A few weeks ago, I was in a conversation with a cashier at my local QFC as she scanned my purchases.  When she got to a bottle of wine – an amusing little Chianti – she asked me if I had ID.  I reached the legal drinking age half a century ago.  I realized that she was using humor to dilute the drudgery that comes with handling other people’s food purchases for eight hours a day.  I pointed out to her that there are hundreds of professional comedians out of work.  I asked her, out of respect for them, to stop cracking jokes for free.

If I were on similarly friendly terms with John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States, I would have made the same point to him after he pronounced that, contrary to President Trump’s claim, there are no Obama judges, Bush judges, Clinton judges, or Trump judges.  In his view, all members of the judiciary are equally conscientious in applying the law fairly and without bias.

He must know it’s not true.  It is true that some judges, originalists and textualists, are prohibited by their creed – if they are true to it – from manipulating their analysis to reach a pre-determined result.  That is not to say that they don’t slip from time to time; but when they do, they are departing from principle.  But an activist judge is acting according to doctrine when he or she interprets a statute or constitutional provision to achieve a desired result.  They are taught from an early stage that achieving those results is their purpose in judging.

Surely that philosophical difference explains why so many immigration cases come to the Ninth Circuit, which has a well-earned reputation for activism.  It isn’t a coincidence that advocates for open borders prefer to start their cases in that circuit.  They may know something that the Chief Justice wants to deny.

But he need not look that far afield.  He knows from personal experience that his criticism of the President’s complaint is unfair.

President Obama, in his 2010 State of the Union address, criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.  The nine justices were sitting in a row in their accustomed places in the middle of the House chamber.  A group of Democratic senators and congresspersons were sitting behind them and immediately jumped to their feet, jeering and clapping.  The President looked on, chin elevated, eyes gleaming.

I recall the Chief Justice’s facial expression and body language at that moment.  He wasn’t enjoying the experience.  However, he did not criticize President Obama, then or later.  Instead, he internalized the political message that the President delivered that evening.

While the case testing the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act was under consideration by the Supreme Court, proponents of the statute kept political pressure on the Chief Justice.  Senator Schumer emphasized how unfortunate it would be for the reputation of the Supreme Court if it were to oppose the popular will on such an important matter.  Nice little court you have here.

A central issue in the case was whether the power granted to Congress to regulate interstate commerce was broad enough to support a statutory requirement that each individual who was not otherwise covered purchase health insurance.  The Chief Justice might have noticed – everyone else did – that the four justices appointed by Democratic presidents thought that the commerce clause justified the statute.  The five justices appointed by Republican presidents, including the Chief Justice, disagreed.

The Chief Justice upheld the statute under Congress’ taxing power.  When the Act was under consideration by the Congress, its proponents emphasized repeatedly that the financial penalties built into the law were not taxes.  During briefing and argument, the government at no point asked that the  Court to uphold the Act as a tax.

The Chief Justice cannot expect anyone who remembers those events to believe that he examined the law, the facts, and the Constitution and made an objective decision without any reference to political issues or to the Court’s reputation.  He did what he had to do to avoid another public airing of grievances by the President of the United States.

He did it again when the statute came in front of the court a couple of years later.  Recall that the statute was written to create financial penalties for states that did not establish health insurance exchanges.  Those states would not receive subsidies available to states that complied.  This was a feature of the statute favored by its architects.  Even so, many states refused to establish exchanges.  The Treasury adopted regulations that allowed the federal government to take the place of the states that failed to set up exchanges.  That action raised a Constitutional issue because the Constitution prohibits the expenditure of funds from the Treasury except pursuant to a Congressional enactment.  Once again, the Chief Justice acted as the blue pencil editor, revising a statute after the fact to make it say what the Executive told him it needed to say to achieve the Executive’s purposes.

You may think that the result he reached is the right one, the one best for the country.  Fine.  At the same time, you would have to agree that he didn’t put on a blindfold and do justice without fear or favor.  He acted to protect the institution he heads from attacks by a political operation that did not intend to go quietly if he ruled against them.

I am bothered by his craven surrender to a political threat but I am disgusted by his outrageous claim that neither he nor any of his colleagues in the judicial branch would ever do such a thing.

In the 1930s, early in the National Socialist reign, the German government enacted the notorious anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws.  These statutes stripped German Jews of citizenship, subjected them to countless humiliations, and were a step on the road to the Holocaust.

The urge to deal categorically with Germany’s Jewish population left open the question how to determine whether any particular individual was a Jew for purposes of the statutes.  The Germans counted grandparents.  An individual’s treatment varied depending on how many Jewish grandparents he or she had.  The scoring system was like golf.  Lower scores were better.

Other laws required proof of “Aryan” descent if an individual wanted to enter public service by joining the SS.  A candidate had to prove that all his ancestors were Germans back to the days of Frederick the Great in the mid-eighteenth century.

The white South faced a similar classification question in the Jim Crow era.  They needed a way to decide which water fountain any particular light-skinned person could use, which part of the streetcar that person could occupy, and so on.  While they adopted the principle that “one drop of African blood” would put an individual in the back of the bus, in practice they looked to great-grandparents.  If you could point to eight white great-grandparents, you could sit in the front of the streetcar.

I thought of these laws the first time I saw a TV commercial for Ancestry.com.  A fellow wearing stereotypical Bavarian clothing – short pants with suspenders, knee-high woolen socks, needing only a string of sausages tumbling out of his pocket to complete the ensemble – tells us that “growing up we were German.”  He sent his DNA to Ancestry.com and learned “we weren’t German at all.”  His ancestors came from Scotland.  The final shot shows him in full Highland regalia.  He tells us, “I traded in my lederhosen for a kilt.”  Wurst came to worsted.

A woman who “had no idea” she was 25% Native American now surrounds herself with Southwest-style pottery as a way of finding out more about “my heritage”.  Another who learned that about 25% of her DNA came from Nigeria ordered a green hat from that nation to celebrate the new-found connection.

I am waiting for the installment where a resident of Chicago, a lifelong fan of the Cubs, learns that ten of her 64 great-great-great-great grandparents came from St. Louis and none from Chicago.  Does she now become a fan of the Cardinals, to get in touch with her heritage?

When Ancestry.com and its competitors analyze the geography of our DNA, the gregarious, wandering ways of our species are bound to produce surprises.  The O’Sullivans whose great-grandparents came from County Cork can have an Italian or an Indonesian forebear eight or ten generations back just as easily as the Mahathir family from Malaysia can learn that an eighteenth-century missionary from England or Portugal developed closer relations with the host population than was apparent to the other members of his Bible study class.

