Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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.

Many of us who play golf in the winter in the Pacific Northwest follow two rules we define for ourselves even if they may not be in golf’s official rulebook. 

They are the “leaf rule” and the “root rule.”

But, one of my friends who also likes to focus on golf rules alerted me this week that the “leaf rule” can be found in golf rules if you look hard enough.

First, what are these rules”

• The “leaf rule” allows you to play a golf ball without penalty if you cannot find it within three minutes in piles of leaves on golf courses such as the one I play in Salem, Oregon, Illahe Hills Golf and Country Club.

• The “root rule” allows you move a golf ball without penalty if playing it near on a tree root would risk damage to your or your golf club.

Can the “root rule” be found in the golf rule book?  No.  It just makes sense here in the Northwest.

As for “leaf rule,” my friend cited a story in Golf Digest for specific information.  So, rather than recite the rule myself, here is the story.

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Each fall, golfers in northern climates invoke the “leaf rule” to lobby for a free drop when they can’t find their ball under a pile of foliage.  Some use it as a concession to appease a frustrated opponent.  Others claim it as justification for avoiding their own lost-ball penalty, emphatically asserting the Rules of Golf supports it.

But is it an official rule?  

Yes, in some instances.  It takes some explaining.

In everyday use (irrespective of what the official rules dictate), when golfers lose a ball that clearly came to rest in a pile of leaves, they often take a free drop rather than incurring a penalty and replaying the previous shot.   On the surface, this “leaf rule” is logical.  Why should a golfer who can’t find his or her golf ball in a dense pile of leaves just off the fairway receive the same penalty as one who just sliced one out-of-bounds?

Unfortunately, in many cases the rules are not so lenient.  Rule 18.2 states that “your ball is lost if not found in three minutes after you or your caddie begin to search for it.”  And, according to the same rule, when a ball is lost, you must take stroke-and-distance relief (adding one penalty stroke) and play from the spot of your previous shot.

So, where is this “leaf rule?”  Proponents of the free drop often cite Rule 16.1, which allows a player to take free relief from a ball not found when it is “known or virtually certain” it came to rest in or on an “abnormal course condition.”  This is where things get a little gray.

Leaves are considered an abnormal course condition only when they are intentionally piled for removal outside of a penalty area.  If that’s the case, and you either saw the ball enter the leaves or are virtually certain it did, then you are entitled to a free drop by finding the nearest point of complete relief and dropping within one club-length, no closer to the hole.

A more common scenario occurs when leaves are scattered or pile up naturally.  They are not considered an abnormal course condition.  They are simply loose impediments, so you are not entitled to free relief even if you’re sure your ball is lost under them.

However, this is where the “leaf rule” can save you.  You may be entitled free relief under Model Local Rule F-14, which a tournament committee or course staff can choose to implement.

At certain times of the year, piles of loose impediments such as leaves, seeds or acorns may make it difficult for a player to find or play his or her ball.  A committee can choose to treat such piles of loose impediments in the general area or in a bunker as ground under repair from which free relief is allowed under Rule 16.1.

Long story short?  Make sure to check with the golf course staff or tournament committee (if you’re playing in competition) before heading out for an end-of-the-year-round to see if they’re implementing this local rule.  If it’s being used, you’re entitled to free relief from a ball lost in leaves.  If not, you’re out of luck.

And, if you’re one of the passionate defenders of the leaf rule, you now have your argument for convincing your head pro to adopt the rule for your fall member-guest. Or, at least, to point to when your buddies question why you’re campaigning for a free drop.

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And, if you ask for a local rule on leaves, add the “root rule” to your request.

The head pro where I play doesn’t favor it because he says “it would help players maintain a lower handicap rather than ‘playing the ball as it lies.’”

For me, the “leaf rule” and “root rule” remain in effect during winter golf.  But, oh I soon I forget.  Winter golf for me means playing in La Quinta, California, so now “leaf rule” or “root rule” there.

Plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their political opponents, but none until now has been publicly accused of being a “fascist” by his own handpicked advisers.

Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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.

If you need a compendium on all of Donald Trump’s, look only so far as the New York Times.

By the way, as an aside, I like that word “compendium.”  It sort of rolls off the tongue and has solid meaning — a collection of concise but detailed information about a particular subject, especially in a book or other publication.

This time, it’s the New York Times where one of the most competent political reporters in the country, Peter Baker, delivers that compendium.

Rather than write more about Trump myself, as tempting as that is about a week or so away from election results, I am devoting my blog today to reprinting Baker’s report.

It is worth reading, especially if you have not voted yet.

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By Peter Baker

[Peter Baker covered all four years of Donald J. Trump’s presidency and co-wrote a book on it. He reported from Washington.]

When former President Donald J. Trump’s longest serving chief of staff said the other day that his old boss “falls into the general definition of fascist,” Trump let loose with the insults, assailing his onetime right hand as a “total degenerate,” a “LOWLIFE” and a “bad General.”

What Trump did not do, at least at first, was actually deny that he was or aspired to be a fascist.

Any other politician might consider that a damning denunciation worth rebutting. Only when asked days later did he directly dismiss the idea. But in the nine years that he has been running for or serving as president, Mr. Trump has regularly evoked the language, history and motifs of fascism without hesitation or evident concern about how it would make him look.

While presidents have pushed the boundaries of power, and in some cases abused it outright, no American commander in chief over the past couple of centuries has so aggressively sought to discredit the institutions of democracy at home while so openly embracing and envying dictators abroad.  

Although plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their opponents, none has been publicly accused of fascism by his own handpicked top adviser who spent day after day with him in the Oval Office.

Trump does not use the word to describe himself — in fact, he uses it to describe his adversaries — but he does not shrink from the impression it leaves.  He goes out of his way to portray himself as an American strongman, vowing if re-elected to use the military to crack down on dissent, to use the Justice Department to prosecute and imprison his foes, to shut down news media outlets that displease him, to claim authority that his predecessors did not have and to round up millions of people living in the country illegally and put them in camps or deport them en masse.

