"Looking for Love" Gets Acquainted in the Age of Trump

Looking for Love responds online:

Dear Wise Lady:

Unlike many people I do like to address both political and religious questions. So fire away. Replies or possible bantering will be my pleasure. I am so liberal and progressive that I often refer to myself as a non-conformist. You may make an inference from my strong political views that I am always willing to discuss: pro choice, pro stem cell research, pro assisted suicide, pro bail and prison reform, pro equal rights for women/minorities, pro affirmative action, pro right to vote for felons, pro equal rights for women, pro rights for LBGTQ community, pro universal healthcare, pro legalization of marijuana, and pro decriminalization of self-medication with any illicit drugs, pro gun reform, and pro separation of church and state. How do you stand on these issues? My favorite president is Franklin D. Roosevelt because his New Deal should be modernized and implemented today, especially in the poverty stricken ghettos.

There are other issues that I can discuss that may show my conservative side as well. I favor Israel (an admitted bias), legal immigration, and communication with Russia in a search for conflict resolution to major world problems that includes meddling in US elections.

I see you have a red line when it comes to Trump. I have a red line when it comes to being censored from discussing the issues or a politician. I am quite capable of maintaining my equanimity when discuss both the good and bad side of a politician or elected official. I am quite eclectic in that I either favor or disfavor issues one at a time without announcing a personal judgment about the politician before the fun of enjoying my provocative, irreverent and audacious side. Both the angels and devils are in the details. I prefer not to be denied the fun of repartee and bantering.

I am pretty sure I missed commenting on some issues. Obviously, you are very bright and I stand to learn from dialog. Your comments will be devoured.

Warm regards,

Jeremy

Dear Jeremy (Looking for Love):

Thanks for the very long message. I think we could feel very comfortable with what the GOP calls “social issues” but which are, rather, important aspects of the American melting pot and the global community.

We should be talking on the telephone. If you will trust me with your number, I won't abuse it.

Miranda (Wise Lady)

Dear Miranda:

Thank you for flattering me by suggesting we should be talking on the phone. Also we should explore a little further. Would you mind explaining, "I think we could feel very comfortable with what the GOP calls ‘social issues’ but which are, rather, important aspects of the American melting pot and the global community"? Are you suggesting something to do with traditional values and a moral majority? Perhaps some details will help me get my brain around this.

Cordially,

Jeremy

Dear Jeremy:

What I've been obliquely hinting at are the usual conservative failures to honor women's reproductive choices, diversity of many kinds (racial, sexual preference, religious, disability, cultural), and the well-being of those with limited resources (employment, wages, housing, medical needs). We are in a battle for the souls of the uneducated, undereducated, and miseducated to puncture the selfish fears that are being stoked by Trump & Co. We face assaults against our physical environment and the immigrant community that are dangerous and shameful.

We are also in a battle for the maintenance of the western global alliance to protect the safety of democracies, such as they are, and keep them from falling wholesale into the hands of autocratic billionaires and grifters.

Off the soapbox. You surely get my drift. I detest the current political direction of this country and its dangerous bumbling president with all my heart.

Miranda

Dear Miranda:

Hahaha. I will respond later. You write very well.

Jeremy

PS: Funny too.

Dear Miranda:

I came back to reply and realized that you pack a lot of information in those sentences and paragraphs. I have to read more carefully before I reply to do justice to your comments. Trying again in the morning will make this more fun for me.

Jeremy

[Jeremy] Wow, Miranda!!

What a succinct critique! Best I ever read about Trump. I have learned from your insight. Maybe I inspired you to greatness. lol I gladly associate myself with your brilliant explanation of his negatives. I haven't missed your humor in making him out to be the pink panther of politics. You must have been a serious challenge in a court room. You must have won a lot of cases.

I can understand your disdain for Trump, which is unusually common in online profiles of women.

Does he make you so angry that you might be blind to any of his assets, or is he bad to the bone?

Jeremy

[Miranda]

No assets. None. A total failure of a human being. A wrecking ball.

[Jeremy]

hahahahaha. In the court room you must have really gone for the jugulars. In another life were you an Italian hit-lady or an assassin of the Israeli Mossad Kidon? Do you think you might reconsider after compassion and loving-kindness meditation. LOL After all he has achieved much wealth and won the electoral college. Is he not pressuring NK and Iran so that there might be a different result from what was achieved by a less crazy more predictable POTUS? Is there anything wrong with a “goal” to comply with US law requiring immigration via legal protocols?

