Tag Archives: RFK

national news

Ivanka takes offense? Get over it, young lady

Ivanka Trump is walking the finest of lines.

She is the elder daughter of the president of the United States. She also is an unpaid senior adviser to the Leader of the Free World.

So, when she gets asked by a broadcast journalist about the allegations of sexual abuse leveled against her father/the president, she reveals why it’s important that the president be mindful of the problems nepotism poses in hiring senior advisers.

Ivanka cannot serve in her “official” capacity without facing difficult questions surrounding her “boss,” who also happens to be her father.

She called the question posed by NBC News’s Peter Alexander “inappropriate.” Wait a minute, young lady. He was asking the question of a senior policy adviser, not of a presidential daughter.

This is why nepotism is a bad thing when it involves people at the highest levels of government.

Many decades ago, the federal government implemented an anti-nepotism policy in response to questions surrounding the appointment in 1960 of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy by his brother, President John F. Kennedy. After JFK’s murder in November 1963 and after RFK was elected to the U.S. Senate the following year, the government enacted a policy that prohibited hiring by presidents of “linear” relatives to paid positions.

It didn’t cover the role that Ivanka Trump fulfills in her father’s administration.

There needs to be some tightening of these rules. If it’s not going to happen, then the president needs to send his daughter packing.

national news, political news

Grandpa would have been proud

I watched Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night.

Then I listened to some of the analysis of it. A few minutes later, I listened with equal intensity to the Democratic Party’s designated respondent to the president’s speech. A young member of Congress, Joseph P. Kennedy III, D-Mass., offered the response.

I listened to Rep. Kennedy with more than just a touch of wistfulness. The young man is the grandson of my first political idol. You’ve heard of him, too: Robert F. Kennedy.

I wrote once about an astonishing Bobby Kennedy Moment that occurred in my life. Here is what I wrote in June 2015:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2015/06/a-bullet-changed-history-47-year-ago-today/

I have shared with you over the years I’ve written this blog about the astonishing array of public figures whose paths crossed with mine.

My brief encounter with Robert Kennedy ranks at the very top of the long list of distinguished individuals I’ve had the honor of meeting.

Get this, though: My meeting with RFK occurred one year after my graduation from high school. It happened on the eve of a 1968 presidential primary election in my home state of Oregon.

I had no possible idea in that moment that my political idol would die one week later after he scored the biggest political victory of his life. RFK had won the California Democratic primary. He thanked his supporters and then said, “On to Chicago and let’s win there.”

He never got to his party’s nominating convention in Chicago. He walked through a kitchen pantry in Los Angeles and was gunned down by Sirhan B. Sirhan.

When I saw the young man deliver his party’s response to the president’s speech last night, I only could imagine how proud he would have made the grandfather he never knew.

At least Joe Kennedy knows of the impact his grandpa had on millions of Americans — such as yours truly — who came of political age in the most turbulent of times.

national news, political news

Can it be? Mitt is getting back in the game?

I do hope this story pans out.

Sources have revealed that U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Senate’s longest-tenured Republican, is calling it quits and that his good friend Mitt Romney is going to run for his seat in Utah.

Why is my heart palpitating? Well, Mitt is no friend of Donald John Trump Sr. Neither, it might be noted, is Sen. Hatch. However, Hatch is facing a near-certain GOP primary challenge. He’s decided — allegedly — that he’s had enough of the fun and games in Washington. He’s now 83 years of age. He must lack the staying power and/or the stomach for another political fight.

But how about that Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who’s made three stabs at higher office? He lost to U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, then came up short in two tries for the presidency, losing the 2012 general election to President Obama.

He might have made an even bigger impact on the current political environment, though, with that stunning speech he delivered in 2016 that tore the GOP presidential nominee, Trump, a new one. He called Trump a “fraud,” a “phony” and a whole lot of other pejorative terms.

Then after Trump got elected Romney supposedly was on the president-elect’s short list for secretary of state. He interviewed with Trump in private, came out in front of the cameras, smiled and said all the right things.