Which brings me to Senator Elizabeth Warren.  She has long insisted that she is descended from Cherokees, that her parents had to elope because the white side of the family objected to the match with an Indian.  This belief proved helpful to her career when she applied to join the faculty of the Harvard Law School.

Half of the Harvard Law School faculty are themselves graduates of that distinguished institution.  The other half were educated at prestigious law schools ranked among the five to ten best in the US.  How did it happen that Harvard took to its hearth Elizabeth Warren, a graduate of the non-elite Rutgers Law School and the co-author of those works of profound scholarship “All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan” and “The Two-income Trap”?  The answer: She presented herself as a Native American.  The Harvard faculty guide identified her that way in the 1990s as did forms that the University of Pennsylvania – her employer before Harvard — filed with the federal government.

The arrangement was exposed a few years back when she first ran for office, earning now-Senator Warren the nickname “Fauxcahontas”.  President Trump is holding back when he refers to her merely as “Pocahontas”.

Both Harvard and Senator Warren denied that her identity as a Native American had anything to do with her selection.  Still, the ridicule stung.  Senator Warren has responded with the report of a DNA test that shows that six to ten generations ago she had an ancestor who was – not Cherokee – but an indigenous resident of the western hemisphere.

These DNA results can help us to sharpen our thinking about ethnicity.  If we assume that Senator Warren is eight generations removed from her indigenous ancestor – splitting the difference between six and ten – and if we allow 25 years per generation, then that ancestor was born sometime round about 1750.  Let’s label that child “AOI” for Ancestor of Interest.  The AOI had at least one great-grandchild.  That would take us to about 1825, at 25 years per generation.  The AOI’s great-grandchild had at least one great-grandchild of his or her own, who would have been born around 1900.  That person is Elizabeth Warren’s grandparent.  After the AOI, everyone in the line is of European descent.

That last statement requires some refinement.  If you go back eight generations, you have 256 ancestors.  (Each individual in the chain has two parents.  Two to the eighth power is 256.)  We can picture 256 empty boxes on a family tree waiting for us to fill in the names.  But there may not be 256 distinct individuals to place in those boxes.  The same individual may appear multiple times.  That’s because some ancestors at the 256 level may have descendants who married each other.  Depending on the culture, marriages between second or third cousins (or even first cousins) are not uncommon.  And in any culture, some couples will marry without knowing that they have a common ancestor from four, five, or more generations earlier.

The logic of this point becomes self-evident as you take your imagination back in time.  At 25 years per generation, we are 30 generations removed from roughly 1250 A.D.  If you don’t allow for cousin marriage, you have over a billion ancestors from that era.  (2 to the 30^th power is more than 1,000,000,000.)  But there weren’t a billion people alive on earth in 1250 A.D.  The descendants of the comparatively small number of humans alive in 1250 produced our seven billion contemporaries by finding cousins to keep company on long summer evenings.

Second, and conversely, the DNA from some of those 256 ancestors may not have made it to the person whose DNA sample is being tested.  Some ancestors’ DNA drops out over time.  To illustrate the point, suppose that of the 256, ancestor number 195 and ancestor 124 produce a child.  Picture their genes as playing cards.  Number 195 contributes 50 diamonds and 124 contributes 50 clubs.  We shuffle the cards to produce a child whose genetic heritage is 100 cards, half diamonds and half clubs.  When that child produces her child, she will send 50 cards into the mix, as will her mate.  There is no guarantee that the cards she sends will be 25 diamonds and 25 clubs.  She might send 20 diamonds and 30 clubs.  There is a fresh random shuffle every generation.  A card that fails to make it to the next generation is gone forever.  As time goes by, the contribution of distant ancestors becomes smaller and smaller.  At the tenth generation, there is only a 50% chance that a particular individual among the 1,024 ancestors at that distance will have any DNA in the donor of a given sample.

That tells us that Senator Warren may have Native American ancestors whose DNA didn’t make it into hers.  Equally, the AOI may have had ancestors who were not themselves indigenes but whose DNA didn’t make it to the AOI’s generation.  The fraction of a percentage point of indigenous western hemisphere genes that the Senator’s DNA analyst found could be masking a Native American ancestry two or four times (or more) larger than what was found, or two or four times (or more) smaller.

The point of going into all of this is not to pick on Senator Warren but rather to point out the prevalence of some genuinely racist thought that seems to survive without comment.  Somehow, people who become red with stammering rage when a non-Mexican wears a sombrero grant a pass to claims that come straight out of the Jim Crow playbook.

The great majority of the 256 or so individuals wandering the earth in 1750 whose descendants include the junior Senator from Massachusetts likely traced their ancestry to Britain, Ireland, northern and western Europe.  Yet, the Senator’s focus is on one individual from Peru or Colombia who happened to catch the eye of another Warren forebear.

Is it not ridiculous to claim that you are – take your pick – Maori, Mayan, Irish, Arab because out of the many ancestors who began to beget you 250 years ago, one was a member of that ethnicity?  But even if your membership in an ethnic group is based on well-documented evidence and stronger numbers, it is beyond ridiculous to claim that your ancestors’ DNA gains you a political credit or that someone else’s nets them a political debit.  It might make perfect sense if you are trying to fit in with your contemporaries in Germany in 1938 or Mississippi in 1920, but it’s utterly antithetical to the principle of equal natural rights on which American governance was founded.  Your natural rights are not derived from your racial, ethnic, religious, or national identity.

The viciousness of the Nuremberg/Jim Crow classifications, the silliness of the Ancestry.com advertising, and the DNA-as-resume-enhancement approach of Elizabeth Warren all have one thing in common.  They want us to believe that we are who we are because of the group we belong to, and further that the group we belong to is identified by the genes we carry.  An interest in one’s ancestors is healthy, but it becomes an illness when a person claims special status because of his or her ancestors’ supposed superiority or, conversely, their documented status as victims.

Ancestry.com notwithstanding, kilts and lederhosen, pottery and millinery are not the products of the DNA that code our individual characteristics.  Your genes will influence physical traits like height and coloration.  Undoubtedly, they contribute to personality, cognitive ability, and behavioral dispositions.  But your genetic heritage does not determine whether you will wear a kilt or a toga or a set of brass rings to stretch the length of your neck.  If you think that the genes of an ethnic group determine their culture, if you think that a person’s DNA defines him or her, haven’t you accepted the premises of Nuremberg and the Jim Crow South?  The idea may wear a smiley face instead of a snarl, but it’s the same thought.

Article IX, Section 1 of the Washington State Constitution provides:

It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.

“Paramount” means “more important than anything else; supreme.”

Citizens sued the state, claiming that the state’s school finance methods did not meet the requirements of Article IX, Section 1.  In the McCleary decision, the state Supreme Court held that the state had failed to meet its constitutional obligation.  It directed the legislature to devote more funding to education.  When the legislature failed at first to hand over the money, the court held the legislature in contempt and imposed a fine on legislators for each day that went by until the state House and Senate had voted the funds.

There are two ways for a court to interpret a law.  The first method requires the judge to read the applicable texts, examine precedent, and interpret historical context in an effort to find out what the law is.  We might call this the “discovery” method.  A judge using the second method determines in advance how a case should be decided.  The judge then searches for the particular form of words found in a statute, a constitution, or a precedent that can be used to support the desired result.  We can call this the “purpose-driven” method.

The purpose-driven method is disreputable.  It’s rare that a judge would acknowledge using it.  The problem is that judges who use the purpose-driven method have become adept at couching their opinions in language that makes it appear that they are using the discovery method.

Because judges can be so clever, we have to look beyond the texts of their opinions to determine if a decision was purpose-driven or discovered.  Which was it in McCleary?

The court directed the legislature to enact law, to legislate.  To do that, they had to overlook the first words of Article II of the state constitution:

The legislative authority of the state of Washington shall be vested in the legislature . . . .

By telling the legislature what to do, the court used authority that it did not have.  Taxing and spending are legislative functions, entrusted to members of the state House and Senate.  When a few brave legislators pointed this out, they were shouted down.  They should have been heeded.

The court relied on the word “paramount” when it was useful and then abandoned it.  If the responsibility to provide for public education is paramount, then no other function of government should have been funded until education had been properly taken care of.  Here, the court could have acted within its constitutional authority.

If education is paramount – and the state constitution says it is – then no other function of government can do better than second place.  Instead of directing the legislature to find new funding for education, the court could have enjoined the state from spending money on any other function of government – law enforcement, roads, child welfare, prisons, any of it – until the constitutional obligation to meet the state’s paramount responsibility had been met.

Had they followed the logic of their own analysis – had they been using the discovery method – they would have been attacked by everyone who benefits from the funding of those other functions of government.  That money goes directly to state employees and contractors and in-kind to the recipients of state services.  Had state money been diverted to the paramount obligation of providing education, all of those employees, contractors, and recipients would have been bidding up the price of pitchforks.  The elegant solution adopted by the court was to require the legislature to find new money, which hurts no one except taxpayers.

We are at the time of year when school districts and teachers’ unions negotiate over contracts for the coming school year.  This year, McCleary has produced a lot of new money to lubricate bargaining.

What happens if a union and a district cannot come to terms?  The teachers withhold their services.  They go on strike.

Isn’t that a violation of the constitutional requirement that the state make “ample provision” for the education of all children within its borders?  Money is one part of “ample provision”.  So are the services of teachers.

The state has no power to compel any individual teacher to supply his or her services.  But should the state enable teachers to withhold their services as a group?  How can the state allow a voluntary association of private persons to prevent the state from meeting its paramount constitutional obligation?

A cynic might note that the justices of the state supreme court are elected.  Their campaigns are funded by voluntary contributions from persons and organizations that have an interest in the outcome of cases that come before the court.  Purpose-driven?  Could be.

In his youth, John McCain performed an act of unimaginable heroism.  His plane had been shot down over Viet Nam.  His Vietnamese captors tortured him, in violation of the laws of war and standards of human decency.  At a time when his captors were hoping to score a public relations victory, they offered him a chance to go home.  He turned them down rather than leave his follow prisoners behind.

It was the high moment of his public life.  The iron will that kept him in the company of his tormenters was often on display in a long life of public service but never again engaged in a cause of equal merit.

After two terms in the House, he won election to the Senate in 1986 and was re-elected five times, most recently in 2016.  His party held the majority for roughly half of his Senate tenure, but he seemed more comfortable as an outsider.  When he worked with Senators from the other party, it was to help them enact their agenda.  His help to his own party was less frequent and seemed less enthusiastic.

His name is associated with three bills, only one of which became law.  McCain-Kennedy would have enacted comprehensive immigration reform.  Its opponents feared that it would have led to open borders.  Senator McCain did not dispel that impression.  McCain Lieberman would have combatted global warming – the name of the object of fear had not yet become “climate change” – through cap-and-trade.

He achieved success with McCain-Feingold, his version of campaign finance reform.  His depth of feeling on this issue arose from his membership in the notorious group of senators known as the “Keating Five”.  A financier named Charles Keating had ensnared four Democratic senators in corrupt schemes to help his banks.  The powers-that-be thought it unseemly for all of the accused to come from the same political party.  They looked for a Republican who could be sacrificed.  McCain had enough of a connection to Keating to support rounding the number of the Keating Four up to Five, although there never was a reason outside of politics to justify including Senator McCain among the accused.

It rankled him.  Enacting McCain-Feingold became a personal mission.  That iron will once again had its way.  President Bush (43) had a constitutional duty to veto the act but decided to punt to the Supreme Court.  The court upheld it.  Sandra Day O’Connor thought that Congress had the power to balance its desire to protect its reputation for honesty against First Amendment considerations.

The court’s opinion could have been as short as this: “The First Amendment states that ‘Congress shall make no law . . .abridging the freedom of speech . . ..’  Political speech is more critical to the protection of liberty than any other kind of expression.  This Act abridges freedom of political speech.  Therefore, the Act violates the Constitution of the United States and is without further effect.  So ordered.”

Instead, they kept it on the books.  The same court struck down a federal statute that attempted to regulate the distribution near schools of certain types of salacious material.  I hope to live long enough to understand how those two decisions can be reconciled.

A gentleman who had testified against McCain-Feingold on the ground that it is unconstitutional found himself alone with Senator McCain in a lobby waiting for an elevator.  McCain refused to shake his hand, telling the fellow that he would not shake the hand of the corrupt lackey of special interests.  (I paraphrase.)  The iron will, again.  He found it difficult to accept that the opposition had its reasons beyond venal self-interest.

His opposition to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques tells a similar story.  It takes study and evaluation to realize that the term “enhanced interrogation” is not a euphemism for “torture”.  The Senator made a snap judgment without the benefit of careful thought.  His lack of depth on the issue is demonstrated by his view that a torturer can get a victim to say anything, although he agreed that torture could be used if we were ever faced with a proverbial “ticking time bomb”.  His position revealed multiple layers of confusion that could have been avoided with more thought, more research.

He did something similar after he had secured the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.  When the financial system was under massive strain in September 2008, he suspended his campaign and returned to the Senate to take action.  That action amounted to looking for someone to blame for the crisis.  He settled on Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  The thought that the crisis was systemic didn’t seem to occur to the senator.

His actions at that moment probably doomed his presidential campaign.  Mr. McCain appeared mercurial, excitable, while Mr. Obama was calm and reasonable.  I doubt that Mr. Obama had any better understanding of what was happening than anyone else did, but the voters preferred the man who seemed steadier.

Senator McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, once he decided to take it up again, was lackluster.  The vigor that was on display when he did battle with his own party was nowhere to be found.  He primly refused to attack his opponent.  He selected a vice-presidential nominee who made people nervous and then failed to intervene when his staff undermined her.  It would have been tough for any Republican to win in 2008, but Senator McCain didn’t make the most of the chances he had.

When he ran for re-election in 2010, voters in his state were actively opposed to his position on immigration.  He ran ads where he stood in the desert and said “Let’s build the dang fence!”  (Note, incidentally “fence” and not “wall”.)  He never supported the idea, before or after that election.

In his 2016 re-election campaign, he vowed that he would vote to repeal Obamacare.  Yet when he had the deciding vote to keep a bill alive that might have accomplished repeal eventually, he famously marched to the well of the Senate and pointed his thumb down.  After that, some who had contributed to his campaign considered filing a lawsuit to get their money back.  They had a good moral case, but saved on legal fees by dropping the idea.

Why this emotional reaction from a man who could just as easily have voted the other way, particularly since his sense of honor might have led him to keep a campaign promise?  I think we can look to the man who in 2016 got the job that Senator McCain sought in 2008.

During the campaign, candidate Trump criticized McCain in an interview.  When the interviewer pointed out that McCain had a heroic record as a prisoner of war, candidate Trump said, “He was captured.  I like people who weren’t captured.”  In Trump speak (I am a Trump Whisperer) that means, “There are heroes who charge the enemy on the battlefield.  There are heroes who run into burning buildings.  This guy was a hero in a prison camp.  Not the same thing.”

The comment had to burn right into Senator McCain’s soul.  His shining moment had been questioned, belittled by someone who had not made a comparable sacrifice.  He would never forgive it nor forget it.  He revenged it.  I wager he would have done more if cancer had not taken away his capacity to do it.

Whatever one thinks of his public career, that moment at the beginning of it stands out.  How many of us could have passed that test and voluntarily remained the prisoner of torturers?  The best answer is to be grateful that the question was not put to us.  In time, he will be remembered for that one transcendent heroic act and the rest will find its way into footnotes.

I am one of the few people in my zip code who was not horrified by President Trump’s comments about the US Intelligence Community’s investigation of Russian activity during the 2016 presidential election.

I figure I can be horrified later if necessary.  In the meantime, what is the answer to the president’s question?  Why didn’t the FBI examine the servers that the Russians hacked back in 2016?

The answer that the Intelligence Community will offer would go something like: “/////////// information //////////.  //////// and ////////.  ////////// Security.   Next ////////.”

Unredacted, that would be: “We cannot provide that information at this time.  Sources and Methods.  National Security.  Next Question.”

The media chorus would add: “Only a pawn of the Russians would ask such a question.  Putin must have something on him.”

Granted, the President did not handle the situation artfully.  Instead of directing attention to the FBI’s curious behavior, he might have said something along one of these lines:

I can’t comment on a matter that is under investigation.

We have the finest investigative organizations in the world looking into various aspects of this matter.  Mr. Mueller and his team are still gathering evidence.  Several Congressional committees are actively looking into it.  Let’s wait until all the facts are in.

Mr. Putin and I each lead a great country.  I am not going to conduct a conversation on a matter as delicate as this in front of a gaggle of reporters.

He might have tried a little subtlety, perhaps something like this:

It’s too early to make a comment about any of this.  Look, in 2016, the FBI and the DOJ signed off on an application for a FISA warrant telling the court that Carter Page was a Russian agent.  It’s almost two years later and Mr. Page is still at liberty, uncharged with any crime.  Obviously, our justice system works at its own pace.  I don’t want to rush anything.

These were among the alternatives available to him, but the president’s rhetorical palette is dominated by bolder colors.

He could have done better.  Everyone agrees, including him. But what’s the answer to the question?  How did it happen that the Intelligence Community declined to examine the Democratic National Committee’s servers, yet concluded that Russian GRU agents (not the KGB, but Alger Hiss’s old clients in military intelligence) were in there hacking away?

If the authorities told us that the Russians burglarized an office, we would expect them to enter the building, secure the crime scene, and dust the office for fingerprints.  When it came to the servers, they didn’t do the equivalent.  Yet, anyone who questions their conclusion is accused of aiding and abetting the burglars.

This sounds like groupthink, which happens when members of an organization value their membership in the group and the survival of the group more than the group’s actual mission.  If you’re part of the group, you don’t question its assumptions.  You could be ridiculed.  You could be shunned.  There is safety inside the group.  It helps if the group tells itself that it is smarter, more knowledgeable, more attuned to the world around it than anyone outside the group.

The president bruised the delicate sensibilities of the Intelligence Community.  His critics think he should accept the work of the Community as settled.  But think of all of the Community’s blunders that resulted from groupthink.  They missed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the rise of Al Qaeda in the 1990s, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the simultaneous bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.  They continued to assume that airplane hijackers wanted hostages, so they missed the change in tactics that converted airliners into guided missiles on September 11, 2001.

The “Community” sent the U.S. Secretary of State (Colin Powell, appointed by George W. Bush) and the Director of the CIA (George Tenet, appointed by Bill Clinton) to the UN Security Council to provide ironclad evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.  Those weapons could not be found by the occupation force when it arrived.  After the occupation of Iraq, the “Community” dismantled the only Iraqi organization that knew anything about governing that unhappy country and then supervised that nation’s descent into chaos.

Following those blunders, the Community rushed to the opposite extreme and announced that Iran was not attempting to develop a nuclear weapon.

Then there is Benghazi, a complete failure of intelligence.  Add the underwear bomber from Nigeria, whose own father had informed on him to the U.S. embassy in Lagos and the Boston marathon bombers, whose threat had been disclosed to U.S. authorities by – of all people – Russian intelligence.

This is not a complete list.

But the Community gets upset if anyone questions their wisdom.  They check with each other and they agree: they’re right nearly all of the time.  It’s treason to say otherwise.  John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama, made that charge on television.

If the charge of treason seems overblown, perhaps that’s because the president’s question struck deeper than the Community’s self-regard.  Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal details the methods deployed by Mr. Brennan, among the most hysterical of the president’s critics, to tie the Trump campaign to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

In 2016, when he was Director of the CIA, Brennan knew that the FBI thought that Russia was intervening in the election, but he didn’t like their opinion that Russia wasn’t taking sides.  The FBI view at that time was that Russia just wanted to sow confusion.  That wasn’t the conclusion he wanted, yet he wasn’t able to persuade the FBI or even James Clapper (then Director of National Intelligence) that Russia’s activities were aimed at helping Trump and hurting Mrs. Clinton.  At the time, there were elements within the FBI dragging other baited lines through the water that would eventually hook George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn of the Trump campaign, but let’s put off to another day a discussion of the FBI-DOJ attempts to tie Trump to Russia.  It’s entirely possible that Mr. Brennan’s efforts were not connected to those of Deputy Director McCabe, Agent Strzok, DOJ Attorney Lisa Page, and DOJ Attorney Bruce Ohr.

According to Strassel, in late August 2016 Brennan briefed Senator Harry Reid, then the Senate Minority Leader, on Russia’s efforts to advance the Trump candidacy.  Reid got the story out to the public.  Ultimately, the narrative has become the Community’s received wisdom.  The Intelligence Community has concluded not only that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, but that they did so to aid Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

The reaction of the establishment – including members of both major parties – to the President’s stinging accusation can be explained in part by incompetence and groupthink, each of which can usually be found pulling an oar when government goes into action.  The extra measure of hysteria we are hearing from people like Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey and others may arise less from the insult than from the implications of the president’s question.  If there is no credible answer to why the servers were off-limits, we might ask further questions about other odd activities of the Community.  These would include:  how did the infamous “Steele dossier” came into the hands of the FBI, why was it used to procure a FISA warrant, did those warrants allow investigators to listen inside a political campaign, and why is it that after some two years all we have are indictments against U.S. citizens for meaningless process crimes (failure to register as a foreign agent, misstatements to investigators about when certain meetings took place, and the like) and against Russian nationals who aren’t going to appear in a US court (and when one of them did, the Mueller team refused to proceed).

The president’s question about the DNC servers pulls on the curtain and may start to reveal the wizard behind it.  If a robber cracks a safe, you examine it.  If someone is shot, you collect and examine the bullet.  If a check is forged, you examine the handwriting.  If a server is hacked, why would you leave it alone?  It’s only one small thread in a much more complex fabric.  Pull it and who knows what may be revealed?

A person more careful with his words than Mr. Trump might have been able to make the point that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election doesn’t imply that they favored one candidate or the other.  It means that they wanted to sow confusion, something they have accomplished.  The problem for him is that If he agrees openly that they meddled but fails to persuade that they were non-partisan, he opens the door to the segment of the news media – a mere 95% of them – who will report that he now admits that he had Russian help.

Instead of trying that more difficult rhetorical gambit, he focused on the FBI’s lack of curiosity about the Democratic National Committee’s servers.  But again: what is the answer to the president’s question?  The failure to examine the hacked servers is so glaring that the default explanation — incompetence and groupthink — may not be sufficient.  And if that’s the case, the answer to the president’s question – Russians or no Russians – can lead to some damaging revelations.  The truth always comes out eventually, but it can take a long time.  I wonder how many people in Washington are thinking, “If the truth has to come out, let it be after the statute of limitations has run.”

The Mueller team’s indictment earlier this week of a dozen Russian GRU agents confirms something I wrote on the subject back in March 2017.  Loyal readers hardly need me to remind them, but if you scroll back to an article headed “Thoughts on the Opposition to Donald Trump” that I posted in March of last year, you will see the point laid out in detail in the second half of the article.

Maybe too much detail.  Let me summarize:

The winning formula for a Democratic presidential nominee is: 1988 + 1992 + Florida > 270.

Until 2016, a Democratic candidate began with the states that every Democrat has won since 1988 (9 states; 90 electoral votes) and the states that every Democrat has won since 1992 (10 states, 152 electoral votes).

Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/11/breaking-blue-barrier-myra-adams]

That gets you to 242 electoral votes.  Add Florida’s 29 electoral votes or the equivalent from other states and you’re parking the family car at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The 1988 + 1992 part of the formula is the “Blue Wall”.  Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were part of the Blue Wall.  They went for Trump by narrow margins.  Secretary Clinton ran up enormous majorities in California and New York, two of the sturdiest bricks in the Blue Wall.  The votes in those states in excess of 50.0001% didn’t help her.  She needed some of those extra votes in the key states that she lost.

The politicians who told us in October 2016 that our democracy will corrode beyond repair if the loser in a presidential election complains about electoral foul play have changed their minds.  After the fact, the astounding outcome in 2016 had to be due to subterfuge and trickery, combined with collusion and foreign interference.

The interference – the meddling – had to be coming from the Russians.  How might the Russians have meddled?  I looked at two possibilities.

First, they might have tinkered with the mechanics of voting.  It’s possible that they tried and will keep trying.  But, as President Obama pointed out when he and everyone else thought Donald Trump had no chance, our voting system is dispersed.  If a foreign outfit somehow gained access to a voting machine or a ballot box here or there, only a few votes could be swung at each location.  The margins of victory in the three rogue states were small in percentage terms, but still amounted to tens of thousands of votes.  Intrusions into the system on the scale necessary to affect the outcome would have been noticed, particularly with the DOJ, the FBI, 95% of the country’s news media, and half of its federal politicians looking for it.

So, if Russian interference made the difference, it was because of the theft and publication of emails from servers of various Democratic party and campaign operations.

Was it the publication of those emails that swung Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to Donald Trump?  Blue collar voters in those states went for Trump.  Their votes usually go to the Democratic candidate, but they will sometimes make an exception.  They voted for Ronald Reagan.  These are voters who like tariffs on foreign goods that undersell the products of their employers.  Trump talked about the lousy trade deals that the country had signed.  He was going to repair the damage.  The wage earners of those three states liked that message and voted for the man who delivered it.  I don’t think they cared about the Democratic Party’s emails.

At the same time, African-American voters gave Hillary Clinton significantly less support than they gave to Barack Obama.  In 2012, President Obama received 960 out of every 1,000 votes cast by African-Americans.  In 2016, 10% of those voters stayed home.  Of the 900 per 1,000 who voted, 72 (8%) voted for Donald Trump.  Where Mr. Obama in 2012 got 960 votes per 1,000 African-American voters, Mrs. Clinton got 822 (counting the 100 who stayed home).  The gap adds up as those thousands are multiplied hundreds of times.  It wasn’t noticed in a place like California, where the size of her victory masked the softness of her support from critical segments of the voting population. It was decisive in the three states that fell out of the Blue Wall.  Was that nearly 14% swing (138 votes per 1,000) against Mrs. Clinton due to voter disgust with the content of stolen emails?  I doubt it.

Pocketbook issues and personal style were more important to most voters than the content of stolen emails.  Also, some voters like to be schmoozed.  If you’re undecided, you might give your vote to the person who asks for it.  Mrs. Clinton took too many votes for granted.  Donald Trump campaigned hard in those upper Midwest blue states.  Enough voters liked his rambling style and his announced plans – the wall, tariffs, lower taxes, reduced regulation, no cuts to Social Security or Medicare, end Obamacare, leave the Paris climate deal, end the Iran deal, renegotiate NAFTA, reject TPP, etc. — to enable him to eke out wins by small margins in critical states that Mrs. Clinton took for granted.  Even so, he had to win the states that any Republican needs — Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, and the like – in order to balance the parts of the Blue Wall that survived 2016.

This is the second set of indictments against Russian operatives.  The dozen this week were preceded by a baker’s dozen a few months ago.  Did you know that one of the baker’s dozen made a court appearance back in April?  Three of the thirteen that Mueller indicted were entities, not individuals.  One of the entities hired a DC law firm and made a court appearance.  They made discovery requests and asked for a speedy trial.  The Mueller prosecutors didn’t want to proceed.  They argued that the defendant had not been properly served with process.  That may be the first time a prosecutor anywhere in the world has made that argument about a criminal defendant who has voluntarily appeared in court.

Call me a cynic, but the prosecutor’s behavior told me that the 13 indictments were done for show rather than for use.  Could it be that last week’s 12 were done for the same purpose?  I would be happy to be proven wrong.  If the Mueller team seeks extradition of the defendants from Russia or asks Interpol to arrest the GRU agents any time one of them steps outside of Russia, that would suggest that these indictments were made for a serious purpose.

Once these individuals are in a US courtroom, they can test the evidence against them and can be forced to pay the price for what they did if the evidence is sufficient.  But whatever these Russian operatives did, the voters in 2016 made up their own minds and cast their votes freely.  The traditionally Democratic voters who turned away from Mrs. Clinton made a judgment about her character and competence and either diluted their support or gave it outright to her opponent despite his flaws.  There are reports that she is considering a run in 2020.  If the voters decide they made a mistake in 2016, they will have the chance to correct it.  The voters will speak in their own voice.  Purloined emails won’t matter then any more than they did two years ago.

The historian Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics states:

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

What other explanation is there for some of the recent additions to the National Mall and the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C.?

The World War II Memorial was completed in 2004.  Its location at the opposite end of the Reflecting Pool from the Lincoln Memorial is significant and symbolic.  The Memorial surrounds an elliptical pool whose long axis is perpendicular to the line of the Reflecting Pool that runs to the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.  One end of the ellipse has a large arch labeled Atlantic.  The identical arch opposite reads Pacific.  The China-Burma-India theater of war is not memorialized.

The pool is surrounded by smaller identical arches, each labeled with the name of one of the 48 states that existed in 1945, with additional arches added for each U.S. territory.  I have never seen an explanation for building a monument to the states and territories to memorialize one of the most significant national efforts ever undertaken by the United States.  Was this a war of Tennessee against Bavaria, South Carolina against Tuscany, Colorado against the Tokyo Prefecture?  What do the names of the states have to do with the world-historical event that the monument memorializes for all time to come?

The key elements of the Korean War Memorial are equally puzzling.  Realistic oversized statues of 19 service members, all in action, stand in a loose formation.  A reflecting element creates an image of an additional 19 figures.  The two together, the statues and their reflections, total 38.  The truce line at the end of the war was set at the 38^th parallel, which was also the line that separated the two Koreas at the war’s beginning.  A monument to an event that called for stern national purpose and personal sacrifice ought to use architectural, symbolic, and monumental elements to impress the historical significance of the war on the visitor’s mind.  Instead, we get numerology.

Moving from the National Mall to the Tidal Basin, this visitor to the memorials to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King has been disappointed.  These are two of the most consequential figures of the 20^th century, but their monuments will, I fear, fail to give the future a fair view of them.

In my opinion, FDR will in time be remembered more for his errors than for his accomplishments.  For example, he is credited with delivering the country from the Great Depression, yet the rate of unemployment was higher in 1940 than it was in 1930.  He presided over a major recession in 1937-38 in the middle of an economic depression, something that no one had ever done before.

In the fall of 1939, Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State, informed Roosevelt of a credible report that the administration was honeycombed with Soviet spies.  Roosevelt refused to hear of it or to authorize an investigation.  As a result, figures like Alger Hiss (State Department), Laughlin Currie (Roosevelt’s personal staff), Harry Dexter White (Treasury) and many others were free to continue their work.

Roosevelt’s conduct of World War II successfully ended totalitarian regimes in Germany and Japan but allowed the expansion of the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union.  World War II began in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, followed a few weeks later by Soviet forces once Stalin was sure that the Polish army was defeated.  At Yalta in 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill accepted Soviet control of the rest of Poland and eastern Europe.  Earlier, FDR had pressed Churchill to agree that Allied war aims should include the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers.  This policy probably prolonged the war by denying to the German High Command the possibility of a negotiated peace through a de-nazified government.  Thus, it gave the Soviets additional time to occupy territory that might have been behind an armistice line established by a negotiated peace.  Tens of millions of people in eastern Europe endured 45 years of Soviet tyranny.  It might have been avoided.

Mr. Roosevelt was given star treatment by the press when he was alive and has had warm fans among the historians.  But a long-overdue reassessment will, I think, gain strength in the decades to come.

But I will say two positive things about FDR.  First, although he was paralyzed by polio in the prime of his life at the age of 39, he never complained about his condition in public and he never allowed himself to be photographed in a wheelchair.  When he met Churchill for their first war conference in August 1941 at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, he walked, supported by his son, down the length of HMS Prince of Wales, to the place where Churchill awaited him.  He refused to arrive in a wheelchair.  A photograph of the two men on board shows them sitting in identical conventional chairs, as do photos from their other wartime conferences.  Yet, the designers of the FDR Memorial insisted on showing him in a wheelchair as a way to inspire disabled persons who might visit the memorial.

Also, Roosevelt was a smoker.  Because he was also an aristocrat, he used a cigarette holder.  And because he was a master showman, he could use that cigarette holder as a prop to help make a point, to exude charm, and help cement his presidential persona.  Anti-tobacco scolds refused to allow the memorial to show Roosevelt with a cigarette.

So, the man who could play a cigarette holder like a violin and who kept his disability out of the public eye is presented for all time sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for the smoke that is not going to arrive.

King was a man of complex and subtle views who could use the cadences of a preacher to speak profound truths to a mass audience.  The place on the Tidal Basin that he occupies might have presented him with warmth and humanity.  Marble, such as that used to depict Abraham Lincoln inside his memorial, would have been the appropriate material to permit the sculptor to present the man in full. Instead, his gigantic statue was carved from unyielding granite.  He is posed with arms folded, breathing defiance.  He looks more like an angry Aztec deity than the man who called a nation to live up to the high ideals on which it was founded.  True, his attitude was becoming angrier, less patient at the time a murderer ended his life in April 1968.  But it is the restatement of the principles of the Declaration of Independence in his “I Have a Dream” speech that places him in the American pantheon.  His memorial fails to present him as, in my opinion, he ought to be remembered.

But really, the trouble began much earlier, inside the memorial to the man who wrote the document that expressed the ideals that Dr. King challenged the nation to actualize.  The Jefferson Memorial was built to celebrate the author of the document that stated our founding principles with clarity and elegance. The designers of the memorial edited Mr. Jefferson’s work to obscure his meaning for their own purposes.

Five great architectural structures are laid out on two lines that intersect at right angles at the Washington Monument.  The National Mall runs west from the Capitol through the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, a distance of some two miles.  A line of about a mile runs from the White House south through the Washington Monument to the fifth site, the Jefferson Memorial.  It was the last of the five to be built and was dedicated on April 13, 1943.  Jefferson’s birthdate was April 13, 1743.  At the time the memorial was planned, constructed, and dedicated, the federal government was as powerful as it had ever been to that time.  For the previous 14 years, the government had been intervening in the American economy in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.  When the nation went to war in 1941, the extraordinary powers thought necessary to win the war were added to those that had already been exercised.  The memorial was planned by officials who were comfortable in the uses of power and confident in their ability to exercise it.

But the exercise of power is not legitimate if it is performed without the consent of the governed.  If those who exercise power illegitimately do so out of good motives, that is preferable to those occasions, unfortunately far more numerous, when the motives are bad, but it is better still not to exercise power except with the consent of the governed.  And that consent can only be granted through the use of documented, precise constructions aimed at ensuring that when power is exercised, it is held within the constraints that the terms of consent have established.  The governing class of 1943 was not happy with these constraints.  They shortened Jefferson’s elegant statement, to remove the concept they found so inconvenient.  This is the portion of the famous paragraph that appears in the Jefferson Memorial, marked to show the words they deleted:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Did they leave those words out to save space?  Other statements from later parts of the Declaration appear below the quoted language. It wasn’t a question of space.  They removed the phrase on consent because they didn’t want to remind the public that it was there in the original.

It’s not a minor excision.  A government “instituted among Men” that takes the first part of the famous sentence seriously, one that believes and acts on the principle that all humans are equal in their natural rights, the right as Lincoln said to eat the bread that one’s own hands have earned, must necessarily believe that no one has a right to govern another person without the other’s consent.  That is the logical consequence of the self-evident truth that all persons are equal in their natural rights. That’s one reason, the most important reason, why slavery is inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration.  But when a government ignores the terms of the compact under which its power was granted, it violates the purpose for which it was created.  To quote a former president: “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.”

If you think you have the right to govern me without my consent, you don’t think we are equal.

As I have written before, one of the great ironies of the nation’s presentation of itself on the National Mall and the Tidal Basin is that the author of the clearest and most elegant statement ever written on human equality, a man who hated to have his work edited, suffered, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth and at the hands of the government he helped to found, the most egregious editorial treatment his work had received since the day Congress authorized its publication on July 4, 1776.

In 1943, the reach of the self-assured arrogance that edited Mr. Jefferson’s work was limited to a single panel inside his memorial.  As time has unfolded, that same attitude has affected entire monuments and has permanently altered the structure of the National Mall and Tidal Basin.  Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics grinds on.

The outrage over the separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border was delayed – some of the triggering photos were more than three years old and were taken during the previous administration. In defense of the protestors, you can’t take action against a policy that you don’t know about, and the news media had taken an interest in the story only recently.  The opposition was heartfelt even if late.

Minor children who arrive at the southern border in the company of an adult create a problem for an administration that intends to enforce the law.  A consent decree dating from 1997 (the “Flores settlement”) says that children in this situation cannot be kept in custody for more than 20 days.  When the adult claims a right to asylum, the problem is compounded.  It takes a lot longer than 20 days to process an application for asylum.

What is a problem for the administration is an opportunity for its opponents.  The photos and video of children wrapped in foil blankets, being processed in facilities walled with chain-link fence, or crying for their mothers forced the administration to change course.  The age of the photos and their provenance were less important than their impact.

The photo that made the cover of Time magazine tells the story.  The crying child was not alone.  She was set down by her mother so that the mother could be processed.  The two were not separated.  The iconic photo misled Time’s readers. In fact, the mother had left three other children behind in Guatemala.  Her husband, gainfully employed, reports that his wife has always dreamed of living in the U.S.  This was the second time she had been caught trying to enter the country illegally.  Her claim for asylum is not well founded.

Time stood by the photo.  They might as well have said out loud that the purpose of the cover was not to present news but to influence policy.

The gambit worked. The president quickly changed course and allowed children to stay with their parents. Despite his self-proclaimed skill as a negotiator, he seems to be influenced more by the last thing he sees or hears than by any firmly held strategic plan (except when it comes to free trade, where he holds fast against it).

I had been wondering how the administration would finesse the problem in its new form.  How would they keep families together, adhere to the Flores settlement, and enforce the law on entry into the country? Twenty days is not a long time to wait to find out how they would square the circle.

I thought they might argue that minor children united with their parents in a detention facility are not being detained.  After the 20-day holding period is over, minor children in that situation could be considered visitors.  They would be free to leave if another family member, lawfully resident in the U.S., would take them and if their parents agreed.  But for as long as the parent agreed to have the child remain a visitor in the facility, parent and child would be free to remain together.

I don’t know if the administration would have used that argument or if it would have succeeded if challenged.  The question may no longer be in play after the latest court decision on the subject.  The president’s opponents may have accomplished more than they intended.

Opposition to the policy on reunification has led to an attack on enforcement itself.  The opponents of the president’s policy were not satisfied with the executive order reuniting parents and children.  The thousands who marched this past weekend did so after the president changed course and allowed reunification.  Last week, the ACLU obtained a court order requiring children under 5 to be reunited with their parents within 14 days and other minor children to be reunited within 30 days.

Why press for legal relief when you have already won politically?  Could the objective be to achieve the suspension of immigration enforcement at the border?  The judge did not order families to be released from custody.  He does not have the authority to do so (but that may not matter if the case comes before him again).  I think the judge and the ACLU have solved the administration’s immediate problem.  If children and parents are to be kept together in detention centers, it will be pursuant to the judge’s order rather than in violation of the Flores settlement.  Implementing the Flores agreement – removing the children from the detention center after 20 days – would contravene the order in the ACLU litigation. The ACLU is running a TV ad touting their victory over the Trump administration.  They may have succeeded in helping to overturn the Flores settlement, something the administration might not have been able to accomplish any other way.

It has been three years since the calamity of Super Bowl 49 (or XLIX if you insist) passed before the unbelieving eyes of Seattle Seahawks fans.  Time dulls the pain but does not erase it.  The Seahawks’ final offensive play of the game – a Russell Wilson pass intercepted by Malcom Butler at the goal line – is what twists the knife, but the wound had already been inflicted.

The Seahawks had the best defense in the NFL that year.  Some thought it was the best defense in the history of the league, although fans of the 1970s Steelers or 1980s Bears might disagree.  Entering the fourth quarter of that game, the Seahawks had a ten-point lead.  In the 48 previous Super Bowls, no team had ever come back from a fourth quarter deficit of ten points or more.

The Patriots erased that deficit against the best defense in the NFL and took the lead.  Even after that, in the final minute Seattle had the ball a yard away from the New England goal line with enough time left to pull off a miracle of their own.

Instead of giving the ball to a premier running back, Marshawn Lynch, they threw a pass that was intercepted at the goal line.  Suppose you were the manager of a baseball team down a run in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs, the bases loaded, and Barry Bonds at the plate.  Your slowest runner is on third base.  If you decided to have the guy on third steal home instead of letting Bonds swing away, your call would not have been as monumentally bad as the decision to throw that pass.  Fifty years from now, they will be showing that play as they warm the audience up for Super Bowl 102 (sorry, CII).

The result of last years’ Super Bowl eased the pain of this Seahawk fan, admittedly in a perverse way.  The Patriots won a game in overtime after trailing 28-3 in the second half.  The outcome was due less to a collapse by Atlanta than to an overpowering will to win by New England.  If they are that good – and fans in Seattle, Atlanta, and now Jacksonville have to admit that they are – then it really doesn’t matter how big a lead you have on them.

Will Philadelphia be the next victim, or will they find a way to break the spell?  I would like to achieve a clinical detachment as today’s game unfolds, but I am pulled in two opposite directions.  My son-in-law is an Eagles fan.  For that reason, but for that reason alone, I pull for Philadelphia whenever they play anyone but the Hawks.  Incidentally, when the two teams met in December, the Seahawks crushed the Eagles.  But of course, that doesn’t matter now.  Not one bit.

At the same time, how will I feel if Philadelphia does what Seattle could not? Fans in Atlanta and Jacksonville will have to take care of themselves, but how are we Seahawks fans going to feel about our personal football tragedy if Philadelphia is hoisting that trophy later today?  “Of all sad thoughts of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.”  I will be glad for my son-in-law, the father of one of my grandchildren, but I know that my joy will be alloyed with grief and regret.

If anyone reading this is a fan of This is Us, one final word – a safety tip.  When the game is over and you are closing up for the night, make sure that your slow cooker is not only turned off, but unplugged.

The Associated Press reports that a man driving his car in Pierce County, Washington lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a tree in a single-vehicle accident.  He was carrying two passengers: a woman in the front seat and a three-year-old in the back.

Witnesses reported that they weren’t wearing any clothes.  I mean, witnesses reported that the two adults exited the car without clothes.  No, I mean witnesses reported that both of the adults were naked when they exited the car.  The police report that the driver was impaired and the couple were having sex as the driver attempted to drive.

Either of these conditions could cause a driver to lose control of a vehicle negotiating the dark roads of rural Pierce County, Washington.  But how did the couple think they were going to manage their rendezvous?  A driver behind the wheel of a car, even one who is intent on having sex with his front seat passenger, and even when both of them have already shed their clothing, would have to negotiate daunting physical and mechanical challenges.  When you consider that the car was moving, it’s a testament to the power of the forces that urge each species to reproduce.

What was the driver doing out on the road at all?  The AP reports that he has been convicted three times for driving under the influence.  How many traffic stops does it take to yield three convictions, and how many times has he driven in that condition without being stopped?  The fellow may have decided that mere drunk driving does not sufficiently test the limits of the judicial system’s willingness to jolly him along.

Was he driving his own car?  How do you buy insurance to maintain registration when you have three DUIs?  And if it wasn’t his car, who would lend a car to someone who is known to drive under the influence habitually?

But the most nagging question was raised by a statement from the police spokeswoman, Brooke Bova.  Quoting from the story:

Bova says the woman, who was also naked, was hospitalized with broken bones. Bova says her 3-month-old child in the back seat was uninjured.

What was the state patrol spokesperson’s child doing in the back seat of the car?