[Miranda]

This is a joke, right? You're not really advocating in Trump's favor, surely?

Much work to do for the rest of the day. Have a good one.

[Jeremy]

I only asked you a couple of questions? Clearly, you are free to imply I am arguing in Trump's favor. I thought there were no bad questions, only bad answers. Oh well. I suspect our fate that brought us together for a few minutes has run out. Perhaps I was right that I am not in your league.

[Miranda]

Trump is no ordinary politician. He is a clear and present danger who is putting the country in jeopardy. We could connect if you stop trying to sandbag me about this man. If you just steer clear of the subject. Over and out.

[Jeremy]

In all due respect, I believe we have crossed each other's red line.

[Miranda]

In Trumpland there are no acceptable opinions, no giving that man the benefit of the doubt. Not after so many months of treasonous and destructive conduct. If you care about the earth and our democracy, you'll stop looking for the positive in that horrid excuse for a human being. Do yourself a favor, and just walk away from him and his purported “ideas.” He is a dangerous void with an insatiable need for attention no matter the cost.

[Jeremy]

As I previously mentioned, I simply see bad ideas and good ideas. Sure, he has plenty of bad ideas. I don't like him kissing up to evangelicals and the southern bible belt fanatics. I am a strong evidence based atheist. Sure, I don't like his planned parenthood bias. I worked for PP for a year in NYC and love its mission. I helped write its long-range plans. Do I strongly believe in legal immigration as a goal. If you think a borderless nation is good then you disagree with Trump and me. If you believe Trump is not likely to make changes in NK, Iran, and middle east then you don't agree with me. I strongly believe he has skills that his predecessors lacked. Trump has the Machiavellian negotiating skills his predecessors lacked. I see great benefits from his tariffs to achieve better deals in the end game. I care about the earth and agree with you. He is irresponsible in putting garbage in my air and increasing global warming. Although I must admit in November I can appreciate the greenhouse effect in NJ. His policies will give us more Indian summers. He is certainly a wacko bird most of the time. But I just cannot find clear and compelling evidence that he is treasonous. So, forget about evidence beyond a reasonable doubt or making a case for impeachment. Innocent until . . . Again we cross the other's red lines. I didn’t need to self-medicate yet. How about you?

[Miranda]

This will have to be my last note to you: We don’t have a borderless nation, although there are some illegal aliens who don’t deserve to remain in the country. But DACA young people have lived with tremendous uncertainty for decades and are entitled to know their ultimate fate, and many immigrants in this country provide great benefits and are a credit to the country. My grandparents and great-grandparents immigrated without worrying about their eligibility, in part because of the times and in part because they were of European origin. Trump's “skills” have already hurt millions of people here and abroad. His predecessors were so far beyond him in competence, leadership, staffing, ability, goal-setting, global interaction, intelligence, empathy, planning, and and and . . . there can be no reasonable comparisons. The sudden tariffs are wrecking global trading and scaring the hell out of many producers in the U.S. Trump is indeed a “wacko bird” or a threat to the security of the country not “most of the time” but all of the time. The “evidence” for impeachment will come from the Mueller investigation, one indictment at a time, one subpoena at a time, one trial at a time, one witness at a time, one damning construct at a time. Do yourself a favor: Open your eyes and your heart. Listen. Observe.

And have a nice life.

Excoriating FBI Agent Peter Strzok

Once upon a time I aspired to become an FBI agent. I was finishing law school and tried to apply to join the Bureau.

My application was summarily rejected because those were the Good Old Days when women just weren’t allowed to join male sanctuaries.

Ultimately, just after the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU agreed to represent me in an action against the Bureau, the FBI magically announced that it would finally accept women in its ranks and invited me to apply.

I was interviewed—lackadaisically—and rejected. No doubt for being a potential troublemaker.

And ironically I would have made a pretty good agent. Or so I’ve always liked to think.

Not too many years ago I was able to communicate with another woman who also tried to join the Bureau. Like me, she was too short—by a couple of inches—to satisfy the old exclusionary 5’8” requirement for agents. Of course, neither of us was short for full-grown females. Such requirements existed in order to exclude us and encourage exclusively male applicants.

