"How the Right Lost Its Mind", by Charlie Sykes

In this book, written in 2017 in the wake of Trump's election, conservative commentator Charlie Sykes examines how "a movement that was defined by its belief in limited government, individual liberty, free markets, traditional values, and civility found itself embracing bigotry, political intransigence, demogoguery, and outright falsehood".

Sykes' account is not very interesting when he is pontificating on the history of conservatism. Where it comes alive is when he gives his personal story. Sykes grew up in the '60s as a liberal Democrat, supporting civil rights and oppsing the Vietnam War. His dad was also a prominent liberal activist. But his father was outraged at the violent student protests at the university where he taught. When strikers tried to shut down the student newspaper, where his father served as faculty adviser, a 17-year-old called him a "fascist pig". Sykes concludes that "left-wing politics came to be dominated by humorless and strident ideologues, who did little to hide their contempt for the older generation, bourgeois values, and for American culture in general."

As for Sykes himself, he graduated from college and became a newsaper reporter. He says that he "watched as the good intentions of the Great Society often failed to match the results, creating as many problems as they solved. Covering urban issues, I watched the multiplication of programs that had increasingly abstruse acronyms but seemed to exist for no other purpose than to satisfy a voter bloc and provide employment to various hacks and mediocrities. They did not discernably imporove any lives or fix any problems. As it turned out, bureaucracies made poor substitutes for famlies and neighborhoods and were often insensitive to their unintended consequences they left in their wake." This strikes me as a fair commentary on the failure of LBJ's Great Society.

By the late 1980s Sykes' shift to the right was complete, and he became a talk radio host in Milwaukee in the early 1990s. Sykes refused to support the Trump campaign of 2015-2016, and he was vilified by his former listeners and supporters. Many called him a "cuckservative", a favorite epithet from the MAGA crowd. Sykes then ended his radio show at the end of 2016 to write this book.

One think that struck me was the significance he attributes to Rush Limbaugh's attacks on Sandra Fluke, who was a law student who advocated in 2012 for health insurance covering contraceptives for females. I remember this well, as at the time I would occasionally listen to Limbaugh, and I was listening when he called Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute", and when he said "If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I'll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch". I remember being outraged by this and I never listened to Limbaugh again.

But what I was unaware of is the retribution Limbaugh faced as a result of his despicable attacks on this young woman. Dozens of advertisers dropped him from their advertising, and he lost key stations in major markets throughout the country. Sykes says this was "a prelude to what would happen in 2015-2016", when allegations of Trump's abuse of women didn't seem as serious due to Limbaugh's normalization of this sort of behavior.

Sykes ends with advice to his fellow conservatives, but this will fall on mostly deaf ears in the current political climate. Some day conservatives will likely look back and realize the wisdom of Sykes's advice, and the foolhardiness of supporting Trump, but that's a long way into the future.

"Original Sin", by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

This is the famous bok by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and his co-author, documenting the decline and fall of Joe Biden during his term as president. The point of the book is summarized in this passage: "What the world saw at Joe Biden's one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly. It was not a cold; it was not someone who was under- or over-prepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired. It was the natural result of an 81-year-old man whose capabilities had been diminishing for years. Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years."

Many Biden advisers talked with the authors and admitted that they had had serious concerns about Biden's ability to meet the challenges of a 2024 campaign. (This is similar to the many Republicans in Congress today who have serious problems with Trump that they are willing to talk about privately, but will not say publicly.) The excuse the Biden advisers use for not speaking out is that his decision-making ability was still intact. But this is only a part of being president; the other part is communicating the reasons for your decisions to the public. And Biden was a horrible communicator; he simply had no communication skills whatsoever as he neared the end of his term. It had gotten so bad that he often could not even complete a coherent thought, often getting lost in mid-sentence.

