DOGE Team Interview

No matter what you think of President Trump and Elon Musk, you owe it to yourself to view last week's interview of Elon Musk and his DOGE team by Bret Baier on Special Report, his daily evening news show on Fox News. Here is a link to the interview that was broadcast in two segments. Even if you just listen to the first 15 minutes, you will find it to be a real eye opening on Musk and his team. 

Here is just one example of what you will find. The Small Business administration has given out about $300,000,000 in loans to children under the age of 11. One loan for $100,000 even went to a nine-month- old infant. In addition, it has given out another $300,000,000 to people over the age of 120. Obviously, the government could not protect itself from fraudsters who steal the Social Security numbers of newborns, or deceased seniors and use them to steal money that could have been used for legitimate purposes. 

It is not that the government officials who approved these loans were corrupt, but the systems and procedures they used were antiquated and inefficient. If the Small Business administration's computers had been able to check the birthdates available on Social Security computers, the fraud could not have happened. Of course, these loans will never be paid back. When the infant enters adulthood, it will find a major blot on its credit rating.

These SBA loans are just a small part of what the DOGE team has found in just a couple of months. Musk claims that he hopes to eliminate a Trillion dollars 0f waste and fraud, and he has assembled what appears to be an extremely competent team. If they can reduce fraud, and eliminate wasteful spending, they will perform a great service. Just the other day, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that the Federal government had been regularly sending Medicaid reimbursements to more than one state for individuals who had moved. 

The interview also provided an insight into the type of people Musk has on his DOGE team. They are not nineteen-year-old whiz kids but experienced and talented business leaders and technocrats. One was the founder of AIR BNB, and another had taken leave from  five thriving businesses he owned in Texas to serve.  

It will be a shame if many refuse to watch this interview because they dislike Trump or Musk, or because it appeared on deplorable Fox News. As far as the latter is concerned, these people should be aware that Bret Baier has carved out a niche for himself on "Special Report." It occupies the 6:00 pm time slot and comes closer to the iconic news shows of the past than any other. Unlike the opinion shows on Fox and other cable news networks, it strives to be fair and balanced. It has become, for good reason, the highest rated news show on TV. Since the beginning of the year the Prime Minister of England, Emanuel Macron of France, and Ukraine's Zelensky have all been interviewed by Baier on Special Report. 

The interview with Musk and his Doge team is perhaps the best of the lot. It is worth 15 minutes of your time. Click on the link above or watch the video below.

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Ukraine: Stop the Killing

                                           

 

Even the most inveterate Trump hater should at least be able to give the President some credit for wanting to stop the killing in Ukraine. I know they distrust anything he says, and fear that he will strike a bad deal with Russia, but the older I get, the more I think that putting an end to the killing and ravages of war transcends all other considerations. 

As the saying goes, “War is Hell” but many commentators on both sides seem to regard it as a game that can be won or lost. However, would any of these pundits be willing to participate on an actual battlefield? It is always the young men on both sides who will bear the burden and face the horror.

A couple of years ago I read and posted on Lawrence Kirby’s Stories from the Pacific, a book about his experience as a young Marine in World War II. I was told about this book by my brother-in-law Richard Gardella who knew Larry Kirby briefly before the former Marine died at the age of 99 in a Senior residence. The stories in Kirby’s book are a real eye opener and at times extremely heart rending. 

In one especially moving chapter he describes one incident that took place while fighting in the jungle of the island of Guam. He was on a scouting mission when suddenly he came upon a young Japanese soldier about 20 feet away. Their eyes met in stunned silence but after a brief pause the Japanese hurled a grenade and Kirby rushed him and opened fire. Kirby was wounded by the grenade shrapnel, but the Japanese soldier was dead. Kirby never forgot that tragic experience. Years later he wrote this poem.

I met a youthful enemy 

My fear reflected in his eye

I loathed him not, nor did he me

But we must fight and one must die.

No longer boys but not yet men

Just sad young soldiers sick with fright

Flag and face our difference then

One’s timeless sleep would come that night

Panic grew with every breath

I had to kill, I had to try.

Why do I seek a stranger’s death?

With vain despair I wondered why?

I could be his friend, not foe

Such wish was true, not foolish whim.

The brave, young lad will never know.

With tragic skill I murdered him.

Long years have passed since when he fell

My heart still aches, no sense of pride.

Though I seem here I live in hell.

On that cruel day I also died. *

Lawrence Kirby believed that soldiers did not like to talk about their experiences mainly because no one would believe how horrible war could be for the young men who actually fought. He wrote, 

"The ultimate desecration of the human spirit is the conscious activity of cruel inhumanity, predicated and justified—at least in the minds of those who sent us—as noble and patriotic duty, a privilege and responsibility accepted willingly by only the brave, offering their lives in this crusade and, further, willing to kill other equally brave and misguided young men in the cause of patriotism and in the name of duty…. (53)

My war ended with Iwo Jima. I was one of the very lucky few to survive the terrible bloodshed. It was my last campaign, thank God. The killing, the screaming, the torn bodies, the shattered limbs the suffering—it had become too much to handle! There were times when I thought I would welcome death. Ending the terror seemed more important than living." (56)

It seems to me that all Americans should unite behind the President in his efforts to stop the killing. I don't believe it will be as easy as the President initially thought, but it would certainly help if, on this one issue, he had the support of a united America.   

