Donald Trump is badly in need of someone to tell him "No!"

Echo opinion published in the Mississippi newspaper, The Meridian Star by columnist Rich Lowry

Rudy Giuliani's harebrained scheme

Where's John Kelly or anybody with an entire human brain, when you need somebody to give advice to stupid Donald Trump?

John Kelly, Donald Trump's chief of staff, was cast aside, like so many of Trump's advisers. For reasons not well understood, he irked Trump with his efforts to bring some discipline to him and his operation. But, if there's one thing that's obvious from the Ukraine controversy, it's that the president could use more "no-men."

During Roman triumphs celebrating military victories, a slave was supposedly given the task of riding behind the conquering general and constantly whispering in his ear, "Remember, you are mortal." The White House needs someone constantly whispering in the president's ear, "There's no freaking way we're doing that."

Anyone who had taken Government 101 would have told the president that going down the path of asking for investigations from the Ukraine president in the context of a discussion of military aid would certainly bring more headaches than upside.

At seventy-four, Giuliani often seems weary. He limps. He has surrendered his comb-over to full-on baldness, and, as his torso has thickened, his neck has disappeared- reported by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker

If press reports are to be believed, plenty of people in the White House realized this. They tried to keep Trump from doing it, but were outmaneuvered by (dumb and bumbler!) Rudy Giuliani, who volunteered for double duty as an amateur sleuth and diplomat and has "honchoed", arguably, the most harebrained foreign policy scheme since Ollie North delivered a cake to the Iranians.

Donald Trump's Ukraine Call was Incredibly Stupid!

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/opinions/trump-ukraine-call-incredibly-stupid-dantonio/index.html

It's not that there aren't legitimate questions about Ukraine and the role of various players there in the 2016 election and aftermath. But they are appropriately handled by the Justice Department, which is currently looking into the sources of the Russia investigation.

As for Hunter Biden, he, too, is a fit subject for investigation and an apt symbol of one of the worst aspects of American life, namely, how easy it is for people with proximity to power to get rich. Hunter had no evident talent worthy of a $50,000-a-month gig with a Ukrainian energy company, except for being the vice president's son. But, that's no reason to create a brouhaha about Biden's cash cow gig, especially when Donald Trump breaks the law by violating the Emoluments Clause in the U.S. Constitution, on a daily basis.

There's a reason, though, that oppo research firms exist. No one could claim an abuse of power if the Trump campaign hired such an operation to thoroughly vet Hunter Biden's various ventures and spread damaging material to media outlets. If the campaign wanted to be just a little clever, it could take a page from Hillary Clinton 2016, and use a law firm as a cutout.

Did no one think of that? Trump is, obviously, responsible for his own decisions and conduct, but it's truly bizarre that it was the president's counsel, of all people, who has his fingerprints all over this.

Giuliani was a great mayor of New York City and an accomplished prosecutor, but somewhere along the line he lost sight of such basic axioms as a lawyer should keep his client from needless risk, not expose him to it; a lawyer should tap the brakes on, not jam the accelerator for, dodgy plans; a lawyer should calmly explain issues, rather than blow them up in extravagant media appearances.

It's hard to think of another president who has so desperately needed good lawyering, and who has been so flagrantly failed by someone who is supposed to be his attorney.

One of the themes of the Mueller report was Trump's advisers ignoring him when he asked for foolhardy things or dissuading him from risky schemes. This, in itself, was discomfiting, but it kept Trump on the right side of the line. For all that the president scorns, say, Don McGahn, the former White House counsel's prudence and professionalism kept Trump from unnecessary peril.

Trump finds his current crew more congenial. That doesn't mean it's better for him. Let the record show that the same people who are most enthusiastic about "letting Trump be Trump" also may be about to let Trump be impeached.

Trump disdains stories in the media about his being minded by "adults," but that should be less annoying than the fallout from a plan that any serious lawyer or competent foreign policy professional would have warned had a good chance of ending in tears.

Follow Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry.

Brett Kavanaugh is unqualified based on his angry temperament - a flawed candidate

An echo opinion written by the Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, published in the Mississippi newspaper, The Meridian Star

WASHINGTON – Brett M. Kavanaugh proved himself unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. His unflattering partisan temperament showed during Judiciary Committee hearings. His behavior was unbecoming of a Supreme Court Justice.

It has little to do with his treatment of women.

Kavanaugh's freshman-year roommate at Yale had told The New Yorker that the future Supreme Court nominee could become "aggressive "and "belligerent" when drunk. 

But, as millions have now seen with their own eyes, he is aggressive and belligerent when stone-cold sober.

His testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday was a howl of partisan rage. He said the behavior of Democrats on the committee was "an embarrassment" and "a good old-fashioned attempt at Borking." He said they were "lying in wait" with "false, last-minute smears."

The proceedings were, he said, "a national disgrace," a "circus," a "grotesque and coordinated character assassination" and a "search and destroy" mission. He blamed Democrats for threats against his family, "to blow me up and take me down."

"This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election," he said, "... revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups."

Kavanaugh shouted and scowled, sniffed and wept, turned the pages of his text as if swatting insects and thumped the witness table. Gone was the nominee who two weeks ago preached judicial modesty. Gone was the man who on Monday spoke to Fox News about fairness and integrity and dignity and respect.

On Thursday afternoon, after his main accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, gave such compelling testimony that even Republican senators described her favorably, Kavanaugh ripped off the mask – or the robe, as it were – and revealed himself to be the man he was when, as a lieutenant to Kenneth Starr in the 1990s, he proposed to hit President Bill Clinton with a sexually vulgar line of questioning.

He mocked his Democratic questioners. Asked by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., about his drinking, Kavanaugh shot back: "I like beer. I don't know if you do. Do you like beer, senator, or not? What do you like to drink? Senator, what do you like to drink?"

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., mentioning her father's alcoholism, asked whether Kavanaugh had ever blacked out. "I don't know. Have you?" he responded. Pressed, he replied, "Yeah, and I'm curious if you have." He later apologized.

Kavanaugh had cast aside judicial restraint for fury and ridicule. Perhaps he figured his nomination was doomed, and his scorched-earth testimony was a parting shot. Or perhaps he calculated that he could only salvage his prospects by making the fight about partisan warfare rather than sexual assault.

Except that it isn't. If Kavanaugh isn't confirmed it will be because of Republican votes from the likes of Sens. Susan Collins of Maine or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who have expressed concern about the allegations. Polling shows plunging support for Kavanaugh among Republican women. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee – all men – were concerned enough about appearances to hire a female prosecutor to question Ford; this produced frivolous lines of questioning about whether she's really afraid of flying and who paid for her polygraph.

Fighting Ford's sexual-assault allegation on the merits was difficult to sustain. Ford seemed credible, and Kavanaugh, like committee Republicans, was reluctant to have the FBI investigate her claims (he derided "phony" questioning on the topic). Kavanaugh was reluctant for the committee to hear from the alleged eyewitness, and he acknowledged that he sometimes drank "too many beers" (how many? "whatever the chart says") and hadn't blacked out but had "gone to sleep" and vomited from drinking.

Eventually, Republican senators jettisoned their distaff mercenary and joined with Kavanaugh in his attempt to cast the fight as partisan. "The most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics," shouted Sen. Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas called the proceedings the most "embarrassing scandal for the United States Senate since the McCarthy hearings."

But this required accepting Kavanaugh's word that the accusations are variously "a joke," "a farce," "crazy," "nonsense," "refuted" or with "no corroboration."

Maybe so. Maybe he doesn't remember. But this we know: Kavanaugh's response revealed him to be a political hack more than a jurist. "Your coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy my good name and to destroy my family will not drive me out," he told the Democrats, threatening them that "what goes around comes around."

Partisanship and revenge fantasies: Exactly what we don't need on the Supreme Court.

Dana Milbank is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. Follow him on Twitter @Milbank.

Trump world of lies

While Donald Trump played golf, the world heard the truth about him resonate during several world class eulogies, at the state funeral for Senator John McCain. 

Opinion echo published in The Meridian Star newspaper in Mississippi

Truth is truth; lies are lies

By Cokie Roberts and Steven V. Roberts

A small but significant line was crossed recently when the Washington Post's fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, called President Trump a liar for the first time.

He's cited the president for about 4,300 "false or misleading claims" since the inauguration, but as Kessler notes, "In many of those cases, it's not possible to tell whether Trump was intentionally fibbing or simply careless or wrong."

That all changed, writes Kessler, when the president's lawyer Michael Cohen pled guilty in federal court and provided "indisputable evidence that Trump lied" about his role in silencing two former girlfriends during the 2016 campaign.

"There's no question Trump lied – repeatedly, intentionally, over more than a year, enlisting top aides and advisers to further the deception," concluded the fact-checker.

Some ardent anti-Trumpers will tell Kessler, "What took you so long?" After all, as presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told the Toronto Star, "We've had presidents that have lied or misled the country, but we've never had a serial liar before. And that's what we're dealing with here."

Even Trump's own lawyers admit Brinkley's right, since they openly fear that if he talks to special counsel Robert Mueller, he'll lie under oath and commit perjury.

Moreover, many respected news outlets started using the L-word about Trump a long time ago. But Kessler is so careful and cautious that his shift marks another milestone in the increasingly determined and aggressive effort by the mainstream media to push back against the president and hold him accountable for his serial trashing of the truth.

As Marty Baron, Kessler's boss as editor of the Post, put it, "I think the public is looking for a press that stands for something, that stands for telling the truth, and will do it regardless of the pressures, and the people will support that."

That's an essential mission, but a very difficult one in the Age of Trump (aka "Trumpzism) – whose own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, recently proclaimed on NBC's "Meet the Press" that "Truth isn't truth."

Trump's incessant attacks on the media as the "enemy of the peopleare deliberately designed to undercut the ability of fact-checkers like Kessler to correct and counter the president. And those attacks work. Gallup reports that 62 percent of Americans think the news they get is "biased."

CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl recalls asking Trump why he assails the press so vociferously: "And he said, 'You want to know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.'"

Trump doesn't just demean and discredit the mainstream press; he also simply goes around it, broadcasting his own bombastic broadsides – at any hour, with no filter – on what can only be called TBN, the Trump Broadcasting Network. He boasts at having more than 100 million followers on various social media platforms. Even if that's an exaggeration, he was correct when he told Stahl right after the election that social media gives him "a tremendous forum ... I have a method of fighting back."

What makes Trump even more dangerous is that he's a very good liar. He never corrects himself, never apologizes, and keeps repeating the same fabrications over and over again. TV reporter Billy Bush recounts this off-camera conversation with Trump: "He says, 'Billy, look, look, you just tell them and they believe it. That's it, you just tell them and they believe it. They just do.'"

Scientists who study human cognition know Trump is on to something. Writing in Politico, Maria Konnikova summarizes the research in the field: "When we are in an environment headed by someone who lies so often, something frightening happens: We stop reacting to the liar as a liar. His lying becomes normalized. We might even become likely to lie ourselves."

Wait, it gets worse. "Here's the really bad news for all those fact-checkers and publications hoping to counter Trump's false claims," she writes. "Repetition of any kind, even to refute the statement in question ... perversely reinforces the very claim it means to debunk."

So should folks like Kessler and Baron give up? Should they abandon their mission of telling the truth?

Absolutely not.

They have to be fair to Trump, and meticulously accurate. The L-word should never be used carelessly, but only when there's "indisputable evidence" that the president is deliberately deceiving people.

But Giuliani is wrong. Truth is truth. Facts are facts. Lies are lies. And the public needs and deserves journalists who will help them understand that.

Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.