Anybody can do anything that's what 'Pussy' thinks. Many disagree...
Did you really say it could have been China who hacked emails
of Democratic
operatives and the Democratic National Committee.
Or someone "sitting on
their bed who weighs 400 pounds."
Should I remain in bed, leave my country or fight against the dragon?
( see also the story by Wolfgang Hampel,
' Betty MacDonald: Nothing more to say ' )
Betty MacDonald's sister Alison Bard Burnett
Betty MacDonald's mother Sydney with grandchild Alison Beck
Betty and Don MacDonald in Hollywood
Ma and Pa Kettle - and Betty MacDonald fan club fans,
we know how much Betty MacDonald adored cats.
Send us a video or a story of your funny or strange Christmas experiences with cats, please.
The 10 best ones are our winners of a whole collection of Betty MacDonald's unique homemade Christmas cards.
You are going to win the whole Betty MacDonald fan club Christmas collection with really unique items.
Betty MacDonald fan club newsletter December will be available on Christmas Eve.
We are still working on it because we got a collection of several outstanding handmade Christmas cards by Betty MacDonald.
We are very happy and grateful because we can share an outstanding gift with Betty MacDonald fan club fans from all over the world.
Betty MacDonald fan club newsletter December does not only include photos of Betty MacDonald's homemade Christmas cards.
We'll have a wonderful Betty MacDonald fan club Christmas gift for you.
You can also see many cards of Betty MacDonald's family and friends, for example from Betty MacDonald's daughter Joan MacDonald Keil, Betty MacDonald's grandchildren, Betty MacDonald's sister Alison Bard Burnett, Betty MacDonald's friend Monica Sone and many more very interesting items.
You can read an essay about Betty MacDonald's Christmas on Vashon Island and in Carmel Valley too.
Vita Magica December was very successful.
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel invited a very famous author.
The visitors enjoyed Vita Magica very much.
A great event!
That's my favourite city for next International Betty MacDonald fan club event 2017. A very beautiful city!
If you know the city send us a mail, please and you can win several new fascinating Betty MacDonald fan club items.
We are looking for your favourite Christmas song.
Deadline: December 23, 2017
Don't miss it, please because you can win several new Betty MacDonald fan club items.
This is my favourite Christmas song.
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel interviewed Betty MacDonald's daughter Joan MacDonald Keil and her husband Jerry Keil.
This interview will be published for the first time ever.
New Betty MacDonald documentary will be very interesting with many interviews never published before.
We adore Betty MacDonald fan club honor member Mr. Tigerli
Thank you so much for sharing this witty memories with us.
Wolfgang Hampel's literary event Vita Magica is very fascinating because he is going to include Betty MacDonald, other members of the Bard family and Betty MacDonald fan club honor members.
It's simply great to read Wolfgang Hampel's new very well researched stories about Betty MacDonald, Robert Eugene Heskett, Donald Chauncey MacDonald, Darsie Bard, Sydney Bard, Gammy, Alison Bard Burnett, Darsie Beck, Mary Bard Jensen, Clyde Reynolds Jensen, Sydney Cleveland Bard, Mary Alice Bard, Dorothea DeDe Goldsmith, Madge Baldwin, Don Woodfin, Mike Gordon, Ma and Pa Kettle, Nancy and Plum, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and others.
Vita Magica was very witty and enjoyable.
We know the visitors had a great time there.
Congratulations dear Letizia Maninco, Wolfgang Hampel and Friedrich von Hoheneichen!
Linde Lund and many fans from all over the world adore this funny sketch by Wolfgang Hampel very much although our German isn't the best.
I won't ever forget the way Wolfgang Hampel is shouting ' Brexit '.
Don't miss it, please.
It's simply great!
You can hear that Wolfgang Hampel got an outstandig voice.
He presented one of Linde Lund's favourite songs ' Try to remember ' like a professional singer.
Thanks a million!
Betty MacDonald fan club honor member Mr. Tigerli and our 'Italian Betty MacDonald' - Betty MacDonald fan club honor member author and artist Letizia Mancino belong to the most popular Betty MacDonald fan club teams in our history.
Their many devoted fans are waiting for a new Mr. Tigerli adventure.
Letizia Mancino's magical Betty MacDonald Gallery is a special gift for Betty MacDonald fan club fans from all over the world.
Don't miss Brad Craft's 'More friends', please.
Betty MacDonald's very beautiful Vashon Island is one of my favourites.
I agree with Betty in this very witty Betty MacDonald story Betty MacDonald: Nothing more to say by Wolfgang Hampel.
I can't imagine to live in a country with him as so-called elected President although there are very good reasons to remain there to fight against these brainless politics.
President-elect Donald Trump continues to question whether the Russian government tried to interfere in the U.S. election. Trump has said it could have been China who hacked emails of Democratic operatives and the Democratic National Committee. Or someone "sitting on their bed who weighs 400 pounds."
And if it is the Russians, why did the White House wait so long to act? Trump asked on Twitter.
"If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?" Trump tweeted early Dec. 15.
Only that’s not true. The administration announced its findings a month before Election Day, and the White House’s announcement prompted a memorable exchange at the final presidential debate.
Don't miss these very interesting articles below, please.
Copyright 2016 Crooks and Liars
Electoral College: Make Hillary Clinton President.
Donald
Trump has not been elected president. The real election takes place
December 19, when the 538 Electoral College Electors cast their ballots –
for anyone they want.
If they all vote the way their states voted, Donald Trump will win. However, in 14 of the states in Trump's column, they can vote for Hillary Clinton without any legal penalty if they choose.
We are calling on “Conscientious Electors” to protect the Constitution from Donald Trump, and to support the national popular vote winner.
Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic.
Learn more in the video above, then sign the petition to join the more than 4.7 million Americans who support this grassroots effort. Please also visit electoralcollegepetition.com to see how you can get further involved in our movement.
If they all vote the way their states voted, Donald Trump will win. However, in 14 of the states in Trump's column, they can vote for Hillary Clinton without any legal penalty if they choose.
We are calling on “Conscientious Electors” to protect the Constitution from Donald Trump, and to support the national popular vote winner.
Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic.
Learn more in the video above, then sign the petition to join the more than 4.7 million Americans who support this grassroots effort. Please also visit electoralcollegepetition.com to see how you can get further involved in our movement.
Lately,
it appears Trump has gone back into the field to drag in a whole new
bunch of State contenders.
My favorite is Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, a person you have probably never heard of even though he’s been in Congress since the 1980s and is currently head of the prestigious Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats.
Rohrabacher
is also a surfer and former folk singer who once claimed global warming
might be connected to “dinosaur flatulence.” My favorite is Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, a person you have probably never heard of even though he’s been in Congress since the 1980s and is currently head of the prestigious Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats.
Don't miss the very interesting articles below, please.
I think the future dinosaur flatulence will be the behaviour of 'Pussy' and his very strange government.
Poor World! Poor America!
The most difficult case in Mrs.Piggle-Wiggle's career
Hello 'Pussy', this is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
You took calls from foreign leaders on unsecured phone lines, without consultung the State Department. We have to change your silly behaviour with a new Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle cure. I know you are the most difficult case in my career - but we have to try everything.......................
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel sent his brilliant thoughts. Thank you so much dear Wolfgang!
Hi Libi, nice to meet you. Can you feel it?
I'll be the most powerful leader in the world.
Betty MacDonald: Nothing more to say
Copyright 2016 by Wolfgang Hampel
All rights reserved
Betty MacDonald was sitting on her egg-shaped cloud and listened to a rather strange guy.
He said to his friends: So sorry to keep you waiting. Very complicated business! Very complicated!
Betty said: Obviously much too complicated for you old toupee!
Besides him ( by the way the First Lady's place ) his 10 year old son was bored to death and listened to this 'exciting' victory speech.
The old man could be his great-grandfather.
The boy was very tired and thought: I don't know what this old guy is talking about. Come on and finish it, please. I'd like to go to bed.
Dear 'great-grandfather' continued and praised the Democratic candidate.
He congratulated her and her family for a very strong campaign although he wanted to put her in jail.
He always called her the most corrupt person ever and repeated it over and over again in the fashion of a Tibetan prayer wheel.
She is so corrupt. She is so corrupt. Do you know how corrupt she is?
Betty MacDonald couldn't believe it when he said: She has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.
