Visiting Column #31 -- Accomplisher of the Year

If you're over 50, you remember when Time magazine was an interesting read in doctors' and dentists' office, a ubiquitous site on the end tables of the medical profession.  You didn't have to subscribe; your dentist did it for you, and you would read as much of it as you felt like.  Having not paid for it, you could pick and choose what articles you wanted to read.

It didn't "feel" like a politically biased publication, even if it probably was for all those years.  I don't particularly recall having that impression until fairly recently, when its extreme anti-Trump bias has taken over the magazine to the point of leading me to read, instead, things like The Medical Digest of the Carolinas, June 2008 issue rather than pick up Time.

In the good old pre-Donald days, at the end of the year, Time would do a "Man of the Year" issue.  Now, I can assure you that it has never been the position of the magazine that its MOTY was the person who had done the most good, but was, rather, the biggest "news-maker" of the year.  Adolf Hitler won it a time or two, if memory serves.  That went over well.

I recall that every year, there would be letters to the editor thereafter, telling Time what a stupid decision their choice was, mainly because the letter writer had not picked up on the notion that the winner was not necessarily winning it for what they regarded as doing good things.  Half of news, as we know, is bad.

So these days, with bias infesting the editorial rooms at Time, the Man of the Year award has been pretty much a pfffft exercise each year.  After all, who really cares what a bunch of hard lefties in New York think?  I certainly don't, and I sort of doubt you do either.

And so we have this year's "winner", who is that snarling little Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, the barely-a-teenager kid who has been running around the world on someone else's nickel, yelling at the USA because we're not doing enough to stop global warming.  Now, I have not heard that she has set foot in China, to be fair to the USA, which is weird given that China and India are the Earth's lead polluters, while the USA has drastically and successfully gone after our own emission levels.

I mean, I understand why she hasn't gone after China.  Let's face it, a country that masses its armies outside the city of Hong Kong, lest they try to exercise the independence granted to it, well, I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't take kindly to a pre-teen girl telling them how to run their country.

On top of that, since the brunt of her rhetoric is aimed at the USA, you have to know that the funding behind her cavorting about the globe is from the Soroses and Steyers of the world, and those types are big fans of totalitarian communist regimes like China, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.  So don't expect to see little Greta leading a march through Beijing.  The tanks are bigger than she is.  And so is her bankroll.

And that's kind of the point.  While it is a blip on the radar in terms of impact when a little girl growls around the world, petulantly taking us to task for living our lives, Time apparently feels that she has actually accomplished something, enough to put her on the cover as MOTY.

But what, exactly, has she accomplished?  All the Paris Accord signees (which the USA thankfully no longer is) look at her and nod and cheer, except they already signed the agreements, such as it is, so they are saying proudly that they're "already on their way" and that she doesn't need to yell at them.  So nothing is happening there.

The USA is doing what it can, successfully, not because of her but in spite of her, since the laws we operate under now were already in place when she was barfing strained peas in Stockholm.

And that's kind of the point of the title of this piece.

Perhaps Time ought to take a look at its criterion for the MOTY award, which is the person who, good or bad, was the biggest news-maker for the year.  Well, shoot, if they really mean that, there are two categories -- Donald Trump and everyone else.  Whatever you think of him, he gives new meaning to the word "news-maker."  So the magazine could just retire the award and start a new one, at least as long as he is president and dominating the news.

I do think there is a better way, though, at least if Time survives another year of dental offices as a print medium.  Instead of trying to determine who made the most news other than President Trump, why don't they change the MOTY standard to biggest "accomplisher" of the year, and award it to the person who had the most impact, either by invading another country, or curing metaformic blastotechnic sofanoma in potatoes, or whatever.  But something at least tangible, at a minimum.

Liberals simply don't know when they are being laughed at, since they are pretty much isolated in their echo chambers in New York and California.  But Time's MOTY choice is being laughed at all over the rest of the country, because they gave an award, not that anyone really cares about it now, to someone who essentially accomplished nothing at all.  Kind of a Jerry Seinfeld MOTY.

Certainly they ought to consider strongly what their criteria are, and that perhaps a basic tenet ought to be concrete accomplishment of, well, something.  Perhaps they have been so Twitterversed into thinking that being an "influencer" is a big thing, so much that they can't see the forest for the trees.  Perhaps they actually think someone cares any longer what they think, because no one cares what Greta Thunberg thinks.

Or it doesn't matter, because Time can't survive forever with idiocy like that.

My dentist might miss it, but I think the rest of us won't.

