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 wrote earlier this week about famous meltdowns in the U.S. Open. 

So, as I promised, as the nation’s championship pro golf tournament starts today, I will turn to the positive.

One way to do so is to cite information about the tournament, which will be held at storied The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Another is to list players who, from my perch out West with nothing other than interest to commend my views, have a decent chance to win this week.

First, the course.

Here’s the way the Washington Post described it:

“The 2022 U.S. Open most certainly has not been supersized.

“Some might say its length — a modest 7,254 yards — is more reasonable than in the recent past.  Nobody will argue that some of the holes on the classic layout at The Country Club are downright short.

“The USGA brought its top-line event — the toughest test in golf — to an old-school course built on a small piece of property, the sort of layout that is becoming more obsolete in big-time golf.  It has a drivable par-4, a reachable par 5, and will also feature a par-3 that could play less than 100 yards.

“’Really a cool style of golf,’ said top-ranked Scottie Scheffler, hoping to add a U.S. Open title to the green jacket he won at the Masters earlier this year.

“Scheffler and 155 others will be forced to think their way around a course filled with blind tee shots.  In practice rounds, players were finding their lines by looking at flags far in the distance and fescue-covered rocks perched on hills just ahead.”

Now, I would add that, as a regular, not a pro, golfer, 7,200+ yards is too much for me and then some.  But I’m glad that USGA chose to hold its national tournament at such a site, one that sits in a toney neighborhood near Boston and that, normally in these days of major golf, doesn’t have enough room to host the golf, much less all the corporate sponsorship tents.

Yet, those of us who watch this week could find ourselves remembering at least two things – (a) the movie coverage of how Francis Oiumet, an amateur, upset the pros at The Country Club to win golf’s biggest major in 1913, or (b) when pro Justin Leonard sunk a 75-foot putt in 1999 to secure the Ryder Club for America.

On to the golfers.

With the New York Times, I cite these names who have a decent chance to win this week based on recent past performance:

Scottie Scheffler:  Forget about the missed cut in last month’s P.G.A. Championship.  Scheffler, the No. 1 player in the world, rebounded with a second-place finish the next week at the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth, Texas.  And, if not for another golfer, his friend Sam Burns who won the event with a huge putt on the first playoff hole, Scheffler would have five victories this season.

Justin Thomas:  Thomas is my new favorite golfer based on his performance, as well as his love for the traditions of the game, coming as he does from a father and grandfather who both were or are golf pros.

Winning a second major, as Thomas did at the P.G.A. this year, puts a golfer on a new plateau.  Winning a third would elevate him even further. Only 47 players have collected three or more major championships.

Will Zalatoris:  This is a new name, but it is hard to move past Zalatoris, given his quick rise to five top 10s in his last seven majors.

Rory McIlroy:  No one should forget McIlroy who shot a 62 last Sunday in Canada to post his 21st tour victory.  He is still trying to win his first major since the 2014 P.G.A. Championship.  What were the odds that a drought in majors would last this long?

He had his chances this year, finishing second at the Masters and eighth at the P.G.A.  McIlroy needs to start strong, as he did at the P.G.A. with a five-under 65, and stay within range, even if he isn’t at his best.

Dustin Johnson:  In a way, I hate to cite Johnson’s name because of his defection to LIV golf, despite all PGA Tour has done for and with him in recent years.  Still, he a good player who could threaten to win in any “real tournament” he plays – and I use the word “real” to distinguish PGA Tour events from the LIV “exhibitions.”

If I was choosing my own favorite this week, I would name Thomas.  He has all the shots in the golf bag and, further, he tends to know when they will come out.

And, he has one more thing going for him.  His caddy is Jim “Bones” MacKay, one of the best going and “Bones” has a knack for bringing out the best in Thomas.

So, I say, “play away.”

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.

About golf, there’s a lot to consider writing today:

1. Reactions to the start of the “exhibition” LIV events
2. Realities of the great competitive environment and result at the Canadian Open last weekend
3. And, owing to an idea from my Golf Week on-line magazine, “top U.S. Open Meltdowns,” it’s possible to remember those bad results.
4. And, what I’ll do later this week, after the Open starts, is to focus on the great competition we have ahead for the next few days – and it will be good to focus on golf, not politics.

