Our U.S. Government: The Triumph of Process Over Principle.

The term process is defined as “a series of actions, changes, or functions bringing about a result”.  The term principle is defined as “a basic truth, law, or assumption”.  The modern Republican Party brands itself as valuing principle over process; holding the Constitution to be sacrosanct.  The modern Democratic Party brands itself as valuing process over principle; achieving its goals through whatever means are necessary.  Invariably, when push comes to shove, Democrats will hold fast to their conviction while Republicans waver from theirs.  The inevitable consequence of this dynamic is that our Congress will dependably devolve into bureaucracy when a clash between process and principle occurs.  Thus we have dysfunction, gridlock, partisan bickering, sandbox feuding, and the current funding dilemma.   It is nothing short of farcical that one can count on a single hand the number to times over the last four decades that Congress has performed its duty and passed all of the government’s required appropriation bills.  

Polls have evolved (or devolved, if you will) to the point where one must consider the source before assigning any validity to the study; it is nigh on impossible to accurately gauge the prevailing sentiment of U.S. citizenry at any point in time.  If you shop long enough, you will find a poll that supports your position.  Who among us has a clear view of exactly what the public thinks?  Don’t count on the national parties; they obviously do not have a clue.  Don’t count on the media; they all have their own agendas.  Don’t count on your own senses; you can’t believe any of what you hear and only a portion (small) of what you see.  Ultimately, it takes a leap of faith for each of us to observe the events in our own personal space, run those events through our own mind’s filters, balance that against our own gut instincts, and then factor all the results together in order to get a sense of what is actually going on in our nation.   Needless to say, this is an imperfect process and one that is handled much more astutely by some than by others.  Very damn few are correct very often.  My record is like most folks; very poor in guessing correctly which way the winds are blowing.  But if you watch and listen to our learned political leaders, they are chock full of absolute certainty about the voice of America.  As soon as they detect a shift in the wind, they move in that direction.  Past records and videotape be damned; there is no documentation on this planet that is sufficient to get an obfuscating politician to own up to a flip-flop on a significant policy issue.  A dying mackerel on a hot Florida day on a wooden wharf with a large hook firmly planted in its mouth has nothing…absolutely nothing…on these elected elites.

Now if each Party adhered to their primary motivation (at least according to my logic), the outcome of the current government funding impasse would be entirely predictable.    Not so.  It seems that while the Democrats continue to hold their discipline and remain faithful to the rule of process, the Republicans predictably begin to fret over the public perception and look for a compromise (process) to provide a way out of the current standoff.  This is a pattern that we have witnessed so  many times before or, as Yogi once famously said, it is “déjà vu all over again”.  The backbones of Congressional members must be made out of the most malleable substance in the universe and if it could be somehow extracted, it would make an incredible road-surfacing element.  But that lack of principle, that unwillingness to stick to your guns when the heat gets turned up, is the very edge that the Democrats hold over the Republicans and thus permits them to tie our entire government into knots of dysfunction. 

I have so many times before called for statesmanship and civility in government.  I have lamented the absence of real debate in legislative problem solving.  I have moaned about the lack of courage that prevents any leader of one party from offering entreaties to those across the aisle.  Ultimately, I have decried the very thing that I now condemn the Republicans for not possessing…principle.   At the end of the day, principle must trump process.  Compromise must be achievable on process; but never on principle.   And because the modern Republican Party lacks the cajones to place all their cards on principle over process when they get into these political showdowns with Democrats, we always end up with a solution that features process.  And process, taken to its extreme, is nothing more than bureaucracy by another name.  

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There is certainly a place for both principle and process in our government; both are fundamental and necessary elements of a nation’s administration.  But let us consider for a moment two opposing football teams who each have one clear advantage over the other.  One features a formidable stable of running backs and can ultimately wear the defensive line down with continual pounding; resulting in eventual touchdowns and effective time management.  The other team has a high-flying passing game that features a skilled quarterback and athletic receivers; relying to a large extent on big plays that gobble up huge chunks of yardage and lead to many scoring opportunities.  For either team to simply abandon their game plan to the other team’s strength, while ignoring their own prominent assets, borders on the foolish.  That, in my opinion, is how the Republican Party is conducting its business.  President Trump, coming from a position outside of the Party as he does, is not conditioned to play the game in this fashion.  Rather, when he is pushed, he pushes back.  When he is smacked in the mouth, he doesn’t glance around to see who is looking; he just smacks back.  Unfortunately, while there is an innate honesty to Trump’s behavior, the problem with it is that his actions and his reactions are not always or entirely motivated by principle.  The genesis of his behavior seems to lie somewhere in between principle and process; being rather independent of either’s influence or tethered to neither. 