He has already sought to overturn a free and fair election that even his own advisers told him he had lost, all in a bid to hold onto power despite the will of the voters, something no other sitting president ever tried to do. When that did not work, he spread demonstrable lies about the 2020 vote so pervasively that he convinced most of his supporters that Mr. Biden’s victory was illegitimate, according to polls, eroding faith in the democratic system that is key to its enduring viability.

He then called for the “termination” of the Constitution so that President Biden could be instantly removed from power and himself reinstalled without a new election.

Trump, of course, failed to reverse the election and had no means while out of office to terminate the Constitution.  As a result, many people these days discount warnings like Kelly’s.

Trump, in their view, talks a good game, but it is mostly bluster and bombast, essentially provocation to rile his opponents and “own the libs,” as his allies put it.

He was not really a fascist in his first term, his defenders maintain, and therefore should not be expected to be one in a second.  All the talk of fascism, they argue, is just hysterical, hyperbolic or opportunistic defamation by the political left, which routinely seeks to tag any conservative with that label to discredit them and their ideas.

If anything, Trump and his allies try to turn the argument around on the Democrats, arguing that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris pose the real threat to democracy because a special counsel appointed by their Administration indicted the former president, which they liken to victor’s justice more commonly seen in countries with less developed systems.

Trump calls Harris both a “fascist” and a “communist” without seeming to realize they were historical and ideological enemies of one another.

There is no known evidence, however, that Biden, Harris or their aides played a personal role in any of the prosecutions against Trump.  And polls show that more Americans consider Trump a threat to the constitutional order than the president or vice president.

Only 28 per cent of Americans described Trump as committed to democracy in an AP-NORC survey in August.  By contrast, 49 per cent of registered voters called Trump a fascist in an ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Friday, compared with 22 per cent who said that of Harris.

That may explain Ms. Harris has seized on Kelly’s comments on fascism in recent days in hopes of motivating her existing supporters to turn out while also persuading undecided voters to back her.  Trump pushed back against the fascist label on Fox News on Friday.  “Everyone knows that’s not true,” he said.  “They call me everything until, you know, something sticks.”

Kelly is not the only person who worked for Trump who worries about his autocratic instincts. General Mark A. Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was appointed by Trump, was quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” calling Trump “fascist to the core.” In recent days, 13 other former Trump aides released a letter backing Kelly’s assessment and warning of the former president’s “desire for absolute, unchecked power.”

Others who have broken with Trump see it differently. John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser, said that fascism is a “comprehensive ideology” and “Trump isn’t capable of philosophical thought.”

But he is dangerous, nonetheless, Bolton said.  “A second Trump term will increase the damage he did in his first term, some of it perhaps irreparable,” he said, “but not because he’s thought about it systematically.”

Either way, advisers like Kelly, Bolton and General Milley restrained Trump in his first term, talking him out of actions they considered unwise or illegal.  None of them will be around in a second term, as Trump has learned to avoid more establishment figures who will resist his more extreme demands.  Instead, he has surrounded himself of late with more radical advisers who encourage Trump’s most anti-democratic instincts.

Evoking Hitler

Whether intentionally or not, Trump has fueled concerns about fascism since the day he first descended the golden elevator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid in 2015.  As he kicked off his campaign that day, he demonized Mexican migrants as rapists and within months he vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country.

He fashioned a foreign policy around the themes of isolationism and nationalism.  When told by New York Times reporters that it sounded as if he were talking about an “America First” approach, he happily appropriated the term.  The fact that it was a term discredited by history because of its association before World War II with isolationists, including some Nazi sympathizers, did not matter to him.

Nor did he mind citing fascists like Benito Mussolini. When Trump re-tweeted a quote that “it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,” NBC’s Chuck Todd told him that it was from Mussolini.

“I know who said it,” Trump replied.  “But what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else?”  He also came to use language familiar to victims of Joseph Stalin when he declared journalists who angered him to be “enemies of the people,” a phrase used to send Russians to the gulag.

Trump has long expressed interest in the most notorious dictator of the past century, Adolf Hitler, whose Nazis also used that phrase.  In a 1990 interview, Trump said he had a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” although his first wife Ivana Trump and the friend who gave him the book said it was actually “My New Order,” a collection of Hitler speeches.

Trump’s onetime chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, thought there was a comparison.  When he saw Trump descend the Trump Tower escalator with strongman imagery on that day in 2015, Bannon later told a Times reporter that he thought, “That’s Hitler!”

He meant it as a compliment.

While he was president, Trump told staff members that “Hitler did a lot of good things.”  At another point, he complained to Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals,” meaning those who reported to Hitler.

In interviews with The Times and The Atlantic in recent days, Kelly confirmed those anecdotes, first reported in several books over the last few years.  Trump denied this past week that he ever said them, and last year he denied ever reading “Mein Kampf.”

Trump has associated with people who praise Hitler. In 2022, he hosted dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who is a Holocaust denier, and the rap star Kanye West.  West, now going by the name Ye, said shortly after the dinner that “I like Hitler” and that “Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.” Twice this past summer, Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., hosted speeches by a Nazi sympathizer who has said “Hitler should have finished the job.”

The former president has likewise affiliated himself with the modern world’s autocrats.  He has praised some of today’s most authoritarian and, in some cases, murderous leaders, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia (“genius”), President Xi Jinping of China (“a brilliant man”), Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea (“very honorable”), President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (“a great guy”), former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines (“what a great job you are doing”), President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (“a hell of a leader”) and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary (“one of the most respected men”).

On the other hand, the leaders who earn his scorn are the democrats, like former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany (“stupid”), former Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain (“a fool”), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada (“two-faced”) and President Emmanuel Macron of France (“very, very nasty”).

‘Whatever I Want’

In the course of American history, a number of presidents have stretched the bounds of democracy, mostly during war or times of national security threats.

