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.

As a political junkie in the years since my retirement, I have enjoyed reading various political columnists, with a changing recipe of favorites from time to time.

Now, one of my favorites is Frank Bruni, who with excellent words that flow into sentences, has an ability to skewer politicians for their misdeeds.  So, it is natural that he has a new target in Donald Trump and sycophants who work for him such as Pam Bondi, who has a title she doesn’t deserve, Attorney General of the United States of America.

I used the headline over the most recent Bruni column for this blog.

Before citing some of the Bruni’s words about Bondi, etc., here is a little background on him.

Born in 1964, he now writes for the New York Times, taking there a wide range of assignments, including a stint, of all things, as chief restaurant critic.  In 2011, he was named an op-ed columnist  and also joined Duke University as professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy.  He is still there and writes his column from that location.

Here is how Bruni started his most recent column:

“I imagine Pam Bondi getting ready for one of her appearances on Capitol Hill by practicing in front of a mirror.  She hones her glare.  She perfects her sneer.  She rehearses her lines, such as they are.

“’Washed-up, loser lawyer!’ That’s for Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland.  What the phrase lacks in poetry it makes up for in pithiness.  It’s just four short words, two of them conveniently conjoined with a hyphen.  Even Bondi can remember that much.

“’Failed politician!’  That’s for Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky.  Two words.  Insults are all about efficiency.

“But it’s not Bondi’s script that matters most.  It’s her voice, and the attorney general got the tone of it — the poison in it — just right when she spat those put-downs at those men during her, um, testimony before a House panel last week.  She didn’t merely ooze contempt.  She gushed it, so that all she communicated during more than four hours of nasty exchanges was how loathsome she found her interrogators.  Which was obviously her goal.  Her mission.”

So, Bruni wonders — and so do I why –Trump and his ilk “perform” this way and why their act engenders favor from some American.  Bruni answers his own question.

“I can’t get it out of my mind.  But then I never stopped thinking about Bondi’s identical performance before a Senate panel last October.  Both crystallized what is arguably the defining trait of the second Trump administration, a bearing and a bullying that cast a noxious haze over all public discourse, which was already plenty polluted.

“This crew — Bondi, Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance, President Trump himself — don’t want to win opponents’ favor.  They don’t even want to win the argument.  Why sweat the delicate art of persuasion when you can use the brute force of condemnation?  Comity and conciliation are a slog.  They’re for suckers.  Contempt is victors’ ready, heady prerogative.”

I wish I could have put together words such as this.  They describe Trump and his clowns perfectly.

“…Trump, his aides and many of his supporters haven’t purged contempt from our politics.  They’ve mainstreamed it.  Purified it.  Industrialized it.  It’s their push-a-button pushback against everyone who challenges them and any circumstances that threaten to undermine them, an all-purpose way to pivot from the substance of a situation to an evasive and obfuscating ill will.  Envelop everything in indiscriminate animosity and nothing real survives.”

So it is that I cannot wait for three more years to elapse.  Those are the years Trump will be in power in the presidency.

I hope we and our country can survive.

Postscript:  Another reason why I like Bruni is that, at the end of every column, he includes examples of great writing from newspapers around the country.  The examples have been sent by Bruni readers who, like me, love words.  So, I am looking for great writing to send along to Bruni.