Thursday, October 26, 2017
The Black Prince
(T)he Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders. . . .
—Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
It’s nice to have him back from Abu Dhabi, the country to which he moved in 2010. He moved there, according to one of his colleagues, because, he “Needed a break from America.” Some of you may be wondering why he needed a break. It all had to do with the bad publicity his company, Blackwater Worldwide, was receiving as a result of activities the company and its employees were engaged in while working in Iraq.
Erik Prince founded Blackwater in 1997. It was a security firm that helped guard government facilities and U.S. personnel in assorted venues overseas, including Iraq. It did not have an unblemished record. In fact, a congressional report found that Blackwater personnel were involved in almost 200 shootings in Iraq between 2005 and 2007. The one with the longest lasting impact (other than on the families who were shot by Blackwater employees), occurred on September 16, 2007. In that shooting, Blackwater guards protecting a U.S. convoy killed 17 unarmed Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. As a consequence, four of the Blackwater employees were criminally charged in the United States and, in 2014, convicted in federal court for their role in the massacre. (In October 2017, sentences imposed on three of the men were thrown out by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and remanded to the trial court for resentencing. The conviction of the fourth defendant was thrown out and a new trial ordered.) In late December 2010, Erik sold the company, then known as Xe Services LLC.
Notwithstanding its sale, Blackwater’s travails continued to follow Erik. They were not limited to the 200 shootings that took place during Blackwater’s tenure in Iraq. In 2010 Xe Services LLC, settled State Department allegations of hundreds of export and other violations committed by Blackwater, and paid fines of $42 million. The offenses with which it was charged included “illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan, making unauthorized proposals to train troops in South Sudan, and providing sniper training for Taiwanese police officers.” Those transgressions all occurred while Erik was running the company. Erik was reportedly unhappy with the bad publicity his company had received as a result of Blackwater’s activities. And that is why, in September 2010, he moved to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, while retaining his residence in Middleburg, Virginia.
Although he moved to Abu Dhabi, Erik has remained actively, if not publicly, involved in politics. During the last election he reportedly became became a close advisor to @thereal Donald Trump. In January, following the election of @the real Donald Trump, Erik participated in a meeting in the Seychelles that had been arranged by the United Arab Emirates. According to a report in the Washington Post, Erik had become an unofficial advisor to the incoming Trump administration, and the meeting in the Seychelles was an effort to establish a back-channel communication link between Moscow and the Trump administration. When asked about the Post report, Erik said the meeting with the Russians was a meeting with “some kind of fund manager we’ve done business with.” Whatever.
In early October 2017, the peripatetic Erik, accompanied by his family, made a visit to Wyoming. Tired of being a resident of only Abu Dhabi and Virginia, he went to Wyoming in order to explore the possibility of establishing residency there so that he could run for the U.S. Senate in that state. (Erik has already said he will not run from his home state of Michigan, but might favor Wyoming with a candidacy even though it already has a Republican senator.)
In order to run for the United States Senate from Wyoming, the only requirement, under Wyoming’s Ballot Access Laws, is that the person running be a registered elector in the state. To become a registered elector in Wyoming you must be a resident of the state. Mr. Prince already owns a house in Wyoming, so he can simply register to vote and will then be qualified to run for the U.S. Senate.
In explaining why he would consider running in Wyoming he said: “I identify with Wyoming. I love the state of Wyoming. I love the people. It’s a fantastic state-people that live in rugged conditions and who make their living doing things in the outdoors. I can relate to ranchers and roughnecks and professional game guides and farmers and homemakers.” That pretty well includes everyone in the state and those are not the only people he relates to. He also relates to Steve Bannon, formerly of Breitbart News and more recently the White House, and more recently still, (again), Breitbart News. Mr. Bannon has encouraged him to run. His election would mean two Prince siblings are in federal government. His sister, Betsy DeVos, is the Secretary of Education. According to recent polls, she is the most unpopular member of @thereal Donald Trump’s cabinet. The prospect of Erik in the United States Senate is exciting not only to Mr. Bannon. Erik’s election to the senate combined with his sister’s position in the cabinet, would prove you can’t get too much of a good thing.
Thursday, October 12, 2017
Tweetiquette
Evil communications corrupt good manners.The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians
It is time for a brief lesson on the art of reporting about tweeting, and how tweeting is affecting the identities of those in the Tweetisphere. Since the tweet is being used almost exclusively by someone who identifies himself as @realDonaldTrump (to distinguish himself from someone who, inexplicably, might seek to establish an on-line presence as @unrealDonaldTtrump or @fakeDonaldTrump), the question assumes an importance it did not have until @realDonaldTrump assumed the office he now enjoys. Although not privy to the complete etiquette of tweeting or what might be called “Tweetiquette”, two things have become obvious over the last few months.
The first is that the tweet does not stand alone when being reported by the print media. It has become accepted that when reporting on a presidential or, indeed, any other tweet, the text of the tweet is reported verbatim in the context of the paragraph in which it is being reported. That paragraph is then immediately followed by an indented, and sometimes smaller fonted, repeat of the tweet. Thus, for example, a recent edition of the Washington publication, The Hill, contains a report by Jacqueline Thomsen about DJT’s description of his brilliant success in helping Puerto Rico recover from the devastation of Hurricane Irma. In her report she quotes the Trumpian Tweet saying: “Nobody could have done what I’ve done for #PuertoRico with so little appreciation. So much work!” That paragraph is immediately followed by the tweet itself. It includes the Trump face, followed by the name Donald J. Trump, followed by the tweet’s text. The same protocol was followed in an article describing the same tweet that appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
Another example of quoting and then repeating the tweet, is found in a CNN description of the dispute between @realDonaldTrump and Senator Bob Corker. The CNN report quoted verbatim the @realDonaldTrump tweet saying; “Senator Bob Corker ‘begged’ me to endorse him for re-election in Tennessee. I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out . . . .Didn’t have the guts to run.” That report is then followed by the transcription of the three tweets that quote comprises, all from the @realDonaldTrump. The CNN report then continues with another verbatim quote of @realDonaldTrump in which tweet a description of Senator Corker’s efforts on the “Iran Deal” are described followed by the appearance of the tweets themselves. The foregoing practice seems to be universally accepted in the publishing world and, accordingly, one has come to treat it as tweet protocol. Although this is nothing more than speculation, it may have become the custom in the publishing world because so many of the tweets that emanate from @realDonaldTrump are so preposterous, inane, or suggest an unhinged creator that, were the tweets simply reported verbatim without the benefit of publishing the tweets themselves, they would not be credible, and people would accuse the publication of publishing “fake news.” Publishing the tweet itself eliminates any possibility that the tweets were created by the entity reporting the tweets.
Another feature of the tweet is that its handle, as it were, has become a part of the identity of the place being referred to, or the human with whom the tweet is associated. Thus, in DJT’s tweet about Puerto Rico, he doesn’t simply refer to “Puerto Rico” but #PuertoRico. This enables the reader to click on that word and be taken to a source that tells the reader more about Puerto Rico. More difficult to understand is the reason for the use of @ when referring to people such as the president or the vice president.
When Vice President Pence walked out of a football game in Indiana, without waiting to see if his favorite team won or lost, (the walkout reportedly taking place according to a pre-arranged scheme between DJT and Mr. Pence), DJT tweeted that he: “asked @VP Pence to leave stadium if any players kneeled. I am proud of him and @SecondLady Karen.” Playing along with those ways of describing each other and, in this case, Mr. Pence’s wife, after @VP Pence left the stadium he explained his departure. He said: “I left today’s Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem.” (It is unclear why the “Flag” was capitalized and “soldiers” was not.) By referring to @POTUS, @VP Pence assumed that tweet readers would know he was referring to @realDonaldTrump.
This piece is not meant to be the final word on the practice of attaching “@” or” #” when naming people or places. By alerting readers to these practices, however, it may make the readers’ journeys through the tweetisphere more enjoyable and give them things to look for. And on the bright side, the advent of these practices are among the least harmful things that have been introduced into our world since @realDonaldTrump became what he has become.