I've often wondered why Biden's advisers let him do that early debate with Trump. The book answers the question by saying that the polls showed the public had serious doubts about Biden's ablilty to serve a second term, and so the debate was planned to demonstrate that Biden was in fact up to the job.

After the debate Biden went on national TV to try to rehabilitate his image. Instead, he confirmed his incompetence when, in response to the simple question, "Did you watch the debate?", he answered "I don't think I did." Huh? You're not even sure whether or not you watched the debate? After this there was no question as to his lack of competence.

The Biden campaign had three highly respected pollsters on staff who were polling daily, and after the debate the polling news was even worse for Biden. The pollsters would report to the campaign leaders, but the word wasn't getting through to Biden, and the pollsters weren't permitted to meet directly with Biden. Finally, on Thursday, July 18th (three days before Biden left the race), the pollsters met with the top campaign aides. The message was that "A Large majority of voters do not believe that President Biden is mentally and physically capable of serving four more years, and the belief that he is too old to be president is a settled question in voters' minds." Biden, sick with Covid at the time, recognized that his staying in the race would have the effect of tearing the Democratic Party apart, and he withdrew.

What is so sad and pathetic is that both Joe and Jill Biden still believe to this day that Joe could have beaten Trump in the 2024 election. Talk about delusional! What is equally pathetic is the grudge held by the Bidens against Nancy Pelosi, for (implicitly) suggesting that Joe re-consider his run after the disastrous debate. Their resentment was so severe that when Pelosi broke her hip in Luxembourg in December of 2024 and underwent hip replacement surgery, neither Joe nor Jill called her to wish her well. So much for Biden as the great empathizer.

Biden's advisers knew he was going downhill and increasingly during his term they limited his press availability. His average of nine press conferences a year was fewer than every post-WW2 president except for Reagan and Nixon. By contrast, Truman had 41 a year and the first Bush had 36. (Had Biden done more press conferences he surely would have been better prepared at answering questions during the horrid debate.)

Biden's advisers even limited his availability to his biggest donors and supporters. At small gatherings of donors, Biden was using a teleprompter instead of the usual informal remarks. Imagine, a donor who had given as much as $500,000 for a meet-and-greet with the president had to settle for canned remarks read from a teleprompter!

What is tragic is that Biden's legacy will now be that through his hubris he gave us another disastrous four years of Trump as president. Had he kept his (implicit) promise to only serve one term, the Democrats might have settled on a worthy candidate who could have beaten Trump, and Biden would then have had a legacy of some accomplishments, putting him somewhere in the middle of all presidents in the rankings. As it is, he will be near the bottom, at least for the near future.

"Dwight D.Eisenhower", by Tom Wicker

This little book has much to recommend it. It is an easy read, both because of its short length (140 pages), and the readable prose of its author, a veteran working journalist. Its relatively recent publication date (2002) enables the author to write from the perspective of time, which allows for geater insight into how bad some of Ike's foreign policy blunders were.

Wicker writes primarily of five major blunders Ike made during his eight-year presidency.

1. 1953 Coup in Iran. Ike teamed with the British to engineer a coup ousting the democratically elected prime minister, and restoring the Shah for what turned out to be a 26-year reign of terror against his people. Is it any wonder that Iranians call the U.S. "The Great Satan"? I just recently learned that the reason Iranians were so upset about Jimmy Carter letting the Shah into the U.S. for medical treatment in 1979 was that they thought the U.S. was planning to re-install him as Iran's leader. (They didnt believe the story about the Shah needing medical treatment.) And now today we have a war with Iran, a continuation of the ongoing hostiities initiated by Ike in 1953.

A website summarizes the damage caused by Ike: "The coup of 1953 was more than the removal of a prime minister—it was the violent denial of the Iranian people’s right to self-determination. It entrenched dictatorship, facilitated foreign exploitation, and left scars that remain visible today."

