Another Boomer autobiography

 At the library just two days ago, I picked up the autobiography of one-time Secretary of Labor (under Bill Clinton) Robert Reich, Coming Up Short.  A rare genetic disorder stopped Reich's growth when he was just 4' 11" inches tall--short enough to keep him out of the draft--and he argues that his stature shaped his world view from a very early age.  He was frequently bullied in elementary school, at one time by older kids who wouldn't let him use the Boys' Room, and he has sided with the "bullied against the bullies" ever since.  Reich is just a year older than I am, and he also spent most of his adult life as an academic, most recently at UC Berkeley, where he just retired.  His parents were middle-class Jews--his father ran a series of women's clothing stores in the outer suburbs of New York.  His family did well enough to summer in the Adirondacks, and one summer he met a somewhat older boy named Mickey Schwerner, who treated him kindly.  Ten years later Schwerner went to Mississippi to help run a voter registration drive and became a particular target of the KKK, that lynched him and two other volunteers with the cooperation of the local sheriff.  That impacted Reich deeply.  The book is oddly erratic in its coverage of Reich's life.  It includes nothing at all about his high school years, or about how he wound up at Dartmouth--the most isolated of the Ivy League schools--in the fall of 1964.  It is at that moment that his story merges with the broader story of the intellectual elite of my generation, like the autobiography of his exact contemporary Michael Ansara, a leader of the Harvard SDS, The Hard Work of Hope, which I read just a few months ago.

Reich was evidently something of  a go-getter from an early age, and he rapidly became a leader of the student government at Dartmouth.  As such, he tells us, he sat on a disciplinary board that had to punish students (all men, of course), for serious infractions.  One of those, I was amazed to learn, was "fornication," that is, having sex with an unmarried woman.  Having a woman in one's room outside of particular hours was a disciplinary offense at Harvard in those days, but I never heard of a specific punishment for "going all the way."  At Dartmouth, Reich claims, fornication was punished by expulsion--whether temporary or permanent is not clear.  Meanwhile, as class president, he arranged for more busloads of students from surrounding women's colleges to show up on weekends.  I can't imagine how the Dartmouth administration imagined how those weekends would turn out, just as I was shocked in the late 1970s to find that sexual intercourse was an expulsable offense at Exeter Academy, which had gone co-ed just a few years earlier, apparently without coming to grips with the inevitable consequences of that step.

Meanwhile, Reich joined the great leftist movement of the mid-1960s that began at Berkeley in the fall of his freshman year. His parents were good New Deal liberal Democrats and his father was a small businessman, but by his own account, he, like Drew Faust, fell for Tom Hayden's Port Huron statement hook, line and sinker.  That dry, overlong diatribe against an oppressive American state--written in 1962--seems to have convinced him that the US needed some kind of revolution.  Yet he pursued it rather moderately.  He doesn't seem to have joined SDS himself, and at Dartmouth--no hotbed of protest--he simply founded an "experimental college" where students and some faculty could discuss advanced ideas.  He also met a slightly younger leader of the student movement at Wellesley College, a certain Hillary Rodham, with whom he had one date. In the summer of 1967 he landed a job as an intern in the Washington office of Senator Robert Kennedy--who called him into his office and chewed him out after Reich affixed his signature to a petition opposing the Vietnam War, which RFK had yet to condemn publicly. He joined Eugene McCarthy's primary campaign in the midst of his senior year and then worked for him in various states across the country.  Meanwhile, he was selected for a Rhodes Scholarship--a process he tells us nothing about--and on the boat to England he met a fellow Rhodes from Arkansas and Georgetown, Bill Clinton, the start of an association that changed his life.  Reich does seem to be a man with a knack for making the right connection at the right time.

I am still scratching my head that Reich, who spends the last part of his book talking about his love for college teacher, doesn't spend a single sentence on his academic experience at Oxford, even to tell us what subject he studied.  The chapter about Oxford deals with the feelings of several Oxford students, including himself, Bill Clinton, and another classmate who eventually committed suicide, about how to deal with the military draft.  He quotes the entire letter that Clinton wrote to the head of an ROTC program at the University of Arkansas that he had signed up for, only to pull out of it in early 1970 after drawing a fortunately high draft number in the lottery of December 1969.  That letter caused quite a stir when it was made public in the 1992 presidential campaign, and the young man who wrote it was obviously determined to stay out of Vietnam, avoid offending any important constituency, and get on with his real plans as soon as possible, all in that particular order.  Reich, as he knew he would, failed his draft physical in Oakland in the summer of 1969 after his first year at Oxford because he fell below the height limit.  He  unblushingly describes how terrified he was when the sergeant who was examining him gave the impression that he might not be quite short enough to be exempt after all.  This leads me to one of my strongest reactions to his book.

