I just heard that some members of Congress are seeking to refer Attorney General (AG) Pam Bondi for contempt because she did not release all the Epstein Files last Friday, as required by law. I’ll get to my thoughts about that in a few minutes. In the meantime, here’s a relevant story about my own dealings with Congress, lightly edited (in the spirit of the season) to obscure the main participants. You may find it enjoyable, ghastly, unsurprising, or all three!
Congress asked the administration to present all it knew, including classified material, about the attack. Due to my position, I was tasked with writing the summary which was appended onto a massive report, including never-released video footage of the event. The entire effort was exhaustive and authoritative: once you read the report and see the video, you can come to only one conclusion. I can say that because I asked a staffer for one Senator–a man known for his fierce honesty who would one-day run for President–why the Senator did not watch the video, and the staffer told me “because if he did, he wouldn’t be able to keep going on television and saying the things he wants to say.” That passes for honesty in DC.
Which is to say partisans of one stripe or another were very unhappy with the report, and called it part of the cover-up. Anyone who knows my politics (which were publicly obscure at the time, as a federal civil servant) knows the likelihood I engaged in a cover-up to aid Secretary Clinton’s campaign was beyond fantastical. Still one Congressional staffer was so angry he requested I turn over all the raw material used to develop the report. I refused, citing the agreement between the Congress and the administration that the report answered the Congressional request, period, end of sentence. This enraged the individual so much, the staffer then spent the rest of the year developing language to be included in the appropriations (or was it the authorization?) law specifically targeting me (not by name, but by position) and my organization. My budget was cut by about twenty percent (if I remember correctly). The remaining amount was frozen until my organization’s leadership acknowledged I had been counselled and given a performance improvement plan (normally a way to redress serious personal under-performance in government). The staffer then tucked the provisions away in a classified annex to the law, which passed!
To say the least, I was shocked, and my organization’s leadership was outraged. I was asked to complete the original task as an honest broker, and was now being punished for doing so. When my boss asked a senior Senator why this language was included in the classified annex, she responded, “what classified annex?” Note I said “senior”; that’s a clue. The good news in all this is that the staffer had spent so much time completing his work of vengeance, the fiscal year was almost over. Meaning the law explaining what I was supposed to do came after I had already spent all the money.
My organization of course had to explain the discrepancy between what I had done and what the Congress had belatedly directed me to do. We dutifully responded with an official note that stated we would have happily acted in accord with the law, but the law came too late to do so. And my boss stated I had been counselled, without mentioning the counselling amounted to a perfect performance rating and sizable bonus.
All of which is to highlight that Washington is a place of strange goings-on, some partisan, some just plain silly. Congress can pass a law (signed by the President) that states “pigs can fly,” but gosh-darnit, Des Moines International Airport (DSM) need not worry, because your pigs will still not fly. Politicians say one thing and do another, or perhaps try even a third. There is always an element of show, or theater if you prefer. Take the Epstein files (please!). If the law says do something that you can’t possibly do (like review mounds of material) in time, it just won’t happen. In the rush to meet the deadline, the Department of Justice (DOJ) already posted some pictures that were not properly reviewed to protect the identities of victims. Not that that matters, apparently.
If Congress wants to refer charges on AG Bondi, it will refer them to . . . (wait for it), the DOJ. You know, the governmental department run by . . . AG Pam Bondi. I wonder what they’ll do with it? But wait, I hear there is a special provision in such circumstances where the Congress can make a referral directly to a federal judge. Who can try the case, and if convicted, refer the defendant for arrest by (wait a little longer) . . . the DOJ. That is so much better. No, that’s not it. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie announced on Sunday that they are pursuing “inherent contempt”charges against AG Bondi, which requires no judge or trial. The House simply orders its Sergeant-at-Arms to arrest the offending figure. What do you think AG Bondi’s security detail will do? Enquiring minds want to know! Everybody involved with this issue in Washington knows all this is nonsense. Now you do, too.
Sergeant-at-arms McFarland, right, on the way!
What lessons shall we draw here? First, if you want to spend your Christmas season dreaming of incriminating Epstein photos, you have my sympathies. Sugar-plum fairies are a better option. Second, nothing in DC is as it seems. That is politics, and the sooner one learns that, the clearer one sees. Finally, while a wise mentor once told me “no good deed goes unpunished,” there remains a great deal of satisfaction for doing the right thing in the end.
*Apologies to A Christmas Story. At least no one got shot in the eye-glasses by a BB-gun in my story.
Since you know me, you already know I’m a huge college football fan. Yes, I follow the Fightin’ Irish, but I also follow my alma mater (Army) and just about every other game I can watch. It was an obsession from my youth that has settled into one of my two hobbies in retirement (the other being blogging, so this is a twofer for me).
So when I tell you I know something about college football, you can take that as gospel truth. Or not. See, one of the great things about college football is there is almost nothing that can’t be argued about. Best teams, best players, best coaches? All of it is up for discussion. The sport has changed so much over the last 150 years that it barely resembles its beginnings. One of the best aspects of college football is its rivalries. I’d like to make an argument for one in particular. But first, as always, let’s define our terms.
What is a rival? Like most things these days, the words we use to describe things are seriously devalued. People “love” all kinds of things they just actually enjoy. Folks who don’t know the difference between “affect” and “effect” impact our hearing using “impact” as a verb. And just about anybody claims to be somebody’s rival. But is this true?
In college football, every team can have only one rival. It’s arbitrary, but that makes the rule no less real. For there to be a rivalry, the teams must play regularly, both teams must win more than occasionally, the fans must dislike each other, the stakes of winning/losing must be high, and the rival designation must be reciprocal. There is still a lot of subjectivity in those criteria: You may not care much about the Egg Bowl trophy, but someone does (Mississippi State and Ole Miss, to be exact). The one-rival rule is based on the simple notion that few teams can meet all those criteria for each other.
For example, Notre Dame plays Navy every year, based on a commitment made during World War II, when Navy kept Notre Dame alive as a university by starting an Officer Candidate Training course there. So Notre Dame pledged to return the favor by playing Navy as often as they wanted. And Navy wanted to play every year. Some pundits call it a rivalry, based on how often it is played. But Notre Dame dominates the series (82-13-1) including a record forty-three game winning streak, our fans like each other (generally), and the stakes are rarely great. Not a rivalry.
Michigan State likes to claim Michigan is their rival, but it’s a one-way relationship. They play almost every year, and Michigan holds a 73-38-5 advantage. The fans hate each other, and the games sometimes decide who might win the conference title, but generally not. And Michigan already has a clear rival. Likewise, Boston College fans like to think of Notre Dame as their rival, and some younger Irish fans agree (they’re young, what do they know?). But the teams have only played twenty-seven times (ND 18-9 series lead). The rivalry seems to stem mainly from the 1993 game when BC beat Notre Dame, preventing them from playing for the national championship, and the feeling among BC fans that Notre Dame fans look down on them. The vast majority of Notre Dame fans don’t even notice Boston College.
Here’s a helpful way to think about it. Rivalries are not a love-hate or even a hate-hate relationship. They form out of a challenge among equals, or schools with some similarities. Familiarity breeds contempt, but there always remains a hint of grudging admiration for a rival. A team may have many enemies, other teams they hate, teams they wish would disappear from the sport. But you need your rival, if for no other reason than to be a foil for your own team. Rivalries are not static; they can grow or die. Notre Dame-Army used to be a rivalry, but the teams went their separate ways. Same for Oklahoma-Nebraska, which might have eclipsed Texas-Oklahoma as rivals, but then teams changed conferences, and it withered.
Now that we have established what rivalries are, how do we judge which is greatest? Should it be the one played most often, or the one where the fans hate each other the most? The one most competitive, or the one with the biggest stakes? All of the above? These are good criteria for establishing a rivalry, but not for measuring between rivalries. The one most people would choose is which rivalry has the greatest impact. The problem with this option is it changes radically over time. Harvard-Yale would have been the winner for decades, but now? The old Southwest Conference produced national champions for years in the 60s and 70s, but those rivalries don’t matter very often now. ND-USC and Ohio State-Michigan have had multiple hey-days. And there’s the whole argument about impact itself: does it have to be national, or regional, or just local. When you have fanatics poisoning trees, that’s pretty serious business, right Iron Bowlers?
To establish what rivalry is the greatest, I posit you need a different criterion from the qualification for rivalry. Which rivalry best exemplifies the essence of the entire sport, at its purest level? So we’re looking for a rivalry where there is deep respect for the opponent, but real hatred, too. The rivalry should embrace whatever shreds of the “student-athlete” or “amateurism” mystique that still exist in the sport. And it must matter to a lot of people: the students and alumni, of course, but also the more general fan of the sport, even the curious on-looker.
Ladies & Gentlemen, I give you Army-Navy. Is it a rivalry (let’s go through the motions)? They play every year. The series is fairly even (Navy will lead the series 63-56-7 after they lose this year). The cadets and midshipmen genuinely dislike each other. They spend (as do others) all year talking about (1) who won the last game, (2) when is the next game, and (3) how much their team will win by. In my years at the Military Academy (note: this connotes the other side is not a military academy. Are they paramilitary? civilians in funny uniforms?), we lost three years in a row, before forging a 3-3 tie in our senior year. You never saw anybody happier about a tie game in your life. We always won the party afterward, but tying the game felt like getting a pardon while on death row.