Mostly, for today, I’ll pick #3, but not before offering this quote from an article in the Washington Post by long-time sportswriter Rick Reilly.  His comments on the first LIV exhibition overseas are worth considering and I cannot help but repeat them because, (a) they are sanguine, (b) they are written very well, and (c) I agree with them.

So, here is the way Reilly started his story:

“LIV Golf, Saudi Arabia’s effort to sportswash its murderous human rights record by buying off pro golfers with stupid money (Phil Mickelson: reportedly $200 million), is working.

“The inaugural event of this LIV and Let Die Tour, with a massive $25 million total purse, finished Saturday at the Centurion Club north of London.  LIV has already signed up nine majors’ winners, with more big-name defectors to come.

“These LIV golfers know the Saudis butchered Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.  They know the Saudis jail dissenters, criminalize homosexuality and oppress women.  And in response, the players have sent a message loud and clear:  We don’t care. We want bigger jets.

“It’s hilarious to hear Mickelson and the others try to justify working for blood money.  Well, sure, he knows the Saudis are “scary mother——s,” as he told his biographer, Alan Shipnuck.  But he also says:  “I’ve also seen the good that the game of golf has done through history.”

“Right.  Nothing relieves the downtrodden people of a despotic nation like a well-struck 6-iron.  Remember when Kim Jong Il shot 34 one day and the North Korean people suddenly weren’t starving?  Yeah, neither do I.”

So, with that, on to the U.S. Open meltdowns, which I mention now, though my thoughts, as of Thursday, will trend what promises to be another great competition.

Anyone who has followed golf for a few years probably knows the meltdown Golf Week would cite as the most significant one.  Yes.  It was Mickelson’s debacle at Winged Foot in New York in 2006.

“Gunning for his third consecutive major championship and his first U.S. Open win, Mickelson had the gift box wrapped in 2006.  All he needed was to tie the bow.  Mickelson shared the third-round lead and arrived at the par-four 72nd hole at Winged Foot’s vaunted West course one shot clear of the field.  A par would win and a bogey would tie.

“He made neither.  Having only found two fairways all day, Mickelson nonetheless hit driver—and sliced it way left, in the vicinity of a hospitality tent.  Eschewing the safe chip back into the fairway, he tried to slice a 3-iron onto the green, but his effort plunked a tree and dropped 25 yards in front of him.

“His third shot plugged in a greenside bunker.  He blasted out—and found the rough.  A fifth shot left him 10 feet from the cup, from where he putted in for double bogey, handing Geoff Ogilvy a one-shot win.  Mickelson summed up his nightmarish sequence succinctly and accurately:  ‘I am such an idiot.’”

Moving on, here’s the quick list of other major meltdowns in the Open, each of which I remember:

• Retief Goosen survives a putting debacle at Southern Hills (2001)
• D.J. Johnson soars to a bloated 82 in a Pebble Beach collapse (2010)
• Colin Montgomery’s miscue costs him a major (2006)
• “Two-Chip” T.C. Chen goes from record-breaker to scorecard-wrecker (1985)
• Arnold Palmer makes history—of the wrong kind (1966)
• Sam Snead self-immolates with a final-hole snowman (1939)

It’s a perverse fact about golf that some who watch hope for meltdowns.  I am not one of those, I say with appropriate modesty.

I hope for great golf and, when someone wins, I hope they do so “by winning,” not “by someone losing.”

So, starting Thursday, I’ll be watching TV to see if “someone wins.”

Should be a great experience.

And, I also hope it will have the same kind of great golf as occurred in the Canadian Open last week.  There, Rory McElroy won over Tony Finau and Justin Thomas.  All were in the final threesome and each produced incredible shots.

At one point, Thomas, one of my favorite golfers, produced six birdies in a row.  Yes.  Six! 