A few pages later, Reich describes how he happened to be in New York City, just returned from Oxford, in May 1970, when Kent State took place, and how he stumbled into the Hard Hat Riot which I blogged about at length last week.  He apparently has read the book upon which the PBS documentary about that event was based, a book which I am still waiting for the local library consortium to disgorge. Reich makes a number of debatable claims in the book, and in one, he says that Nixon aide Charles Colson actually brought that riot about in a conversation with New York union leaders on May 5, several days before it happened.  The documentary made no such claim, documenting Colson's interest in the riot only after it happened, and I shall report what the book said after it arrives.  But my real quarrel with him lies elsewhere.

As Coming Up Short moves into the late 20th century and then the 21st, it focuses more and more on the changing ethos of American life, and the increasing supremacy of the idea of every person for him- or herself over any idea of the common good.  He mentions, of course, that the hard hats resented the college protesters' deferments from the war that they and some of their sons had to fight, but it doesn't seem ever to have occurred to him that his friends' attitude towards the war--that the government had no right to make them fight in it because it was wrong--was itself a spectacular refusal to admit that a common obligation to serve the country might trump one's own personal views.  Nor has it ever occurred to him, as it has to me--thanks to my service in the Army Reserve from 1970 to 1976--that the end the draft which our generation successfully demanded eliminated a critical arena in which the working class and educated classes had worked together and gotten to know each other, while also teaching a lot of less educated young men of wildly differing backgrounds the basic skills they needed to get along in the modern world.  The willingness of young men to serve went along with all the other public-spirited aspects of mid-century America, and we began losing them all at once, thanks in part to the pressure of the Boom generation.

Reich went from Oxford to Yale Law school, where Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, and Clarence Thomas were fellow students.  He takes credit for introducing the first two, although they clearly were very likely to meet in any case.  One of the funniest passages in the book--and there are many--describes the classroom styles of these four now-famous students. Hillary, he says, was always perfectly prepared and spoke in clear, knowledgeable paragraphs.  Reich says that he himself spoke adequately, but that was all.  He does not remember Thomas opening his mouth--just as I don't remember Al Gore opening his in the first-year economics section we shared--and Bill Clinton never bothered to show up in class at all.    Then Reich got a federal clerkship, and moved from there into the office of then-Solicitor General Robert Bork.  He went to work a the Federal Trade Commission under Jimmy Carter, and went from there to the Kennedy School at Harvard. In 1992, to his amazement, his old friend Bill Clinton became president, and he became Secretary of Labor in the first Clinton administration.

His frank account of the Clinton years is perhaps the most revealing and depressing part of the book.  Reich, like me, had remained a New Dealer, although he doesn't describe himself that way.  He wanted to reverse the growing trend towards inequality and invest more in the future of  US workers.  He makes it sound as if he realized that NAFTA, which Clinton had ratified, was probably a mistake and a setback for American workers, but he loyally lobbied for its passage at the time.  He wanted higher taxes for the wealthy.  On this point he is not entirely fair: both George H. W. Bush and then Clinton did increase taxes on the wealthy and other Americans, and both took big political hits for doing do. But Clinton, Reich says, was terrified of running afoul of Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, making him a fiscal conservative. That was how the budget balanced towards the end of Clinton's second term.  But even then, Clinton preferred to spend the surplus on reducing the national debt, and perhaps on protecting Social Security, rather than putting it into social programs. Reich lost many arguments on these issues with Clinton's Treasury Secretaries Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers. Rubin and Summers pushed ruthlessly and successfully to deregulate the financial sector, including the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that had separated commercial and investment banking, and turning Wall Street loose, with terrible consequences a decade later.  Reich writes effectively about the extent to which finance, rather than industry, has come to dominate our economy.  Reich had been away too long to go back to Harvard in 1997, but he landed a job at Brandeis and eventually moved to UC Berkeley, where he spent 20 years before retiring.  He is a prolific writer.  

