It’s only six months into the Trump presidency and already the circle of wagons is drawing tighter. Normally, it takes a special prosecutor months of investigation and hundreds of interviews before he or she begins to get close to the inner circle of any investigation. This time, it’s being handed to them by the New York Times — who not only gave them the names and pedigree of most of the eight at the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, complete with the Russians CVs, but also a paper trail of emails so there can’t be any questions about authenticity.
Now, I’ve read enough John Le Carre novels to know that you just don’t go into a conspiracy with eight people in a room — several close to a government hostile to the USA — when you don’t know who is coming to the meeting, who you think you can trust and without a taste of what they have and where it came from, and whether it’s worth anything to you. You certainly don’t invite other insiders in the campaign into the meeting with everyone flying blind.
Without getting into the morality or the legality of doing business with representatives of Russia, what strikes me most is the monumental stupidity and naiveté of the Trump operation and family. I can only assume they must operate like this all the time, otherwise red signals would have come up like flares. The president says, “What’s the big deal? It’s only politics as usual,” and in that regard, he may be right. His problem is that he simply doesn’t understand the nuances of American politics and dealing with foreign governments and the kind of trouble you can get into if you don’t realize that you’ve crossed the line.
A case in point is when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 and soon thereafter Iran released the American hostages. If the hostages had been released on Carter’s watch, Carter might well have been re-elected. There were all sorts of rumors that William Casey, who was one of Reagan’s right hand men and later was appointed to head the CIA, had met with an Iranian representative to make sure that the hostages were not released before the election. What the Iranians got later in return were a bunch of missiles that they desperately needed in their war with Iraq. Was it illegal? Probably, but they got away with it and won the prize, the presidency, so it’s not that this kind of stuff doesn’t happen. It’s just hard to believe that they’re all this clumsy.
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When this newspaper hits the streets tomorrow, you will see that the city is running a Fire Preparedness Workshop on Wednesday, July 19, at 7 p.m. at city hall. If you have a chance, you definitely should go or watch it on streaming video later when it’s up on the city’s website. I speak from personal experience. Karen and I have lived in Malibu for 41 years and I can absolutely guarantee you that “stuff happens.” We all live in this cocoon that says, “Not me — perhaps you, but certainly not me.” I lived in that same cocoon until Nov. 3, 1993, which was the great Topanga / Malibu fire that wiped out over 400 homes in the Malibu area. It was a hot dry day, in what had been a hot dry fall. The brush was dry, and there was a lot of it. Malibu hadn’t had a major fire in a number of years and La Costa, the area we lived in, hadn’t burned in 70 years. Many homes had trees and vines overhanging the houses and many of the houses were older, with a lot of wood. It started in Topanga with the cause still unknown, and the County Fire Department almost caught it before it broke out of Topanga, picking up speed as it burned. We were all at The Malibu Times Building in Las Flores Canyon when one of our neighbors, a retired fireman, came into the office and said, “It looks like the fire is coming down Las Flores Canyon and we better get out.” So, we packed up everything into our cars, took all the copy and computers, set up a phone tree for the next day and I sent everyone home while we still could get out. Then I drove up to our house on the La Costa hill.
It was still a bright clear day, but the Sheriff had evacuated the neighborhood, so I grabbed what I could: the computers, some oriental carpets I was supposed to take to the rug store for cleaning, a few pictures off the wall and our Chocolate Lab CeCe — that was about all the room I had in the SUV. It was surreal because I could see the fire coming from Carbon Canyon, at about a pace that a man might walk, and the sky was still blue and the smoke was up high and blowing out toward the west. Then, suddenly it began to change. Flames began to come over the top of the hill, the air in my chest started to get dry, and it was tougher to breathe, and then there was the noise. A roaring fire makes its own weather. It sucks up the oxygen all around it and creates a swirling wind and roars at you. By now, our dog CeCe was pulling at me and basically saying — let’s get the hell out of here. She was right, because by morning just about every house in the neighborhood had burned to the ground. We were fortunate. We lost the house, but the paper survived. So, “stuff happens,” believe me. And it’s a lot better if you are prepared.