I suppose that until the Republican Party finds a leader who will implacably place principle over process and gamble the entire house on that premise, our government will continue to be ruled by process.  And in very real and practical terms, as long as the Democrats continue to use the Federal Judiciary as a tool for achieving their policy agendas, as long as the Resist Trump movement remains alive and well, and as long as many of the archaic rules of Congress remain in place, the Democratic Minority will continue to limit the ability of their opponents to achieve their policy initiatives.  The Democrats are game-planning based on their strengths and the rules of the game; the Republicans are game-planning based on how they figure the Democrats will play and how they wish the rules were written.  This is not a recipe that will result in a very successful implementation of the Republican’s agenda.  Perhaps if the Republicans ever achieved a 60-vote Senate majority, along with control of the House and the Presidency, they might be sufficiently emboldened to actually do what they say they want to do.   But the likelihood of that occurring in today’s environment is…well, the Patriots are in the Super Bowl again, aren’t they?

The Fork in Mueller’s Road.

Now that the Steele Dossier is increasingly being exposed for the political ponzi scheme that it is, the question of how this impacts Mr. Mueller’s investigation becomes more prominent.  What is the man with the Democratic all-star team of lawyers and donors to do now that the impetus of his entire effort is crumbling?

Mr. Mueller is rapidly approaching, if he has not already arrived there, a fork in his special investigative road.  One path will lead him to lock up his shop, send his various minions back to work for Clinton Inc. or the DNC, crow about his pitiful indictments of Trump associates on matters entirely unrelated to any Russian Collusion, and slink off back into the WDC political morass of power and influence wherein he resides.  The other path is one that is much more interesting in terms of what it may bring forth.  As the foremost authority, Andrew C. McCarthy, on this entire Russian Collusion Circus recently writes @ http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455426/steele-dossier-fusion-gps-glenn-simpson-trump-russia-investigation, the alternative path is fraught with peril for both Mr. Mueller and his target, Mr. Trump.

If Mr. Mueller so chooses, he is in a position to obviously and significantly deviate from his appointed mission of pursuing evidence of Trump Campaign Russian Collusion and look down another road.   That road would be the one populated by Donald Trump’s personal business and financial connections; a neighborhood that is very likely to possess some extremely unsavory districts.  No sane person who has been paying any attention to Mr. Trump since he first announced his effort to pursue the Presidency can harbor much doubt that he has likely arrived at his current position of wealth and influence through means that are…shall we say…not strictly church material.  You have to assume that Donald Trump’s ambition to become President was not life-long in nature and much more likely a whim that occurred to him rather late in his eventful and privileged life.  If that be true, maintaining a resume that would serve him well in his later political ambitions was of little to no concern for him as his pursued his wealth and fame throughout his pre-Chief Executive portion of his life.  As Mr. McCarthy so clearly points out in his writing, there are bound to be portions of that era that Mr. Trump would just as soon leave buried.  Now the simple fact that Mr. Trump would like to keep this stuff hidden is sufficient motivation to most Democrats to expose it.  But in Mr. Mueller’s case, while it would be somewhat satisfying in a scalp-acquiring kind of way, it would also be accurately seen as a clear admission that he came up empty on his primary mission and settled for crumbs in a feeble attempt to justify his efforts.  In a professional sense and given the glorious praise heaped upon him and his team from certain quarters, that would likely be a very…painful…admission.  Not only would it hurt his pride; it might also bring with it legal actions from the President by challenging the obvious deviation from his primary directive.

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In the case of the President, his will be a choice of reaction…not action.  He will be reacting to whichever path Mr. Mueller selects.  As callous as he might have become in the hard scrabble world wealth, power, and greed, it must nonetheless unnerve him somewhat to think of the possibility of exposing some his less-savory early life adventures to the public eye.  While he might have welcomed such celebrity while hosting reality TV; the experience might not be so rewarding while seated in the Oval Office.  Alternatively, he is now in position to simply poke, prod, and ridicule Mr. Mueller’s efforts,  knowing that the primary target of Russian Collusion will ultimately come up empty; but somewhere in the back of his mind, he must be living in dread that the whole story of the Steele Dossier will come to light.  While he may publicly goad Mr. Mueller and mock his efforts, there is no doubt a bit of reluctance and fear in pushing him too hard to reveal the entire case he is assembling against Mr. Trump. 

