President Obama's Legacy: 'For Eight Years He Walked On Ice And Never Fell'

PETE SOUZA / THE WHITE HOUSE

There has been much gum flapping over whether President Barack Hussein Obama's legacy will be undermined by his successor, for whom Pretend Time will soon come to a crashing end with his inauguration.   There indeed have been occasions over the last eight years when the hope-and-change mantra that propelled Obama to the presidency has seemed like a fiction, and the election of Donald Trump would seem to verify that in an especially cruel way.   

Yet despite taking the reins of a war-weary nation in the midst of an economic calamity and having to endure the unrelenting enmity of an obdurate opposition party and the stench of racism, which had been lurking in its hidey-hole until bursting forth newly triumphant with Trump's ascendency, Obama has wrought enormous changes during what has been the most transformational presidency in 80 years. 

As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, "For eight years he walked on ice and never fell."   

Obama turned out not only to be so much more than many of us give him credit for, he happened to have done the most difficult job in the world with acuity, wisdom and wit while weathering vicious personal attacks as the man who broke the 220-year White House monopoly on whiteness.  And somewhat ironically, the right-wing Republican hate machine made him a better president.    

Obama has:  

* Implemented far-reaching and, yes, lasting reforms in a dysfunctional health-care system. 

* Stopped the Great Recession from becoming the second Great Depression. 

* Raised school academic standards. 

* Legislated pay parity for women. 

* Revolutionized the way we produce energy through harnessing renewable resources. 

* Fought back against global warming. 

* Protected over 550 million acres of federal lands and waters from exploitation. 

* Taken on the epidemic of childhood obesity with his First Lady. 

* Revitalized the Justice Department, which has vigorously investigated police brutality. 

* Appointed the first Latina justice to the Supreme Court.

* Provided deportation relief to young immigrants.   

* Legalized same-sex marriage and opened new opportunities for women and gays in the military. 

* Saved the domestic auto industry. 

* Added 15 million jobs through 75 consecutive month of growth. 

* Reduced unemployment to below 5 percent and the federal deficit by two thirds. 

* Engineered egalitarian tax reforms and eliminated the most usurious of credit card abuses. 

* Took out Obama bin Laden. 

* Normalized relations with Cuba and stabilized relations with Iran. 

* Resurrected America's dismal image in the world. 

And unlike his predecessors, Obama has served without scandal once you discount the innumerable faux outrages ginned up by Republicans.

DOUG MILLS / THE NEW YORK TIMES

Had the Supreme Court not stolen the 2000 election, Barack Obama would not have become the 44th president of the United States.  Things would have been very different had the smirking frat boy from the Texas oil patch not been so spectacularly inept, had the economy not belly flopped, and had the relatively inexperienced senator from Illinois not run on a message that galvanized an electorate desperate to turn America back from the dark side.   

That a sizable portion of that electorate has opted for a return to the dark side with Donald Trump is less a reflection of Obama's tenure than the latent stupidity of Americans in general.  What is happening to America is a kind of entropy, a gradual decline into disorder.  Trump is merely a symptom, not the disease, although it is certain that the case of presidential buyer's remorse that will begin unfolding in the coming weeks and months will be unlike anything ever seen in American history.   

Still, there have been setbacks, as well as outright failures, on Obama's watch.   

Obama has:  

* Played much too nice with Republicans and a deeply dysfunctional Congress.   

* Chose many of the same insiders for the most important administration fiscal posts who helped sew the seeds of the 2008 economic collapse. 

* Failed to act on marijuana reform or push back sufficiently against the War on Drugs. 

* Failed to keep his pledge to shut the revolving door to lobbyists. 

* Allowed mass surveillance of Americans to grow. 

* Done too little too late to push back against Vladimir Putin's efforts to throw the 2016 election.

Obama also has not been particularly effective in using the presidential bully pulpit to allay fears of terrorism, which has inadvertently made the Republican blowhard brigade seem stronger when they rail about foreign policy.  His Mideast policy, especially as it has pertained to Syria, was been a hash, while he has repeatedly wavered on human rights in Egypt and Turkey, among other countries. 

Most importantly for me, he issued go-free cards to Bush administration torture regime perpetrators.  His rationale in not ordering the Justice Department to investigate these evildoers is understandable if disheartening: He did not want to begin his presidency with Republicans screaming blue-blooded murder over what they would view as political prosecutions, although they screamed anyway about practically everything else.  And yes, Gitmo is still in business.

Yet Obama has been clever in the face of obstructionist Republicans even if it sometimes seems he has been content with a half a loaf when a whole loaf was needed.  He made recess appointments with some success and took unilateral executive action on gun control.  He has understood that sweeping reform of environmental regulations is impossible because of the Republicans' big energy-fossil fuel mindset, so he has worked within existing regulations and fairly effectively at that. 