The feelings are mutual. While both academies also have Air Force to play, it’s not the same (sorry, Zoomies!). But what about the stakes? When was the last time Army-Navy made a difference on the national scene? You’d have to go back at least to the 1960s, and probably better to the 1940s. But the stakes are high for the cadets and middies: life at the Academy changes for the better after a win. It’s not just a happier place; they actually relax the rules, and Lordy, do they have rules.
And that effect stretched around the world, to the millions of active duty service members and veterans of the two services. Now I have met enlisted people who saw the whole affair as “much ado about nothing” to do with them. But even people with no direct ties to the academies find something entertaining in the competition.
Finally, especially in the modern era of college football, where players can jump from team-to-team every year, receive tens-of-thousands of dollars in Name/Image/Likeness deals, and leave early to play in “the league,” Army-Navy is the last, best hope of amateurism. There is the rare service academy player who goes to the pros, but the vast majority go to work, defending the country. Like the millions of other college athletes who end their athletic endeavors at college, the cadets and middies on the gridiron are playing for the love of the game, for each other, for their team and university. That’s what made American college football the phenomenon it remains today.
Other rivalries have more glitz, more championship effect, better players, more money at stake. Army-Navy is pure football, college football. And that makes it the greatest rivalry of all. There’s a reason this game gets a Saturday all to itself: even the money-grubbing barbarians who rule the sport today recognize it as something different, almost sacred. So watch the game this Saturday. Join me in praising the precision of the cadets during march-on and critiquing the wavy entry of the middies. Assess the one-time only special uniforms, always with a tie to history, not just football. Enjoy the President changing sides at half-time, giving both teams their due. Marvel at how the cadets and middies will survive the massive parties which will erupt post-game, regardless of the outcome.
In a recent post, I mentioned my famous Irish temper and affinity for Notre Dame football. For those of you who follow the sport, you know what comes next. My Irish were excluded from the College Football Playoff. There are always good arguments for and against the “first team out” when making such a selection. I myself could make the case for including Miami and Alabama, as well as against including Notre Dame. It’s the absence of such arguments in this case that has me blood boilin’.
But let’s set that aside for the moment, and instead channel that anger into something more productive: what lessons can be learned from this year’s playoff selection?
First, for my scorned Irish: Take care of business. If we had won either of our first two games, we would be arguing over whether Notre Dame deserved a first-round bye or a home playoff game, not their elimination. We lost one game on a last drive field goal, the other on a last play touchdown and extra point. If you lose your two toughest games, you place yourself at the mercy of a committee which has (ahem) other thing$ than mer¢y on their mind$.
Also, the sins of the (former) Athletic Director (AD) are visited upon his children. Years back, then-Notre Dame AD Swarbrick agreed to then-coach Brian Kelly’s request to schedule easier opponents in order to facilitate his chances of getting into the playoffs (Like that would have worked!). That schedule posed two problems: it started the season with two ranked opponents (nobody does this), and it left us with no solid opponent thereafter. Which meant even though the Irish railroaded the rest of the teams they played, the teams they played weren’t any good, degrading the claims of success.
Finally, the Irish and conferences are mortal enemies, and can never be anything else until the existing conference structure blows up. The Irish insist upon their independence, meaning they can make their own schedule, have their own TV rights deal, create their own rules (versus having extra conference rules), and keep all the money they earn in the playoffs. The very existence of a successful independent program is an affront to the notion of the conference system. When Oklahoma and Texas felt unappreciated in the Big-12, they talked about going independent before leaping to the SEC. When Michigan and USC recently got into a brawl with the B1G over a private equity funding scheme, they murmured about going independent. Conferences once were regional groupings of like-minded schools; now they are irrational agglomerations foraging for ever-more money (private equity? Seriously Big-10? Has anything ever been improved by making a deal with private equity?). The “Big 10” has eighteen members. The Atlantic Coast Conference has Stanford and California, notably lacking Atlantic access. And so it goes.
When push comes to shove in a playoff committee comprising conference representatives, the Irish have no representative. This year the ACC stumbled into a situation with no playoff contender from its championship game (more on that later). I would like to hear the committee assert that the fact an entire conference was about to be cut out of the playoff $ trough never came up for discussion. Right. Notre Dame has a business partnership with the ACC, whereby the Irish are in the conference for all sports except football, where they agree to schedule five ACC football team per year. This deal led some Notre Dame fans to believe the ACC was somehow friendly to the Irish. ACC schools constantly complain about the arrangement (Pat Narduzzi @ Pittsburgh being a fine example). They hate when the Irish win (see Lacrosse or Women’s B-ball), and don’t give ND credit when the ACC team’s stadium is full for a game against the Irish. Oh, and the conference got a better deal with the non-playoff bowl games because the Irish were in the mix. Here’s how the ACC acted this year: they replayed the Notre Dame loss to Miami on an endless loop on their cable channel. Their X account constantly brought up the game. Some business partners.
The next ACC-ND business meeting will probably go something like this
Don’t bet on the Irish-ACC agreement lasting more than next year. No, the Irish won’t join a conference: remember the bolded lead in? Notre Dame will find another home (like the Big East or the Atlantic 10) for its other sports and remain independent in football. Someday, the conferences will cease to exist for college football, probably by the creation of a Super League, which is something ND would join. Then the rest of college sports can return to regional conferences that make some sense.
Before I leave the Notre Dame section, I want to reiterate what I alluded to at the start. I can make a case that Miami deserved a spot because they had the same record as the Irish, similar schedules, and won head-to-head. I can argue Alabama played and beat more ranked teams. Both of them had horrible losses to bad teams, but one could argue the point. What I can’t forget (or forgive) is the committee placing the Irish ahead of those teams during the early rankings, then switching them at the end. Miami’s victory and Bama’s record were well-established when the first rankings came out. They didn’t matter, according to the committee. Until the end; then they mattered the most. Or something else was afoot.
Best joke of the weekend? Notre Dame had more rushing yardage than Alabama this week. Notre Dame didn’t play; Bama had -3.
Second, for the conferences.Your cherished championship games, which were million-dollar windfalls in the old days, are now an albatross around your necks. Get rid of them. What is the point of a game between Indiana and Ohio State where number one and number two switch places? What if Indiana had roughed up Ohio State badly, or maybe injured their star quarterback, costing the Buckeyes either a bye, a home playoff game, or even a playoff spot. For a felt banner? The ACC is the prophet here. Their selection process was so screwed up they ended up with their best team (Virginia, or UVa–what’s the “a” for?) playing a 7-5 opponent picked after a group “rock-paper-scissors” contest. Oh, and Duke (rock-paper-scissors champ) is now the ACC champion, and did not qualify for the playoffs, necessitating Miami getting a slot, or else the ACC went home hungry.
Next for the conferences is to schedule hard. The B1G has generally done this, but the SEC used to have three weak out-of-conference games followed by a game during the penultimate weekend of the season (the week before rivalry week), when they scheduled teams like Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind and Little Sister of the Poor. Seriously. I hear they are going to a nine-game conference schedule, which might alleviate this. No one got punished for playing a hard schedule: they either got punished for losing too much (sorry, Texas) or being independent (ND). And while we’re at it, stop adding teams. Conferences are so large now you can go multiple seasons without playing a conference opponent. Finally, drop the insistence on conference champions getting an automatic bid. Schedule hard, play the games, win them, and get a ranking in the top 12 to ensure you get into the playoffs. The conference champion auto-bids are how we get teams like Duke almost being in the playoffs.
Third, here are some lessons learned for college football writ large, or the minor gods who oversee it. Buy a vowel, get a clue, phone a friend in the NFL and figure out how to run a playoff. You would think no one has done this before. Last year’s trial run was atrocious, and little has been fixed. It’s really simple. Seed the teams in the first round, then re-seed after the first round results, so that the teams who receive an opening bye get an opponent proper to their seeding. Since you use a committee and don’t have the set divisions of the NFL, you have two options: either establish set, objective criteria for your rankings, or just televise the playoff committee meetings. They would be a ratings bonanza, and prevent any shenanigans (that’s Irish for “screw-job.”).
Next, do something about coaching changes. Coaches bailing on teams headed into the playoffs is an abomination. Come up with something imaginative, like a scholarship loss, or a recruit contact-ban, or an NIL limitation for coaches who do so. It will still happen, but it’s endemic right now. There will always be Lane Kiffens out there (“hey, look, a cute cheerleader . . . I mean team!”), but there has to be some way to limit the damage.
The transfer portal could have gone one of two ways: the rich getting richer, or greater parity. It seems the latter is the case, as we talk about teams like Texas Tech and Vanderbilt (the school, not the family), and that’s a good thing, even though I felt otherwise when it started. Now the sport needs to emphasize what made it great: rivalries. Find a way to reinstate or recover rivalry games, which are endangered by conference metastasizing. Here’s the thing: believe it or not, nobody uninvolved cares about Ohio State-Michigan, or Texas-Oklahoma. But the people who are involved care deeply: it’s life or death to them. Every school has a rival (or more than one). Make sure whatever changes we make to the sport encourage the continuation of rivalries.
Start planning for some type of super-conference, with tiers for relegation. The end of the existing conferences would enable the return of regional football, less expensive for the teams and fans, and better games (Hey I really enjoyed a 2245 kick-off time local for the epic Notre Dame-Stanford game!). It eases the path to objective playoff criteria (like the NFL uses). And I bet after one year of televising the playoff committee deliberations they’ll be begging to change the process. A two- or three-tiered league would allow for teams to rise or fall, encouraging fan interest even for a losing team (note: ever watch a Premier league match when relegation is at stake? It’s epic!)
