Sargent Painting:  El Jaleo

Dear Commons Community,

Elaine and I spent the last two days in Wellesley and Boston.  In Wellesley on Wednesday,  we visited with our friend and colleague, David Podell, who was installed as president last year of Massachusetts Bay Community College.  He gave us a tour of the school that enrolls over 5,000 students.  MassBay has a number of two-year and certificate programs and an especially fine reputation for its technology and career programs.  The grounds and buildings at the Wellesley Hill Campus are attractive and well laid out.   David seems very happy at the MassBay and will do a fine job as its president.

On Thursday, we went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  This museum is a small gem named for Isabella Stewart Gardner, known also as “Mrs. Jack” in reference to her husband, John L. (“Jack”) Gardner.  She was one of the foremost female patrons of the arts of her time and a friend of leading artists and writers including John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Henry James.   In 1903, she completed the construction of Fenway Court (now the Museum) in Boston to house her collection and provide a place for Americans to access and enjoy important works of art. Isabella Gardner installed her collection in a way to evoke intimate responses to the art, mixing paintings, furniture, textiles, and objects from different cultures and periods among well-known European paintings and sculpture. The collection has several interesting pieces including Sargents, a Botticelli, and a Giotto.  The Museum also was unfortunately the victim of a major theft of 13 major pieces from its collection in 1990.  A $10 million reward is available to anyone providing information that leads to the return of the 13 pieces.

An enjoyable two days.

Tony

The Courtyard

The Chapel

Sargent Painting:  Isabella Stewart Gardner

Dear Commons Community,

The Harvard Crimson yesterday reported that Drew Faust, President of Harvard since 2007, would be stepping down.  As Harvard’s first woman president, she guided the school with skill and grace. She led Harvard during some difficult times especially with regard to its endowment losses during the Great Recession of 2008. She was fond of saying she was a good listener.

“Listening is always an essential part of what I try to do. So I say that’s a key part of it,” she said. “I also think that you can be very tough and very gentle at the same time, that being tough doesn’t mean being noisy or cruel or aggressive, it just means standing your ground and pursuing your goals, and being equitable and decent to people.”

Faust has emerged as a major leader for higher education.  I have used her positions in my own work especially her views on the future of American higher education. For example:

“The major forces that will shape the future of higher education:

• the influence of technology
• the changing shape of knowledge
• the attempt to define the value of education.”

She went on to extol the facilities that digital technology and communications will provide for teaching, learning, and research.  She sees great benefits in technology’s ability to reach masses of students around the globe and to easily quantify large databases for scaling up and assessment purposes. On the other hand, she made it clear that “residential education cannot be replicated online” and stressed the importance of physical being interaction and shared experiences. 

On the nature of knowledge, she stated that the common organization of universities by academic departments may disappear because “the most significant and consequential challenges humanity faces” require investigations and solutions that are flexible and not necessarily discipline specific.   Doctors, chemists, social scientists, and engineers will work together to solve humankind’s problems.

On defining value, she accepts that quantitative metrics are now evolving that can assess the importance of meaningful employment and life-long fulfillment in a career.  But she also believes that higher education provides something very valuable; that it gives people “a perspective on the meaning and purpose of their lives”; and that it was not possible to quantify this type of student outcome.  She concluded that:

“So much of what humanity has achieved has been sparked and sustained by the research and teaching that take place every day at colleges and universities, sites of curiosity and creativity that nurture some of the finest aspirations of individuals and, in turn, improve their lives—and their livelihoods. As the landscape continues to change, we must be careful to protect the ideals at the heart of higher education, ideals that serve us all well as we work together to improve the world.”   

Best wishes to Drew Faust!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

There was just too much news coming out of Washington, D.C. yesterday.

First, a lone gunman who was said to be distraught over President Trump’s election opened fire on members of the Republican congressional baseball team at a practice field in Alexandria, Virginia, using a rifle to shower the field with bullets that struck four people, including Steve Scalise, the majority whip of the House of Representatives.

Mr. Trump, in a televised statement from the White House, condemned the “very, very brutal assault” and said the gunman had died after a shootout with the police. Law enforcement authorities identified him as James T. Hodgkinson, 66, from Belleville, Ill., a suburb of St. Louis.

Second, Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel examining Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, has requested interviews with three high-ranking current or former intelligence officials, the latest indication that he will investigate whether President Trump obstructed justice, a person briefed on the investigation said on Wednesday.

Mr. Mueller wants to question Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence; Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency; and Richard Ledgett, the former N.S.A. deputy director.

None of the men were involved with Mr. Trump’s campaign. But recent news reports have raised questions about whether Mr. Trump requested their help in trying to get James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, to end an investigation into the president’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Last week, Mr. Coats and Admiral Rogers declined to answer questions before Congress about the matter.

Mr. Mueller’s office has also asked the N.S.A. for any documents or notes related to the agency’s interactions with the White House as part of the Russia investigation, according to an intelligence official.

Third, the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday for new sanctions punishing Russia for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, and to force President Donald Trump to get Congress’ approval before easing any existing sanctions.

The vote was 97 to two for the legislation, filed as an amendment to an Iran sanctions bill. It is intended to punish Russia over issues including alleged meddling in the election, annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and support for the government of Syria in that country’s six-year-long civil war.

The measure sets up a process for Congress to review changes in sanctions, puts into law actions previously established via presidential executive order, imposes new sanctions on Russians found guilty of human rights abuses or conducting cyber attacks.

Quite a news day!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Kathy Griffin subjected herself to a torrent of outrage last month when she was photographed with a likeness of the decapitated head of Donald Trump.  She has since apologized and has literally cried in front of cameras in response to the public chastisement and seeing sponsors cancel her shows.

On Monday, The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar opened to a firestorm of criticism  over the use of an actor styled as President Trump portraying Caesar, and then knifed to death as part of the story.  It has led to questions about the depiction of Trump as Caesar.

Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public and director of the Julius Caesar production, gave an interview about the matter. He first made the point that the play has often been used to depict world leaders and noted that a few years ago there had been an American production of the play in which Caesar was Obama-like, and no controversy had ensued.  Here are excerpts from the interview.

“What were you trying to tell us about our politics today with this particular staging?

We have faced a transition and a set of electoral choices, which are clearly destabilizing our democratic norms. Now, the question is, How do we respond to that? What do we do about it? And this, if you will, is a progressive’s nightmare vision of that.

For me, the whole thing is an anxiety nightmare parable about our current state, and that’s why it looks the way it looks.

Is Trump Caesar?

Of course not. Julius Caesar is Julius Caesar. What we are doing is what we try and do in every production, which is make the dramatic stakes as real and powerful for contemporary people as we can, in our time and our place.

Did you anticipate the outrage?

No. But all of this stuff is not about my production of “Julius Caesar.” This is about the right-wing hate machine. Those thousands of people who are calling our corporate sponsors to complain about this — none of them have seen the show. They’re not interested in seeing the show. They haven’t read “Julius Caesar.” They are being manipulated by “Fox & Friends” and other news sources, which are deliberately, for their own gain, trying to rile people up and turn them against an imagined enemy, which we are not.

You know by this point that my mentee and dear friend, Rob Melrose, did a production in 2012 with Obama as Caesar. That production played all over the country. Not one peep from anybody.

So this is not about my play or my production of a play. This is really an example of what this kind of demagoguery does.

So you did not see this coming?

I thought there might be some fuss. I did not see this.

Did you give any kinds of heads-up to either your board or your donors?

No. I was not secret about what I was doing. And lots and lots of people saw it. Twenty thousand people saw it before anything went on Breitbart and there were maybe eight, nine complaints.

Did you get any queasy feelings when the Kathy Griffin controversy happened?

We noticed, and we went, “Whoops!” But, of course, we knew we weren’t doing anything like that. We were doing Shakespeare in the Park, for God’s sake. So we noticed, we talked about it, but, again, we didn’t think what we were doing was directly comparable to Kathy Griffin.

Do you think that what’s happened illustrates something about our culture today?

I don’t want to criticize anybody except The New York Times. The fact that you guys broke the decades-long precedent on embargoing reviews, in response to what Breitbart had done — because that’s what you did, because Breitbart ran a story, other people picked it up, and you broke your arrangement with us. That’s a perfect example of how we are allowing the right-wing hate machine to change our relationships to each other, and that is bad. You and I, and The New York Times and I, will recover from it, but still I think it’s not what we should be doing.

Did you try to talk anyone at Delta or Bank of America out of changing their financial relationship with the Public?

No. We had conversations. But we weren’t trying to talk people out of anything. It’s their money, they’re supporting us, they get to decide what to do with it.

You don’t give them preapproval of productions?

Never give that to anybody and never will. It would be dreadful if we allowed anybody to preapprove or censor what we do.

It’s complicated because we live in a country where government support of the arts is limited so you are dependent on private fund-raising.

Right. However, our private fund-raising is fine. We have a massive, loyal base of support that gives us a great deal of confidence that we’re going to be fine.

How much money did you lose over this production?

I shouldn’t talk about exact figures, but let’s just say that the loss of money is not the significant blow to us. We’re sorry we lost the money, but it’s not going to damage our operations at all.

Are you disappointed in Bank of America, given the long relationship you’ve had with them?

No. People have to do what they have to do. I’m not a banker. I don’t understand that. What I do understand is that there are an awful lot of people who have stepped up, without being asked, to express solidarity with us, in emotional and financial terms, because the stand that we’ve taken about freedom of the art, freedom of speech, the ability to do provocative work, the ability to do work that speaks to the real issues and anxiety of our time, is something they support.

If you were to do this over again, would you do anything differently?

No. This production does not hate Julius Caesar. This production makes some fun of him. I kind of think I’m not the first guy to make some fun of our president. Certainly not this president or any other president. This production is horrified at his murder.”

So what to do?

This is a complicated issue involving free speech, artistic license, and the role of the arts in a democratic society.  Mayor Bill de Blasio characterized it as a “slippery slope.”  It reminds me of a controversy in 1999 when an exhibit titled,  “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,” opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  One of the pieces,  The Holy Virgin Mary, depicted Mary smeared in elephant dung and angels characterized as flying genitalia. Mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to cut off the Museum’s city subsidy and remove the Brooklyn Museum Board if the show was not canceled.  He singled out The Holy Virgin Mary as “sick stuff.”  John Cardinal O’Connor called the show an attack on religion itself. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said it found the painting offensive. The fact is that the exhibit went on.   Julius Caesar at the Public Theater should go on also but we must be concerned about the violence we promulgate in our society and culture.  

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ turn before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.  He was not as riveting as James Comey last week and avoided making any major revelations.  The New York Times characterized his testimony as “clamming up” and “How many ways are there to fail to answer a question under oath?”  Below is the full Times editorial.

Tony

========================

Jeff Sessions Clams Up in Congress

How many ways are there to fail to answer a question under oath

Ask Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The last time Mr. Sessions appeared before a Senate committee, during his confirmation hearing in January, he gave false testimony.

“I did not have communications with the Russians,” Mr. Sessions said in response to a question no one asked — and despite the fact that he had, in fact, met with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, at least twice during the 2016 presidential campaign. The omission raised questions not only about his honesty, but also about why he would not disclose those meetings in the first place.

On Tuesday Mr. Sessions returned to answer questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian sabotage of the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s possible ties to those efforts.

That was the plan, anyway. In fact — and to the great consternation of the Democratic members of the committee, at least — Mr. Sessions was not on board. He arrived in full body armor, testy and sometimes raising his voice to defend what he called his honor against “scurrilous and false allegations” that he had colluded with Moscow.

He also defended his misstatements in January, to the Judiciary Committee, as being taken out of context, and he lowered a broad cone of silence around all his communications with President Trump regarding last month’s firing of James Comey as F.B.I. director, claiming it was “inappropriate” for him to discuss them. Did they involve classified information? No. Was he invoking executive privilege? No, he said, only the president may invoke that. Reminded that Mr. Trump has not done so, he said, “I’m protecting the right

In lieu of a real excuse, he cited a longstanding policy at the Justice Department — although he couldn’t confirm that it existed in writing or that, if it did, he had actually read it. In other words, Mr. Sessions has no intention to answer any of those questions now or in the future.

Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, angrily accused Mr. Sessions of “impeding this investigation” by refusing to respond, but perhaps the attorney general was wise to keep his mouth shut. When he opened it, he often seemed to contradict himself, his staff at the Justice Department, or the president.

The most glaring example was his claim that the letter he wrote supporting Mr. Comey’s dismissal was based on the former director’s missteps in the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server — even though Mr. Trump himself had almost immediately blown that cover, telling a national television audience that he had the Russia investigation in mind when he decided to fire Mr. Comey.

Mr. Sessions’s explanation would’ve been impossible to swallow anyway, since he, like Mr. Trump, had originally praised Mr. Comey’s actions in the Clinton investigation.

The attorney general also had a strange reaction to Mr. Comey’s plea that he not be left alone with the president again. By his own account, Mr. Sessions seemed less concerned with the president’s highly unusual and inappropriate behavior than he was with Mr. Comey, telling him “that the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice needed to be careful to follow department policies regarding appropriate contacts with the White House.”

So here are a few more questions that Mr. Sessions should answer, but probably won’t.

Why did he not resist when Mr. Trump asked him and others to leave the Oval Office so he could have a private conversation with Mr. Comey? At the very least, why did he not take steps to find out what had happened?

Why does he believe he did not violate the terms of his recusal by taking part in Mr. Comey’s firing? His recusal extended, in his own words, to “any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States” — which clearly includes the Clinton email investigation.

If his recusal was truly based, as he claimed, on his closeness to the Trump campaign, why not announce it immediately upon his confirmation, rather than wait weeks, until after news of his undisclosed meetings with Mr. Kislyak broke?

And perhaps most pressing: Why, since he agreed with the committee that Russian interference in the election represents a profoundly serious attack on American democracy, has Mr. Sessions never received or read any detailed briefing on that operation?

Dear Commons Community,

Ivanka Trump said earlier this week that she was surprised by the “level of viciousness” directed by the media at her father. In an interview Monday on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,”  Ivanaka said the machinations of Washington still amaze her.

“It is hard and there is a level of viciousness that I was not expecting. I was not expecting the intensity of this experience,” the 35-year-old said. “But this isn’t supposed to be easy.

“Some of the distractions and some of the ferocity, I was a little blindsided by on a personal level,” she added. “But for me, I’m trying to keep my head down, not listen to the noise and just work really hard to make a positive impact in the lives of many people.”

The media’s response to Ivanka’s comments were quick and unapologetic bordering on “give me a break.”  Here is an example:

The Washington Post deadpanned: “Irony is dead.”

“President Donald Trump conducted one of the most vicious presidential campaigns in recent history. Trump called women “pigs,” Mexican immigrants “rapists,” and Meryl Streep a “loser.” He mocked a disabled reporter and urged people at his rallies to “knock the crap” out of protesters.  

This “seems to be a talking point for the White House now. And it is ridiculous,” wrote Aaron Blake in The Fix.  “Not because politics in Washington isn’t vicious — it certainly can be and is — but because Ivanka and Eric Trump’s father’s political rise was marked by probably the nastiest and most bare-knuckled brand of public campaigning that we’ve seen in modern history.”

One of the most stinging criticisms of Ivanka’s lament came from John Podhoretz, columnist  in the usually Trump-friendly New York Post, who called the first daughter a “filthy liar” in a tweet for saying she was shocked by ugly attacks in politics.

Only someone living in an alternate universe would be so unaware of the ugliness that her father spews throughout the world.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As General Electric’s  CEO Jeffrey Immelt prepares to leave, the New York Times has a featured article today on G.E.’s History of Innovation, lauding the company’s contribution’s to electronics, home appliances, medicine, etc. For example:

“In 1889, the company that Thomas A. Edison founded joined with two others to form what would become one of the most storied conglomerates in the United States. Called Edison General Electric, the company mirrored the growth of industrial America from the steam age to the age of electricity and beyond.

During World War II, General Electric supplied the United States military with executives and equipment manufacturing. In the postwar boom, G.E. sold appliances that helped free America’s housewives from the kitchen. And in the 1980s, Jack Welch, then the chief executive, expanded the company into media and Wall Street. Throughout, G.E. amassed a library of patents. Below are a few of the company’s notable products and periods.”

The article goes on to praise the company and its leaders, however, there is not one mention of the fact that G.E. has been one of the major environmental polluters especially of the Hudson River.

G.E. may be admired in corporate circles as one of America’s most profitable companies but along the Hudson it is despised by many for what it did to our waterways.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Various media are reporting that Donald Trump’s eldest son seemed to confirm fired FBI director James Comey’s account that the president expressed “hope” Comey would end the FBI investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russian officials, contradicting the president’s denial that he made such an appeal.

While defending his father in a Fox News interview with Jeanine Pirro on Saturday, the younger Trump said there would have been “no ambiguity” if the president had made the request to Comey during a Feb. 14 Oval Office meeting, despite the president and his personal lawyer disputing the exchange.

“When he tells you to do something, guess what? There’s no ambiguity in it, there’s no, ‘Hey, I’m hoping,’” Donald Trump Jr. told Pirro on Saturday, trying to explain that it could not have been a direct request. “You and I are friends: ‘Hey, I hope this happens, but you’ve got to do your job.’ That’s what he told Comey.”

Chalk one up for Comey in the  “he said – I said” battle that is brewing as  a result of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last week.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, has an op-ed piece today in the New York Times highlighting the work of CUNY’s Start Program which is designed to help community college students overcome their mathematics and language remedial education needs.  Here is an excerpt:

“CUNY Start holds some clues on how to solve an education crisis. Nationwide, only 35 percent of those who start community college receive any form of credential within six years. At urban community colleges, the six-year graduation rate is only 16 percent.

The biggest academic stumbling blocks are remedial math and English courses. More than two-thirds of community college students must take at least one such class, and there they languish. Only a third of those referred to remedial math, and less than half those who take remedial reading, pass. Just 15 percent of students who take remedial classes at two-year colleges earn a certificate or degree on time.

Typically, those students fell behind in elementary school, and as new concepts were piled on every year, they never caught up. The “Strasbourg goose” school of teaching, in which students’ heads are stuffed with formulas that bear no relation to the real world, left them convinced of their own incompetence. Old-school remedial education in college — skill and drill, lecture-style classes, taken at the same time as college-level courses — offered more of the same.

The CUNY Start model is different. Full-time students are exclusively in Start classes for 25 hours a week — substantially more than the usual course load — for one semester. The focus is on thinking, not memorization. “Math isn’t just memorization,” an instructor in the program, Erica Fells told me. “I teach them how to investigate problems — how to think. The first sentence on the first day is a question. We start by making a connection to real life and slowly build a foundation of knowledge for more abstract algebraic problems. I never say you are right or wrong. The answers come from them.”

Ms. Fells knows, firsthand, what the students are going through. “I grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same mediocre schools,” she said. “They’re as smart as students anyplace — they just haven’t been given the opportunity.”

Typically, these students are juggling school, jobs and family obligations. One student told me that at lunch she pumps breast milk while studying. “I work full time, and my husband requires kidney dialysis,” she said.

Jessica Mingus, the director of CUNY Start at Hostos Community College, told me that many have gotten the message that they are no-hopers. When she was a high school freshman, one student was informed by her high school counselor that she should drop out. “You’re going to get pregnant by the time you’re 16 — why waste everyone’s time by staying in school?”

Counseling is vital to the success of the program, because it gives students someone to talk with about their lives. “They aren’t comfortable telling their teachers about the court date, the pending eviction, the abusive foster parent,” Ms. Mingus said.

During orientation, students are asked to list the ups and downs in their lives. “Sex experience with a family member,” “Guns fired all the time,” one student wrote matter-of-factly. All that took place while she was still in elementary school. In middle school, she added, she had a miscarriage, tried to join a gang and wound up in jail. Abandonment, homelessness, fickle boyfriends and thoughts of suicide were among the “downs” other students mentioned.

“They say they’re not cut out for this,” Ms. Mingus said. “We remind them that they passed their New York State Regents exams, after as many as five tries. We tell them that’s a great accomplishment, and you can do the same here.”

Once they start taking college-credit classes, nearly three-quarters of the eligible students will enroll in another CUNY initiative, called Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, which I’ve written about in the past. The package includes financial help, carefully constructed class schedules and one-on-one advising. Sixty-four percent of ASAP students earned a degree within six years.

Educators elsewhere are paying attention; colleges in upstate New York, Ohio and California are starting their own ASAP initiatives. And a group of New York City high school teachers are, in a pilot program, being trained in CUNY Start’s model of teaching. It’s the classic ounce-of-prevention approach — improve teaching in high school, so students won’t have to take remedial math in college.

CUNY Start and ASAP aren’t City University’s only success stories. Researchers at Stanford, Berkeley and Brown universities have shown that CUNY is a more powerful engine of mobility than almost any university in the nation. Places like CUNY, Stony Brook University and California State University, Los Angeles, are the workhorses of higher education, and they’re doing a fine job.”

Nice recognition of the good work being done here at CUNY!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd gives us her take on the James Comey testimony last week in her New York Times column this morning.  After describing the personalities of Comey and Donald Trump as the G-Man v. the Mob Boss, it is her opinion, that Trump is on his way to self-destruction. 

Here is her recap:

“Who is bigger than Trump?

Sure, Trump got called a liar by the ousted F.B.I. chief, in what was “almost certainly the most damning j’accuse moment by a senior law enforcement official against a president in a generation,” as Peter Baker wrote in The New York Times.

Sure, the president came across in Comey’s testimony like a mob don, demanding fealty and calling on Comey to do him a service by seeing his way clear to letting the nefarious Michael Flynn go.

But on the bright side for Trump — which is a historically low bar — there were these things:

Comey admitted he was a leaker, and Trump is obsessed with catching leakers even though he’s a world-class leaker himself. They are their own Deep Throats.

Comey confirmed that he had told the president three times that he was not under investigation.

He asserted that Loretta Lynch lost her credibility on the Hillary email investigation when she let Bill Clinton on her plane and directed Comey to call it “a matter” rather than “an investigation.”

And Comey seemed like a wimpy careerist for not confronting Trump on the Flynn meddling and looking him in the eye and saying, “What you want is wrong and we will not do it and I will no longer work for you.” Unlike Trump, Comey wasn’t even willing to do the dirty work of leaking himself.

The main takeaway, however, is that with the absurdist Trump administration, we have sunk very low. There’s no way that the Republicans would not be calling for the head of a Democratic president who had done this stuff. They would be going nuts trying to impeach him.

Instead, we have the risible Paul Ryan trying to excuse the president’s sleazy behavior with Comey by painting the most powerful man in the world as Candide.

“He’s just new to this,” Ryan told reporters, explaining that Trump “wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols” between the Department of Justice and the White House.

The real problem isn’t that Trump is a Washington naïf, though he is. It’s that he brought his own distorted reality and warped values with him.

He has yet to express a scintilla of real concern that the Russians tried to hurt our democracy and alter the will of American voters.

At the press conference Friday, he reiterated his ridiculous contention that the Russia scandal is a red herring, even now that everyone agrees that it is real.

“That was an excuse by the Democrats who lost an election that some people think they shouldn’t have lost, because it’s almost impossible for the Democrats to lose the Electoral College, as you know,” Trump said. “You have to run up the whole East Coast and you have to win everything as a Republican, and that’s just what we did.”

Trump is so self-regarding that he can only process the Russia hack as an insult to him. If the Russians helped him beat Hillary, then he gets less credit.

And with Comey & Co., Trump is so eager for the credit that he would rather bring himself down than allow someone else the honor.”

Classic Dowd but the key question is how much time the Republicans will allow Trump to bring  himself down.  They have Vice President Pence waiting in the wings who will do all of the bidding of the GOP leaders. It could come sooner than later if one of Trump’s cronies should flip and became a state witness.

Tony