Reich briefly narrates the events of the Obama Administration as well, in which new Fed chair William Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and White House adviser Larry Summers went all in on the idea that bailing out Wall Street was the only way to get out of the financial crisis that Wall Street had created.  Obama survived the slow economic recovery in 2012, but Hillary Clinton did not in 2016.  Reich treats the emerging Republican Party with contempt, as most of us do, and he understands that Democratic failure on the economic front did a lot to bring Trump into the White House.  He also however describes himself as a fighter for social justice and pursues a policy of no enemies on the Left, often echoing the rhetoric of feminism, antiracism, and the LBGTQ+ movement.  He never acknowledges that the majority of Americans do not agree with the most extreme aspects of those ideologies.

Reich is an engaging figure, and that also emerged from the documentary he made recently about the end of his teaching career, The Last Class.  I agreed with the substance of most of his policy positions and I wish he could have had more influence.  I think, though, that he hasn't come to terms with the negative aspects of the late sixties revolt in which he participated, and he shares the conviction of so many of our contemporaries that his views on key subjects should have prevailed simply because they were so right. I think I have learned better.

The Hard Hat Riot and the Great Turning Point of the late 1960s

 Several months ago, The American Experience on PBS screened a superb documentary, The Hard Hat Riot.  It explored a unique episode in the Vietnam war protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  After major revolts and building occupations at Berkeley (beginning in 1964), Cornell and Columbia (1968), and Harvard (1969), campuses around the country erupted in May 1970 after President Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia and the deaths of four students at Kent State at the hands of the National Guard followed.  More than fifty campuses around the country were shut down by protests and never reopened until the fall, and hundreds of others--including Harvard and other Ivy League institutions--canceled exams and encouraged students to use their free time to mount more antiwar protests.  Just days later, on May 8, a huge antiwar demonstration in downtown Manhattan was interrupted by hundreds of construction workers, who began beating the demonstrators.  The confrontation moved to the mayor's office at City Hall Park, where Mayor John Lindsay had ordered the lowering of the flag to half staff in honor of one of the dead Kent State students, who came from Long Island, and the angry construction workers first forced city officials to raise the flag, and then set upon students at Pace University, across the street.  The documentary includes only a few talking heads, led by David Paul Kuhn, who wrote the book upon which it is based.  It draws overwhelmingly from interviews with participants on both sides, and with a couple of Nixon White House aides.  It tells the story of a cultural and political split that continues to this day, and it occurred to me that it is a brilliant representation of the great cultural turning point that my generation was leading the nation into at that time, with fateful consequences.

The great changes then underway, we can now see, overturned a cultural and political order that had grown up in the United States and most of the developed world in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.  It was an era of very strong institutions, led by national governments, that commanded the loyalty of the great mass of the population and demanded, and received, enormous sacrifices from them.  The United States in particular had abandoned a more libertarian tradition to mobilize millions of young men in three stages:  for the First World War in 1917-18, for the Second World War in 1941-5, and then for the Cold War, beginning in 1950 and continuing, really, all the way to 1970.  The military draft had ended in 1919 and again (effectively) in 1946, but it had continued for 20 years in 1970, now feeding the Vietnam war.  The great mobilizations also led to unprecedented economic demands upon  the population, including marginal tax rates that topped out at 91 percent by 1945 and had dropped only to 70 percent in 1965.  Meanwhile, the New Deal had transformed the role of the federal government, making it the employer of last resort, tightly regulating financial institutions, establishing the rights of organized labor, and passing Social Security.  That in turn had led to the passage of Medicare in 1965.  A significant minority of Americans had always opposed this expansion of the federal government's role, but the election of 1964, in which New Dealer Lyndon Johnson overwhelmingly defeated unreconstructed libertarian Barry Goldwater with more than 60 percent of the popular vote, showed the extent of the national consensus.

