Mountain Views News, Sierra Madre Edition [Pasadena] Saturday, November 19, 2016

B4

OPINION 

DICK Polman

Mountain Views-News Saturday, November 19, 2016 


Mountain 
Views

News

PUBLISHER/ EDITOR

Susan Henderson

PASADENA CITY 
EDITOR

Dean Lee 

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Joan Schmidt

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CONTRIBUTORS

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Merri Jill Finstrom

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Keely Toten


SUSAN Henderson

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM OUR 
MOUNTAIN VIEWS NEWS FAMILY!

 With our emotions still running high after the nation’s 
Presidential Election, I thought I would just remind 
everyone that no matter what side of any issue you are 
on, we are still united as members of the human race. 

HUMAN FAMILY

By Maya Angelou

I note the obvious differences

in the human family.

Some of us are serious,

some thrive on comedy.

Some declare their lives are lived

as true profundity,

and others claim they really live

the real reality.

The variety of our skin tones

can confuse, bemuse, delight,

brown and pink and beige and purple,

tan and blue and white.

I’ve sailed upon the seven seas

and stopped in every land,

I’ve seen the wonders of the world

not yet one common man.

I know ten thousand women

called Jane and Mary Jane,

but I’ve not seen any two

who really were the same.

Mirror twins are different

although their features jibe,

and lovers think quite different thoughts

while lying side by side.

We love and lose in China,

we weep on England’s moors,

and laugh and moan in Guinea,

and thrive on Spanish shores.

We seek success in Finland,

are born and die in Maine.

In minor ways we differ,

in major we’re the same.

I note the obvious differences

between each sort and type,

but we are more alike, my friends,

than we are unalike.

We are more alike, my friends,

than we are unalike.

We are more alike, my friends,

than we are unalike.


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TYRADES! BY DANNY TYREE

JOHN L. MICEK

WILL THE ELECTION RUIN YOUR 
THANKSGIVING DINNER?

According to the New York Daily News, the 2016 presidential 
election is dividing families on Thanksgiving. 

 Don’t be surprised if the occasion brings empty seats at the 
table, heated debates, awkward silences and (at potluck meals) 
a confusing array of dishes labeled “Not my casserole” and “Not 
my cranberry sauce.”

 The earliest Thanksgivings I remember took place when the Vietnam War was 
escalating and the Sexual Revolution was exploding, so I have enough perspective 
to realize that holiday tension is not unprecedented. When Abraham Lincoln 
declared a national day of Thanksgiving in 1863, we were still in the midst of a 
war that pitted brother against brother. (Granted, that has morphed into a battle of 
brother-trapped-in-a-sister’s-body against sister-trapped-in-a-brother’s-body, but 
things are basically the same.)

 Some people will always be more interested in finding bones of contention 
than PULLING the wishbone. I think my late grandfather could have found some 
way to start a Thanksgiving table war between the green Hula-Hoop fans and the 
godless orange Hula-Hoop fans.

 But I do empathize with the citizens who think the divisiveness will hit new 
depths this year.

 Who am I to question nostalgic yearnings for a simpler time? Many folks 
sincerely miss the olden days when “extreme vetting” meant the family dog would 
be walking funny for several days and when the only “nasty woman” was cousin 
Bertie, who observed the “30-second rule” when she thought no one saw her 
dropping cooked yams on the dining room floor.

 But that Mayflower has sailed. This will not be a Norman Rockwell holiday. 
Politics has seen to it that even the most wholesome old holiday songs are now 
tainted. (“Over the river and through the w—oh, somebody’s aides have closed 
the bridge!”)

 On a positive note, family members will chew their food really, really well – out of 
fear that President-elect Trump will declare the Heimlich Maneuver retroactively 
stripped from Obamacare. 

 Some hosts will undoubtedly go out of their way to get a rise out of their guests. 
(“Thank you, Lord, for this succulent turkey, which was allowed to grow to an 
impressive size, instead of being yanked untimely from its mother’s womb. Egg. 
Whatever.”)

 Other hosts will bend over backwards to avoid controversy. (“No more choice 
of ‘white meat’ or ‘dark meat.’ This bird is being blended into Thanksgiving 
smoothies.”)

Ground rules may have to be set down, including no talk about fracking Plymouth 
Rock, no referring to the cornucopia (“horn of plenty”) as a “horn of deplorables” 
and no bragging about how many bankruptcies one can generate while participating 
in pre-Black Friday door-buster sales.

 Most people will bring their own well-rehearsed talking points to the gathering, 
but of course one clueless idiot will stumble right into a controversy. (“I guess the 
Electoral College is okay, but it would be better with safe spaces and adult coloring 
books and an occasional kegger…”)

 There’s still time to salvage the holiday. Thanksgiving can still be a time for 
traditional activities, such as kibitzing your niece’s new beau, loosening your belt 
while watching televised football games and listening to a grandchild’s first word 
(“Misogynist!”)