During a period of tension with France, John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts that permitted the government to imprison journalists who defamed the president or Congress.  Andrew Jackson defied an adverse Supreme Court, saying that Chief Justice John Marshall had made his decision so let him enforce it.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and seized hostile newspapers that published misinformation. Woodrow Wilson likewise shut down newspapers and rounded up opponents of American involvement in World War I.  Franklin D. Roosevelt confined more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in interment camps during World War II.  George W. Bush bypassed limits on torture and surveillance after the attacks of September 11.

Whatever the exigencies used to justify those actions, the system for the most part eventually corrected itself.  Most of the Alien and Sedition Acts were repealed or allowed to expire.  Lincoln ultimately won approval from Congress for his suspension of habeas corpus, and Bush accepted restrictions forced on him by the Supreme Court and Congress on his war against terrorism.

Trump during his four years in office regularly asserted the most expansive view of presidential power.  “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he once said, referring to the article in the Constitution that deals with executive power, ignoring the limits built into the document.

Whenever he was frustrated by checks on his power, he sought to take actions that his own advisers like Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, or Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, told him were illegal.  He pushed to shoot in the legs unarmed migrants coming over the border, sought to use a “heat ray” on them and even suggested digging a moat at the border and stocking it with alligators.

When the liberal U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit based in California blocked one of his border policies, he pressed Nielsen to “just cancel” the court, or eliminate it, even though of course he had no power to do so.  At another point when he demanded aides simply shut down the southwestern border altogether, he was told it would not be legal.  He insisted they do it anyway. “If you get in trouble for it, I’ll pardon you,” he said.

Trump’s instinct to use violence against unarmed migrants extended to unarmed Americans, too, if he perceived them to be trouble.  When protesters flooded into the streets after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May of 2020, he publicly suggested they be shot if they began looting.

A ‘Wannabe Dictator’

]

Trump’s penchant for the use of force put him in conflict with the nation’s uniformed military.  He came to office enamored with the armed forces even though he never served himself, installing veteran officers in a variety of civilian roles, including defense secretary, national security adviser and White House chief of staff.

“My generals,” Trump called them proudly, which set off alarm bells in an officer corps that takes seriously its tradition of nonpartisan loyalty to the country and the office of the presidency, not the man. As far as they were concerned, they were America’s generals, not Trump’s generals.

An early sign of the tension came during a meeting when Trump was pushing the generals to stage a military parade down the streets of Washington, the kind of spectacle not typically seen outside of a moment of wartime victory.

General Paul Selva of the Air Force, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, objected, explaining that it reminded him of his childhood in Portugal when it was a military dictatorship. “It’s what dictators do,” General Selva told him.  Trump was undeterred and brought up the idea dozens of times again, officers later said.

The rift grew over time and culminated in Trump’s final year in office. When some of the protests over Floyd’s murder turned violent, the president’s first instinct was to use the armed forces.  He repeatedly pressed his team to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 so that he could send active-duty military to quell the protests.  He wanted 10,000 troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne Division called up.

Trump demanded that General Milley personally take charge, but the Joint Chiefs chairman resisted, saying the National Guard would be sufficient. Mr. Trump shouted at him in a meeting.  “You are all losers!” he yelled and then repeated the line with an expletive.  Turning to General Milley, he said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

The president then staged a dramatic walk through Lafayette Square after protesters were violently cleared out, flanked by General Milley and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, among others, to St. John’s Church where he held up a Bible.  Both General Milley and Esper regretted their roles in what they considered a political stunt for fear that it would politicize the military.

General Milley went so far as to write a letter of resignation that assailed Trump for betraying the values of the “greatest generation” that defeated the Nazis.  “That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism,” he wrote.  “It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against.”

General Milley decided not to send the letter, reasoning that he had to stay and “fight from the inside” to guard against a commander in chief willing to use the military as a political tool.  He expressed concern to aides that Trump would find his own “Reichstag moment” to justify an armed crackdown, referring to a key episode in Hitler’s rise.

After Trump lost the election to Biden later that year, a pivotal moment arrived when Michael T. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and Trump’s first national security adviser, recommended the president declare a form of martial law by ordering the military to seize voting machines and rerun the election in states he lost.

That was exactly the kind of scenario that General Milley had stayed to prevent and Trump ultimately did not try.  But he never forgave General Milley.

In 2023, the former president lashed out at the general for having once called a Chinese counterpart to reassure Beijing that the United States was not planning to attack, even though he did so with permission of the Trump Administration at the time.  “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” Trump wrote on social media.

General Milley pushed back a week later during his retirement ceremony.  “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” he said.  “We don’t take an oath to an individual.  We take an oath to the Constitution.”

Getting ‘Pretty Wild’

Embittered by his defeat and vowing “retribution” against his adversaries, Trump has increasingly embraced the language of authoritarianism since leaving office.  He has used phrases often associated with Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, calling leftists “vermin” that need to be rooted out and asserting that undocumented migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

His call to terminate the Constitution has not been an aberration.  Even when his friend, the Fox News host Sean Hannity, tried to coax him away from such talk, Trump did not follow his hint.  Hannity invited the former president during an interview to reassure America that “you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody.”  Trump replied, “Except for Day 1.”

He similarly passed when another Fox host, Laura Ingraham, tried to get him to clarify comments he made about how his conservative Christian supporters “don’t have to vote again” if they put him back in office.  Noting that the left interpreted that to mean he might try to end future elections, Trump did not take the opportunity to dispute it.  Instead, he repeated that Christians should vote on November 5.  “After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it.”

Over the past four years, Trump has escalated his threats to use the power of the presidency to punish his antagonists. He has vowed to prosecute Mr. Biden and other Democrats if he wins the election and threatened prison time for election workers who he deems to have cheated in some way.

He promoted a social media post saying that former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, should face a military tribunal for investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.  He calls Democrats “the enemy from within” and suggested that he would order the National Guard or active-duty military members to round up American citizens who oppose his candidacy.

He has signaled that he would go after the news media as well. After “60 Minutes” edited an interview with Harris in a way that Trump did not like, he said that “CBS should lose its license.”

