One cannot overestimate voters’ gullibility

The proverbial light bulb flashed on in my skull the other evening as I was listening to a young Sirius XM reporter offer her view on how Donald J. Trump got elected president of the United States.

She noted that voters elected an “entertainer,” someone they knew via his reality-TV exposure. He brought that personality with him to the presidential campaign and . . . presto! He won!

Then it occurred to me. Voters are susceptible to this kind of nonsense. Indeed, I witnessed a case of unfold up close in Potter County, Texas, in 2000. That was the year voters in the Texas Panhandle county elected a profoundly unqualified — and as it turned out, profoundly corrupt — individual as their sheriff.

Mike Shumate won that year’s Republican Party primary for sheriff, defeating a man who had served with distinction as the chief deputy under Sheriff Jimmy Don Boydston. Art Tupin, though, did not have Shumate’s cult following developed over the years he ran the Amarillo Police Department’s Crime Stoppers program.

Shumate was a media star in the Texas Panhandle. That stardom translated to votes in that year’s GOP primary. He would sound off on radio stations talking about how APD would arrest criminal suspects, how the courts would convict them and how a fictional prison character named “Bubba” would receive the criminal once he got sentenced.

Man, the guy was a laugh a minute.

Except that he had no business running a sheriff’s department in a county comprising a population of around 125,000 residents. Shumate’s tenure as sheriff didn’t end well. He lost his job after being convicted of embezzling funds and serving time in a Texas Panhandle jail.

The point here is that voters too often become suckers for a personality. They glom onto an individual’s “star status,” ignoring his or her actual qualifications. Donald Trump benefited from the form of “cult of personality” that surrounded him as he campaigned for the presidency; meanwhile, more qualified GOP opponents never got the traction they deserved while this carnival barker kept piling up victories in state after state.

Let us hope voters won’t be fooled in 2020.

Happy Trails, Part 157: oh, the joy of anonymity

It takes me a while at times to recognize blessings when they present themselves, but I surely have found one related to our move from the Texas Panhandle to a small — but rapidly growing — community northeast of Dallas.

Forgive me if I sound a bit high-falutin’. It is not my intention, but please bear with me.

The blessing is in the anonymity I am enjoying in Princeton.

I spent many years in two Texas cities — Beaumont and then Amarillo — working in jobs that elevated my visibility. I wrote for newspapers that were essential to the communities they served. My face was in each publication fairly regularly; my name appeared on the pages’ editorial page mastheads daily. Those who read the papers — and they numbered in the tens of thousands in each region — got to know my name; many of them recognized my mug.

Even after I left daily journalism in August 2012 in Amarillo, I would hear from those who would ask, “Hey, aren’t you the guy from the newspaper?” Yes, I would say, although I might say that “the guy in the paper is my evil twin.”

Indeed, when my wife and I were preparing to sell our house in Amarillo, we moved into our fifth wheel, found an RV park on the east side of town. We checked in and the lady who worked the counter that day recognized my name and chortled, “Oh my! You’re famous!” It turned out she is related to a former neighbor of ours . . . but, I digress.

I no longer have those encounters in Princeton. I blend in. My wife and I are just two new folks strolling around our neighborhood with Toby the Puppy.

We go to the grocery store, we make our purchase, we leave. We’re just two folks doing whatever it is we want to do.

And so . . . I welcome this newfound status of being just another face in the crowd. Don’t misunderstand, I occasionally would get a rush over being recognized, especially when someone had a good word to say about the work I did at those earlier stops on our life’s journey. To be sure, not everyone I met in that fashion was complimentary, but that goes with the territory, too.

That was then. Those days are long gone. My life these days is so much better.

First things first, Mr. VPOTUS: you gotta be nominated

This is just my view, but my sense is that the national political media are getting ahead of themselves with regard to Joe Biden’s entry into the 2020 presidential campaign.

The former vice president is the 20th Democrat to enter his party’s primary. A lot of highly qualified, well-heeled, articulate candidates have been in the game for a good while.

Yet the media have become focused on Biden’s campaign rollout and the ire he is incurring from Donald Trump, who is responding to Biden’s direct criticism of him.