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*Lawrence F. Kirby: Stories from the Pacific. P. 102

Irish Heritage

    

On St. Patrick's Day I repeat an earlier post on our debt to the Irish.                                          

Practically everyone must know that the great migration of the Irish to America took place after the terrible potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century. However, even before that disaster the Irish had been the subject of persecution going back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century when King Henry VIII seized control of the English church. 

The Irish were longtime enemies of the English and when Henry, who considered himself King of Ireland as well as England, attacked their thousand-year-old faith the enmity only grew worse. Later, Henry’s daughter Elizabeth tried unsuccessfully to subdue the Irish Catholics throughout her reign. After the Puritan revolution in England in the mid-seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell brutally suppressed Irish resistance. By the end of the century William and Mary, after driving Mary’s Catholic father James from the English throne, delivered another devastating blow to the Irish at the battle of the Boyne.

The almost perpetual Irish resistance led the English and their Protestant friends in Ireland to pass penal laws that had the effect of depriving most Irish Catholics of all their rights including the right to their own confiscated properties. 

Many Irish left their homeland for good in the century before the great famine. They were sometimes called the “wild geese” and many of them made a name for themselves in Europe. In the nineteenth century the ruling family in Serbia was the Obrenovich family, heirs no doubt of some Irish O’Brien. Years ago, Ed Obradovich played linebacker for the Chicago Bears. His family must have come from central Europe but there must have been a Brady ancestor. I recall meeting a Polish American priest whose name, Okonski, must have derived from O’Conner. John Konecny, a long ago squash buddy, looked as Irish as Paddy's pig.

When the Irish came to America, they didn’t starve because of the availability of jobs and land. Nevertheless, despite separation of Church and State in America, the Irish were still objects of prejudice and discrimination primarily because of their Catholicism. I recall an American historian saying that the most long lasting and abiding prejudice in America was directed not against Jews or Blacks but against Catholics. That assertion may be disputed by some but the KKK was so called because its hatred was directed against Koons, Kikes, and Katholics.

Just because national or ethnic groups have been victimized by prejudice and discrimination does not mean that they themselves cannot practice such behavior when given the opportunity. Growing up in New York City in the 40s and 50s I vividly recall that only Irish need apply for membership in the City’s Transit Workers Union. I have never forgotten the resentment of my mother-in-law when her Italian parents were told by an Irish priest that they did not belong in predominately Irish St. John’s church and that they should attend the Italian church in town. 

Still, the success of the Irish in America means that we all are in their debt. I would just like to give a few personal examples. I was born and raised in the Woodside section of Queens, a neighborhood after WW2 made up largely of the descendants of Irish and Italian immigrants. My best friend was my cousin Pete whose father’s ancestry was Irish and German. Pete’s father, my Uncle Pete, was a New York City policeman who always seemed all Irish to me, and so did my cousin even though his mother was Italian. My next best friend was Dermot (Dermie) Woods whose family was very Irish. Both of Dermie’s older brothers had served in the Navy during the war.

St. Mary Help of Christians, my parochial elementary school, matched the ethnic make up of Woodside. There were some Italian kids in my class, but the majority was Irish. I still remember Richie Moylan, John Regan, Tom Fay, Charley Dunphy, and top student Pat Ryan who would go on to become a Jesuit priest and get a doctorate from Harvard in Islamic studies. His father was a saloon keeper. 

Most of the nuns were of Irish ancestry. They were of the order of St. Dominic and their formidable black and white habits helped them keep almost perfect order in classes sometimes numbering over 50 students. Only years later did I come to find out that many of them were barely out of their teens and still attending college.

It seemed natural for me to follow cousin Pete to Power Memorial high school in Manhattan. Power was a Catholic school for boys run by the Irish Christian Brothers whose most famous graduate would be Lou Alcindor, who would later call himself Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I still remember some of the Irish brothers with great affection and respect. There was Brother Hehir, my first home room teacher, a saintly innocent old man who was the butt of innumerable pranks and jokes by us “dirty little stinkers.” No one fooled around with wise old Brother Gleason, however. He was the Latin teacher with a passionate love of ancient Rome. Only years later did I discover that it was the Irish who had saved Western Civilization during the Dark Ages when monks in the mold of Brother Gleason preserved and later revived the lore and wisdom of antiquity. Finally, I remember Brother Conefrey who ran our honors class and exposed us modern barbarians to the wonders of English literature. 

