MAY 4, 2018, KEIZERTIMES, 2AGE A5
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
White House doctor down
By DEBRA J. SAUNDERS
When he ran for president, candi-
date Donald Trump promised to hire
“the best people” and said he would
look at potential cabinet members’
“track record, great confi dence, love
of what they’re doing, how they get
along with people, references.”
In many ways, Dr. Ronny Jackson,
Trump’s choice to be the
next secretary of Veterans
Affairs, fi t Trump’s list—
until the doctor pulled his
name from consideration
last week after enduring
a torrent of ugly if un-
substantiated allegations,
which he denied.
Track record, love of the work
and references? The rear admiral had
worked his way up from serving as a
combat trauma doctor to the White
House physician. He clearly loved
his work, and could boast of glowing
praise from President Barack Obama,
who wrote, “Ronny does a great job
—genuine enthusiasm, poised under
pressure, incredible work ethic and
follow-through. Ronny continues to
inspire confi dence with the care he
provides to me, my family and my
team. Continue to promote ahead of
peers.”
Missing from Trump’s require-
ments was an important distinction —
that his picks be qualifi ed. That ought
to top the list for a post that oversees
the federal government’s second larg-
est department—smaller only than the
Department of Defense—with more
than 360,000 employees.
In 2016, Trump didn’t say he’d pick
people just because he likes them—
but that seems to be the big motivator
here.
Trump liked Jackson. He especially
liked the way Jackson had the White
House press corps stammering and
too quick to reject good news during
a January press conference about the
president’s good health.
Trump recognized Jackson’s lack of
experience during a press conference
with French President Emmanuel
Macron on Tuesday. “Now, I know
there’s an experience problem because
of lack of experience,” he said.
But Thursday on Fox and Friends,
Trump suggested no one is qualifi ed
for the job. “You could take the head
of the biggest hospital corporation of
the world, and it’s peanuts compared
to the VA,” Trump said by phone. “So
nobody has experience. You know it’s
a big monster.”
Of course, Jackson withdrew from
consideration, not because he lacked
CEO-type experience, but because of
damaging stories about his handing
out sleeping pills on foreign trips, al-
leged drunkenness on the job, includ-
ing a car wreck, and a toxic manage-
ment style.
Jackson denied the allegations as
“completely false and fabricated. If
they had any merit, I would not have
been selected, promoted and entrust-
ed to serve in such a sensitive and
important role as physician to three
presidents over the past 12 years.”
Trump has argued that there was a
campaign to smear Jackson, and there
is reason to believe the doctor had en-
emies.
A 2012 personnel assessment
documented an intra-offi ce rivalry
between Jackson, then head of the
White House Military Offi ce, and the
then-White House physician. News
reports cited unprofessional
behavior between the two
offi cers and low morale—
overall morale was rated as
2 on a scale of 1-10.
A year later, after cor-
rective actions that sup-
ported Jackson, the inspec-
tor general found that staff
rated the unit considerably higher.
The White House suggested the tox-
ic work environment was all on the
other guy.
The same 2013 report also noted
the perception among staff that Jack-
son “had blind ambitions to be the
next physician to the president” and
his actions were “purely politically
driven for his self-advancement.”
Critics who believed Jackson had
overstated Trump’s health in January
just found another talking point.
Ditto those who believe Trump
chose Jackson to head the VA because
of the glowing health report delivered,
as Brookings Institution senior fellow
Kathryn Dunn Tenpas noted, with
Trumpian “hyperbole.”
On a human level, the episode left
a stain on the 23-year career of a one-
time combat physician. “You can’t
blame the man the way he was get-
ting beat up by anonymous sources
and innuendo,” said Joe Davis, com-
munications director for the Veterans
of Foreign Wars.
Jackson’s personnel assessments ad-
dress the toxic work environment is-
sue, but charges that he mixed work
with alcohol and was loose with con-
trolled substances need more explana-
tion from the White House. If they are
false, the White House should docu-
ment these reports as irresponsible.
The White House should respond,
if not for Jackson, then as an act of
self-protection. Jackson’s example
serves as a warning to highly qualifi ed
people that Trump’s opposition will
go to great lengths to destroy them.
Ergo, Tenpas argued, Trump cannot
pick people mainly because he likes
them and they passed an FBI check.
