REMEMBER, WE’RE FROM “THE LAND OF THE FREE AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE!”

By Edwin Cooney

It ALMOST doesn't matter what one’s position on the upcoming impeachment battle is. The important thing to remember is that all of us are from “the land of the free and the home of the brave." Accordingly, whichever side we take in this, the most wrenching battle of our 46-year-old culture war, it's important that we carry three vital items with us into the conflict.

First, we must acknowledge and even respect what we know about the legitimacy of the opposition. Mistrust or hatred of our political opposition won't bring about victory.

Second, our strategic thinking must be designed to counter those of our opponents.

Third, we must have a strategy not only for victory, but a strategy for governing once we prevail.

As I've stated in recent musings, were I in Congress, I would have held off on an impeachment effort thereby saving my political ammunition for the upcoming election. However, those who are in a better position than I to effectively analyze the political atmosphere in Washington have, for the present, decided to pursue an impeachment effort. It's important to remember that impeachment is a political process not a legal struggle. Thus, politicians rather than lawyers will be practicing their trade in the immediate future. (I almost felt sorry last Thursday as I listened to Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, as he listed all of the outrageous and unfair attacks Democrats have made against President Trump from the day he was elected to the present. Then I recalled the unwillingness of men such as Mr. Nunes to grant that President Barack Obama was even an American citizen. I also wondered when President Trump ever granted any political opponent the slightest benefit of any doubt as I recalled his slanders against his fellow Republicans during the 2016 primaries and my sorrow just melted away!)

As I've asserted before in these musings, during recent campaigns, Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals have substituted legitimate policy differences for the criminalization of their political and ideological opponents to the country's detriment. To the extent that you and I have indulged ourselves by being swayed by this tactic, we deserve what has happened to us. What these authors of ideological theory and personal smear have succeeded in doing is to devalue the influence and integrity of the very offices that they are seeking. Nevertheless, our current challenge is to discern how specific actions by President Trump actually endanger us.

Back in 1796, when President Washington warned against the formation of political parties in his farewell message, he never offered an alternative method for selecting the leaders of our republic. Thus we are left with a leadership selection process that's both competitive and antagonistic by its very nature. Many of our "Founding Fathers" believed that only property owners and the more educated among us should have the voting franchise. However, what Jefferson called "the disease of liberty" proved to be very contagious and now all of us have converted this "disease" into a human right. Even more to the point, the most significant element of a human right is the obligation of personal responsibility in the exercise of that right. I was reminded just a few days ago that back in 1992 when there was a question as to what degree candidate Bill Clinton had consorted with Soviet officials in his opposition to the Vietnam War, the Bush administration actually refused to investigate the seriousness or innocence of candidate Clinton's activities when he visited the Soviet Union while he was in college. In other words, unlike President Trump, President George H. W. Bush refused to use a foreign government to his advantage during a political campaign he would ultimately lose.  

Recognizing that in a democracy there must always be room for compromise but that no one can be expected to cooperate when backed into a corner, I'd be willing, if I were a member of the House of Representatives, to support a censure of the President by the House and the Senate rather than indulging in a Senate trial. This is the very position I took back in 1999 when Bill Clinton faced impeachment and conviction via the Congress. The absolute truth is that the United States Senate, as it is now politically composed, will not convict President Trump in a Senate trial.

As for the people, as fickle and easily manipulated as they can be at times, I'll take a chance on their political judgment.

After all, this not only remains the land of the free and the home of the brave, it's also the home of the most humane and conscientious people in human history!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

A NEW WAY, A NEW SAY!

By Edwin Cooney

As I listened to and read the tweets and the testimony from Friday's impeachment hearing, I began to be alarmed about a number of things.

First, there was the very need for impeachment hearings.

Second, there is the likelihood that the hearings and the process will not succeed in the conviction of President Trump.

Third, there was the obvious harassment of Marie Yovanovitch, a nonpolitical but professional diplomat, whose job of representing America was obviously politicized by her boss President Trump.

Fourth, and most stressing of all, there was that intimidating tweet from the president even as she was testifying.

