recognized the importance of freedom.

The CNN piece concluded, "So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, 'I voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall' ... and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that's not going to be disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government."

Brennan’s Wikipedia bio, (always subject to a reasonable doubt regarding some citations), includes this paragraph:

While riding a bus to class at Fordham, he saw an ad in The New York Times that said the CIA was recruiting. He decided that a CIA career would be a good match for his "wanderlust" and his desire for public service.[5] During his application to the CIA he admitted in alie-detector test that he had voted for the U.S. Communist Party candidate for president, Gus Hall, in 1976. He explained to the interviewer that his vote was a way of "signaling my unhappiness with the system," and he later described his vote as a protest against partisanship of the Watergate era.[19] He emphasized after leaving office that his entry into the CIA showed that freedom of speech in the U.S. does not disqualify a person for a career in government.

Note this excerpt from the New York Times citation (19), which reads,

“As Brennan tells it, he applied to join the C.I.A. around this time, after seeing a newspaper ad. An interviewer strapped his arm to a polygraph machine and asked if he had ever been a member of an organization that sought to overthrow the government of the United States. Brennan, not wanting to carry even the smallest deception on his conscience, said that he voted for Gus Hall, the Communist Party candidate for president, in 1976. (Decades later, Brennan volunteered the story of his Communist vote to a young woman who had asked him if participating in protests might disqualify her from working for the C.I.A. Reports of Brennan’s vote reached right-wing critics of the Obama administration, who tried to use this nearly 40-year-old vote as evidence of ongoing Communist sympathies. Brennan now says that it was cast in protest against the partisanship of the Watergate era.)

It is important to note that even the NYT citation includes a rewind of the CNN reporting of Brennan’s comments before the Congressional Black Caucus’s 2016 conference on diversity. Nonetheless, it should be reasonable by this time to conclude that had any major news organization, not including CNN of Fox, uncovered more about Brennan than his vote for Gus Hall, neither the CIA nor the Congress nor any of the Intelligence Community’s leaders would have remained silent about a “known communist party member” in their ranks.

I have had the privilege to work closely with many senior officials of the intelligence community during my time in government, and I’ve worked on certain tasks that required very close ties to men and women who deal daily in the silent depths of our intelligence operations. I have no need to poll any of them to determine their position on the matter of John Brennan’s link to the communist party. To a person, including those who worked with Mr. Brennan, they are the sort of career and appointed intelligence agency employees who would not for one moment countenanced a member of the communist party in their midst. They may have problems with his style, or doubts about his public statements, of concerns about his leadership qualities, but they would be the first to speak out if they believed Mr. Brennan harbored some deep-seated affection and ties to the communist party.

It stretches credulity—with the exception of those who waive credulity in favor of hatred, disruption, lies, prevarications, misdirections, political gain, and personal aggrandizement—to believe that for all the years Mr. Brennan has been in public service, for all the clearances he’s held and had to account for, for every microscopic look into his background, his foundation as a member of the communist party, then or now, has not been cracked and revealed to the public eye.

Let’s agree that in 1976 Mr. Brennan voted for Gus Hall, communist and presidential candidate. Let us also agree that Mr. Brennan’s future employer, the CIA, after their normally rigorous examination, hired him. The train of evidence must stop there. As Newsweek reported on August 15, “While this vote has regularly been scrutinized by his critics, there is no evidence that he was a member of the Communist Party.” 

There is simply no more track laid down ahead of that train of youthful whim, and the station at which it stopped—an election 42 years ago—has been bypassed and left to decay along with all the nasty rumors promulgated by malcontents and Daffy Ducks of politics.

Love You, Dad, But I'm Glad You're Not Here To See This

Pop, Fresh out of West Point, 1943

August 14th would have been my dad's 97th birthday, and while it's true the Moores of our line don't make it out of our 80s (he died in 2003 at 81, and I'm already 69), I think lately it is best that he did not make it this far.