He has to be more careful. He should
fi nd a VA head like his Supreme Court
nominee Neil Gorsuch, she said, who
was “fl awless” in terms of his creden-
tials.
Hours after Jackson’s announce-
ment, the Senate confi rmed Mike
Pompeo as secretary of state. Pompeo
was a highly qualifi ed nominee of the
Gorsuch mold, and still the White
House had to exert muscle to wrangle
Republican votes to push him over
the hurdle.
Note to the White House: Getting
nominees through the Senate is not
going to get easier, so up your game.
debra
j.
saunders
(Creators Syndicate)
The steep price of the DC circus
By E.J. DIONNE JR.
One of the many costs of the
Trump era is the dumbing down of
our political discourse. The incoher-
ent spoken and tweeted outpourings
from President Trump and the daily
outrages of his adminis-
tration leave little time
for serious debate about
policy or meaningful
dialogue about our larger
purposes.
In a normal environ-
ment, the Republican
Congress’ assault on
food-stamp
recipients,
the administration’s waivers allowing
states to erode Medicaid coverage, and
Housing and Urban Development
Secretary Ben Carson’s proposed rent
increases for some of the country’s
poorest people would be front and
center in the news.
But poor people lack the media
cache of Stormy Daniels, Michael
Cohen or a president who rants un-
controllably over the telephone to his
favorite Fox News show.
News outlets are entirely justifi ed
in lavishing coverage on the sensa-
tional and the personal, since devel-
opments in these areas are a part of
a bigger story that could undermine
the Trump presidency all together.
Nonetheless, the circus that Trump
has brought to town is nearly as much
of a threat to a well-ordered political
system as is Trump himself.
Nothing is signifi cant for long, ev-
erything is episodic, and old scandals
are regularly knocked out of the head-
lines by new ones. It’s a truly novel ap-
proach to damage control.
And governing? It seems almost
beside the point. Thus does the un-
raveling of regulatory protections for
workers, the environment and the us-
ers of fi nancial services rush forward
with little notice.
This is where the Trumpian circus
benefi ts the Trumpian project. If there
are too many scandals for any one of
them to seize our attention for long,
all of them taken together allow what
are potentially very unpopular policies
to take root without much
scrutiny.
Yes, good journalists are
on top of what’s happen-
ing. But their stories usually
get buried beneath reports
about the latest presidential
statement contradicting an
earlier presidential statement.
Also consider this: Budget
Director Mick Mulvaney last week
made a brash admission about his time
in Congress. “If you were a lobbyist
who never gave us money,” he said to
an audience of banking executives, “I
didn’t talk to you.”
In a more innocent age, this con-
fession would have provoked sustained
indignation over how our political
money system fundamentally corrupts
our politics. (And imagine if Hillary
Clinton had said such a thing.) But
Mulvaney’s words just seemed to slide
by.
Mulvaney should write thank-you
notes to Trump, Cohen and Daniels.
Also to Environmental Protection
Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt,
who had to justify his unjustifi able
uses of public money before Con-
gress, and Ronny Jackson, who with-
drew from consideration to lead the
Department of Veterans Affairs after
allegations (which he denies) related
to, among other things, his improperly
dispensing drugs and his own use of
alcohol.
But if the severity of every abuse is
relativized, something less tangible but
at least as important is lost as well. We
are ignoring the imperative of shoring
up the philosophical underpinnings of
liberal democracy.
guest
opinion
Intellectual confusion and ambiva-
lence now haunt the West. Older and
once vital systems of thought -- in
Europe, Christian democracy and so-
cial democracy; in the United States,
New Dealism and free market conser-
vatism -- have an ever-weaker hold on
the popular imagination.
This vacuum is fi lled by strange
concepts that hark back to the irra-
tionalism of the 1930s. They include
what to supporters of liberal democ-
racy are oxymoronic ideas such as “il-
liberal democracy” or “authoritarian
democracy.”
Former Secretary of State Mad-
eleine Albright has the intellectual
courage to raise the specter that lurks
behind these terms in her new book,
“Fascism: A Warning.” She notes that
fascism arose at “a time of intellectual
liveliness and resurgent nationalism
coupled with widespread disappoint-
ment at the failure of representative
parliaments to keep pace with a tech-
nology-driven Industrial Revolution.”