Afterwards old toupee praised his parents, wife, children, siblings and friends.
He asked the same question like a parrot all the time:
Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?
I know you are here!
Betty MacDonald answered: No Pussy they are not! They left the country.
They immigrated to Canada because they are very much afraid of the future in the U.S.A. with you as their leader like the majority of all so-called more or less normal citizens.
By the way keep your finger far away from the pussies and the Red Button, please.
I'm going to fly with my egg-shaped cloud to Canada within a minute too.
Away - away - there is nothing more to say!
I can understand the reason why Betty MacDonald, Barbara Streisand, other artists and several of my friends want to leave the United States of America.
I totally agree with these comments:
This
is incredible! I'll You get what you pay/vote for and Trump is the
epitome of this ideology. America I won't feel bad for you because you
don't need my sympathy for what's coming but I am genuinely scared for
you. 'Forgive them lord for they know not who they do' or maybe they do
but just don't care about their future generations who will suffer for
this long after the culprits have passed away.
Daniel Mount wrote a great article about Betty MacDonald and her garden.
We hope you'll enjoy it very much.
I adore Mount Rainier and Betty MacDonald's outstanding descriptions
Can you remember in which book you can find it?
If so let us know, please and you might be the next Betty MacDonald fan club contest winner.
I hope we'll be able to read Wolfgang Hampel's new very well researched stories about Betty MacDonald, Robert Eugene Heskett, Donald Chauncey MacDonald, Darsie Bard, Sydney Bard, Gammy, Alison Bard Burnett, Darsie Beck, Mary Bard Jensen, Clyde Reynolds Jensen, Sydney Cleveland Bard, Mary Alice Bard, Dorothea DeDe Goldsmith, Madge Baldwin, Don Woodfin, Mike Gordon, Ma and Pa Kettle, Nancy and Plum, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and others - very soon.
It' s such a pleasure to read them.
Let's go to magical Betty MacDonald's Vashon Island.
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund and Betty MacDonald fan club research team share their recent Betty MacDonald fan club research results.
Congratulations! They found the most interesting and important info for Wolfgang Hampel's oustanding Betty MacDonald biography.
I enjoy Bradley Craft's story very much.
Don't miss our Betty MacDonald fan club contests, please.
You can win a never published before Alison Bard Burnett interview by Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel.
Good luck!
This CD is a golden treasure because Betty MacDonald's very witty sister Alison Bard Burnett shares unique stories about Betty MacDonald, Mary Bard Jensen, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Nancy and Plum.
Do you have any books by Betty MacDonald and Mary Bard Jensen with funny or interesting dedications?
If so would you be so kind to share them?
Our next Betty MacDonald fan club project is a collection of these unique dedications.
If you share your dedication from your Betty MacDonald - and Mary Bard Jensen collection you might be the winner of our new Betty MacDonald fan club items.
Thank you so much in advance for your support.
Thank you so much for sending us your favourite Betty MacDonald quote.
More info are coming soon.
Wolfgang Hampel's Betty MacDonald and Ma and Pa Kettle biography and Betty MacDonald interviews have fans in 40 countries. I'm one of their many devoted fans.
Many Betty MacDonald - and Wolfgang Hampel fans are very interested in a Wolfgang Hampel CD and DVD with his very funny poems and stories.
We are going to publish new Betty MacDonald essays on Betty MacDonald's gardens and nature in Washington State.
Tell us the names of this mysterious couple please and you can win a very new Betty MacDonald documentary.
Betty MacDonald fan club honor member Mr. Tigerli is beloved all over the World.
We are so happy that our 'Casanova' is back.
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel
and Betty MacDonald fan club research team are going to share very
interesting info on ' Betty MacDonald and the movie The Egg and I '.
Another rare episode (from March 21 1952) of the short-lived comedy soap opera, "The Egg and I," based on best selling book by Betty MacDonald which also became a popular film.
The series premiered on September 3, 1951, the same day as "Search for Tomorrow," and ended on August 1, 1952.
Although it did well in the ratings, it had difficulty attracting a steady sponsor. This episode features Betty Lynn (later known for her work on "The Andy Griffith Show") as Betty MacDonald, John Craven as Bob MacDonald, Doris Rich as Ma Kettle, and Frank Twedell as Pa Kettle.
Betty MacDonald fan club exhibition will be fascinating with the international book editions and letters by Betty MacDonald.
I can't wait to see the new Betty MacDonald documentary.
Enjoy a great breakfast at the bookstore with Brad and Nick, please.
Don't miss this, please. You'll enjoy it very much.
Excerpts from SVT and TV4 broadcasts from Lucia 2015.
Participating are students from music classes in Gothenburg and Växjö.
Have a very nice Friday,
Another rare episode (from March 21 1952) of the short-lived comedy soap opera, "The Egg and I," based on best selling book by Betty MacDonald which also became a popular film.
The series premiered on September 3, 1951, the same day as "Search for Tomorrow," and ended on August 1, 1952.
Although it did well in the ratings, it had difficulty attracting a steady sponsor. This episode features Betty Lynn (later known for her work on "The Andy Griffith Show") as Betty MacDonald, John Craven as Bob MacDonald, Doris Rich as Ma Kettle, and Frank Twedell as Pa Kettle.
Betty MacDonald fan club exhibition will be fascinating with the international book editions and letters by Betty MacDonald.
I can't wait to see the new Betty MacDonald documentary.
Enjoy a great breakfast at the bookstore with Brad and Nick, please.
Don't miss this, please. You'll enjoy it very much.
Excerpts from SVT and TV4 broadcasts from Lucia 2015.
Participating are students from music classes in Gothenburg and Växjö.
Have a very nice Friday,
Thomas
Vita Magica
Betty MacDonald
Betty MacDonald fan club
Betty MacDonald forum
Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English ) - The Egg and I
Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( Polski)
Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - LinkFang ( German ) Wolfgang Hampel - Academic ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - cyclopaedia.net ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - DBpedia ( English / German )
Wolfgang Hampel - people check ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Memim ( English )
Vashon Island - Wikipedia ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Monica Sone - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( French )
Wolfgang Hampel - Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle - Wikipedia ( English)
Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel
Betty MacDonald fan club interviews on CD/DVD
Betty MacDonald fan club items
Betty MacDonald fan club items - comments
Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I
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Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund
Betty MacDonald fan club and Heide Rose
Betty MacDonald fan club fan Greta Larson
"If Russia, or some other
entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why
did they only complain after Hillary lost?"
Pants on Fire! Trump tweet about White House, Russian hacking probe
President-elect Donald Trump continues to question whether
the Russian government tried to interfere in the U.S. election. Trump
has said it could have been China who hacked emails of Democratic
operatives and the Democratic National Committee. Or someone "sitting on
their bed who weighs 400 pounds."
And if it is the Russians, why did the White House wait so long to act? Trump asked on Twitter.
"If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?" Trump tweeted early Dec. 15.
Only that’s not true. The administration announced its findings a month before Election Day, and the White House’s announcement prompted a memorable exchange at the final presidential debate.
Who’s the puppet?
On Oct. 7 — a few months after WikiLeaks released a trove of DNC emails, but the same day WikiLeaks released emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta — President Barack Obama’s administration said it was confident Russia was behind the cyberattacks.
"The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations," read an Oct. 7 joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The U.S. Intelligence Community consists of 17 agencies and organizations within the executive branch, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence speaks on the group’s behalf.
Their statement said releases of alleged hacked emails on DCLeaks.com and Wikileaks and by the online persona Guccifer 2.0 were "consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts."
"These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process," the statement said. "Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
Clinton used the statement as ammo when she referred to Trump as Putin’s preferred "puppet" in the Oct. 19 presidential debate. ("No puppet, you’re the puppet," Trump replied.) When Clinton brought up the intelligence community’s statement, Trump said, "She has no idea whether it is Russia, China or anybody else."
Post-election doubts
After the election, Trump has been just as dismissive about Russian involvement.
Regarding Russia’s involvement in the DNC email hack, Trump told Time magazine (which named him Person of the Year), "I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they interfered."
On Dec. 12, Trump also questioned the timing of concerns about election-related hacks, tweeting, "Unless you catch ‘hackers’ in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn't this brought up before election?"