Monastery Iona*

For some reason that still remains unclear to me I went to college at Fordham University, a famed Jesuit school in the Bronx. The Jesuits had been founded in the sixteenth century by Ignatius of Loyola, a young soldier from the Basque country in what is now northwestern Spain, but the Jesuit fathers at Fordham seemed to be largely of Irish ancestry. Nevertheless, in 1957 they taught and revered an old curriculum based on a model devised during the Renaissance. We studied Western philosophy, theology, history (eight credits in medieval history were required), rhetoric, literature, and language under scholars named O’ Sullivan, O’Callaghan, Mc Nally, Walsh and Clark. 

Three cheers for the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. 

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* Iona photo courtesy of David Orme.

I Lose My Job

Many people today are worried about losing their jobs, especially those with government jobs. In his recent speech to Congress, President Trump read a long list of wasteful and unnecessary spending on the part of the federal government and promised significant cuts. Even state and local government employees are worried since the loss of Federal grants might cause them to lose their jobs.

I know from experience that it is a hard thing to lose your job. Back in 1972 I lost my job as an Assistant Professor of History at a small Catholic college in Connecticut. The college had only come into existence ten years earlier as an experiment in Catholic higher education. It was to be run entirely by lay people although the local bishop would still head the Board of Directors. In addition, there would be no dorms, and the students would all be commuters or day hops. 

Initially, the school flourished as students and parents took advantage of the low cost. Also, during the Vietnam war many young men enrolled to avoid the draft. However, by 1972 the war was winding down and enrollment was dropping. As a result, administration decided to cut costs by trimming the faculty and did so by declining to grant tenure to anyone eligible that year.

Seven of us were denied tenure that year. Tenure is an unfamiliar concept to most people. For academics, it meant that once you receive tenure, it was almost impossible to lose your position thereafter. You have a job for life. In effect, the seven years I had been teaching there were a probationary period. 

I did have some paranoia about my dismissal. I thought that the administration had decided to terminate seven people just to get rid of me since I was the elected head of the faculty association. In academe it was not called a union, but it had some resemblance although there was no collective bargaining. I had also been overwhelmingly elected to the Faculty Senate during the years of student unrest that accompanied the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. 

Looking back now, I can see that while administrators might have been glad to see me go, I did not have a strong case for tenure. I was not a popular teacher since I had a reputation of being a hard grader. As an academic, it took seven years for me to complete my doctoral dissertation, and I had no publications to my credit. Coincidentally, I received my doctorate on the same day my tenure appeal was denied. 

So, in the Spring of 1972, I was thirty-three years old and out of a job. Complicating things was the fact that my wife and I had five small children ranging in age from 8 to 2. We had bought a small house in Fairfield with help from my father who provided the $2000 down payment. We lived from paycheck to paycheck and had only meager savings. Teaching jobs were nonexistent in the area, and we did not want to relocate our family.

I had to find work out of academe, but my doctorate made me virtually unemployable. Prospective employers would only laugh and say that someone with your education would not be happy or useful working for them. Eventually, the only employers interested in me were insurance companies always on the lookout for new agents who basically worked on a commission basis. No sales meant no pay. 

At that time, most academics looked down their noses at people engaged in business. Today, practically everyone goes to college to study business, but back in 1972 the business department at our school had only a few majors. Just as today, people in higher education tended to frown on those who worked for profit. Insurance agents were regarded as the lowest of the low in the business world, maybe just a notch above used car salesmen.

Nevertheless, I had no choice. I interviewed with a couple of companies but one seemed to have a novel approach. It was then among the leaders in the nascent mutual fund industry and offered low-cost life insurance as a supplement to mutual fund investing. I did fail their aptitude test that showed that I was an academic with no aptitude for sales. The office manager, whose contempt for academics matched mine for salesmen, informed me that he would not be able to take me on, but when I asked if I could borrow the study materials he had given me, he admired my persistence and immediately changed his mind. It was no skin off his nose since it was a commission only job. So, I became a salesman, a peddler of life insurance and mutual funds.

Needless to say, it was extremely difficult. Most new agents flunked out in weeks or months. The aptitude analysis was correct, but it only measured what I was and not what I could become. Only with the help and unflagging support of my wife, who went back to nursing, was I able to survive the first year and develop the knowledge, skills, and experience needed for success in this very competitive field. As the years went by, successful sales agents would morph into financial planners no longer dependent on commissions. Over the next 35 years I was able to build a very successful financial planning practice with hundreds of contented clients. 

In my case, losing my job was one of the best things that ever happened to me and my family.

 

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Ash Wednesday

 

                                             

A few years ago around Ash Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Michael S. Roth, the President of Wesleyan University, on the reluctance of modern students to consider topics like the soul and salvation. In addition to his administrative duties Roth taught a class in which he tried to inculcate historical imagination in his students by asking them to consider and discuss the questions that deeply concerned people in the past. However, he was disconcerted when he discovered a particular blind spot among his students.

Whenever he tried to discuss the interest of philosophers and other thinkers in the past with questions about the soul and salvation, he found a decided reticence on the part of his students to engage. Although usually eager to discuss any of the pressing issues of the day, the students generally clammed up and avoided eye contact by looking down into their notebooks. 