My father was very proud of his military service (West Point, class of January 1943, fighter pilot in Europe, Cold War warrior in USAFE and SAC, and black-budget stuff in the early 70s), and he loved this country with a passion. He had the most-human of disagreements with our national leadership from time to time, but he never disparaged his commanders-in-chief, no matter their political stripes. Nixon's fall from grace stung my dad, not because he supported him, but because Nixon let the country down, betrayed his oath of office. We all know what it's like to hear a parent say, "I'm very disappointed in you." To hear my dad say that about a disgraced president was proof enough of his feelings of betrayal.

My father believed with all his heart that America's role in the world was honorable, and that our word was our bond, and that we had to earn our position of trust every day. Those were the ties that bound us to our allies. As one who ran a number of intelligence operations overseas, and as one who probably did more things behind the scenes than I'll ever know (and I know only a few), he was aware of the value of trust among friends, at home and abroad.

Pop believed in honoring the work of those who worked for him; no Airman was too low on the totem pole to miss out on praise when it was earned; no officer under his command was ever left wondering if "the boss" appreciated the long hours and sacrifices--Pop made sure anyone in his chain of command received commendation for a job well done.

Allow me to digress with a short story: when we were living on Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, and my dad was the base commander, I got pulled over by an Air Policeman (AP) for speeding on base. When the Airman First Class saw my driver's licence, he asked me if I was Colonel Moore's son. I said yes, I was. He hesitated to write a ticket, wondering aloud about how my father, his boss, would react if he gave me a ticket. I told him my father would be disappointed in him if he did not give me a ticket, because I would have to tell my dad about the incident. The AP wrote the ticket, and, of course, I told my dad. Several days later, the Airman was called into my father's office in base headquarters. My father asked the AP if he was the one who issued the ticket. The Airman said yes. My father, in a very typical reply, said, "That is the right answer. Thank you. No one on this base gets a pass for busting the rules." I didn't get a chance to meet the AP again, but when my dad was transferred to our next duty station in Nebraska, he received more notes of support from his men than he received from his superiors (and his bosses wrote some nice things, I have to say), and he wore that response with pride.

My Dad as one of the AF's youngest full colonels

Pop believed that federal service was an honorable and worthwhile commitment should a citizen choose that path (which I did in several capacities). He believed public service was a public trust, and when I began working on the Hill, in the House and then in the Senate, and when I received my security clearances, he was the first one to tell me how much faith the country put in me to honor my oath.

Pop also believed in a strong and wide-spread news media. His relationship with local and national newspapers was always courteous and supportive whenever he was interviewed or otherwise covered. When I started in the news business, he urged me to always try to see every possible side of a story, and to avoid the loudest voices, which often were loud because they were wrong. 

He did not live long enough to know much about computers or social media--his health declined over his last decade, and his primary source of news was television and my reading him the Post. Looking back, I don't think he missed out on much when it came to the ramping up of the Internet with its myriad choices of everything. He was a simple and straightforward Tennessee boy when it came to getting to the heart of things. I like to think seven generations of Tennessee Moores, and a few more generations of North Carolina Moores, have urged my genes in the same direction.

So, to close out here, I'm sadly glad that Pop does not have to ask me to explain the White House, the Congress, the social divisions, the hate, the lies, the shaming and shunning and the national calamity that is our foreign policy. He would not understand why Canada--our partner at Normandy and in so many other fights--is on any president's shit list.

He would not understand why, after he and 16 million Americans fought to free Europe and the Pacific Rim from tyrannical conquest, we have a president who drives wedges deep between us and our allies. He would be shaken to know that an American president seeks to strengthen ties to his Russian counterpart rather than cement bonds of security and trust with our friends in Germany, France, England and the rest of NATO.

I cannot explain here how my father knew the Russians so well, but he spent a great part of his career--losing the blood and treasure of 17 of his own men--to pushing back against ruthless thugs like Putin. How could I tell him those sacrifices mean nothing to the man in the Oval Office? How could I tell him that a sitting president, with no military service, holds such a deep grudge against an American Naval hero that even when he signs the Defense bill, he refuses to mention the bill's namesake, Senator John McCain?