For readers who were not yet born or grown in the sixties and seventies, height requirements were used to prevent women from becoming police officers, firefighters, and god knows what else.

Civil rights laws gradually made a difference, although the numbers have never reached real parity over the years.

The second woman or a third woman who also wanted to join the FBI—and all three of us were attorneys, at that time a requirement—was actually on trial to force the FBI to consider her employment application when the FBI must have realized the jig was up and made its less-than-earth-shattering announcement that women were inherently as capable as men of performing an FBI agent’s job.

Today that confluence of affairs would have been identifiable on the Internet, and we three female aspirants could have communicated with each other and planned a joint campaign to force the FBI to at least seriously consider our employment.

But, again, those were the Good Old Days when the Information Highway had not yet been created.

Hence, I have always paid more than token attention to the FBI, and watched a good part of yesterday’s House Judiciary and Oversight Committees’ public questioning of FBI agent Peter Strzok with a good deal of interest.

Strzok, the top counterintelligence agent in the Bureau, was removed from oversight or participation in the Mueller Russia investigation last month.

The reason Robert Mueller removed Strzok? It was revealed that Strzok had used his FBI cell phone to text his former girlfriend ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page on hundreds of occasions dating back to 2015 with mostly anti-Trump messages right up to election day November 9, 2016.

Mueller apparently realized immediately that the anti-Trump texts appeared to indicate partiality even though Strzok had actually behaved impeccably and without prejudice in his work on the Russia investigation.

Strzok was strongly anti-Trump (and anti-Bernie Sanders, anti-Martin O’Malley, anti-Ben Carson, and anti-Mitch McConnell). In March 2015 after Page texted “God trump is a loathsome human,” Strzok answered, “Yet he may win.”

During the Republican National Convention, Page and Strzok “goaded each other” to watch the proceedings. “TURN IT ON, TURN IT ON!!! THE DOUCHEBAGS ARE ABOUT TO COME OUT,” texted Strzok. Many additional negative texts—often containing profanities—followed in quick succession.

By August 2016 Strzok was texting, “What the hell has happened to our country!?!?!??,” days later adding that he was “worried about what Trump is encouraging in our behavior.” When he went to a Walmart in southern Virginia, Strzok texted that he could “SMELL the Trump support. . . .” Not a description to please the bloodthirsty Republicans with seats in the current House, several of whom excoriated Strzok for this slur during yesterday’s hearing.

Strzok described a story about Trump interacting with Vladimir Putin by texting “What an utter idiot.” When Lisa Page expressed the wish that Paul Ryan would “fall and crash in a blaze of glory,” Strzok answered, “Yes. And me too. At some point the Rep party needs to pull their head out of their *ss. Shows no sign of occurring any time soon.”

Among other texts, Strzok was asked to explain Page’s text question, “[Trump is] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" to which Strzok replied, "No. No he's not. We'll stop it." At yesterday’s all-day hearing, GOP Committee members tried to strongarm Strzok into admitting that these remarks proved he was part of a concerted campaign to somehow derail the Trump campaign.

After being questioned aggressively and repeatedly about that text, Strzok explained during the Committee’s hearing that:

“In terms of the texts that 'we will stop it,' you need to understand that was written late at night, off-the-cuff, and it was in response to a series of events that included then-candidate Trump insulting the immigrant family of a fallen war hero, and my presumption, based on that horrible, disgusting behavior that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be President of the United States.”

As a CNN reporter describes the scene that followed this explanation, “[a]t the conclusion of his remarks, several Democratic members of the committees audibly cheered.”

At one point during often his tumultuous exchanges with GOP lawmakers, Strzok had pointedly indicated that “I am here under oath, I am not lying, I have never lied under oath, and I never will.” Nor did it appear that he had lied. He showed courage and commitment throughout the efforts of the GOP to humiliate and chastise him.

In the end Agent Peter Strzok countered the multiple attacks on him during a 10-hour televised piling on by Republican members of the House with tremendous stamina, verve, passion, and resoluteness. He would not be moved although he admitted that the appearance of impropriety or partiality caused by the content of his texts with Page made his removal from the Russia investigation necessary and appropriate.

Near the end of the hearing, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) succinctly summarized that

“This hearing is a kangaroo court. It is a three-ring circus. It is not even meritorious of an investigation by Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, let alone 75 members of the United States Congress. Let’s stop wasting taxpayer dollars and get back to the business of the American people.”