Finally (no, really, I’m almost done!), since the NCAA is a dead-man walking, the conferences should band together and develop some criteria shoring up the idea that it’s college football, not semi-pro football. NIL money, the transfer portal, and other developments (like the player lawsuits seeking “employee” status) could fundamentally damage the sport. There has to be a way to maintain a link–however tenuous–to the notion the players are still students. I will leave it to creative minds to find the ways, but I do know this: there is a reason every semi-pro football league that has been tried in the States has failed miserably. If you want to watch pro-football, there is a very successful league for that. College football is different in kind–just ask the many successful college players and coaches who didn’t make it in “the league.” If you make the players into employees or mercenaries, the mystique of college football will carry over for a time, but it will eventually fail.
And then all I would have to write about would be politics!
Post Script: I lately noticed some sports talking-heads saying that Notre Dame’s decision to not play in the PopTarts bowl was “sour grapes” and hurt the players. Some Irish fans have claimed it was a middle-finger to ESPN, since our absence tanks the ratings. It was neither. The AD received the offer immediately after the announcement that ND was out of the playoff. He passed it to the coaches, who asked the team captains to poll the team on what they wanted to do: they chose not to play. Bowl games exist to (1) raise money for the town hosting, (2) raise money for the schools participating, (3) give the teams two extra weeks of practice, and (4) reward the players with a fun trip and some gifts. Notre Dame doesn’t need the money, and the players decided they didn’t want the practice or gifts. End of story. If you want to bash the Irish, find another angle.
I got some interesting feedback on my last post (you can see it in the comments section below the post). Even more interesting was the Washington Post story accusing SecWar Hegseth of a war crime regarding the very first boat-strike (back in September), which was published just days after the Democrats’ video dropped. Is this to what the video-makers were alluding? I still have my doubts, as they cited the administration pitting soldiers against civilians, which connotes the National Guard/Regular Army deployments to various cities, not the drug-boat interdiction effort.
Sticking to the war crimes accusation, the Post reported that a single anonymous source quoted the Secretary as saying “kill them all” in reference to the boat-strike. The source (and the Post) did not place this quote on a timeline of the action: before the initial strike, or after. The inference was that the first missile killed many of the fisherman/drug-smugglers (two things can be true, as they were both fishermen and smugglers), but the boat did not sink, and two men “clung to the burning ship.”
As a means of showing just how complicated all this is, let me use a land warfare example. Others will quickly point out war at sea is different, and they are right, but I’ll cover how the difference plays out at the end, so please hold your objections!
Here’s our notional scenario: you’re in a war, operating as a tank commander. You are in a “hide-position” from which you can see the enemy, but they won’t see you at first, so you get a clean first shot. You’re surveying the battlefield in front of you, and an enemy tank pulls clear out from a tree-line. It stops. Its turret is pointed away from you, and you have a clear shot at its flank, one of the most vulnerable spots. Can you fire on the tank legally?
Absolutely! There is no fairness doctrine in war. You get an easy kill, cheers to you. So you look through your gun-sight, which gives you enhanced magnification, and you see the other tank’s commander standing behind the turret, taking a whiz off the back of his tank. If you think this doesn’t happen, you’ve never been around tankers. This man and his tank present no danger to you; can you legally open fire and kill him and his tank?
Yes. The fact he is otherwise engaged does not mean he and his tank aren’t still legitimate targets. A soldier urinating (or bathing, or praying) is still a soldier at war and it is entirely legal to kill him. Sometimes soldiers adjust their views on this, called the rule of military necessity (“I don’t need to kill him peeing because I want to pee in peace, too”) but this is informal and a courtesy, not the law of armed conflict.
You fire on the tank. The commander is blown off the vehicle, and smoke is billowing out of the open hatch. The tank is not moving, but it is unclear if it is disabled or not. Can you fire at it again?
Yes. It remains a target until it is destroyed or surrenders. Note here you can assume there are injured crew members inside; it doesn’t matter.
You scan for other targets, not wanting to waste another round on a tank that may be out of the fight. You scan back to the tank, and you see the crew climbing out of the hatch and falling off the sides, clearly escaping the vehicle just to breathe. Can you target them or the tank? This is murky water. You are judging from a distance that they are incapacitated, but the tank is not. You can legally fire at the tank. If you target the tank crew, it’s a shady value judgment. You may be wrong. But the larger point to this part of the exercise is that while you may not target the incapacitated, there is no such thing as a “no-fire” or safe-zone due to injury or incapacitation. It’s unfortunate, but being near a piece of military equipment makes you possibly collateral damage.
Now you see the tank commander climbing back onto the tank, and motioning his crew to join him. Can you legally fire at the tank and/or the crew? Yes. The tank is a weapon of war, and by climbing back on, they are signalling they want to continue to fight. But wait, the commander grabs a white hanky and starts waving it: ceasefire! This tank and crew have surrendered and are no longer legal targets.
See how clear and clean cut it all is? Now imagine this scenario while you’re inside a sixty-ton metal monster, bouncing around at fifty miles an hour, with your crew screaming in your headset, your commander asking for updates, shells exploding around you, and (oh, yeah) facing imminent death if you make a mistake. All the armchair lawyers should take a breathe.
Now back to the differences between war on land and war at sea. Soldiers separated from their vehicle are still–literally–on terra firma. Man is a land mammal, and being on the land is not in itself deadly. The same is not true for sailors. A sailor in the water is at risk (side note: I always wondered why the Navy had a swim test. If a sailor is in the water, they are already in the wrong, no? Why test for it?) So when a sailor is separated from his boat/ship, there are rules which require the opposing side to rescue them, not to leave them to their inevitable fate. Sailors have to make the same difficult choices I described above: is the ship viable? Are the men surrendering? And the circumstances of naval warfare are just as prone to the fog of war as the land examples I cited above. When all is said and done, the sailor has a duty to police-up the survivors. Even on land, the soldier has to collect up and process the enemy wounded, not shoot them.
People jumped all over the original Washington Post story. While several sources in that story confirmed multiple strikes, only one quoted Hegseth as giving his “kill them all” directive. Now the Admiral in charge has denied it. Before you even think “of course he did, he sees his career flashing before his eyes,” know that he is a thirty-year veteran of the US Navy Seals, was one of the first SOF officers deployed to Afghanistan, was recently unanimously confirmed by the Senate as head of Special Operations Command, and when he was confirmed, Senator Tillis described him as one of “the most extraordinary people that have ever served in the military.” If you want to call him a careerist or a coward, I hope you forward the comment to him first. Let me know how that works out.
So there was no “kill them all” order. I admit that it sounds like the kind of thing Secretary Hegseth would say, and it would be lousy command guidance. Truman didn’t need to tell Colonel Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, Japan, to “kill everybody.” He already knew that. To the extent such a command represents a no-quarter order (do not accept surrendered enemy, kill them) it is always illegal. The fact remains there is no evidence such an order was given, and there is a complete denial of same from the one man with authoritative knowledge: the Admiral in charge.
In other news, there appears to have been two strikes on the boat. The second strike comprised three missiles (perhaps in sequence, that part is unclear as I write this), because the damn thing just wouldn’t sink. Which reinforces the story the boat was the target, not the fishermen-smugglers. They were collateral damage, not the victims of a war crime. We still haven’t seen the video of the second strike. Congress members who did reacted along predictably partisan lines. But remember, the issue revolves around (1) who gave the order, (2) what was the order, and (3) what was the reasoning behind the order. Not what Senators felt when watching a video.
If the video is eventually released, I will bet people will have strong opinions on it. If you’re debating the legality of the second strike, remember one thing. You’re not debating me, nor Hegseth. You’re debating the Admiral who gave the order. The professional we all count on to do the right thing. The man, who according to the video from the Congressional Democrats, we can count on to uphold his oath.
I know it’s hard for some to believe, but one can make the arguments here about the law of armed conflict as I did without supporting the boat-strike campaign either as an effective or legitimate policy. Plinking speed boats may help intimidate the traffickers in the short term (it certainly intimidates-to-death the fishermen-smugglers), but it does nothing to staunch the flow of drugs into the US (note: those boats can’t get to the States, and what they carry is mostly cocaine headed to Europe). Perhaps it helps intimidate Venezuela. But it’s ineffective as counter-drug policy. Furthermore, the “authorization” the administration had publicized is based on the concept that (1) the President is authorized to strike terrorists, (2) the President has designated drug cartels as terrorists, therefore (3) the campaign is legal. To see the obvious fallacy here, re-read (2) and replace “drug cartels” with “elephants.” Babar beware.
This is part of a larger problem with the War Powers Act and the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF, the initial post 9/11 law), whereby Presidents have sought ever more leeway in the use of the military, and Congresses have worked hard to avoid being blamed for it. Once again, a real, long-standing issue has been corrupted by the “Trump effect.”
The entire controversy rests first and foremost on the notion SecWar Hegseth gave a no-quarter order which never happened. Some leapt from that to the notion he actively supervised the murder of defenseless, shipwrecked fishermen (note the drug-smuggler part of their job is omitted in this version of the account). Which Hegseth contends he wasn’t there for, and which the Admiral in charge flatly confirms that he gave the command in order to destroy the boat, not to kill the fishermen/smugglers. Because he is well trained, well-versed in naval warfare, and because that’s the kind of guy he is. If you continue to contend this is a war crime, you’re not making a case against the Secretary of President Trump; you’re calling into question the morals and professionalism of Admiral Bradley. That’s okay, but be clear about it.
