Wading In

“If we get rid of Trump, Pence will be worse.” You've probably heard progressives say this ever since the 2016 election. It's a popular sentiment but it's demonstrably false. We've never had such an ill-prepared, unfit, divisive threat to the republic in the Oval Office as Donald John Trump. I've always thought one could throw a dart at a phonebook and hit upon a person who would be a better president than Donald Trump. But in regards to Vice-President Mike Pence... At least as a Tea Party Republican Mike Pence has read the U.S. Constitution. Tea Partiers required the Constitution to be read aloud at the beginning of the 112th Congress and added a rule that the part of the Constitution that justified a particular bill had to be listed at the top of the bill. We know that Donald Trump surely has never read it. In fact, in Michael Wolff's “Fire and Fury” former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg is quoted as saying he tried to teach Trump about the Bill of R...

The passing of Arizona Senator John McCain is poignant for a number of reasons. Probably none more than that he represented the last of a dying breed of forward-looking Republicans unafraid to reach across the aisle and work with Democrats, and to criticize their own party when necessary. In the wake of his death we've heard words like patriot, hero, honorable, integrity and maverick and all of those words describe who John McCain was. But he was also a complicated, flawed man and one can acknowledge those flaws and still admire the man. Being a political geek I'd watched McCain on the Sunday shows for a decade before his 2000 presidential run and devoured his 1999 bestselling memoir “Faith Of My Fathers.” His harrowing story of military service in Vietnam, surviving the USS Forrestal fire, being shot down on his 23rd bombing run and spending five and a half years of confinement and torture as a POW was genuinely moving. I admired the work he'd done in the Senate with v...