2. 1954 Coup in Guatemala. Wicker writes that there was "even less excuse" to overthrow Guatemala's elected government in 1954. He concludes that "Arbenz's land reform was cancelled, unions were outlawed, hundreds of political and labor leaders were exiled, unknown numbers of campesinos were murdered, thousands were arrested, political parties were suspended, and thre-quarters of the people were disenfranchised because they were illiterate. For years to come, Guatemala was racked by guerrila warfare, coups and countercoups, murder and repression."

A webside sums it up this way: "What followed was one of the most tragic chapters in Latin American history. Guatemala’s brief democratic experiment gave way to decades of military dictatorship. When leftist guerrillas took up arms in the 1960s, the response was overwhelming state terror: death squads operating from unmarked vehicles, bodies dumped in public as warnings, systematic campaigns of torture and disappearance. The violence reached genocidal proportions in the 1980s, when the military waged scorched-earth warfare against indigenous Maya communities suspected of supporting rebels. Entire villages were wiped out; survivors spoke of helicopters dropping mutilated corpses to terrorise the population. By the time peace accords were signed in 1996, more than 200,000 Guatemalans had been killed or disappeared – over 90% at the hands of US-backed security forces. A UN truth commission would later conclude that the military had committed acts of genocide against the country’s indigenous population."

3. Failure to condemn McCarthy. Ike always maintained that he didn'ty speak out against McCarthy because he didn't want to give him any more publicity. This represents a huge failure, showing a complete lack of moral leadertship. I once heard some speculation that McCarthy had some dirt on Ike, namely, that he had used Nazis to help run post-war Germany, and this is why Ike kept quiet, but I've never seen any evidence that this was actually the case.

4. Failure to speak out in support of the Suprme Court decision in Brown v. Bosard of Education. Ike disagreed with this decision, though he did take steps to enforce it in LIttle Rock in 1957. Ike even attempted to lobby Chief Justice Earl Warren before the decision was announced, telling Warren at a dinner party that "These southerners are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big overgrown Negroes". For shame, Ike.

5. The U2 incident. Ike had a summit confertence scheduled with Khrushchev in May of 1960, at which nuclear disarmament was to be discussed. However, this fell apart on May 1st when an American U2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Ike's folly here was in authorizing this flight, knowing it could jeopardize a diarmament agreement, an issue which he felt very strongly about. Then he committed another blunder when he denied it was a spy plane, lamely claiming that it was a weather mission over Turkey that had strayed off course. As we have seen so often since then, the cover-up was not successful, and only made things worse. Ike could have saved the upcoming summit by admitting the error and apologizing, but he didn't have it in him to do this.

Wicker doesn't even mention Ike's role in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of what is today known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And only in passing does he mention the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, a CIA operation that was planned during the Eisenhower administration and then carried out after Kennedy took over.

Wicker's conclusion is that Ike was a great man, but not a great president. But was he even a good president? Historians seem to think so. A 2021 C-SPAN survey ranked him 5th, behind only Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt. I am more inclined to place him in the middle of the pack.

"Anatomy of a Scandal"

This is a six-episode Netflix drama from 2022, which I binge-watched in one day recently. Prior to watching it I read many IMDB user reviews, most of which complained about the ending. I am writing mainly to examine the issue of whether the ending spoiled an otherwise good series, as the reviewers have claimed. Spoilers to come.

There are several questionable plot issues with the ending. The idea that the main characters aren't able to recognize their university classmates from 20 years before is ludicrous. There is no reason for the prosecutor of the rape charge, a really weak character, to have turned out to be the same woman raped by the defendant 20 years before at the end of a wild party. And now, after a name change, she is prosecuting him for a similar type of rape. On this I agree with the criticisms.