Then, he didn’t play the last two holes well.  McElroy did.  So did Finau.  Great golf!

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.

It was a privilege for me to be Pronghorn Golf Resort in Bend, Oregon about a week ago.

The occasion:  One of several final stage qualifiers for the U.S. Open, which will be held at Brookline Golf Club in Massachusetts starting June 16.

A total of 66 players teed it up on the Nicklaus Signature Course at Pronghorn trying to earn one of three spots into the Open.

Here are the three who made it to the Open from this qualifier:

• Brady Calkins, from Chehalis, Washington, shot 68-68

• Isaiah Salinda, from San Francisco, California, also shot 68-68

• Ben Lorenz, from Peoria, Arizona shot 71-67 (winning a playoff to secure the third spot)

Why was I there?

Well, on behalf of the Oregon Golf Association, which ran the tournament for the United States Golf Association, I had the privilege of serving as the starter on hole #1, both for the first 18 holes, as well as the second 18. Because, as you see, it was 36-hole qualifier.

So, I got to watch 66 players hit their tee shots during the day.  In a way, both impressive and intimidating.

With this experience, you can understand that I will be watching for the above three names to see how they fare at Brookline under the pressure of the U.S. Open.  They wanted to be there enough to try to qualify.  Now, they have the challenge to perform.

Another interesting fact was that a golfer from Mission Viejo, California, Michael Block, was trying again to make it to the Open.  He was the last player off in the queue for both the morning and afternoon rounds.  I talked with him on the tee and both of us remembered that, in the final stage qualifier held at Portland Golf Club several years, he made it to the Open that year.

It was the same year that, of all people, Mike Weir, the Canadian golfer who now plays on the Senior PGA Tour, showed up in Portland, but ended up not advancing through the qualifier (and, unfortunately, in the PGA Tour’s Canadian Open, now running in Toronto, Weir missed making the cut there by one stroke, though he was playing against much younger golfers).  He would have loved to contend in his country’s national openl.

Block remembers fondly that he beat Weir and, with Lucas Herbert at Portland Golf Club, advanced to the Open.  Alas, Block did not make the cut in the Open that year, while Herbert has gone to make a mark on the Tour, winning enough money to stay eligible.

At Pronghorn, it turned out that a variety of players from the Northwest region tried to qualify, but didn’t make it.  For them, I imagine that it was still a good experience as they worked to lift their games from the college ranks to the national championship arena.

Here’s another interesting final fact about this year’s Open:

Any professional golfer or amateur with a Handicap Index that does not exceed 1.4 was eligible to enter.  More than 8,600 golfers entered local qualifiers and, of that total, 500 advanced to final qualifying stages, one of which was the Pronghorn event.  Only a few then went on to make it to the Open.

Tough odds to go all the way, but that’s the way it should be for the country’s “open” golf tournament. 

Know this – I’ll be glued to the TV for the four days at Brookline.

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.

It’s called “sportswashing.”

It’s what Saudi Arabia is trying to do by spending billions of dollars to go after the PGA Tour by creating its own series of what I call “golf exhibitions.”

I hope the Saudis won’t win.  I hope the country’s intolerable human rights record will remain in the limelight, no matter how much money is spent to wash it away.

Recently, I have demurred from writing about the challenge to the PGA Golf Tour being orchestrated – and funded – by the Saudi Arabian government.

I demur no longer.

This blog summarizes my comments, which may not mean much, but they are still mine, so I value them, even if no one else does.

The latest development is that, as American players teed off in the first round of an LIV golf tournament overseas Thursday, the PGA Tour reacted immediately.  Emphasis on immediately.

The players who chose to play in the LIV exhibition were informed they had been suspended from the PGA Tour for violating their commitments to that tour.  The suspensions were meted out even to players who had resigned from the Tour.

So, here’s my take.

Point #1:  I have a hard time believing why some players have defected from the PGA Tour, golf’s best playing situation, even after the Tour has done so much for them, even if the PGA Tour is not perfect in its administration.  There is a way to effect change.  It’s to work within the system to prompt improvements, not to defect.