Unfortunately, Roth did not go into the reasons for the students’ reserve but took most of his essay explaining why it was important to understand why such issues had such importance to great thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. Roth admitted that he was a secular Jew and an atheist, and insisted that he was certainly not trying to “convert” the students. 

It’s too bad that Dr. Roth did not ask his students about their reasons for shying away from any discussion that smacks of “religion.” I can think of a number of reasons why the students might have been reluctant to engage, but I’m only guessing.

The first that comes to mind stems from the high probability that most professors at Wesleyan, then and now, neither believe that they have an immortal soul, nor think that they require salvation. Any student professing such beliefs would likely be ridiculed by teachers and regarded as a pariah by their classmates. Actually, I think that the animus towards religious subjects was inculcated even before the students went to college. It is part of the media world that they have inhabited since childhood.

Despite Dr. Roth’s good intentions, I doubt if he ever would have become President of Wesleyan if he had been a church going Methodist. Even though the school is one of many named after the eighteenth century religious reformer, a school like Wesleyan would probably never name a President today who shared John Wesley’s beliefs or concerns.

Practically all the great institutions of learning in Europe and America were founded by churches, but today a belief pervades modern society that there is a total disconnect between religion and reason when it comes to the search for truth. Nevertheless, our universities have not become centers of reason and science. Credulity of all kinds still prevails. Someone once said, “when people cease to believe in God, they will believe in anything.”

Look at the popularity of the supernatural and occult in films and videogames today. Vampire films are box office bonanzas. My grandson went to a Jesuit Catholic university where he could hardly find a course on Catholicism to fulfill his religious studies requirement. He had to fall back on a course on Voodoo taught by a truly committed believer. 

Ironically, Dr. Roth admitted that despite his atheism, he still felt the need to say the Jewish Kaddish for his deceased father. Of course, tradition would not allow him to say it alone and so he had to find a group of ten. It wasn’t easy for a non-practicing Jew but he eventually found a group. Not only was he able to say the prayers for his father, but he also found in the group a congenial community. So Dr. Roth is not really an atheist. Either he reserves his religion for special situations, or he just has gone back to ancestor worship, the earliest form of religion.

I suspect similar motives drive modern Catholics when they go to Church on Ash Wednesday. Years ago on a visit to our daughter in California, my wife and I attended the local church, St. Joseph’s Basilica, in Alameda. The church is an enthusiastic community made up of the descendants of the original settlers of the island right next to Oakland, as well as more recent immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, China, and Vietnam. The dynamic but self-effacing young pastor from India scheduled five masses for Ash Wednesday. The morning mass that we attended was packed with people waiting to receive the ashes on their foreheads.

Maybe people don’t like to think about the soul and salvation any more but down deep they seem to want to be reminded that they are dust and to dust they will return.

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Russia: Twelve Angry Men

  

                                

 

As President Trump attempts to negotiate an end to war between Russia and Ukraine, politicians and pundits are flooding him with advice as if he had no competent advisors on his team. It is interesting to note that Trump has set a priority on ending the killing, while former President Biden did little to bring the fighting to an end. 

To my mind Biden's greatest failure as President was his inability or unwillingness to act as an agent of peace. Indeed, in his interview with Tucker Carlsen last year, Vladimir Putin claimed that then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had quashed a peace settlement hammered out between Russia and Ukraine at a meeting in Turkey. It is hard to believe that the British P.M. would have acted without the support of the Biden administration.

In any event, I suspect that many people offering unsolicited advice to President Trump are not really aware of the situation in Russia today. Their repeated references to Hitler and Stalin indicate that they are living in the past. They do not understand that a second Russian revolution occurred after the break up of the Soviet Empire. The ineptness of our media makes it difficult for Americans to understand what is going on in Russia.

I have had an almost lifelong fascination with Russia. I suppose it started with literature during my high school and college years. I never took a formal course on Russian literature, but I read War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, the Brothers Karamazov and others with fascination although perhaps little understanding. A few years later I discovered the novels and histories of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest and most influential authors of the twentieth century. No one ever explained the nature of Communism in Russia netter than he did. Just a couple of years ago I waded through The Icon and the Axe, James Billington’s magisterial study of Russian history and culture.

Today, I doubt if any of my college educated grandchildren have ever read or will read any of these great authors. I doubt that they have even heard their names. I suppose that their knowledge of Russia, like that of our own politicians, is likely superficial and unhistorical. Since books are too time consuming, and seemingly irrelevant in our age, film may be the only way to provide insights into a country like Russia, especially after the revolutionary events that followed upon the collapse of the Soviet empire. Here is a brief review of a film that sheds much light on this extremely diverse country that extends over nine time zones. 

In 2007 Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov produced, directed, wrote, and acted in “12”, a film based on the American drama and film “Twelve Angry Men.” Mikhalkov won a special award at the Venice film festival that year, and his film also received an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film. The film is a masterpiece that far exceeds the earlier American version in power and intensity. 