Amen.

So let’s hear it for the FBI agent who toughed it out against GOP congressmen who tried to cut out his heart and his liver on live television, and were thwarted by Strzok’s elan and endurance, plus an absolute commitment to the Rule of Law—qualities from which many Republicans could learn a good deal.

As one commentator described the exhaustive live hearing, “Peter Strzok just gave a hard-to-rebut defense of the objectivity of the Russia investigation’s origins.”

Those of us who still value and revere our democracy would like to think so.

The World Holds Its Breath for the Thai Soccer Team

Postscript (July 10): All twelve boys and their coach have been safely evacuated. We applaud the exceptional efforts of the Thai/international rescue divers and other support personnel.

Like the families of the twelve young boys and the teacher of the Thai soccer team marooned deep within a long treacherous undulating cave in the mountainous north of Thailand, I hope that they will all soon be safely evacuated from their perilous perch four kilometers from the cave’s entrance.

Like the families of those boys and their 25-year-old teacher, I try to think positive thoughts:

— That the monsoon rains will wait several more weeks although they are already later than usual;

— That even if the rains come they will be light and will not fill up the crooks and crannies and murderous turns within the snakelike cave so as to hamper an escape;

— That the rescue workers will be able to successfully teach the twelve imperiled students and their teacher to scuba dive in the cold murky depths of the twisting lakes that fill up the narrowest portions of the cave and lie between them and the entrance;

— That all the boys and their teacher will have regained adequate strength during this ordeal to help rescue themselves by scuba diving with assistance of experienced divers to whom they will be tethered and then walking through connecting unflooded but slippery and muddy portions of the cave;

— That news of the death of a Thai SEAL who was laying out extra oxygen tanks along the only realistic escape route will not reach the captives in the cave before they begin their swim to freedom;

— That the boys and their teacher can be emotionally buoyed to keep from panicking during any effort to swim out if they should become spooked or if there is any kind of equipment failure;

— That other possible escape methods of pumping out more water or drilling escape route holes from above must be forgotten or disregarded as no longer feasible;

— That a major tragedy is not beginning to ensue in spite of all the rescue efforts under way.

The world is holding its breath and imagining what might already be occurring. The world is sending rescuers and other help, offering advice, and nervously waiting. The world is meditating and praying and hoping that the miracle of the thirteen will not end in tragedy.

Being Grateful on the Fourth of July

On this Fourth of July I am grateful:

That Donald Trump has not headed up a coup and declared martial law in these United States, sending white supremacist troops outfitted by Russia to take over control of military bases, government offices, and transport;

That Donald Trump has not fired Robert Mueller and his honorable and intrepid team of prosecutors;

That Michael Cohen has not been pardoned and silenced;

That Americans all over the country still rise up and make their passionate voices heard in favor of freedom and inclusiveness;

That Canadians, English, French, Germans and other free peoples around the world still support American dreams and intentions in spite of our national government;

That immigrants from all over the globe still consider America to be their final destination to escape poverty, hunger, bigotry, and persecution regardless of the obstacles now threatening their ability to seek better lives among us;

That no illegally imprisoned Latin American immigrant child has died in the custody of DHS or HSS;

That Maxine Waters is not afraid;

That Senator John McCain is still among us as a symbol of courage;

That Milo Yiannopoulos is not analyzing the news on CNN;

That Alan Dershowitz is feeling the heat;

That new generations are absorbing the lessons of our history and running for office all over the country;

That our free press is still exposing the corruption and rot of this presidency;

That writers and cartoonists around the world join us in their surveillance and descriptions of the Man Who Would Be President and his criminal family and enterprise;

That ordinary citizens continue to step up and confront the architects of the new kleptocracy when opportunities arise;

That the Russians have not invaded . . . yet;

That Christopher Steele is safe;

That North Korea and Iran have not launched a nuclear war in spite of provocations from Washington;

That we can drive over the Canadian border and feel welcome;

That we have among us diplomats, civil servants, and office holders who uphold the high standards expected of them, waiting for an opportunity to replace the swamp dwellers who sully our reputation and stain our history;

That the Day of Reckoning will come;

That our nation will remain a beacon of light;

That we still believe in the words of the Declaration of Independence that:

— “A Prince whose character is . . . marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. . . .

— “[and hence] we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”