If you’re asking me whether I trust Secretary Hegseth or Democrats in Congress, I pass: both would merit a chapter in the book entitled, “Lyin’ Liars and the Lies They Tell.” If you’re asking me whether I trust Admiral “Mitch” Bradley or an anonymous Washington Post source: please. In the end, the boat-strikes in general and the first so-called “double-tap” are poor policy, not war crimes.
People who know me know I don’t lose my temper often. Okay, with the exception of watching my favorite Notre Dame football team lose (not often), or when driving (more often). Even those cases are momentary, as I try to keep a pretty even keel, probably because my Irish-German heritage makes me prone to behavioral extremes. Something I just saw had me simmering, because when anything masquerades as morality, morality suffers. At first glance, you may think I’m overreacting. Please consider my full case. For starters, here’s the offending video (this copy of the video repeats, so you only need to watch the first two minutes):
Firstly, I have just as much credibility to discuss this matter as anyone you saw speaking: West Pointer, Army officer, career federal civil servant in the departments and agencies cited, with over thirty-eight years under this oath:
“I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
That oath is basically the same for all civilian federal employees and military officers. Enlisted personnel have a slightly different version, which includes the following: “to obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” Notice the differences, as they are important. No mention of orders for the civilians and officers, and a requirement to obey among the enlisted.
Service members (civilian, officer, and enlisted) receive a great deal of training in what the oath means. Part of that training always covers the concept of an illegal order: that under this oath, we not only didn’t have to obey such an order, but that we were morally and legally required to disobey such an order. I joined the Army less than ten years after the infamous My Lai massacre, so that was often the focus of the Army’s training. To wit, just because your commanding officer says everybody in the village is an enemy combatant, you can’t justify shooting unarmed women and children. It was a recent, searing example which drove the point home. The overwhelming majority of the oath takers would never face such a dilemma in their careers.
The emphasis in the training was that for officers and civilians, there was a system you could engage if you found an order to be questionable. The enlisted were taught the same, but the emphasis in the oath is clear: obeying is the norm, engaging with the system is the exception. For those public servants, the training went on to explain what to do: when you see something you consider potentially an illegal order, you should state such to the officer/leader giving the order, that they may clarify or reconsider. You can ask that it be referred up the chain of command. You can go to appointed persons like the Judge Advocate General, Inspector General (IG) or an Ombudsman, who can investigate it for you. You can even in some circumstances contact your Representative or Senator under special “whistleblower” provisions.
Here’s the catch: whatever path you choose, it does not include deciding for yourself. Once you choose among these different options, you are required to accept the legal or moral judgment rendered by the official in question. That’s the system in law, as in the Constitution. What is not in the Constitution is the right of an individual to abrogate to him or herself the right to decide what is Consitutional/legal or not. Why is that? The oath-takers are taught that they may not have the same advantage of information the person making the decision does. They might not be expert in law, or the overall situation. What may seem counterproductive or unreasonable at one level may be entirely justified at another level. That is why there is a system for you as the person “pulling the trigger” so-to-speak to reach out to others to confirm or deny your suspicions.
As a practical example, Eddie Snowden decided the electronic spying the National Security Agency (NSA) was doing was morally wrong and probably illegal. He made this decision on his own, from his lofty perch as an analyst and later contractor. He didn’t do the right thing; he sent an email to the NSA General Counsel asking a vague question about whether an Executive Order can override federal statute (it can’t), and from this he made the definitive legal judgment to leak massive volumes of classified data to the Russians, Chinese, and who knows who else. He continues to defend himself from a protected spot in Moscow, calling himself an advocate for truth, transparency, and individual rights. Rather, he is the avatar of ego, mal-education, and moral turpitude. This is what happens when people mistake using the system with being the ultimate decider.
Now the video I asked you to watch reiterates much of the training I experienced, so you might be wondering why my blood pressure spiked. It did so because it adds some things and omits others. It adds specifically that “this administration” is the threat to the Constitution. Not that a certain policy is wrong or illegal, but the administration itself is a threat, “pitting” soldiers and civilian professionals “against American citizens.” That is a sweeping statement well beyond the confines of the subject of lawful orders. How is the average oath-taker supposed to process such a generalization, other than to suspect everything they are told?
Second, it omits the most important part: what the oath-taker is supposed to do. Yes, if you’re the trigger-puller on the Special Forces Black Hawk helicopter in the Carrib, you do face a real, instantaneous decision on whether to blow the boat out of the water. But there was a time before that, during the pre-operational briefing, to ask the right questions. There is a system to do so. Telling that soldier, or any government employee, that they have the right–nay, the obligation–to ignore an order without explaining what that means within the system they operate? That is unconscionable. Suggesting the hundreds of thousands of oath-takers in the government who don’t face such a stark, immediate decision do the same? Immoral.
I have seen some of the people featured in this video explaining that they have “constituents” in the military expressing concerns, for example, about the drug-boat strikes near Venezuela. This explanation makes the situation worse. If it is true, they should be referring the constituents to the system designed to answer their concerns, not making generalized videos about “the administration.” Whether it’s the drug boats or domestic military deployments, these issues are either currently in the courts (domestic deployments) or an issue of international law, and not something a soldier or civilian is placed to decide for themselves. Worse still, the self-identified patriots in the video have ample means to seek redress if they think the administration is in error. They are in Congress. They can be specific about issues and use their (constitutional) authority. Instead they spout generalities and spark others to act; that’s cowardly.
For my friends who never had the honor of taking the oath, here is an analogy that might resonate. Imagine you wake up tomorrow and there’s this video, from a former Surgeon General of the United States, the head of the Mayo Clinic, and other prominent medical officials. They say “the administration” is the problem and you shouldn’t follow the medical advice of the government elements like the CDC, the Public Health Service, or the National Institutes of Health. They don’t take issue with any specific thing, like vaccine recommendations or puberty blockers or hormone treatments for women in menopause. No, they simply remind you that it’s your health, your right, and you can stand up to the government. But remember, the government’s medical advice is suspect. Does that sound like a good idea, or a recipe for disaster?
The leaders in the real video say that they “have your back.” There are two kinds of people who stand behind you. Those that have your back, and those who will stab you in the back.
Why are so many people so interested in this story? For many in the MAGA movement, it was the secretive proof of perverse left-wing elites protecting themselves. They will not be happy until all the dirty laundry is dragged out into the streets, sure it will hurt the other side most. Democrats and Progressives mostly mocked the MAGA obsession with Epstein, until it became a seismic rift inside the MAGA world, and now they too are all about it. If you don’t believe me, ABC World News Tonight took to playing the same two-minute script (with the same videos) for five nights in a row, although of course there was nothing “new” about any of it.
So why am I joining in the fun? I do think there are lessons here worth considering. But first–as always–let’s review the facts.
Jeffrey Epstein was a rich pervert who died in custody awaiting trial on federal charges. He was undoubtedly rich based on his homes, private jets, and lavish lifestyle. No one is exactly certain how he became rich, but he was associated with several millionaires (especially Lesley Wexner of Victoria’s Secret fame and Leon Black from Apollo Global Management) who either rewarded him for great work, were victimized by his thievery, or fell prey to blackmail. All of those options are conjecture, but they remain the sole explanations for the fact of Epstein’s wealth, which was key to his lengthy criminal behavior.
He was a pervert because he plead guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution and of solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18 (the youngest was apparently 14), and was sentenced to 18 months in a minimum-security state facility. He was eventually released and a decade later charged with one federal count of sex trafficking of minors and another of conspiracy to do the same. Under federal law, the last two charges were dismissed upon his death. At no time was the word pedophile introduced or used in his prosecution; it’s far easier to use the popularly-understood term “pervert.” That’s about as far as facts go, and that’s where the strangeness and conspiracies start.
It’s quite possible he got rich completely legitimately. No one knows for sure. He impressed people at Bear Stearns (investment banking firm) and rose quickly, then did the same when he left to start his own firm, where he got Wexner and Black as clients. Based on later behavior, some believe he must have run in perverse-elite circles, too, and anyone associated with him is therefore suspect.
Epstein did run in New York City’s high society circles, and as such, partied with the rich and famous. Who else knew about his depravity and what did they do about it? Watch American Psycho or read Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. New York City in that era was a cesspool of whatever you can get away with. It was the ultimate expression of libertinism, and nobody was going to call “foul” or “disgusting.” All the while, Epstein engaged in elaborate grooming rituals with his former girlfriend-turned-accomplice Ghislaine (pronounced “hill-ane” with a hushed “g”) Maxwell, who was convicted of five federal counts around and including sex trafficking of a minor. She is currently serving a twenty-year term in federal prison. She assisted him in taking in vulnerable, underage women, and under the guise of arranging “massages,” implicating them in sex work with Epstein.
What is suspicious about all this? When Epstein was first tried in Florida, the federal prosecutor, Alex Acosta, was set to bring multiple charges. The two sides bargained down to a plea deal of one state charge each (as noted above) and remuneration to the victims. The bargain also included a further non-prosecution agreement (NPA) deal for Epstein and his colleagues, as well as confinement in a minimum security prison with a sentence of 18 months. In total, this was very lenient. Much is made of the latter provisions, but they are not unusual. Epstein’s legal team would have insisted on the NPA to prevent the government from coming back on the other charges they bargained away, and Epstein’s willingness to plead guilty, and lack of previous record argued for a lesser place of confinement.