But the reviewers are really off-base in criticizing the MP's wife for leaving her husband after he is found not guilty. They miss the whole point of this fascinating story. The series starts with showing the wife at a cocktail party where she is enthusiastically greeted by all and is obviously a very popular figure in govenrment social circles. She is beautiful, charming, and seemingly has the world at her fingertips. She then finds out her husband has been having an affair with a young staffer but has recently broken it off. She and her husband work through this OK, but then the staffer accuses him of raping her in an elevator (lift) two weeks after he had ended the affair. He and his wife endure a trial, which is strictly a "he-said, she-said" case as there is no physical evidence, and no corroborating evidence other than the young woman's friend who testified that the woman had mentined the incident to he the day after it happened.

Naturally the MP is found "not guilty" by the jury, but in the process certain events of 20 years earlier come to light, and the wife realizes that her husband has been hiding the truth about this past event from her, and in essence hiding the truth about himself and what kind of person he is. The sense of entitlement of the upper class in Britain becomes more obvious and more odious to the wife, and she leaves him, taking their two kids with her to an idyllic place away from London and to a new life. This makes perfect sense in light of her new insights. It makes perfect sense that she does not want her children growing up in this type of toxic environment of entitlement.

Asa retired lawyer, I am dismayed at certain legal aspects of the case. No competent prosecutor would ever bring rape charges on this flimsy evidence. The trial itself is shown in in a believable manner, but the idea that there would even be any charges brought in the first place is totally bogus. The alleged victim didn't even say "no"; what she said was "not here", a statement the defendant emphatically denies hearing when he testifies, but which is ambiguous in any event.

The other legal problem with the plot is the idea that the MP and his friend, the Prime Minister, would be arrested for crimes committed 20 years before. Their resignations from Parliament are quite realistic, and mirrors actual scandals in Britain's past. But to also be accused of a crime on top of being disgraced seems out of bounds. In the U.S. the crmiinal statute of limitations would have ruled out such a charge 20 years after the fact. Apparently there is no statute of limiations in Britain for serious crimes, a real oddity to me.

The Topsy-Turvy MLB Standings

The All Star break is an appropriate time to take stock of what has happened so far. Never have I seen so many surprises at this point in the season. Here are the most striking examples.

1. White Sox. The Whie Sox were picked to finish last, but at the break are in first!. Granted, they are only five gmes above .500 in the weak AL Central, but still it is first place for them at this point.

2. Mets. The Mets were supposed to finish first or second, but they have been in last place virtually all season. At the break they are 15.5 games back, and 7.5 games out of fourth place!

3. Blue Jays. The Jays were favored to repeat as AL East champions, but at the break they find themselves in last, 12 games out of first.

4. Tigers. The Tigers were an easy pre-season pick for first, but they now languish in fourth, 6.5 games back of the surprising White Sox.

5. Royals. The Royals were picked for third, but at the break are in last, tied for the worst record in the majors at .392.

6. Reds. As an Ohioan the Reds have been quite disappointing, Instead of third, they languish in last place, 15.5 games out of first and 6 games out of fourth in the NL Central.

7. Rays. The Rays are in first in the strong AL East. How the low-budget Rays continue to outperform ther roster is an ongoing mystery, but here they are again, still suprising the pundits.

Homeland (2011-2020)

This Tv series ran for eight seasons from 2011 to 2020. I was able to watch parts of it on DVD at the time, but now I am having the pleasure of watching the whole thing from start to finish via Netfix streaming. The series follows CIA agents as they fight foreign terrorism. I can best describe it by discussing some of the characters.

Carrie Mathison. This character, played by the amazing Claire Danes, is the series' central character. She plays a totally committed and obsessive CIA agent in the fight against foreign terrorim. Her obsessiveness is enhanced by her bi-polar condition, which flares up periodically. Danes expresses more with her facial espressions than most actors can express with pages of dialog. She has deservedly won six major acting awards for her work in this series, along with many more nominations and minor awards.

The series begins with a foreign terrorist who is about to be executed whispering to Carrie that a former U.S. prisoner of war has been turned. Carrie assumes it is Nicholas Brody, who has recently been rescued after eight years of captivity and has returned to the U.S. She orders, without agency authority, to have Brody's house put under constant surveillance in order to obtain the evidence to prove that that he was turned. It lasts for a month, with no clear evidence having been gathered, and the surveillance has to be shut down.

