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.

I have decided to open another department, the Department of Words Matter.

Doing so will allow me to continue writing about one of my favorite subjects, words.  Until now, I had just done so willy-nilly, without a department to house all my well-written, well-designed prose. 

With this new opening, I will be able to group all “words matter” commentary in one place.  And, remember, I run all my departments with a free-hand to manage as I see fit.

The other departments are the Department of Pet Peeves, the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering, and the Department of “Just Saying.”

So, today, I open the new department with this – a few quotes from a column written by Benjamin Dreyer, Random House’s executive managing editor and copy chief and the author of “Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.”

His column appeared under this headline:  Liz Cheney, Donald Trump and the January 6 scandal’s “Potent Quotables.”  Here is how he started his piece:

Error! Filename not specified.The House select committee’s January 6 hearings are generating quotes and sound bites almost faster than the internet can memeify them. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) was first out of the gate, in the initial televised hearing, with “Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

“I do not join the chorus asserting that Representative Liz Cheney’s admirably steadfast presence on the committee — and disinclination to join her fellow Republicans, insofar as the attack on the Capitol is concerned, in sticking their fingers in their ears while chanting la-la-la-la-la-la — warrant her immediate ascension to the White House as our next president.  But she undeniably has a way with an ultimatum.

“Grammar and punctuation aficionados who can recall the difference between a restrictive clause and a non-restrictive clause will, moreover, take particular note of the absence of a comma in Cheney’s comment as it was presented in the committee’s own transcript:  Not the blanketly non-restrictive “my Republican colleagues, who are defending the indefensible,” which would imply that all her fellow party members are pro-insurrection (or at least pro impromptu Capitol visits that include smearing excrement on walls and baying ‘Hang Mike Pence’), but simply the restrictive ‘my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible.’

“That points a merciful finger at only a select few.  Well, a lot more than a few, but not all.”

Political scandals, Dreyer adds, have a way of generating what the “Jeopardy” people might well dub “Potent Quotables.”

For example, media coverage last week of the Watergate break-in’s 50th anniversary dusted off President Richard M. Nixon’s notorious, “Well, I’m not a crook.”

“Republicans and Democrats practice bi-partisanship when it comes to scandal quotables:  It was President Bill Clinton, in the depths of a sex scandal, who contributed the monumentally evasive, “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

Dreyer goes on to note other lines that he says “will become permanently evocative” of the January 6 scandal, read “insurrection,” my word – and more about that later.

• There was professional son-in-law Jared Kushner’s comment concerning White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s threat to resign — “I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”
• And testimony from J. Michael Luttig, an adviser to Vice President Mike Pence and former federal judge, that “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
• Or consider Trump adviser/schemer John Eastman’s plaintive email request of presidential what-not Rudy Giuliani:  “I’ve decided / that I should be / on the pardon list / if that is still / in the works.”
• Then there were Trump’s own immortal words on the evening of January 5, 2021, addressed to his vice president:  “I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”
• But let’s get back to one key word and the key question that dominates the January 6 hearings:  The meaning of the word “insurrection.” Noted constitutional scholar and lexicographer Tucker Carlson – just to confirm, that’s tongue-in-cheek — informed us the night after the first committee hearing (not that Fox News aired it) that “an insurrection is when people with guns try to overthrow the government. Not a single person in the crowd on January 6 was found to be carrying a firearm.  Not one.”
• I add this from Rudolph Giulani as he represented Trump:  “We’ve got lots of theories.  We just don’t have the evidence.”
• Or, this from former attorney general, William P. Barr.  He had one word for the swirling fact-less theories of fraud embraced by Trump in the election’s aftermath:  “Bullshit.”

So, back to my word and Carlson’s word:  Insurrection.  Carlson was way off, which is not surprising, given his penchant for enunciating idiocy, not to mention being one himself.

What insurrection means is this:  “An act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.”

That’s what happened on January 6 and, if Donald Trump and his acolytes have their way again, it will happen again.

So, as the director of the Department of Words Matter, I decree this:  Insurrection is absolutely the right word in the case of what happened at Trump’s bidding on January 6.