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Clark Kent aka Scott Pruitt
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s . . . .
The mystery is solved. The mystery is why does Scott Pruitt think he needs a $24,750 phone booth installed in his office at the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s because . . . . But I get ahead of myself.
Scott Pruitt is the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The phone booth that is being built for him in his private office, at a reported cost of $24,750, is being built by Acoustical Solutions. That company builds a variety of sound-dampening and privacy products. The booths that the company builds are used for hearing tests where complete soundproofing is important. A sales consultant for Acoustical Solutions, however, said that Mr. Pruitt wanted: “a secure phone booth that couldn’t be breached from a data point of view or from someone standing outside eavesdropping.” The fact that Mr. Pruitt says he needs a sound proof phone booth in order to have private conversations when in his office with the door closed, comes as something of a surprise to those who have entered federal buildings in Washington. Those people know that it is not possible to walk into a federal building and stroll from office to office at leisure, entering private spaces without vetting of any sort. Indeed, to visit EPA headquarters it is necessary to present forms of identification that are prescribed by the agency.
An obvious question presented by construction of a telephone booth in Mr. Pruitt’s office is, why hasn’t one been installed in DJT’s office. Pictures of the Oval Office do not show the presence of a sound proof phone booth. The reason is that DJT does most of his important communicating by means of the tweet, and a tweet is, by its very nature, only effective when it is not distributed quietly. Therefore, a secure phone booth is not needed in the Oval Office. What we have now figured out, however, is that privacy is not why Mr. Pruitt wants a sound proof phone booth. He wants it because he thinks it will enable him, in the future, to avoid the criticism he has received from the press for taking charter flights at taxpayer expense instead of flying commercially. His affinity for charter flights is shared by a number of the swamp like creatures who inhabit DJT’s cabinet. They, too, prefer the elegance of the charter flight to the plebian mode of travel favored by the average citizen.
According to one report, during his first months in office, Mr. Pruitt’s non-commercial airplane travel cost taxpayers more than $58,000. He went home to Oklahoma at least ten times, often flying there at taxpayer expense. On a trip to visit a mine in Colorado with the governor of that state and other officials, Mr. Pruitt declined the offer of a free ride on the governor’s plane, preferring to charter a plane for himself and his staff. And here is why Scott Pruitt, a man who lives in the past and denies climate science, needs a phone booth in his office.
Phone booths, as older readers recall, were formerly found all over the country. The only way of making a phone call, if away from home, was to enter one of those booths, deposit the money in the appropriate slot, dial the number, and proceed to talk with the party on the other end of the line. For one famous comic book character from many years ago, however, it served an even more important purpose. The comic book character was Clark Kent, a man of extraordinary talents, whose day job was as a journalist for the Daily Planet a newspaper in the town of Metropolis. Clark, however, had another persona that he used for the benefit of humanity. When the need for his services arose, he entered a phone booth and within moments emerged from the phone booth as Superman, a man of extraordinary strength who was able to fly all over the world without the aid of an airplane to rescue those in peril. Mr. Pruitt devotes himself in his new day job to help the industries that he, as the EPA’s administrator, regulates. Mr. Pruitt does not believe that climate change is real. He is dismissive of scientists who think otherwise. He has replaced dozens of members serving on EPA’s scientific advisory boards. And he wants to put an end to the criticism he has received for using chartered airplanes to visit and dine with the executives of energy companies he regulates and has befriended. Recalling Clark Kent, Mr. Pruitt thinks that by installing the phone booth in his office, he will be able to follow in Clark’s footsteps and fly as Superman did, thus saving the taxpayer considerably more money than the cost of the phone booth. The odds are that he will be sorely disappointed when he comes out of the phone booth. He will still be Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The rest of us will also be disappointed because we know that the phone booth is nothing more than another example of Mr. Pruitt’s ability to find ways to have the taxpayer fund his foibles.