The wildfires in Australia are a poignant metaphor for our time — a world out of control, untold collateral damage.
The Iowa Caucuses are in meltdown due to “inconsistencies in reporting data,” whatever that means. Results are due later today, Feb. 4. (Gee, they missed Groundhog Day just by two days. It would’ve been so appropriate.) Remember when we had voting machines that worked?
Meanwhile, President Donald J. “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City (Kansas)” Trump will be acquitted in his witness-less impeachment trial. The Republicans say they voted against witnesses for the good of the country, which would be torn apart if Trump’s presidency were declared illegitimate. There’s nothing that lends an air of ease to a non-choice quite like one whose expediency is couched in faux nobility.
I myself would’ve voted to remove Trump, given that everyone agrees he extorted Ukraine for his own ambitions. And yet, there is a part of me that wonders, Why did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bother? Perhaps the Democrats would’ve been better off censuring Trump and moving on. But then, how will history judge them and us? Sometimes the truly noble thing is not expedient. Now the Dems have to remember a saying that I keep tucked in my computer: “The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.” Time to concentrate on the long road that could lead to Trump’s real impeachment and removal — the November presidential election.
The field of candidates consists of people who would all make good cabinet officers. They’re just not necessarily presidential material. The appeal of the surging Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is baffling. He’s the Eugene McCarthy of the 21st century and the Jeremy Corbyn of this side of the Pond — a grumpy old white leftist whose captured the youth vote for reasons that are not clear. Oh, I know when you’re young, it’s easy to hate Wall Street (much harder to do when you have to pay a mortgage and kids’ education or fund retirement.) Wall Street is the tide that lifts all boats, including those of Main Street. Or, in the words of our first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, so popular because of the surprisingly moving “Hamilton” the musical and yet so misunderstood by his public: “Power without revenue is a bauble.”
If Sanders is the nominee, Wall Street money will dry up for the Dems, and Trump will be reelected in a landslide that will make Corbyn’s crushing Labour Party defeat at the hands of that phony Boris Johnson and the Tories look like a real horse race.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren shares many of Sanders’ left-of-center views and is passionate and knowledgeable. So why is she fading? Is it the dreaded W (for woman) word and the notion that a woman can’t win? If so, what does that say for Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a competent moderate who lacks Warren’s charisma? Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is another moderate — personable, persuasive and an Iraq War veteran. But if America is still questioning if a woman can win, what about an openly gay man? I've always said when asked about my homoerotic novels (“Water Music,” “The Penalty for Holding,” “Daimon” and, to a lesser extent, “Burying the Dead”) that sports is the last bastion of homophobia — an idea underscored by the new Netflix documentary series “Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez,” about the murderous, bisexual former New England Patriots’ tight end, who committed suicide in prison, and the recent memoir by the now-out former Patriots’ and Kansas City Chiefs’ lineman Bryan O’Callaghan, “My Life on the Line: How the NFL Damn Near Killed Me and Ended Up Saving My Life.” But now I think politics may be the last bastion of homophobia.
Plus, Buttigieg seems to have no traction with black voters. Ditto another former mayor, New York City’s skillful billionaire Mike Bloomberg, whose stop-and-frisk policy many in New York remember. One person who does have traction with black voters — and can win in that Rust Belt quadrangle of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio that defeated Hillary Clinton — is . former Vice President Joe Biden. But will he be tainted by Ukraine-gate, which all began because Trump was seeking dirt on Biden and on his son Hunter, who got a cushy Ukrainian oil company post while Joe was President Barack . Obama’s veep? Still, as one Iowa Democrat reminded us in a TV interview, “Vote Blue, No Matter Who.”
Across the Pond, the British voted for Brexit, sort of — and now it’s come to pass, sort of, brought home on the larger 2016 anti-immigration wave that swept Trump into office. I can’t help but feel sad for all the people whose lives and livelihoods are going to be upended by this. (The actual departure is Dec. 31.) But in rejecting the European Union, the United Kingdom could find itself rejected by an independence-seeking Scotland and a Northern Ireland thrust into an uneasy role as buffer between the departing U.K. and the Republic of Ireland, an E.U. member. (Both Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to stay in the E.U.)
Now the U.K. will have to negotiate a new trade deal with the E.U. But what will be the E.U.’s incentive to go easy on the U.K.? And what of the much-anticipated trade deal with once and future BFF America?
If I were the Brits, I’d think long and hard about what that’s going to mean. The British will do fine negotiating with individual states like California. But with a Trump Administration whose Commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, can look at the coronavirus plaguing China, unsettling the world and destabilizing the stock market and say it’s good for U.S. manufacturing jobs? Good luck wringing blood from that stone.
It may be that England — out of the E.U. and in bed with the U.S. — has gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.