The PGA Tour has huge tradition to ignore.  Or, if the players are new and just getting started, the potential of the PGA Tour is immense, if they play for the love of the game and not just for a financial handout.  Better to acknowledge the legacy of the Tour and try to improve it.

Point #2:  I think players should not just opt for “the money,” as attractive as that may be at first blush.  They should consider the source of that money, which is the Saudi regime and its intolerable human rights record.  It was only a couple months ago that the regime lined up 81 men and summarily executed them by firing squad simply because they disagreed with regime leaders.

In the Washington Post, here’s the way a writer, Barry Svrluga, described the Saudi’s detestable record:

“Left unsaid:  In choosing what’s best for themselves and their families, in providing balance, in pursuing the freedom to play wherever they want, in sustaining their business, the breakaway group of golfers assembling in London this week are articulating clearly they care not an iota where their money comes from.

“This is worth stating and restating:  The money these golfers are guaranteed before they even tee it up Thursday in LIV’s inaugural event, the money they will pursue in purses over the course of the series — it’s blood money.  The investment arm of the Saudi Arabian government provides it all, and the Saudi Arabian government is a murderous regime that killed Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, that continues to wreak havoc with innocent civilians in Yemen, and that very much wants to use international sports to provide cover for all of it.”

Plus, this from Jay Monahan, CEO of the PGA Tour who – no surprise — is biased in favor of the organization he runs:

“These players have made their choice for their own financial-based reasons.  But they can’t demand the same PGA Tour membership benefits, considerations, opportunities, and platform as you (as he wrote to players who are remaining with the Tour).  That expectation disrespects you, our fans, and our partners.”

And, finally, this from PGA player Rory McElroy who has said he will remain with the PGA Tour:

“Any decision that you make in your life that’s purely for money usually doesn’t end up going the right way.  Obviously, money is a deciding factor in a lot of things in this world, but, if it’s purely for money, it never seems to go the way you want it to.”

Point #3:  Just because some American corporations have made the misjudgment to do business with Saudi Arabia does not provide an excuse for golfers to do so.  It’s wrong for corporations; it’s wrong for golfers.  Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Point #4:  Just think about the LIV tournaments.  They won’t be tournaments.  They will be exhibitions.  Even golfers who finish last in the 48-man fields will get $120,000.  Guaranteed.  And that comes on top of appearance money.

Point #5:  It is abundantly clear that what the Saudis are doing is “sportswashing,” a relatively new term I used in the lead to this blog and which means that the country is trying to wash away its intolerable human rights record with sports money. 

Here is the way Golf Digest put it:

“The PIF (the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, which, according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, has $580 billion in assets) is essentially the financial arm of the Saudi Arabian government, which has been accused of numerous human-rights violations.  

“To improve its reputation, especially to the Western world, Saudi Arabia has heavily invested in various athletic organizations and events, a practice often referred to as “sportswashing.”  This exercise, particularly when used by state-run groups, is considered a form of propaganda to distract the public from its abuses.  The most famous example of sportswashing is when Nazi Germany hosted the 1936 Summer Olympics.”

So, my bottom line, at least for the moment, is that PGA Tour players who have cast their lot with the LIV tour are off my list of favorite players.  That, unfortunately, includes Phil Mickelson.  I will decline to watch their “exhibitions.”

But, forget the to’ing and fro’ing over all this, at least for the moment.  Including my points.

The issue will not be decided until it ends up court. 

The PGA Tour, like any other employer or organization, believes it has the discretion to enact rules of conduct for its members, employees, and independent contractors.  One of the provisions in the PGA Tour Player Handbook and Tournament Regulations is that each PGA Tour member acknowledges the commissioner, the Tour’s Policy Board and the appeals committee have the authority permanently to ban a member from playing in competing events, unless specific permission is granted to play in such events.

And, so, I will choose to watch and support real golf, not LIV, which, to me, is nothing more than sportswashing with blood money.

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.

The question is this blog headline notes an interesting development in the Washington Post last weekend.