Republican and Democratic leaders have raised concerns about Russia’s role in the election and have called for a congressional investigation.
According to a New York Times investigation, Obama warned Putin about the cyberhacking and potential U.S. retaliation in person at the G-20 summit in China.
The administration, however, chose to issue the joint written statement from Homeland Security and the national intelligence director rather than a more public rebuke from Obama. "It was far less dramatic than the president’s appearance in the press room two years before to directly accuse the North Koreans of attacking Sony," the New York Times noted.
Obama was aware of Russian hackers previously targeting the State Department, White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the New York Times reported, but he chose not to publicly call out Russians or issue sanctions out of "fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria."
Our ruling
Trump tweeted, "If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?"
About a month before the Nov. 8 election, the Obama administration accused Russia of interfering in the U.S. elections, directing the release of emails "from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations."
This didn’t happen under the radar. Trump was confronted with it at the final presidential debate.
For a ridiculously wrong statement, we rate it Pants on Fire!
And if it is the Russians, why did the White House wait so long to act? Trump asked on Twitter.
"If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?" Trump tweeted early Dec. 15.
Only that’s not true. The administration announced its findings a month before Election Day, and the White House’s announcement prompted a memorable exchange at the final presidential debate.
Who’s the puppet?
On Oct. 7 — a few months after WikiLeaks released a trove of DNC emails, but the same day WikiLeaks released emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta — President Barack Obama’s administration said it was confident Russia was behind the cyberattacks.
"The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations," read an Oct. 7 joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The U.S. Intelligence Community consists of 17 agencies and organizations within the executive branch, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence speaks on the group’s behalf.
Their statement said releases of alleged hacked emails on DCLeaks.com and Wikileaks and by the online persona Guccifer 2.0 were "consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts."
"These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process," the statement said. "Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
Clinton used the statement as ammo when she referred to Trump as Putin’s preferred "puppet" in the Oct. 19 presidential debate. ("No puppet, you’re the puppet," Trump replied.) When Clinton brought up the intelligence community’s statement, Trump said, "She has no idea whether it is Russia, China or anybody else."
Post-election doubts
After the election, Trump has been just as dismissive about Russian involvement.
Regarding Russia’s involvement in the DNC email hack, Trump told Time magazine (which named him Person of the Year), "I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they interfered."
On Dec. 12, Trump also questioned the timing of concerns about election-related hacks, tweeting, "Unless you catch ‘hackers’ in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn't this brought up before election?"
Republican and Democratic leaders have raised concerns about Russia’s role in the election and have called for a congressional investigation.
According to a New York Times investigation, Obama warned Putin about the cyberhacking and potential U.S. retaliation in person at the G-20 summit in China.
The administration, however, chose to issue the joint written statement from Homeland Security and the national intelligence director rather than a more public rebuke from Obama. "It was far less dramatic than the president’s appearance in the press room two years before to directly accuse the North Koreans of attacking Sony," the New York Times noted.
Obama was aware of Russian hackers previously targeting the State Department, White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the New York Times reported, but he chose not to publicly call out Russians or issue sanctions out of "fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria."
Our ruling
Trump tweeted, "If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?"
About a month before the Nov. 8 election, the Obama administration accused Russia of interfering in the U.S. elections, directing the release of emails "from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations."
This didn’t happen under the radar. Trump was confronted with it at the final presidential debate.
For a ridiculously wrong statement, we rate it Pants on Fire!
John Podesta: Something is deeply broken at the FBI
John Podesta speaks in Washington. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press)
John Podesta was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The more we learn about the Russian plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and elect Donald Trump,
and the failure of the FBI to adequately respond, the more shocking it
gets. The former acting director of the CIA has called the Russian
cyberattack “the political equivalent of 9/11.”
Just as after the real 9/11, we need a robust, independent
investigation into what went wrong inside the government and how to
better protect our country in the future.
As the former chair of the Clinton campaign and a direct target of Russian hacking,
I understand just how serious this is. So I was surprised to read in
the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in
September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials.
Instead, messages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.” As a former
head of the FBI cyber division told the Times, this is a baffling
decision: “We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of
the woods of Montana.”
What takes this
from baffling to downright infuriating is that at nearly the exact same
time that no one at the FBI could be bothered to drive 10 minutes to
raise the alarm at DNC headquarters, two agents accompanied by attorneys
from the Justice Department were in Denver visiting a tech firm that had helped maintain Clinton’s email server.
Seven reactions to CIA assessment of Russia’s role in presidential election
President-elect Donald Trump as well as
Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Dec. 11 reacted to the CIA’s
assessment that Russia intervened to help Trump win the election.
(Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
This trip was part of what FBI Director James B. Comey described
as a “painstaking” investigation of Clinton’s emails, “requiring
thousands of hours of effort” from dozens of agents who conducted at
least 80 interviews and reviewed thousands of pages of documents. Of
course, as Comey himself concluded, in the end, there was no case; it was not even a close call.
Comparing
the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the
seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to
subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the
FBI.
Comey justified his handling of the
email case by citing “intense public interest.” He felt so strongly
that he broke long-established precedent and disregarded strong guidance
from the Justice Department with his infamous letter just 11 days before the election. Yet he refused to join the rest of the intelligence community
in a statement about the Russian cyberattack because he reportedly
didn’t want to appear “political.” And both before and after the
election, the FBI has refused to say whether it is investigating Trump’s
ties to Russia.
There are now reports that Vladimir Putin personally directed the covert campaign to elect Trump. So are teams of FBI agents busy looking into the reported meeting
in Moscow this summer between Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy
adviser, and the Putin aide in charge of Russian intelligence on the U.S. election? What about evidence that Roger Stone was in contact with WikiLeaks
and knew in advance that my hacked emails were about to be leaked? Are
thousands of FBI person-hours being devoted to uncovering Trump’s
tangled web of debts and business deals with foreign entities in Russia and elsewhere?
Meanwhile,
House Republicans who had an insatiable appetite for investigating
Clinton have been resistant to probing deeply into Russia’s efforts to
swing the election to Trump. The media, by gleefully publishing the
gossipy fruits of Russian hacks, became what the Times itself calls “a
de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”
But
the FBI’s role is particularly troubling because of its power and
responsibility — and because this is part of a trend. The Justice
Department’s Inspector General issued a damning report this summer about
the FBI’s failure to prioritize cyberthreats more broadly.
The
election is over and the damage is done, but the threat from Russia and
other potential aggressors remains urgent and demands a serious and
sustained response.
First,
the Obama administration should quickly declassify as much as possible
concerning what is known about the Russian hack, as requested by seven
Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Second,
the administration should brief members of the electoral college on the
extent and manner of Russia’s interference in our election before they
vote on Dec. 19, as requested by a bipartisan group of electors.
Third,
Congress should authorize a far-reaching, bipartisan independent
investigation modeled on the 9/11 Commission. The public deserves to
know exactly what happened, why and what can be done to prevent future
attacks. Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) have introduced legislation to authorize such an investigation.
Finally,
Congress should more vigorously exercise its oversight to determine why
the FBI responded overzealously in the Clinton case and insufficiently
in the Russian case. The FBI should also clarify whether there is an
ongoing investigation into Trump, his associates and their ties to
Russia. If ever there were a case of “intense public interest,” this is
it. What’s broken in the FBI must be fixed and quickly.
Read more here: Eric Chenoweth: Americans keep looking away from the election’s most alarming story
The Post’s View: ‘Lessons learned’ about Russia
Paul Musgrave: If you’re even asking if Russia hacked the election, Russia got what it wanted
For Republican Russia Hawks, a Dilemma Named Rex Tillerson
WASHINGTON
— Congressional Republicans face a vexing dilemma with the impending
presidency of Donald J. Trump: Will they maintain the tough line on
Russia that has been central to their foreign policy for decades, or
cede that ground to Democrats?
For
decades during the Cold War, Republicans tried to claim the hawkish
mantle when it came to confronting the Soviet Union. Vice President
Richard M. Nixon famously squared off against Premier Nikita Khrushchev
in 1959, and years later President Ronald Reagan cast the Soviets as an
“evil empire.”
Reagan
made that kind assertiveness central to his foreign policy and he is
credited by many with hastening the downfall of the Soviet Union, the
most persistent and formidable adversary of the United States of the
last 60 years. And Reagan disciples today in the Republican Party,
including Vice President-elect Mike Pence, are many.
