CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--What did the Trump campaign say when the elephant walked into their headquarters?
Answer: Nothing. They didn't see it.
There was a lot of flurry today about the indictment and arrest of Paul Manafort for his numerous crimes. It may be the lesser story, since a "smoking gun" was revealed a few minutes later (see below). The Trump campaign immediately distanced itself from the Manafort indictment, claiming that it had nothing to do with Trump or the campaign. You might call this implausible deniability.
Perhaps Trump didn't have anything to do with the financial crimes, but the affair underscores Trump's propensity for surrounding himself with shady, greedy characters lacking ethics or self restraint. In Manafort, we have a man who was willing to sell out the interests of the United States and carry water for Russia. Remember how the Trump campaign modified the Republican platform to make it easier on Putin policies in Ukraine?
The first lesson here: Trump's appointees are mirror images of Trump. This is presumably why Trump sees these people as normal appointees -- he doesn't understand what normality and ethics actually are. In a political environment that demands judgment, Trump shows a lack of judgment that is pathological.
But there is a bigger story which is getting lost in the Manafort buzz.
A few minutes after the Manafort news broke, the real smoking gun revealed itself. (Notice how Watergate terminology is starting to guide the flow of the discussion.) To use the phrase popularized by Andrew Sullivan, here is the money graf.
"Just minutes after the President sounded off on Twitter to say the Manafort charges had nothing to do with him, and Trump’s former campaign manager defended him on television, court documents from a separate case were unsealed. Those documents revealed that a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser had pleaded guilty earlier this month to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia."
George Popadopoulos (inset above) was the Trump campaign's foreign policy adviser, and he is now revealed to have pled guilty for lying to federal agents. A detailed summary is available on Talking Points Memo.
From that report, we have the following:
"According to the statement, Papadopoulos was in regular contact with three individuals he believed to have high-level ties with the Kremlin from the time he came onboard as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign in March 2016 through at least August of that year, and he regularly informed other members of the Trump campaign about those communications."
The Trump campaign was being offered things of tangible value (information on Clinton's campaign and its emails) from a foreign power (Russia). That foreign power provided services to the Trump campaign by leaking documents and by carrying on campaigning within the United States. What's left, and would be an impeachable offense, is to show that Trump himself had knowledge of what was going on. I find it hard to believe that he didn't.
Five Hours and Seventeen Minutes of official game time
I was all set to spend maybe two and a half hours watching the Dodgers defeat the Houston Astros, and then have the rest of the evening to develop a cogent discussion of national affairs.
But it didn't work out that way. Game five of the World Series went well into the night. By the time they got through the pregame mishmash and the obligatory rhapsodic postgame prose, five and a half hours had gone by. It's amazing what a dragged out, extra inning affair like this will do to my good intentions.
This World Series game was the proverbial car wreck -- it was ugly but it was hard to look away. I suspect that there were more 3-run innings (for both teams) than an average team enjoys in a week. Pitchers who were supposed to be among the best in baseball gave up soaring hits time and again. What seemed to be insurmountable leads gave way to the same for the other side. And then the first side would come back and take the lead again. In other words, there was no satisfaction to be had when the Dodgers took an early lead. They've shown that in this series, they can't hold the lead.
This modern form of baseball is an entertainment, but it doesn't seem to be representative of what major league baseball is supposed to be. You would think that one of the two teams should have been able to field a pitcher who could shut down the other side for three or four innings. Maybe the season is just too long, or the players are using steroids to perfection, but this slug fest wasn't artful.
I'd like to remind the older generation and explain to the younger generation what Dodger baseball used to be. I'll refer to 1988, remembered for Kirk Gibson's unlikely home run that miraculously beat Oakland in the first game of the World Series. But we might also look at a couple of other numbers.
For the entire series, The 1988 Oakland A's scored 11 runs total. Compare that to the 12 runs scored by the Dodgers in Sunday night's game alone -- a game which they lost. (Houston scored 13.) By the end of Sunday's game, each team was down to a couple of remaining pitchers.
Perhaps the comparison is a bit unfair, but in the 5th game of that fabled 1988 series, the Dodger pitcher threw a complete game victory while giving up a total of 4 hits. Admittedly that pitcher was Orel Hershiser having a very good year, but starting pitchers serving up complete games wasn't too terribly unusual in those days.
The Dodgers won the five game 1988 series while scoring a mere 21 runs in total.
Angelenos from an earlier era will remember the first World Series played in Los Angeles in 1959. Actually, it was the first World Series ever played on the west coast. Curiously, the Dodgers also won that series by scoring a total of 21 runs, and it took 6 games to do so. The Chicago White Sox scored a total of 23, for a grand total of 44 runs in six games shared between the two teams.
Something has changed. Maybe it's the players or maybe it's the ball. For whatever reason, we are seeing a Series that is more like watching the coach serving up batting practice. Or maybe the vaunted Dodger pitching just isn't that good. And I haven't even mentioned those irritating light panels in the stadiums (stadia?) that instruct the fans when to make noise. It used to be that the fans could figure that out for themselves.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
