Snippets

The article on cocktail mixers said that “he is an expert in tiki bars.” It did not report who his mentor was, where he trained, or whether he had had a fellowship from a famous foundation.

I see Sidney Powell on TV in Georgia and other places claiming that Trump was robbed by a fraudulent election. She, however, is not part of the Trump defense team according to the news. And I wonder who is paying her expenses.

The news article headline said: “Share your harvest photos.” The two accompanying pictures were of boys with dead bucks, their first kills. I wondered if a hunter ever says, “Honey, I am off to the woods to harvest a deer.”

A generational difference: Learning that the proper method is to squeeze and roll the toothpaste tube from the bottom.

“I consider myself an average man except for the fact that I consider myself an average man.” Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.

News sources report that Rudy Giuliani has been seeking a presidential pardon. In the distant past, Giuliani was known as a corruption fighter. I wonder if he remembers what he said then: “And this corruption will be discovered and prosecuted. The political establishment does not understand that law enforcement has changed.”

“Che had what you might argue was the good fortune of being martyred when he was still young.” Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

I snap on the TV in foreign hotel rooms, mostly to see if it carries an English-language news station, but I also like looking for a few minutes at the other shows even when I don’t understand the language. On my last trip, oh so long ago, I was feeling a bit queasy and tired one morning and stayed in. Mostly I slept, but I watched a bit of TV. I could get mostly Moroccan, Arabic, or European channels. On a sports channel, I watched a few minutes of snooker from Northern Ireland. I don’t understand snooker, and I was not helped by the commentary, which was in German. On another channel, I watched women’s international rugby. On another station, for several minutes, I watched a cat playing with a dead mouse. There was no sound. It was amusing, but questions abounded.

On a trip on I-95 with the spouse years ago, we stopped in a barbecue place in North Carolina. We went to get takeout. Everyone else in line was black, and a number of them looked at us quizzically.  Later I learned that this was a remnant of the Jim Crow era when blacks could not eat in the restaurant, but they could go to the kitchen’s back door and get takeout. I also learned that I do not like the vinegar-based bbq of Carolina.

City for Sale–Lessons, Parallels, Ironies (concluded)

If there is a hero to the 30-year old book City for Sale, it is Rudy Giuliani. The authors say about him: “The deepest passion of this priestly prosecutor was apprehending crooked politicians [emphasis added], an achievement that gave him a richer sense of satisfaction than even catching drug traffickers, financial finaglers, and Mafia godfathers. ‘I don’t think there is anybody worse than a public official who sells his office and corrupts others,’ Giuliani once said, ‘except maybe a murderer.’ He had a moral comprehension of why political corruption subverted democracy and injured the commonweal. Giuliani regarded corrupt public officials the way Robert Kennedy thought of Jimmy Hoffa; the outrage was personal.”

The government officials, friends, and family around Trump today may not take the kinds of kickbacks Giuliani zealously prosecuted, but I wonder if the former U.S. Attorney ever thinks about the possibilities of the president and cabinet and other high officials using their offices to further enrich themselves. (I say “further” because all of them already seem to be fantastically rich.) Does he think that what happened in New York three decades ago injured the commonweal, but what may be going on around him currently does not? If so, how does he justify his conclusion?

Giuliani, however, continues to show personal outrage, but now his targets are not the office holders. His targets are those who are much like what he used to be, people seeking to find out whether government officials, politicians, and Trump friends and family have entangled themselves with foreign governments. His targets are people, like the Giuliani of the seeking, seeking to determine who may have sought access and political favors after donating or spending money that has aided Trump interests; who has lied about what they have done; who may have sought to obstruct justice and corrupt our electoral system.

And there is Giuliani himself. At least in one way he has remained consistent. Murder is worse than political corruption. Except now, apparently, political corruption is not so bad. He said about Michael Cohen’s corrupt actions that implicate the president, “Nobody got killed, nobody got robbed. . . . This was not a big crime.”

Certainly, Giuliani now thinks that advancing private business interests can go hand-in-hand with being the president’s lawyer. He was recently in Bahrain meeting the king and the interior minister. In Bahrain Giuliani was described as leading a “high-level U.S. delegation,” but he was not there performing official duties. He instead was seeking a lucrative contract for a firm he owns, Giuliani Security and Safety, part of a worldwide effort he has been making to get the firm more business. This may not be illegal since Giuliani is not a government official, but the odds are strong that at least some of the foreign officials will think it wise to hire Giuliani Security to stay in Trump’s good graces.

Thirty years seems to me as both a long time and but a blink. The Trump of today seems to be, to put it nicely, the same ethically-challenged Trump who appears in City for Sale. But for Giuliani, those three decades have been enough to bring an apparent reversal of ethical and legal standards.