Tag Archives: Clinton administration

national news

The attention span of a ‘fruit fly’?

Robert Reich leans to the left; his critics surely would say “the far left.” He served as secretary of labor in President Clinton’s administration. His progressive chops are well-known.

Still, for this former Cabinet official to say what he has said about Donald Trump is, well, quite stunning. Reich posted this on Facebook:

In all my years advising presidents and working in government, I have never heard of anything like this happening in the White House. During a meeting with Paul Ryan on health care, Trump reportedly became so disinterested that he stared blankly out the window and finally wandered out of the Oval Office to watch television in another room. Mike Pence had to convince (Trump) to return to the Oval Office to finish the meeting.

This man has the attention span of a fruit fly. He has no interest in facts and figures nor does he pretend to care. Even the simplest duties of the office bore him. He is more interested in what’s on Fox News than actually running the government. This is (a) real national emergency, not migrant women and children seeking asylum at the border.

I am not aware of Reich’s sourcing for what he says occurred during that meeting with the former House speaker. It sure sounds like what so many of us have heard already about the president’s lack of attention to anything approaching the details of public policy.

Thus, I have to concur with Secretary Reich’s assertion that the “real national emergency” is present inside the Oval Office, in the West Wing, in the White House.

Donald Trump’s base has elected a menace.

media news

Yes, the White House is at ‘war’ with the media

White House press secretaries have a singular mission, which is to convey the message of the president to the American public.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is now performing that task to mixed reviews. Those who support Donald Trump’s agenda applaud her; those (of us) who don’t, well, we jeer her.

I’ll offer this jeer, therefore, to Sanders for saying that the White House is not “at war” with the media. Sure thing, Mme. Press Secretary.

Then, why does the president declare that the media are “the enemy of the American people”? Why does he keep insisting that media reports he finds objectionable come from what he refers to as “fake media”? Why does he disparage reporters individually, by name, along with their organizations?

Good grief, Sarah! The president declared war on the media long ago. The first press flack, Sean Spicer, fired the first barrage on Day One of the Trump administration when he challenged the media reporting of the size of the Trump inaugural crowd!

I am pretty certain the media believe they are in a state of “war” with the administration. Whether the White House’s “fine-tuned machine” believes it ignores what many of the rest of us realized long ago.

Sanders took part in a discussion of White House media relations with Mike McCurry, press secretary for the Clinton administration. McCurry, not surprisingly, took issue with Sanders’s assertion that there is no warfare taking place. He said the White House criticizes media reporting “every day,” which he considers to be a form of media war.

Read The Hill’s story here.

I am one of those former media guys who knows White House combat with the press when he sees it.

Thus, I believe Sarah Sanders is, um, quite wrong while she parrots the White House line on its relationship with the media.

national news, political news

Terrorists, union protesters: all the same?

Robert Reich is a former labor secretary during the Clinton administration.

He posted this message on Facebook today in response to a patently absurd statement made at the Conservative Political Action Conference by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Reich wrote this:

“Can it get any lower? Last night, at CPAC’s ‘beauty pageant’ for right-wing presidential hopefuls, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was asked how he would fight ISIS if elected president. Walker referred to his political fights with teachers and labor union members in his home state: ‘If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.’ I doubt Walker really believes Americans who peacefully protest for a decent wages are analogous to foreign barbarians who saw off peoples’ heads. But to him and the other right wing-nuts of the Republican party, political opponents are enemies rather than fellow citizens, to be ‘taken on’ mercilessly. This is why they can’t (and mustn’t) govern America.”

There you have it.

A governor who has all but declared war on the union movement in his home state equates facing down peaceful protesters in the streets with the monsters who are terrorizing innocent people on the other side of the world.

This is the kind of rhetoric that CPAC has been hearing from its dog-and-pony show of candidates strutting across the stage to fire up their followers.

The serious thinkers of the Republican Party need to be heard above the demagoguery that’s getting all the attention.

I share Reich’s belief that Walker really equates the protesters with terrorists. Then again, why does he spew such garbage? Oh, I almost forgot. He’s appealing to his party’s “base.”

International news

Why oppose relationship with Cuba?

The continuing argument over whether the United States should normalize relations with a Third World communist country 90 miles off the Florida coast continues to baffle me.

The Cuban-American community is split on this issue. Republican politicians — and even a couple of Democrats — by and large oppose it; Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is a notable Republican exception to that opposition.

The opponents of President Obama’s decision to begin that process keep citing Cuban’s horrible human rights record. Yes, it’s horrible, but let’s compare it with another nation with which the United States does have diplomatic ties.

It’s Vietnam.

Consider a few facts about this country.

* We fought Vietnam in a bloody and brutal war for roughly a decade.Ā The VietnameseĀ killed 58,000 Americans during that struggle. How many Americans have died fighting Cuban military personnel since Fidel Castro assumed power in 1959? Nineteen, while fighting Cuban troops during our 1983 invasion of the island nation of Grenada.

* How did the communists from the north respond when they took control of Vietnam? They imprisoned those who had worked with the South Vietnamese government, sending them to what they called “re-education camps,” which was a euphemism for concentration camps. I met a few of those “re-educated” Vietnamese when I returned to the country in 1989. Believe me when I say that they were treated as common criminals by the conquering communists.

* Have the Vietnamese enjoyed the same kind of human liberty and freedom that some in Congress are demanding of Cuba? Hardly. VietnamĀ remains a hardline communist autocracy. There’s been plenty of economic reform since Saigon fell in April 1975 and the country is enjoying some economic prosperity. Its people do not live totally free, however.

And yet we’ve been diplomatic partners with Vietnam since July 11, 1995, when President Clinton opened that door.

Why are some of us now so reluctant to follow the same course with Cuba?

Let’s get real. If we can bury the hatchet with a former battlefield enemy, then surely there lies opportunity to forge a relationship with a nation that poses zero military or economic threat.