The film also opens a window, actually twelve windows, into post-Soviet Russia. "12" refers to the twelve jurors who are hearing a case involving a young man accused of murdering his stepfather. Complicating matters is the fact that the young man is a Chechen, a member of that ethnic group that has never been fully assimilated into Russian society. Chechens are, at the same time, hated and feared by most Russians. Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed that even Gulag prison guards feared the Chechen prisoners who often terrorized the other prisoners.

The film, however, is not about the prisoner but about the jurors. These twelve men, each represents an aspect of Russian life after the fall of Communism. They are a diverse group that includes, among others, a successful post-communist businessman, a doctor educated in Moscow but originally from the provinces, a Russian TV executive with a degree from Harvard, a former Soviet bureaucrat who fondly remembers the good old days of Communism, and even a bigoted cab driver.

The case against the young man seems open and shut but doubts arise. Inevitably, each juror reveals himself in dealing with what turns out to be a very complicated case. In revealing their own stories, they tell us more about modern Russia than we will ever find in our own media.

As mentioned above the film is powerful and intense, and filled with often mysterious flashbacks that eventually come together like pieces in a puzzle. But most of the power and intensity takes place in the makeshift jury room where twelve fine actors strut their stuff.

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Ukraine Settlement

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated this week that the way to a settlement of the war in Ukraine would be to give up the idea of Ukraine ever entering the NATO alliance. In other words, Ukraine would be independent of both East and West with no foreign troops on its soil. There is no doubt in my mind that when former President Biden opened the door to NATO membership for Ukraine, Vladimir Putin regarded it as a provocation. A few months later Russian troops invaded Ukraine. 

I have put up a number of posts on Ukraine in the past and readers who think I am too old or ill-informed, might be surprised to find that I anticipated the Trump administration position ten years ago. See the following post that originally appeared on February 13, 2015, seven years before the war began.

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In an interview in last Saturday's Wall Street Journal, General Frederick B. Hodges, commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe, made the case for military aid to the Ukraine and for an increased NATO involvement. Nevertheless, the General made some admissions that make one wonder if there might be another alternative. 

The General argued that Russia is preparing for war some five or six years in the future with some unspecified enemy. He believed that the Russians regard China as their greatest threat but that at the same time noted that they were conducting simulations of a nuclear attack on the United States. He did not mention that they might be concerned with the threat of Islamic fundamentalism all along their southern borderlands.

To counter the Russian threat the General pointed out that our own resources are stretched thin. Nine out of ten of our divisions are currently engaged in missions all over the world. The General insisted that we cannot act on our own anymore and must rely increasingly on our allies. However, our NATO allies have not and will not live up to their treaty commitments. Only four of them dedicate more than the required 2% of GDP to defense spending.

Finally, the General admitted that we need a strategy, and that military aid to the Ukraine or any other country does not by itself constitute a strategy. He asks that we consider the outcome we want to achieve in the Ukraine.  Do we really want the Ukraine to become a battlefield where millions might die? Do we want a city like Mariupol on the Black Sea to become a desert like Mosul?

Why can't we consider Russia as an ally and not an enemy? Instead of confronting Russia with NATO, why not guarantee that an independent Ukraine will never be part of NATO. The Ukraine provides Russia with millions of customers for its vast energy reserves. After all, both the US and Russia will more and more have to deal with the growing power of China, as well as with radical Islam. 

The Journal has launched a barrage of editorial comment against Russia in the past week. One op-ed suggested that a military buildup is not necessary because we could crush the Russians economically with increased sanctions and low oil and gas prices. This is another dangerous suggestion since if we drive the Russians to the wall, they might become desperate. Why isn't a strong Russia to our advantage? If we think economic sanctions hurt the Russian oligarchs, what do we think they will do to the ordinary Russian citizen.

Journal columnist Bret Stephens, a longtime proponent of arming the Ukrainians, even quoted and praised a practically insane statement by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham who claimed that he did not know what the outcome of military intervention would be, and did not care how many Ukrainians or Russians might die, or even if we lost. All that mattered was that the US not back down and appease Putin.

It would be so much less costly in terms of men and money to bring the Russians into NATO than to confront them with a flaming sword on their historical Western front. It would be better to have a strong, economically viable Russia as an ally rather than an enemy in the ongoing war against radical Islam.

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Note: The flaming sword is the insignia of the U.S. Army in Europe.

Mickey Rooney and The Human Comedy

 

    

                  

 

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, the diminutive Mickey Rooney was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. He is best remembered for playing teenager Andy Hardy in an extremely popular series of films, and for the MGM musicals where he was paired with MGM’s other great teen star, Judy Garland. In these light comedies and musicals Rooney, who had been in show business since early childhood, demonstrated that he was an extremely talented performer and musician. A good example can be seen in Strike Up the Bandwhere Rooney appeared as a leader of a teen age band hoping to make it big. His “Drummer Boy” number where he plays both the drums, and a xylophone is truly iconic. Click on this link or see the video below. 