Copyright 2019 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #30 -- Dual Motivation Compromising Impeachability

So as we watch the charade masking as House committee hearings into the impeachment of President Trump, today's jollies were provided by Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who unfailingly reminds me for some reason of Burgess Meredith playing The Penguin in the old Batman TV show.

But I digress.

The premise of the Democrats, if they needed one, is that President Trump committed an impeachable offense, which apparently is defined as "doing something the Democrats don't like."  In this case it all goes back to the July phone call from the president to the new Ukrainian leader, Volodmyr Zelensky, wherein he asked him to take a look into Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that hired the son of the then-sitting VP, Joe Biden, for at least $50,000 a month, despite the son knowing nothing about either energy or Ukraine.

We know about the call because Eric Ciamarella, a bureaucrat in the NSA whom we now know to be the "whistleblower", filed a whistleblower complaint after being told of the call (he was not on it) by someone inside the White House who disliked Trump.  We know that, because Ciamarella went, not immediately to an IG to file it, but first to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who has since repeatedly lied that he doesn't know who the whistleblower even is, although never under oath.

Here is the point.

The Democrats' case is based on the idea that Trump asked Zelensky to look into Burisma because it would be an opportunity to cause problems for Joe Biden, a political rival.  That would constitute soliciting foreign help to influence the 2020 election, specifically the reelection contest in which Biden was a potential candidate, if he were to win the primary.

But that's far from "it."  You see, the request was based on some Ukrainian history of corruption that Federal law plays into -- our law requires that the president be assured of foreign aid recipients cleaning up their house.  Was this a problem in Ukraine?  Well, a survey of Ukrainians showed that over 60% had actually paid a bribe to a government official there.  That's a problem.

So the law mandates that the president perform due diligence to protect the American taxpayer by providing assurance that corruption of the recipient country is being addressed.  In the case of Ukraine, this also included common understanding that the they had interfered, or tried to interfere, with the 2016 election on behalf of candidate Hillary Clinton.  And President Trump certainly wanted to know about that -- legitimately so.

Joe Biden went public with his declaration -- proudly at the time -- that he had held up $1 billion in aid to Ukraine until they fired the prosecutor who was at the time investigating, you guessed it, Burisma, which at the time was paying an ungodly Board fee each month to -- you guessed it again, Joe Biden's son Hunter.

So let's take it as independently as possible.  Even if you thought that President Trump was far out of line in asking Zelensky to investigate Burisma and the son of a political rival, there is also the fact that there is a perfectly legitimate, in fact, a legally-mandated justification, for having done exactly the same thing.  We were going to give Ukraine millions in military aid (vice the meals and blankets that Biden and his folks were only willing to send).  The law says that Trump needed to be assured that Ukraine was addressing that corruption history under a new president.

That leaves an extreme complication that hasn't been addressed anywhere, so here goes.

You can say that asking Ukraine to investigate Burisma and the Bidens' influence is wrong and political.  But it begs this question.  Does thinking it is impeachable to do so, mean that a person who is also a political opponent is then free to do whatever corrupt thing he wants to do overseas, since it would be impeachable to ask the foreign country to investigate him?

Think of it this way.  Let us suppose that we were not providing foreign aid to Ukraine.  Would it still be thought impeachable to investigate the Bidens?

Suppose that Biden were not running for president at the time, or had dropped out of the race, or not declared yet.  Would it still be thought impeachable to investigate the Bidens?

Or is the fact that Biden was running at the time insulate him or his family from a US president calling for an investigation of any corruption of an American overseas?  Could a future VP who had committed hideous corrupt acts in a foreign country avoid investigation, let alone prosecution, simply by the act of running for president and calling himself a political rival?

There are two reasons for investigating what Hunter Biden was doing on the board of Burisma.  One is to follow Federal law and ask the Ukrainians to show that they are fighting corruption, and to have the former VP protect his son on a corrupt Ukrainian company's board is consistent with that.  The other is to wound a political rival.

How would any investigation determine whether the actual motivation was one or the other?  What if it were both -- how can you impeach a president for following the law, even if following the law means choosing to take steps that could wound a political rival?

But the Democrats will keep trying.  And I hope for their sake that they have their collective glutei adequately armored.

Because come November, this is going to bite them, right there.

Copyright 2019 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #29 -- Lisa Page and Buck Weaver

There is probably little expectation that Lisa Page, the adulterous FBI lawyer who was a major part of the Russia collusion hoax, knows the name George "Buck" Weaver.

I'm not surprised; I'm betting that you have never heard of Buck Weaver either.  But they're rather linked, now that Mrs. Page has decided to "break her silence", the newspeak term for when someone decides to write a book or do a paid interview, whether or not they were silent before (hint: she was not).