There, two very capable analysts – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – showed up again with a great joint post under this headline:  “Woodward and Bernstein thought Nixon defined corruption. Then came Trump.”

Remember the two reporters/analysts.  In short-hand, they have come in some quarters to be called “Woodstein.”

Together, they uncovered the Watergate scandal of Richard Nixon’s presidency and, what they wrote prompted Nixon’s resignation in disgrace.

They were memorialized in the movie, “All the President’s Men,” which is one of my favorite movies of all time – and I watch it again whenever it shows up in various streams.

The movie captured the great work of Woodward and Bernstein.  As a journalist by background, I was impressed by their diligence and spirit in the face of long odds.  They persevered and wrote a great story, one that literally saved the country.

Watergate – I remember it like it was yesterday – is now 50 years old, which prompted Post editors to ask Woodward and Bernstein to reflect on Watergate and all that has followed.

One additional piece of good news for me is that the two writers link the failed presidential administrations of Nixon and Donald Trump, the latter of whom, in this day and age, has gone far beyond Nixon to seditious conduct. 

By rights, Trump’s conduct should result in time in prison for him, but, of course, he is still at it, with no chagrin for the bad he already has produced for America, nor for the negative implications of his conduct for the future of American democracy.

To whet your appetite to read the Post piece by Woodward and Bernstein, I provide this selection of quotes, with obvious and deserved credit to them for solid journalism.

• The heart of Nixon’s criminality was his successful subversion of the electoral process — the most fundamental element of American democracy.  He accomplished it through a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and disinformation that enabled him to literally determine who his opponent would be in the presidential election of 1972.
• Donald Trump not only sought to destroy the electoral system through false claims of voter fraud and unprecedented public intimidation of state election officials, but he also then attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his duly elected successor, for the first time in American history.
• In a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination, Trump and a group of lawyers, loyalists and White House aides devised a strategy to bombard the country with false assertions that the 2020 election was rigged and that Trump had really won.  They zeroed in on the January 6 session as the opportunity to overturn the election’s result. Leading up to that crucial date, Trump’s lawyers circulated memos with manufactured claims of voter fraud that had counted the dead, underage citizens, prisoners, and out-of-state residents.
• Unlike Nixon, Trump accomplished his subversion largely in public. He pursued attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election process from campaign rally podiums, the White House and his popular Twitter feed.  Nonetheless, he lost 61 of his court challenges, even from judges he had appointed.  After Election Day, Trump began another, more deadly assault on the electoral process.  “JANUY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” he tweeted on December 30, 2020, from Mar-a-Lago, where he was spending the holidays.

• Both Nixon and Trump created a conspiratorial world in which the U.S. Constitution, laws and fragile democrat traditions were to be manipulated or ignored, political opponents and the media were “enemies,” and there were few or no restraints on the powers entrusted to presidents.
• Fear of losing and being considered a loser was a common thread for Nixon and Trump.
• Another dominating personal trait binds Nixon and Trump together: Each viewed the world through the prism of hate.
• Both Nixon and Trump have been willing prisoners of their compulsions to dominate, and to gain and hold political power through virtually any means.  In leaning so heavily on these dark impulses, they defined two of the most dangerous and troubling eras in American history.

There?  “Woodstein” deliver(s) a solid rebuke of two of the worst presidents in U.S. history – Nixon and Trump.  Nixon is gone, but Trump continues to promote sedition.  It’s just that, so far, he has not been convicted in court, or the court of public opinion.

I hope that time will come.

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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 toyed this morning with writing another blog about guns – my phrase, “gun safety,” not gun control – but then deference got the better of me.

After reading a column by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post – he is a great writer, plus a great thinker – I decided that what he wrote would stand the test of time and criticism better than what I could produce.

So, as I do from time to time, I devoted my blog to Gerson’s column.  He asks this what he called this “lingering” question:  “Is the slaughter of innocents the unavoidable price of freedom?”

His answer?  No.

Here is Gerson’s column that appeared under this headline:  “The GOP spin on gun rights is wrong — morally and legally.”

