Syndicated columns

In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, President Donald Trump has what most of us should have figured out: His campaign against “fake news” is really a war against any news that he does not like. “The Fake News is working overtime,” he tweeted Wednesday morning. “Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91 percent of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?”

“If Reality Is Altered, What Can We Believe In?” In 1994, that was the headline of the first column I ever wrote about the manipulation of images and words – digital lies that made it difficult to know what was really real. Small wonder, I said, we were a nation “paralyzed by cynicism.”

You might have noticed an insert in today’s paper for Initiative 1608. If, like us, you’re a fan of government accountability, you should give it a look. I-1608 would require local and state governments to conduct collective bargaining in public. There’d be no more haggling with public employee unions behind closed doors.

Jeb Bush said Donald Trump would be a “chaos president.” And last week, Trump lived up to the billing, choosing to defy virtually the entire world, including America’s closest European allies, and raising tensions in the most unstable part of the globe, the Middle East. It is hard to understand the rationale behind Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. If Iran is as dangerous and malign an actor as he says, surely it is best to have its nuclear program frozen at a pre-military level and monitored 24/7. The chances of getting Tehran to agree to more stringent terms are close to zero. If the terms of the Iran deal were applied to North Korea, it would require Pyongyang to destroy its nuclear weapons – the fruits of a decades-long effort – and agree to invasive inspections and foreign surveillance in a country so closed it is known as the Hermit Kingdom.

The inauguration of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem is an important recognition of Israel’s inherent right to govern itself. It is also the start of a new era, one in which the international community’s relationship is based on reality and fact, not fantasy and fiction. President Donald Trump’s decision to allow the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act to move forward is historic. At the most basic level, it states what has been obvious to Jews for thousands of years: Jerusalem is, has been and will always be the capital of the Jewish people. This notion was formally adopted by Israel when it named Jerusalem its capital in December 1949. For too many years, however, foreign countries continued to site their embassies in Tel Aviv, a symbolic statement with a clear message – a refusal to recognize Jerusalem, even West Jerusalem, as the country’s capital.

“A government-run, single-payer, bureaucratic health-care system that doesn’t work.” That’s how Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., described the Department of Veterans Affairs last month on “Meet the Press.” Johnson’s remarks are typical of Republicans in Congress, who have made no secret of their intention to privatize the department. President Donald Trump’s firing of Veterans Affairs Secretary David J. Shulkin constitutes the latest Republican assault on the agency. Shulkin’s poor judgment regarding his well-publicized trip to Europe would not have provided sufficient cause for firing were it not for his well-known opposition to the privatization of VA services. Remember Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s use of government aircraft or EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s need to fly first class?

At long last, have they left no sense of decency? White House official Kelly Sadler, during a meeting Thursday, had this to say about Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for opposing President Trump’s CIA nominee over her failure to condemn torture: “It doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway.”

The nomination of Gina Haspel to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency presents an exquisitely difficult choice for senators weighing her confirmation. It is one that should tip, on the basis of Haspel’s own words, against her confirmation. On one side of the ledger is the sheer fact of Haspel’s qualifications for the job by virtue of her experience in the agency. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., did not exaggerate when he described Haspel, at the panel’s hearing Wednesday, as “the most prepared nominee in its 70-year history.” Those signing a letter urging Haspel’s confirmation span Democratic and Republican administrations, and include eight former CIA directors or acting directors, three former directors of national intelligence and two former secretaries of state.

It was one of the Clinton administration’s biggest counterterrorism successes. Just weeks after al-Qaida terrorists trained by Iran blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Gina Haspel’s phone rang in the middle of the night. She was in her final weeks as station chief in what the CIA describes as an “exotic and tumultuous capital” in central Eurasia, and intelligence had just emerged that two senior al-Qaida associates linked to the embassy bombings were on their way to the country where she was stationed. Haspel swung into action, devising an operation to capture the terrorists. She worked around the clock, sleeping on the floor of her office, as agents tracked the terrorists to a local hotel, where the men were apprehended after a firefight. According to the CIA, “The successful operation not only led to the terrorists’ arrest and subsequent imprisonment, but to the seizure of computers that contained details of a terrorist plot.” For her efforts during the operation, which ultimately disrupted a terrorist cell, Haspel in 1999 received the George H.W. Bush Award for Excellence in Counterterrorism.

Evangelical Protestantism, thank God, is experiencing its own version of a #MeToo moment.

Given the cornucopia of issues Americans have to select from each day, the recent firing and rehiring of the House of Representatives’ chaplain may not have bestirred many to form an opinion. But these days, the Hill is alive with buzz as people absorb the odd goings-on between House Speaker Paul Ryan, who pushed the chaplain to resign, and the Rev. Patrick Conroy himself, who later withdrew his resignation, and Ryan’s acceptance of what appears to be pastoral bullying.

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal signed with Iran and the European powers in 2015 doesn’t just make it likelier that Iran, too, will abandon the treaty and renew its push to make a bomb. It could also determine if the social unrest sweeping the Islamic Republic deepens and further destabilizes the regime. The government is facing perhaps its greatest opposition nationwide since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Trump’s decision will change how that story plays out in ways that will further destabilize the regime while giving conservatives more power for now. The U.S. decision is sure to exacerbate Iran’s economic crisis, promoting more political unrest. Although the Iranian regime will blame the United States for an even greater decline of its economy if Washington reimposes sanctions, much of Iranian society no longer believes the claims of the regime. (During recent demonstrations, one chant from the protesters was: “Our enemy is here 1/8at home 3/8. It is not America.”)

WASHINGTON – My fellow Americans, I understand that some of you are questioning why I, Scott Pruitt, head of what’s-its-name, that environmental office that I sued 13 times, spent $100,000 to go to Morocco. Or had to build a $43,000 phone booth.

This is for Rose. She is a nice lady who wrote me a nice email in which she spoke about the need to try to understand Donald Trump’s supporters. As Rose put it, “We need to not close ourselves off to how the other side thinks.”

That President Donald Trump knew about hush money paid to a porn star isn’t the only shocking thing his new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, acknowledged Wednesday. Giuliani also said that the reason Trump fired James Comey as FBI director was essentially because Comey wouldn’t do his bidding in the Russia investigation. “He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation,” Giuliani told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

The prospect of winning the Nobel Peace Prize is understandably tantalizing for President Trump. After all the contempt he has faced from the political establishment, watching liberal heads explode at the suggestion by South Korean President Moon Jae-in that he deserves the award must be gratifying. It would be even more gratifying to watch the collective meltdown as he delivered his Nobel acceptance speech. Moon understands this, which precisely is why he dangled the prospect of a Nobel Prize in front of Trump. He is flattering Trump in the hopes that this will make him more flexible in his negotiations with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Trump should refuse to take the bait.

For many years, Democrats have been convinced that the American people, and even their Republican opponents, are open to persuasion. If they could just have the opportunity to explain why their policies are morally right and practically effective, they could win almost anyone over. Republicans, on the other hand, harbored no illusions about persuading Democrats of anything. Instead, they had a much more hard-headed view of how politics works.

When I moved to Washington several years ago, a D.C. veteran whispered a warning that she had learned from her father: New York is tough, but Washington is mean. Truer words, my friend, truer words.