Reagan
helped to frame the template for an American foreign policy that
promulgated democracy around the world and curbed what has often been
called Russian adventurism.
Now Republicans will have to reconcile that party catechism with their vote on Mr. Trump’s selection as secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, who is the chief executive of Exxon Mobil and a longtime friend of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Mr.
Tillerson, who has described his relationship with Mr. Putin as close,
was once presented with the Russian Order of Friendship, one of the
highest honors a foreigner can receive. Mr. Trump’s selection of him
drew strong condemnation from Democrats and a cool reception from a
handful of Republicans like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, a
longtime leader against Russian aggression.
Graphic
Donald Trump Is Choosing His Cabinet. Here’s the Latest List.
A list of possibilities and appointees for top posts in the new administration.
“Russia
is going to be the central litmus test for United States policy,” said
Heather A. Conley, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. “Our allies and our adversaries are watching this
very closely, and obviously the names of the cabinet positions are
being scrutinized that much more closely.”
Senate
Republicans — including Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of
the Foreign Relations Committee — who have long been critical of Mr.
Putin and of President Obama’s attempt to “reset” relations with Moscow,
have praised Mr. Tillerson.
“Mr.
Tillerson is a very impressive individual and has an extraordinary
working knowledge of the world,” Mr. Corker said. That view was echoed
by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader.
The
laudatory response from many Republicans over a choice that a year ago,
on paper at least, might have appalled them demonstrates a strong
desire to begin a new administration aligned with Mr. Trump.
It
is the same dynamic that has prevented a larger outcry from
congressional Republicans over revelations that Russia interfered with
the presidential election. They fear they could appear aligned with
Democrats in raising questions about the election’s legitimacy. While
congressional leaders called for investigations into possible tampering,
they stopped short of ordering expansive efforts like a select
committee.
At
the same time, a majority of Republicans are overjoyed with Mr. Trump’s
other cabinet picks — staunch conservatives in the world of education,
health care and law enforcement — and are likely to accede to the
president-elect’s choice for the nation’s chief diplomat.
The
other selections are “draft picks for conservatives who have been
looking to reform those departments for years,” said Kevin Madden, a
former adviser to Mitt Romney, who was passed over for secretary of
state. “Those cabinet picks have certainly helped build up some of that
political capital.”
Still, the contrast from recent years is striking.
In 2012, when Mr. Romney was running for president, he called Russia the “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” a position echoing decades of Republican thinking. He was derided by Mr. Obama, his opponent.
Mr.
Corker and others have joined the most robust voices on Capitol Hill in
calling for sanctions on Russia, a position that would seem to put them
at odds with Mr. Trump and Mr. Tillerson. He and 20 Senate Republicans
tried in 2014 to push through severe new sanction triggers against the
nation, and he praised Mr. Obama when he imposed them on Russia for destabilizing Ukraine.
Both
of the last two major defense bills authorized funding for security
assistance to Ukraine, including lethal assistance the Obama
administration has refused to provide.
This
year’s bill authorizes $3.4 billion for the European Deterrence
Initiative, a fourfold increase from last year, focused on increasing
the size, capability and readiness of American forces in Europe against
growing threats to their security and territorial integrity.
Those
bills, while championed by Mr. McCain, are in keeping with a long
history of bipartisan agreements over checking Russia, like the 1974
Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a trade measure that required emigration
criteria to get certain trade benefits.
In
2012, led by Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, Congress
overwhelmingly passed more sanctions tied to Russian human rights
abuses. Last week, Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Human Rights
Accountability Act as part of the broad defense bill, continuing a
longstanding bipartisan focus on human rights and anticorruption
efforts.
“I
have found Congress on both sides of the aisle to be entirely robust on
the issue of Russia,” said William Browder, chief executive of
Hermitage Capital, noting that the Senate passed the 2012 measure 92 to
4.
“Since
then the situation has gotten only worse between Ukraine, the Crimean
War, crimes in Syria, cheating in sports, hacking in American elections
and so on,” Mr. Browder continued. “It is hard for me to imagine that
Congress would suddenly change their mind about Russia just because
Donald Trump has a different view.”
There
have been notable exceptions to the Republicans praising Mr. Tillerson.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said this week: “I have
serious concerns about his nomination. The next secretary of state must
be someone who views the world with moral clarity.”
Senator
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who often aligns with Mr. McCain,
said in a statement that he expected “the U.S.-Russian relationship to
be front and center in his confirmation process.” Two other Republicans,
Senators James Lankford of Oklahoma and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, reacted
to the news as if they had been presented with their sixth choice on a
lunch menu of 10 items.
“Senator Sasse has been outspoken
against Russia’s recent aggressions,” said his spokesman, James
Wegmann. “He also looks forward to diving into every nominee’s record.”
The
burden will fall to Mr. Tillerson, and perhaps Mr. Trump, to persuade
Mr. Rubio and enough other Republicans that he shares their views on
Russia, his friendship with Mr. Putin notwithstanding.
The
process, Ms. Conley, the Russia expert, said, may well provide clues to
allies and adversaries about where the United States is headed under
Mr. Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress in what has been a
fraught relationship with Russia.
“The
question is: Is the United States willing to accommodate the Russian
annexation of territory, the invasion of its neighbors and its
indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Syria, or are we willing to
defend principles and rules that go back to the end of the Second World
War?” Ms. Conley said. “If the U.S. walks away from these principles,
other countries such as Russia will step into the breach and trample on
the very rules that keep Americans safe.”
Correction: December 14, 2016
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this
article misidentified the state that Senator Lindsey Graham represents.
He is from South Carolina, not Kentucky.
White House: Trump 'obviously' knew Russia hacks were benefiting him
White House: Trump knew Russia hacked Clinton 01:21
Story highlights
- Russia's interference in the US election is coming into clearer focus
- Earnest defended the White House against accusations they were slow to act
Washington (CNN)President-elect
Donald Trump was "obviously aware" that Russia meddled in the US
election to benefit his own campaign, the White House said Wednesday.
Citing
Trump's own suggestion over the summer that Moscow locate missing
emails from Hillary Clinton's private server, White House Press
Secretary Josh Earnest said the beneficiary of Russia's cyberintrusions
was clear.
"There
was ample evidence that was known long before the election, and in most
cases long before October, about the Trump campaign in Russia,
everything from the Republican nominee himself calling on Russia to hack
his opponent," Earnest said. "It might be an indication that he was
obviously aware and concluded, based on whatever facts or sources he had
available to him, that Russia was involved and their involvement was
having a negative impact on his opponent's campaign."
Earnest
was speaking as the extent of Russia's interference in the US election
is coming into clearer focus. The CIA has told a group of top US
senators that Russia's hacking was aimed at helping Trump, a finding
that's caused angst among some Democrats, who believe the White House
should have provided more details about the hacking ahead of the
election.
The Obama
administration, through a statement from the Director of National
Intelligence, did identify Russia as the culprit in early October. But
private assessments had pinned the blame on Moscow far earlier.
Earnest
defended the White House and President Barack Obama against accusations
they were slow to act, saying it was essential all 17 US intelligence
agencies completed their reviews before making the information public.
He
insisted the administration didn't want to appear politically motivated
in naming Russia as the culprit in the election meddling.
"It
would have been inappropriate for White House figures, including the
President of the United States, to be rushing the intelligence community
to expedite their analysis of this situation, because we were concerned
about the negative impact it was having on the President's preferred
candidate in the presidential election," Earnest said.
"That
would have been all the more damaging in an environment where you have
the Republican nominee without evidence suggesting the election was
rigged," he continued.
Trump repeatedly made the claim the election was rigged against him, an allegation Obama said was harmful for democracy.
Helping Trump win isn’t a sign of Russian strength. It’s a sign of Russian weakness.
There’s a lot to parse when it comes to Russia’s role in the US election — both the overwhelming evidence
that it interfered in the vote and the recently disclosed CIA
conclusion that it did so in order to help get Donald Trump elected. But
there’s an even more fundamental question that needs to be answered:
What the hell are the Russians thinking?
Interfering in a US election is a dangerous game. Imagine
if Hillary Clinton had won — as virtually every pundit and statistical
model was predicting at the time that Russia started leaking hacked
emails of Clinton allies. The Russians would have infuriated the most powerful person in the world.