Buck Weaver was the third baseman on the 1919 Chicago White Sox.  Yes, those White Sox, the ones who lost the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds after concocting a scheme to throw the Series, and engaging noted gamblers to help them.  For the record, despite what you have heard, it was the players who decided to throw the Series and brought in the gamblers, not the other way around, but I digress.

Eight White Sox players were in some way a part of the scheme, including Weaver.  Of course, their relative involvement was very different.  Swede Risberg and Chick Gandil were the ringleaders; they originally brought in Weaver, "Shoeless Joe" Jackson and Happy Felsch, and two pitchers, Lefty Williams and Eddie Cicotte, figuring that would be enough to tip the balance.  Fred McMullin, a utility infielder, overheard some of the plotting and had to be brought in.

Weaver, however, effectively pulled out right after the initial meeting.  He loved the game and didn't want to corrupt it.  He attended no further meetings, told no one about the plot, and hit .324 throughout the Series.  He received not a penny, of course, since the plotters knew he was "out" after the first meeting and didn't discuss anything with him thereafter.

Of course, the defenders of "Shoeless Joe" claim that he played on the square, too, and point to his .375 average for the Series, which sounds a bit exculpatory until you dig into the numbers and realize that he hit much better, a .500 average, in the three games that the White Sox tried to win (and indeed won) and far worse in the five games they threw (.286).  Weaver, on the other hand, hit .333 in the thrown games and .309 in the games they tried to win.  Oh yeah, "innocent" Shoeless Joe got paid, too.

So Lisa Page.

The other day, she decided to tweet out a few things and got her name in the news, with a story quoting her as saying "There's no fathomable way I've committed any crime."  In other words, outside of adultery, she's as innocent as it comes.

Well, not so fast.

Let us go back to the infamous "insurance policy" text that was sent to her by Peter Strzok.  Cleaned up a bit from the original text shorthand, it reads as follows:  “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before 40.”


Here is what that text says to anyone who reads it with an open mind.  Lisa Page had previously told Strzok and their boss, Andrew McCabe, in McCabe's office, that Donald Trump was not going to get elected, so there was no need to "do" anything.  Strzok then texts her to say that while he'd like to believe that, it was too "risky" that Hillary Clinton might not win, and they had to "do" something to make sure Trump didn't win, or was neutralized if he did.

That, of course, is treason.  And being treason, it was the job of an honorable FBI employee to notify the proper authority -- in this case, someone other than Andrew McCabe, who allowed that discussion in his Government office on Government time -- that there was an indication of a plot to remove the president as stated by Peter Strzok.  It was her job to do so, to notify authorities, even if she had been sleeping with the guy for goodness knows how long.


She did not do that, and there's no evidence she even considered doing so.

So Buck Weaver.

As you might know, the eight players involved played through the subsequent (1920) season until, late in September, they were all indicted on charges of defrauding the White Sox organization and the American League, and were suspended, including Weaver.  Several of the players, given putrid legal advice and victimized by a corrupt conflict of interest on the part of their lawyers, signed confessions.

Ultimately, the players were all acquitted by a White Sox-loving jury after the confessions all mysteriously disappeared from the State's records. Without evidence, there went the legal case.  It didn't matter, of course.  Everyone knew that the Series had been thrown, and newly-appointed Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned all eight from organized baseball for life, a ban that was never lifted.

Buck Weaver protested that he hadn't truly participated in the plot; however, Landis pointed out that he had been present in the first meeting, certainly knew about the plot, but did not point it out to his management or ownership, which in Landis's view was sufficient participation.  For years, Weaver tried every-which way possible to get reinstated into the game he loved, but it was all to no avail.

So Buck Weaver and Lisa Page.

Lisa Page cannot really make a statement like "There's no fathomable way I've committed any crime" and then be taken seriously. She, being a lawyer and a Federal employee, was present and participatory when another Federal employee actually made a statement, documented in a text, suggesting that he would be taking steps to neutralize a duly-elected U.S. president if he were to be elected.

She knew that to be treasonous, and yet, blinded by whatever, failed to notify any authority of that fact.  She is every bit as guilty of participation by her silence as was Buck Weaver by his.  I can't say for sure if she could be convicted in a court of law (unlike her, I'm not a lawyer), but it would surely be a trial where her acquittal would not be a slam-dunk.

She thinks there's no "fathomable way" she's committed a crime?  Well, I can fathom up a couple to consider, if she can't.

I'm more sympathetic toward Buck Weaver.

Copyright 2019 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton