Category Archives: Op-Eds

Op-Eds

Donald Trump and the Politics of Whine

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“No politician in history, and I say this with great surety,” US president Donald Trump told Coast Guard Academy graduates on May 17, “has been treated worse or more unfairly” than himself.

A day later, in the wake of the US Justice Department’s appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate allegations of “Russian meddling” on his behalf in the 2016 presidential election, Trump once again offered a grandiose reference to his place in history, this time via Twitter: “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”

Poor, poor Donald.  Nobody likes him, everybody hates him, guess he’ll eat some worms. And apparently he’s never heard of Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, Richard Nixon, or Bill Clinton, each of whom enjoyed “witch hunts” of their own, with varying justifications and outcomes .

For decades, Trump publicly epitomized Barry Switzer’s observation that “some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” Now he’s finally made it to the big league and it turns out his whole skill set consists of kicking dirt at the umpire and trying to empty the dugouts for a brawl every time a fastball gets past him.

Irony break: One of the loudest blocs of Trump supporters in last year’s presidential campaign consisted of voters outraged by decades of identity politics and what they considered the Democratic Party’s abusive use of victim groups to gain and hold political power: You know, those spoiled African-Americans whining about being shot dead by police, those evil gay couples demanding to be treated equally in matters of marriage (never mind that The Donald is the most openly pro-LGBTQ candidate ever elected to the office — he came out for marriage equality years before Hillary Clinton did, and draped a rainbow flag over himself at a campaign rally; logic is not those particular supporters’ strong suit), etc.

So here’s their anti-victimhood hero, Little Donald, sitting in the corner of the Oval Office screeching his lungs out, waving his rattle, and waiting for Kellyanne Conway to change his diaper, give him his ba-ba, and rock him to sleep.

That’s not to say that Trump’s complaints are wholly without merit. The “Russian meddling” thing continues to run on fumes and the fervent hope of Democrats that at some point evidence will show up to substantiate it.

But every president has complaints. Pardon us for expecting presidents to handle those complaints like responsible adults instead of like spoiled toddlers.

The Constitution requires the president to be at least 35 years old. Perhaps we need a new amendment likewise requiring the president to act his age. Time to grow up, Mr. President.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY

Op-Eds

Seth Rich, the DNC, and WikiLeaks: The Plot Thickens

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WikiLeaks Retweet of Seth Rich Story
WikiLeaks Retweet of Fox News’s Seth Rich Story

According to the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department, the nation’s capital reported 135 homicides last year. One of those homicides, the killing of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich on July 10, 2016, continues to make news ten months later.

Who killed Seth Rich, and why? We may never know for sure. On the other hand, a significant piece of the puzzle may have just fallen into place.

Fox News, citing a federal investigator as source, reports that Rich may well — as long rumored — have been the source of DNC emails published by WikiLeaks, less than two weeks after he was shot twice in the back during a robbery in which, curiously, nothing was apparently taken from him.

That email release, which revealed an internal DNC conspiracy to ensure the nomination of Hillary Clinton for president at the expense of her opponent, Bernie Sanders, wounded Clinton’s campaign and cost US Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz her position as DNC chair.

The federal source, as well as an investigator hired by the Rich family (former DC homicide detective Rod Wheeler), claims that Rich communicated with (now deceased) WikiLeaks director Gavin MacFadyen.

WikiLeaks founder/director Julian Assange, in line with the organization’s policy against outing sources, has resolutely declined to confirm or deny Rich as the DNC leaker. On the other hand, WikiLeaks did put up reward money for information leading to the arrest and conviction of his killer or killers — and retweeted, without comment, the Fox News story referenced above.

For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. In the case of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the right-wing conspiracy theory project of putting every fatal heart attack and accidental traffic death in America on a constantly updated, Internet-circulated “Clinton Body Count” list tends to make the rest of us cautious about just assuming skulduggery on the part of the Clintons and their associates in any given instance.

Still, it can’t be denied that Hillary Clinton has, as what her husband called his “co-president,” as a US Senator, and as US Secretary of State, proven herself to have both a sense of political entitlement and a distinctly murderous bent. If you doubt this, watch the CBS News video of her giggling “we came, we saw, he died” response to the killing of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Clinton’s publicly flaunted attitudes lend credibility to claims, admittedly listed as “unproven” (not necessarily “false”) by pro-Clinton site Snopes.com, that as Secretary of State she once seriously proposed the assassination of none other than Julian Assange: “Can’t we just drone this guy?”

Is it really that far-fetched to hypothesize that Clinton, or officials in her campaign or party — many of whom are accustomed to exercising power of life and death in when actually in office — wouldn’t quail from likewise killing in pursuit of their political interests? The DNC leak (and therefore the DNC leaker) arguably cost Clinton more than the 80,000 votes or so by which she lost the 2016 presidential election.

As the straight news types like to say: Developing.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY

Op-Eds

The US Postal Service is Dying. Let it.

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Image taken by User:Minesweeper on December 14...
Image taken by User:Minesweeper on December 14, 2003 and released into the public domain. From left to right, the post boxes belong to FedEx Corporation, University of California, Berkeley, United Parcel Service, and two from the United States Postal Service (the one on the left is for Express Mail only) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Like most monopolies, the US Postal Service isn’t interested in changing its business model. An enterprise hemorrhaging cash  in a free market would cut prices, improve service, look for new revenue streams, or simply close its doors. The USPS solution, as usual, is to raise prices and hope for the best.

Alternative proposal: Let’s put it out of its misery.

The Service posted losses of $562 million in the first quarter of 2017, the Associated Press reports.  This year will likely bring the Service’s sixth straight annual operating loss. While its package delivery revenues have grown, the areas in which it enjoys a monopoly — “first class” (letter) mail and “marketing” (junk mail) — are in decline thanks to the ascendance of email and other Internet technologies.

That decline is terminal. The age of hand-delivered paper mail on the scale required to sustain the Postal Service model is coming to an end, and the market is already well-situated (via the likes of Federal Express and United Parcel Service) to handle ever diminishing future levels of emergency and vanity traffic of that kind.

In truth, we’ve known for nearly 175 years that the Service’s government-granted monopoly is all that keeps it afloat. Its prices don’t reflect the market value of its services. In 1844, anarchist Lysander Spooner  founded the American Letter Mail Company and turned a profit selling stamps for 6.25 cents each or 20 for a dollar versus the Post Office’s price of 12 cents, delivering mail up and down the eastern seaboard until the federal government shut it down.

In the past, one excuse for a government monopoly on mail was to protect “universal service.” Spooner could make money serving Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, but the government’s postal monopoly used those “easy” routes to subsidize letter delivery to, for example, rural Kentucky and distant San Francisco, where private competitors would have had to charge prohibitively high rates.

Today, however, nearly all US households have telephones (cell or land line). According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of American adults use the Internet, and most of the rest COULD use it. Even with no home connection, they could visit the library or any of numerous free wi-fi locations, just as citizens of rural communities once visited the Post Office to pick up mail in the absence of home delivery.

If the Postal Service shut its doors today, taxpayers would still be on the hook for generous retirement and retiree health care commitments to its current and former employees. That’s no  reason to keep throwing good money after bad forever.

Neither is our natural nostalgia for the big blue corner mailboxes and the friendly neighborhood mail carrier.

Let’s say goodbye to what’s clearly become a relic of a bygone age.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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