That didn’t happen, and the US instead elected the most
Kremlin-friendly presidential candidate in recent American history. But
it’s not clear that Russia will get off scot-free, with lawmakers from both parties calling for as-yet-unspecified punitive measures
designed to retaliate for Moscow’s interference in the 2016 elections
and to deter Russia from trying to meddle in elections to come.
So why take the risk? Part of the answer has to do solely
with Trump’s jarringly positive views of Russian President Vladimir
Putin and his willingness to embrace policies — like potentially pulling
the US out of NATO — that have long been among the Russian strongman’s
top strategic objectives. Compare this with Clinton’s long record of
hawkishness on Russia, and Trump was (from the Kremlin’s perspective) a
far better choice.
But there’s a deeper answer, according to several Russia
experts: The Putin government is much weaker than it appears, and the
hack comes from a position of weakness, not confidence.
Their argument is that Moscow is outclassed militarily by
the US and its NATO allies and buckling economically under the weight
of international sanctions and low oil prices. It’s a country that’s
very far from reaching the heights of power that Putin wants for it.
The hack, on this analysis, is the clearest evidence yet
of how far Putin is willing to go to weaken his rivals and thus raise
Russia’s relative strength. He’s not trying to repair his own
government; he’s trying to damage those of other countries. With a
democracy like the US, the best way to do that is to use a large and
sophisticated propaganda campaign to shake confidence in the election
and elect a threat to the established Western order like Trump.
“The military balance is grim; the economic balance is
grim. And so how do you deal with that?” asks Dan Nexon, a professor at
Georgetown University who studies great power politics. “[Information
warfare] is pretty much what the Russians have going for them.”
Trump’s instincts are a lot friendlier to Putin than Clinton’s
Nobody really knows what Donald Trump will do as
president. But if his policy ideas voiced during the campaign were a
good guide, the Kremlin will have reason to celebrate.
Trump has praised the Russian bombing campaign in Syria,
supported moves like Brexit that destabilized Russia’s European rivals,
and personally praised Putin. Most importantly, he has mused about
weakening American commitment to NATO. Nothing Putin could do on his own
would help Russia’s standing on the world stage and regional influence
more than the collapse of the Cold War–era military alliance.
Now, we don’t know how exactly how seriously to
take Trump’s musings about NATO. He could change his tune once in
office, given the immense pressure that would come from lawmakers,
allies, and the American security establishment. It’s hard to say, and
uncertainty when it comes to America is definitely worrying to Russian
security people.
What is clear, though, is that Putin and his allies really didn’t like Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary is the worst option [from the Russian point of
view],” Fyodor Lukyanov, the chair of Russia's Council on Foreign and
Defense Policy and an influential voice in Russia’s security
establishment, told Vox last year. “There is a widespread view that she personally hates Putin.”
The Kremlin saw her proposals for a no-fly zone in Syria
and a history of aggressive criticism of Russian foreign policy as
strong evidence that the US would be more confrontational toward Russia
with President Clinton in the White House. Even if the Russians aren’t
convinced that Trump would be good for them, they could very well think
he’s better than the alternative.
“I was in Moscow just last week ... and my sense is
they’re concerned and confused about what a Trump presidency means,”
Alina Polyakova, the deputy director of the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center
at the Atlantic Council, tells me. “Trump is absolutely a risk. [But]
it was worth the risk, from the Kremlin’s point of view.”
The Putin regime is much weaker than you think
But the mere fact that the Russians preferred Trump to
Clinton doesn’t explain why they’d be willing to actively support him.
There were doubtless US elections during and after the Cold War where
the Russians had a preferred candidate, but Moscow has never intervened
as aggressively as it appears to have done in 2016.
“What’s new is how brazen and explicit it has been,” Polyakova says.
So why? Why would the Russians so boldly attempt to elect
their preferred candidate, knowing that the intervention carried a
serious risk of American retaliation?
Some experts argue that the key variable here is Russian weakness, not strength. To understand this, you need to understand Russia’s strategic situation a little bit better.
By any metric
— defense spending, control of advanced military tech, you name it —
the United States is by far the world’s most dominant military power. A recent book
by Dartmouth’s Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth attempted to
quantify the degree of American dominance in these terms. Their findings
were unequivocal.
“Our investigation shows that the United States
indisputably remains the sole superpower, and the gap between it and the
other powers ... remains very large,” they write.
Russia, by contrast, fell into disrepair after the collapse of the Soviet Union — and modernization efforts under Putin
have failed to come close to making up the gap. When you add America’s
might to that of its NATO allies, some of which have increased defense
spending in response to Russian military adventurism in Syria and
Ukraine, the picture for the Kremlin looks quite bad — “much, much
weaker,” as Nexon put it in our conversation.
The Russian economy, likewise, is in dismal shape. Russia
has depended heavily on trade in natural resources, particularly oil
and gas; the recent collapse in oil prices and spread of shale gas in
the West has been painful for Russia. Western sanctions, punishment for
its invasion of Ukraine, have made it much harder for Russian
corporations in key sectors (including oil and banking) to do business
abroad.
The result is an economy that has been in recession for two years. GDP has declined to roughly the level it was in the immediate wake of the 2008 financial collapse:
The
result, then, is that you have a Russia that is extremely limited — at
least, compared to what it once was. Russia can bully around a weaker
non-NATO state, like Ukraine; it can help prop up an ally against ragtag
rebels, as in Syria. But it cannot challenge the Western-led alliance
for global supremacy in the way the Soviets could.
Putin can’t change this — he can’t rebuild the Russian
military overnight, or solve its fundamental economic weakness relative
to America. That means that accomplishing his ultimate goal of restoring
Russian greatness means he needs to break the American-led alliance —
somehow persuading these countries to abandon institutions like NATO and
take a softer view of Moscow’s overseas meddling.
“Information operations” — like, say, hacking a political
party’s emails and dumping them publicly — is a particularly effective
tool for accomplishing this goal. Putin’s principal rivals are Western
democracies, whose elections can theoretically be swayed by the release
of damaging information. And the United States happened to be holding an
election with a candidate who, at least on paper, seems likely to
destabilize America’s commitment to its allies and cozy up to the
Kremlin.
To analysts like Nexon and Polyakova, the takeaway is
clear: Even though there was a chance the US might retaliate, Russian
leaders likely concluded that intervening to help Trump was worth it.
“Putin is willing to take increasingly bigger risks to
strategically place Russia as a [great] power in the world again,”
Polyakova says. “I think it’s the Kremlin’s attempt to balance the
security asymmetry that currently exists.”
If this analysis is correct, then don’t expect Russia to
stop with the US election. Both France and Germany are holding national
elections in 2017; both of them feature far-right candidates who support
a less hostile stance to Russia than their opponents. If Russia’s
information operation worked in America, there’s no reason to think the
Russians wouldn’t try it with two of their other leading rivals — or,
for that matter, in a future US election.
“If you can divide [Western countries], even in a
half-assed way, that’s good,” Nexon says. “If you can get people elected
who look like they might rip up [institutions like NATO] on their own,
that’s even better.”
Franken,
the second-term Democratic senator from Minnesota and, before that, a
longtime writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live,” has studied
this. He provided commentary
for MSNBC at the Al Smith Dinner, the Catholic charity fund-raiser in
October where presidential nominees engage in good-natured ribbing of
themselves and each other (Trump mostly skipped the “good-natured” part
and was booed). “I wanted to see if Trump laughed,” Franken said. “And he didn’t. He smiled, but didn’t laugh. I don’t know what it is.”
I
went back and watched video of Trump, not just at the Smith dinner. He
is, to say the least, a comic cash cow. No one has provided as much
fodder for the political, media and celebrity axis that Franken has
operated in for over four decades. But Franken is correct. It is
extremely rare to see or hear the president-elect himself laughing.
Franken offered no theory on this, just a contrast. “I happen to laugh
an incredible amount,” he told me. He has a distinctive and rollicking
cackle, which allows his staff to track his whereabouts on the Senate
floor. Conan O’Brien, a longtime friend and fellow “S.N.L.” alumnus,
told me that Franken’s laugh sounded like “a hydraulic seal” whose
rhythmic and almost mechanical force “can clear your sinuses.”