The first two-thirds of the century were also an era of strict social mores.  The United States before 1968 was not, as many people now seem to believe, a real-life version of The Handmaid's Tale, but gender roles were quite strict in all economic classes of society.  Divorce was quite stigmatized and was barely legal in several states, and homosexuality was prohibited by law.  The marriage rate for US adults had peaked at 72 percent in 1960 (it is now 50 percent.) Crime rates were relatively low.  Meanwhile, the population was becoming better educated at an extraordinary rate.  While only 30 percent of 18-22 year-olds attended college in 1950, 50 percent of them were in college in 1969--and there were far more young people in that age group in 1969 than in 1950 because of the baby boom. 

The United States seemed to be progressing on many fronts in 1965, most notably with respect to civil rights for black Americans, now protected for the first time by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  But Lyndon Johnson's Administration triggered a great turning point in American life in the middle of that year when it embarked upon a long large-scale conflict in Vietnam.  That conflict gave a substantial part of the new Boom generation, born from 1943 through 1960, the target for a revolt that became a more general rebellion against fundamental aspects of the mid-century era.

As The Hard Hat Riot shows, one must not overgeneralize about the Boom generation.  The events of the 1960s looked very different to different social classes, different races, and ultimately to the two different sexes, and in 1972, the first election in which very large numbers of Boomers could vote, their vote divided evenly between Nixon and McGovern.  Boomers were the most pro-Trump generation in 2016 and 2020, losing that honor to Gen Xers in 2024, and Trump himself will obviously go down in history as the most important political leader that my generation has produced.  Yet the minority of Boomers in elite institutions who turned the academic and political world upside down in the late 1960s had, I believe, an extraordinary long-term influence, because of the nature of its revolt.  To understand this, I return to the 1990s works of my contemporaries, William Strauss and Neil Howe.

In The Fourth Turning (1997) Strauss and Howe defined the Boom generation as a Prophet generation.  Such generations are children in the wake of the last great crisis in national life--in our case, the Depression and the Second  World War--and grow up in relatively stable, comfortable circumstances.  As you adults, however, they take over a now-vacant role:  society's moral stewards, who propagate their own views of good and evil.  As a very young and acute student of Strauss and Howe pointed out just a few years after that book was published, one finds the same story in the  Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve are living in the rich paradise the lord has created for them, but he has commanded them not to eat from the Tree of Good and Evil, which will allow them to make their own moral judgments.  Naturally, human nature being what it is, they immediately do so.  In Genesis the lord expels them from paradise; in history, such generations tend to redefine paradise and make their vision come to life.  The Boomer campus activists of the late 1960s opposed the Vietnam War and anything connected to it because it was evil.  Nothing, in their eyes, could justify it: not that it had been decided upon by a duly elected president and duly elected legislators, not that it initially commanded a consensus of opinion among the foreign policy establishment, and not that (until 1968) a majority of the American public supported it, with many arguing that we should fight harder.  And because the war was evil, and continued despite their opposition, any institution that collaborated with it in any way--including colleges and universities with ROTC programs and Defense Department contacts--was evil as well, and must be brought to a halt.  These views are on display both in The Hard Hat Riot and in another great documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties.  And by 1970 many activists had taken a further step, claiming that our whole society was criminally implicated not only in the Vietnam War, but in racism and sexism, and that its laws were unworthy of respect.  Like their contemporary Donald Trump today, they were guided only by their own morality.

The student revolt grabbed the attention of many colleges and universities, of the elite media, and, by 1970, of an increasing number of liberal politicians in both parties.  In subsequent decades, as I have often argued here, their essential approach to politics--an emphasis on defining what is morally right, and insisting that reality must conform to their view--became very influential and even dominant in those same sectors.  At the time, however, they provoked intense opposition among many (though not all) of their own parents, who had succeeded in life by playing by the rules.  As as the interviews in The Hard Hat Riot demonstrate beyond question, they also aroused enormous anger among their less wealthy working class contemporaries, who had gone into demanding occupations instead of going to college, who had thereby remained subject to the draft, and who had fought, and sometimes been killed or wounded, in Vietnam.  They, like their parents, had played by the rules, and they resented the college students who didn't have to and who now claimed the right to chart the nation's destiny.  And already, the student revolt, combined with general dissatisfaction over the Vietnam War, inflation, and white racial resentment, had started a critical national political realignment.