I hope Biden keeps getting under Trump’s skin. The president deserves to be rankled and riled. I want him to lose the next election. I want him gone from the White House. He has disgraced the office. He has sullied and soiled our nation’s good name. He has proven to be an incompetent imbecile, a lying narcissist.

However, I am not yet willing to say that the former VP is the man who should beat him. Biden has a towering hurdle to clear if he hopes to win his party’s presidential nomination. He has to get past those 19 other Democrats. That’s just for starters.

I just want the media to stop inching toward treating Biden as if he’s the presumptive nominee already.

AG walking dangerous line if he refuses to talk

I want to offer Attorney General William Barr a slice of unsolicited advice.

Do not, Mr. AG, follow through on your threat to be a no-show before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee later this week. If you do so, sir, you open the door a bit wider leading to a possible impeachment of the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

Barr is considering staying away from the House committee, which wants to question him regarding his handling of Robert Mueller’s report into alleged collusion and obstruction by Trump’s campaign in 2016.

The AG apparently doesn’t like what he senses will be a tough grilling by the panel, which is controlled by Democrats. There are some provisions being built in to questioning, forcing Barr to possibly stay away.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler says he’ll have a hearing anyway, with or without the attorney general.

Look, I don’t want the House to impeach the president at least until it has completed its own investigation into some of the questions that Mueller left unanswered when he released his findings.

The impeachment train might become a runaway vehicle, though, if Barr stonewalls the House.

Don’t do it, Mr. Attorney General. Sit before the panel and answer the questions to the best of your substantial ability.

Texas seeks comprehensive solution to school gun violence

Texas state Sen. Larry Taylor was hurting nearly a year ago, along with many of the rest of this state, not to mention the rest of America. A gunman opened fire at Santa Fe High School in his Senate district, killing 10 people and wounding 13 others.

Taylor, a Friendswood Republican, sought to do something to at least mitigate such tragic events in the future. He has produced a bill that isn’t perfect, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to protest it here.

Senate Bill 11 — which the Senate approved 29-2 and heads for the House of Representatives — seeks to strengthen mental health initiatives in Texas. According to the Texas Tribune, it gives teachers access to telephones and other electronic communications, and establishes threat assessment teams to help identify potentially dangerous students while determining the best ways to intervene before they erupt.

The bill also “requires school districts to appoint school safety committees that meet once a semester to provide their boards of trustees with recommendations for updates to their districts’ multihazard emergency operations plans,” the Tribune reports.

Does the legislation deal with the purchase of firearms, or the access that bad folks have to obtain them? No, but to my way of thinking it seeks a comprehensive approach to seeking out and identifying those who might be prone to producing the kind of insanity that has shown itself too often.

“We cannot afford to do nothing,” Taylor said, adding that too often legislators let “perfect become the enemy of the good.” So, the bill isn’t perfect. It is, however, a good start.

“Multiple young people’s funerals back to back in a few short days is very difficult,” Taylor said. “That’s why we have to get this done.”

Indeed. We mustn’t have to endure such heartache.

No. 2 at DOJ calls it quits

Rod Rosenstein had me. Then he lost me.

He submitted his resignation today from the U.S. Justice Department. Rosenstein’s last day will be May 11.

The deputy U.S. attorney general made what many millions of Americans thought was a stellar choice in naming Robert Mueller the special counsel in determining whether Donald Trump’s campaign “colluded” with Russians during the 2016 presidential election.

Rosenstein was called into action after then-AG Jeff Sessions recused himself from anything having to do with Russia.

So, he answered the call. He acted wisely.

But then . . .

Most recently it was revealed that he fought for his job near the end of Mueller’s exhaustive probe and told Trump that he — the president — was not a target of the special counsel.

Huh? What’s up with that? Deputy attorneys general aren’t supposed to spill the beans about ongoing investigations. Are they?

He had me at first. Then he lost me at the end.

Still, I want to give him high marks for selecting Mueller to do a thorough job looking into these terrible questions regarding the president’s campaign and its alleged relationship with Russians who dug up dirt on Hillary Clinton and sought to pass it on to the Trump political team.