It is going to be extremely entertaining to see which path Mr. Mueller selects.   Will he be willing to endure the professional embarrassment that would accompany his admission of no Trump/Russian Collusion in order to revel in the delight in exposing some of Trump’s pre-White House plays of the week?  Or will he simply close up his books, settle for the legal pittance indictments and pleas he has constructed, and call it a day; allowing him to slink back into the shadows of the WDC establishment from which he came with his political gunslinger image pretty much intact?  

Reaping What We Sow.

In my rural Kentucky County, local politics have been a continual entertainment source.  We have a long history of selecting the least able among us to shepherd our county tax revenues.    When on rare occasion we actually get a solid, quality candidate to run for a county office, they typically are soundly defeated by the local good old boy or girl.  I would like to think that over the last decade or so, we have improved somewhat in our discretion as it comes to selecting county officials; but I am likely overvaluing the good few that have managed to slip into office.  And now, for those good few, the challenge becomes trying to maintain some modicum of integrity and common sense, in spite of the many influences that pull them counter to that goal.  On the national stage, I fear we are duplicating what I am seeing at home.  It seems that the quality of leadership, in both parties, has been trending downward.  

Like him or not, there can be little dispute that Donald Trump came into the presidency with a place on what must be considered the short list of “least prepared for the White House”.  Now a good President and a poorly prepared candidate are not necessarily mutually exclusive.   At the end of the day, the effectiveness of a person’s tenure in the White House is based on how the nation fares during their term(s) in office.   As they leave the Chief Executive’s office, it is largely forgotten from whence they came.  The memories that remain are what they did once they came into office.  But having said all of that and acknowledging that some of our apparently well-prepared Presidents turned out to be some of the lesser ones; it only makes common sense that we should pull our Presidential timber from the stack of boards that are kiln-dried, well-seasoned, free of knotholes, lacking in warp and twist, and have an obvious consistent grain to them.  If you continually pull from the cull stack, you cannot reasonably expect to get good boards.

So, upon the heels of the Republicans and Democrats selecting two of the least desirable candidates in history for the last Presidential race, you must pardon me for being astonished at the bum rush to promote Oprah Winfrey as our next President.  Do we learn nothing and simply repeat the same mistakes over and over?  Hillary Clinton was a known corrupt politician long ago and well before the Democrats picked her to run for President.  The Republicans selected the loud-mouthed and pompous Donald Trump from a slate of rather impressive candidates.  At the time, few people dreamed of this brash reality-TV personality winning the election; but most all of us underestimated the ability of the voters to recognize a crook, reject a crook, and reluctantly choose the lesser of two evils.  The incredible coincidence here is that the Democrats chose that election cycle, one in which they were damn near guaranteed a Presidential victory, to run a historically weak candidate.  In all truth and honesty, when it comes to evaluating the quality of Presidential candidates, Clinton and Trump both undoubtedly came out of the cull stack.  And now, fresh off their embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Donald, following more than a year of crying from the mountaintops how unfit for President this caricature is, the Democrats (at least  momentarily) coalesce around another entertainment personality as their bright hope for the future?  And who amongst us would be foolish enough to dismiss out of hand the possibility of Winfrey being our next President? After all, we…elected…Donald…Trump.  There can be a robust debate about whether it is best to have an insider President or an outsider President; but who in their right mind can argue that the best source for this nation’s leadership is the entertainment industry?

The immediate concern for our country should be the rejuvenation of a bipartisan and civil government; one that actually functions in some type of fundamental fashion.  Instead, we continue down the dangerous road of the idiotic Resist Movement and the bizarro world of Cryptic Tweets.  Instead of our two primary political parties examining and analyzing why candidates like Clinton and Trump end up on the ballot, we see them going bonkers over Oprah and finding non-existent redeeming characteristics in our current President.  The plain and simple truth is that the Presidential primary process as it currently exists in each party might very well, if not likely, lead to the same type and quality of candidates that we are now experiencing.  We should look closely in the mirror and ask who is to blame for the Roy Moores and Al Frankens of the political world.  Do we blame them or do we change the system that put them on the ballot? 

