The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
@JamieStiehm
Centennial Of A Prophet: James Baldwin's 100th Anniversary

Centennial Of A Prophet: James Baldwin's 100th Anniversary

You're born poor in Harlem, the oldest son, and hit the streets in the Depression doing errands and odd jobs. Your father gives you a dime to get kerosene. You fall on the ice, losing the dime. Your father beats you. He says you're ugly.

Your mother is your salvation. You help her with baby after baby. Your father works in a factory and as a church minister on Sunday. You're a preacher's son and preach to young people.

You love when the church rocks and sings the power and glory. You're not religious, but knowing the Bible shapes your sonorous voice for the ages.

A school principal sends you to the public library. A cop says, "Why don't you stay uptown where you belong?"

You grow up fast, a complex soul, and move to Greenwich Village. You work as a waiter and at an army depot.

You're an outsider on two counts: Black and gay. The 1950s were so rigid, you need to breathe freer air.

So you sail to Paris, once your first novel is out: the autobiographical Go Tell It On the Mountain. At 29, your life becomes a tale of two cities, New York and Paris, with friends on both shores.

But you are always American. Maybe you see your country more clearly from over the ocean. We see it more clearly thanks to you.

Your name is James Baldwin, the major 20th-century author. You were born in 1924. This is your centennial year.

Gone for years, Baldwin stays ahead of our time as a literary prophet.

A Northerner who felt the Southern sting of Jim Crow law, Baldwin foretold the racial fury and protests that spilled onto streets when George Floyd was choked by police in 2020.

Baldwin's powerful essays and novels are his main legacy.

For the novels alone, he belongs in the pantheon. "Giovanni's Room" is a self-portrait in Paris and tells of a tragic gay love. His publisher turned it down.

Baldwin's wrenching fiction paints a lynching at a village picnic; police brutality ending in suicide; a white farm boy getting his neck broken.

In the lynching story, Baldwin forces us to face the fate of thousands of African American men.

A blunt declaration underlies Baldwin's work: "The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling."

Baldwin's characters are Black and white. Race lies at the heart of his work. Following footsteps of the Harlem Renaissance writers, he surpassed almost all.

Baldwin's social criticism cuts to the bone. His rise as a writer accompanied the Civil Rights Movement.

The movement became the music to his words. Baldwin knew Martin Luther King Jr. and attended the 1963 March on Washington. He visited Selma, Montgomery, Atlanta, the places that made bloody history. Baldwin lived civil rights on the front lines.

Once Baldwin brought freedom riders to confront Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Harry Belafonte and others demanded the Justice Department protect peaceful marchers. Kennedy was shocked at the barrage.

1963 was an inflection point, sun shadowed by a Klan church bombing that killed four girls in Alabama. Then came the November knell: President John F. Kennedy's death drove the nation into despair.

The year before, a sweeter note with the Kennedys had sounded. Baldwin was a guest at the famous White House dinner for Nobel laureates. That year he turned 38 and published Another Country.

Authors William Styron and Norman Mailer and actor Marlon Brando were among his friends.

For all Baldwin's slings and arrows, he lived in the light of genius. No starving writer, he became a posh citizen of the world seen in Istanbul and Paris cafes. He called others "baby.'

Baldwin had a home in France. Yet he was never at rest.

The classic novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, arose from Baldwin's bleak vision at 50.

His great love was a Swiss man, Lucien Happersberger, who had a cottage in the Alps. They spent a winter there when they were young — a long way from Harlem.

Baldwin became Lucien's son's godfather.

As Baldwin lay dying in France, Lucien and his brother David stayed by the writer's side. James Baldwin was 63.

The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit Creators.com.

Rose Garden, The White House

Murder In The Rose Garden (Melania Did It)

The laziest first lady in American history paved over parts of the White House Rose Garden for her husband's four addresses to the Republican National Convention.

So, why should we care in a summer of sorrow and woe, wildfires and hurricanes, a reckoning on race and the pandemic? What are crab apple trees to thee and me?

Ruining the Rose Garden design brought destruction of the tulip bulbs that dance in bloom, leading a lively parade of other flowers and shrubs. Gone, just like that. News of the "renovation" landed like a cross to my spirits, a bell of warning that there's more to come from President Donald Trump and Melania Trump. Nothing's sacred to these people.

Gardeners do not renovate, by the way. That's for houses, buildings, man-made places. I have it from the best of historians that Melania Trump is the laziest first lady ever, so perhaps the president plotted the murder and used her as a shield from critics.

Still, the bloody deed is done. Melania Trump is now implicated in her husband's radical disrespect for the dialogue between ages and presidents that goes on in the White House. There's only one president he shows any feeling for: fierce Southern slaveholder, lawyer and warrior general Andrew Jackson, who marched Native American tribes away from their land.

President John F. Kennedy envisioned the Rose Garden as a sublime gathering place and asked a family friend to design the colonnade space and bright colors for each season. He loved the seamless connection to the Oval Office, walking outside to beauty back in 1962. Every time he saw Rachel Lambert "Bunny" Mellon, he asked her how plans for the garden were coming along. He read Thomas Jefferson's garden writings and wished to plant Virginia magnolia trees in an unbroken pattern of history.

It's often thought Jacqueline Kennedy designed the Rose Garden, but it was President Kennedy's signature gift to the White House. Jacqueline Kennedy concentrated on art, furnishings and historic preservation. She once gave a dinner to celebrate Renaissance music and poetry.

Those days are over. The garden, until five minutes ago, exuded a cheery, unfussy elegance that sang of American optimism and belief in the future. Every garden is a world and a vote for the future.

This captures the heart of the loss: a shared concern about the 2020 election and what the future holds.

I was too young to remember the enchanting Kennedy era, of which the garden was a living remnant. The bloom was never off Camelot's rose. Jack Kennedy's sojourn on earth was short. He broke our hearts in a swift snap when he died by murder in Dallas.

Trump has broken our hearts in a different way — slowly, one day at a time, sowing seeds of discord and fury for his summer garden of thorns. And perhaps he has us where he wants us — demoralized, fragile, indoors, boarded up.

We're all missing people or things we love, little and large, under stress and siege since March. Like the post office, reader, our democratic service for all spelled out in the Constitution. The rage Trump rains and sleets on this precious institution is unheralded, trying to shake American faith in voting by mail before the election.

There are two 2020 anniversaries that we marked: Ludwig von Beethoven's 250th birthday, to be celebrated by orchestras worldwide, from Berlin to Washington. I had my tickets ready, choosing among my favorite symphonies. Don't tell me virtual playing is just as good. There's nothing like a full concert hall.

Then there's women's suffrage, winning the vote in August 1920. The centennial got lost in the crush, lucky for Trump. He wouldn't like knowing a young leader, Alice Paul, prevailed over President Woodrow Wilson.

My home state of California, once a promised land, is burning. New Orleans, which holds sweet memories, may be lashed by hurricanes. Somehow, it's all of a piece.

Time hangs heavy on our hands. Biking around town frees my soul, but I miss swimming's summer kiss on my skin. Crickets and cicadas sing me to sleep, a sound that gets back to the gardens we've lost.

Jamie Stiehm can be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To read her weekly column and find out more about Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.

Arlington National Cemetery, confederate monument

The Capitol’s Confederate Past Is Still Present

WASHINGTON — Eleven Confederate statues still stand tall in the Capitol. Let the ghost of the "Lost Cause" be gone for good as the nation undergoes a wrenching racial awakening.

Oh, no, says Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. He refuses to "airbrush the Capitol."

Read NowShow less
Election Day: Our Own Gettysburg Looms Before Us

Election Day: Our Own Gettysburg Looms Before Us

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

 

Pennsylvania looms large in our national story, not only in 1776 but also Saturday, Oct. 27, the cannons of 1863 and back to 1681.

If we’re edging near the political equivalent of civil war, the president is on the wrong side of history, emboldening white male supremacy and inciting anti-Semitic violence — the worst ever in America. Things happened we thought couldn’t happen here.

At first, President Donald Trump called up populist Andrew Jackson, outraging the elites. Now Trump is like Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, without the Southern charm.

Like that scoundrel, Trump is tearing the country in two. Most American presidents try to bring the country together. By his own admission, as he told author Bob Woodward, he brings out “rage.” That is his singular talent, spewing a mix of invective, boasting, ridicule and even “war” — on the press. Every day.

He never rests, even as the dead are being buried, and the mayor of a grieving city says to stay away.

Campaigning for an Illinois House seat mattered more to Trump than observing silence and respect for a mass slaying in a house of worship that very day. Then again, the House seat was a vehicle for his vanity. He didn’t want to stay home Saturday night.

No, he has no “sense of decency, sir.”

After the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue tragedy left 11 Jews murdered in a rampage of hate, there’s no denying it. We are facing a political crisis. The 1850s were polarized, too, with a racist Supreme Court upholding slavery shortly before the Civil War broke out.

The arc between then and now is rumbling. And it’s not bending toward justice.

The 2018 midterm election map shows a bitterly divided landscape. The House is closer to the voice of the people, likely to turn Democratic. The aristocratic Senate, removed from debates of the day, likely remains red, lodged in the hands of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

He’s what they used to call a Southern bull. His hero, Henry Clay, the Kentucky “Great Compromiser” tried to save slavery as long as possible.

Kentucky was a slave state, where runaway slaves crossed the Ohio River to freedom. Kentucky is also where an older man and woman were slain only the other day for being black.

The old South was no fun for anyone except plantation masters. America was nothing to be proud of, where mobs of white men attacked abolitionists in Boston and Philadelphia. Let’s not turn back in that direction.

So, picture Pennsylvania farmland with hills in the distance: Gettysburg on three smoking summer days in 1863. That battle was the turning point of the Civil War. Brash Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, had never gone that far north with his ragged barefoot army. The Union Army was finally ready to prevail in a huge engagement. General Meade knew this would be decisive. It was the midpoint of the four-year Civil War, just as we are at the midterm of Trump’s four years. The blue army won, but boy, it was close. After Gettysburg, a military historian told me, Lee could not have won the war.

Soon we’ll have our own Gettysburg, the political donnybrook on Election Day, Nov. 6. The sides of this torn nation meet at the ballot box. High are the stakes, getting higher. The result will speak loudly — in divided houses of Congress.

The Virginian founders were rich slaveholders. We glorify them but forget great colonial governor William Penn, the Quaker who championed peace and religious freedom. The bright Englishman sailed to found a Quaker colony dedicated to such radical ideals. The New World land was named Pennsylvania. Penn would weep to see bloodshed in the beloved Squirrel Hill synagogue.

History is full of turns toward the right thing. Abraham Lincoln told us that truth in the Gettysburg address, on an autumnal November day. But as the battlefield he stood on made clear, the cost of saving American democracy can be dear.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other cartoonists and columnists, visit creators.com.

 

August Farewells To McCain — And Another Great, Too

August Farewells To McCain — And Another Great, Too

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

 

WASHINGTON — I wept for the senator who showed me, as a rookie reporter, that I might be worth talking to in the marble halls by the Senate floor. The noble gadfly is gone, days short of 82. He’ll have full-dress honors, lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. The National Cathedral will be full as the bell tolls.

John Sidney McCain III was right out of that Hemingway novel, his favorite: “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” He was an American original. So was another larger-than-life senator, a Democratic lion who died on the same date in 2009 of the same cruel disease: Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Lightly smiling, McCain tapped in Morse code on the elegant lunch table, to show how he communicated with other prisoners of war in the Hanoi Hilton. I couldn’t get over his cheer. I understand now: sweet freedom.

I’m not the only one grieving for the staunch Republican who died Aug. 25 at his home near Sedona, Arizona, of brain cancer.

Journalists relished his wit and zest. The senator called the Fourth Estate his base, exuberance mixed with candor. Believe me, we appreciate him even more now, after the “war” President Trump waged on press freedom since his first day in office.

McCain actually enjoyed our company, with his contrarian streak. His eyes danced as he spoke of one Senate stickler for tradition: “We’re so close!” He nursed loves and hates; there wasn’t much in between.

Yet I remember, he said to a departing Democrat, “Let’s let bygones be bygones.”

His last speech on the Senate floor was gallant, given to a full, hushed house. I remember him saying it was an honor to serve with each and every one. Aaron Burr gave an eloquent farewell that made men cry; McCain’s will also make the books.

The morning sky seems starker. The August full moon looks reddish, like a late summer elegy. August, die she must, as the folk song goes. The sky reveals flags flying at half-mast, and one that goes grudgingly up and down.

The man inside the White House hates how much this city — and country — loves McCain, the man who saved Obamacare, the signature legacy of the man who defeated him for president. That moment took amazing grace.

Trump’s anger at the “activity” honoring McCain may be an inflection point for his haphazard presidency. His legal troubles are rising like a flood, but his sullen refusal to pay respects to a late rival shows him in all his smallness. Is he just a wretch, like the voice in “Amazing Grace”? You tell me.

McCain reached “across the aisle” to a younger Democratic senator, Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, to co-author a campaign finance reform law. He was merry about it in an early phone interview, praising Feingold, with whom he went out on the road to pitch the bipartisan bill.

More recently, he took a stand against torture — practiced by the George W. Bush administration — because he had been there, borne the nightmare.

When McCain was wrong, he could be way wrong, as in his nonsensical pick of Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor. And he never met a war he didn’t like.

Senator Kennedy, his friend, was a great lawmaker for the ages. Consistently a liberal champion, he sailed straight into the wind, without the zigs and zags of McCain. Kennedy voted against the Iraq War. They saw eye to eye on immigration.

You could hear them a country mile from the floor, especially Kennedy. Republicans feared his roar.

Both McCain and Kennedy had catching joie de vivre. If they entered a room, something was going to happen. Kennedy once climbed the Matterhorn.

Born in the 1930s, each felt destined to be president. They were raised to serve the nation from a young age.

They were American elites, raised on privilege and power. McCain was the son and grandson of admirals. Kennedy was born to the breed. One brother was president. His grandfather was mayor of Boston.

Trump represents a rapacious real estate family empire. He sees government as an extension of himself.

Nine Augusts ago, I wept for Kennedy, too.

To find out about other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the website Creators.com.

The Beautiful American — And The Ugly One

The Beautiful American — And The Ugly One

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

 

Simply, she’s the best of times, the spring sun. He’s the worst of times, the darkness before the dawn.

The world witnessed a walking American Revolution in Meghan “Sparkle” Markle, who marched down the aisle alone to marry the sweet English Prince Harry. He looked dashing in a black frock coat uniform while the bride wore white satin — black and white, get it? The contrast was in plain sight.

Alone, fancy that! Under those fascinators were a sea of raised eyebrows. The biracial Californian actress Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, was a sight to behold in ancient Windsor Castle.

Sorry, but we have to go dark now.

Stateside, the reason we were captivated (even the weary press) is that the American president — his name is Donald Trump — is humiliating, at home and abroad. He’s the walking Ugly American.

The sparkling American is a note to the world that we are not all bad. We send good will to the mother country and the 50 British Commonwealth nations — I know, right? We can but hope for the rest of the atlas.

You know as well as I that the United States has a bad name in the world community. Shall I count the ways?

We’ve broken with two major international treaties, on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal, championed by President Obama. France is only Atlantic ally that even pretends to like us. In 16 months, we’ve broken a lot of china in NATO and upended trade with China.

Travel bans on some Muslim countries. Insulting others as “s—-holes” in a heartless White House turn on immigration. Threatening to deport “Dreamers” brought here as children. Well, word gets round the world.

The United Nations considers us a bad actor on Israel. Yes, we’re way too cozy with belligerent “Bibi” — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

(Wait, isn’t the U.N. sitting on prime waterfront real estate? Come on. Let’s build a fantastic hotel there.)

And you know what? In the political night we’re living in, we were pining, starved to see some happy news that gave us beauty, uplift, love that bridged an ocean. Loads of we the American people were beyond refreshed at the water’s edge early in the morning.

It’s hard to explain to friends across the pond just how Trump got to be president, anyway, though he lost the count by three million votes. What a web we weave. Let’s not even talk about guns.

With the Justice Department’s Russian investigation going on, and with Trump insisting the investigators be investigated, are we in a constitutional crisis?

“Not yet,” said my mother, the political scientist. “Not yet.”

She knows one when she sees one, since she knew President Richard Nixon was bound for the gallows of impeachment way before he did.

Yes, we dimly remember a time when American democracy was the last best hope and light of the world. Even at the end of the 20th century, President Clinton was known as a peacemaker — in Bosnia and Ireland.

Scene change to Prince Harry, red-bearded in fine English monarch style. He showed history can bend and move forward gracefully to become more inclusive than ever.

His bride proudly brought her own heritage to make it a true meeting of Anglo-Afro-American hearts and rituals. The gospel singers raised the rafters.

In an arc of loss and joy, Meghan, the self-possessed duchess, is 36. Old enough to be accomplished, outspoken and to stand on her own two feet — literally. That’s the very age Diana, the “People’s Princess” and Harry’s mother, was when she died in a tragic car crash in Paris.

I know these things. I lived in London. I married an English guy and also felt perfection crumble, like Diana.

Spring sun, shine on. Our spirits need a lift.

To find out more out Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit Creators.com.

 

An Officer, Gentleman, Senator

An Officer, Gentleman, Senator

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

 

At lunch in the Senate Dining Room, the man knocked on the table in a burst of taps.

Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., showed his press secretary and me how he communicated with other prisoners of war in the Hanoi Hilton: Morse code. And he smiled impishly.

McCain lays dying of a rare brain tumor, like the one that took the life of Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., in 2009. Last summer, McCain came back after his grim diagnosis, head bandaged, to save Obamacare — by a thumbs-down floor vote at 2:30 a.m.

Ninety-nine gasps. Not only did McCain defy President Trump, but also he single-handedly salvaged the signature law of President Obama, who defeated him in 2008. Call it largeness of character, seldom seen in the marble halls.

Resting on his ranch, McCain remains the most vocal Senate Republican resisting Trump. (The second is Arizona’s Jeff Flake.) He’s not welcome at the senator’s funeral. McCain’s absence means his party’s majority hangs by a thread, 50-49.

A forthcoming May 22 memoir, “The Restless Wave,” promises bracing hope — to the last. Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Washington Post, wrote, “McCain unspools something akin to a self-help manual for a country that has, at least for the moment, lost its way.” His last gift to the country.

McCain, 81, will be remembered as a great denizen of the Senate. He’s no angel, but he took lonely stands with immigrants and against torture.

His 2012 opposition to Susan Rice for Obama’s secretary of state resulted in a stellar pick, Senate colleague John Kerry, D-Mass. Remarkably, he and Kerry — a fellow naval officer in Vietnam, later an anti-war leader — had worked together to gain diplomatic recognition for Vietnam. A generational ghost put to rest; for once a little poetry in politics.

McCain’s reckless pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, based on a coffee chat, chilled the nation’s spine. Such an unserious choice cost him dearly. He deserved to lose.

Remember campaign finance reform? A noble thing, the law championed by McCain and Democratic co-author Russell Feingold. McCain reached out to the young Wisconsin Democrat, the best of the crop across the aisle.

I know that because he told me in an early morning phone interview. There were not many senators who made time for a rookie reporter (for The Hill) to sing praises of a junior senator from the other side. McCain’s exuberance, early in the morning, was real.

McCain, born to privilege, squandered much in a misspent youth at the Naval Academy. His suffering and valor in North Vietnam gave him a restless redemption.

Shot out of the sky, McCain spent five years there; starting with broken bones, surviving under brutal conditions, tortured and imprisoned by the Viet Cong. His North Vietnamese captors gave him chances to be freed first, because he was blue-blood American military, the son and grandson of admirals. But McCain refused that way out. He was finally released in turn, a gaunt shadow in a white Navy officer’s uniform, in 1973.

It’s no secret that Hill reporters felt a rush of kindred spirits with McCain. We crowded around him by the Senate elevators, and he liked us, too. He’d share what he knew about anything we asked, with gusto and relish. He seemed to greet every day with uncommon intensity, as if making up for lost time. Republicans loved him not so much, for never being a company man. Not for nothing did McCain call the press “my base.”

Curiously, when McCain took over the Armed Services Committee, that plummy chair, the rebel was gone. He presided over Pentagon business as usual. However, McCain marked my generation of journalists, especially those who covered him on presidential campaign quests. David Von Drehle also wrote a farewell salute on the Post op-ed page. Years ago, Michael Lewis found a devilish glee in McCain’s subversiveness.

To share a personal note, when McCain heard who broke my heart — Michael Lewis — he slapped a fist on his palm. Worked like a charm. And that Morse code moment is fixed in my memory forever, with the smile on McCain’s face.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

 

Trump Can’t Charm, Not Even For One Spring Night

Trump Can’t Charm, Not Even For One Spring Night

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

 

WASHINGTON — Call me Cinderella.

I’m getting dressed in blue rags to go to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. It’s the annual April spring thing. Black tie in a ballroom. Usually the president sits at the head table and acts like Prince Charming. He stands up and makes jokes at his own expense in a monologue that brings the house down. That would be Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton bringing their best game of bonhomie.

Not this April. Donald Trump’s a no-show at the ritual for the second straight time. The president is boycotting the best chance to make peace with the press and let his hair down. (Kidding!)

OK, nobody’s that upset about Trump’s snub. Nor was he wanted at the funeral for former First Lady Barbara Bush. He’s the skunk at a garden party. Sad!

But it’s worth noting that the “running war” Trump declared on the press on his first full day in office is real. Scowling, he visited the Central Intelligence Agency and cut into the “dishonest” media, echoing a campaign rant. His fury filled the room to honor fallen spies. No American president worth his salt attacks a democratic institution in public. President Nixon was a hater in private, and for that we must thank him.

Trump also insisted Press Secretary Sean Spicer lie to the press about the size of the inaugural crowd — sparse compared to the Women’s March. If you trace the river of “fake news” to its mouth, it’s Trump’s mouth — and Trump’s term.

The White House press corps carries on. I admire them, cool under fire. But they are so close, working in the West Wing, they may have normalized the bizarre.

The best and brightest chase Trump’s tweets starting at dawn. They let slings and arrows pass, even when Trump lashes journalists by name, like Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. (She responded civilly to his last blast: Her story was “hitting a nerve.”) They endure snide asides by Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. It feels like a cramped Dickensian orphanage in there, nothing but crumbs.

Correspondents waited and wondered for a year when Trump would hold a second press conference. It took French President Macron’s visit for a full-dress news conference to happen.

The Fourth Estate’s blood was chilled by a recently revealed conversation between Trump and FBI Director James Comey, before he fired Comey. They spoke about putting a leaker’s “head on a pike as a message.” Trump voiced enthusiasm for jailing leakers. To us, sources and leaks are the lifeblood of democracy. How little he cares about constitutional press freedom.

It’s not just adversarial. No, it’s his war, as Trump declared. But to their credit, the correspondents covering him take the high road.

I told my father about all this. A California doctor, he diagnosed a malady. He said Trump won’t attend the mirthful evening because he can’t smile or laugh. Have you seen him try? It’s Herculean. He has no humor, but more to the point for the press dinner, he can’t use irony to laugh at himself, an art President Kennedy mastered. Self-deprecating wit is too sophisticated for someone who can’t let go of social dominance at all times.

President Obama made light of Trump, a guest at one WHCA Dinner, in an elegant takedown of the “Celebrity Apprentice” reality show. “You didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf — you fired Gary Busey. And those are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir.”

Trump looked like a baited bear. Some say this was his catalyst to run for president.

My father pointed out other character failings. Cultural events are notably absent on the president’s calendar. “Hamilton” is coming to town, to the Kennedy Center, but he doesn’t care. (The Obamas loved “Hamilton.”) He doesn’t read books and tells staff to keep memos short, to eye while watching Fox News. Curiosity never killed this cat.

So Trump never leaves his “comfort zone.” Golf and partisan rallies are all he does for fun outside the house.

He doesn’t know what he misses. Not just me in rags.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

The Big Chinks In Comey’s Righteous Armor

The Big Chinks In Comey’s Righteous Armor

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

America is living a Greek tragedy, because of a freakishly tall man who thinks he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. His name is James Comey; his brand-new book title is “A Higher Loyalty;” he’s here to say that Donald Trump is “morally unfit to be president.”

As if we didn’t know. The irony of his ink runs deeper than the well.

The former FBI director, fired by President Trump last May, is avenging his abrupt exit from the job J. Edgar Hoover held for half a century. Comey just launched a war of words with Trump. Reckless or high-minded? You tell me.

Either way, there are chinks in Comey’s armor as he makes media rounds. For starters, the FBI chief did not resign in protest. That’s the honorable road less taken, if he found Trump unfit and untruthful. But Comey loved his job’s “tremendous fame, attention and power.” So he tolerated the ogre in the Oval: Trump, a boss he sketches with a scathing pen. (I can’t argue with the critique.)

The second chink is well-known. Running for president, Hillary Clinton made mistakes along the way, but she didn’t deserve Comey as her tormentor. It’s etched onto many memories that Comey took Clinton to task publicly over “extremely careless” emails on a private server.

He first broke FBI protocol to scold the former secretary of state in the summer of 2016, though the bureau did not pursue the case.

But wait, it gets worse. Comey did the same on Oct. 28, 2016, the election’s home stretch. He announced taking another look into Clinton’s emails, a case closed days before the volatile election.

Polls on the morning of Oct. 28 show Clinton with a comfortable lead. By night, her numbers tumbled down. A fateful day for democracy. Comey made grave moves that dismayed his own colleagues. At the FBI, it’s close to a commandment: Thou shalt observe silence about failed investigations before a presidential election.

But wait, here’s the cruelest chink of all. Trump’s campaign was under federal investigation, too, for ties to Russian cyberattacks on the elections. Why didn’t Comey pipe up to warn the public about a far worse foul on our free elections? Confounding. President Obama knew, too, and kept quiet on the western front.

Comey and Obama, each 56, share a cool cerebral mind meld. They fancy themselves above the political fray. Both assumed Clinton would win and did not want to be seen as favoring her. Great minds.

Reading between Comey’s lines, he’s always right in a world of woe, overcoming others. Surely, Obama admired an independent Republican, with so few of those bison roaming the range.

But let’s not forget Comey was an avid Republican political appointee in the George W. Bush Justice Department. He made an unusual scene: racing to Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room to prevent a surveillance program from being renewed. He felt like Martin Luther, crossing the cross Bush-Cheney White House.

In 2013, Obama committed a serious unforced error. He rewarded the Luther-like Comey by appointing him FBI director. What folly for his party, though Obama hasn’t owned any regrets. (When was he ever wrong?)

Obama praised Comey in the Oval after the election, for integrity and ability. “I want you to know that nothing — nothing — has happened … to change my view,” he told Comey.

As for Clinton, Comey is sorry he couldn’t explain why he did what he did well enough for her to understand.

That is not an apology.

The Democratic nominee decisively won the popular vote. She didn’t deserve Comey’s rebukes, always at her expense. Nor did we the people deserve his thwarting fair play in the public square.

The New York Times noted that somehow Corey blames us for the fine mess: “Impeachment would be a cop-out for a public that should also be held accountable for electing Mr. Trump in the first place.”