Perhaps his greatest role came in 1943 when he starred in a film adaptation of William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, a wartime drama that depicted life on the home front in a small California town. Saroyan had originally written a screenplay for a film that he planned to direct himself, but when the studio complained that the film would be way too long, Saroyan walked out and published his work as a novel which became hugely successful right before the studio completed its version. It is a great and moving read.

The film version based on Saroyan’s script and directed by veteran director Clarence Brown was also a huge hit in wartime USA. The story revolves around a family headed by a recently widowed mother played by Fay Bainter, one of Hollywood’s standard mothers, who has four children. The eldest son, played by Van Johnson, has been drafted into the army and awaits assignment overseas. Donna Reed, a budding young star, plays the daughter on the verge of womanhood. There is even a four-year-old son, what used to be known as a caboose baby, who gets some good scenes. Although Mickey Rooney was 22 years old at the time, his looks and small stature allowed him to play the fourteen-year-old son.

Although everyone in the fine cast is featured in various vignettes, Rooney is the star, and he gives a magnificent performance. He plays Homer Macaulay, a teenager whose father has recently died, and whose elder brother is in the army. At 14 he must somehow become the man in the family. He takes a part-time job as a messenger for a local telegraph company to help his mother with the bills. It turns out to be a life changing experience.  The office manager, played by James Craig, becomes a mentor, as does the elderly, alcoholic telegraph operator played by Frank Morgan, a veteran character actor who had played the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz.

Telegrams are largely a thing of the past but delivering them during the war could be difficult. Apparently, the War Department used telegrams to notify families of the death of their sons. In one memorable scene, Homer has to deliver such a message to an illiterate Mexican mother who asks him to read the dreaded message. It is an extremely moving scene, and Rooney does a great job. It’s no wonder that he received a nomination for Best Actor.

Although largely forgotten today, The Human Comedy is one of the great films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Like the book, it is a beautiful and moving story with a memorable if idealized depiction of small-town life during the war years. 

By the end of the war, Rooney was too old to play teenagers and had to make the transition to grown up roles. His looks and stature made it impossible to play traditional leading men, but he still possessed great dramatic ability.  Two of my favorites from the post-war era are the 1949 Quicksand, and the 1953 Drive a Crooked Road.

In Quicksand Rooney plays an automobile mechanic working in a large garage who falls for a sexy cashier in a nearby diner. He asks her for a date and when she accepts, he has to come up with some dough since he is broke until payday. He decides to borrow some from the garage cash register and replace it on payday. Unfortunately, he is found out and must struggle to replace the money. His attempts only get him deeper and deeper into trouble. The film’s title is appropriate. The film also features Jeanne Cagney, James Cagney’s sister, and Peter Lorre.

Drive a Crooked Road, follows a similar pattern. Once again Rooney is a garage mechanic but, in this film, he also drives race cars in local races. He plays a lonely young man who can only dream of driving at Indianapolis or Le Mans. One day a beautiful young woman walks into the garage and singles out the unlikely Rooney to work on her car. It turns out that she is part of a gang of bank robbers who need a skilled driver to drive the getaway car for their next job. Sure enough, he falls for her and the dream of big money with tragic results. 

Quicksand and Drive a Crooked Road are low budget “B” movies, but Rooney gave “A” performances in both. Although he would never again reach the fame and fortune of his Hollywood heyday, he continued to work in movies, TV, Broadway, and touring companies almost until his death in 2014 at the age of 94. 

 

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Pardon Me

A recent headline in my local newspaper exclaimed in large bold letters, ‘A terrible mistake’. The quote was from Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal concerning the pardon granted by former President Biden to a Connecticut man convicted of conspiracy to commit the murders of a woman and her young son who were scheduled to appear as witnesses in a murder trial back in 1999. 

Blumenthal attributed Biden’s mistake to an “oversight” but did not explain how such an oversight could have occurred? How could the name of this convicted criminal, as well as the names of a dozen other convicted Connecticut drug dealers mentioned in a related article, have come to Biden’s attention in the first place?  Who pleaded their cause? Who wanted them pardoned? Most of them had long criminal histories that included illegal firearm possession.

What reason could President Biden have had for pardoning these criminals? Perhaps he did not even know who he was pardoning and just signed the document placed before him. But in that case, who was responsible for the terrible mistake?  I suppose we will never know.

It is different in the case of the pardons meted out to Biden’s own family in the last minutes of his Presidency. Actually, these family members have so far never been accused or convicted of anything. The President took the unprecedented step of pardoning them for anything they may have done wrong since 2014.

The start date of this immunity, 2014, is very important. It was in that year that then Vice-President Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter, became involved in the affairs of Ukraine. At that time Biden openly bragged that he had forced the government of Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating corruption. At the same time, Biden’s son Hunter enjoyed a lucrative position of the board of a Ukrainian energy company that was the focus of the corruption investigation. In pardoning his family and his son, Biden effectively pardoned himself for any wrongdoing over the past ten years.

