The last several days, my deck has been my living room, my office and my dining room. It’s here I have spent the daylight hours. As I type now, a storm threatens with distant thunderclaps.
The water in the creek is so clear I can see stones that line its bottom. The day is cooling as I sit here; having been warm and humid.
On August 8th, I am departing Hudson and journeying by train to Minneapolis for a reunion of old friends. Whenever I tell people I am making a trip by train they ask me if I am afraid to fly? No, says the man who, for a time in his life, flew at least a hundred thousand miles a year.
Trains are interesting because there is a sense of a journey when taking them. It’s not a magic carpet ride from place to place [though these days rarely is flying a magic carpet ride]. It is a journey, as you pass places and towns, sit for meals, read, look up and see surprising things and meet surprising people. You have an incredible sense of going from place to place and I love it.
It will give me a chance to think, contemplate, speculate, dream, postulate and hopefully not pontificate.
And then, when I am ready, I will fly home from Minneapolis. My trip is a bit open ended, a reflection of the joys of my life right now.
While the water in the creek is clear, so very little else is clear.We have lived through the extraordinary and extraordinarily short tenure of the foul-mouthed Anthony Scaramucci as White House Communications Director. In that brief time, he missed the birth of his son and was served with divorce papers by his wife.
He texted his congratulations to her on the birth of their son. Might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back…
Seth Rich was a young man working for the DNC. He was murdered. Fox News suggested he was murdered because he had leaked emails from the DNC. A lawsuit has been filed by a Fox contributor that claims Fox colluded with the White House on the story that Mr. Rich was the leaker when he was not.
How convoluted this all is.
Politics has always been a dirty business and it seems dirtier than ever right now. Or, at least in my memory.
As “any father would,” Donald Trump helped craft the statement Donald Trump, Jr. made about his meeting with some Russians, who promised him dirt on Hillary. That’s the story from the White House. Other, less kind versions, have him dictating the statement his son gave.
It’s another JDLR – just doesn’t look right.
After six months, I am worn out.
Really, I am. Every day when I wake up, I wonder what new roil I am going to encounter in the news. There is no shortage of them.
General John Kelly has been named Chief of Staff at the White House. Is there a more painful job in the world right now? I mean, really!? Kelly kicked Scaramucci’s butt out which shows he is exercising control and has demanded the President pay attention.
Good luck with that. Trump’s tweets early this morning goaded his new Chief of Staff about not promoting the stock market heights it has achieved may indicate his attention span lasted the night. It’s not your Chief of Staff’s job, Mr. Trump, to spend his second day in his job telling people how great the market under you is. That, arguably, is for your Communications Director.
Oh, yes, you don’t have one right now, do you, Mr. Trump?
And, as several friends remind me, we will survive Trump.
Thank goodness. At times, I think of the Roman Empire which survived a hundred bad Emperors, carried along by the bureaucracy that supported it. As we will be, by the bureaucracy we have built but we may have lost the dream, I’m afraid.
John F. Kennedy was one of our most flawed presidents and yet he inspired us.
And, while there have been monsters enough in human history, we now have ones with nuclear weapons, like the North Korean dictator who is testing ICMB’s, an acronym whose meaning had almost slipped from my mind since the Cold War.
Yikes!
Every Sunday since January 20th, I have lit a candle for us, the people of the United States, as well as all the other people out there who are living on this crazy planet. And for solutions to the craziness…
Tags: Chief of Staff Kelly, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Fox News, General Kelly, Hudson NY, ICBM, JDLR, John Kelly, Minneapolis, North Korea missiles, Roman Empire, Scaramucci, Seth Rich, technology
Letter from the Vineyard 
August 4, 2017 at 1:55 am |
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