In Greek tragedy, the hero’s hubris — or pride — results in his downfall. But in Comey’s case, his pride cost his country dearly before the fall.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

Uncle Joe, Let It Go

Uncle Joe, Let It Go

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Everybody loves Joe.

In certain circles in Washington and Hollywood, you hear a lot about the virtues of Joe Biden running for president in 2020. Chris Matthews, the MSNBC pundit, and Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee chair, as well as actor George Clooney, have been counted as supporters of Biden.

In addition, Newsweek made Biden a media darling, with a big fat kiss piece on how he can beat Donald Trump — if only his party will let him. And Biden himself will soon join the chorus with an upcoming book tour to promote a new memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” the heartbreaking story of his son Beau Biden’s death in 2015, at 46, from brain cancer. The tour cuts through several political battleground states.

The younger Biden was Delaware’s state attorney general who served in Iraq. He had a bright future, but fate had other plans. Biden had devastating personal loss serve as bookends to his political career: Back in 1972, his first wife and baby daughter died in a car crash. Biden’s tragedy invited sympathy when he entered the Senate shortly afterward. Indeed, he is one of Washington’s best-loved characters. That luck-of-the-Irish grin has lit up many stuffy gatherings.

But Washington doesn’t always know best. Biden’s perch is so high here that it’s hard to speak hard home truths about him. First, he’s 75. Imagine the hubris to think he could become president at 78. Trump is the oldest American president so far, sworn in at 70. If Biden pursues this vain dream, he’s shamelessly stealing from the future.

A rising star, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is an expert on sexual harassment in the military. She was the first to call for Senator Al Franken, D-Minn., to resign over allegations of sexual harassment. Touted as a presidential prospect, she’d have a field day ripping Biden’s sloppy handling of the Hill-Thomas confirmation hearing. Believe me, Biden does not want to cross a younger generation on this riptide issue. None of his supporters have a good answer to that; they prefer to forget.

The phrase that’s haunted me over years: “You get the benefit of the doubt, Judge. You get the benefit of the doubt.” As chairman, Biden stated Thomas would be subject to common criminal standards — for the highest court in the land. One senator, Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., responded that the American people deserve the benefit of the doubt. Biden did not even call witnesses to support Hill’s story. Thomas narrowly won confirmation, 52-48.

Biden said recently he owed Hill an apology for the grave injustice. Well, she’s listed in the Brandeis University telephone book. Is Hill still waiting on that call?

Third, in the Senate, the genial Biden made a lot of friends, but he didn’t get a lot of work done. Consider a man who was a senator for 36 years, who chaired two major committees, but only had a slender record of major legislation: the Violence Against Women Act was his most impressive achievement. Another thing he did was hire and nurture outstanding young men — Antony Blinken and Ronald Klain, who both went on to the White House.

But here’s what he did for Barack Obama, a service that the cool, cerebral president needed to warm up the White House. For eight years, Biden made a cold, glittering presidency seem more human and down-to-earth.

The man from the small state of Delaware should call it a good day.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit creators.com

 

Trump Tax Bill Is Thin Gruel For Middle Class

Trump Tax Bill Is Thin Gruel For Middle Class

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

The Senate — the Republican Senate — is ready to sell us out, though it will be a very near thing. As I write from the press gallery, the place is buzzing like a beehive over this tax act and braced for a late night — aptly under cover of night.

By “us,” I mean we everyday people. The tax bill Republicans mean to pass is an overstuffed turkey that will be served to and devoured by the very rich at the table. They’re different from you and me, see?

The rest of us will settle for thin gruel and bare bones. Turkey marrow soup, anyone?

Tempers are shortening. Senator Bernie Sanders thundered on the floor, “Come down to the floor and tell me I’m wrong!” He contended that government social programs like Medicare and Social Security would soon suffer under the bill. No one came down to the floor.

President Donald Trump’s America desperately depends upon passage of radical tax code change. Much is at stake, namely, the fundamental fairness in the taxation system President Clinton put in place in 1993.

The crux of the Republican plan is to cut the rate businesses and corporations pay from 35 percent to 20 percent. This break is a sealed-with-a-kiss thank-you note to the Republican base of wealthy donors, who have made this cut their central demand.

Republican senators say a steep tax cut for business will create jobs and competitiveness. There’s absolutely no evidence for this, but no worries. It’s an article of faith they repeat often as if to justify throwing the nation’s finances way out of whack.

And by the way, this overstuffed turkey adds more than a trillion dollars to the deficit — from the party that swears it cares about fiscal responsibility. (They just love business tax breaks more.)

Meanwhile, the plan does next to nothing — or less than nothing — for working-class and middle-class families. Any modest relief they have is set to expire. Obamacare premiums are projected to rise by 10 percent because the individual mandate, a linchpin, will be broken by the plan. That part strikes me as sheer spite toward Barack Obama’s legacy, courtesy of Trump.

The ramifications are huge. Remember, Trump has lost every major legislative battle in the Senate so far. Notably, his Obamacare repeal lost by one vote. Senator John McCain’s, R-Ariz., thumbs-down was decisive, giving rise to a gasp in the midnight hour. McCain won’t be the dissenter in this showdown. Yet a similar drama may unfold, living proof of how the country is divided into two political camps at war.

Now, at the end of the president’s first year, Trump and Republican members of Congress are champing at the bit for bragging rights, something big and real to take home to their voters and districts. The tax act sailed through the rock-ribbed Republican House.

On the Senate side, a clenched optimism fills the ornate halls. Republican leaders try to count to 52 — the number of Republicans in the slim majority. They can afford to drop two votes, since Vice President Mike Pence breaks ties in the chamber. He will lie in waiting.

“I’m ready to saddle up and ride,” declared Republican Senator John Kennedy, a southerner from the Bayou State.

In character, Trump came for a showy lunch with all Republican senators this week. Give him this — he’s a potent force and presence. He carries himself much like a Roman emperor, mobilizing his troops.

I was reminded of the late Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a Roman Senate expert. Once he told me, “(Julius) Caesar did not seize power; the Senate ceded power to Caesar.”

If only he could see this.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit creators.com.

 

JFK: When The Light Went Out Of The Sky

JFK: When The Light Went Out Of The Sky

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

SANTA MONICA — Nov. 22 will always be a day the heavens are hung in black.

John F. Kennedy was the American president on a bright morning in Texas. He was murdered at midday in Dallas, in 1963. The world’s heart stood still before it broke. Beyond our borders, Berlin and Dublin wept because Kennedy won over their citizens. He built goodwill abroad and spoke in German: “I am a Berliner!”

People loved listening to Kennedy for lofty ideas crossed with cool wit. It didn’t hurt that he was tall, slender and movie-star handsome after the grandfatherly general, Dwight D. Eisenhower. In his 1961 inaugural address, he made a point of saying the torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans, “born in this century.” Kennedy was born in 1917, a century ago.