The pardon given to Hunter Biden late last year is somewhat different. Hunter had actually been convicted of tax evasion and a violation of Federal gun control laws. While he was still running for re-election, Joe Biden said that he would not pardon his son, but when a plea deal fell through, he had no choice. At the time progressive commentators gushed that even though the President lied, he was motivated by love of his son. Who can blame such a loving father? Who would not do the same? 

Nevertheless, it appears to me that the pardon had more to do with fear than with love. I suspect that ever since their meddling in the Ukraine back in 2014, the son had something potentially damaging on his father. Hunter’s pardon was not just for his recent convictions but went all the way back to 2014.

 I have been poring through Miranda Devine’s recent book, “The Big Guy,” about Joe Biden and his son Hunter. On many occasions Hunter claimed that over the past ten years he had worked very hard for his family. He was not going to take the fall. 

Reading Miranda Devine’s book, it is not hard to imagine that the relationships in the Biden family were not always loving especially when Hunter was addicted to crack, sex, and porn. Devine writes that at the time Hunter dropped the now famous lap-top off at the repair shop, his “life was at rock bottom. His crack addiction was out of control, and he had been bouncing between cheap motels filming himself having threesomes with hookers.”

“He was in a rage with his family. His relationship with his widowed sister-in-law Hallie had grown toxic. He accused her of cheating, and she had banned him from seeing her children until he sought rehab. He accused his father of siding with her and was on the outs even with Uncle Jim. [98]…”

He seemed to have little regard for his father and stepmom Jill. Perhaps it was the crack addiction, but Miranda Devine quotes the following words from Hunter about Jill and Joe.

“And you do know the drunkest I’ve ever been is still smarter than you could ever even comprehend and you’re a shit grammar teacher that wouldn’t survive one class in a ivy graduate program.

“So go fuck yourself Jill let’s all agree I don’t like you anymore than you like me.”

He also complained to his uncle that he had been to drug rehab seven times, but his father “literally has never come to one never actually called me while in rehab.” [109].

 

In his famous little political treatise, The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian Renaissance diplomat and political observer, devoted a whole section to whether it is better to be loved or feared. For a number of reasons he concluded that for anyone in power it was better to be feared than to be loved. Hunter was a loose cannon to be feared and had to be pardoned.

 

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Predictions 2025

                                             

January is the time of year when many pundits like to make predictions for the upcoming year. Shortly after I started the Weekly Bystander, I realized that it was foolish to make predictions. Most predictions are either just wishful thinking, or simply a call for the continuation of the current trend. 

Nevertheless, I would like to do some wishful thinking of my own for 2025. Today, I listened as President Trump's spelled out an ambitious agenda in his inaugural address. As he spoke I thought about the harsh realities that would face him in the next four years.

Trump seems remarkably fit and hearty for someone his age. Still, as time goes by it will be more and more apparent that he is a lame duck who cannot succeed himself. He has surrounded himself with a group of ambitious young people who inevitably will begin to jockey for party leadership.

He has the slimmest of margins in Congress where he cannot even count on unanimity in his own party. Democrats in Congress will obviously be even more obstructionist than ever. I believe that it will be very difficult to advance his domestic agenda through Congress. Like his Democrat predecessors he will have to govern by executive order and administrative action.

Even if his appointees to high office are approved by the Senate, they will be impeded and obstructed by a Federal bureaucracy that is more than 90% Democratic. This bureaucracy is relatively secure in their jobs. Elon Musk will not be able to treat them as if they were Tesla employees.

However, President Trump will have a freer hand in foreign affairs. It is interesting that in his remarks today he said that he wants to be remembered as a man of peace. One of the reasons I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 was his stated concern about the danger of nuclear war. I cannot find the exact source but I recall that when he was asked about the greatest issue facing the country, he put the threat of nuclear war at the top of the list. I do not recall whether any other candidate expressed a similar concern. Certainly, his first administration saw four years of relative peace in the world.

Of all the failures of the Biden administration, the greatest has been the failure of the outgoing President to appear as a champion of peace. For example, not only did his actions provoke the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also, they quashed a peace agreement reached by the warring parties early in the war.

Internationally, however, Trump has a freer hand. In his upcoming State of the Union address he could present himself as a champion of world peace and claim that his primary goal in the coming years will be to lessen tension all over the globe. 

Over a hundred years ago, World War I, a conflict sparked by the assassination of a leader in central Europe, eventually led to the slaughter of millions. Many even think that the aftermath of WWI led to the rise of totalitarian states with their horrible persecutions of their own people, and ultimately to the devastation of the Second World War.

There are many trouble spots in the world where a similar spark could ignite a nuclear exchange that would have unthinkable consequences for the whole world. The President could make the lessening of tensions his major issue in the coming year. Here are some examples.

First, some real collusion with Russia would be a very good idea. Russia does not have to be an enemy of Europe or the United States. It would be really beneficial if Russia was brought into working relationships with Europe and the USA that would be beneficial to all.

If Russia became the primary supplier of oil and natural gas for Europe, it would have little reason to aim intermediate range nuclear missiles at its customers in Europe. It would have every reason to treat its customers well. At the same time, Russia would receive a much needed revenue stream. 

As far as the USA is concerned it would be much better for us if Russia became a wealthy modern economy rather than a backward third world nation with so much of its GDP going to support a massive military. We don’t want to drive Putin’s back to the wall either economically or militarily. If we cut a deal with Russia, we could radically rethink the need for NATO, a military force that the Europeans don’t even want to support. 

A Russian deal could include a Ukraine deal. It is imperative to bring that war to an end. Both sides have much to gain by cutting a deal that would guarantee Ukrainian independence of both NATO and Russia. 

Second, the closing of a fair trade deal with China would not only benefit both sides economically, it might also lead the Chinese government to reconsider and reduce its provocative military build-up in the South China Sea. The last thing anyone wants is some trigger happy pilot on either side buzzing a rival warship.

We no longer have to fear Communist ideology in either Russia or China. It is true that both have authoritarian governments but their leaders seem much less interested in Communism than teachers and students in American colleges and universities.

Korea would also be a good place to cut a deal on behalf of peace. A peace treaty between North and South Korea would finally bring an end to the Korean War that began in 1950. It would be a great first step in reducing the enormous military weaponry already in place on both sides of the demilitarized zone. If all it takes to get North Korea’s leader to dismantle his nuclear program is the removal of American troops from the peninsula, I think it would be worth it. We should let the Korean people decide.

Finally, there is no greater tinder box in the world than the Middle East. American troops have been stationed there for over 20 years. Impossible as it might seem, I do think that deals could be cut there that would involve both Russia and Iran. If you look at a map, you will see that both of them have much more reason to be there than we do. After all, we don’t need the region’s oil anymore.

 If he presents himself a champion of peace, President Trump can rise above petty politics and secure his reputation forever.

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Lies and Hoaxes

                  

As the Biden administration comes to its end, it is amazing that most Democrats are still unaware that their party leadership, while routinely claiming that Donald Trump is an inveterate liar, have perpetrated three major hoaxes on them and the American people over the past eight years.

Hoax #1.  Eight years ago when Donald Trump first ran for President, Democrats claimed, and some still claim, that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the election. Their complaints led to the famous Mueller investigation which found no evidence of collusion. So not only was the Democrat charge unfounded, but we also now know that the so-called Steele dossier was a hoax that originated at the highest levels of the Hillary Clinton campaign. That’s right, the same person who recently received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden was behind the 2016 hoax.

Hoax #2.  Four years ago in the midst of the 2020 Presidential campaign, the New York Post ran the story of the laptop abandoned at a computer repair shop by Hunter Biden, the son of Democrat contender Joe Biden. Apparently, the laptop not only contained salacious images of Hunter’s drug and porn addicted life, but also evidence of criminal business activities that could even implicate his father.  

Immediately, Democrat operatives sprang into action and drafted a letter claiming the story was a product of Russian disinformation. 51 former US intelligence officials signed the letter and effectively quashed the story. We now know they all lied and that the hoax was initiated by Anthony Blinkin, who has been Secretary of State since Biden’s election. If Blinkin and the intelligence officials could lie to us to achieve their political goals, why should anyone trust them when it comes to Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia, Israel or Iran?

Miranda Devine, who wrote the original Post story, gives a very full account of this hoax in her recent book, “The Big Guy.” Now, four years later, we know that there really was a laptop abandoned by Joe Biden’s drug and porn addicted son. The laptop contained evidence of criminal activity that eventually led to Hunter’s recent conviction on tax evasion and fireman violations. 

No wonder that President Biden was forced to pardon his son despite his repeated avowals that he would not do so. Once a judge threw out a plea bargain, it became obvious that Hunter was not going to take the fall for anything. What else could explain the extent of the pardon that excused Hunter not only for the recent convictions, but also for anything Hunter might have done as far back as 2014 when both he and his father were heavily involved in Ukrainian affairs. Hunter’s pardon eliminates any further investigations of any kind.  

Hoax #3. Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an article detailing President Biden’s mental decline over the past four years, and the elaborate cover up of his incapacity by his family and close aides.  The cover up included repeated lies by Democrat politicians like Vice-President Harris, and Biden aides that the President was “sharp as a tack.”  Even after Biden’s disastrous debate performance last June, Democrats refused to accept the obvious until polls led them to insist the President withdraw from the Presidential race.  

To this day the aged President insists that if he had stayed in the race, he would have won.  Four years ago The Weekly Bystander observed that Biden was obviously suffering from the effects of old age.  Nevertheless, Democrats managed to put him in the White House by the barest of margins.  The idea of a puppet President whose strings were being pulled by others would be laughable if it hadn't had such serious consequences both at home and abroad.

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