Error! Filename not specified.After a new round of well-armed hate crimes and child murder, the congressional process to pass gun regulations remains the harvesting of low-hanging fruit. The minimalist outcome (if there is an outcome) will be advocated under the stirring slogan “better than nothing.”

Which would be true. Any kind of agreement would be good for democracy, demonstrating that the creaking machinery of self-government can still turn. But the triumph of legislative incrementalism is unlikely to feel equal to the real-world provocation: the effect of advanced weaponry on small bodies.

And it will not answer the lingering question: Is the slaughter of innocents the unavoidable price of freedom?

A significant group of Americans believe it is. In a recent CBS-YouGov poll, 44 percent of Republicans agreed that mass shootings are “unfortunately something we have to accept” in a free country. It is the “unfortunately” that gets to me.

This is a case involving unequally distributed peril. For most observers, such misfortune amounts to reading a depressing newspaper article. For the families involved, it means suffering beyond measure and grief beyond relief. Government cannot take all the risk out of life. But is it permissible to “accept” the risk of murder on behalf of other people’s children? Is it moral to make our peace with such evident evil?

Any consideration of gun regulation in the United States immediately involves a debate about our fundamental law. Through most of American history, the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment — “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” — determined the meaning of the operative clause, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

This made sense in a country where the entire western frontier was ragged and bloody with danger. Every able-bodied man was expected to possess a useful weapon to fight for the security of his state. And at least part of the reason to stay armed was that many people feared and opposed the accumulation of federal power.

The Virginia Constitution made this connection explicit, saying “that a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defense of a free State; … that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

The conservative legal revolution of the past few decades has sought to decouple the two clauses of the Second Amendment. The prefatory clause has been dismissed as but one application of the operative clause, which establishes an individual right of gun ownership for purposes of self-defense.

Some have called this a conservative application of the evolving Constitution. But since District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, the Supreme Court has upheld gun ownership as a right, not just as a precondition for the common defense.

Heller overturned D.C.’s prohibition of nearly all handguns, affirming these as the weapons of choice for Americans engaged in self-defense. But the ruling made clear that the Second Amendment does not create an absolute right to gun ownership.

It is still permissible, Heller states, to restrict the gun rights of felons and the mentally ill. It is still allowable to prohibit the carrying of firearms in government buildings and schools. It is still lawful to ban particularly “dangerous and unusual weapons.” (Sorry, no grenade launchers or guided missiles.)  And it is worth noting that since Heller, lower courts have generally upheld the gun restrictions they have considered.

This means that one of the main pro-gun arguments — that reasonable gun restrictions violate sacred, natural rights — is somewhere on the far side of laughable ignorance. The right to keep and bear arms does not mean the right of 18-year-olds to buy assault rifles. Many Republicans seem intent on combining the stability and wisdom of teenagers with military-grade firepower.

This issue is also pregnant with paradox. For years, judicial conservatives have tried to reposition the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to gun ownership. But now, some MAGA Republicans want to return to the prefatory clause, with a twist.

Like some Jeffersonians, they fear concentrated federal power as a threat to liberty. But what does it mean when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) refers to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as a “1776 moment” or embraces the Second Amendment as permission for insurrectionary violence?

Does this indicate that the future targets in a MAGA war against tyranny might be police officers and tax collectors, soldiers, and FBI agents?  Merely playing with such ideas is an invitation to the unstable.

It is past time forRepublican politicians to embrace some risk in the cause of life — and end their dance with death.

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.

It didn’t take much for me to come up with the headline for this blog.

The major reason is that, in the last primary election, I didn’t get to discharge my civic responsibility to vote.

I wanted to do so.  But could not.

Why?

I am not registered as a Republican or a Democrat.  Thus, I cannot vote in Oregon in a primary election.

I prefer to be an independent for at least these reasons:

• I don’t want to be identified with either party, given how far they have strayed into invective and inane criticism.  Frankly, they hate each other, just because of the labels.  Which I eschew.

• I thought being an independent was more appropriate when I served for about 25 years as a state lobbyist.  I didn’t want to be identified too specifically with either party because I often wanted to work what I call “the middle” to get the best results for clients.

• When I was appointed by Governor Kate Brown to serve on the Oregon Government Ethics Commission about five years ago, I had to be “unaffiliated” to earn the option for her nomination.  Now, as an Ethics Commissioner, I believe it is important for me to retain the unaffiliated status.

So, in Oregon in the May, I could not vote other than in non-partisan races.

The solution is to create an “open primary” here.  That means everyone could vote in a primary election and the top two vote getters would advance to the general election, no matter their party affiliation – Democrat, Republican or Independent.

Sounds good.

But party enthusiasts likely will say “no.”  They want to control the two-party system without interference from independents.

Party affiliates demand loyalty to the party.  They often worry that some unreasonable voters will turn an open primary into a challenge to elect idiots who are easier to defeat in a general election.

To grasp that view, you have to stand on your head.

So, I say, create an open primary in Oregon.  If the Legislature won’t do it, which is likely, take the vote in a ballot measure to the people.  With a growing number of independent voters, they might just say “yes.”

Then, I could vote in every election.

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

Ever thought about this?  It’s impossible to reason with someone whose views have been hijacked by disinformation.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank made that point yesterday, so I owe him proper credit, as well as for some of the evidence that appears below.

“Once you’ve taken leave from the reality-based community, every day is fantastic! Milbank wrote.

“It has been particularly so over the past week.  As the rest of the country mourned the latest young victims of gun violence, the Q-Anon crowd and their enablers in the Republican Party have constructed a walled fortress of alternative facts.

“Beginning in the hours after the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, right-wing social media churned out every manner of conspiracy theory:  The shooter was an illegal immigrant!  No, he was transgender!  Or, maybe the massacre was a false-flag operation perpetrated by the anti-gun left!  And the grieving families are paid crisis actors!”

Incredible!

Not surprisingly, the disinformation found its way into the words of members of Congress, mostly Republicans.

More from Milbank:

“Arizona Representative Paul Gosar, who has repeatedly tied himself to white nationalists, tweeted that the gunman was ‘a transsexual leftist illegal alien’ — and let that multi-headed falsehood stand for two hours before deleting it.

“On Fox Business, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican and prominent advocate of Ivermectin de-wormer as a covid-19 therapy, blamed the shooting on critical race theory.  We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools; now we’re teaching wokeness.

“We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling  some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.”

Then came the ubiquitous Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, fresh from a GOP primary victory, repeated in a live Facebook broadcast the false narrative that the perpetrator was trans (“wearing eyeliner, cross-dressing”).  She also nodded to the conspiracy belief that the shooter couldn’t have afforded the weapons and therefore anti-gun forces must have given him the guns to create a pretext for gun confiscation.

Then, of course, the duplicitous Texas Senator Ted Cruz got into the act because, like Donald Trump, he works hard to find what he thinks is the limelight and then tries to bask in the glow.

“Their real goal is disarming America,” Cruz said in a speech stocked with falsehoods. 

Then, Trump falsely told the NRA annual meeting that the Biden Administration reportedly “is considering putting U.N. bureaucrats in charge of your Second Amendment rights.”

All of this is why it is not possible to have a rational discussion about guns – or anything else for that matter – with these sorts of irrational individuals.  Of course, they don’t care.  Facts and honesty don’t matter.

Republicans automatically turn to disinformation, which as Milbank puts it, “shows that one side, Republicans, have been hijacked by disinformation.”

Now, I add that Democrats are on the far left are not always much better, though they seldom journey to the depths of the Republicans.  I say this to respond to one of my good friends who argues, with accuracy, that “to equate Republicans and Democrat these days is to engage in ‘false equivalence.’”

To illustrate.

Milbank points to a new study that shows how distorting disinformation has become a force on the political right in the Trump era.

“Yhe Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others set out to learn why, as previous studies of social media patterns have found, Republicans share between 200 per cent and 500 per cent more fake news (fabrications published by sites masquerading as news outlets) than Democrats.