Most of all, how could I ever explain to my dad that the practice of national trust by our nation's leaders appears to be an outdated concept, overrun by greed, deception, treachery, and possibly treason. I love you dad; I'm so glad we didn't have this talk. I wouldn't want to disappoint you.

To Congress: Remember, it is "We the People," not "I the President"

Because, as has often been noted here, I enjoy reading the early explanatory writings of the Nation’s Founders—notably The Federalist Papers and the Constitution—I tend to forget that my pleasure of ancient parchment perusal is not widely shared. During, and in the aftermath of, the 2016 election campaign, that observation was reinforced: neither The Federalist Papers nor the Constitution played much of a role in the minds and speeches of many of the candidates, and certainly no role at all in the vacuous mind and unintelligible speech and tweets of the tenuously-elected president.

When I began writing this particular column, I intended to discuss the placement order of the Constitution’s Articles, focusing on the first three, the underpinning explanations of the principal branches of the federal government: the Legislative (Article I, with 10 Sections); the Executive (Article II, with 4 Sections); and the Judicial (Article III, with 3 Sections). I was going to point out that the order in which these three branches was presented was not a whim of haphazard numbering.

Read again the Preamble:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Note the Preamble does not begin with, “I the President…” It begins with “We, the People.” The Constitution’s drafters had a very clear vision of the order of a federal government, a government first and foremost constituted by, of, and for “We the people.” Without the informed debate and consent of the people—the citizens—as vested in a representative legislature, the fear of the emergence of a king or tyrant such as the one the colonies rejected by force during the Revolution, was still very real in the minds of the Founders.

Those fears would be realized in 1812, twenty-five years after the draft Constitution was submitted to George Washington (see transmittal letter below), when the British tried one more time to retake their lost ground. I suggest we should remain alert, if not fearful, given the current president’s base proclivities and unabashed tendencies to embrace counter-freedom strongmen. But I digress.

It is only after Article I and its 10 Sections laying out the responsibilities and powers of the Legislature that the Congress turned to Article II (and its 4 Sections), the powers and responsibilities of the Executive. Article I over-arches Article II in its scope of authority as the elected voice of the people. Yes, the president, also elected by the people (in theory, if not practice), can exercise a fairly broad range of authority. But, with few exceptions (Section 2, the power to pardon, comes to mind, but even that is limited to federal, not state, crimes and does not cover impeachment) nothing the president undertakes under Article II is unequivocally, immutably, unilateral; ultimately, all presidential power can be checked by a determined Congress under Article I, and by the Judiciary under Article III.

My goal was to use the unbreakable two-by-four of the Constitution’s enumerated order of the Articles to smack both the elephants and donkeys trumpeting and braying on Capitol Hill (perhaps “trumpeting” is too easy a pun) firmly across their foreheads to remind them that they are not subservient to the president, nor are they his co-equals. They are, by the obvious placement in the Constitution’s order of presentation, and in the expanse of their powers, superior to the executive in many fundamental ways. And they need to start acting like it.

Anyway, that was the initial direction of today’s blog post. But, as usual, I became sidetracked in the research process. I was happily, willingly, hijacked once again by the wisdom of the Federalists. It is from these 86 Papers (yes, I know they end with Federalist 85, but Federalist 70 is split into two parts) that I draw my deep affection for the enabling language of our democracy, and to which I go frequently to regain my perspective as a citizen.

As I searched for confirmation of my own semi-educated bias that the Congress is Constitutionally-licensed with greater authority than that which is granted to the president, I reread the Federalist Paper that deals with the overall form of our government, and what the Founders may have had in mind for the dynamics behind popular representation. In this particular Paper, I re-discovered the author’s vision of a constantly-refreshed voice of the people and a stable executive whose steady hand guides the ship of state.

Energy and Stability/the Legislative and the Executive

James Madison, in Federalist 37, on the issue of devising a form of government, wrote, 

“Energy in government is essential to that security against external and internal danger, and to that prompt and salutary execution of the laws which enter into the very definition of good government. Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society.”

