The Mitchell Report

Trump Sinks in Helsinki

 

 "I think that press conference was the single most embarrassing performance by an American president on the world stage that I've ever seen.”

Ambassador William J. Burns, President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 

July 16, 2018

 

 “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake,”  

Senator John McCain

July 16, 2018

 

 

 

 

Dear Friends,

 

If you weren’t able to watch today’s press conference with Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin following their brief meeting in Helsinki, put it at the very top of your “To Do" list.” 

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/shameful-treasonous-disgrace-lawmakers-pundits-react-trump-s-joint-news-n891736

 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2018/jul/16/key-moments-from-the-trump-putin-press-conference-video

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HlYCyJ2znc

 

 

To borrow from President Franklin Roosevelt’s opening remarks in his speech to Congress on December 8th, 1941, I believe it can be said that July 16th, 2018 is also a date which will live in infamy. It was a day on which an American president stood next to and stood up for the president of the Russian Federation versus the word of America's intelligence agencies, run by his own political appointees, in response to a clear and direct question from Associated Press reporter Jonathan Lemire about the U. S. intelligence community's report that Russians had directly interfered in the 2016 elections — a charge which Putin has consistently denied, and which was just reaffirmed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of twelve Russian intelligence officers last week.

 

Q: "Who do you believe? Would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin, would you denounce what happened in 2016, and would you warn him to never do it again?"

 

A:  ‘President Putin says it’s not Russia . . . and I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be [Russia].”    

 

Instead of defending the findings of the country's intelligence agencies and publicly supporting its most valued law enforcement and intelligence resources, while sharing a stage with President Putin, Donald Trump launched into a rambling, rancorous, and risible monologue about ’servers,’ 'Hillary Clinton’s emails,’ ‘a Pakistani gentleman who worked for the DNC,’ and multiple plaints about ‘What happened to [those] servers? Where are they?”

 

It was a disgraceful performance by Donald Trump, an astonishing moment for all in the room and those watching around the globe, an unrivaled embarrassment for American citizens, and a senseless, indiscriminate utterance that suggested a reversal of seven decades of (mostly) bipartisan national security policy, capping off several days of a shallow, shabby show of disrespect and dissembling throughout Europe.

 

If Donald Trump believes Putin, he is a fool. If he was there to placate or pander to Putin, he is a coward. If he said it because he seeks alignment with Putin rather than America’s traditional allies in NATO and the EU, he is in violation of his oath, of the Constitution, and has met the standard for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.”

 Now, let us see whether we have a Congress and an administration of patriots or quislings, combatants or collaborators.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Of Me I Sing

 

Dear Friends,

 

With thanks and apologies to the Gershwins, George and Ira, and their ‘collaborator,’ George S. Kaufman. TMR offers a bit of doggerel on a day when more Americans have reason to wonder whether we have actually lost our way, or whether we are simply in the temporary clutches of the kind of person we thought existed only in B movies, pulp novels, and the occasional Broadway musical. After Helsinki, we have our answer. And after yesterday’s sham performance in the Cabinet Room of the White House, where he was surrounded by a bevy of toadies from the House of Representatives, and where the stage went dark for a brief, Freudian moment, we also know that little has changed for this President with his Congressional base. Despite a handful of genuine expressions of outrage, and a larger number of ‘tsk-tsk’s’ from Congressional Republicans, we recognize that Mitch McConnell will continue to preside over a Senate majority caucus that operates on an amended version of the Constitution’s ‘Advice and Consent” clause— aka, ‘Curtsy and Comply.’

 

With that in mind, we turn to doggerel.

 

 

Of Me I Sing

 

I meant to say wouldn’t, instead I said would

So listen up, folks, and listen up good

I know what I meant, of that there’s no doubt

So, let’s move on from Helsinki and enough of your pout(s)

 

I love America and Americans love me

At the higher ends of intelligence, it’s plain to see

I put America first with nary an exception

Any thought to the contrary is a yuuuuuuge misconception

 

There are snowflakes a-plenty who think otherwise

But they’re really just quislings in patriotic disguise

What do they know about hacking and cyber-infiltration

Or the preposterous notion that there was collaboration

 

They love the fake media and believe every word

In transcripts or videos whose verbatims are absurd

BBC, CNN, PBS, and Bezos’ Post

Are the fraudulent offspring of Gorby’s glasnost

 

So, stand up for America — walk tall and  be proud!

And let’s shit-can Bob Mueller who has created this cloud

Filled with indictments of more than two dozen folks

And call it what it is — a ginormous hoax

 

It’s a witch-hunt, a ruse, and an elegant deception

All cooked up by sore losers who lost an election

Now they bring shrinks who say that I’m ‘dangerous,’

Next thing you know, some will claim that I'm 'treasonous!'

 

Let ‘em claim, let ‘em fume, let ‘em say what they want

I’m a (card-carrying) malignant narcissist and an idiot savant

Who learned years ago that remorse and contrition

Are simply specious detours on the road to perdition.

 

“I yam what I yam,” and I like it, you see

It got me to the White House, where you thought I’d never be

You can huff and can puff and can throw rocks in my path

But you can never discomfit a born psychopath.