Charges that Obama has let down African-Americans while not adequately advocating against racism are rubbish, although First Lady Michelle Obama certainly has been more outspoken.  There also is the reality that like Bill and Hillary Clinton, some of the criticism of him has merely been because he is a Democrat. 

Obama remains a potent symbol for African-Americans.  Their lives have improved during his two terms because of his trademark quiet determination, not fire and brimstone, while I find offensive the notion that just because he's black things would or should automatically have gotten better.  Obama fought powerful racist headwinds and it's going to take a lot more than eight years to undo hundreds of years of racism as the election of a proto-birther whose only talents are making money and white bluster has so painfully reminded us.  

EPA

Barack Obama's style has been as important as his substance: His determinedly placid temperament has enabled him to keep his head when others lose theirs, most notably at the height of the recession he inherited and in the Ebola outbreak crisis, but in many other instances, as well.  He has disdained the theatrical and possesses a calculated coolness that at times can be infuriating but became a personal trademark as the challenges -- and the Republican insults and dirty tricks -- piled up and his hair turned gray.  And when was the last time the leader of the free world danced to Drake's "Hotline Bling"? 

Obama has had a gifted ability to engage when he speaks -- that is if you are inclined to listen in the first place. And you'd darned well better listen when the subject is complicated and his explanation is complex, which it sometimes is because of a tendency to slip into policy wonkery.  George Bush invariably talked down to and tried to frighten us, as will Trump, while Obama has talked with us, appealing to our better nature and resilience as a nation as he did yet again in his farewell valedictory on Tuesday night.  (Or perhaps was it not really farewell?) 

And where Bush was a dismal speechmaker, Obama has been inspirational. 

There was his 2008 "More Perfect Union" speech on race in which he renounced Reverend Jeremiah Wright's beliefs while embracing his faith.  His 2011 memorial speech speech for Christina Taylor Green and the other Tucson shooting victims.  Then there was the extraordinary eulogy last June during which he sang "Amazing Grace" for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was among nine people slain during a church Bible study by a self-avowed white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina.

PETE SOUZA / THE WHITE HOUSE

Yes, Barack Obama has outstanding oratorical chops.  But let's recall that his opponents in 2008 said that was all he had, and John McCain went so far as to label him a "celebrity" in one of the more memorable insults of the campaign.   History will be particularly kind to Obama, and while Republicans are working feverishly to undo the Affordable Care Act, his signal accomplishment, this transformation of health care in America has touched every nook and cranny of the system and has a momentum that will be impossible to stop.   

My favorite photograph of the last eight years is not of Obama crossing the Freedom Bridge is Selma, dancing with Michelle at one of his inaugural balls or greeting troops in Afghanistan.  It is that little black boy touching his hair.   

Underlying Obama's accomplishments, as well as his failures, is a humility that all great men possess. Everything bitter conservatives and disillusioned liberals said he was he has not been, and everything they said he could not be he has been. 

But most of all, Barack Obama has been one of the greatest of presidents because he has been a deeply decent and moral human being at a time when those qualities are becoming extinct.

America's Intelligence Agencies Suck & Trump Has Just Made Matters Worse

ELIZABETH GRIFFIN / ESQUIRE

At first blush, Donald Trump's efforts to discredit America's intelligence agencies seemed like a pretty good idea.  After all, they've done an historically craptastic job of fulfilling their missions.  But like everything else that the president-elect does, his blasts against the CIA, FBI and NSA regarding their fairly well-documented assertion that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally sought to influence the 2016 election on Trump's behalf were just more logs on his very own bonfire of vanity that will allow these agencies to yet again avoid the kind of harsh scrutiny they have long deserved.    

Yes, America's intelligence Big Three appear to have done themselves proud on the election hacking scheme, even if foreign governments first tipped them to what was going under right under their noses.  The scheme, if you missed the news, threw the election to Trump by sewing enough doubt in voters minds about Hillary Clinton through an unrelenting campaign of stolen emails and false news and then the coup de grâce administered by FBI Director James Comey a few days before the election, all of which has gifted the republic a tweet-happy narcissistic boy-man with notoriously thin skin who in clearer-headed times easily meets the definition of a traitor but is about to be handed the Pentagon's nuclear codes.  

To quote the slam-dunk summary in the unclassified portion of the report: 

 "We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.  Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.  We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump."

The list of missions blown and dire warnings overlooked and ignored by U.S. intelligence agencies is stunningly long.  But other than noting that the CIA in particular has been historically inept (my favorite being it finding out on CNN that the Soviet Union had collapsed and the Berlin Wall was coming down), the most catastrophic failure was the 9/11 attacks.    