Fifth, the president's angry and outrageous self-justification against the reaction by the media and the Democrats to the way he reacts to things or, if you prefer, his "modus operandi."

As the hours pass, I'm becoming increasingly unhappy with my own resentful reactions toward the president and the state of affairs he's put us through, not due to their lack of justification, but for two other perhaps more significant reasons.

First, my anger toward and resentment of the president is largely due to how difficult it has become for intelligent, well-meaning, and knowledgeable leaders to reach a bipartisan consensus as to what’s real and what’s partisan about the crisis through which we’re passing. In other words, truth and reality have become distorted making it more difficult to develop a sense of direction and thus peace of mind about the future. 

For instance, throughout the Watergate era, there was a consensus that when President Nixon was forced from office, we’d be a government of laws and not of men. Hence, the political and social crisis would pass. Second, even more, I spent last weekend insisting that peace is a state of mind rather than an absence of war. The fact of the matter is that modern lingo and politics have had a tendency to enhance rather than denigrate the very idea of conducting war itself.

Traditionally, war has been a state of political and social existence between nations that have been or are about to be militarily engaged in battle. I've always been rather fascinated with the words Franklin D. Roosevelt used back on Monday, December 8th, 1941 when he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. Here they are:

"I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire." (Note that the president was both specific about the date and the act that brought about that "state of war.”) In other words, there was no ongoing ideological or sociological cause of the war. Since that Monday, December 8th, 1941, because the very idea of war is so deadly, politicians have been using the idea of war to tackle any number of unhappy conditions, projects or activities that threaten the safety and happiness of a people. These include the “cold war,” wars on disease, the war on poverty, the war on crime, and, finally, the culture war which has been going on since 1973, a war which many sociologists and historians insist was launched by Roe v. Wade.

As you read this, you may well insist that this musing is little more than an exercise in intellectual semantics. However, I insist that semantics or language altogether reflects our thoughts just as our thoughts reflect our conclusions about circumstances and even life itself. If we are perpetually at war, then most of the time we are not at peace! If we're perpetually not at peace, we're obviously unsettled and angry, are we not?

I'm not suggesting that either you or I should be in denial, or try in any other way to mask our feelings about President Trump, pro or con. However, I do suggest we should compel ourselves to think more affirmatively about the type of leadership we prefer rather than to merely curse the darkness.

As I listened to the president's self-justification regarding his own attitude toward his political opposition casting them all as liars and of being entirely dishonest, I wanted to ask him when was the last time he granted any opponent the benefit of the doubt he demands for himself.

The unhappy fact for me is that President Trump as president is a reality. It would be silly to pretend that nothing he says or does really matters by saying all politicians are crooked or dishonest. The reality of President Trump will be of vital importance as long as he's in office. What we need is a new paradigm or way of thinking about who he is and what he does!

Here's the bottom line. As Mick Mulvaney might say: Get over him, especially if pondering him is poisoning you! If he's angering you too much, he's got you exactly where he wants you!

By all means, avoid going to war with him. Be at peace with your convictions and the peaceable intentions behind those convictions and you'll be at a peaceful state of mind — thus a new way and a new say!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

THE "WAR TO END ALL WARS" -- AN ARMISTICE, NOT A PEACE!

By Edwin Cooney

Exactly 101 years ago this very day, the war declared so that all humanity would end all wars was halted by an armistice rather than by a peace. The first mistake, of course, was to not adequately distinguish between an armistice and a peace and to plant that distinction in the public mind.

So, what was the ultimate problem? Was it a worldwide language barrier that no national leader could possibly comprehend? Of course, President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and French Premier George Clemenceau understood perfectly well what they were both saying and doing! However, the devil was in the details.

The 1918 Armistice was an agreement merely to stop the fighting without putting the German leadership in a position of being forced to surrender. The Paris Peace Conference would complete the substantive details. Ultimately, time demonstrated that Britain and France, even more than most nations, saw profit more satisfactory to their people than peace. For Britain and France, both profit and peace were the same thing. However, a mere peace couldn't mend their hurts or heal their injured national dignity which was responsible for beginning the conflict in the first place. Thus, the huge war debt the peace conference would force Germany to pay, no matter how difficult it might be for a defeated nation to feed, clothe and pacify its melancholy inhabitants, would cost both sides an even more devastating war in a mere twenty-one years.