He said similar things this year about NBC, ABC and CNN.  While in office, aides have said he pressed them to use government power to punish corporations affiliated with CNN and the owner of The Washington Post, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The discussion of presidential power has gone so far that his own lawyers said during court hearings that Trump, if elected again, could order the Navy SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political opponent without being exposed to criminal prosecution.  That was a hypothetical posed during arguments over whether a president should have immunity for official acts, which the Supreme Court eventually agreed to.

Such far-fetched scenarios are often raised during legal arguments as an intellectual exercise to poke holes in the logic of a position, but Trump did not feel compelled to disavow it as an absurd notion.  Indeed, he has favored more violence by the government if he is reinstalled.  He has called for the summary execution of shoplifters and ruminated about unleashing the police to inflict “one really violent day” on criminals or even “one rough hour — and I mean real rough” to bring down the property crime rate.

If re-elected, Trump would not only be without advisers like Kelly and General Milley to curb his wildest instincts, he would also have a vice president who in some instances shares his views about expanding the power of the office.

In a 2021 podcast, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, now Trump’s running mate, said that if the former president won again he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” in effect turning the nonpartisan government work force into a partisan cadre of loyalists.

Vance added that Trump should defy legal impediments. “Then when the courts stop you,” he said, “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did.”  To counter what he called the ruthlessness of the left, he said, “we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

“Speak not injurious words, neither in jest nor earnest; scoff at none though they give occasion.”

Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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 wrote yesterday about Donald Trump’s contempt for the U.S. Military he wants to lead.

That alone should prescribe a defeat for him as he wants the presidency he once ha.

But, regarding the military, I cannot help by write about this again based on a column in the Wall Street Journal this morning by William McRaven, a retired four-star admiral who served as the ninth commander of the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) from August 8, 2011 to August 28, 2014.

As a leader of Seal Team 6 and other Seal Teams, he knows more the military than I ever will know.

So, his words below are worth reading as he reflects on how Trump fails to meet every test of solid leader. 

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McRaven writes:

When George Washington was 12, he began copying by hand “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.”  The first rule states:  “Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present.”  Rule No. 65 says: “Speak not injurious words, neither in jest nor earnest; scoff at none though they give occasion.”

A 1949 U.S. Army pamphlet, “Personal Conduct for the Soldier,” offers similar prescriptions.  In the foreword, General Omar Bradley noted that good conduct was as applicable to the civilian as the soldier.

Under the section titled “Self Control”:  “You make a fool of yourself every time you let the old mind and body get out of control. . . . If you lose self-control, you’re like a ship without a rudder.”

The section on “The Courteous Leader”: “ Most great leaders are kind and courteous. . . . The leader who treats his men badly will find that his men behave badly. . . . A courteous attitude toward all races, nationalities, and religious faiths helps a man get along with people.”

Those of us who have spent time in the military know that these maxims aren’t mere words.  These qualities define good leaders and reflect their followers.  Character, honesty, integrity, honor and a sense of duty all matter.  These aren’t just platitudes but tangible qualities that make a difference in every organization, from the neighborhood coffee shop to the White House.

The White House is the home of American leadership, where Republican leaders like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush resided.  

While each of these leaders had his shortcomings and foibles, none of them consistently violated every principle of good leadership like Donald Trump does.

Trump has no self-control.  He lashes out at immigrants, religious groups and military heroes.  He lies with reckless abandon.  In August, in what was outlandish even by Trump’s standards, he reposted on Truth Social a picture of Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton above a crude sexual joke. Just last week he was regaling a crowd about Arnold Palmer’s anatomy.

These are things a disturbed 15-year-old boy would do, not the commander in chief, not the man who holds the nuclear codes, not the leader of the free world.

More recently, Trump called Harris “mentally impaired” and a “s— vice president.”  This is a former president of the United States, a man who might represent the nation again.  And for those of you who dismiss this kind of language or, worse, defend it, if rump is re-elected you shouldn’t be surprised if this kind of aberrant behavior continues.  And everything about it will affect the future of the nation.

Being a person of good character matters.  Doing what is right matters because when a leader exhibits honor, integrity and decency, it instills those qualities in the culture of the institution and in the next generation of leaders.  What will the culture of America look like if Trump is re-elected?  What will the next generation of leaders look like if they are followers of Donald Trump?

You will, no doubt, ask the same question about Harris, but you will get a different answer.  You may not like her policies, her followers or her vision for America, but Harris won’t threaten the press, demean immigrants, mock those who have died for the country, break with our allies, or undermine the Constitution.

And in four years, if we are past the era of Trump, the Republican Party can rise again and provide the kind of principled leadership and followership that this nation needs.

I am pro-life.  I believe in a small government, big business, a strong military ,and a secure border, and I always stand for the American flag.  I am a conservative, and I would love to be part of a Republican Party I can be proud of, one that stands for the values, the decency, the sense of duty and honor and country which so many previous Republican presidents strived for.

Washington’s final rule of decent behavior says:  “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little celestial fire called conscience.”  My little celestial fire won’t allow me to vote for Donald Trump. I think George Washington and Omar Bradley would agree.

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And this footnote.  The New York Times shows up this morning with a story under this headline:  An Ethical Minefield Awaits a Possible Second Trump Presidency.

The story goes on:  “With business ties to foreign governments and holdings in industries overseen by federal regulators, Donald Trump would likely be the most conflicted president in U.S. history.”

No matter, for Trump.  He wouldn’t recognize an ethical conflict if it hit him in the face.

Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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.

It is hard to limit my disdain for Donald Trump to just one point.  But if there was, it would be this:

Trump hates the military he says wants to lead as commander in chief. 

He has made that ultimately clear in recent years, culminating in a current pledge, if he wins the presidency, to turn the military into his own national police force going after persons who have opposed him.

That, coupled with his ridicule for a national military hero, the late Senator John McCain, makes it hard for me to understand how anyone who served in the military could vote for Trump, the charlatan.

U.S. News and World Report carried a story under this headline:  THE LIST OF HIGH-PROFILE MILITARY LEADERS SLAMMING TRUMP

And here is the subhead:  Former Chief of Staff John Kelly is one of several high-profile military leaders to denounce the former president.

