No reason to give up my cup, a gift from last December. No, I did not smash it with a hammer or shatter it against the kitchen wall. We watched the hearings Wednesday to see if anything had changed, and nothing had. Robert Mueller was not going to tell us what to do. He is a prosecutor, not a politician, and, bless the difference. Mueller was going to leave it up to Congress, and the people, which is too bad, but that’s all there is. I still have the image of Mueller as the Marine officer, taking a bullet in the thigh in Vietnam while leading his platoon. He serves his country, still. He is more than a veteran prosecutor. Robert Mueller is a concept, an ideal -- Paul Revere riding through Massachusetts, warning “The Russians are coming! Hell, the Russians are here! -- and they have a friend in a high place." He did that again on Wednesday and, instead of the Vietcong taking potshots at him, he faced some distempered legislators who seemed offended at being thusly warned. I give the Democrats this much credit: they actually planned their questions. I am sure the Democratic elders had been shamed by rookie legislators like Katie Porter and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who asked informed questions in recent hearings rather than make self-serving speeches like most mossbunker legislators of both parties. Mueller was generally inscrutable, just getting through the day –his plan for his 89th and 90th visits to Congress, and with any luck at all, his last. Mueller clearly was not going to deliver an “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” rant. Through the eyes of somebody half a decade older than he (that is to say, me), he looked like I felt – he needed a nap. So I took one. After a day of reflection, I wonder, even more strongly, if there should be some self-imposed limit, whether elders like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders should try to “run the country,” as the cliché goes, for the next four years. I also look at the disturbed old man now currently the President, his already meager brain cells obviously crammed with memories of being a reality TV star for the millions, plus the fat from a zillion Big Macs. Incoming senility – or fast-food grease – or malicious intent -- or some toxic combination? (Elizabeth Warren turned 70 on June 22, but she clearly has the physical and psychic and mental energy of a 50-year-old, plus she has done her homework. She knows stuff. Every case is different.) Meantime, the septuagenarian Robert Mueller delivered a warning that the Russians are coming. Most of the country is on vacation, watching videos on smartphones or summer movie sequels, clearly not reading newspapers, much less 444-page reports (mea culpa on that one.) Robert Mueller has tried. Whatever happens next, not his fault. He is an American hero, and in my mind remains one. ![]() Paul Moses quotes Horton the Elephant (by Dr. Seuss) to stress the Semper-Fi values of Robert Mueller. Please see the follow essay from Common-weal Magazine: www.commonwealmagazine.org/i-said-what-i-meant
bruce
7/25/2019 11:07:41 pm
george, 7/26/2019 11:28:35 am
I believe that the Democrats miscalculated in what they expected to gain from Mueller’s testimony. They should have taken him at his word and realized that he was not going to do their job for them in exposing our president.
bruce
7/26/2019 11:47:31 am
alan,
Ed Martin
7/27/2019 12:49:09 pm
On target as Usuall, GV, Alan, et.al.
Ed
7/27/2019 12:52:30 pm
Please forgive typos, my fingers have a mind of their own these days.
George Vecsey
7/27/2019 05:33:35 pm
Edd: No prblm wit typg. My too. GV
bruce
7/27/2019 05:40:28 pm
george,
bruce
7/28/2019 11:30:41 am
george,
George Vecsey
7/29/2019 11:40:12 am
Bruce: If they were going to sue me, they would have done it in 2004 at the Olympics in Athens when the Media Center was catered by, you guessed it -- "salad" meaning a piece of lettuce and a section of tomato, in plastic. This in a country of fresh food (one of first things I learned in Greece was how to say "Roast chicken and Greek salad."
bruce
7/29/2019 12:08:41 pm
george,
bruce
7/29/2019 12:02:47 pm
george, Comments are closed.
|
QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God! Then I would wake into keening grief all over again. Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days. After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy. Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s. Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone. ----- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html Jan. 30, 2023 Categories
All
|