But
these were suddenly unfunny days. A shellshocked aura was cast over
Capitol Hill, particularly among Democrats. I went to see Franken in his
Senate office on a rainy Tuesday as lawmakers were trickling back to
town after Thanksgiving. They convened in caucus meetings and hallway
quorums that became commiseration sessions. Since Nov. 8, Washington has
felt like a fortressed village bracing for a guerrilla invasion.
At
65, Franken retains the thick build of the high-school wrestler he once
was. The resting pout of his mouth — the Baby Huey countenance to match
his honking voice — has assumed more of a smirk. Franken is not good at
masking emotions. He cries easily and can become impatient and never
bothered much to disguise his contempt for adversaries, at least until
he arrived in the Senate, whose hidebound traditions of decorum demanded
at least an honest effort. Franken has been mostly successful at this,
and has been strenuous in his attempts to leave his comic past behind,
though he was once busted for making dismissive faces and hand gestures
behind Mitch McConnell as the Republican leader gave a floor speech in
2010. “This isn’t ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Al,” McConnell said,
admonishing Franken, who later wrote a note of apology.
One
thing that made it safe to laugh was the ridiculousness of the conceit.
People assumed that the normal checks and balances would kick in and
never allow someone like Trump to be elected — the disapproval of the
“establishment,” the outrage capacity of the electorate or even a
candidate’s own code of ethics or ability to be shamed. Back in the
spring of 2015, when few believed that Trump was serious or would mount a
real campaign, comedians reacted to his entry into the race with
ostentatious gratitude: Jon Stewart, whose final six weeks on Comedy
Central coincided with the first stage of the campaign, thanked Trump
for “putting me in some kind of comedy hospice.”
As
Trump bloated into the campaign’s inescapable parade float, his
supposed comic abundance became more of a crisis. Every stopgap failed
in 2015 and 2016. So did every pundit assumption, and even the
long-understood barriers between, say, real and fake news. Where does
comedy even fit when the outrageous becomes the default? By October, the
executive producer of HBO’s “Veep,” David Mandel, was complaining to The Los Angeles Times
that Trump was “ruining comedy.” By December, it was revealed that
Trump would remain the executive producer of “The Celebrity Apprentice,”
and the fusion between reality TV and the sobering reality of the
presidency seemed complete. Political humor has faced similar moments in
the past, but never such a reckoning. “People on ‘S.N.L.’ actually were
saying eight years ago when Sarah Palin was running, We couldn’t have
written this ourselves,” said Robert Smigel, a longtime writer for the
show and friend of Franken’s who is best known as the voice behind the
foul-mouthed puppet Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog.
Franken’s
body of work has been oddly prescient. He was the subject of a 2006
documentary, “God Spoke,” which chronicled his journey to the Senate.
A.O. Scott of The New York Times described it as
“an investigation of the phenomenon of ideological celebrity, with Mr.
Franken as a willing case study.” You could make the case that Trump
himself might represent something of a next-phase case study himself — a
nominally ideological celebrity that has grown into a political
phenomenon.
More
remarkable, Franken wrote a satirical novel called “Why Not Me?” which
details his own fictitious celebrity run for president. His character is
corrupt, clueless and unprepared, but a confluence of unlikely factors —
and Franken’s wildly popular vow to eliminate A.T.M. fees — somehow
propels him to the White House, where things quickly go off the rails.
President Franken loses his mind (punching Nelson Mandela in the stomach
during a meeting!). He is the subject of a special congressional
inquiry — the Joint Committee on the President’s Mood Swings — and is
forced to resign after five months. Franken published “Why Not Me?” in
1999.
Now,
in his Senate office, Franken kept shaking his head. He seemed to be
choosing his words carefully, trying to toe the opposition party line
about Trump, in so much as there is one: “Where there are places we
agree, I will try to work with this administration.” But his despair was
obvious. “He’s very different,” Franken said of Trump. “And that’s as
far as I’ll go in my conjecture of who he is.” He chortled. “That’s
become kind of a cottage industry.” Psychoanalyzing Trump, he meant. I
reminded Franken that he was qualified, having presented himself at the
Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last summer as “a
world-renowned expert on right-wing megalomaniacs.” He had received “a
doctorate in megalomaniac studies from Trump University.” That was a few
days after Trump accepted the Republican nomination, a remarkable
development that — if you listened to the dismissive speeches and
constant mockery across the spectrum of smug progressives and Never
Trump conservatives — still felt at a safe remove.
I
was curious whether Trump’s election would herald a change in Franken’s
approach. He was always fierce in what he describes as “the heaping of
scorn and ridicule,” first on “S.N.L.” and later as a liberal talk-radio
host and author of political commentary with titles like “Rush Limbaugh
Is a Big Fat Idiot (And Other Observations).” He heaped abundant scorn
and ridicule upon George W. Bush but was not in the Senate at the time.
“I think this can be a moment that calls out for Al’s voice,” said Ben
Wikler, the head of the Washington office of MoveOn.org and producer of
Franken’s show on the defunct progressive radio network Air America.
Wikler, who helped Franken write his 2003 book, “Lies and the Lying
Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” said there
is a great need for “fearless opposition fighters that can cut through
the noise.” Franken has established himself as a legislator, he said,
and it might be time for him to return to his insurgent comic roots.
“Part of Al’s earlier approach to public life was swashbuckling and
baiting antagonists into fights they could not win,” Wikler told me.
“Humor can be a way of blasting through fear and anxiety and giving
people backbone.”
I
asked Franken about this. He nodded as if it had occurred to him but
was otherwise noncommital. “We’ll see how he operates,” he said of
Trump. “I don’t think anyone here has ever been a senator with this kind
of person in the White House. This one is very different.” He coughed
out a nervous laugh. “We’ll see how he evolves. And we’ll see how I
evolve.”
You sometimes hear the
expression “famous for Washington.” It describes someone well known
within the staid and dorky confines of the Beltway. Someone like Senator
Orrin Hatch, say, or maybe the election superlawyer Ben Ginsberg. It is
a somewhat backhanded designation, which is not to say Washington does
not love celebrities (to wit, the metastatic growth of the White House
Correspondents’ Association dinner in recent years). Occasionally,
celebrities from other realms cross over into politics. The Hall of Fame
wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks, Steve Largent, was in Congress
for a while, as was the guy who played Gopher on “The Love Boat” (Fred
Grandy). Franken followed in this tradition and is unquestionably the
only person ever to both serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee and
play a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — Paul Simon of Illinois
— in a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
Now
comes probably the best-known celebrity ever to enter American politics
— Trump — who cannonballed in at the highest level. His election made a
case that celebrity itself may today be the most potent driver of
American populism. Franken understands better than most the power of
fame as a way to gain a political audience and scramble ideological
paradigms. “One thing I’ve learned,” Franken told me, “is that celebrity
trumps ideology. I have spent a lot of time over the years heaping
scorn and ridicule upon Republicans. But then you meet them, and a lot
of people are like, Hey, Al, love that satellite mobile-uplink guy” —
one of his signature “S.N.L.” characters,
a “Weekend Update” correspondent from the early 1990s who reported back
to the studio via a “totally self-contained one-man mobile-uplink unit”
(with a 1.3-meter parabolic antenna attached to his head).
Two
weekends before Election Day, Franken went to Philadelphia to appear at
get-out-the-vote events on behalf of Hillary Clinton and local
Democrats. “You all have jobs and kids,” Franken would say to rooms full
of volunteers. “Ignore them.” The rooms would erupt in laughter. “Kids
love being left alone. Eight-year-olds are perfectly capable of
operating microwave ovens.” These are Franken’s stock lines at such
events. They always land. “Thank you for keeping your sense of humor
through all of this,” one volunteer, Liz Martinez, told Franken after he
spoke. Franken cocked his right eyebrow, John Belushi-style. “Who says
I’m keeping my sense of humor?” he said.
Franken
fell asleep at 2 a.m. on the night of the election and woke up with a
migraine. For days, it was hard to think about anything besides Trump in
the White House. “There was a week or so when sleeping literally was a
great thing,” Franken said. “You go through a process of internalizing
it.” In addition to the political shock, there was a broader despair
over the cultural disconnect that the election laid bare. I kept
thinking of an Onion headline that ran a few weeks after the Sept. 11
attacks: “A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid [Expletive]
Again.” How long does it take a culture to forge a new sensibility,
whether comedic or political? Franken seemed to be struggling with this a
bit. There was similar confusion in the various liberal bubbles of
Washington, New York and Hollywood, whose inhabitants were the supposed
keepers of the American zeitgeist — the geniuses who so spectacularly
dismissed the zeitgeist that elected Donald Trump.