The story continued:

“Former high-profile military leaders are sounding the alarm on former President Donald Trump, referencing his rhetoric of admiring dictators and vows to turn the military on domestic opponents.

“Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine general, told The New York Times that Trump met the definition of a fascist and detailed his admiration for Adolf Hitler and his lack of understanding of history and the rule of law.”

Kelly is just the latest general who served under Trump to re-up his concerns about the former president so close to the election.  In the years since his first term ended, more than a dozen high-ranking military leaders have openly criticized him, including in remarks that surfaced last week from retired Generals Mark Milley and Jim Mattis.

Now, before I relate some of the specifics of what these and other generals said, note this from the Wall Street Journal as it reported on a Trump rally in New York:

“You never know when you may hear him refer to opponents as “vermin,” suggest violence, praise Hannibal Lecter, or marvel at Arnold Palmer’s manhood.  So, rambling have the rallies become that Trump, always one to flip a liability on its head, came up with a phrase for it:  “The weave,” which is “a way” to describe Trump’s incoherence.

Here’s a look at some of Trump’s former generals have said:

• John Kelly:  “Certainly the former president is in the far right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictator, so he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist.”

• Mark Milley:  “Trump is a fascist to the core.”

• Jim Mattis:  “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite American people, does not even pretend to try.  Instead, he tries to divide us.”

• H.R.McMaster:  “In the January 6 siege on the Capitol, Trump abandoned his oath to ‘upport and defend the Constitution, a president’s highest obligation.”

• Mark Esper (not a general, but a Secretary of Defense):  “After stolen documents were found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, stashing them there was an irresponsible action that places our service members at risk, and places our nation’s security at risk.”

So, with all these compelling comments, I also find myself wondering what Senator McCain would say from the grave.

I suspect he would say don’t for the scofflaw, Trump.

Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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.

Give credit to the New York Times.

Yesterday, it made an endorsement for president by going all in for Kamala Harris.

The decision stood in stark contrast to the timidity of the Washington Post where, apparently, the owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, he of Amazon fame, overruled editors by saying there would be no endorsement.

His decision caused angst among Post editors and writers, but, still, stood, which ought to make Donald Trump happy because, for one thing, editorial writers had already prepared a pro-Harris missive before being derailed by Bezos.

Part of the Post angst was illustrated when self-styled humor columnist, Alexandra Petri, produced her own column endorsing Harris.  She was one of several Post writers to decry the Post’s timidity, which, I guess, could have been designed by Bezos to curry favor from Trump.

But what will Bezos get for his timidity?  I suspect nothing.

So, to herald the NY Times decision, I reprint its endorsement as my blog today.

*********

Opinion/The Editorial Board

The Only Patriotic Choice for President

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump.  He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest.  He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president:  His many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy, and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational.  It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.

As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Harris stands alone in this race.  She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence.  Yet, we urge Americans to contrast Harris’s record with her opponent’s.

Harris is more than a necessary alternative.  There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.

Over the past 10 weeks, Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division.  She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.

While character is enormously important — in this election, pre-eminently so — policies matter.  Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world.

For them, Harris is clearly the better choice.  She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers.  Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.

Beyond the economy, Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost.  She has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom.  Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion.

Globally, Harris would work to maintain and strengthen the alliances with like-minded nations that have long advanced American interests abroad and maintained the nation’s security.  Trump — who has long praised autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un — has threatened to blow those democratic alliances apart.

Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to the global problem of climate change and would continue President Biden’s major investments in the industries and technologies necessary to achieve that goal.  Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish fealty to fossil fuels.

As for immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, while Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system.

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies.  They are right to ask.  Given the stakes of this election, Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Trump may be enough to bring her to victory.

That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record.  And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

Harris is not wrong, however, on the clear dangers of returning Trump to office.  He has promised to be a different kind of president this time, one who is unrestrained by checks on power built into the American political system.  His pledge to be “a dictator” on “Day 1” might have indeed been a joke — but his undisguised fondness for dictatorships and the strongmen who run them is anything but.

Most notably, he systematically undermined public confidence in the result of the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn it — an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and resulted in him and some of his most prominent supporters being charged with crimes.

He has not committed to honoring the result of this election and continues to insist, as he did at the debate with Harris on September 10, that he won in 2020.  He has apparently made a willingness to support his lies a litmus test for those in his orbit, starting with J.D. Vance, who would be his vice president.

His disdain for the rule of law goes beyond his efforts to obtain power; it is also central to how he plans to use it.  Trump and his supporters have described a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats.  He vows, for instance, to turn the federal bureaucracy and even the Justice Department into weapons of his will to hurt his political enemies.  In at least 10 instances during his presidency, he did exactly that, pressuring federal agencies and prosecutors to punish people he felt had wronged him, with little or no legal basis for prosecution.

Some of the people Trump appointed in his last term saved America from his most dangerous impulses.  They refused to break laws on his behalf and spoke up when he put his own interests above his country’s.  As a result, the former president intends, if re-elected, to surround himself with people who are unwilling to defy his demands.

Today’s version of Trump — the twice-impeached version that faces a barrage of criminal charges — may prove to be the restrained version.

Unless American voters stand up to him, Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy.

That is not simply an opinion of Trump’s character by his critics; it is a judgment of his presidency from those who know it best — the very people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House.  It is telling that among those who fear a second Trump presidency are people who worked for him and saw him at close range.

Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president, has repudiated him.  No other vice president in modern history has done this.  “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Pence has said.  “And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Trump’s attorney general has raised similar concerns about his fundamental unfitness.  And his chief of staff.  And his defense secretary.  And his national security advisers.  And his education secretary.  And on and on — a record of denunciation without precedent in the nation’s long history.

That’s not to say Trump did not add to the public conversation.  In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade, and China’s rise.  His criminal-justice reform efforts were well placed, his focus on Covid vaccine development paid off, and his decision to use an emergency public health measure to turn away migrants at the border was the right call at the start of the pandemic.