She remains convinced of Brody's' guilt until another prisoner of war, previously thoguht to have died in captivity, is discoverd to be alive and working for Al Queda. For several episodes she is baffled by how she could have been so wrong about Brody. But then it turns out Brody has also been turned, as we learn when a tape surfaces that he made in anticipation of conducting a suicide bombing of top government officials.

Sol Berensen. This character, wonderfully played by Mandy Patinkin, is a veteran CIA officer who is a mentor and father figure to Carrie Mathiessen. He is basically a kind man who believes in Carrie and supports her, but he also has to balance that with his desire to defend the CIA's reputation. He becomes the acting head of the CIA at the start of the third season, after the death of the former head.

Jessica Brodie.This is Nicholas Brody's wife, played by the the beautiful Brazlian-American actress Morena Baccarin, also known for her role in "Gotham" as Leslie "Lee" Thompkins. During the eight years Brody was in captivity and presumed dead, she began an affair with Mike, Brody's best friend. When Brody is rescued and returns home, she tries her best to make a life with him and their two kids, but Brody has been forever changed and it just doesn't work out.

Nicholas Brody.This is a very weak character, a dull and wooden performance by the actor who plays him. He conveys no emotion, there is nothing there that causes us to care about him, to take any interest in him. This is the biggest drawback of this otherwise fine series. The first time I was bored was in the final episode of the second season when Brody and Carrie are discussing whether they have a future together. She helps him obtain a new identity and get across the border into Canada, and I was hoping that would be the end of him. But, unfortunately, we see him again in Season three when he mysteriously appears in Episode three in Caracas, with no explanation of how he got there. The love affair between Brody and Carrie is completely unbelievable; surely a better actor would have been able to pull this role off, but not this one.

Dana Brody. This is the 16-year-old daughter of Nicholas and Jessica Brody. She is a senstive soul who is always the fisrt one to sense when something is wrong. She has there teenage romances, all quite believable and touching.

William Walden. This is the Vice-President, an unsavory charzter who is gungho to root out the terrorists by any means necessary. When Brody returns from captivity, Walden proposes Brody for Congress and then picks him to be his running mate for his upcoming run for president. Walden's plans get derailed when he is killed by an electronic sabotage of his pacemaker.

David Estes. This is the CIA Director, a protege of VP Walden, and just as hard-hearted and cruel and opportunistic. He dies, along with 218 others, in the bomb attack which takes place at Langley during the funeral of VP William Walden. After his death, Sol takes over as Acting Director for the CIA.

Peter Quinn. This strong character, a CIA assassin expertly played by Rupert Friend, shows up in season two and ends up appearing in 58 episodes, third-most after Carrie and Sol. At one point Estes orders him to kill Brody, but Quinn refuses, telling Estes that he is "the guy who kills bad guys", and Brody isn't a bad guy at that point.

Dar Adal. This CIA man is a strong character, played by accomplished actor F. Murray Abraham. He is a real hard-ass, which is obvious from the first time we see him. But the full extent of his evil cruelty isn't obvious until season six, when he feeds false intelligence to President-elect Elizabeth Keane about the Iranians violating the nuclear agreement, and then is involved, or at least his people are involved, in an attempt to assassinate the president-elect. He ends up in federal prison, which is where he deserves to be.

Maggie Mathison. This is Carrie's sister, one of my favorite characters, played by the amazing Amy Hargreaves. There is just something special about her, that twinkle in her eye, that certain indefinable spark that makes a person special. She is a medical doctor who helps Carrie cope with her bi-polar condition. After Carrie's daughter Frannie is born, Maggie takes csare of the baby while Carrie is overseas, and then in season seven when Carrie is back in the states, Carrie and Franny live with her. Eventually she gets custody of Franny as Carrie's life is just too chaotic to be a custodial parent, with Carrie having every other weekend visitation rights.