The CIA and FBI, supported by NSA eavesdropping data, were aware that five of the 19 hijackers were in country, but because of their historic rivalry -- which continues apace -- and bureaucratic inertia -- which remains alive and well -- failed to communicate with each other.  Add to that toxic mixture the fact that President Bush was more interested in photo ops with a weed whacker at his Texas ranch in the weeks before the attacks than taking seriously intelligence briefings about the emerging Al Qaeda threat against the homeland, the very briefings that Trump also has poo-pooed, and so the U.S. blithely sailed into a perfectly deadly storm that took 3,000 lives and altered the course of history.  

Heaven forbid that Trump get any credit since he continues to frame the election hacking in starkly partisan terms as "a political witch hunt," and the guy makes no secret of his disdain for anything to do with computers.  But his belief that the office of director of national intelligence has become bloated and that the CIA needs to get more agents off their asses and into the field are spot on.   

So much for praise. 

The reasons that Putin meddled are twofold: He didn't like Hillary Clinton and he knew he could diddle Trump, something he has been unable to do with an American president since he quit the KGB to become a Russian government bigshot and then president.   

Diddling aside, I happen to think that Trump's bromance with Putin is more a case of lazy-assed convenience and his dependence on money from the autocrat's corrupt buddies, as well his compulsion to constantly try to shock people as with his embrace of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, than genuine admiration of a thug. Although it is fun in a train wreck sort of way to watch Republicans on Capitol Hill tie their boxer shorts in knots over their exalted leader's peregrinations concerning America's one-time Cold War rival, which for 70 years the GOP viewed as the global Satan and not too long ago would have accurately characterized the hacking as an act of war.   

(Let's also not forget that The Donald and The Julian have something in common.  They're both sexual predators.)  

Trump's presidency already is deeply tainted, and not just because the election was stolen.  But it is unlikely he will lift the sanctions President Obama has placed on Russia for interfering in it because that would trigger a shitstorm he would not be able to tweet away, while it is just as it is unlikely that the intelligence agencies will get the kind of scrutiny their sucky long-term performance demands.  Because Trump, of course, has made such a hash of things.

Cartoon du Jour

MICHAEL RAMIREZ/WEEKLY STANDARD

Trumpcare Bigfoots Into Our Lives: Making America (And Republicans) Sick Again

TY WRIGHT / GETTY IMAGES

When you strip away the crap and corruption, of which there has been plenty, the issue of health care in America is extremely simple.  

How simple? 

This is the starting point from which any discussion of health-care policy must flow. You either believe that:  

Access to health care is a right of citizenship, just like our other cherished if sometimes abused rights. The legislated consequence of that belief is that a healthy American is a better and more able, engaged and productive American. 

Or: 

Access to health care is not a right and is to be determined by a citizen's ability to pay. The consequence of that belief, which is about to be legislated, is that only affluent Americans have access to comprehensive health care and that many millions are denied care.

It's like being pregnant.  You either are or you aren't.  There is no in between, which makes the sad spectacle of Obamacare circling the drain in Congress such a tragedy, and all the more so because Republicans have no alternative beyond a return to Free Market Hell. 

Of the many ironies attendant in this sea change, none is greater than the fact that Americans love Obamacare.  They just don't know it.  Survey after survey after survey reveals that about seven in 10 of us like the prohibition on denying insurance coverage because of preexisting conditions, including six in 10 Republicans, while the numbers are even more robust for a provision allowing young adults to stay on parents' insurance plans until age 26 and another helping states to expand Medicaid for low-income adults.   

The stinker always has been and remains the individual mandate -- the requirement that almost all of us must sign up for insurance or pay a fine.  What many of us don't understand is that this provision is necessary to keep insurance markets . . . uh, healthy and preserve the preexisting condition mandate by people who are not sick counterbalancing the costs of people who are sick.

Obamacare is flawed, to be sure, but it has been a profoundly successful start to ironing out the enormous inequities in health care and some of the more egregious shortcomings in the system itself.  (Yes, the system that charges $16 for a Tylenol tablet during a hospital stay and $15,000 for a knee replacement that costs $3,000 in an EU member nation.)  

Obamacare has nearly halved the number of people who lack health insurance to an all-time low of 8.9 percent and leveled the health-care playing field for women, who have been routinely discriminated against in health care.  Anyone who believes that returning the insuring of Americans to rapacious, underregulated insurance companies and their partners in crime, which include for-profit health organizations and Big Pharma running roughshod, as the The Donald pledges to do, will result in anything other than a catastrophe is a fool.   

It matters not that even many Republican pols realize that they're playing with kryptonite and will incur the wrath of voters if Obamacare's core components go away.  (A new survey finds that only 26 percent of voters now actually want to repeal it, an all-time low.) It has been and remains all about seeking revenge on a president who has more compassion in his little finger than the entire GOP caucus on a good day. 

As one health-care consultant notes, Obamacare can be compared to a stool in which the unpopular parts of the law are helping prop up the more popular parts.   