The leaders of Britain, France, and the United States, as different as they were in personality, background, and experience, all saw themselves as democratically chosen  representatives of a free people. Thus, the people's suffering was their political obligation to heal as quickly and profitably as they could, and to the maximum degree possible. Thus, work-a-day, and live-a-day folks didn't often draw distinctions between an armistice and a peace. (Just a short time ago, I wrote a column noting that the Korean conflict in 1953 was concluded by an armistice and not a peace.) The allies (Britain, France, Italy, Russia, and the United States) signed a "peace treaty” designed to draw much of the wealth and vital resources of the vanquished Central Powers which consisted of Germany, Turkey, Austria and the Austrian Empire (which was to be dismantled.) 

The League of Nations was designed by Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian Minister, and only reluctantly agreed to by David Lloyd George, the son of a Welsh Unitarian Minister and teacher, and by French Prime Minister George Clemenceau, the son of a French atheist. It was more of a political arrangement than it was a spiritual covenant. President Wilson, an American political practitioner who saw his election as our 28th president as an act of God as much as it was a political achievement, believed that a league of nations would ultimately provide the opportunity for international unity which would morally compel sustained international peace. The Treaty of Versailles which contained the League was ultimately rejected by the United States Senate under the leadership of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., a friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s and a bitter opponent of President Wilson. Both Wilson and Lodge were very willful men of substantial intellect who saw themselves as one another's moral and intellectual superior. Both men poisoned the League's potential by their personal vanity. Ultimately, there came a war claiming 50,000,000 plus rather than the 40,000,000 casualties and deaths of the just concluded “war to end all wars!"

Even today, as much as most of us are opposed to war, somehow the nature of peace  too often escapes us. According to the Dutch 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, peace is not the absence of war, peace is a state  of mind! It would seem to me that both war and peace are a state of mind. During the middle ages, wars were seasonal, often fought on open fields and away from heavily populated cities. Most of the weapons inflicted personal injuries rather than multiple injuries to multiples of people. Thus, there is the distinctive possibility and even the likelihood that war may yet change in ways we cannot even fathom. 

Just a few years ago, during the Carter administration to be precise, much horror was expressed with the development of the neutron bomb designed to kill people and leave physical structures intact. "What's war coming to?” People wondered if our leaders see value only in the maintenance of structures at the close of a devastating war.

It's just possible, even probable, that war may come to mean merely the destruction of a nation's functional economic and productive capacity. Perhaps we'll go to sleep one evening and wake up the next day wholly intact minus our money and property which was confiscated by another nation's super computer system while we slept. Let's call it the super grabber computer system. Rather than Communism, Fascism, Socialism, or any other social “ism,” we may be conquered by something called “Systemism.”

For most people, World War I was over on Saturday, June 28th, 1919 when Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau put their signatures to the Versalles Treaty containing the League. However, when our Senate rejected participation in The League in November 1919 and March 1920, we found ourselves still at war with Germany. Thus, on Saturday, July 2, 1921, while changing his golf shoes between games at the estate of Joseph Sherman Frelinghuysen, Sr. in Raritan, New Jersey, President Warren G. Harding signed the Knox-Porter Resolution. It had been passed by the Senate as a substitute peace treaty with Germany. (Who says vital business doesn't occur while playing golf?)

Beware of an ironic reality: the conditions that bring about both war and peace are never predictable!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

IS THE FOLLOWING SUBSTANCE OR TRIVIA? - I VOTE SUBSTANCE!

By Edwin Cooney

President Donald John Trump has done very little to rate even the mildest admiration from me since I first became aware of his existence about a decade ago. However, last Sunday night, October 20th, his decision to attend the fifth game of the World Series at Nationals Park compelled just a bit of, admiration and even a dab of respect from my cold Democratic leftist impeachment-driven otherwise "bleeding heart." Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that "Donnie Johnny" was brave, but one can't suggest that he was in any way a "coward" as he, just hours earlier, pronounced of another man who was facing certain death at his own hand. Fortunately, the President wasn't facing such a fate as was al-Baghdadi, but for the first time since he stood before Congress last January, President Trump was facing a crowd of people he hadn't selected.