Rosenstein’s conduct near the end of his time at DOJ doesn’t negate completely the good he accomplished by picking Mueller.

However, it does give me pause.

I trust that congressional investigators will have plenty to ask him once he clears out his desk at Justice.

Take your MAGA … and shove it!

You have to hand it to Donald J. Trump. He has produced a slogan that has morphed into an all-purpose acronym that one can use in more than one fashion.

I refer to “Make America Great Again,” which has become MAGA to those of us who comment frequently about the president’s campaign mantra.

Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 while vowing to MAGA.

He uses it all the time to remind his adoring throngs that he is MAGA — or “making America great again.”

I have found the acronym to be a rather creative item to toss around.

I prefer using MAGA as a verb. You know, kind of like this: Hey, let’s MAGA, you and me. We can do this!

MAGA as a noun is a bit more problematic, but it’s not without its uses. Try this on: I am proud to be a MAGA.

Or, how about as an adjective? We MAGA supporters are going to keep the White House when the president is re-elected. Surely, too, you’ve seen the “MAGA hats” sitting atop people’s heads or the “MAGA shirts” that cover their torsos.

I must acknowledge something about MAGA: Trump isn’t the first recent presidential candidate to make such a vow. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton declared during their 1980 and 1992 campaigns to win the White House to “make America great again.” The slogan didn’t morph into acronym form, though, when they said it.

OK, that all said, the president’s re-election slogan presumes he already has MAGA. So now he’s going to run on his vow to “Keep America Great.”

KAG, though, just doesn’t have the same ring.

Time of My Life, Part 31: Y2K? The ‘worst’ never arrived

We all remember Y2K, right? That was when Earth was supposed to fly off its axis, the sun would rise in the west, hell would freeze over and the world we knew would come to an end.

It didn’t happen. Planet Earth is still spinning around the sun, which continues to rise in the east; hell is still hotter’n hell and the world — with all its troubles — continues to keep on.

I was on duty at the Amarillo Globe-News in Texas when we entered the 21st century, but in the run-up to that big event, I was afraid for the worst. What’s more, so was my boss, G-N Publisher Garet von Netzer.

Happily, the worst never happened. However, von Netzer — a cautious, deeply conservative and hard-driving man — wasn’t about to take any chances. Yes, he hoped for the best and prepared for the worst.

We weren’t the only business in the world to go through that kind of pre-Y2K preparation. Man, it was a hell of a ride.

Our day prior the dawn of The Year 2000 unfolded quite differently than other days. We started producing pages for print before we put the afternoon Globe-Times to bed around noon on Dec. 31, 1999.

Von Netzer feared that computer systems worldwide would lock up, they would vaporize, they wouldn’t know how to log the next day’s arrival. He was concerned about whether they would even recognize “2000” as a year.

So, he decided we would button up the next morning’s Daily News early that evening. There would be no breaking news in the first edition of the Daily News to mark the new century. There would be what we called “time copy,” feature stories with no time element attached to them.

Our sports pages would have no game-day coverage. They, too, would be full of feature material.

The editorial page, which I was in charge of publishing, wasn’t affected quite so dramatically. We had plenty of appropriate commentary that didn’t depend on any time element. Our editorial for the next morning’s newspaper heralded the arrival of the 21st century and gave appropriate recognition to its importance in the history of humankind.

But by golly, we shut it all down early. I cannot recall the precise time, but I believe it was around 8 p.m.

After producing our final pages for the next day, von Netzer ordered all the computers shut down, powered off, unplugged from the wall sockets. Every computer terminal in our business went dark.

What happened when the clock struck midnight was, well, a serious non-event. Electronic calendars logged the correct year. Time didn’t stand still. The sun rose the next morning.

We went to work. Flipped the switches back to the “on” position. We were in business once again, per usual.

The frenetic pace of the previous day proved to be all for naught. Then again, what if the worst had happened?

This isn’t how you MAGA, Mr. POTUS

Well, Mr. President, you’ve crossed a fascinating threshold so early during your time in the only public office you’ve ever sought.