That's why Paul Ryan and his posse are mush-mouthing plans to phase out Obamcare over several years and threats by the so-called Freedom Caucus in the House to blow up the entire program, incurring a one trillion dollar deficit, are laughable.   

But yes, Trump wants to make America sick again.

Recalling Friends From Back In The Day -- When There Was A Day To Be Back In

Stew at the helm of Ralph Hicks's Alsager off Antigua 

Back in the day, the social if not exactly the cultural hub of Newark, Delaware was the Townie Bar at the Deer Park Tavern.   

Back in the day -- that is, when there was a day to be back in -- Newark was a quaint college town with but three places to buy a drink.  One of them was the Deer Park Tavern, which Edgar Allan Poe is said to have cursed when he got falling-down drunk following a lecture at the then mens-only Delaware College and was thrown out onto Main Street.  The Poe story is apocryphal because the tavern didn't exist when the legendary poet-storyteller gave the lecture, but that hasn't prevented owners past and present from plastering raven images on T-shirts and other stuff.

The Deer Park back in the day    

There was nothing new about the Deer Park back in the day except fresh coats of shockingly white paint on the Townie and College Bar ceilings every year or so after they would turn a bilious yellow from cigarette smoke. 

The tavern's glory days were long in the past and beyond the memories of all but the most elderly tipplers.  The Townie Bar underwent a metamorphosis from daytime to nighttime as most of the old timers moved on and the dirt and decay, as well as the bright glow of the neon beer signs, disappeared behind thick clouds of cigarette smoke.  The two constants no matter the hour were the smell of cigarettes and beer and the likely presence of Bob "Stew" Stewart and Jim "Muggs" McGinnis, who while not passionate about having to toil as house painters, reveled in storytelling, drinking shots and beers (usually "black and tans" drawn half and half from kegs of dark and light bargain-basement lagers and chased with rye whiskey), as well as clobbering all comers as members of the Deer Park's phenomenal softball teams.  This was in the early to mid-1970s.

Muggs 

Stew and Muggs will be remembered at a . . .  what to call it?  How about a Scots-Irish wake and celebration. It will be held on Sunday, January 15 at 2 p.m. at the Blue Crab Grill in Suburban Plaza off Elkton Road in Newark about two miles south of the Deer Park.  Stew died on November 30 at age 69 while Muggs left this mortal coil on December 3.  He would have been 73 this month. 

Back in the day and for a few years before moving on, Stew and Muggs painted houses in Newark and Wilmington, or anywhere there was a buck to be made.  

For Stu, that was sailing yachts from New England to Florida or the Caribbean in the fall and then back again in the spring when he was not painting houses, and later working as a plumber.   

For Muggs, that was indulging his passion for opera and fine literature when he was not painting houses, and later working as a water engineer and full-time father when the mother of his children died.  

Stu grew up in Nottingham Green off West Main Street in Newark and was a graduate of Newark High School.  He is survived by two daughters, a granddaughter and three brothers.   

Muggs grew up in Wilmington and was a Salesianum School grad, where he had been a quarterback on some of Dim Montero's legendary football teams.  He got a full ride to the University of Delaware, blew out a knee but stayed on and graduated.  He is survived by a son and daughter, two brothers and two sisters.  

One of the championship softball teams. (Muggs is third from upper right)

As the names implied, the Townie Bar was for locals and College Bar was for university students. This segregation was not enforced, but we looked down our noses at the mob of students who stood three and four deep around their bar on most nights, especially Thursdays. 

Even though they were only a few years younger than us, we believed ourselves to be worldly wise while they were naifs. We were ready for anything, or so we thought, because we had gone out into the world and had its measure.  Or at least had begun to figure it out.  Some of us had survived Vietnam and some of us were working at the Chrysler assembly plant and in shipyards and factories. A few were even teaching those students, who we believed had no time for anything beyond slamming down drafts and doing shots of tequila.  

Back in the day, the Deer Park was a retreat from that all too real world and a great equalizer where a pipe fitter could hoist a pint with a PhD.  For the students looking through the door into our smoky lair, Stew, Muggs and the rest of us must have seemed terribly grown up.  I suppose we were.

YACHT PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN DILL, SOFTBALL PHOTO © FRED COMEGYS 

If 2016 Was The Year America Had A Nervous Breakdown, Just Wait Until 2017

CHRISTIAN BLOOM 

No matter what, there are bound to be big problems in a nation of 320 million with more guns than people, an unraveling social order and yawning gap between the rich and everyone else.  But the accelerating dialectic of violence and retaliation and emergence of a racist demagogue as the standard bearer of the Republican Party --and then president-elect on the wings of a Kremlin- and FBI-abetted gangbang of hacking, false news stories and spuriously interpreted emails -- are less reminders of the frailty of a democracy that has been historically short on delivering what its leaders promise than a full-blown nervous breakdown.  From sea to shining sea. 