 Here’s hoping that we can find common ground, join hands and give thanks for 
our many blessings -- like, for instance, the ability to come up with the cleverest 
scheme for getting great-aunt Maude to promise US that antique chest of drawers!

 ©2016 Danny Tyree. Danny welcomes email responses at tyreetyrades@aol.com 
and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades.” Danny’s weekly column is 
distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons Inc. newspaper syndicate.

TRUMP WILL HAVE A HARD 
TIME DRAINING THE SWAMP

 The internet justifiably lost its collective mind this week with 
the news that President-elect Donald Trump had appointed 
Stephen K. Bannon, a leading voice of white nationalism, to a 
senior White House position, seemingly dashing hopes that the 
populist billionaire would strike a more conciliatory tone in office 
than he had on the campaign trail. 

 But even as civil rights groups charged that Bannon, the former top executive to 
the alt-right site Breitbart News, was in position to whisper racist, anti-Semitic and 
globally destabilizing views into the ear of the most powerful man on Earth, some 
slender hope also emerged that one of the oldest forces in Washington might align to 
counter it: 

 Namely, the Capitol’s tendency toward inertia. 

 With his election last Tuesday, Trump, 70, became the first man to win the White 
House without ever having served in elected office or the military. 

 And while his outsider status thrilled supporters, it presents a genuine challenge 
as Trump scrambles to fill the roughly 4,000 appointed vacancies needed to keep the 
government running after President Barack Obama leaves office in January. 

 That means that Trump, who does not have the same extensive network of contacts 
within government that Hillary Clinton would have boasted had she won election, will 
likely have to turn to the very establishment figures he denounced on the campaign 
trail. 

 “To get Republican candidates with relevant executive branch experience,” Trump 
will have to “choose former Bush administration officials,” Noah Feldman, a professor 
of constitutional and international law at Harvard University, wrote in a piece for 
Bloomberg View this week. 

 As a result, “Trump’s presidential agenda is therefore likely to be filtered through 
mainstream Republican personnel,” Feldman observed. 

 And those officials are, by and large, more moderate than their likely boss, throwing 
into question whether Trump will be able to fulfill some of his key campaign promises 
- like building a wall and getting tough with China on trade. 

 “No Republican whose first name wasn’t George and whose last name wasn’t Bush 
has been president in an astonishing 28 years,” Feldman wrote. “That means any Trump 
appointee who held a prior Republican political appointment basically had to have 
worked for Bush as a matter of mathematics and longevity.” 

 At this early stage, it’s clear that Trump is rewarding loyalists with plum administration 
appointments. 

 This week, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani emerged as a leading 
contender for secretary of state, The New York Times reported. 

 The potential for global catastrophe, of course, seems limitless with the fiery and 
combative Giuliani at the negotiating table. 

 But that’s where Feldman’s thesis, and that of another expert, Michael J. Glennon, 
offers some reassurance. 

 Glennon, a Tufts University professor, former Senate Foreign Relations Committee 
counsel and State Department consultant, had something of a moment during the 
campaign when he observed that an army of professional bureaucrats, mostly in the 
national security infrastructure, make up one half of a “double government” that acts 
as a significant check on executive power. 

 These bureaucrats exert so much authority, in fact, that in his new book “National 
Security and Double Government,” Glennon devotes the first three pages to cataloging 
a range of policies, including drone warfare, that have remained unchanged between 
the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. 

 “The presidency itself is not a top-down institution, as many people in the public 
believe, headed by a president who gives orders and causes the bureaucracy to click its 
heels and salute,” Glennon told The Boston Globe last month. “National security policy 
actually bubbles up from within the bureaucracy. Many of the more controversial 
policies, from the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors to the NSA surveillance program, 
originated within the bureaucracy. John Kerry was not exaggerating when he said that 
some of those programs are ‘on autopilot.’” 

 In an interview with Slate this week, Glennon acknowledged that Washington’s 
traditional unwillingness to rock the boat might also enable Trump to implement some 
of his more controversial national security proposals - such as executing terrorists’ 
family members. 

 But the significant hurdles Trump will have to cross to meet those goals, as outlined 
by both Glennon and Feldman, strongly suggest that the nation’s 45th president might 
have a harder time than he thinks draining Washington’s swamp. 

 That’s probably good news for Democrats and Trump’s GOP critics. But it might 
leave the residents of Trump nation with a case of buyer’s remorse.

 An award-winning political journalist, Micek is the Opinion Editor and Political 
Columnist for PennLive/The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. Readers may follow him 
on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek and email him at jmicek@pennlive.com.


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