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 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 continue to be stunned by:

• The necessity for no less a seasoned commentator than New York Times Chief Editor Joseph Kahn to write this week that “democracy is under attack.”  It is unusual for the chief editor to make such a pronouncement.  He said he had ample reasons for doing so.

• The continuing duplicity of Donald Trump and his minions.  This week, Trump held a rally to court QAnon weirdos to his aide, another in a long time of disingenuous actions by a clown who wants to be president again.  And, his courtship occurred as he comes under increasing legal jeopardy for, among other things, inflating the value of his properties when it came time to get loans and deflating those same properties when it came time to pay taxes.

Kahn’s major column a couple days ago appeared under this headline: “Democracy challenged; Representative Government Faces Its Most Serious Threat in Decades.”

He wrote:

“This is an election unlike any we’ve experienced in recent decades.  Not only do candidates of both major parties in the United States have starkly different views on the pressing issues of the day, including climate change, war, taxes, abortion, education, gender and sexual identity, immigration, crime, and the role of government in American life.

“They also disagree on democracy itself, especially one of its central pillars – willingness to accept defeat at the polls.”

His reference was to recent comments by many Republicans who said they would not accept defeat at the polls.  So, I ask them, why conduct an election in the first place; why not coronate them and move on?

Meanwhile, at the Trump rally in Ohio, the former president closed his speech to the strains of a melody widely associated with the QAnon conspiracy movement, which holds that the government is run by a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles.

As reported by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank:

“En masse, audience fully extended their right arms and pointed their index fingers as Trump proclaimed them to be ‘one movement,” apparently echoing the name of the QAnon song they were hearing, with the theme – ‘where we one, we go all.’”

The one-arm salutes reminded some of the “Heil Hitler” salutes of the Nazi era in Germany.

So, Trump is courting QAnon, “despite clear evidence that the paranoid madness (the QAnon fantasy ends in Trump’s opponents being executed) inspires violence.”

Well, at first blush, my notion is this:  QAnon weirdos and Trump deserve each other.  They have nowhere else to turn but to blame someone for something as they seek to aggrandize themselves.  It’s what narcissists do. 

But, a second notion arrives.  What Trump is doing is very dangerous territory, bordering on sedition, if not already there.  No doubt, that won’t bother him. 

It bothers me.

And, as Kahn writes, American democracy is, in fact, under attack.