 

 

 

 

One Brief Shining Moment

 

A thousand-year-old English castle echoed with the exhortations of a black preacher and a gospel choir on Saturday, as Prince Harry wed Meghan Markle, an American actress, nudging the British royal family into a new era.

New York Times, 19 May 2018

 

"Camelot, located no where in particular, can be anywhere.”

Norris J. Lacy, Arthurian Scholar

 

 

Dear Friends,

 

Like millions of people around the globe, I began yesterday morning at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, albeit from the comfort of a couch, not a wooden pew. I was prepared to start the morning with grim television reportage of the tragic school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, or a fresh round of conspiratorial condemnations from America’s prevaricator-in-chief, aided and abetted by his roving barrister, Rudy Giuliani. 

 

Instead, I was transported to the wedding of Prince Harry and his bride, Meghan Markle, and for an hour or more, I watched in silence as the ceremony, whose choreography derives from centuries of custom, but which was enhanced by bold new cultural infusions, took me by total surprise. I had no expectations, nor did I anticipate that I would last long as a viewer.  

 

It was a Proustian moment, however, without the madeleine and the tea, for the thoughts it engendered about how far we have fallen from our tradition of behaving well during moments of national ceremony. Though a royal wedding and a presidential inauguration are wholly different occasions, they are both moments in which we are expected to display our best face and to honor our common values.

 

To enjoy this particularly festive wedding was to be reminded of how dreadful the inaugural ceremony of the 45th President was, from the divisive, discordant presidential address about “American carnage” and the failure of all those presidents who had preceded him, to the day-after shenanigans about crowd size, climatological conditions, and the sorry spectacle of the speech at the CIA.

 

On the one hand, there was the joy of being present at such a moment — with its glorious assemblage of choral and musical performances, the Kingdom Choir and “Stand By Me,” the exquisite cello artistry of Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the soaring oratory of an African-American Episcopal preacher, the vibrant colors and architectural shapes of hat-fascinators, and the invigorating sense of energy and promise that all of this and the bride, Meghan, and groom, Prince Harry personify. It was a magnificent start for the day, and for that hour or more, it seemed like the brilliant blue, sunny skies of Windsor were right outside our window.

 

But, of course, they were not.

 

All of that was thousands of miles away, across an ocean, and in a country where the monarchy is the institutional rock upon which is anchored  the nation’s solidity, continuity, and tradition. Meanwhile, England’s Brexit-stained political landscape is buffeted by the ill winds of nativism, faux-nationalism, and fear of the foreigner.   

 

Here at home, we have the ill winds, but no rock. 

 

Where once we could believe that a President could be the standard-bearer of our best traditions — not unfailingly, but when kismet came calling — and the White House the repository of our Constitutional bedrock, today we are bereft, bankrupt at the very top. 

 

Instead of a paragon or even a journeyman, we have a grifter, an habitual fabricator and fabulist, a malignant presence who delights in the dismantling of existing relationships, partnerships, and alliances, and who has assembled through a mixture of cunning and crass communications tactics and techniques, an army that wears red hats, cheers wildly at his attacks on the ‘deep state,’ and which delights in his  stentorian denigration of the institutions upon which this democracy was built — the judiciary, the press, and the exercise of First Amendment rights. 

 

His former opponent called these people ‘deplorables,,’ which placed the name tag on the wrong party. Instead, it’s an apt characterization for the President himself and the corps of collaborators who are his lieutenants, enablers, and proxies, and who participate in the boorish, vindictive behaviors that are at the core of the Trump disposition.

 

But for ‘one brief, shining moment’ yesterday, we were with Harry and Meghan, their family, friends, and supporters around the globe in celebration of their marriage. It was a moment of unexpected exuberance, genuine glee, and a nourishing vacation from the vulgarity that is our lot for the nonce.

 

We may not have our Camelot, but we can surely set our sights on ridding ourselves of this Babylonian dominion and America’s Nebuchadnezzar.

 

 

 

 

Please Do Not Pester During Sequester

23 February 2013

 

Dear Friends, 

If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.

First, there was the ‘fiscal cliff,’ over which the republic would tumble on its way to another financial disaster.

This was quickly and tragically followed by the ‘slippery slope,’ on which the rights of gun owners would be taken away in treacherous acts of legislative legerdemain by the heirs to the anti-war movement, and the kinds of deadbeats who were once dragooned into appearances before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Now, of course, we are approaching ‘sequestration,’ a euphemism for castration in the fiscal arena, and about which Bob Woodward will soon set us all straight. It’s the thing we most prize about Woodward -- i.e., ‘being set straight.’

And if you fear that TMR is about to leap into that fray, relax. It’s at moments like this where we most need diversions from the solemnity and humorlessness of public policy, and that explains this week’s offering.

When you’re able to set aside seven uninterrupted minutes, and are ready for an exercise in erudition, here’s a graphic and musical journey through the history of music.

But don’t sequester yourself; share it with family and friends in acts of random bipartisanship and generosity of spirit.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/the_history_of_music_told_in_seven_rapidly_illustrated_minutes.html