“I
really believe nobody knows anything right now,” Conan O’Brien told me
over the phone from Los Angeles. O’Brien is among the less political TV
comedians, particularly on cable (his show has run since 2010 on TBS).
But Trump is an inescapable topic. “I really think the whole mantra that
everyone must have, not just in this medium but in the world in
general, is that no one knows anything.” O’Brien recalled that after
Sept. 11, people were declaring the death of irony. It was not. There
was like a three-week pause. But then irony regenerated itself in some
altered, post-Sept. 11 form. Trump’s victory has landed a blow to the
country’s notions of certainty. “I would say we’re not seeing the death
of certainty,” O’Brien said. “But certainty has taken a holiday right
now.” Plenty of certainty, now discarded, was generated in 2016. Our
cozy silos of belief and customized group assumptions gave us our most
brutal campaign in years. “Everyone has their own street corner,”
O’Brien said.
While
“Saturday Night Live” was always subversive and groundbreaking, it was
also conceived before cable and the internet rewarded niche
sensibilities. As a network show, it needed to reach a critical mass of
the American middle. “We’ve actually tried to make ‘S.N.L.’ a safe space
across the political spectrum,” Lorne Michaels, its creator, told me in
his office near the “S.N.L.” studio on the 17th floor of 30 Rockefeller
Plaza. It has never been a production that preaches to a choir, as
contrasted with cable comedy shows hosted by the left-leaning likes of
Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee and John Oliver. “Jon Stewart was giving voice
to visions and ideas and doing it brilliantly, but in a way that almost
everyone watching agreed with,” Michaels said with a bit of an edge.
“It was 100 percent pure.”
The
election was still a few weeks away, and our discussion — like most
discussions during that stretch of ancient history — was predicated on
the assumption that Clinton would win. Michaels caught some heat for
inviting Trump to host the show in October 2015; critics accused him of
helping to celebrate and “normalize” someone they viewed as a monster.
But the fact that Trump would eventually wage a Twitter assault against
“S.N.L.” — particularly over Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him as a
menacing, bumbling imbecile — would itself suggest that the show struck
the right balance. “Trump is the head writer of this whole thing,”
Baldwin told me. “They could come up with something for us to do every
week.” Baldwin, who said he had no Trump impersonation until he debuted
the character on “S.N.L.” on Oct. 1,
said he takes no special satisfaction in angering the president-elect,
whom he calls “the first modern-day president who does not have thick
skin.” He said that he, too, has been blamed by some people for making
Trump appear more palatable than he is. “It’s kind of a Rorschach test,”
Baldwin said, “for how people see the political world in general.”
Clinton’s cameo,
playing Val the bartender consoling the distraught Kate McKinnon
version of her, was arguably her most endearing moment in an otherwise
dreary slog. By the time of the Trump and Clinton debates, the lines
between parody and self-parody had blurred to a grainy haze; it was
difficult to watch the candidates for two seconds without my mind
jumping immediately to Baldwin and McKinnon.
Franken, who joined
“S.N.L.” at its inception in 1975, never achieved the star status of
the show’s first wave — John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and
Chevy Chase. “Al was relentless about being a performer,” Michaels said.
Franken’s best-known creation at “S.N.L.” was probably Stuart Smalley,
the mirror-staring host of the mock self-help show “Daily Affirmation
With Stuart Smalley.” Smalley, who was also the subject of a movie, was
inspired by Franken’s experience going through a 12-step recovery
program with his wife, Franni, who battled alcoholism. “I was trying to
explain recovery though a character,” Franken said. “He is a character
that, at first blush, looks like kind of an idiot, but actually a lot of
the stuff he’s trying to talk about is true.” There is, Franken said, a
larger lesson embedded here. “I’m trying to express that you can learn
things from people who you think aren’t smarter than you,” he said. “I’m
embarrassed by how late in life I learned that.”
Franken
left “Saturday Night Live” in 1995 and settled into a successful next
act as a liberal satirist, author and radio host. He had no plan to seek
any office. But then his friend and political idol, Senator Paul
Wellstone of Minnesota, was killed in a plane crash along with seven
others — including his wife and daughter — on the eve of his re-election
campaign in 2002. “It was just this shattering thing,” said Norman
Ornstein, an author and congressional scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute and a close friend of Franken’s who grew up in the same
hometown, St. Louis Park, Minn.
The
Republican candidate, Norm Coleman, wound up defeating Walter Mondale,
who replaced Wellstone on the ballot. Franken started thinking about
running against Coleman, especially after Coleman said in an interview
with Roll Call after a few months in office that he was a “99 percent
improvement over Paul Wellstone.”
Franken
knew that running for Senate would uproot his life. Not only would he
have to move back to Minnesota, but he would have to work brutally hard.
“This was not someone who saw this as, Oh, I’ve been an entertainer,
and now as a dilettante I’m going to run for office,” Ornstein said.
Franken wound up defeating Coleman by 312 votes after months of recounts
and court challenges. When he joined the Senate in 2009, Franken was
determined to shed any hint that he was anything but a humble newcomer.
He resisted national news coverage and tried for the most part to
subvert his funnyman impulses to the solemn duties of his new role.
O’Brien
said it was strange to watch Franken, such an instinctively funny
person, “choose not to use one of his superpowers.” It took getting used
to. “We had some serious conversations,” O’Brien said. “But clearly he
was witnessing, every day in the Senate and in the government, the most
absurd things. And he would have to control himself.” O’Brien said
Franken told him that one of his aides gave him some advice early on:
“Whenever you have an instinct to do something, just don’t do that.”
Franken’s
rejection of type became his defining characteristic, at least in the
Washington shorthand. The news media dutifully ground his determined
seriousness into a cliché. Every publication that wrote about Franken
seemed compelled to deploy some version of “No Joke” in its headlines.
He keeps a framed collage in his office made up of a couple of dozen
such examples (including a “Franken’s Campaign Against Comcast Is No Joke” headline from The New York Times).
Still,
colleagues from both parties would seek Franken’s help in workshopping
jokes for their speeches. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Franken’s close friend
and fellow Democrat from Minnesota, was preparing a comedy act at the
expense of Senator Ted Cruz for Washington’s annual Gridiron Dinner in
2013. This was around the time a Carnival Cruise ship ran aground in the
Gulf of Mexico amid a four-day accumulation of human waste. That
debacle inspired the following: In Washington, Klobuchar said, “when
Democrats hear about a difficult cruise, we don’t know if it’s Carnival
or Ted.” That was funny, kind of. Klobuchar ran the joke by Cruz
beforehand on the Senate floor as a matter of collegial courtesy.
Franken approached the pair and asked Klobuchar to repeat the joke,
which she did. “Without missing a beat,” Klobuchar recalled, Franken
offered this improvement: In Washington, went the Franken version, “when
you hear about a cruise that’s full of [expletive], you don’t know if
it’s Carnival or Ted.” That was funnier, Klobuchar conceded, though she
opted for the tamer original.
Franken
won re-election by more than 10 percentage points in 2014, a year in
which several Democratic incumbents were defeated. He said he has felt
more freedom in the Senate since his re-election. “I think the people of
Minnesota get that I came here to be their senator and do the work and
legislate,” he told me. I asked Franken, a longtime New Yorker until he
moved back to Minnesota to run for Senate, whether he had met Donald
Trump. They were in the same room on many occasions, in the way that
famous New Yorkers often are. But their only interaction came at a
screening of “The Sopranos” at Radio City Music Hall. Franken recognized
Trump in front of him and was moved to yell out, “THAT IS THE WORST
COMBOVER I HAVE EVER SEEN!” Trump spun around and saw it was Franken. He
didn’t say anything, Franken said, but “sort of gave that look that
said, Oh, that’s a comedian, O.K., I get it.” I asked Franken if he
would have done the same if he were in elected office at the time.
“Probably not,” he admitted.
