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 write the headline on this blog as Elon Musk and Donald Trump appear headed toward a decision for Trump to re-join Twitter.

I say – the two can have each other.

There is an irony in what I write this morning:  If I advocate paying attention to goofballs like Musk and Trump, then this blog achieves the opposition.  I am paying attention.

But, I add, I am doing so while also advocating a clear prescription:  Quit.

Also, I wish my “friends” in journalism would not devote so much time to following the two.  They don’t deserve star treatment.  Frankly, who cares what they say or do.

In the Washington Post, opinion columnist Megan McArdle agrees with me – or, perhaps, better said – I agree with her.  Her most recent column appeared under this headline – “What journalists should do if Trump returns to Twitter.”

Her column started this way:

“Until it happened, I didn’t want to go out on a limb and say that Elon Musk would definitely buy Twitter.  I am reluctant to make firm predictions about anything Musk does.  So, until he actually walked into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink, I treated his acquisition of Twitter as a thought experiment, like Schroedinger’s cat — maybe it is alive!  Maybe it is dead!  The only way to find out is to wait and see.

“But now he’s gone and done it, and it’s time to start grappling with the problem that might soon be upon us:  What to do if Musk allows former president Donald Trump to rejoin Twitter?

By “us,” McArdle said she means journalists.  If you are not one, she said there is an easy way to handle Trump’s tweeting – “ignore it.”

“Sure, I understand that you might be anxious about his vile provocations, but your fretting about every stupid tweet isn’t going to change anything.  All your attention does is encourage him.”

When Trump was president, McArdle said he did what he always does playing the role of the narcissist – he wants all the attention anyone will give him.

“As president, Trump cannily exploited those traditions to get himself billions worth of free media.  Every news cycle was about him, and some awful or ridiculous or provocative thing he said.  It is no exaggeration to say he climbed into the presidency on the shoulders of the hundreds of journalists who kept treating his pronouncements as matters of epic importance, even if it had been tapped out one-handed while schmoozing around Mar-a-Lago.

“It’s no longer news that Trump likes to say terrible things on social media. It isn’t news that he likes to threaten people, attack important civic institutions, tell baseless lies, and rub elbows with bigots.  No one in the country — in the world — can possibly be unaware of the kinds of things Trump likes to tweet or the revulsion this produces in establishment media.”

It’s time, McArdle argues, “to create a new journalistic tradition that will be harder for Trump to exploit.”

Rather than leaping to condemn his every pronouncement, we should treat Trump’s Twitter account the way we’d treat some random account with five followers and a penchant for rancid verbal attacks:  As if it were generally beneath our notice.

Then, as real journalists, report only on the tweets that actually convey new information, without the normal rancor and invective.

And, the bottom line:  Avoid covering his deliberate provocations.

Good advice.

And, as I said earlier in this blog, Musk and Trump deserve each other.  Let have them their own space and don’t let them intrude on yours.