Let's be clear that government has not necessarily failed America, but our politicians have, and this means we have too we since we elected the idiots, most recently that tweet-happy narcissistic boy-man who in clearer-headed times easily meets the definition of a traitor but is about to be handed the Pentagon's nuclear codes and not an orange prison uniform. 

It is no coincidence that in 2016 we were gifted Cheeto Jesus and She Who Wears Pants Suits, the former a consequence of a political party that has long pandered to hate mongers and the latter a reminder that beyond the well-funded malevolence of the right-wing noise machine the long overdue election of the first woman president was put on hold because -- face it folks -- of her Nixonian failings and the cluelessness of a Democratic Party that has lost its populist way and doesn't have a frigging clue as to why it was decimated up and down ticket on November 8.   

I can't say that Americans "supported" a president-elect who was rejected by 54 percent of the electorate, but we sure did earn him. 

And in perhaps the most inane twist on the "logic" that drove so many people to vote for Putin's poodle en route to that national nervous breakdown, they rejected the very economic policies that are doing a pretty decent job of relieving a good many of their anxieties, thank you Mr. Barack Hussein Obama, because they would rather "shake up Washington," including the evisceration of the federal safety net that has been there for them when they slip or fall, or -- heaven forbid -- decide to retire.   

This is because any enhancements to that safety net a la a Clinton or Sanders talking point, according to how these extraordinarily dumb clucks have been conditioned to view things, would disproportionately help the "wrong" kinds of people even though those people often are their white working class selves.   

A corollary of this is perhaps the greatest of lessons not learned in the campaign just past by that feckless news media: While it would treat Donald Trump's outlandish behavior -- whether his history of sexual predation or personal financial chicanery -- as disqualifying, his supporters believed otherwise.  Which is not to say that many of these supporters went for Trump although he was a bigot and racist, which is another post-election media fiction.  They voted for him precisely because he was. 

§  

Nevertheless, there were things that were right about America in 2016.   

This included that two-term African-American president who has been the right leader for the times despite obdurate Republicans and the stench of racism, which had been lurking in its hidey-hole and never really went away, a fairly robust economy, a revival of the vibrant big city, significant strides toward equality for gays, and a timely reminder that despite the stop-and-frisk carnage most cops are good people doing a tough job.  But none of that really counterbalances, mitigates or nullifies the awfulness. 

In 2016, America was first among so-called developed nations by some measures, but all of them are negative.  These include infant mortality, incarceration rates, health-care costs, obesity and child poverty.  And it was last among those nations in commitment to infrastructure development, broadband access and arts funding, while millions of people struggle with crushing student loan debt as a result of outrageously expensive but mediocre college educations that do little to prepare them for the real world, only a life of gobbling anxiety-disorder medications to make it through each day.   

And America attained another first with the "election" of a kleptocrat for whom character assassination by tweet is as reflexive as eating French fries. 

Who will be the first chief executive to juggle his weighty responsibilities with being executive director of a reality television show and leveraging the presidency to expand his family businesses, his pious claims of avoiding conflicts of interest notwithstanding, and who has purposefully restocked the swamp he promised to drain.  This includes a prospective Cabinet that includes an HUD pick who doesn't believe in discrimination, an HHS pick who wants to kill Obamacare and gut Medicare, a Commerce pick who is a fraudster, a Labor pick who believes in depressing wages, an Education pick who despises public schooling, an Energy pick who wanted to eliminate the department, a State Department pick who slavishly supports Vladimir Putin, an Attorney General pick who is a flaming racist and wants to turn back the clock on marijuana decriminalization, as well as a security chief who traffics in right-wing conspiracy theories.   

Mr. Swamp Draining Populist's Cabinet-in-waiting is worth a mind boggling $14 billion in personal income, at least 50 times greater than George W. Bush's circle of department heads and advisers. 

Extraordinary. 

§  

Is anyone really surprised that Trump reverted to form as quickly as he returned to his Fifth Avenue palazzo from the campaign trail?    

If you are shocked -- just shocked -- that he threw over his baseball cap posse in a New York minute, then you are a sucker.  And if you didn't think the entire purpose of his post-election modus was to reorder the universe to suit his crony capitalist wonts, then you need to get a prescription for a heavy-duty sedative before Obamacare is abolished.  Especially if you live in one of the states that went cherry red and has benefitted so greatly from Obama's historic health-care reforms.   

As for Social Security and Medicare, tighten your seat belts.   

Federally-mandated improvement in wages?  Fuggedaboutit.   

Consumer protections?  You have got to be kidding. 

§  

Despite natterings to the contrary, our nervous breakdown cannot be blamed on ISIS, Brexit, Putin, Twitter, energy drinks, the Cuisinart food processor blade recall, rising sea levels or the war in Afghanistan, which at 15 years and counting is far and away the U.S.'s longest overseas military misadventure.  