Conclusion. In season three Brody is sent into Iran, with instructions from the CIA to seek asylum there so as to get close to Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Danesh Akbari and assassinate him, so that CIA asset Majid Javadi can take his place, creating an opportunity for a U.S.–Iran rapprochement. Brody does his job but the CIA refuses to extract him from iran, so that the larger mission can go forward as planned.

One of the central themes of Homeland is that anti-terrorism work often forces impossible moral tradeoffs. Brody's death is arguably the series' clearest example: he finally redeems himself by accomplishing his mission, only to be sacrificed because his survival would jeopardize a major geopolitical success. The show intentionally leaves viewers wrestling with whether that sacrifice was justified.

Before his execution Brody is permitted a final meeting with Carrie, who is still hoping to rescue him from Iran. During that meeting he wrestles with the moral ambiguities of his situation, saying, "In what universe can you redeem one murder by committing another." Later in the conversation he tells Carrie, "I'm OK, I really am. I just want it to be over."

In the fourth season we see Carrie serving as head of the CIA operation in Pakistan. Her main adversary is not just the Taliban and other terrorist groups, but aslso the ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's main intelligence agency. This is a powerful organization, established in 1948, shortly after Pakistan's independence. Just as is the case in real life, in Homeland the ISI is depicted as hopelessly duplicitous, half on the side of the terrorists and half on the side of the government which is supposedly trying to fight the terrorists. Hence the Obama Administration's decision not to inform the Pakistani government about the raid which killed Bin Laden.

The first two seasons of Homeland take place in the U.S., but the nest few seasons take place abroad, in various hot spots including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Germany, Russia, Syria, and Lebanon. The show depicts the CIA engaging in assassinations and engaging in activities within the U.S. borders, both contrary to its charter. The real issue here is how to get the CIA to stay within its stated mission, and how to improve the intelligence-gathering process.

Also, how to get the exective branch to take the intelligence seriously. Just recenty we heard that the recent strike on an Iranian school which killed more than 170 people happened because the military did not heed the CIA warnings that the intelligence saying it was a military installation was outdated. Not to mention Jimmy Carter's 1979 blunder in ignoring the intelligence telling him that our embassy in Iran would be in danger if he let the Shah into this country.

Supreme Court Rejects Dershowitz Appeal

Alan Dershowitz has courted controversy during his entire career. Indeed, the cover to his book Contrary to Popular Opinion calls him "America's most controversial lawyer".

This makes his defamation suit against CNN all the more inexplicable. His suit was filed shortly after his controversial remarks during the first Trump impeachment trial in January of 2000. He sued CNN for $300M on the dubious claim that he was defamed by the way they described his comments. CNN had carried his comments in full, and then had him on twice in the followng days to explain them, and yet Dershowitz still sued, a horrible mistake of judgment on his part.

A trial judge granted summary judgment for CNN, finding that Dershowitz had shown no actual malice by CNN, and an appeals court upheld the judgment 3-0. Now today the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, effectively ending the suit after six years.

The only way the Supreme Court was going to hear the case is if they wanted to reexamine the 1964 Sullivan case, which held that a public figure must show acutal malice to win a defamation suit. Gorsuch and Thomas were ready to do so, but the other justices were not.

The case illustrates the importance of retaining the actual malice standard, as a lesser standard would open the door to nuisance lawsuits against media outlets whenever somebody was offended by their coverage. The rationale behind the standard is that a public figure has a better way to correct the record, which Dershowitz certainly has in light of his fame and fortune. He has deliberately courted publicity and controversy, and he cannot now plausibly claim to be harmed by innocent comments made by CNN in the course of reporting on the Trump impeachment.

I have previously written about how Dershowitz has been losing his mental faculties. Sadly, he seems to have only gotten worse in recent years.