In the wake of World War I and
the Great Depression, she adds, “the
promises inherent in the Enlighten-
ment and the French and American
Revolutions had become hollow.”
Albright is not a catastrophist (and
neither am I). But she doesn’t mind
being called an alarmist. She notes
“that for freedom to survive, it must
be defended, and that if lies are to stop,
they must be exposed.” We can’t just
“close our eyes and wait for the worst
to pass.”
Yet at a moment when we need
politics to be thoughtful and engag-
ing, we have a government whose
profound swampiness only further
deepens public doubts about democ-
racy and encourages us to view public
life as mere spectacle. It’s a very bad
time to be distracted by a circus.
(Washington 2ost Writers Group)
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Two American fi ction writers and
movie producers who had a positive
infl uence on my formative years were
Stanly Kubrick and Gene Roddenber-
ry. They both contributed expansively
to the science fi ction fi lm genre that
delighted and expanded my interests
as a youth in outer space and its explo-
ration. Incidentally, both were born in
the 1920s and died in the 1990s while
both inspired 20th cen-
tury efforts at expanding
human knowledge beyond
the Earth-bound as well as
inventions that have im-
proved our human lives
here.
Star Trek watchers will
remember the mind-
bending idea of a trans-
porter beaming people
from ground to spaceship Enterprise
danger levels surpassed the ability of
the crew to cope with them. “Beam us
up, Scotty!” is not yet a reality although
we humans have added to our reper-
toire of abilities to go from ground to
airborne. Roddenberry’s greatest con-
tribution to modern times, however,
may be argued the reforms in social
progress he displayed in Star Trek epi-
sodes. For just two examples, he had
women serving in command roles on
the Enterprise and he blended sev-
eral races on the bridge to steer the
spaceship through adventures in other
worlds and galaxies during the 1960s.
It has been exactly 50 years since
2001: A Space Odyssey was released
to the world. Director Stanley Ku-
brick provided in visual form a vast
array of technologies we enjoy today.
These would include the iPad-like
video screens, Skype-like phone ser-
vice, Artifi cial Intelligence (AI) similar
to HAL, the lunar lander, the space
shuttle, and the space station. 2001
was breath-taking in sci-fi
symphony format, pushing
the limits of narrative and
special effects toward what
some considered a medi-
tation on technology and
humanity. It was the “ulti-
mate trip” for members of
America’s counter culture
youth as well as those like
me who enjoyed it as the
best science fi ction experience to that
time.
The April issue of Smithsonian
magazine displays a photo of the room
that’s a precise replica of the one in
2001 where the fi lm’s hero, Dave
Bowman, enters as an astronaut and
departs, reborn as a star child. It’s just
one of the scenes from the movie that
left the viewer awe-struck; that one as
an attempt to explain the question so
often asked by humankind: “Where
did we come from and how did we
get here?”
Human ingenuity had been shap-
ing a new technological future be-
gene
h.
mcintyre
fore the Kubrick and Roddenberry
productions; yet, the work of these
two men most certainly served to
speed thing up: their efforts have in-
spired and accelerated man’s advances.
Other transformative events such as
immunotherapy on the verge of kill-
ing cancer by unleashing the human
body’s natural defenses and AI, mov-
ing to a place where machines may
outpace thinking humans, are well
underway. Then, too, renewable ener-
gy stands on the precipice of saving us
from exhausting the resources through
conservation and re-application so the
planet can be saved for the human
race and all creatures great and small.
A personal interest in outer space
was inspired by an event in the 1950s.
A grassy knoll near my home as a
child was a place where cardboard
sleds could be used to enjoy a down-
hill ride. On one occasion, while sit-
ting atop the knoll with half a dozen
fellow sledding enthusiasts, our atten-
tion was suddenly focused on a round,
saucer-shaped, shiny object with a
small dome hovering motionless some
100 yards away. It hovered in place for
a minute or two and then sped off at
a speed so rapid, it was there one mo-
ment and gone the next. Didn’t see
any little green men but later learned
from testimonials and news accounts
that other people had also seen what
we saw and called them “fl ying sau-
cers.”
(Gene H. McIntyre lives in Keizer.)