What President Trump's appearance at the fifth game of the World Series does do, is to offer some perspective on what’s symbolic and what’s superficial about someone’s status, and brings to mind the fates of previous presidents at opening day, All-Star and World Series games over the years. Before sketching them for you, a word about the worst and the best one can say about anyone else. President Trump is pretty loose when it comes to name calling as have been many of our leaders over the years. President Reagan referred to the suicide bombing  of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon as "an act of cowardice." President George W. Bush called the criminals of 9/11 "cowards," which they clearly weren't if offering one's life for one's political or patriotic cause is what we claim it is every Memorial, Independence and Veterans' Day. To you and to me, ISIS leader  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, represents the epitome of what's evil. However, evil and cowardice aren't the same thing. Even as the Nazi leaders of World War II Germany were wicked men, that doesn't mean that the average German soldier was wicked. (Perhaps members of the German SS were, but the average member of the Wehrmacht wasn't.) General Eisenhower, in the wake of victory, described the status of the average GI as, "an agent of his government." I'm not sure that's an adequate description either, however, how we ultimately view the acts of men, great and small, valiant and timid, good and bad, really and truly represents our degree of humanitarianism. Set against this background one is in a position to analyze President Trump's appearance at the fifth game of the World Series last week.

Presidents have been a bit of a side show at opening day All-Star and World Series games going back to opening day Thursday, April 14th, 1910. All of "Big Bill" Taft's six feet two inches and 330 pounds of him stood up to stretch during the seventh inning of that opening day game and baseball fans have been following his example during every seventh inning ever since. Not every presidential appearance has been as successful as was William Howard Taft's. Herbert Hoover was booed lustily in 1931 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia while attending the World Series between the Philadelphia Athletics and the St. Louis Cardinals. It's said that Hoover showed up at the game to demonstrate that the depression wasn't as serious as folks thought it was. Obviously, baseball fans had a different view than did their Chief Executive, thus the boos! President Roosevelt accidentally beaned a newspaper reporter, but wasn't booed on Tuesday, April 16th,  opening day of 1940. George H. W. Bush and "Shrub" were booed at All-Star games in 1992 and 2008 as was President Obama at the 2009 All-Star game in St. Louis. However,  Harry Truman was in "big trouble" and knew it on opening day, Friday, April 20th, 1951 when he visited Griffith Stadium to toss out the first ball of the season. Just nine days earlier he'd fired General Douglas MacArthur. "The General" had delivered a dramatic speech just the day before from the House of Representatives and was America's latest national hero. Republicans, including Senator Robert A. Taft, were screaming for Truman's impeachment. Still, there came Harry to perform his annual presidential baseball duty. As he left in the eighth inning the boos rained down upon him with the announcement asking the fans to stay in their seats until "President Truman and his official party left the stadium.” As Truman was saying goodbye to owner Clark Griffith, a woman was heard to yell, “Where's General MacArthur?" So, was Harry Truman braver than Donald Trump? Trump wasn't at the game to throw out the first pitch - Jose Andres, a prominent Mexican chef who took exception to Mr. Trump's characterization of his countrymen, threw out the first pitch. Still President Trump did show up and he heard the boos and the calls to "lock him up!" President Trump wasn't as physically exposed to the crowd as was President Truman, seated, as he was, in a suite just to the left of home plate. Nor did he sit next to the owner as President Truman had back in 1951. Still, he was there and I think, deserves a dab or a tad of recognition of it.

Last Sunday night's negative reception of President Trump is no forecast of the President's fate official or mortal. Harry Truman more than survived that 1951 Washington Senators opening day crowd, and he survived Congress’s distress as well. However, President Trump’s reception does reflect the temper of the time, and we’re all more than a little foolish when we rudely brush the temper of the time aside!

Keep our current temperament in mind even if it doesn’t provide us the answer to the president’s fate - nor ours!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY