Courtside

Just when I thought the Supreme Court of the United States was relatively immune from all the political chaos surrounding us the past five years or so, up pops Ginni Thomas.

Ginni Thomas is the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who also happens to be a prominent conservative political activist in the Washington DC power structure.

That fact alone should be alarming, given what her husband does for a living. Can you imagine the pillow talk?

Ginni Thomas

But late last week The Washington Post published a story – co-written by legendary muckraker Bob Woodward, along with colleague Robert Costa – that Ginni Thomas exchanged messages with President Trump's then White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to look into overturning the 2020 election results and to never concede the election loss to Joe Biden.

At least 29 messages between Ginni Thomas and Meadows were revealed by The Washington Post. The 29 messages were handed over by Meadows himself to the House select committee, investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He actually forked over 2,320 messages before deciding enough was enough, citing nonexistent presidential executive privilege as his reason to stop, subpoenas be damned.

I'm guessing that Ginni and Clarence both had wished Meadows had stopped with 2,291 messages.

Some of the messages included such refrains as "Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! ... The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist in our History."

Her use of the upper case and verb agreement (Creighton University must be proud) is perplexing enough, especially for a lawyer, but to wallow in QAnon conspiracy is simply astounding.

Although what Ginni Thomas wrote in her messages is not illegal, the texts are still chilling. The wife of a Supreme Court justice is calling for the overthrow of an American election (she attended the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse, but left before the assault on the Capitol because the weather was "too cold."), which is essentially calling for the overthrow of American democracy.

Freedom fighters in Ukraine are currently showing more of a conception of democracy then many House and Senate Republicans, some of whom still can't bring themselves to acknowledge that Biden is the legitimately elected President of the United States in the most secure elections ever held in this country.

What makes Ginni Thomas's messages so alarming has already been illustrated by her husband, who was the lone dissenting vote (without comment) in a Supreme Court decision to allow the Jan. 6 committee access to the National Archives for White House records. Apparently, Clarence Thomas felt strongly enough that the Jan. 6 panel should not have those documents. So did his wife. Did I do right, dear?

It's not a good look for the Court, which is supposed to operate in a world of equal justice and transparency and not conflict of interests. If that supposition holds true, then Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from any relevant Jan. 6  cases, if not resign outright. This affair goes directly to the integrity of the Court. He can thank his wife for that.

But neither recusal nor resignation will happen. The court is steeped in politics, no matter how indignant it becomes when it's accused of being political. But such may have always been the case, dating back to slavery and Dred Scott in 1857, if not Madison v. Marbury in 1803. It seems we have no choice but to accept the illusion that the Court is free of politics. Even now, the justices are claiming they can police themselves without following the ethics rules that are mandatory for the lower courts. Yeah, right. But this is where we are. This is why there will be no recusal or resignation.

Madisonian democracy, which mandates a revolution every four years with free and fair elections, is coming under assault by a Republican Party that has no platform – and hasn't had one ever since the Trump administration. How does that serve a government of, by and for the people? Consequently, American democracy is trying to keep its balance on constantly shifting ground littered with land mines.

Mid-term elections are approaching and the chaos constantly swirls around us unabated. Think hard and carefully before you vote. The ball, ironically, is in our court.

News views

 There's an old, familiar chestnut that says the first casualty of war is the truth.

So what is the truth? How do you determine the truth? What is propaganda? What is disinformation? What is a lie?

The current struggle in Ukraine, a sovereign nation fighting to keep its democracy in the face of an invasion from neighboring Russia, shows us almost hourly how the truth – and the bending of the truth – is a potent weapon of war.

And while war is almost always a battle for territory, it is also a battle for hearts and minds.

So while most of the world appears to support Ukraine's courageous struggle just to stay alive, there are some – Americans – who still favor Russia's rationale for its campaign of conquest.

Why?

Do they believe that Russia attacked Ukraine because there are supposedly biolabs on the border that threaten Russia? Really? Where is the evidence for that? Where are the pictures of these labs? Where are the videos? There is no physical evidence because there are no biolabs. It's that simple. To believe otherwise is to believe Qanon.

Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is propelling this vanity war in an effort to restore the old Russian empire, claims that Ukraine must be excised of Nazis. Is that believable? Of course not. There are no Nazis in the Ukraine government. But, remember, Russia lost perhaps as many as 30 million people in its Great Patriotic War against Hitler's Nazism during the 1940s. Mentioning Nazis now becomes a historical threat to those Russians who opt to believe it: Nazism happened once before, it can happen again. It's an effective brainwash.

Women and children – civilians – have fallen in the Russian onslaught, but Putin seems determined to blame those war crimes against the Ukrainian people themselves – that they are responsible for their own misfortune. A hospital blows up, a school crumbles, and Russia blames Ukraine. Right.

Ironically, that's exactly the same road map Germany used in World War II in its invasion of Russia.

Why some Americas – conservative politicians like Madison Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene, to name a few – denounced the Ukrainian struggle is baffling, if not actually outrageous. Mostly, I think, it's a political stance taken solely to oppose the current administration. What else could it be? Unless it's a treacherous path to support Putin. If so, then what are Cawthorn, Gaetz, Greene, et al, doing in an American congress? Useful idiots.

Social media also influences thought. I've seen the memes on Facebook – memes designed to divide Americans from each other. The next time you see a clever meme and feel compelled to post it, you might want to consider that it probably originated in a cyber meme factory in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Truth is not always easy to discern. Common sense helps. So does a smell detector. So does logic.

The truth is what you make it.

Map quest

 I was working out at the YMCA the other day and got involved in a conversation with a person at least 50 years younger than me (which would still make this person I was talking to about 20 years old).

It somehow came out that I was from the Philadelphia area. I was trying to give this person a mental point of reference about something we were discussing when I asked, "You know where Philadelphia is on the map, right?"

"Umm," came the reply. Then came a few passing seconds of silence, like I was offering up a trick question on an SAT exam. "Near the eastern part of Pennsylvania? About halfway up?"

I almost said, "Yeah, next to the Delaware River," but then I thought that this little tidbit might be overkill given the way this conversation was headed, so I just nodded "yes" and worried about the future of our children.

This geographic discussion got me to thinking about where we are in the world, and more precisely, do people actually know where we are located in the world? And especially now, with global events unfolding the way they are.

I've always been a map guy. I liked the folding maps we kept in our cars' glove compartments back in the day. When I got older and started traveling across state lines, I found comfort (and motels) in Rand McNally's life-saving road atlases. I still take an atlas with me on road trips, even though I've got all kinds of GPS stuff in my car.

I study maps in history books.

The mapboard.

 And, years ago, I played Avalon Hill strategy war games.

Whut?

Yep. Back in the 1960s, when I was about 10 or 11 or so and living in East Hartford, CT, a good friend of mine, Richard Bober, introduced me to Avalon Hill war games.

Briefly, the games are played on cardboard maps printed with hexagonal grids which determine movement. The playing pieces are little cardboard counters representing battalions and divisions, and they are printed with numerical movement, attack and defense factors. In addition, the mapboard includes rivers, mountains and cities, which can double defense factors.

Combat (and sometimes the weather) is resolved by the roll of a die, which are the games' random element. But, curiously, most of the games turned out with historically correct outcomes.

So, over the years, I bought Avalon Hill games left and right. I played D-Day, which taught me the geography of France. I played Afrika Korps, which taught me the geography of north Africa. I played Battle of the Bulge, which showed me Belgium and parts of Germany. I played Stalingrad, and later, The Russian Campaign, which showed me the geography of Russia and eastern Europe.

I even played Gettysburg, which showed me where Devil's Den was on the battlefield before I actually saw it for the first time.

Anyway, in Russia's current real-time onslaught of Ukraine, I know where Kiev and Kharkov are. I know where Lviv is, as well as Odessa and Brest. I know the Bug River, the Volga and the Dniper. I've crossed them hundreds of times with the roll of the die on my way to crushing Nazism.

I remember playing D-Day with Richard, who always seemed to win (hey, it was his game). In fact, I called him up the other day after going through my closets and finding a few of my old Avalon Hill games.

"Hey, Rich," I said with great anticipation. "I was looking through my closet, and you'll never guess what I found."

"Your Avalon Hill games," he instantly replied, stealing my thunder, and so the nostalgia tour began. 

I tried playing The Russian Campaign the other day (you can play the games solo, but what fun is there in beating yourself?), but after about an hour of trying to set up the counters on the battlefield and re-reading the directions on how to play the game, I gave up. Thin patience.

Avalon Hill was eventually bought by Hasbro in the 1990s and no longer publishes strategy war games. I think they've been replaced by computer games, which take no time at all to set up.

But I do have the memories. I reminisced with an old friend. And for what it's worth, I know where Kursk is.

 

Ukraine migraine

There's a part of me that can't help making comparisons from the past with the current crisis in Ukraine. I mean, history can't help but repeat itself, it seems. We just have to be observant enough to see it.

The fact that Ukraine is reportedly providing unexpectedly stiff and unrelenting resistance to the Russian invasion makes me wonder if this is similar to what the American colonists faced against King George III and the world's strongest military at the time as the colonies tried to gain their independence.

Ukrainians, of course, are fighting to keep their independence. Different, but the same.

The comparisons of Russian president Vladimir Putin to Nazi German chancellor Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and '40s is almost too easy. Both leaders relied on obviously contrived and unprovoked excuses to justify their aggressions upon neighboring sovereign states. Both leaders are/were heartless in their world view of humanity.

In truth, most aggressors initiate their invasions with provocations.

Incredibly – and I hadn't really considered this until now – is the persecution of both Jews and people of color by the invader state and, in some cases, by states supposedly providing safe spaces. World history cannot escape its centuries long oppression of Jews, Blacks and immigrants in general. And so it continues.

Refugees still flee from their oppressors with not much more than the clothes on their backs and whatever they can carry in their hands. What has surprised me is the seemingly large number of refugees bringing their pets with them. I didn't expect that.

Sanctions are a tool to use against aggressor nations, and the sanctions imposed on the Russians right now seem to be significant. Financial sanctions that cause discomfort among the populace can ultimately result in revolution. Russia should know this from the revolution it experienced in World War 1 in 1917.

A large number of body bags returning home also could foster a Russian revolution. It depends on how the critical mass of the dead is defined and reached. Vietnam is within our own history – and memory – on this matter.

And speaking of critical mass, the existence of nuclear technology, both in weapons and vulnerable power plants. has a role in this conflict, and maybe for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Even now, it's enough to be unsettling. 

If the nuclear option ever does come into play (and I might sound a whole lot like a duck-and-cover kid from the 1950s – which I am), this conflict will require a deft mixture of diplomacy, brinkmanship, wisdom and luck to keep us from becoming the third cinder from the sun.

Russian roulette

As an amateur military historian, the one most important thing that I've learned about war from the books I've read and the lectures I've attended is that war is mostly about miscalculation management and the resulting unintended consequences.

War is also about death, destruction, horror, sorrow, famine, misinformation, collateral damage, displacement and cruelty among its many injustices.

As a species, we seem to be in a constant state of war, killing each other in droves somewhere or another on the planet at any given moment.

Found in Ukraine: Putin as Hitler.

 The latest miscalculation seems to be Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, now in its fourth day. Russian president Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and current Russian mafia oligarch, is waging a vanity war again his neighbor. He's fearful that Ukraine, a modern and Western-leaning sovereign state, will become a member of NATO, thus adding another country to what he perceives as an encroaching ring of democracy around Mother Russia.

Putin's assault is also history repeating itself, as if we needed another lesson. While falsely claiming the intervention is for the "de-Nazification" of Ukraine (there are no Nazi's in Ukraine. Here's Putin's misinformation campaign on full display), he is ironically mirroring the tactics of Adolf Hitler's land grabs in the late 1930's. We've seen this before. Putin is not fooling anybody.

So far, Putin's paranoia seems to be a huge miscalculation on his part. The set-piece battles so far have reportedly cost Russia 3,500 of its soldiers, 14 airplanes, eight helicopters, 102 tanks and one BUK missile. We are probably days, if not hours, away from seeing the war go urban. That will make it even more costly for the Russians. And that will not play well to those soldiers' mothers, wives and sweethearts on the streets of Moscow.

It seems Putin's less-than-lightning war is coming at an unexpected cost. Not only are there surprisingly high losses in men and material, but growing worldwide economic sanctions against a nation that has an economy about as large as Texas are becoming effective. Economic sanctions could hinder the Russian war machine as badly as Stinger rockets, and soon. It's costly to keep an army on the field, and costlier to occupy that country. Did they already forget about Afghanistan?

The real danger, of course, is how much of this humiliation can Putin stand? He's already bandied about the "nuclear" word a few times. Chernobyl, site of the nuclear power plant meltdown in 1986, could see the release of radiation pockets into the atmosphere, thus creating a European environmental disaster.

Clearly, Putin is a heartless, soulless megalomaniac, sheathed in lies and untruths. We've seen it for decades. How much more proof do we need?

Knowing that, why is former president Trump praising Putin as a genius while Ukranians die in the streets? Why is Trump's former secretary of state and former CIA director Mike Pompeo lifting Putin above the Biden administration in this conflict as Biden brings NATO together like never before?

Russia has been an opponent of the United States political system since the end of World War II and the ensuing creation of NATO. That basic political tenant has never changed, even when Trump was licking Putin's shoes in Helsinki a few years ago and apparently not comprehending that Putin was not his dear friend. It's astounding to me that the Republican Party, not long ago once a party of hawks against the Russian bear, has caved to the Russian point of view.

Maybe it's time to recalculate those miscalculations.

 

Figuring out figure skating

Decades ago, while still in my childhood, I remember the family gathering around the old black-and-white Motorola to watch the Olympics.

These were the Winter Olympics, mind you. I have it in my head that I enjoyed watching the Winter Olympics long before I ever watched the Summer Olympics. I don't know why that is, but it could have been because of some of the rather exotic sports we were seeing: slalom, luge, bobsled, cross country skiing, and the oddly named skeleton.

I think one of the reasons I liked the Winter Olympics so much is that mom made waffles for us. Waffles were generally a rare breakfast treat (rare because I think it was rather labor intensive for breakfast), but she'd occasionally make them as our evening meal during the Olympics. I particularly enjoyed the copious amounts of Log Cabin maple syrup I was allowed to pour on my waffles, not to mention all the powdered sugar sprinkled on top.

It's a wonder I'm still alive.

One thing I don't remember seeing was curling, which has now become one of my favorite events to watch. But there was always the figure skating.

Ahh, figure skating. That was back in the days before it had become so highly nationalized. It was pretty girls doing impossible twirls in the air. It was handsome men skating backwards, complete with what seemed like 100-mile-per-hour spins.

I couldn't even skate forward without falling, much less backward. Still can't. This was magical stuff.

But somewhere between then and now, we've reached the Kamila Valieva saga, the 15-year-old Russian figure skater who, for one night, was magical in her own right in the women's individual figure skating in the Beijing Olympics.

She was expected to win the gold. That's how good she was. Then, on Thursday morning our time, she fell or stumbled three times during her routine, something she never does. She ultimately finished fourth, out of the medals, devastated, and pretty much emotionally violated by the adults, coaches and teammates around her. That's the Russian system, I guess.

The general consensus is that she probably shouldn't have been competing in the first place. A banned drug was found in her system back in December (a heart medication supposedly belonging to her grandfather and taken by mistake. Yeah, right. And the Russians didn't interfere with our elections, either. Sheesh).

She was allowed to compete in Beijing by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, whatever that is, even though Russia has a long and palpable history of doping its athletes. Russia, in fact, has been officially banned as a competitive nation for this Olympics but is allowed to compete as the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC in the medal standings). The CAS cited otherwise "irreparable harm" as its reason to let the equivalent of a high school sophomore compete.

You've got to be kidding. You can't compete because you're doping your athletes, but if you change your name, you're good.

What we saw on global television the other night was the systemic demolition of a 15-year-old girl before our very eyes, pathetically clutching a stuffed panda bear doll while her world crumbled around her. Valieva was berated, not comforted, by her coach when she first came off the ice. It was worse than pathetic. It was as cold as the ice in the rink. It was as cold as a Siberian heart.

The International Olympic Committee is now facing a serious integrity issue, if it hasn't already, over the past decades of doping antics.

And why are children allowed to compete in this type of competitive world?

Meanwhile, I think the Court of Arbitration for Sport, established in 1984, has some explaining to do, too. I just hope it doesn't become involved in the current Major League Baseball negotiations. We wouldn't want to do "irreparable harm" to the sport, would we? Yikes.

The Beijing Olympics are in their fading hours now, trying its best to squeeze out a semblance of success in a world of covid and controversy. Empty stands. Empty gestures. Empty hearts.

I miss my waffles.

 

 

 

71

It's not as if turning 71 is a milestone birthday, but I do think every year you take in your 70s, at this point and almost by definition, is a milestone.

I turned 71 yesterday – Lincoln's birthday – so all these thoughts about aging come rushing pell-mell into my brain. I think it's probably a natural thought process for us. I had this conversation with one of my septuagenarian friends the other day and we both agreed that – actuarially speaking, anyway – we are most likely in our decade of death.

So there's that.

It can be a time for review, to see if we've reached any of our life goals over the previous 70 years. And I have to say, I feel pretty good about that. I've never been arrested. I think I've helped people – some people, anyway – when they've needed it. I think I've been a good friend, son, brother and husband. I think I was a pretty decent journalist, which was my lifelong profession. Bear with me: This is now my It's a Wonderful Life moment.

I've been told that I don't look nor act my age, which kind of presumes we should know what people in their 70s should look and act like. But I'll take it as a compliment.

Although I have a countertop littered with various medication bottles, I've been reasonably healthy over the years. I acknowledge the medications probably help maintain that good health, but I also think genetics might be involved. Somehow I inherited the camouflage gene that disguises the way I should look and act at this age.

I work out at the YMCA four or five days a week, for two hours each session, which means, ultimately, most of my clothes still fit.

I think my mental health is OK, too. I read a lot, and I play computer puzzle-solving games, each activity designed to keep me active. There are those moments, though, when I can't find my car keys or where the heck did I put my glasses or my cell phone? As a writer, I occasionally find myself searching for the right word more often. I don't want to let my words get away from me.

I do have to say it does feel like I got here in a hurry, though, and I certainly didn't mean for that to happen. I was talking to my brother yesterday when he called to wish me a happy birthday. He's only a few years younger than I am – still in his 60s – but we were reminiscing about our childhoods. "You know," I said, "remember when we were kids and 70 sounded old?" 

It doesn't sound too old now.

Just think. Next year, when you read my blog about turning 72, it's because I've totally forgotten about the blog I wrote when I turned 71. 

Cool, huh?

 •   •   •

It's not often the Super Bowl falls on the same weekend as my birthday, but I guess I ought to throw my two cents out there.

I really don't have a dog in this fight, but I think I'm leaning toward the Bengals, 27-24.

It's been a spectacular couple of playoff weekends, so there's a part of me that is afraid this game, just by law of averages, could end up being a real dog. I hope it's not asking too much to see one more game decided in the final seconds.

We'll see.