No, our breakdown is entirely self-inflicted.  

What is happening to America is a kind of entropy, a gradual decline into disorder.  Our selective outrage -- pretending that one person's pain is greater than another's -- only makes things worse and Trump is merely a symptom, not the disease, although it is certain that the case of presidential buyer's remorse that will begin unfolding after his inauguration will be unlike anything ever seen in American history.

Cartoon du Jour

DREW SHENEMAN/Newark Star-Ledger

Best Holiday Wishes From KIko's House To Your House

FROM THE MAGICIAN AND THE MAID OF BEAUTY

By N.C. WYETH

Musings On The Winter Solstice: 'The Fire Star . . . The Sun, Comes Back To Us'

MATTHEW TAUZER

And so at last the days grow longer.  The additional hours of darkness this autumn passed have been physically telling for me, which would be unusual for this four-season guy until you consider what's been going on: The cyber Pearl Harbor of an election and the collective Nothing To See Here, Move On yawn of our so-called leaders in response.  And Sylvester Stallone won't even get to be Minister of Arts for Cheeto Jesus.  N'y at-il pas de justice?

§  

It was an unusual autumn in another respect: the virtual absence of the usual reports of deer hunters' rifles echoing through our valley. 

This is because there aren't any hardly any deer.  

While I respect the right of people to shoot game for food -- and there are too many people hereabouts who live deep in the woods, barely scrape by and must supplement their meager diets with wild game -- the vast majority of hunters with their expensive sighted rifles, lavish Cabela's kit and immense over-accessorised pickup trucks are in it for the thrill of the kill, and that I don't respect.   

Deer hunting is a linchpin of the tourist industry and so popular that schools and government offices still close on the opening day of the fall rifle season (there also are bow and flintlock seasons), but this year all hunters could do was stand around in their spanking clean international orange garb and brag about whose pickup truck had more chrome before retiring early to the nearest bar for rounds of beers and shots.  There simply are no more bucks to be slaughtered to speak of, while the doe season was severely limited so that population could be replenished and in a few seasons the bang-bang carnage can begin anew.  

"Our" doe hasn't reappeared yet, but we have to assume that she is okay. 

This beautiful lady, who is unusually blond for a white tail (Odocoileus virginianus) has been coming out of the deep undergrowth on the mountainside behind our retreat for the past few years in the late spring to show off her foals (two this year) to us and graze at the foot of the yard on our wildflowers before slipping away to hide during hunting season.  She returns after the New Year when bow season is over and we put out cracked corn and a salt lick for her when there is substantial snow cover.

§  

In times of great stress -- like now, for example, we turn to music to sooth the soul.   

And so we have tix or are lining up tix for these artists/groups in the next few weeks: Rusted Root, Ben Folds, Ladysmith Black Mambazzo, Wayne Shorter with Weather Report & Beyond Reimagined, Joey Alexander, Stanley Clark and Ron Carter, and the Alvin Alley American Dance Theater.  Oh, and that unpatriotic Hamilton on Broadway.

§  

My dear friend Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés lives in the Colorado Rockies.  She has written:

"This is a great night and day: Winter solstice; the time when the light comes back more and more for longer and longer glancing across Planet Earth to us, the Fire Star, that is, the sun, comes back to us. 

"In our family the old people would put on their galoshes over their butchkors and bring in fresh and oh so cold water from the well pump outdoors and we would feast on something yellow, orange and/or red, the colors of the sun! most often the banana peppers, the lantern peppers and the cayenne hot hot hot peppers we’d canned in late summer and put up in shining glass Mason jars on the rough sawn boards in the dark cellar. Consume warmth to bring warmth was their backwoods homeopathy. 

"You too, drink clean and eat fresh today, warmth to bring warmth . . . as here, winter is still deeply upon us. Yet . . . the sun, our sun, comes . . . "

The coming year will be a special one for Dr. E: She is editing the 25th anniversary edition of her seminal Women Who Run With The Wolves. 

Woman or man, if you want to get back in touch with the real world -- please give this fine book a read.  There may be no worthier and more important goal in 2017 than reconnecting with what really matters.

'Truth' Itself Writes The Book To Reveal The 'Inner Truth' About Who Won The War

(SEMI-PLOT SPOILER ALERT. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.)  

I have long been a sucker for novel-within-the-novel books because of a fascination with alternate realities.  In this respect, Philip K. Dick's sci-fi classic The Man in the High Castle is superlative. And Amazon Prime's eponymous miniseries is even better. 

Set in 1962, some 15 years after an alternative ending to world War II, the novel and miniseries on which it is based center on intrigues between the victorious Axis powers, who have divvied up the U.S., with Japan ruling the West and Nazi Germany the East, with a neutral zone in between, as well as the grinding routine of daily life under the resulting totalitarian regimes. 