But … my gut tells me Mitt isn’t in Trump’s camp.

I’m not at all sure about Mitt’s residency. Does he still live in Massachusetts? Does he maintain a residence in Utah? I guess it doesn’t matter too terribly, given that these residency laws at times can be quite lax and open to broad interpretation. Do you remember the time the late Robert F. Kennedy (in 1964) and then Hillary Rodham Clinton (in 2000) ran for the U.S. Senate from New York, even though neither of them actually lived there at the time they ran for the office?

Whatever. I am glad to see Mitt Romney possibly getting back into the public service game. I just hope he can muster up the guts to keep “telling it like it is” as it regards the president of the United States.

national news

400K for one speech? No wonder they’re griping

Barack H. Obama delivered a speech to a Wall Street health care outfit’s annual conference.

The former president plans to rake in a cool $400,000 to make the speech. As you might imagine, he’s getting some guff from those within his Democratic Party base who contend that it’s insulting for him to earn the equivalent of the annual salary he drew while he was president of the United States … with just a single speech.

I happen to agree.

I also understand that the president is taking advantage of what the market will provide him for his words of wisdom.

Former adviser has a good idea

But here’s another option, which comes from Van Jones, a former Obama adviser who now serves as a contributor for CNN: Why not go on what Jones calls a “poverty tour.” It would help fend off some of the complaints the former president is getting from members of his base.

“We need a Bobby Kennedy in this country,” Jones said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.

Indeed, RFK famously took a lengthy tour of Appalachia before launching his 1968 bid for the presidency. Kennedy got to see up close the abject poverty that engulfs families in eastern Kentucky; he heard tales of misery and heard people’s pleas for help.

And, yes, Bobby Kennedy was born into privilege.

As The Hill reported: He (Jones) suggested the former president “go to Appalachia, go to Native American reservations where they’re shoving these pipelines down their throats and they don’t even have clear, running water. Go to South Central, go to the Arizona border where you have a lot of poverty.”

What would this do? Oh, it likely wouldn’t persuade the former president to give back the money or perhaps donate it to worthy causes. It would allow him to understand better the plight of millions of Americans who are unable to collect that kind of money just for making a speech.

legal news

Didn’t they enact an anti-nepotism law?

President-elect John F. Kennedy called the media together shortly after his election in 1960 to announce his choice for attorney general.

It would be his brother, Robert, who never had practiced law privately. He had served as general counsel to a Senate committee chaired by the infamous Joseph McCarthy and later worked with his brother in the Senate.

JFK joked that RFK needed a bit of experience before he would become a successful lawyer, so he named him AG.

The appointment caused some consternation at the time, even though RFK would go on to become a highly effective attorney general.

In 1967, Congress enacted a law that banned such nepotism at the highest levels of government.

Then came Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States. What does he do? He places his daughter Ivanka into a West Wing office, where she now has an actual White House job. Oh, and her husband, Jared Kushner, also now works as a senior policy adviser.

Neither of them has government experience. Neither has any political seasoning.

Trumps take over the White House

But hey, what’s the problem? Ivanka won’t take a salary, which I guess serves as Dad’s dodge in giving her a government job.

However, didn’t Congress have enough fear about nepotism 50 years ago to approve a law to prohibit it?

I don’t believe that concern has lessened.

national news, political news

Once ‘noble’ pursuit getting more vengeful

The late Robert F. Kennedy used to proclaim that politics could be a “noble” pursuit if its practitioners kept their eye on the public service aspect of their craft.

It’s gotten a lot less noble in the years since RFK’s time in the public arena.

Politics has become a contact sport. A blood sport in the eyes of many. We are about to witness it become even bloodier as the next president of the United States takes his oath and begins the work of leading the country.

Donald J. Trump is headed for the roughest ride imaginable. More than half of those who voted in this year’s election voted for someone else. There are myriad questions surrounding the president-elect’s fitness for office, about his business dealings and about the quality of the team he is assembling.