It was well to reflect on a paradise lost, as Thanksgiving was celebrated around the nation. I promise you this salted the holiday with bittersweet herbs, as we consider the overstuffed turkey in the White House today.

My father and I counted the ways that Jack Kennedy was different from Donald Trump.

For starters, JFK was born to privilege and wealth, like Trump, but wore it lightly. The Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, in shipshape New England style, is a stark contrast to Trump’s gaudy gold tower in midtown Manhattan. Kennedy loved to sail; Trump’s a golf landlubber, just like Ike, um President Eisenhower.

Kennedy was a naval war hero in World War II. On his valor, he replied, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” Disarming laughs like that are the best cut of character. Trump never served in the military, yet somehow he had the nerve to slight Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., for being a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Kennedy was a true history intellectual even as he served in Congress. His Senate study, “Profiles in Courage,” explores men who cast unpopular votes when it mattered most. He found “Liberty and Union” Daniel Webster fell short of what he was cracked up to be. And he won the Pulitzer Prize.

The book is beautifully written. Kennedy thanks his wife Jacqueline, who edited and polished the work, soon after their 1953 wedding. In their “Thousand Days” White House, the Kennedys made it a lighthouse of culture.

Poetry had a place, with Robert Frost a guest. Cellist Pablo Casals performed one shining evening. Nobel Prize winners were invited to gather there: the most extraordinary collection “with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone,” Kennedy said lightly.

But things changed this year. Trump did not host the American Nobel laureates. I wonder why. It’s no secret, he’s an anti-intellectual. He rarely cracks a book.

Before the lark in the book world, Kennedy was even up on “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. He told reporters he asked his science advisor to read it just before the monumental work was published. It was a harbinger of the environmental movement.

What a rub. JFK enjoyed banter and repartee with the press. In a profound insult to freedom of the press, Trump declared us his “enemy” on his first full day in office.

Kennedy spoke in soaring language, some of the best presidential prose ever. Concluding his inaugural address, he declared, “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days. … But let us begin.”

Then there’s this: “The American carnage stops right here.” Trump’s inaugural address was defiantly rough. Elegance gasped and fainted in the city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm, JFK’s line on Washington.

In 1962, a foreign policy crisis hit: the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cabinet tapes show hours and days of Kennedy conducting clear, calm discussions on the Soviet Union’s sending nuclear missiles to Cuba. In brilliant reasoning, Kennedy never let the generals have the last word. No hero-worship the way Trump pays homage to “my generals,” like former Marine Corps general John Kelly, chief of staff. JFK consulted allies and the British ambassador.

A naval blockade was the way to a peaceful resolution.

Remembering the extinguished light is like peeling an onion: you end up in tears.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit creators.com.

 

How Social Change Comes In Twos, And History Rhymes

How Social Change Comes In Twos, And History Rhymes

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Go down, Harvey Weinstein, down to Alabama and campaign for cowboy Roy Moore, the Republican rocking Washington the way you roiled Hollywood. The dirty river of sexual harassment finally rose to claim and name each of you — and more. Comedian Louis C.K., you can go, too.

Masters of the universe are shattered at how swiftly the rules of the game changed. How unfair; how unfortunate. They’re gobsmacked that the world takes women seriously now. They’re just women, after all. Or girls, as the case may be.

You wonder why the change came in a twinkling, with sexual harassment victims speaking out, tales tumbling like dice. Weinstein may be charged with rape by the New York police department. The sheer numbers of powerful men brought down became a breaking point in a short time. From Bill O’Reilly of Fox News to Washington literary lion Leon Wieseltier, the list is long.

The answer is clear. The Black Lives Matter protest movement was strengthened in Baltimore on an April Sunday in 2015, when several police officers chased after a young man, Freddie Gray, and broke his spine while taking him into custody. Revolutions often come in twos to the ark of moral justice.

Gray died of trauma injuries, setting off riots in Baltimore and sympathetic stirrings around the nation. City after city — including Ferguson, Missouri. and Cleveland, Ohio — had witnessed police brutality against black men — and boys.

Outrage grew when the dots connected, when white people finally saw the ugly pattern of police abuse of power. Black men and youths do get harmed for doing nothing. Gray was doing nothing that Sunday morning in his neighborhood. He was no violent criminal.

The militarization of city police forces since the Sept.11 terrorist attacks — along with Pentagon tanks and weapons — has made policing even more hostile. The ACLU found that Baltimore police made hundreds of thousands of arrests in a city of 640,000 in one year. Across the nation, even with a black president, black men bore the brunt of police violence. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates, a Baltimore native, hit nerves in the reading public’s consciousness of the state of race.

Progress happens in fits and starts, not a straight line. But one can observe the influence of one movement on another. The sexual harassment wave is kin to Black Lives Matter, like a sister/brother tie. In both gathering storms, violence and abuse unseen by the public eye finally surfaced and came to light. Exposing the abuse and anguish inflicted by alpha men (armed with guns or power) on blacks and women was nothing short of shocking.

The Freedom Riders and civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, similarly, was the forerunner of the women’s movement of the early 1970s. For participants, one social movement led naturally to the other. “Women’s lib” emerged to take stands on Ms., Title IX and sex discrimination. Gloria Steinem and Billie Jean King were standard-bearers. Ivy League doors opened to women.

The original brother/sister human rights model is the American anti-slavery society, started in Philadelphia in 1833. Many abolitionist women decided to work for their own emancipation as citizens, too. The women’s rights movement was launched in 1848 by leading Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott, present at the creation of the anti-slavery society. It doesn’t take that many brave people to crack the world.

Cracked, but we’re not going back. I must say, now that misogyny is a household word, a few glib men are now experts. Women will speak for themselves in this national conversation.

But hey now. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has undergone a reformation. “I believe the women,” he said of Moore’s accusers. That wasn’t his stance on Anita Hill’s testimony, on how Clarence Thomas viciously harassed her, at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Fruits of privilege are never surrendered without a fight or a scene. But the fact such confrontations and scenes are happening is a good thing. And then we move on from victimhood.

The Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote, “hope and history rhyme.” That’s absolutely true when it comes to African-American and women’s rights.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit creators.com

 

Virginia, A Ray Of Light On A Rainy Day

Virginia, A Ray Of Light On A Rainy Day

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Washington — Cold, dark and autumnal at five o’clock — and that’s not just the weather. It was a year ago to the day that Hillary Clinton lost her historic bid to become president, though she won the people’s vote decisively.

Forgive my blue gloom. Clinton was for all seasons — first lady, senator, secretary of state. She deserved better: a fair chance, not to be run down in the mud of her opponent’s misogyny.

Her defeat was a defeat for every woman and girl who avidly supported her. My sister and her girl campaigned door to door in Las Vegas. This is what the election told us: Put your dreams on hold. History’s going backward.

The man who won the Electoral College, President Donald Trump, now has record low approval ratings. His associates are under investigation for campaign contacts with the Russians to sway a close race. It still seems surreal, that Facebook let itself be played in a massive Russian meddling conspiracy, even getting paid in rubles. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president and a former KGB spymaster, harbored a vendetta against Clinton since her diplomatic days. In a way, he won the election.