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America is a wonderful experiment that has generated heroes of every shape and size.  We as a nation have been largely blessed to have many of these heroes serve in leadership capacities throughout our history.  If we continue to select that leadership from the cull stack, is it reasonable to expect that things will turn out well?  The last Presidential election pointed out in clear terms the failings of each party’s primary system.  NOW is the time and the place for Republican and Democratic leaders to alter their candidate selection processes so that the best of each group are the ones that end up on the ballot.  If they fail to do this, the quality and effectiveness of our country’s leadership will continue to atrophy.  And if Americans cannot find suitable leaders on the ballot from the two major parties, is it unreasonable to imagine a third party rising to give a broader, and hopefully better, choice?  Chickens come home to roost.  We get the government we deserve.  We WILL reap what we sow

Moving the Goalposts and Renaming the Rose.

Radical environmentalists and liberal Democrats are both engaged in that old game of switcheroo; the former pretty much a fait accompli and the latter a work in progress.  Both parties have benefited greatly, basically been enabled, by a liberal media that has been more than willing to carry their water in any fashion they deign.  And unfortunately, even in today’s world where audio and video exists like air to breathe, most of the public has swallowed these bait and switch schemes lock, stock, and barrel.

How many of us can recall the term global warming?  Can you remember when the “One” proclaimed that he would single-handedly stop the rise of the oceans?  What about all of those polar bears that would be floating down the east coast due to the ice caps melting?  And please…do not ask the people along the Atlantic from Florida to Maine about global warming; better to ask them about the bomb cyclone.   After building mega fortunes (looking at you, Al Gore) on hype and running all over the planet warning of the coming apocalypse, the environmental carpetbaggers realized at some point that their falsified data and bogus research would eventually be exposed for the fraud that it was…and is.  At some point, they began to slyly substitute the term climate change for global warming.  Think about that for a moment…when was the last time you heard the term global warming?   Global warming is a pretty definitive term; it entails a consistent rise in temperatures and can be pretty well quantified.  On the other hand, climate change is a much more generic term and can be bent or shaped to suit.  Who in their right mind can deny that the climate is changing?  Forget that there are decades of archives detailing all of the Chicken Littles running around the world crying about global warming; they will now tell you that it was always about climate change.  I suppose that all of that historical fact is nothing more than just…An Inconvenient Truth.  So the next time you see some environmental radical espousing the imminent catastrophes that will be forthcoming from climate change, just remember that these people are actually thinking global warming and saying climate change.  Of course the climate is changing; the pertinent question is “why is it changing”?

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And now we fast forward to the most recent chapter in this game; that of switching the conversation from Russian Collusion to Obstruction of Justice.  It has been nothing short of HI...LAR…I…OUS to watch the old gray rag herself, the New York Times, switch its holy grail from the Steele Dossier to a drunken and puffed-up campaign juvenile named Papadopoulos.  Six months ago, the NYT was telling us all that the Steele Dossier, a shoddy tabloid composite of salacious lies and fables (just ask Mr. Comey), was the Rosetta Stone for all this Trump Campaign/Russian Collusion stuff.  They breathlessly parroted anything the most honorable Mr. Schiff leaked to them and were…so…damn…certain…that they had Mr. Trump dead to rights.  But in the last couple of weeks, curiously just as their key piece of evidence was being exposed for the shameless product of the Clinton Campaign, DNC, and corrupt DOJ officials that it is, the ignoble NYT now simply pooh-poohs the Dossier and says that it was never the genesis of all this Trump Collusion business.   Of course not, they say; it all began with the drunken braggadocio of a 30-year old campaign staffer in a London bar to an Australian diplomat.  Now if you are getting a sense of déjà vu, please feel free to indulge the impulse.  The same old global warming/climate change metamorphosis is taking place.  Refusing to acknowledge that their world-shattering, Pulitzer Prize seeking expose on the Steele Dossier has flown south; the liberal media now is attempting a smooth transition from collusion to obstruction.  Once again, as in the former episode, they expect folks to simply transfer all that was previously reported under the guise of collusion to the new flavor of the month headline…obstruction of justice.  Fortunately, they are making a fatal error this time around.

Whereas the term climate change is a generic term that is sufficiently deep and wide to eliminate any possible disproof; the term obstruction of justice is sufficiently precise as to require supporting facts in order to claim legitimacy.  The NYT, the Washington Post, and all the pompous and self-important television networks that have created this Resist Trump cottage industry have now boxed themselves in a corner.  They must back up their wild allegations of obstruction with actual proof or else admit, in likely the most evasive and subtle ways possible, that…well…they didn’t actually mean to use the term obstruction of justice; they were actually meaning…something else.  I wonder...how many times can someone move the goalposts and remain in the game?