The Washington Post tally of lies/misstatements/fibs/prevarications has just crossed the 10,000 mark. Are congratulations in order, Mr. President? If so, then I offer them to you.

Your lying — and I’ll stick with that description for the purposes of this blog — has transcended anything many of us can remember.

I’m old enough to recall how presidents have hidden the truth from us. They do so because of because of perceived national security issues that could put the nation in peril if they were to reveal the “whole truth.”

The Vietnam War, the Cold War, specific crises (such as 9/11) all have produced incidences of presidents keeping certain information from the public.

Not you, Mr. President. You lie at every opportunity. You lie when you don’t need to lie. You’re penchant for making things up simply is mind-blogging/blowing in the extreme.

I have to wonder how you live with yourself. Oh, never mind. I know the answer to that. Your entire life prior to becoming a politician was predicated on self-enrichment. So, I gather that to further your own self you feel as though you had to lie to make yourself look better than you are . . . which I have determined isn’t all that difficult a chore.

Why, you even lied about the size of one of those buildings that has your name on it, inflating it by 10 stories.

You make these outrageous claims of being the “most” this or that, or the “best” at whatever you endeavor to do. One cannot categorize those as lies, per se.

However, you are really and truly good at lying.

Well done, Mr. President.

I just want to note that lying your way through life is not going to “make America great again.” Really. That, sir, is the truth.

Time of My Life, Part 30: Remembering all those colleagues

When I read stories these days about newspapers’ shrinking newsrooms, I remember how it used to be in print journalism.

I was fortunate enough to be part of two newspapers that sold enough copies each day and raked in enough advertising money to invest deeply in personnel who were assigned to cover specific issues, work specific “beats.”

The most recent present-day tale I read came from Politico and it tells the story of the Des Moines (Iowa) Register, the one-time media titan in a state where presidential politics kicks off every four years with those vaunted Iowa caucuses. The Register, as are all newspapers these days, is retrenching. It is doing as much with fewer individuals to do it.

Read the Politico story here.

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, newspapers were flush with cash. I went from a small, five-day-a-week afternoon suburban daily in Oregon City, Ore., in 1984 to a mid-sized newspaper in Beaumont, Texas. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. The Beaumont Enterprise had a huge staff of reporters. They were assigned many specific beats.

The paper had an education reporter, police reporter, entertainment reporter, environmental reporter, courts reporter, someone to cover City Hall, someone to cover county government, reporters assigned to cover surrounding communities, we had a business editor who had a reporter working under his supervision. Then we had a sports department with about 10 reporters, including someone who covered “outdoor sports,” meaning chiefly huntin’ and fishin’. We had a photo staff of around six photographers.

Then, of course, we had copy editors, line editors who assigned stories to the reporters.

Then we had an editorial page staff, of which I was a member. I went to work in Beaumont as an editorial writer. The page had an editor and a cartoonist.

The Beaumont Enterprise, as the saying goes, was a “cash cow” for Jefferson Pilot, the owners who ran the paper when I got there and then for the Hearst Corporation, which bought the paper late in 1984.

I stayed for nearly 11 years before gravitating from the Gulf Coast to the Texas Panhandle. My professional journey then took me to a post where I served as editorial page editor for two papers in Amarillo, the morning Daily News and the evening Globe-Times.

The Globe-News, as everyone called it, was as rich as the Enterprise. The staff there was as diversified and exclusive as the paper I had departed. Its reach was enormous, covering the Panhandle, eastern New Mexico, the Oklahoma Panhandle and a small slice of southwestern Kansas.

Then the bottom started to fall out. It happened in the early 2000s. The Globe-Times was shuttered. The paper began to retrench. I heard that the Beaumont Enterprise did the same thing.

But the good old days were grand, indeed. They brought lots of fun, fellowship with colleagues and a joint pride in being able to assemble a publication each day of the week.

I don’t sense as much pride these days in the publications that employed me. Neither paper has nearly the staff they had back when they were flush with money.

I just recall all those friends and colleagues who have gone on to “pursue other interests.” I think of them often and hope they’re all as happy I am now that it’s over.