It’s been said there might be an impeachment in Trump’s future if he doesn’t take care of some of those business dealings that could run him smack into the “emoluments clause” in the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits presidents from receiving income from foreign governments.

Is all this to be expected? Sure it is.

Is it unreasonable to ask these probing questions? Of course not!

Vengeance can be most troubling. Trump will take over from a president who’s himself felt the wrath of those who opposed him at every turn. There was talk of impeaching Barack H. Obama, too.

President Obama sought to do some bold things, such as get medical insurance for millions of Americans; he sought to rescue the failing economy early in his presidency with a costly stimulus package; he continued to pursue terrorists abroad using aggressive military action; he sought to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

All along the way, his foes sought to stymie him. There were a couple of shameful incidents, such as when a Republican member of Congress shouted “liar!” at Obama as he was delivering a speech to a joint congressional session; there also was the declaration from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell who said his “No. 1 priority” would be to make Barack Obama a one-term president.

The Democrats now are on the outside looking in at Republicans’ efforts to reshape the federal government.

It won’t be a cakewalk for the new guy any more than it was for the fellow he will succeed.

Memories are long in Washington, D.C., even if politicians who say spiteful things to and about each other can make up and join the same team — which happens all the time in the nation’s capital.

Trump’s team must know that political nobility is long gone. They’d better get ready to be roughed up.

As they say: Payback is a bitch.

national news

Hoping for the next true American hero

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Dale Butland has written a truly depressing essay about the death of John Glenn.

Writing for the New York Times, Butland — who once worked for the one-time Ohio U.S. senator — seems to think Glenn is the “last American hero” … ever!

I wince at the thought. I shudder to think that there won’t be someone who can capture Americans’ hearts the way Glenn did in 1962.

The essay itself isn’t depressing. Its premise, though, surely is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/opinion/john-glenn-the-last-american-hero.html?smid=tw-share

Do I have any clue, any idea where the next hero will appear?

Of course not!

However, I am going to remain the eternal optimist that we haven’t yet traipsed through the portal that takes us all into some parallel universe where no heroes can ever exist.

Sure, Glenn was an exceptional American. A Marine Corps fighter pilot who saw combat in World War II and Korea. The astronaut who became the first American to orbit the planet. A successful business executive. A close friend of John and Robert Kennedy and their families. A four-term U.S. senator. A man who got the call once again, at age 77, to fly into space aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

He became “an American legend.”

That, dear reader, is a full life.

Is he the final legendary figure ever to walk among us?

Oh, man … I pray that someone will emerge.

national news, political news

Bush 41 voting for Hillary

bush

This probably isn’t nearly as spectacular a political story as some are making it out to be.

Still, it’s an important development in the presidential campaign of 2016.

Former President George H.W. Bush — aka Poppy Bush, Bush 41 and Bush the Elder — has told a member of a leading Democratic family that he’s going to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton over Republican Donald J. Trump.

The person who “outed” Bush 41 happens to be Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former Democratic lieutenant governor of Maryland — and the eldest child of the late Robert F. Kennedy.

Sure, it’s an important story. President Bush is as “establishment Republican” as you can get. He served in many high-profile government capacities before being elected president in 1988. Now he’s going to vote for the wife of the man who defeated him for re-election in 1992. Bush’s forsaking of Trump’s candidacy speaks to the reluctance among many Republicans to back their party’s nominee.

But hold on. Is this a jaw-dropper? Hardly.

President Bush is a dedicated family man who loves his children more than life itself. When a politician attacks the kids, as Trump did this year en route to the GOP nomination, it’s only natural for Dad to take it personally.

Trump called former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush “Low Energy Jeb” and chided him repeatedly for his failure to do better against Trump in the GOP primary campaign.

