While many Californians remain cut off and isolated in Big Sur, CalTrans continues work on slides, drop offs and building a new bridge.
These are challenging times for those who live and work in the Big Sur region. Others are also suffering a withdrawal from visiting one of the planet's beauty spots. We feature a few more frames from our Big Sur file to salve our unease especially as we begin to measure a more menacing cut off-in this case from normalcy and that dateline is Washington.
after watching the blue
The coast was not perfectly clear but less occluded than the scene from Congress. A point of reference here-I am fortunate that I drive the Pacific coast.
The sun and the big blue contribute to saturated light, long views and a framework for clarity. It is a perfect place to let the mind ponder the madness wrought by the heathen fool who rambles in the White House eating ice-cream and watching Fox News while fouling American democracy.
the "lech" enabler
A couple of thoughts about his enablers....
His friend and a man who must share some of the blame is dead. People will speak nicely of Roger Ailes. But his legacy deserves not a shred of respect. Ailes, who was a Trump confidant and advisor was, like the president, a sexual predator. He was forced out of his castle because his sexual harassment and tawdry behavior caught up with him. We can hope the same will be true for the dirty old man who desecrates the presidency.
But Ailes did something else evil. He almost singlehandedly created news by flavor-political flavor. Back when he worked for that other paragon of honesty, Dick Nixon, Ailes began to dream of a network where the news was spun by party line, propaganda! When he labeled Fox News-fair and balanced-he shoved journalism into a direction that is diseased.
Ailes was not a journalist, he was a con man, a true propagandist. He made a fortune. He had power but in the end it all crumbled. We are sorry for his family, but his true demise occurred when the Murdoch's tossed his lecherous and deceitful presence out of Fox.
the other enablers?
There's a little story with a huge significance. In 2016 California Congressman Kevin McCarthy, now House Majority Leader said he thought Donald Trump was on the take, being paid off by Vladimir Putin. The tape reveals that House Speaker Paul Ryan, immediately cut off the comments and told assembled Republicans those comments were "family matters" and were never to be reported. They hadn't been, until the tape surfaced.
Maybe McCarthy was only joking, but in the context of everything else we've learned, how do you know? What is most troubling is Ryan's order to shut up. It is symbolic of his spinelessness in dealing with the trump madness.
There are many Republicans who I have known personally and professionally. They are or have been office holders, high government officials, advisers and strategists at the federal, state and local level. Many of them are troubled not only by the despicable and ruinous behavior of the president, but by the lack of courage of the men and women in the House or Senate who could begin to rein in the man child who now even the most ardent of conservative and republican analysts and writers have begun to savage.
Some of their own party and certainly many Democrats have said the spineless will pay. This is a full season of investigation now and the facts will come out.
remembering a more vibrant time
See you down the trail.