Yet, even when the former president’s overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament, and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes.  Trump’s tariffs cost Americans billions of dollars.  His attacks on China have ratcheted up military tensions with America’s strongest rival and a nuclear superpower.

His handling of the Covid crisis contributed to historic declines in confidence in public health, and to the loss of many lives.  His overreach on immigration policies, such as his executive order on family separation, was widely denounced as inhumane and often ineffective.

And those were his wins.  His tax plan added $2 trillion to the national debt; his promised extension of them would add $5.8 trillion over the next decade.  His withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal destabilized the Middle East.  His support for anti-democratic strongmen like Putin emboldened human rights abusers all over the world.

He instigated the longest government shutdown ever.  His sympathetic comments toward the Proud Boys expanded the influence of domestic right-wing extremist groups.

In the years since he left office, Trump was convicted on felony charges of falsifying business records, was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse ,and faces two, possibly three, other criminal cases.  He has continued to stoke chaos and encourage violence and lawlessness whenever it suits his political aims, most recently promoting vicious lies against Haitian immigrants.

He recognizes that ordinary people — voters, jurors, journalists, election officials, law enforcement officers and many others who are willing to do their duty as citizens and public servants — have the power to hold him to account, so he has spent the past three and a half years trying to undermine them and sow distrust in anyone or any institution that might stand in his way.

Most dangerous for American democracy, Trump has transformed the Republican Party — an institution that once prided itself on principle and honored its obligations to the law and the Constitution — into little more than an instrument of his quest to regain power.

The Republicans who support Harris recognize that this election is about something more fundamental than narrow partisan interest.  It is about principles that go beyond party.

In 2020, this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Trump.  Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds.

We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.

Kamala Harris is the only choice.

Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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.

Two columnists tried valiantly this week to answer what for me is an unanswerable question:  Why supposedly rational people vote for Donald Trump who wants to be a dictator in America.

This question has irked me for months.

In Trump, we have:

• A convicted felon.

• A rapist who views women as nothing more than objects.

• A person who vilifies the military he wants to lead as commander in chief, including by calling the late Senator John McCain – who was a genuine military hero – a failure because he got captured in Viet Nam.  Trump, of course, never served.

• A person who wants to deport millions of immigrants, though he, himself, is part of a family of immigrants.

• And, speaking of immigrants, a person who says immigrants commit more crimes than others as they enter the country, but, of course, the facts say otherwise.  Those already here commit more crimes.

• A person who values dictators like Vladimir Putin from Russia and Kim Jong Un from North Korea, and says he wants to be like them.

• A person who values Adolph Hitler, one of the worst criminals – if not, THE worse – in history.

• A person who views himself as being the only person of value.

That’s Trump.

And it is possible he could win the election.

Before moving on to the views of the two columnists, the Washington Post showed up with solid information on the speaking style of Donald Trump, which it labeled crazy under this headline:  “Abrupt shifts, profane insults, confusing sentences” – and this, too, adds to not understanding people can vote for him when he doesn’t say anything understandable.

“Trump’s recent public appearances have been strikingly erratic, coarse and often confusing, even for a politician with a history of ad-libbing in three consecutive presidential runs, a Washington Post review of dozens of speeches, interviews and other public appearances shows.

“His speeches have gotten longer and more repetitive compared with those of past campaigns.  He promotes falsehoods and theories that are so far removed from reality or appear wholly made up that they are often baffling to anyone not steeped in MAGA media or internet memes.

“Trump’s unusual delivery has inspired comedy routines and armchair diagnoses for years.  Long, meandering stemwinders, provocations, brazen falsehoods and blunt language, jokes and insults have distinguished his speeches since he launched his candidacy in 2015 calling Mexican immigrants ‘rapists.’”

Now, for the analysis by the columnists – Philip Bump from the Washington Post and Tom Nichols from The Atlantic Magazine.

From Bump:  “A secretary of defense, chief of staff and joint chiefs chairman who served under Trump offered warnings about the former president that his base is primed to ignore.

“One of Donald Trump’s most effective and most useful tactics in rebuffing criticism has been to insist that any critic is operating in bad faith. There are no valid complaints about Trump, he insists, and there are no reliable complainers.  Saying something critical of the former president means that you are not loyal to the former president and, therefore, that your criticism is tainted by your anti-Trump bias.  Question-begging as political defense.

“It works. People who are supportive of Trump are almost definitionally inclined to grant him the benefit of the doubt, meaning that they are predisposed to assume that he’s the one approaching a point of debate from a more defensible position.

“Put those things together and we get where we are today.  A phalanx of former Trump advisers and appointees has delineated the ways in which he embraces fascism, hopes to implement authoritarianism, disparaged the military and offered praise for Adolf Hitler — and the most likely reaction from Trump’s supporters will be that they are just anti-Trump haters.”

Bump adds that “the insistence on personal loyalty that Kelly describes as Trump’s primary motivation means that his supporters will dismiss concerns out of hand

From Nichols:  “Donald Trump’s opponents are continually stunned by the disconnect between his ghastly behavior and his polling numbers.  But millions of voters support Trump because of his offensiveness, not in spite of it.

“The belief that at some point Trump voters will have finally had enough is an ordinary human response to seeing people you care about — in this case fellow citizens — associate with someone you know to be awful.  Much like watching a friend in an unhealthy relationship, you think that each new outrage is going to be the one that provokes the final split, and yet it never does:  Your friend, instead of breaking off the relationship, makes excuses. He didn’t mean it. You don’t understand him like I do.

“But this analogy is wrong, because it’s based on the faulty assumption that one of the people in the relationship is unhappy.  Maybe the better analogy is the friend you didn’t know very well in high school, someone who perhaps was quiet and not very popular, who shows up at your 20th reunion on the arm of a loudmouthed boor, who tells offensive stories and racist jokes.  She thinks he’s wonderful and laughs at everything he says.

“For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring.  They want Trump to be awful — precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins.  If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting.

“Some Trump voters may believe his lies.  But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that re-electing him will be a fully realized act of social revenge.  