Trump has governed against the great American middle, from the hard right. Politics was the art of compromise, once upon a time. It’s sad to see the White House press corps scrambling after his Archie Bunkeresque tweets. The snide White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, dredges up President Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler. It’s that bad.

But wait, there’s a ray of light inside the Capitol Dome. The two Virginia senators walked in the press gallery for a “pen and pad” session. The election of a folksy Army doctor as the new Democratic governor was a real rebuke to Trump in a battleground state.

Democratic Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner looked giddy with relief. Their man, Dr. Ralph Northam, was a low-key candidate running against a Republican lobbyist, Ed Gillepsie, who employed Trump tactics, such as defending Confederate statues after the deadly race riot in Charlottesville.

“I was worried about the rain,” Warner cheerfully admitted, “and the traffic.”

The rural vs. urban divide is cleft in “Old Virginny” vs. new Northern Virginia, a thriving urbane mosaic of well-educated white-collar workers.

“When a Democrat wins by 9 points in Virginia,” Kaine enthused, “that’s a landslide.” He was on the ticket “with Hillary” Clinton. They carried Virginia — but not by much.

But the doctor said it best in his Eastern Shore drawl.

“Virginia has told us to end the divisiveness, that we will not condone hatred and bigotry,” Northam said. “It’s going to take a doctor to heal our differences. And I’m here to tell you, the doctor is in!”

In a strong signal to other Democrats, Northam’s liberal primary opponent, Tom Perriello, campaigned with vigor for the man who defeated him.

Virginia led the nation in a victorious night for Democrats, including first-time city and state officeholders. Abrasive Chris Christie, Republican governor of New Jersey, will be succeeded by a Democrat. With a 14 percent approval rating, he won’t be missed.

The 2016 election also tested outgoing President Barack Obama’s chops as his party leader. Trump began his outsider’s crusade for office by challenging Obama’s legitimacy as a citizen. Obama never confronted him.

Strangely, Obama also failed to tell the American people about ongoing Russian interference till late in the game — for he thought Clinton was going to win the election and didn’t want to rock the boat, so he said. We the people should have been told, regardless of his political read.

Obama’s a solo artist, but not a team player for the party. He did not even energize his base to come out for Clinton. Of course, she chased the little red-haired girl for Democrats, the unattainable red state of Ohio, instead of spending time in places like Green Bay, Wisconsin. Trump said one true thing about the election: Democrats should have won it.

Rubbing it in, this week was the 25th anniversary of President Bill Clinton’s win in 1992. Better days beckoned.

The cold, dark autumn night fell fast.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage atwww.creators.com.

Mike Pence Ready For Presidential Broadway

Mike Pence Ready For Presidential Broadway

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

WASHINGTON — The honorable Mike Pence is my neighbor, living in the huge white Naval Observatory residence a few blocks down Massachusetts Avenue.

It’s strictly a temporary stop on the way to a sweet stone period pile on 16th and Pennsylvania.

Primed and ready, Pence is acting presidential, learning his lines, much like the senior statesman he never was. Donald Trump’s reign, volatile and fragile, has left an opening for mild-mannered but ambitious Pence, 58, to seamlessly slip through.

Shakespeare would be impressed. Not bad for an Indiana boy following Dan Quayle’s footsteps.

Grumpy bad cop Trump is distracted by the Russian investigation and other fronts — now battling a record low 33 percent approval rating.

Good cop Pence pursues his own agenda with that Lego-like haircut. They say he has an affinity for calling his wife “Mother.” Oh brother.

For now, the vice president lives in shipshape digs within shouting distance. He’s not exactly the boy next door. Pence’s regal comings and goings, with full dress Secret Service and Metropolitan police escorts, cause more flashing sirens and traffic closures at rush hours than the neighborhood recalls. Past Vice Presidents Joseph Biden, Al Gore and Dick Cheney weren’t loud and showy.

Diplomats at the nearby Norwegian and British Embassies are probably too polite to complain about the intrusions to quality of life on the lovely meandering hill down to Dupont Circle, Rock Creek Park and Capitol Hill.

Speaking of Capitol Hill, Pence spends time there, hobnobbing with the legislative branch. Here again, he’s breaking china, unwritten Washington customs. The three branches of American government — the executive, judiciary and Congress — are supposed to be separate.

Remember, Mike, those lessons we learned in school? An archconservative, Pence was once a member of the House, but never the Senate. But now, it’s like he’s fraternity president. In fact, he’s officially president of the Senate, under the Constitution, but votes only to break ties if necessary.

It’s inside baseball, but the Senate Republicans and Democrats have Tuesday party lunches to huddle and strategize in secret. When I was a rookie reporter covering these lunches, it was a special event to see the White House show up, either President Clinton or Vice President Gore.

Here’s the thing: Pence is guest of honor at the Republican Party lunch more often than not. That’s a culture change right under the Capitol radar.

Does he play the heavy? Next to trashy Trump, anyone would seem genteel. Dusted with silver hair to match his silver tongue, Pence is defining himself as a pleasant force — yet a potent one — compared to his boss.

Manners matter. After the divisive election a year ago, Pence displayed civility when the cast of “Hamilton” made a statement from the stage, an appeal for the arts and diversity. Pence said nothing from the audience. But he listened. Trump, who was not there, blasted the actors and demanded an apology.

I say, good for Pence, for attending the hit Broadway musical celebrating the brash immigrant and constitutional genius. (I saw the show the next night and heard the buzz.) Our bumpkin Trump does not go in for theater, symphony or opera. “Fox & Friends” is too enthralling.

Pence’s stage clue, or “tell,” came when he stepped onto the sacrosanct Senate floor to elbow Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., on a major vote past midnight. Repealing Obamacare could not have been closer. Ailing from brain cancer surgery, McCain refused to bow to Pence’s pressure and cast a thumbs-down vote that saved Obamacare.

This was the most breathtaking political theater of the year. Pence did not belong there, and I’m sure McCain did not like it. But when you’re a usurper, that’s what you do. Pence sought the hero role, to break a tie.

A violent history hangs over a House member stepping onto the Senate floor. Before the Civil War, a South Carolina slavery zealot “caned” and beat Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts abolitionist.

We know Pence and Trump are sworn enemies of women’s rights, liberties and privacy. Given that, who’s worse? You tell me.

To my neighbor: Keep up the good work; you’ll be moving downtown any day now.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

 

Kelly’s White House Tirade Snuffed A Candle Of Hope

Kelly’s White House Tirade Snuffed A Candle Of Hope

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

 

WASHINGTON — White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was an officer, but he’s not a gentleman.

So much for the deft touch his job demands and the high hope we held he’d be a voice of reason, the innkeeper for the inmates of the Trump presidency.