“Were they less able to distinguish fact from fiction?  More psychologically predisposed to political bias?

“In part, yes.  But the researchers found that the issue primarily seems to be a supply issue.  There’s just way more fake news on the right than the left.”

Milbank summarizes this way: 

“In lay terms:  Garbage in, garbage out. Republican voters hear lies by the thousand from Trump and imitators such as Johnson and Cruz.  They hear new conspiracy theories daily from Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and other Trump-inspired elites.  It’s hardly surprising that, thus exposed, they become more toxic in their language, more extreme in their ideology and more outraged.”

All of this, to me, summarizes why Congress is stuck when it comes to dealing with important issues facing this country, including the logical issue of gun safety in the aftermath of school shootings, plus the new one at a hospital. 

Republicans block the way and reasonable Democrats – yes, there are some – can’t find a way through or around the blockade.

Who should be blamed for this? 

First, Republicans deserve the rap.  But, so do Americans who continue to elect persons of bad faith and dishonest ambitions, including such irrational figures as Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene…and the list goes on.

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.

This is one of three departments I run with a free hand to manage as I see fit.

The others are the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering, and the Department of “Just Saying.”

This blog means, for example, that today, I won’t write much about election results.  Except:  (1) glad Christine Drazan won the Republican primary for governor, setting up a three-way race among women – Democrat Tina Kotek and Independent Betsy Johnson; (2) my friend Tobias Read lost big to Kotek, which raises a question about what the current State Treasurer will do next; (3) the Statesman-Journal was delinquent for not focusing as much as it should have on the interesting race for City of Salem mayor. 

Unfortunately, friend Chane Griggs ran a good race, but lost.  I would have voted for her, but I live just outside Salem’s city limits.

And, writing this blog means I will not write much more, at least for now, about what I now call the “gun safety” issue.  The more I read about action – and inaction – in Congress the more I fear “we” will not do anything about guns…again.

Further, I remain frustrated that Oregon Independent candidate for governor, former State Senator Betsy Johnson, is expressing her strong support for guns.  She may pay a political price for that strong support in Oregon, but who knows. 

Urban Oregonians may favor gun safety, but not rural Oregonians.  Johnson even told the Oregonian newspaper that she owns a machine gun, though it is “stored safety” and has not been fired for 25 years.

So, without further ado, here are my new pet peeves, none of which rise of level of my support for gun safety:

USE OF THE WORD “PROGRESSIVE” TO DESCRIBE SOME OF THOSE INVOLVED IN POLITICS:  This is a standard pet peeve for me – and I have cited it in previous blogs.

But, in this campaign season, it grinds on me when anyone uses the word “progressive” to describe those with a liberal bent.  Often, what liberals want does not represent progress.  It represents retreat. 

Conservatives can be for progress, too.

So, I say stick with the labels “liberal” and “conservative.”  They’ll do just fine, even as labels.

PLURAL PRONOUNS AND SINGULAR NOUNS:  In all kinds of writing, including in major newspapers where copy editors ought to know better, folks use plural pronouns when singular ones are accurate.

An example:  The committee did “their” work late into the night.  The pronoun should be “its.”

USE OF THE TERM “CENTER AROUND:”  Think about it for a moment.  Centering around something is impossible.  The phrase should be “centered on.”

When usually competent writers make this mistake, I cringe.

FITTED SHEETS:  I was prodded to write this blog when my wife showed me a “Pickles” cartoon the other day.

I think the author manages a satellite that sits over our house!

This time, he wrote about problems with fitted sheets.  You can’t fold them.  They come undone in the middle of the night.  Your mattress is too big for them.

Or, you end up in the morning in a body bag.

So true.

My approach:  I let my wife fold all the fitted sheets.

HAVING TO FOLD TOWELS IN THIRDS:  Speaking of another “folding” issue. 

A long time ago when my brother was getting married, I was asked to speak at the dinner before the wedding. 

I advised my brother to get ready for some realities in marriage, one of which was the requirement “to fold towels in thirds.”

More work than I want, then or now.