“Exactly why so many Americans feel this way is a complicated story, but a toxic combination of social resentment, entitlement, and racial insecurity drives many Trump voters to believe not only that other Americans are looking down on them, but that they are doing so while living an undeservedly good life.  These others must be punished or at least brought down to a common level of misery to balance the scales, and Trump is the guy to do it.”

Nichols adds that “unfocused rage is an addiction fed by Trump and conservative media, and the MAGA base wants it stoked continuously.  If Trump were suddenly to become a sensible person who started talking coherently about trade policy and defense budgets, they would feel betrayed, like hard drinkers in a tavern who suspect that the bartender is watering down the high-proof stuff.”

There you have it.  A little about “why” some voters go with Trump.  They want revenge and they feel good about getting it with an egotist.

*********

As a footnote, NY Times writer Nicholas Kristof, a columnist with connections to Oregon where he drew up, shows up today with this trenchant analysis:

“What should we think as Donald Trump urges people to vote in January, confuses places and names, fumbles for words, simplifies his speech patterns, describes recent experiences that did not happen and in public seems increasingly vulgar, menacing and unfiltered?

“It’s unarguable that Trump is acting even more erratically than he has in the past.  It’s also indisputable that Trump is at an age when many people see a physical or mental decline over the following four years.”

So, in conclusion, I say let Trump live out his remaining days in private, not in the presidency.

Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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.

For at least another day, I depart from wondering about the scoundrel running for president, Donald Trump.  A worthy respite.

Sam Skillern is a friend of mine here in Salem, Oregon, and he has done a superb job leading Salem Leadership Foundation (SLF) even now as he heads toward what I assume will be well-earned retirement.

But, I forgot that Skillern and I share a background in journalism.

This came through in a missive from Skillern early this week.

I reprint it here in my blog because it is, (a) well written, and (b) calls us to live out our faith in Jesus, even as we face a presidential election that could elevate Trump again to the Oval Office, perish the thought.

Here is Skillern:

For God has not given us a spirit of fear – but of power, and love, and a sound mind.  (2 Timothy 1:7)

There is no fear in love.  But perfect love drives out fear …  (1 John 4:18)

As a journalism major (OSU ’82), I’m a student and a consumer of news.  I was fortunate to learn the craft in the post-Watergate era of journalism, when facts were king.  No accusation or quote could be published/broadcast without at least two (better yet three) independent confirmations. 

Also, there was the News department and the Editorial department:  One for facts, one for opinion, with a firewall between them.
 
Of course, journalism wasn’t perfect in that era … but oh how things have changed! 

Today, thanks to social media and smart phones, virtually everyone is (or thinks they are) a journalist.  But the lines have been blurred – actually, obliterated – in those two important areas:  Facts and opinion.  Just the facts, ma’am?  Cross-checking facts?  Truthfully telling the story without spin?
 
With my degree and through my work with SLF, sampling a wide variety of media outlets is something I do.  I listen and read on both sides of the dial – not to become a disciple of any one outlet, but to know what’s being said and what impact it’s having.  

My heart is troubled.  It’s not merely the disregard for facts and the glorification of opinion … it’s the fear-peddling!  Especially from talking heads and outlets that claim to be God-centered. 
 
Fear is not from the Lord.  Fear is the opposite of Love.  It’s in the Scriptures (above).
 
I’ve been engaging a little experiment.  I want to make sure my impressions are accurate and not fake news.  So I’ve been analyzing and prayerfully discerning many news sources.  Again, on both sides of the aisle. 

There’s a glut of fear.  Name-calling.  Slander.  Fear, Insinuation.  Gossip.  Fear.   Repeated lies.  Conspiracy theories.  Fear.

 
Both science and faith contend that such behavior is unhealthy.  For individuals and community.  So why do we persist?  Especially the Christ-follower? 

With a contentious election nigh, we can’t control what others say.  But we can control – based on facts – what we believe, say and do.  And even if the facts are hard and harrowing, we don’t need to peddle fear.  Just the opposite.  

Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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.

Given the current political season when polls are made public every day, I am talking my own poll.

Not on politics because, if for no other reason, I already have voted using Oregon’s mail ballot voting process.  Kamala Harris and Tim Walz get my vote!

But, if you were king or queen for a day, what golf rule would you change?

For me, the answer is easy.  If a player hit a good golf shot, but it ended up in divot created by another player who did not fix it, I would give free relief.

Now, there is no relief as so many golfers have found, including the late Payne Stewart who hit into a divot once in a late round of the 1998 U.S. Open, couldn’t get out cleanly, and ended up losing the tournament to Lee Janzen, though Stewart won the next year just before he unfortunately died in an airplane accident.

Given Stewart’s experience, not to mention my own, my summary above is such an obvious rule change that I cannot believe everyone doesn’t agree with me.

So, my poll – obviously not a scientific one – produced these results, which I list without the names of those who made each suggestion:

• From a friend:  Nothing matches your suggestion about being able to move a ball which rests in the divot of another careless golfer who failed to replace or sand it.
  
  I’d also change the rule about grounding a club in a sand bunker.  Why is the sand such a holy place?  We have to hit from the divots of others.  We can now ground our club in penalty areas, why not the sand?

Comment:  Good point.  Plus, if you were to take time to read official golf rule #12, you would find out a lot of other stuff that makes this friend’s point even more solid.

• From another friend:  I would pick either free relief from a tree root or raise the limit on the number of clubs allowed. 

Comment:  The root rule makes good sense; in the games I play at my course, all of us follow this rule.  As for more than 14 clubs, my golf bag is already too heavy.

• From another friend:  First, this isn’t fair because you know all the rules and I don’t.  Therefore, I am going to suggest that a rule be added that allows one mulligan per round.  I mean, yes, I already golf that way, but I think it should be more formally part of the game.

Comment: This is not a rule change, but a new rule – and a good one.

• From another friend:   I’d suggest re-visiting the language on pin placement.  I believe it says there “should” be 3 feet of level ground on all sides of the pin.
  
  We’ve all had instances playing impossibly tough pin placements where there was only a yard or so of flat ground prior to a steep hill. Not a fair pin and significantly slows pace of play.  Perhaps language should say “must” be 3 feet.