Then there is this: Trump said the younger President Bush — George W. — “lied” the country into going to war in Iraq. He accused W. of fabricating the pretext for taking out Saddam Hussein by saying he had “weapons of mass destruction” and that he was complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

Setting aside whether one believes Trump’s assertions about W.’s veracity — and they do ring true to me — it’s totally understandable that the first President Bush would hold those utterances against the man who made them.

With 49 days to go before the election, it remains to be seen whether Poppy’s plan to vote for Hillary will bring other disaffected establishment Republicans along.

As for George H.W. Bush’s apparent defection … I do get it.

national news, political news

‘Outreach’ to African-Americans lies beyond Trump’s grasp

Donald J. Trump is trying to pander, er, reach out to African-American voters.

The Republican Party’s presidential nominee is plotting a curious course in that direction.

He’s held a couple of rallies in recent days. One was in suburban Milwaukee, Wisc., the other was in suburban Detroit, Mich.

I emphasize the “suburban” aspect for a specific reason.

He was standing in front of virtually all-white audiences telling them, apparently, about how terrible life has become for black residents of inner-city neighborhoods. “What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump asked, supposedly speaking over the heads of those who were standing in front of him. He was asking the larger audience that wasn’t there, the African-American voting bloc that — as of this moment — is giving the GOP nominee about 1 percent of its support.

It’s been reported that an avowed segregationist — the late Alabama Gov. George Corley Wallace — polled 3 percent of the black vote when he ran as an independent candidate for president in 1968.

A better, more sincere way to reach out to Americans is to speak to them directly. Venture into their neighborhoods. Look them in the eye, tell them you care about them and offer them demonstrative evidence that you have cared for them before.

Other politicians have employed that strategy while campaigning for African-American votes. I think specifically of the late Robert F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.

Sure, President Clinton has had his hiccups regarding race relations, such as his occasionally frosty relationship with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and with Barack Obama and the time he scolded the rap singer Sister Souljah for spouting lyrics that promoted violence.

As for RFK, well, those of who are around at that time remember vividly his venturing into an Indianapolis neighborhood the night of April 4, 1968 to tell the black audience before him that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr had just been assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. Many of America’s cities erupted in violence that night. Indy, though, remained calm.

These days, such “outreach” by a leading politician consists of screeds shouted from podiums in affluent neighborhoods.

I’m trying to imagine Donald Trump following RFK’s example.

Nope. I can’t picture it.

national news, political news

Nobility of politics facing serious challenge

trump-and-clinton-1062x598

I’ve long believed in the nobility of politics and public service.

Yes, they’re related. To attain one measure of public service, one must endure the political rough-and-tumble.

My very first political “hero,” Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, would talk occasionally about politics as being a noble pursuit. RFK imbued in me an interest in the political process just about the time I was coming of age. Then, in a tragic spasm of violence in that Los Angeles hotel kitchen after RFK won the most important political victory of his career, he was gone.

My love of politics remained.

This election season, I fear, is going to put my political affection to a severe challenge. I’ve noted already in a tweet that this election cycle just might “cure” me of my political addiction … political junkie that I am.

I don’t want to be cured. I want to remain engaged in the political process. I mean, heck man, I studied political science in college and came away from my post-secondary education with a keen interest in the process that elects people who purport to become our leaders.

What can we expect from the next presidential election campaign?

I fear it will be little of anything truly positive.

Already I’ve noted that this election cycle is presenting me with the unhappiest set of choices I can remember. I’ve been able to vote in every presidential election since 1972. I voted with great pride in that election, just a couple of years after being discharged from the U.S. Army.

I was full — if you’ll pardon the pithy language — of piss and vinegar … and I wanted the political process to be full of it, too.

I’m feeling quite a bit different this time around.

The two candidates for the highest office in the land don’t fill me with much joy. In fact, one of them — you know the fellow to whom I refer — fills me with dread. The other one? Well, she still has to prove herself.

I’m waiting to be won over yet again. I fear, though, that the Campaign 2016 misery index is going to send us all scampering to the tall grass.

Yes, I’m a political addict.

I hate the idea, though, of being “cured” of the addiction.