Lyndon Johnson in 1964 had won 61 percent of the popular vote; Hubert Humphrey in 1968 had won just 43.4 percent, losing to Richard Nixon with 43.4 percent, while George Wallace won 13.5 percent of the vote.  The next two Democrats to win a majority of the popular vote would be Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Barack Obama in 2008.  And a parallel drama had played out in the city of New York, one that is not sufficiently explained in The Hard Hat Riot.  John Lindsay, a very handsome and charismatic liberal Republican Congressman, had won the mayoralty in 1965 with 45 percent of the vote, compared to 41 percent for regular Democrat Abe Beame and 13.4 percent for conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr. The documentary makes clear that Lindsay had had a difficult first term, losing repeated confrontations with the city's municipal workers' unions.   It does not mention that in 1969 Lindsay had lost the Republican nomination to John Marchi in the primary, while a conservative Democrat, Mario Proccacino, had defeated a slew of liberal Democratic candidates. Running on the Liberal Party ticket, Lindsay had won a narrow victory with just 42 percent of the vote.  But Lindsay remained a darling of the liberal media, and by 1970 he had joined a number of other liberal politicians in essentially taking up the cause of the war protesters against the war.  So it was that in the week that a large body of construction workers decided to beat up antiwar student demonstrators in downtown Manhattan, Lindsay had ordered that the flag over City Hall be lowered to half staff--not in honor of the week's casualties in Vietnam, but in honor of a single Kent State student killed by the National Guard who happened to hail from Long Island.  At the height of the second phase of the riot, the hard hats intimidated Lindsay's staff into raising it again.  They still believed in the positive symbolism of the American flag, not that of the Vietcong flag which so many protesters carried.

By 1972, the war had wound down, draft calls had fallen and the end of the draft was imminent, and campuses were quiet. Meanwhile, George McGovern, an early opponent of the war and the favorite of the new Democratic left, had won Democratic nomination. Nixon carried every jurisdiction but Massachusetts (where I proudly soldiered in the McGovern campaign) and the District of Columbia, with 60.7 percent of the popular vote, and the era of Republican majorities--briefly and narrowly interrupted by Jimmy Carter in 1976 after Watergate--had begun.  

I am now convinced that the leftwing Boomer revolt of the late 1960s was the first step in something much bigger:  a general revolt touching every major group in American society against the strict discipline and spirit of sacrifice for the common good that had dominated the middle third of the twentieth century.  In subsequent decades that revolt led to lower taxes, less government regulation, and the overturning of virtually every social taboo that had shaped American life hitherto.  That revolt secured basic rights for women and gays, on the one hand, but freed business from the regulatory hand of the federal government, on the other.  It encouraged the better off to use their power to become even better off--not only business people and financial interests, but professionals in law, academia, and medicine as well.  It was closely related the increasing inequality of income and wealth that began in the 1970s and reversed the trends of the previous 30 years, for both white and black Americans.  It destroyed the loyalty of both Democrats and Republicans to their party establishments and thus paved the way for Donald Trump.  And all this proves, to me, that the extraordinary discipline of the midcentury period that allowed institutions to do so much--sometimes for evil, but more often for good--represented only one side of human nature, and provoked, as Newton would say, an equal and opposite reaction.  

In 1941 an historian from the previous Prophet generation, a Harvard professor named Roger Merriman who had taught an introductory history course to students including Franklin Roosevelt and John R. Kennedy, gave his last lecture before retiring.  He emphasized that history was a succession of alternating periods, one tending towards more centralized power, the next towards anarchy.  He could not have known then, anymore than we did in 1965, that the next turning point in that long story was only a few decades away.   I did not, because of certain intellectual changes in academia that are also part of the story I have been telling, have the opportunity to play the role that he did at Harvard or anywhere else, but thanks to my friend William Strauss (d. 2007) and his co-author Neil Howe, I have been able to revive the tradition to which he belonged. The students of the late 1960s did not on their own cause the changes we have lived through, they played their key role in an historical drama that was written many millennia ago, and which no generation can control.  We are in another climactic drama now--and however it ends, it will not be the last.  Such is the way of history.