Comment:  Good point.  The language on pin placement, as I understand it, is advisory.  Placing the pins still relies on the judgment of the person doing the work, so it is important for that person on the maintenance crew to understand placement realities.

• From a head golf pro:  He said he would “play the ball down” every time, thus not allowing “preferred lies” around any golf course at any time.

Comment:  This would be tough, especially in inclement weather in the Pacific Northwest, but, to be sure, this head pro knows more golf than I do, so I’ll take him at his word.

• From another pro:  He said he would always place bunker rakes outside the bunker, not inside.  This is not necessarily a rule change, instead a change of advice, but, as the poll taker, I rule that it is a permissible comment for this poll.

Comment:  I can go both ways on this suggestion – rake inside or outside the bunker.  As I understand it, the United States Golf Association (USGA) advice is to keep rakes outside, so the USGA agrees with this pro.

Good suggestions, all.

So, I’ll be talking with the USGA and the R & A about adding these changes and additions to the next official golf rules book.

Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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.

One of my favorite books – yes, a golf book – is a “Season in Dornoch:  Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands.”

It was written 25 years ago by a famous golf writer, Lorne Rubenstein, who, with his wife, went from his home in Toronto, Canada to live in the small town of Dornoch. 

There, over about four months, he and his wife lived in a flat above a bookstore, played a lot of golf on one of the greatest courses in the world, Royal Dornoch.  He and his wife wandered around meeting venerable Scottish citizens.

And that produced his book.

For my part, I have had the privilege of visiting Dornoch on several occasions and playing the course, a links-style test which earns its monicker, Royal.

It is one of my very favorite courses in the world, perhaps standing only second for me because I also love my favorite, Illahe Hills Golf and Country Club where I live three houses from the first tee in Salem, Oregon.

Why do I write about this again?

Well, it always is fun to write about Royal Dornoch.

And I do this in connection with a note in Fore Magazine, which is produced by the Southern California Golf Association, of which I am member, along with the golf association in Oregon.  The note heralded the 25^th anniversary of a “Season in Dornoch.”

From Fore:

“Lorne Rubenstein had no distractions such as LIV when he spent a summer in Dornoch back in 2000, an experience he eloquently detailed in ‘A Season in Dornoch.’

“The 25th anniversary edition includes a new introduction and afterword, plus Herbert Warren Wind’s New Yorker piece on the course.

“What Tom Coyne writes in a new afterword:

“Scotland is the protagonist of these pages — its people and culture and history seep into every word of this odyssey.  A story that could easily have read as an indulgent boondoggle instead brims with a pedagogic generosity.

“We might have come to learn about a golf course, but we leave educated about a people, a country and ourselves.”

So, armed with a flag from Royal Dornoch given to me by a good friend in Salem, along with a book – “Personal Memories of Royal Dornoch, 1900-1925 by Donald Grant — I am setting out to read “A Season in Dornoch” again.

It will be about the 25^th time through the book for me, which is appropriate for the 25^th anniversary.  More good reads are in store.

Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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.

The presidential election, if you can go by polls these days, appears essentially to be tied.

With all due respect to reputable pollsters, I am not sure there is any way for polls to be accurate these days.  Often, respondents who are asked to express a view don’t express an accurate one.

Still, I think Kamala Harris has one thing going for her in the final days of the campaign.  In a name:  Donald Trump.

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. put it this way:  “If the race turns Harris’s way, it will be because she used Trump’s wild rhetoric against him.”

More from Dionne:

“Vice President Kamala Harris has an indispensable ally as she closes her presidential campaign.   She carries messages from him nearly everywhere she goes.   His name is Donald Trump.

“At a United Auto Workers union hall in Lansing, Michigan on Friday, she showed video of Trump demeaning the labor of autoworkers by describing them as simply taking parts ‘out of a box’ and putting them together — ‘we could have our child do it,’ he claimed — and declaring his hatred of overtime pay.

“On Saturday night in Atlanta, the video presentation focused on a shamefully dismissive comment by Trump about Amber Thurman, who died in 2022 after being unable to access medical care because of the state’s abortion restrictions.  Trump, Harris said, was ‘cruel,’ and ‘still refuses to take accountability, to take any accountability, for the pain and suffering he has caused.’

“For Republican-leaning voters who can’t stomach Trump but are reluctant to vote Democrat, she has highlighted the threat he poses to freedom and constitutional democracy.  Clips of Trump describing his political opponents as ‘the enemy within’ and threatening to use the military against them make the point more dramatically than anything a critic could say.

“And if Harris is looking to back up her new ad calling Trump ‘unhinged, unstable, unchecked,’ he provided pornographic evidence by admiring the size of golfing luminary Arnold Palmer’s p____.”  [I use the blank because I can’t find a way to type the full word, but you get the drift, right?]

Dionne continues that “Trump’s indiscipline offers Harris a chance to seize back the momentum she enjoyed from three surges:  Her buoyant emergence after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, the success of the Democrat convention, and her pummeling of Trump in their single debate.”

Like some analysts, Dionne suggests that Harris’ closing forays should focus on female voters and “an overlapping group of college-educated moderates and moderate conservatives.”

Or, what about Black voters who, some analysts argue, are turning toward Trump?

For my part, here in the cheap seats out West, I find that hard to believe, at least in large numbers that could include the election result. 

Similarly, Dionne writes,  “Black political leaders largely dismiss talk of a substantial defection to Trump among Black men — ‘I almost brought my husband here with me to dispel that,’ Detroit City Councilmember Latisha Johnson joked at a Harris early-vote rally here on Saturday.”

One other thrust for Harris.

Dionne says she can “into Trump’s blue-collar vote by reminding union members of Trump’s attitudes toward labor, as she did at the Lansing UAW rally, hitting Trump hard on tax cuts for the wealthy and contrasting the loss of manufacturing jobs under Trump with the revival of manufacturing under Biden.” So, I say, Harris go!  Take Trump with you to every venue and report how ba