But on top of that, the prison had a work-release program which allowed Epstein to leave for twelve hours a day to work at his office, and eventually reduced his sentence to thirteen months for good behavior! While sex offenders (and Epstein did have to register as such) are not normally allowed work-release, the judicial system did not treat his illegal behavior with the same seriousness as pedophiles or child rapists. Was that because he was rich, all the people involved were also pedos, or a moral failing when it comes judging another man’s sexual criminality? In any case, it was wrong.
Epstein left prison, only now two things changed: fewer of his former friends wanted to be seen with him, and more girls were coming forward claiming he abused them. Epstein had to settle a continuing series of civil suits to avoid testifying or perjuring himself. In 2021, the feds charged him with new counts of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors. Shortly after being charged, Epstein was found hung to death in jail, a suicide according to the New York City Chief Medical Examiner.
What stinks here? Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who agreed to the lenient plea deal, later became President Trump’s Secretary of Labor, but he resigned as more people expressed outrage at the Epstein agreement. But no one has discovered any connection, bribe, or evidence against Acosta. And Acosta originally took on the Epstein case because state prosecutors thought the victims were too unreliable as witnesses and the case wouldn’t result in a conviction. So Acosta treated Epstein more, not less, rigorously than others.
What about the victims, or as they call themselves, “the survivors?” None of the women who originally came forward to accuse Epstein mentioned being trafficked to anyone other than Epstein. Later on, two women (Virginia Giuffre and Sarah Ransome) claimed to have been so trafficked. Under the rubric of #believethewomen, this ends the conversation. Why did no one follow up on these accusations?
Giuffre claimed to have been trafficked to the Andrew-formerly-known-as-Prince, and American attorney Alan Dershowitz. The former settled with her with no admission of guilt, the latter sued her for defamation and she withdrew her claim, saying she “may have made a mistake” in her identification. She had a previous case of claiming to have been sexually assaulted dismissed for a lack of evidence, and later claimed she was rescued by the FBI in another case of abduction, although the FBI has no record of such an incident. Giuffre committed suicide recently, so the allegations she made will never be adjudicated.
Ransome drew attention for claiming to have sex tapes with Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, which she later admitted was false. She also claimed to be the target of a shadowy international conspiracy, but said the “Russians. . . are coming to (her) aid.”
Julliette Bryant , another victim, claims Epstein was a reptilian shape-shifter, and she witnessed him changing into a lizard or devil during orgasm. There’s a sentence no one should ever have to write.
Needless to say, one can see the problems with such people as witnesses. Other survivors have stepped forward to demand the federal government release all its Epstein files. This is a confusing request: if they know who did what to them, why don’t they announce it? Why is the government even involved? There is no doubt these women were sexually abused by Epstein; there is no evidence produced so far, by anybody else (journalists, victims, police, courts) that anybody else was involved. Was there perhaps someone else involved? Possibly. Was there a vast conspiracy? No. And if you fell for the anti-Semitic trope about Epstein as an intelligence asset, I feel sorry for you (and read this).
Now some of the “survivors” insist they want the full release of the files because it will disclose those who helped Epstein. The problem here is the difference between law and vengeance. Under the law, if there was evidence someone assisted Epstein in his felonious criminality, they would be subject to charges, too. But they weren’t, with the exception of Ms. Maxwell. Plenty of people were his friends, and while I am sympathetic with those who feel such people should suffer our contempt, I am not sure it is in the government’s rights or obligations to provide the content for such a popular action.
I am even more suspicious now, as the first release has shown the non-voting delegate from the US Virgin Islands, Democrat Stacey Plaskett, received funding from and was actively seeking the advice of Epstein well after his criminal behavior was confirmed. Did she seek culinary tips from Jeffrey Dahmer; inquiring minds want to know! Yet House Democrats succeeded in defending her from a simple censure vote, and she remains on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. How does that square with punishing Epstein’s “friends” or co-conspirators?
Will the material be abused for partisan purposes? Of course. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Hell, I mean Dallas) is a case in point. She took to the floor of the House to announce her intrepid staff had already determined that “a Jeffrey Epstein” had donated to several prominent Republican candidates. Turns out, not “the Jeffrey Epstein.” As Emily Litella would say, “nevermind.” I’m sure she’ll be far more professional with the rest of the Epstein files.
What about those Epstein files? People throw the term around like it’s the “X-files.” Every state and federal case results in a case file. This forms the basis of the prosecution, and much of it must be shared with the defense team. The case file does not get publicly released. It includes hearsay, irrelevant detail, things alleged but not charged, pretty much everything the investigating officers uncovered. If you’ve ever been a witness, a victim, charged, or a close relative of the same who was interviewed, your name is in a case file somewhere. It is absolutely no one else’s business, and such things are protected by state and federal privacy laws. Could you imagine if gangs or organized crime could get a hold of case files?
Some suggest there is a client list in “the Epstein files.” This is based on the assumption that Epstein partied with the rich and famous, so they must have partied with him, too (wink, wink). And so he kept a list in case he needed to blackmail them. And he got treated leniently, so he must have blackmailed someone (nudge, nudge). And he died suspiciously, so probably that same someone “rubbed him out” (choke, choke). If you’re in a red hat, you’re sure Bill Clinton spent some wild nights on Epstein’s private island and Epstein himself was victim #57 of the Clinton crime family. If you swing blueski (I know it’s Bluesky, but isn’t blueski funnier?), Trump’s number is up and you’ll finally catch the damn roadrunner (beep-beep).
In point of fact, if there was any hard evidence of other people engaging in the crimes Epstein was guilty of, the investigators would have brought charges against them. Few prosecutors would have turned up the opportunity to get Clinton, or Trump, or Andrew-what’s-his-name-now in exchange for an Epstein plea deal. As a result of leaks, acknowledgments and agreements, other names like Bruce Willis, Cameron Diaz, Cate Blanchett, Kevin Spacey, Naomi Campbell, Leonardo DiCaprio, Woody Allen (!), Les Wexner, Leon Black, Jes Staley (Barclay’s bank), Joi Ito (MIT), Glenn Dubin (Highland Capital), Steve Bannon, Bill Gates & Larry Summers (who both continued to see Epstein after his initial convictions) have shown up. None have been implicated in anything. While some of Epstein’s victims have cited specific incidents with specific famous people, those cases have either been dismissed or settled. Did some of the rich and famous join Jeffrey in his criminal endeavors? Undoubtedly. But little evidence exists. And state and federal prosecutors have been investigating for twenty years. Read that again: twenty years of different political parties, both state and federal judicial officers, and nothing.
Ahhhh, but that proves the conspiracy, no? So let’s entertain the conspiratorial mindset for a minute to understand just how far it goes. Epstein was tried and convicted, creating a case file history in 2008. So the conspiracy must start there, and include the investigators, the state and federal prosecutors, and probably the federal judge. Remember, the first tranche of the “Epstein files” has been sitting in prosecutors’ file cabinets/cloud storage for seventeen years, and probably thousands of people have had access. Nobody saw nuttin’.
Then Epstein got into more trouble. Numerous cases of civil litigation followed, with discovery and trial and . . . no additional evidence of a conspiracy. Or they were all bought off, or threatened, or brought into the conspiracy. At this point, the conspiracy is either as powerful and violent as a Mexican cartel, or as large as WalMart. But wait, hay mas (there’s more)!
The files are available to first the Trump administration, then the Biden administration, then finally again the Trump administration. Trump shows remarkable restraint and never drops a dime on Bill Clinton. Right! Biden has hard evidence of Trump with teenage girls but decides instead to go after real estate valuations in New York, instead? Right! What if both teams found incriminating evidence, so each decided not to expose it? And this grand conspiracy never got around to destroying the files? Right!
Finally, there is another federal case, under a different prosecutor. All those files are going to be shared again. Where were Epstein’s protectors? Maybe they turned on him? Or did the great conspiracy decide that if Epstein “killed himself,” it would all go away? Because there would be nothing suspicious about that, and no one would be talking about Epstein, would they? Right. Even Epstein might have been running low on funds, and he wasn’t going to get another part-time gig in Club Fed. So like the coward he always was, he likely hangs himself.
What do we take from all this? There is some poetic justice in watching President Trump hose down his most frenzied conspiracy-minded supporters. And we’ll never have to listen to anyone on the left seize the pulpit and moral high ground after they joined in a fake conspiracy they knew was nonsense, just to “get Trump.” I hope Progressives enjoy Marjorie Taylor Greene as much as MAGA has, and congratulations, you’re now on Team Jewish Space Lasers! Lesson One: Bad men and women did very bad things, and people looked the other way. Other people did not take these crimes seriously, and many victims’ lives were ruined and they never got justice. If you think this is limited to the rich & famous, think again. Next time there is a teacher at a local school caught in an inappropriate relationship with a minor student, google the accused and find their work history (it’s easy these days). You’ll find a string of other schools where the teacher came and left under questionable circumstances. Groups protect their own, and avoid calling disrepute upon themselves and their colleagues. Lesson Two: Many, many more people turned the affair into a a sex-stained, public rugby match, rolling around in the filth while disclaiming how dirty the other side was. I saw way too many of my educated friends falling into such speculation, when they should have known better. If you don’t want to be included in any of these groups, walk away fast and never come back. If I never hear the name Jeffrey Epstein again, it would be too soon.
Brings to mind a joke I heard on Ezra Klein’s podcast the other day. A conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter says, “welcome to paradise. Now you may know the secrets to all the mysteries of all time. Do you have any questions?” “Just one,” the man replies, “who really killed Jeffrey Epstein?” “He hung himself,” Saint Peter replied nonchalantly. The conspiracy theorist shakes his head and says, “I had no idea how high the conspiracy went!”
PS: I wrote this back in September, hoping the whole story would go away and I would never need to publish about it. That’s why there is a *sigh* in the subject line. Now gobs of material have been released, with more pending. Nothing has changed. I could add many more names to the list of public figures who paled around with Epstein, some before his perversion was public, some even after. It goes to the point the rich and famous look past each other’s moral failings, which is only news if you lived your life in a cave. Whether you simply seek justice or had an ax to grind, none of it matters.
Did you see Epstein’s email to Maxwell saying “Trump spent hours with (Giuffre) at the house”? Yet she testified under oath to the contrary, and told the same story in her autobiography penned just before her suicide. Some will misquote Epstein’s email that “of course, Trump knew about the girls” without including the rest of the sentence, “he told Maxwell to stop.” Epstein alleged he knew all about “Trump’s dirty side” but also said “he never got a massage.” When the writer/bullshit artist Michael Wolfe tried to get dirt, Epstein offered “a picture of Trump with girls in bikinis in my kitchen.” Some fail to see the ridiculous humor in that. Wolfe claims he got close to Epstein to get information, but the emails expose a seedy relationship where one prostitutes himself to the other without getting payback. Perhaps it was another case of Epstein’s sexual abuse. Sure, Jeffrey Epstein went to prison (and death) without ever releasing the photos he had. Even after he claimed he was “the only one who could take (Trump) down.”
Epstein, his perversions, and his eponymous files are a modern Rorschach test: you see in them what you want to see. It tells you something about you, not Epstein, not Trump, not even the rest of us. All of this recalls for me a Friedrich Nietzsche quote: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.“
I don’t normally recommend a forensic autopsy on a live patient, but who knows when the latest government shutdown will end? You might have heard it was about ObamaCare. It was and it wasn’t. You might have heard it was all the (Republicans’/Democrats’) fault. It was and it wasn’t. You might have heard it was necessary (according to some) or inevitable (according to others). It wasn’t. But you have to understand government, politics, the federal budget, and health care if you want to have an informed opinion about what just happened. Or just post your favorite uninformed meme on social media.
By now, most people are generally familiar with the federal budget process. They know it takes a bill through two houses of Congress and a President’s signature to become law. That’s called “authorization” in budget-speak, meaning, it tells the executive branch agencies they have authority to spend money thusly. If they try to spend more, or differently, they’re breaking the law (the budget is, in the end, a law). To put it in everyday terms, when you sit down with your spouse and agree that you’re only going to spend $100 a week on eating out at restaurants, and only $5,000 on your vacation, you have “authorized a budget.” If you commit to your friends to blow an extra $100 on boys’ night out, there will be consequences (legal or otherwise).
Authorization is permission, but the money still has to found. That second process is another bill (again through Congress and the President) called “appropriations.” This actually sends the money to the executive branch to be spent in accordance with the budget. If the Congress authorizes you to spend a million, but only appropriates one-half million, the latter is the limit. In family terms, if the savings account only has $2,000 in it, you’re vacationing in Dollywood, not Disney World. Normally the federal government passes many separate appropriations bills, but since normal isn’t these days, the Congress has taken to passing omnibus bills or continuing resolutions (which say keep spending as you were spending). Earlier this year, Congress passed such a resolution as the Democratic leadership held to the idea shutting down the government was a bad idea. Just wait.*
The MAGA party (formerly the GOP) controls both houses of Congress and the Presidency, which should make passing a budget easier. However, they hold less than sixty seats in the Senate, which has its own norm called the filibuster, meaning it takes sixty votes to break the filibuster and pass a bill. The main exceptions are to confirm some nominations, and to pass the budget (as long as the budget is strictly about money). So MAGA passed an authorization into law, called the One Big Beautiful Bill, but could not get enough Democratic support to break a filibuster on the appropriations paying for what it authorized. And a shutdown ensued.
Normally, the two parties negotiate to resolve the impasse. The minority party (the Democrats in this case) picks some ideas they want to support or resist, and the majority party (MAGA) chooses what they can live with to get the larger bill enacted with the rest of their agenda. Needless to say, these are not normal times. President Trump and MAGA are in no mood to negotiate, period. Senator Chuck Schumer caved the last time this happened, based on a long-standing Democratic party principle that shutting down the government is irresponsible. This time, the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate decided to reject their previous principled opposition to government shutdowns, and instead to stake their negotiating position on several healthcare provisions. President Trump probably would not have negotiated on any Democratic party requests, but these were tailor-made to (1) get support from the party’s progressive base, and (2) aggravate the President. And we achieved shutdown.
There is nothing wrong with all of this: it’s politics. Dysfunctional politics, mind you, but those complaining about it remind me of Captain Renault:
Politics in Washington? I’m shocked!
Whose fault is it? Yours. And mine. Every time we voters give a party control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, but not a sixty-seat majority in the Senate, we invite this chaos. The governing party thinks it has a mandate, the minority party wants to play with fire, and we voters get burned. It should force the parties to negotiate, but that’s failed often enough to not be a justification for continuing to do business this way.
MAGA’s fault? Yes, because they could have negotiated, but refused. What the Democrats asked for was their opening position; President Trump, he of The Art of the Deal, could have gotten a better deal, no? But he refused to try. The Democrat’s fault? Sure. They once again abandoned a principle to oppose Trump, then they chose enhanced ObamaCare subsidies as the point of contention. Why were these subsidies at risk? Because they were expiring, and MAGA left them out of their budget bill. Why were they expiring? Because when a Democratic-majority Congress and President passed them in 2021, they did so on the basis of the idea they were temporary, to make sure no one lost health insurance during a pandemic despite being a very expensive benefit. What kind of fool does the party leadership think voters are to say now it must be continued regardless of cost, when the Democrats approved them as temporary?
Furthermore, Senator Schumer correctly pointed out the last time a shutdown loomed that to cause one gives the President enormous emergency powers to decide how the remaining money gets spent. Facing an internal party revolt (perhaps a primary challenger!) and progressive desire to “fight Trump” (without thinking things through), Schumer caved this time to cause the shutdown, and President Trump predictably used those emergency powers to gut federal programs the Democrats support.
What about the enhanced ObamaCare subsidies? Aren’t they worth fighting for? Firstly, they were an extension of the original subsidies. The original subsidies weren’t temporary, so they are unaffected. Second, President Obama promised his Affordable Care Act had provisions to bring down the cost of health care (not the cost of the insurance, the actual cost of health care). None of these worked, as most experts predicted. ObamaCare did bend the cost curve somewhat: the costs rose 6.9% annually for a decade before ObamaCare, only 4.3% the decade after it. But that’s a decline in the rate of growth, not a decrease! One of the arguments for the temporary subsidies was to offset the continued rise in health care costs. So all the ObamaCare provisions to add more people to Medicaid or to create the exchanges where these subsidies help cover the cost of insurance? They amounted to a huge increase in demand for health care, with no increase in supply. You don’t need a Nobel in Economics to know what happens next: prices surge, as they did.
And remember, we’re not talking about the basic subsidies for the poorest Americans. As an example, I asked Gemini (Google’s AI product) to tell me whether a California family of three making $300,000 annually could qualify for the enhanced ObamaCare exchange subsidies. The short answer is yes under the expanded, temporary subsidies at the heart of the shutdown. Not to be heartless here, but do you think the government should be subsidizing health care insurance for such a family? Given our deficit and debt, I don’t.
The shutdown is now the longest in US history. It won’t end well for either side, especially for the government workers or benefits recipients trying to make ends meet when the checks don’t come. Perhaps the Congress will start talking amongst the parties and come up with a compromise. Whatever the outcome is, it won’t be an improvement in how government runs, how we reduce our profligate spending, or the relative power imbalance between the legislative and executive branches. Other than that, it’s been great for political junkies and social media memes.
* For the love of God, I’m not even going to get into “authorized but not appropriated” called “A-not-A” in budget lingo, or the reverse. Let’s just say there are parts of the sausage-making process better left un-examined.
Norms are expected patterns of behavior, usually applied to a specific group, organization, or even culture. The penalty for breaking norms is usually social: from criticism to ostracism. The purpose of the penalty is to re-establish the norm: you broke it, and we make you return to it by apologizing and making appropriate restitution. Or you refuse, and suffer the social consequences.
If the society or group in question decides to enact civil/criminal penalties, the norm may evolve into a law. An historical example of this was consanguineous marriage, that is marriage between close blood-relatives. It used to be a norm, since most of the eligible marriage partners in pre-modern societies came from your village, which was your extended family. The Catholic Church opposed it, and eventually influenced people to reject it. That changed norm became so fixed in many people’s minds that countries enacted laws prohibiting it. And many people today recoil and the very thought of it.
But norms by themselves have little or no power. The funny thing about norms, unlike some other social constructs, is that they can only be restored by insisting on them, not by violating them. If you have a social norm that violence is never acceptable as a means to settle a disagreement between two opponents, you can’t insist that you can use violence to respond to a violation of that norm. “He hit me first, so I hit him back,” is playground jurisprudence that has never won a case.
As an example, many societies have a norm to the effect that “you don’t speak ill of the dead.” It’s not a superstition, or even a religiously-inspired norm. It stems from two, solid, human emotions: the dead person isn’t there to defend themselves, and every death is a cause for mourning, so the immediate aftermath of a death should be about mourning, which can include being positive about the deceased. The process has no balancing criteria: I’ve looked closely at the quote I posted as the norm, and try as hard as I can, I can find no asterisk.
If you stand up at a eulogy and say, “that rat-b@st@rd slept with my wife” people will think less of you, even if it was true. It’s not the time nor the place. It’s just wrong; that’s the norm. People will criticize you or even exclude you until you make reparations for violating the norm. But what if, right after you commit the faux pas, someone else stands up and yells, “Sure, but you *bleep* goats, so what’s your issue, goat*bleeper*?” This will not re-establish the norm; rather, it also violates it (not the time, nor the place, not even if the goats are willing to testify in court), and exacerbates it. You can’t re-establish the norm by engaging in the same norm-violation. It doesn’t work that way.
I’m sure I don’t need to make the obvious point about celebrating someone’s death. Okay, maybe Hitler’s. But to those who say they felt compelled to point out a recently-deceased person’s faults because others were lauding the man? Read the norm again. Or just decide if you want to put your likeness onto the person in this video:
I wrote all this (and made you read it!) to get to the larger issue: one of my biggest concerns about life in these United States today is we have come to the point where both sides now believe they can–or more truthfully–they must violate the norms to re-establish them.
Let’s start with the walking. talking epitome of norm-breaking, President Trump. He gets very upset when people make fun of his weight, his hair, his orange-hued tan, and about a hundred other things. He says people who make these comments are “nasty.” He proceeds to talk about them in ways that also break the norm: “dummy,” “ugly,” “horseface,” and “retarded” are among his rejoinders. The norm teeters. His opponents respond with “pedophile,” “rapist,” and “Nazi.” Down goes the norm.
It happens not only in impromptu, personal observations, but in policies, too. The President maintains he was the victim of selective, vindictive prosecutions. Reasonable people may agree or disagree with him. But what are his directions to go after certain members of his first administration but the same thing? “Oh, but they’re guilty,” my MAGA friends would object, as did my progressive friends when talking about Trump’s legal problems. You see the point: guilt or innocence is not it, the norm is the point.
We used to have a norm in this country that we don’t go after our political opponents using the justice system (federal or state). Richard Nixon committed a bag of felonies in addition to the cover-up that got his impeachment rolling and resulted in his resignation. His successor, Gerald Ford, could have let the prosecutors go after him, but instead he cost himself re-election by reinforcing the norm and pardoning Nixon. And it wasn’t just Nixon. Reading history will remind you that many of our leaders (great and otherwise) could have been in the docket after the White House. That’s what happens elsewhere, not here . . . until now.
Some norms are small things, but they are part of larger things, like small building blocks. The Senate filibuster is one example, ensuring a majority party needs either an overwhelming majority or some minority support to get basic things done. Yet some are itching to erase it despite its obvious utility to whichever team isn’t in charge. Beware those who say such progress is always good, because norms great and small play important roles. You won’t know what you got till it’s gone, as the song goes.
Look at the norm about non-prosecution of past administrations. When the Democrats tossed it aside “because Trump,” they proceeded on a federal and state tear amounting to four indictments and eighty-eight criminal counts. Among these were the charges of interfering in the 2020 election, including the Supreme Court case of Trump vs. the United States. The decision established the President has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”
Now the Supreme Court majority reviewed the competing notions that the Founders certainly wanted no kings above the law, but also did not want a presidency which ended with endless subsequent criminal litigation. Before this, it was just a norm, understood that the President can’t be subsequently sued or charged for his actions in office. The push to end the norm led to a binding precedent that is sweeping. Whether you agree with it (I do) or not, I’m not sure this is a better place for the country to be in legally. I am absolutely sure the Democrats who pursued this course of action didn’t intend where it ended up.
When Michelle Obama told her Party, “when they go low, we go high,” many Democrats rejected it and described it as “weak,” “defeatist,” or simply “unacceptable” when facing Trumpism. She was right, they were wrong. It’s not weak or defeatist to insist on norms, it’s principled. Principled positions win in the end. Many people who don’t know the derivation of the term Nazi* but like to talk about fascism or Hitler forget that the Allies didn’t win by rejecting the norms of human decency in society or war. We won by insisting on those norms. Even after the war, we insisted on a legal tribunal with certain rights, judges, defense attorneys, and procedures before administering justice . . . even for Nazis.
Once you start jettisoning norms, principles and laws are next on the chopping block. Mr. Trump has always viewed laws as things to be manipulated or obeyed only as a last resort. Trying to claim he doesn’t have to back-pay some government employees idled by the shutdown is just his latest one, or is it bullying his ball room over the East Wing of the White House? It’s so hard to keep tally. Mind you, it’s a bipartisan sport. The Democrats recently took a principled stand against Gerrymandering, going so far as to put specific limits on it in blue states, with some notable exceptions (Maryland, for instance). History again is instructive: what are the norms of districting in America? Well the very term Gerrymander is a home-grown term, showing it has been going on since the inception of the Republic. There was indeed a norm that a state normally only redistricted after a federal census, or under court order, but it was only a norm. The Republicans tossed it aside, and then so did the Democrats with their once-principled stand. So much for norms and principles.
“Pat, you’re missing the larger issue. If Trumpism is not defeated in the next election, it will change us forever.” I regret to inform those who hold this view that it has already changed us forever. The question is whether those changes will be for the better or for the worse. If we toss aside every norm, principle, or even law, those changes will be for the worse. If we insist on reestablishing the norms, etc, by continuing to abide by them, it will be for the better. I would remind all that about ten years ago, Democrats were predicting their coalition had an unstoppable majority which would dominate the Presidency and the Congress for decades to come. Didn’t happen. Republicans feel somewhat similar today. Nothing is guaranteed. The new districts the Texas GOP is developing are based on continuing support from Hispanics in Rio Grande border areas. If those voters change their mind (which they did in 2024), the gerrymandering fails miserably. The same will happen elsewhere.
American politics are in flux. This is yet another reason the norms need to be re-asserted by all of us. Nominees come and go, as do parties. What we have left are the rules they compete under. When we suggest those rules are just part of the game, not even norms (let alone laws), we weaken the ties that bind us together. That is a far greater challenge than anything on the ballot in 2026 or 2028.
*Most people know the term Nazi stands for National Socialist in German. But the derivation is interesting. It should be NaSo, right? But Socialists in Germany were called by a derogatory term “SoZis” by the other parties. When the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP in German) came on the scene, the other parties gave them the derivative NaZi nickname. They embraced it.
When I’m engaging in rhetorical combat on social media (which seems to happen more frequently as time goes by) my frustrated opponents sometimes take to pigeon-holing: “oh, you’re a Trumper!” or “your MAGA hat is showing.” Their actual words are closer to slurs, but you get the point: they think by disclosing the hateful ideology behind my otherwise reasonable-sounding words, they can end the argument with victory. Alas they’re wrong, as my MAGA friends can attest. I used to explain that “after thirty-eight years of honorable active service to the government of the United States, both in uniform and mufti, Donald J. Trump represented a repudiation of all that I stood for.” This left my opponents stammering.
Some still tried to ease their cognitive dissonance with online psychoanalysis: “why is someone like you justifying/defending/explaining what Trump just said or did?” I had to develop a second “Pat” answer for that: “Trump is neither my Lord & Savior, nor is he Hitler reincarnated. He’s just the guy currently occupying the Oval Office.” In today’s bifurcated political environment, I fear I don’t have much company in that opinion: you either hate him and his movement with a white-hot passion, or you adore him. I liken this to the two shades of TDS: Trump Derangement Syndrome and Trump Devotion Syndrome. In political theory, pundits sometimes refer to the spectrum of thought as a line with left and right limits. There is another version called the horseshoe, which bends the two extremes closer together (hence the horseshoe), which indicates the crazies on the left and right begin to resemble each other. Under TDS, I believe this is true: both end up believe everything revolves around Trump.
What about me? I served under six different Presidents: Carter, Reagan, Bush pater, Clinton, Bush filius, and Obama, representing an extremely wide array of political inclinations. Some I knew only from a distance; others I got close enough to know their principle advisors. I learned several things as a civil servant. Some leaders I liked as people but disliked their policies; others the reverse. In all cases, I was not there to render my personal judgment on them or their policies. That had been done by the American people. I was there to advise, inform and execute all the legal policies of the administration. And before you try to jam an elephant (or a donkey) through that loophole word of “legal,” I was taught (as are ALL federal employees) that we are not the sole determiners of legality. If we object, we can say so and face the consequences (being fired). We can resign in protest. We can contact the Inspector General or other Ombuds, or even the Congress as a whistle-blower. But we cannot go rogue or public with our criticism, cannot stay and work to thwart the policy, cannot take matters into our own hands.
My time in federal service also taught me that initial reports are little better than rumor, that everyone has a bias (and it’s worst when one refuses to admit it), that the press has an agenda, and everything (and I do mean everything) is much more complicated than partisans want you to believe. I learned all this before the advent of the internet and social media, and it has served me well.
I’ve told this story before. Way back in the 1990s, I was charged with looking deep into the future to advise the US Army on what to prepare for next, as the Soviet Union was fading away. I spent a lot of time studying the nascent “internet” and the experts debating whether internet access would be a key to victory in the future. Those that had access had more and better information; those that lack access would be at a disadvantage. I joined the debate with a slightly different idea: internet access would eventually become like water: a public utility with very low cost, and nearly everybody would have it. I suggested the strategic advantage would fall to those capable of using the access to sort good information from crap.
Sitting in dusty file cabinet in a huge warehouse somewhere in Washington, DC–probably down a row from the Ark of the Covenant– is a paper copy of my work. As I watch people on social media readily ingest pure garbage, and then spew it back out as opinion, I feel sadly exonerated.
Another thing I learned is that few things are as important as they seem at the time. Remember the population bomb (1960s)? DDT and the Silent Spring (1970s)? The Japanese economic challenge (1980s)? Y2K apocalypse (1990s)? How about SARS (2000s)? Earlier generations could add “Who lost China?”, the atomic bomb, and the end of segregation. There has always been a cottage industry in predicting the next big (or terrible) thing, and it’s rarely correct. Nowadays, it’s not a cottage industry, it’s a massive business, and apparently you’ve been buying!
I also learned a related lesson that people who cite “unprecedented challenges or threats” are just ill-informed about history. This has been especially useful to me in putting things into context.
“No one has ever trampled on due process the way this administration does.” Let me introduce you to the statue of a guy in a wheelchair who knowingly and willingly ordered the roundup and incarceration of loyal, Japanese-American citizens at the onset of World War II.
“Trump ignores the Constitution and fires independent commissioners at will.” Same people were yawning when President Obama declared the Congress to be “in recess” (helpful hint: that’s not his job, nor an authority he has in Article II) and appointed commissioners to the National Labor Relations Board. His action was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the commissioners de-commissioned, and all the actions they ruled on voided. But hey, that’s a nit!
LBJ sent the FBI AND the CIA after Barry Goldwater in the ’64 election, not to mention after Senate staffers he didn’t like. Thomas Jefferson actually actively oversaw the treason case against Aaron Burr. FDR sicced J. Edgar Hoover on many political opponents, including some who criticized his wife, Eleanor! Don’t get me started on Richard Nixon, who really did have an Enemies List! It goes on and on, but of course there has never been weaponization like today, right?
What about intimidating opponents with threats, like a mob boss? You mean publicly cowing the Supreme Court with the threat of stacking until it passively approves the New Deal? It worked, so I guess it was morally acceptable, right?
Using the Federal Communications Commission to attack public media? FDR directed the FCC to deny licenses to any radio station with a viewpoint he didn’t like. He similarly directed his colleague, Senator Hugo Black, to investigate the tax and telegram records of reporters who didn’t support the New Deal.
You might have noticed many FDR references in the previous section. That’s not selective history. FDR just happens to be the last President to significantly expand the President’s powers, and to use/abuse those powers. Nixon tried, but generally failed. Funny how the same people who seem about to spontaneously combust over Trump conveniently forget the same actions when done by their hero.
You get the point, or you’re seething about “both-siderism” right now. But that’s not my point: I’m not defending Trump or MAGA. I’m putting the outrageous claims made today in a broader historical context. That context tells you (1) we’ve faced these challenges before, (2) they’re not unprecedented or unsolvable and (3) describing them as such with excessive rhetoric makes solving them harder, not easier. No where in this discussion do I suggest (1) there aren’t any challenges or problems or (2) Trump is right about everything (his favorite hat).
For example, we’ve seen a sustained growth in presidential power since the weakest point of the modern presidency after the Nixon resignation. Some of that was good. Weak presidential powers make for weak presidents, and that’s a problem in our system of government. But recent Presidents (note the plural) have begun to wield power as if there were no checks and balances. The Supreme Court can’t solve this on its own; Congress must re-assert its authority, of which it has a lot! But right now, partisanship in the legislature is preventing almost any legislation from getting passed.
Scoring public points has become more important than doing your job, or even addressing the larger issues. Right now, we’re amidst a government shutdown. Minority Leader Schumer pointed out last time, in voting to keep the government running, that shutting it down enlarges the President’s authority to do all kinds of (even crazy) things. Yes, President Trump encouraged a shutdown, as he believes that it frees up his hands. But now the Democrats in Congress are willing to go there (a place they used to call the height of irresponsibility) in order to make a point: not address the problem, nor even redress the balance of power. Just to make a meme. #Resistance.
I do have tremendous empathy for my liberal/progressive friends in this Trumpian era, but it’s empathy leavened by experience. Those of the left feel disoriented: how could this have happened? What kind of country elects a man like Trump, not only once, but twice (thrice by his counting)? How can anyone not see the danger to “our democracy” (sic)? What is wrong with the rest of you?
As Bruce said, “welcome to the party, pal!”
My friends have a sense of disillusionment, a feeling that the “arc of history” stopped bending their way, and that causes a deep sense of loss. To which I quote officer John McClane of the NYPD: “welcome to the party, pal!” I grew up in the 1960s, and from the time I was old enough (1968) to recognize a world outside the Catholic bubble of my family, neighborhood, church & school, it became clear to me the rest of the world not only didn’t agree with the world inside the bubble, it disliked it. At best, the dominant forces in society tolerated it, but only as long as it kept itself to the bubble, or agreed with the powers-that-be.
Think I’m exaggerating? If you ask, I’ll bore you with a litany of gripes. But the overall effect was that people of my persuasion (conservative Catholics) were on “the wrong side of history” and needed to either get out of the way, STFU, or just go away. So I know what it’s like to look around at the country and quietly think, “am I the only one who thinks this is insane?” I’ve been watching the Republic lurch from one insanity to another for almost sixty-five years. I never had the luxury of believing things would change toward my views; rather, I had the comfort of knowing we are pilgrims in a foreign land, journeying to a better place. I sense my liberal and progressive friends feel such a deep sense of loss because they now feel the way I’ve always felt, perhaps without the ameliorating belief in a just and loving hereafter. I can’t imagine what that would be like, but I think it explains the willingness to go to extremes in the here and now.
If nothing I’ve said at all convinces you, here’s one last attempt: the Dr. Phil question. When confronting some outrageous, self-sabotaging behavior, the good TV “doctor” likes to ask “how is that working for you?” I don’t find myself anticipating the Apocalypse. I watch what’s happening and adjust to the political or economic trends, not by setting myself on rhetorical fire, but by deciding what’s new, what’s different, what’s good or bad about it. I have faith in God, hope in His Mercy, and (I try) to love my fellow man . . . which includes, as I recall, my “enemies.” I searched and can find no “but Trump” exception in the Good Book.
It makes for a good life, I can attest. No, I don’t like everything that is going on, but when did the world–or the government–ever make that promise? Or you can place all your hope or hate on the man in the Oval. We all have choices to make.
Every once in a while, I see a comment about expats or just regular tourists engaging in the evil behavior of . . . over-tipping. Tipping by visitors (permanent or otherwise) is a place where cultures engage, with predictable controversy. Now for the record, I support large tips. I have history here. Long ago, my mother was a waitress at clubs like The Elks, and she earned only tips. Dad was a cop, and we were a lower middle-class family, basically one missed paycheck from poor. So those nights when my mom came home sad or even crying about a table of wealthy local businessmen leaving pocket change as a tip made an impression. We tip 20%. More if we like the service, or if it’s for breakfast (the work required of the staff is the same, but breakfast entrees are usually much cheaper). And we round up. I don’t tell other people how to tip, as I don’t have their experience, and they don’t have mine. I do call bull*bleep* about some of the complaints/justifications I hear about tipping.
One complaint I hear is that one shouldn’t over-tip because it raises prices. No one has yet explained to me what magic economic effect would cause this, beyond the fact the waiter has additional money to spend. If that were the case, if we don’t tip at all, will prices start dropping? There are studies which show tipping culture in general reduces prices, because the business owner has less cost (the diner is in effect replacing part of the cost of a salary). There is nothing to support the assertion over-tipping raises prices overall. Nada.
Maybe don’t over-tip because it makes the waitstaff expect higher tips, and they’ll provide some others with worse service if that person doesn’t share your over-tipping style? I am unsure why it is my responsibility to enable another diner’s tipping style. And are the servers at your favorite restaurant that petty? They don’t just do their job, short of a few examples where a really outrageous client gets “special (negative) treatment”?
Don’t over-tip because it disrespects local culture? Okay, time to come clean. I often hear this from people who railed on about embracing different cultures when they were back home, but now that the shoe is on the other foot, they’re saying the visitor has to adopt the local culture. As a visitor, it’s always a dilemma about how much local culture to adopt, to tolerate, or to reject. I wouldn’t overtip a waiter in France because it might offend them, thus defeating the intent of my trying to recognize their superior service. There I adopt the rounding up tradition for tipping. If I was visiting the Chinese countryside, I would not adopt the older locals’ habit of spitting; I would tolerate it, not making a big deal about it. And I won’t even speak of some local customs in other places that any decent human being would abhor. There is no hard-and-fast rule to one’s engagement with foreign cultures while traveling. Certainly as an expat one is more immersed in the culture and must be more aware. There are endless expat debates about paying mordita (bribes) as a part of local culture, versus working to change that unfortunate part of the culture.
To my mind, tipping is more of a personal choice than a cultural concern. In that regard, arguing about tipping is like arguing about flavors: “I like chocolate better than vanilla”. . . “No way, vanilla is way better than chocolate!” I don’t think less of those who tip less, unless of course they offer a poor excuse for doing so. I don’t care how others feel about my tipping, unless someone tries to tell me why I’m wrong.