The novel within the novel is an alternate history within an alternate history in which the Allies defeat the Axis, although in a manner different from the narrative drummed into us.  The novel in the book is just that, while it is a series of newsreels in the Amazon series. 

I would heartily recommend both the book, which while flawed still is a terrific read, and Amazon miniseries, which is superbly cast and photographed.  A second season of the miniseries has just debuted, and events of recent weeks have added a certain unwelcome pungency to it.  Wonder why that is?

Election 2016: An Homage To George Orwell, Vladimir Putin & Donald Trump

THE NATION 

It is fitting in a grotesque sort of way that the big story in the wake of the Through the Looking Glass Election of 2016 is not the outcome changing hacking of Democratic Party assets by Russian intelligence services backed by a legion of fake news providers with Donald Trump's "victory" being a mere footnote, but the other way around: Trump "won" an election he actually lost by nearly 3 million votes and the mere footnote is that he "won" because of the Kremlin pogrom to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency, which he unashamedly supported, while the White House and U.S. spy agencies dawdled, the FBI meddled and the news media and fake news enablers like Facebook and Twitter snoozed. 

You would have scoffed had you been told before the November 8 cataclysm that Trump would be the next president because of a sinister Commie cyber plot that read like a bad sci-fi movie, but that is exactly what has happened.   

There will not be a national redo, and even the recounts in three states that Clinton lost by less than a percentage point will not alter the outcome, while the stain on the American system of electing its leaders, not to mention American democracy itself, will be indelible.   

And that's just for starters. 

As unprecedented as this madness would seem to be, there is an historic antecedent -- the 9/11 attacks -- only this time the homeland attacked itself despite again having ample warning as it did on that September morn 15 years ago.   

Despite government malfeasance before, during and after the terror attacks that lapsed into outright criminality, we were told to buck up and move on although report after report whitewashed the Bush administration's culpability, there was a crackdown on civil liberties in the name of fighting Al Qaeda, and war was declared against Iraq that would take many tens of thousands of lives, provoke an immense refugee crisis and further destabilize the region although Saddam Hussein was a mortal enemy of Al Qaeda and had nothing to do with 9/11.   

We also were told to buck up and move on when:

* The Reagan administration secretly sent weapons to Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, in 1985 as part of the Iran-Contra scheme.  Reagan couldn't be impeached, we were told, because America was still getting over Nixon and Watergate although only a few years later Bill Clinton would be impeached for a blowjob. 

* The Supreme Court in 2000 jumped the extra-constitutional shark and meddled in a presidential election, ruling that the winner was George Bush, who "won" because the Republican-controlled election apparatus in Florida was as fixed as the high court majority turned out to be.

* The very moral foundations of our democracy were subverted by a secret post-9/11 program of dark-site prisons and the use of Nazi torture techniques no matter if the victims weren't terrorists, which they often were not. This yielded no valid intelligence but did tank America's standing abroad.

Is it merely a coincidence that all of these outrages were perpetrated by Republicans?   

Nope, and that leads me to note one of more noteworthy if sadder aspects of the time in which we live: Barack Obama has been much too nice a guy in the face of eight years of unrelenting Republican mendacity and has been much too slow to move on investigating stolen election claims.  No matter, because his look-at-the-brighter-side style of governance will soon be that of an ancien régime. 

And yet again, we are being told to buck up and move on as a kleptocrat for whom character assassination by tweet is as reflexive as eating French fries, is on the verge of becoming the first chief executive to juggle the responsibilities of being leader of the free world with being executive director of a reality television show and leveraging the presidency to expand his family business.   

All the while, Trump is revving up to sell out his base in restocking the swamp he promised to drain with a HUD pick who doesn't believe in discrimination, an HHS pick who wants to kill Obamacare and gut Medicare, a Commerce pick who is a fraudster billionaire, a Labor pick who believes in depressing wages and opposes paid sick leave, an EPA pick who denies climate change, an Energy pick who once wanted to abolish the department, an Education pick who despises public schools, a Secretary of State pick who is a fellow apologist for Vladimir Putin, an Attorney General pick who is a racist, deeply hostile to immigrants and wants to turn back the clock on marijuana decriminalization, and a White House security chief who traffics in right-wing conspiracy theories.   

How do we know that the CIA is right about the Kremlin's pogrom to deny Clinton the presidency? 

Because Trump, who has more Russian connections than St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square has towers, is denying it so vehemently as the first crisis of the many his rump presidency will encounter looms large -- a clash between he and leaders of his own party over his fondness for a monster who exerts an increasingly autocratic grip on the former Soviet Union and with his election replaces the American president as the most powerful man in the world, and his solicitousness toward Russian foreign policy interests, including an oft-repeated promise that as president he would not necessarily abide by the U.S.'s long-standing commitment to go to the aid of a NATO nation in the Baltics if it were attacked by Russia. 

