Perspective from the 19th 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 am taking the action in this blog headline in order to include three items.
The first two could be included in the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering, one of five departments I manage with a free hand to act as I feel compelled to act. For the third, the other department is the Department of Bits and Pieces
See, all this shows my incredible diversity. Just don’t tell Donald Trump.
FROM COLUMNIST FRANK BRUNI IN THE NEW YORK TIMES:
“Kimberly Guilfoyle must be frenzied. She was abruptly ousted from her role as the U.S. ambassador to Greece and needs to scram, but I doubt she’s capable of packing in a jiff. She probably fills a half dozen steamer trunks with the wardrobe needed to maintain her busy social calendar.
“Guilfoyle must be panicked. Normally, a disgraced or displaced Trump-administration showboat can hope for lucrative harbor at Fox News, but she already worked for the network years ago, and that arrangement also had a tawdry finale.
“But above all, Guilfoyle must be baffled. What exactly did she do to warrant President Trump’s contempt?
“But with her fame-hungry dreams and money-ravenous schemes, she didn’t violate the Trump ethos. She paid tribute to it. She didn’t contradict the Trump brand. She was its gaudy, greedy hood ornament.”
Comment: Call it what it is – mimicking Trump, which, in his world, gets you fired.
FROM COLUMNIST MAUREEN DOWD IN THE WASHINGTON POST:
“Sometimes a candid photograph captures a moment in a presidency, and the essence of the officeholder, so tellingly that you get a penetrating portrait of an era.
“It happened when L.B.J. yanked up his beagle by the ears for photographers and demonstrated his domineering leadership style.
“It happened when a photographer captured W. being told, while reading to children in a Florida classroom, that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. His look of shock raised questions about whether, after his decades of winging it, a parlous rendezvous with destiny might be too much for him to handle.
“It happened when Obama was photographed bending over in the Oval to let a Black child touch his hair, to see if it was the same texture as his own, capturing the historic nature of his election.
“It happened again when Doug Mills, The Times’s dazzling White House photographer, took a picture on Tuesday of President Trump on Marine One with his blond aides/acolytes Katie Zacharia, his wobbly new press secretary, and Natalie Harp, his special assistant for floofing.
“The president is leaning in to talk to the two Ivanka knockoffs, who look like sorority-sister clones, four eyes glued on the man they adore, two fervent smiles glazed with pink lip gloss.
“It is a snapshot of Trump’s hunger for adulation that has dragged us to this fraught moment in America.
“He desperately craves being the center of attention, and seeing blind devotion mirrored back at him as that devotion wanes with an increasingly disgusted, exhausted public.”
Comment: In Trump world, he gets what he wants, which is adulation. But his attempt to gain that every day is starting to fall flat.
A POSTCRIPT ON MY CHOICE TO BELIEVE THAT GOD CREATED THE UNIVERSE:
Upon reflection, I could have – or perhaps should have — placed this item first because of its prime importance. At the same time, ending with it is okay, too.
In the Bible, Colossians 1:15-17 says this:
“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
“For in him all things were created: Things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
Comment: Consider these words, which reflect my CHOICE to believe in God as creator, which I summarized in more detail in a previous blog.
Great words: “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
As creator, that’s fine-tuning!
