This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

If you needed any more grist for the mill of what you know to be Trump stupidity, you got more from Georgia this week.

There, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, in a new book, detailed former president Trump’s stupidity in a long and rambling phone call early last year as he, Trump, ticked off a host of debunked and fanciful conspiracy theories he blamed for his electoral defeat. 

Hill.com wrote about this in a story under this headline:

Georgia secretary of state:  Trump “had no idea how elections work”

The story started this way:

“Former President Trump demonstrated virtually no knowledge of the conduct of modern elections procedures in a long and rambling phone call with Georgia’s top elections administrator as he ticked off a host of debunked and fanciful conspiracy theories he blamed for his electoral defeat. 

“The man on the other end of that call in early January, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, details months of mistruths and disinformation perpetuated by the Trump campaign.”

The new book that recounts this is called “Integrity Counts,” which by those very words would exclude Trump. 

In the book, there is a roughly 40-page transcript of the call itself, which shows an increasingly agitated Trump grasping at allegations that Raffensperger and his top deputy systematically refute as then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows pleaded with the Georgia officials to investigate further and Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to deliver the state’s electoral votes.

Here are examples of how Raffensperger described Trump:

• “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes.  Give me a break.”  “This repeated request for votes,” Raffensperger said,“ showed me that Trump really had no idea how elections work.  The secretary of state’s office doesn’t allocate any votes.”
• “At the time of the call in January, I didn’t know if he believed what he was saying.  I didn’t know if he was trying to push a narrative, or was he just believing stuff that was fed to him.  As a conservative-with-a-capital-C Republican, I’m disappointed like everyone else is. But the cold hard facts are that Trump did come up short in the state of Georgia.” 
• Trump said he had been told that ballots had been cast in the names of as many as 5,000 dead people; Raffensperger’s post-election audit found two people had voted in the names of dead relatives.  Trump alleged 4,925 voters who lived in other states had cast ballots in Georgia; Raffensperger found 300 out-of-state voters. Trump accused Fulton County officials of shredding thousands of ballots; Raffensperger counters that officials in Cobb County shredded blank envelopes, and no ballots. 

“We are a nation of laws; we believe in the rule of law. We have a constitution. We have state laws, we have federal laws,” Raffensperger said.  

Raffensperger, who is up for re-election next year, remains a target for Trump and his acolytes.  

In the hill.com article, Raffensperger declined to say whether he believes Trump is morally fit to be president.

I won’t decline.

He is not morally fit for the nation’s top political job.  Lying is second nature to him.  He rallies folks to believe he is like a god, if not a god, and, thus, deserves to be re-elected, even if it takes violence to achieve that goal.

Perish that prospect as this country heads toward 2024.

NOTE:  At one point after Trump lost the presidential election, I vowed that I would not write again about the buffoon.  Well, I am not keeping that vow; I cannot as Trump heads toward trying to be president again.