So many outrages, so little time. 

Under other circumstances, it would be heartening that Republican leaders are joining Democrats in calling for a bipartisan probe into the election being thrown to Cheeto Jesus by Russia, which put Democratic organizations and operatives under a more sustained and determined assault, according to the CIA, and while Republican organizations were targeted, it sat on those emails.   

But any investigation that might skate too close to the truth, which necessarily includes the backstory to the thousands of innocuous Clinton emails so vigilantly outted by FBI Director James Comey a mere 10 days before the election, will be neutered and probably would have been even if the president-elect was not a lump of clay that Putin looks forward to molding to his own specifications.   

And so America, it's time to buck up yet again and move on.

Cartoon du Jour

RICHARD CODOR

Tales From The Creche: Or Why Santa Claus Always Has To Be A White Guy

Does anyone know if people in other countries fight over Christmas like Americans do?  No, I didn't think so.   

For one thing, these countries tend to be more . . . uh, mature than the U.S. and don't get as uppity over religious correctness, let alone whether one group or another is trying to kill the celebration of the birth of the Christ Child, which is a favorite right-wing meme despite the fact that Christmas is a pagan holiday.  Or clogging the courts with frivolous lawsuits such as those by creche-contrary atheist groups over displaying Nativity scenes in public spaces.     

Then there are Seinfeld fans who want space reserved for a Festivus pole, Flying Spaghetti Monster devotees who spoof creationists, and the truly hard-core who want to erect "Santa Claus Will Take You To Hell" signs.    

We can blame that false news trailblazer, Bill O'Reilly, for contemporary War on Christmas convulsions.  It was 10 years ago that the Fox News commentator opened an early December show with a segment called "Christmas Under Siege" during which he claimed that all kinds of stuff was being banned that wasn't and asserted that the "secular progressive agenda" included legalizing drugs, euthanasia and gay marriage.  Oh, and by the way, Santa Claus always had to be a white guy.    

What I do think is needed is a war on bad Christmas songs, and I would start with an abomination called "Christmas Shoes."   You know the song: A poor kid saves his allowance to buy his terminally ill mother a pair of shoes so she'll look nice for Jesus if she packs in on Christmas.  I'll take Handel's "Messiah" any day.     

While we're declaring war on Christmas stuff, how about poorly made toys?   

You haven't lived until you are confronted with a Some Assembly Required task in the wee hours of Christmas morning, my own particular hell being filing metal burrs from every nut on my young daughter's first two-wheel bike in an unheated workshop in the first hours of a below-zero wind chill blizzard. 

So much for good will toward men. 

Answer This Question & You Will Be Able To Understand Why Cheeto Jesus Won

It has been nearly a month since election cataclysm.  In that time, there have been tsunamis of recriminations and mea culpas, fleeting apologies from the mainstream media, deep embarrassment on the part of more honest pundits (myself included), ample evidence that the Democratic Party has its collective head up its ass, fledgling ballot recount efforts and pushbacks all playing out like so much background music, or perhaps the screeching of a discordant string section, coming from Trump Tower, which figuratively and literally is the new seat of American power.    

Yet all of this tacking and yawing, hemming and hawing and kicking and screaming fails to reveal the answer to the question of the moment; hell, the question of the millennium: How could Donald Trump have won? 

The answer to this question will reveal all: 

How could 46 million people vote for a man who has never done an honest thing in his life?  Who is an unashamed racist, nativist, misogynist and narcissist who built his fortune on the back of poor working stiffs and a cult of celebrity, has no patience or understanding of the nuances of domestic and foreign policy, and all that aside is a vile and pathetically borish boy-man incapable of growth, comprehension or compassion? 

Your answer is? 

'Well, Mr. Potter, He Died A Much Richer Man Than You'll Ever Be.'

Seventy years ago on Christmas eve, George Bailey was at the end of his rope and was about to jump off a bridge in Bedford Falls, New York.  So began the beginning of the end of It’s A Wonderful Life, a movie that I never tire of seeing this time of year.

Even when I was at my most cynical, It’s A Wonderful Life was never simplistic, a label that feckless critics pasted on the Frank Capra-directed film upon its 1946 debut. On one very lonely Christmas Eve, it helped me through a long night, while with every passing year its message continues to humble and inspire me.

That message reverberates even more strongly today given the horrors that seem to visit our lives with such numbing regularity: Each of us, no matter how insignificant we may seem, has the power to make a difference.  And that the true measure of our humanity has nothing to do with fame or money, but with how we live our life.

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen It’s A Wonderful Life, check your TV listings or webstream it from Netflix. If you’ve never seen it, you owe it to yourself to do so.

Oh, and have yourself a happy holiday.