A few paragraphs later, Madison writes, 

“The genius of republican liberty seems to demand on one side, not only that all power should be derived from the people, but that those intrusted [sic] with it should be kept in independence on the people, by a short duration of their appointments; and that even during this short period the trust should be placed not in a few, but a number of hands. Stability, on the contrary, requires that the hands in which power is lodged should continue for a length of time the same. A frequent change of men will result from a frequent return of elections; and a frequent change of measures from a frequent change of men: whilst energy in government requires not only a certain duration of power, but the execution of it by a single hand.”

Here, Madison is describing the practical and group-psychological (social trust) importance of a constantly-refreshed (energetic) legislature coupled with a long-term executor of the legislature’s laws—that is, a stable chief executive. [It is important to bear in mind that there were no presidential term limits at the time the Constitution was ratified. The 22nd Amendment (ratified in 1951) limiting the president to two four-year terms was still a long way off in 1787.]

What Madison is getting at is good government—a government the people can trust to enact socially-just and practically-relevant laws based on the will of the people—needs the energy of a constantly-refreshed legislature that can, in turn, rely on a stable executor of the laws enacted by that legislature. 

It is the duty of Congress, consisting of representatives who, on a regular basis, bring new ideas and fresh problem-solving skills to examine constantly the state of the union and the needs of the people locally and nationally, and enact laws to the benefit of the nation as a whole. Such a Congress should be able to rely on a steady hand at the wheel of the Executive who will guide those laws through the machinery of the departments and agencies under his or her leadership.

Let me repeat Madison’s words: “Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society.”

The energy of an informed and frequently-refreshed legislature, and the stable, reliable, credible, and oath-affirmed actions of a chief executive—neither of which are present today in the nation’s most pressing time of need—are crucial to America’s civil, social, and economic health, strength, and success. In short, the future of our national character, our credibility abroad, and our ethical reliability, is jeopardized by the ineffectual and polarizing actions of a stultified, craven Congress and an intellectually-crippled, fear-mongering president.

I leave you today with Congress’s letter of transmittal of the Constitution to President Washington. Please read it carefully, and note especially the tone of reasonableness, the acknowledgment of imperfection, the hope for compromise, the examination of individual rights in conflict with national needs, and the future-forward flexibility the authors sought to imbue in the operation of representative government.

Consider with an open mind and a clear eye on current events this passage written more than two centuries ago: “In all our deliberations on this subject, we kept steadily in our view that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety—perhaps our national existence.”

SIR:

We have now the honor to submit to the consideration of the United States in Congress assembled, that Constitution which has appeared to us the most advisable.

The friends of our country have long seen and desired that the power of making war, peace, and treaties, that of levying money, and regulating commerce, and the correspondent executive and judicial authorities, should be fully and effectually vested in the General Government of the Union; but the impropriety of delegating such extensive trust to one body of men is evident: hence results the necessity of a different organization.

It is obviously impracticable in the Federal Government of these States to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all. Individuals entering into society must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest. The magnitude of the sacrifice must depend as well on situation and circumstance, as on the object to be obtained. It is at all times difficult to draw with precision the line between those rights which must be surrendered, and those which may be preserved; and, on the present occasion, this difficulty was increased by a difference among the several States as to their situation, extent, habits, and particular interests.

In all our deliberations on this subject, we kept steadily in our view that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety—perhaps our national existence. This important consideration, seriously and deeply impressed on our minds, led each State in the Convention to be less rigid on points of inferior magnitude than might have been otherwise expected; and thus, the Constitution which we now present is the result of a spirit of amity, and of that mutual deference and concession, which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.

That it will meet the full and entire approbation of every State is not, perhaps, to be expected; but each will, doubtless, consider, that had her interest alone been consulted, the consequences might have been particularly disagreeable or injurious to others; that it is liable to as few exceptions as could reasonably have been expected, we hope and believe; that it may promote the lasting welfare of that Country so dear to us all, and secure her freedom and happiness, is our most ardent wish.