Venezuela and our new era

 I thought about 25 hours ago when I first learned about the armed seizure of Venezuelan president Francisco Maduro that the Trump administration might have pulled off a political coup, in two senses of the word.  Having argued without much evidence that Maduro was waging war on the United States by sending lethal drugs into the country and flooding the US with dangerous immigrants, President Trump had now apprehended the criminal and would put him on trial.  The operation reminded me of the first President Bush's invasion of Panama in 1990 to depose and arrest Manuel Noriega--an important analogy, as we shall see in a moment--but it had gone much more smoothly.  And few people, it seemed to me, would be very disturbed by Maduro's deposition, since Venezuela had descended into economic chaos under him and his predecessor Hugo Chavez and he had recently retained power only by stealing an election.  The Nobel Committee had just awarded the peace prize to his leading political opponent.  Then came the press conference at Mara Lago, in which the president announced much bigger plans.  The US, he said, would "run" Venezuela until a transition to a new regime could be arranged, and it would secure the return of oil properties which, he claimed, had been unfairly seized by the Venezuelan government to US oil companies. They in turn would revive oil production in Venezuela, with great economic benefits for all.  In addition, he seemed to say, the refugees from Venezuela--who are estimated at 8 million since 2014--would be able to return to that country.  

Let me begin with two pieces of history.  As so often happens, the Trump Administration has found a precedent for what initially looks like an unprecedented step.  In 1989, just before the invasion of Panama, future attorney general William Barr, then of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Council, wrote a memo arguing that the president had the inherent right to order the FBI to make an arrest outside the territorial limits of the United States, and to back up that power with military force.  That memo legitimized the invasion of Panama and the detention and eventual trial and conviction of Manuel Noriega.  This is what is known in some legal circles as a "bootstrap precedent," in which one party to a case--in this instance, the US government--simply repeats a claim that it has made in the past, whether higher authority has ever approved the claim or not.  It also illustrates the two roles that the Office of Legal Counsel can play and has played.  On the one hand, it can tell the Attorney General and the President what the law governing a particular case appears to be, based on the Constitution, statutes, treaties, and court decisions.  On the other, it can put forward its own view of what the law should be,  based on its own sometimes tendentious reading of the Constitution.  That is what it did in this case and what it also did in the notorious torture memorandum under George W. Bush, one of whose authors once confirmed to me that it reflected the view that the executive branch was the proper judge of its own powers.

The second piece of history relates to the nationalization of Venezuelan oil properties, which was mostly carried out by a non-socialist Venezuelan government in 1976.  According to Google AI, the oil companies received some compensation. In 2007 the leftist Hugo Chavez completed the seizure of foreign oil assets, and two US companies sought compensation via international arbitration. They won an award, but Venezuela has been unwilling or unable to pay it, thanks at least in part to sanctions.  International law does require compensation in exchange for nationalization of natural resources, but it does not appear to support President Trump's claim that the United States can simply take back ownership of the properties that US companies surrendered fifty years ago.

I think the president's claims reflect his view of the world and his place of it. He is now the CEO of the United States of America, which he, like Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, thinks can be saved by greed.  He is handling that role in the same way that he did his business enterprises, setting grandiose goals and using every possible means of pressure at his disposal to get his way.  Presidential means include the use of the US military to detain hostile foreign leaders and, in this case, to replace their governments with cooperative ones.  The serious complicating factor is President Trump's chronic inability, both in business and as president, to reconcile his vision with reality.  He spent much of his business career decreeing that massive losses had magically turned to profits, and he now demands the Nobel Prize for ending wars that are still going on and claims in the face of the facts that no one has been murdered in Washington, D.C. for months.  He declared during the press conference that the Venezuelan vice president had told Secretary of State Rubio over the telephone that she would do whatever was necessary, but she is actually demanding that he release and return President Maduro.  And it would appear that there are no US forces left in Venezuela right now either to subdue the country or to "run" it.  Venezuela is larger in area than Texas and has a nearly equal population of about 30 million people.  As I write, Secretary Rubio has just announced that we will keep naval and military forces offshore in the Caribbean and continue to blockade oil exports as "leverage" against Venezuela.  Trump has just hinted that we might take direct, personal action against the vice president as well, if she doesn't cooperate.  This sounds like a new case of assuming that we can have whatever we want by wishing for it.  Rubio also made clear during yesterday's press conference that he would be glad to turn the nation's attention to regime change in Cuba, the home of his forbears.  

The abduction of Maduro has created a new media frenzy that will at least temporarily reduce attention to the Epstein documents.  It is the latest act in the long-running movie serial, Donald Trump, Superhero.  I would not dare guess what the ultimate result of all this will be.