As the days passed this bleak week, Kelly kept a silence, hardened into ice. He failed to apologize to a Democratic congresswoman of color for speaking poorly and falsely of her in a national media moment. Nor did he have a kind word for a pregnant Gold Star widow whose husband died in Niger. Even while saying women were “sacred.”

Mind you, Kelly was a four-star Marine Corps general, so he was slumming by speaking to civilian dweebs in the White House press corps. In the world we live in now, his stars give him a pass to speak strange untruths with no consequences.

Take it from Sarah Huckabee Sanders: “If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that’s highly inappropriate.” The White House spokeswoman delivered her chilling line straight, snide, with a scowl.

Praising the warrior class, Kelly made clear “the best 1 percent this country produces” are superior to the rest of us in a band of brothers, we happy few, Shakespearean way. That’s bad news in democracy, which depends upon civilian control of the military.

It’s un-American to exalt the military, sir. But Marines are a breed apart, even in the military. Their fierce intensity inculcates a faith they are tougher than the rest: Army, Navy, Air Force. Huzzah.

Kelly was called out by a few pundits after a morbid solo in the pressroom, where he described how casualties are wrapped in shrouds and packed in ice. His son Robert was a Marine Corps casualty seven years ago in Afghanistan. It felt like yesterday as he recounted hearing the news from fellow Marine Corps commander, Joseph “Fighting Joe” Dunford, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Clearly, the chief’s raw grief and anger on display created a potent political brew. His smear of Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., however, salted a grieving family’s wound and exposed a grim thinker with no sympathy for 99 percent of the populace.

Here’s Thomas Friedman of The New York Times: “Kelly squandered his moral authority.” Richard Cohen in The Washington Post: “Did Kelly lie or did he misremember? I prefer the second choice, but either way, the stars he once wore on his shoulder do not immunize him.”

Back in the briefing room, Kelly accused Wilson of grandstanding at the 2015 dedication of an FBI building, which was proved wrong. In Boston slang, he spoke harshly of her as an “empty barrel.”

Too bad he wildly missed the reason Wilson was with the widow when the president called her to say, “(Y)our guy … knew what he signed up for,” in his inimitable way.

Trump’s call came in on speakerphone in a parked vehicle.

At that moment, Wilson kept a vigil with the family of the slain soldier, La David Johnson, while waiting for his remains with an Army team. The congresswoman saw the sergeant grow up and mentored him as a youth. She was a family friend.

“When (Kelly) lied on me, he lied to them,” Wilson said, meaning the American people. She’s a spirited 74.

“The only thing I could do to collect my thoughts,” Kelly concluded, was to go to Arlington National Cemetery across the river that day.

Perhaps the battle-hardened Marine, 67, knows Montgomery Meigs, the Civil War quartermaster general, was the genius who suggested to President Lincoln: Let’s turn Robert E. Lee’s rolling plantation acres, Arlington, into a “field of honor” for Union soldiers.

The symbol was not so subtle: Their blood was on Lee’s hands. Meigs hated Lee, whom he knew, as a traitor. Like Kelly, he buried there his own son John, a West Point-educated soldier who died young in Virginia in 1864.

Kelly sure knows this: We have an all-volunteer military because the Pentagon and presidents like it that way. They can go to war easier. A draft requires a social consensus.

As for civilians, the last candle of hope at the court was extinguished with Kelly’s tirade.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

 

 

It Happens All The Time: Hollywood, Washington, The Old South

It Happens All The Time: Hollywood, Washington, The Old South

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Hollywood was shocked (shocked!) at the story pyramid revealing Harvey Weinstein’s violent passes at younger women.

(Why wait 20 years, superstars Angelina, Gwyneth and boyfriend Brad?)

Hear the echoes of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas and, telescoping time, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Did the champion of liberty coerce his subjugated slave mistress? You tell me. But there’s a twist to that tale.

The free-fall from movie pharaoh to industry pariah brought a breeze of vindication. Weinstein’s life crumbled in such cinematic style that a plot point was born: a flood named #MeToo. The hashtag sprang up for legions of women who vividly reported sexual assault and harassment. They voiced their experiences online, breaking silences on social media.

This is not new, and white Hollywood stars are far from the only victims.

Speaking out is freeing. The volume from Everywoman showed sexual harassment happens all the time. Hollywood came clean on its dirty open secret, just how sordid Weinstein was with women.

Social movements cannot live on ether alone. Gathering force, women can hew new lines for their safety. Since the president has bragged about sexual assault, women should plan to protect each other in the workplace — and that includes the White House. The energy need not stop there; it can seize on other outrages in the age of Trump.

Back in 1991, Anita Hill’s sworn testimony was not believed by 52 senators, 26 Octobers ago. The Senate hearings riveted the nation. Hill’s specific allegations of Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment when he was her boss were so graphic and embarrassing that Thomas fled the room — he couldn’t take the heat. Senators Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., acted like witches. Thunder, lightning and rain, I called them from my San Francisco fog.

A Supreme Court seat was at stake. There were two women senators. Senator Robert C. Byrd, D-W. Va., stood and declared Hill told the truth. The vote was a sea of ties: 52 to 48 to confirm arch-conservative Thomas. Had the drama gone the other way, I’m sure society would be in a different place. The vote sent a chilling message to a woman’s word against a powerful man.

In Jefferson’s Virginia, enslaved women were at the mercy of their master. Their bodies were legally his property. That was the way of the plantation world. “Planters” had slave mistresses all the time. Everybody knew, few talked. That’s how slavery grew so fast, by natural increase.

Women and girl slaves were always in the workplace — morning, noon and night. A master’s move to claim them was inescapable. And they had no way to voice their victimization. They couldn’t read, write or tweet. They are lost to history, mostly, save one.

Sally Hemings’ life has come to light since 1999. There are shades of gray in the Hemings-Jefferson bond of 38 years. Jefferson’s wife, Martha, died young, leaving him devastated with two daughters. He took Sally to France, where he was the American ambassador, to take care of the girls.

And there the thing began. Sally was in her teens, Jefferson in his 40s. As the French say, droit de seigneur. The master’s right. Jefferson historians took forever and a day to handle the bombshell truth.

Here goes: Sally and Martha were half-sisters. They had the same white father, whose slave concubine was Sally’s mother. You see, Sally was Martha’s slave, her own flesh and blood.

Hemings had a rare choice: Stay a free woman in Paris or return to Virginia a slave. Jefferson pleaded that she’d have a good life in the great house, Monticello. He promised to free their children at 21. (He did.)

Sally Hemings had four children by Jefferson. DNA results told us so. One strikingly resembled his father, visitors noted. Madison Hemings was so named because Dolley Madison pressed a pregnant Sally to name a son after her husband, James.

Madison, a carpenter, wrote a memoir of Monticello and his “stately” father in an Ohio newspaper. His brother Eston played the violin, like his father, and went west to Wisconsin. Some light-skinned Hemings-Jefferson descendants crossed the color line.

Let’s keep working to change the tragic chorus: It happens all the time.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.