Month: March 2024

NIKKI HALEY

I usually avoid politics in these politically hyperventilating times. . But a recent tortured political enterprise, now ended, has provoked me into the arena. I’ll say my piece, then slip back into the shadows.

I speak of Nikki Haley’s quixotice candidacy.

Nikki probably never really had a chance, and ultimately probably did nothing more than douse a certain portion of the American electorate with purple dye so Democrats know where to hunt for wobbling, disgruntled voters to rescue their senescent blowhard placeholder from the morgue reserved for one-term losers.

At the outset, when it seemed she just might have a shot at the White House, she endured the predictable, execrable slanders from the Left, beginning with the dreadful , narcissistic Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, who dismissed her as a woman NOT in her prime.

The so-called Progressive Left has no shame. Theirs and the Democratic Party’s appalling influence from Washington to Hollywood is probably why Republicans wound up with the convex carnival mirror opposite with the likes of Marjory Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert who, as one pundit has commented, appear to mistake regular appearances on cable news and social media taunting thier opponents –wearing MAGA hats — with the business of governing. Indeed Green famously suggested we split up as a nation with “a national divorce from the Left.”

But, back to the demise of Nikki Haley….and the Left’s abuse of her.

Recall how Donald Trump was (rightly) attacked for engaging in “birtherism” during the presidency of Barrack Obama. The hypocritical Left did the same with Nikki Haley over her Indian heritage, suggesting there should be a search of South Carolina probate records to see just who and what she is. MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan declared that Haley, former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina governor, should not be understood as a positive example of how successfully minorities can advance in the United States because she “uses her brown skin to launder white-supremacist talking points.”

I guess she wasn’t black or brown enough for them. It’s the old Clarence Thomas exceptionalism.

And they asked about her name (as Barrack Obama was quizzed about his name). Mary Trump, a favorite of the Left for her regular excoriation of her uncle Donald, tweeted, “First of all, f*** you Nimrata Haley.

(Yes, these are dreadful times. Perhaps I should refrain from such harsh words for the President. It’s just that I loath his obvious and toxic and manifest phoniness and his rosary-bead-rattling Whited Sepulchre Catholicism while he actively, aggressively attacks the pro-life moment at every turn, pledging now to negate the hard-won, generational victory of that movement by reimposting the legally insupportable national abortion license known as Roe V. Wade rather than let the people decide where and how much they wish to be pro-abortion. Fear not, those of you who support abortion rights. You’ll be winning in the long-short term. But the other side deserves some bargaining power. I fear you fear our national conscience will be awakened to this horror and it will cease. That, my friend, is a long way off.)

Nikki Haley ultimately probably hoped to be the face of traditional institutional Republicanism and traditional conservatism in the post-Trump era. –a noble aspirtaion, but I fear that ship has sailed. And it didn’t help that she indulged in her own form of identity politics, speaking of how her family, “wasn’t white enough to be white, weren’t black enough to be black.” Enough already! Let us finally usher in a truly post-racialist era.

So, she fought on, resisting Trump’s pressure to withdraw. I have to admire her for that, up to a point. But it was a rolling example of futility that, again, just let the Democrats know where the reluctant Democrats and renegate, non-MEGA Republicans might be lurking.

I don’t know if she’ll ever be back or might, more likely, drift into political oblivion. She never, ever truly cut a very strong or forceful figure –no fault of hers. A University of New Hampshire poll at the outset of her candidacy had her only at 8 per cent. This improved as time marched on and other challengers dropped out. But not by much.

Nice try, Nikki. You just weren’t what we were looking and praying for.

Now, pray with us that we somehow survive the coming four-year hell that the purgatory of bad choices has left in your wake.

UNANSWERED “NEWS” TIP

This is about a letter from a man ‘alleging to have information,’ as the saying goes. It was an unknown man –likely an old man. The man, forever nameless, the moment, forever lost, have been on my mind lately — for some unknown reason.

It goes back to a letter I received one day in the mid-Seventies. I was the Norwood Bureau reporter for the fledgling Daily Transcript suburban Boston newspaper. It, too, has been lost. About fifteen years ago, it vanished. It began in the early 1970s by collapsing four suburban weekies into one daily newspaper. Having never totally caught on with the reading public, struggling along lamely for years, it finally was converted into a weekly serving a far smaller area – and may, for all I know, have vanished altogether by now. Newspapers, in our time, regularly shrink or die. So it goes.

As the newest daily in the Boston area, the Transcript didn’t get a lot of attention. The residents of those four towns had resented the loss of their beloved weekly newspapers with their exclusive focus on their towns’ news. And their local news was thinned out in order to squeeze in the news of neighboring towns about which they cared little or not at all.

The towns were Dedham, Norwood, Westwood and Needham, all in southwest suburban Boston.

Back to that letter:

I forget if it was addressed exclusively to me. It would have been nice to know some reader was paying attention exclusively to my by-line.

But–it was more likely addressed to the Bureau office on Washington Street.

I think it came from one of the town’s nursing homes. This might automatically prompt some editors to dismiss it, suspecing it came from some soul suffereing dementia. The writer was, indeed, a resident in that nursing facility. The letter is lost but, as I recall, its author wrote, in longhand, something like this:

Dear Editor (or Reporter), I have some information I believe is newsworthy and that you might find very interesting. Please excuse my handwriting — I’ve got a touch of arthritis. But you can reach me at (was there a phone number? Just an address? Just his name ( forgotten) along with the name of the nursing home? Don’t remember.

I just know that I somehow felt, way back then, that I should “check this out,” as they say. I just had — a sense. It might have been sympathy for the hopelessly obscure of all “senior” facilities languishing away — and w riting unasnwered letters to editors.

Nonetheless, I felt I should check it out for two reasons: first, the writer, whom I believe was a male, might actually have something newsworthy to tell me. There was always that possibility, though the multitude of news tips go nowhere, r egardless of their source. Second: it’s not nice to ignore an elderly person looking for attention and maybe just a little company.

But also, how many times in my career as a reporter did I or other reporters or editors fail to follow up on a request for coverage of something or other–that turned out to be legitimate and important? Innumerable times, no doubt, during the busy course of multitudes of spinning news cycles in the history of the busy earth!

In truth, I suspected it wasn’t a “news” tip, as such, at all. I wondered if it was just one of those fabulous stories of the kind the elderly stand ready to pass on about their participation or involvement in some epical moment in Massachusetts, America, World, or just Personal History.

Everybody has a story.

If one lets one’s imagination range, the possibilities are infinite….

Perhaps this fellow was present when they exploded the Atom Bomb and saw some terrible flaw in the design andplanning that would one day, if left uncorrected, end civilization. Maybe he was a shadow Oppenheimer.

Perhaps he knew the identity of the men behind the deadly 1920 payroll robbery that got Sacco and Venzetti — innocent and, in the minds of millions across the globe, falsely accused — sent to the electric chair.

Perhaps he was a retired doctor who’d been a personal physician to H0ward Hughes.

Perhaps he WAS Howard Hughes.

Perhaps he was the doctor who delivered Elvis.

Perhaps he had good informtation about the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart and her plane.

Perhaps he had secret information about the Kennedy assassination. (Who doesn’t?)

Perhaps he knew the location of illegal uranium deposits and other nuclear waste buried under a nearby residential neighborhood.

Perhaps he was the grandson of a Scotland Yard Detective and had irrefutable, long hidden DNA evidence about the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Perhaps he played football with Jim Thorpe

Perhaps he’d once been a drummer for The Rolling Stones.

Perhaps he was a scientist whose theories about the causes of cancer had been unjustly supressed by a major medical institute.

Perhaps he was just an old man with nothing special for me, but who would have been delightful by a visit — from anyone! Especially a reporter.

Considering that, about that same period of time, I managed to respond to a call from excited Norwood parents who insisted their little daughters, currently trading off bouncing a ball in their backyard, were bound and determined to break the Guinness Book of Records for the number of hours spent bouncing a ball. Consider the absurd fact that I actually found time to write a dumb story about that utterly quixotic, silly parentallly-generated endeavor ( I don’t recall if the bouncing continued even past sundown).

Certainly, considering this, I could have found time to visit this poor man even if just pretending to check out his tip. I could have brought him an ice cream.

But I didn’t. The moment, the man, my reporter’s career, and whatever this guy had to tell me and whatever his human needs — are all long gone.

But, I’ll probably always wonder — if I should happen to hear of the collapse of a generations-old Norwood building with a long-ignored construction flaw, or the long-standing, long concealed poisoning of a Norwood water source due to the action of 1970s engineers, or the investigation and prosecution of individuals behind a decades-long suburban nursing home scam — or (why not?) the discovery that the illigitimate son of a member of the British Royal family lived out his last days in a Norwood nursing home — yes, I’ll always wonder…..

The moral:

Never as a reporter totally ignore even the most dubious news tip.

More importantly, never ignore the elderly and their stories.

And whoever you were, Mister I’ve-Got-Something-That-May-Interest-You, please forgive me. Your story probably died with you.

Or maybe, after being ignored, you simply wrote instead to the Patriot Ledger, the Boston Globe, The Boston Herald — or even the New York Times….and you had a huge story.! Huge!

No, not likely.

Whatever.

Wherever you are, whoever you were, these dozens of words are in your memory.