Franken
is fully aware that even the most thrown-off or nominally irreverent
quip can become toxic after being put through what Franken calls the
“de-humorizer” of partisan America. I witnessed this firsthand, and even
participated, when I joined Franken in late August at the Minnesota
State Fair in St. Paul. As Franken made his rounds — pouring glasses of
milk at a dairy stand, eating a pork chop on a stick — he paused for a
minute to receive a distraught call from his son, Joe. Joe relayed the
news that Teddy Bridgewater, the young quarterback for the Minnesota
Vikings, had just suffered a gruesome injury to his knee at practice
that afternoon. “No!” said Franken, a lifelong Vikings fan. “This is so
depressing,” he muttered after hanging up. “It’s like finding out
Hillary’s having an affair with Anthony Weiner.”
Franken
blurted this out with such matter-of-fact exasperation, which I
happened to find hilarious. Later, I did something I probably should not
have and shared Franken’s quip via Twitter, itself a kind of
de-humorizer. This spelled trouble for the home-team senator. Audience
reaction ran heavily against the remark, especially from Vikings fans
(there are a few of these in Minnesota) and Franken nonfans
(“Frankenstein is a liberal pinhead”). Franken wasted little time
grabbing the cleanup mop. “Pretty insensitive and stupid of me,” he
tweeted. “Regret it and sincerely apologize.”
The day before
the presidential election, Trump dropped in for a quick rally in a
hangar at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. He railed against
the “disaster taking place in Minnesota,” with “large numbers of Somali
refugees coming into your state, without your knowledge, without your
support or approval.” He drew raucous applause and came within just 1.5
points of beating Clinton in the historically blue state. “You’ve
suffered enough in Minnesota,” Trump said.
Franken
was furious about Trump’s remarks. He had worked closely with the
Somali communities of Minnesota and had made many friendships. A young
Somali-American woman, Muna Abdulahi, whose family immigrated to
Minnesota, went to work as a page in Franken’s office. He wound up
speaking at her high school graduation in Willmar, Minn., last spring
and ran into her on Election Day on the campus of the University of
Minnesota, where she is now a freshman. She told him that her younger
sister, Anisa, had just been named homecoming queen back in Willmar.
In
the weeks after Trump was elected, Franken was asked to speak at a
middle school in St. Paul that has a big population of Somali students.
The students were terrified about the election. Tensions had run high
after a September incident in St. Cloud in which a knife-wielding Somali
man wounded 10 people in an attack at a mall (an off-duty police
officer shot and killed him). A spate of harassment targeting Somalis
ensued. “So I went to the school, and I talked to the kids,” Franken
told me, “and I said: You’re Americans. You’re Americans.” Franken told
me about a conversation he had in his office on Nov. 17 with a French
diplomat. Franken asked the diplomat who could be considered a
“Frenchman” in France. The diplomat explained that the designation was
usually reserved for someone whose family went back a few hundred years
in the same village. In other words, new arrivals are not “Frenchmen.”
“But
in the United States, we make them homecoming queen,” Franken said with
a catch of emotion. “Goddamn, it made me mad,” he said again, referring
to Trump’s airport rally. “It’s literally sad, you know, that kind of
thing.”
Before
he entered the Senate, Franken was always more of satirist than a Henny
Youngman jokester type. “You take a reality, and you exaggerate, and
you show how ridiculous it is,” Ornstein told me. Take, for example,
this scenario — a celebrity runs for president and does a bunch of
bizarre and seemingly beyond-the-pale stuff, like boasting about the
size of his penis on the debate stage, and winds up in the White House.
“You look at a situation, you analyze it, and you see the weak points
where you make something funny out of it,” Ornstein said. But what if no
one notices the difference between the fact and the fiction, much less
cares to recognize the absurdity of the details? What’s the use of
satire, or straight-out ridicule, if your target can’t even be bothered
to care?
“There
are a lot of ironies in this election,” Franken said, folding himself
into a crooked angle on his office couch. Franken kept pointing out
ironies. There are different kinds of ironies. There are funny ones,
like what you read in The Onion, or cruel ones that leave you
bewildered. These seemed more like the cruel ones. He mentioned Trump’s
unsubstantiated claim that he saw thousands of Muslims somewhere in New
Jersey cheering after the Sept. 11 attacks and his contention that the
Clintons were behind the Obama “birther” conspiracy. “He’d say several
things a day that would end anyone else’s race,” Franken said. The day
before, the president-elect had tweeted with no evidence that millions
of fraudulent votes were cast against him.
After
the election, the Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as its word of
the year for 2016 (defining it as a state “in which objective facts are
less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and
personal belief”). “The big irony is that I made some of my living by
writing books about people who lied,” Franken told me, naming Limbaugh,
Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and others. “It just seems adorable now that
I could make a living doing that, fighting misstatements of fact. And
people were like, Oh, that’s terrible, I can’t believe it. And now it
just doesn’t matter.” He laughed, as Franken does, but with no sign of
joy. This felt too visceral to be called humor, as if we were moving on
to something else entirely.
Mr. Tigerli in China
Copyright 2016 by Letizia Mancino
translation by Mary Holmes
All rights reserved
Yes Betty, either or it seems he wanted to fly only with
Singapore Airways.
Boeing or Airbus, it’s just the same
isn’t it? Aren’t they both just fat birds with 500 passengers?
Yes, but Singapore Airlines has the
most beautiful airhostesses: delicate, fine, graceful… Mr. Tigerli had looked forward to the flight
so much!
So the little man was disappointed?
You just can’t imagine how disappointed
he was.
But thank God one of the hostesses was a
pretty Chinese girl. Mr. Tigerli purred loudly but she didn’t hear him because
the purring of the Airbus 380 was even louder.
The poor cat!
You’ve said it Betty. Mr. Tigerli was
in a very bad mood and asked me for a loud speaker.
I’m sure you can get one in 1st
Class.
“”Russian Girl” had even heard you over
the roar of the Niagara Falls” I said to Mr. Tigerli. “You are a very
unfaithful cat. You wanted to get to know Asiatic girls. That’s how it is when
one leaves one’s first love”.
And what did he say to that?
“Men are hunters” was his answer.
Yes, my dear cat, a mouse hunter. And
what else did he say?
Not another word. He behaved as if he
hadn’t heard me.
The Airbus is very loud.
I told him shortly “Don’t trouble
yourself about “Chinese Girl”. There will be enough even prettier girls in
China. Wait till we land in Guilin”.
Did he understand you?
Naturally Mr. Tigerli understood me
immediately. Yes, sweetheart, don’t worry. They will find you something sweet
to eat.
And he?
He was so happy.
No problem going through the immigration
control?
Naturally! Lots of problems. How could I explain to
customs that the cat had come as a tourist to China to buy shoes?
Fur in exchange for shoes…
Don’t be so cynical Betty!
Cat meat in exchange for shoes?
He came through the pass control with
no trouble!
Is this Mr. Tigerli?
 |
Betty MacDonald's Vashon Island is a paradise.
info to: Sandra Lorinda Traci Petr Dana Jana Michaela Rebekah Swiss Charrd Tru John Darsie Darsie Toby Jeanine Carol Justin Lila Daniel Mo Nika Steve Neal Jitka Jitka Tami Pete Laurie Maia Nancy Kelly Pam Mary Jan and all our other friends
www.bettymacdonaldfanclub.blogspot.com/
info to: Sandra Lorinda Traci Petr Dana Jana Michaela Rebekah Swiss Charrd Tru John Darsie Darsie Toby Jeanine Carol Justin Lila Daniel Mo Nika Steve Neal Jitka Jitka Tami Pete Laurie Maia Nancy Kelly Pam Mary Jan and all our other friends
www.bettymacdonaldfanclub.blogspot.com/
Take an illustrated day trip through Washington state’s largest city with artist Candace Rose Rardon.
gadventures.com
Linda White yes,if my health allows.I have a few problems but is something I have always wanted to do,especially as I reread her books.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · August 1 at 6:37pm
Linde Lund Dear Linda I'll keep you posted.
Like · Reply · 1 · August 1 at 6:42pm
Bella Dillon · Friends with Darsie Beck
I still read Mrs Piggle Wiggle books to this day. I love her farm on vashon.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · August 1 at 10:32pm
Lila Taylor Good morning...Linde Lund
Unlike · Reply · 1 · 18 hrs
