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.

Dan Balz writes for the Washington Post and always comes with trenchant ways to view the current political tapestry in this country.

He did so again yesterday in another great piece.

First, about Balz.

He serves as chief correspondent covering national politics, the presidency and Congress for the Post.  He joined the newspaper in 1978 and has been involved in political coverage as a reporter or editor throughout his career.

Before coming to The Post, he worked at National Journal magazine as a reporter and an editor and at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

It is his work these days that often captures my attention, as it did yesterday.  Balz listed reasons why he thought it would be difficult, if not impossible, for Donald Trump and his ilk to defend their actions in and around the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the Nation’s Capital. 

Here is his list:

• Could they defend Trump’s repeated attempts to use the Justice Department to interfere in the election process, after having been told repeatedly, beginning with then Attorney General William P. Barr, that DOJ had found no evidence of fraud?
• Could they defend the president telling then acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue in a telephone call, “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen”?
• Could they defend the president for asking why the government was not seizing voting machines that his campaign lawyers had targeted with a spurious conspiracy theory involving Venezuela and its onetime leader Hugo Chávez?
• Could they defend his plan to replace then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen with an assistant attorney general named Jeffrey Clark, who other DOJ officials said was not competent to run the department and yet who was willingly compliant to do the bidding of the president to prevent the Congress from ratifying Joe Biden’s victory?
• Could they defend Clark’s drafting of a letter to be sent to several swing states saying that the department had “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election” when in fact there was no evidence to back that up?
• Could they defend the discussion of appointing lawyer Sidney Powell — who with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, was promoting various conspiracy theories for which there was no evidence — as a special counsel to conduct an investigation for which there was no other purpose than to delay and disrupt?
• Could they defend the fact that a lawyer named Kenneth Klukowski, who had joined the Justice Department after the election and was working with Clark, was also working with Trump’s outside attorney John Eastman, an architect of the so-called fake electors strategy?
• Could they defend Trump’s repeated attempts to bully, badger and otherwise try to force state or local officials to overturn the results of recounted and certified elections in their jurisdictions?
• Could they defend him asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” and thus deny Biden by a single vote his legitimate victory in that state?
• Could they defend efforts to persuade Russell Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona House, to organize a formal inquiry into the election without providing evidence of fraud?
• Could they defend what Giuliani said to Bowers, according to the speaker’s testimony, which was, “We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence”?

Of course, the answer to all of the questions is no.  Emphatically.  There is no defense for what Trump and his acolytes did. 

They deserve specific and solid punishment.