Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times’s Opinion Desk published an op-ed by an anonymous senior official in the Trump administration on Wednesday. This op-ed has caused a firestorm within the Trump administration as it tries to determine who wrote it.  The news media has been covering the story non-stop since it was first published.   The Times announced that as of this morning, there were more than 13.6 million views of this op-ed making it the most read article of the year for the newspaper.  In addition, nearly 23,000 New York Times readers had submitted questions to the Op-Ed editor, James Dao, who has published a small selection of them and his answers.  Below are Dao’s sampling of these questions.

Tony

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Why did you publish this piece?

Why publish this? What purpose does it serve, other than to enrage its target and assuage the guilt of a collaborator? We have a mad king and a shadow government. This is a coup, not a heroic attempt to save democracy.

— Henry Matthews, New York

Henry:

In our view, this Op-Ed offered a significant first-person perspective we haven’t presented to our readers before: that of a conservative explaining why they felt that even if working for the Trump administration meant compromising some principles, it ultimately served the country if they could achieve some of the president’s policy objectives while helping resist some of his worst impulses.

We’ve certainly read excellent news stories that quoted anonymous officials making similar points and criticizing the president’s temperament and chaotic style. What distinguished this essay from those news articles was that it conveyed this point of view in a fleshed-out, personal way, and we felt strongly that the public should have a chance to evaluate it for themselves.

The only way that could happen was for us to publish the essay without a byline. That was an extraordinary step for us, but the piece touched off what we believe to be an important national debate about whether the writer, and similarly situated Trump administration officials, are making the right choice (many of our readers clearly think they are not).

— Jim Dao

How did you find this writer?

Did The New York Times seek out the author of this piece, or did the author seek out The New York Times?

— Norma Buchanan, Billings, Mont.

Norma:

The writer was introduced to us by an intermediary whom we know and trust.

— Jim Dao

How do you vet a piece like this?

How are you certain of the author’s identity?

— Martin Trott, Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Through direct communication with the author, some background checking and the testimony of the trusted intermediary.

— Jim Dao

What does ‘senior administration official’ really mean?

Who qualifies as a “senior administration official” for The New York Times? How many individuals are there in the administration who fit the bill?

— Daniel Burns, Hyattsville, Md.

Daniel:

I understand readers’ frustration that we didn’t provide a more precise description of the official. But we felt strongly that a broader categorization was necessary to protect the author from reprisal, and that concern has been borne out by the president’s reaction to the essay. The term we chose, senior administration official, is used in Washington by both journalists and government officials to describe positions in the upper echelon of an administration, such as the one held by this writer.

— Jim Dao

Would you ever reveal your source?

Under what conditions would The New York Times be forced to disclose the source of the Op-Ed?

— Stephanie Genkin, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Stephanie:

It is difficult to imagine a situation where The Times could be forced to disclose the author’s identity. The First Amendment clearly protects the author’s right to publish an essay criticizing the president, and absolutely nothing in the Op-Ed involves criminal behavior. We intend to do everything in our power to protect the identity of the writer and have great confidence that the government cannot legally force us to reveal it.

— Jim Dao

Were the writer’s motives considered?

Were the motives of the author considered when deciding whether to publish the Op-Ed?

— Samantha Combs, Pensacola, Fla.

Samantha:

Our first step in evaluating any submission is to look at the background of the writer and the quality and significance of the piece itself. But we do also take into consideration a writer’s motives as part of the vetting process.

It can of course be difficult to discern what those motives are, and in this case a combination of motives were undoubtedly in play, including the writer’s desire to defend the integrity of the president’s internal critics.

But we concluded that the author’s principal motivation was to describe, as faithfully as possible, the internal workings of a chaotic and divided administration and to defend the choice to nevertheless work within it. The resulting essay, we believe, is an important piece of opinion journalism.

— Jim Dao

Why now?

Why did you publish it now? At a time when the country should be focused on the Kavanaugh hearings, the outcome of which will affect us for the next 30 years or more, you totally distracted everyone with a guessing game. This administration is placing our democracy in enough danger. Do you really need to play along?

— Paul Birkeland, Seattle

Paul:

The simple answer is that we published when we did because the piece was ready to go and we saw no reason to wait. It certainly was not our intention to start a guessing game or draw the nation’s attention away from the Kavanaugh hearings.

The Op-Ed section considers the Supreme Court nomination to be of the utmost importance and, for that reason, has published numerous Op-Eds and columns about Judge Kavanaugh since he was nominated (including several just this week).

It was always our expectation that even if the Op-Ed created a splash, that the Kavanaugh hearings would remain a focus of media attention. And indeed, though the Op-Ed was the big news on Wednesday and Thursday, the hearings remained front-page news in The Times throughout the week. I should also point out that the actual vote on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination could be more than a week away, leaving plenty of time for additional coverage.

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— Jim Dao

Has this happened before?

You said publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay is a “rare step.” So does it mean that it was not unprecedented? Then what were other times when you made a call to run anonymous Op-Eds? What were your rationales back then?

— Dien Luong, Vietnam

Dien:

It has happened before. Earlier this year, we published an anonymous essay by an asylum seeker whose name we withheld because she was concerned about gang violence against her family in El Salvador. In 2016, we published this Op-Ed by a Syrian refugee in Greece, using her first name only because her family in Syria faced threats. We also published in 2016 an account of the Syrian civil war by a writer in Raqqa using a pen name to protect him from being targeted by the Islamic State.

— Jim Dao

Did you consider the effect this piece might have?

To what extent did The Times consider the effect that publication of the piece would have in bolstering conspiracy theories about the “deep state” or QAnon, etc.?

— James Apps, Berlin

James:

We did not take that into consideration. It is difficult to ever know what reportage might feed into a conspiracy theory. But the essay included a passage that indicates the author suspected the piece might be viewed as part of a “deep state” theory: “This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.”

— Jim Dao

Dear Commons Community,

Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times dispelling the myth that an overindulgence in using technology is contributing to an “epidemic” of teenage anxiety.  His main point is that our brains have molecular and structural brakes that control the degree to which they can be rewired by experience.  Here is an excerpt.

“We hear a lot these days that modern digital technology is rewiring the brains of our teenagers, making them anxious, worried and unable to focus.

Don’t panic; things are really not this dire.

Despite news reports to the contrary, there is little evidence of an epidemic of anxiety disorders in teenagers. This is for the simple reason that the last comprehensive and representative survey of psychiatric disorders among American youth was conducted more than a decade ago, according to Kathleen Ries Merikangas, chief of the Genetic Epidemiology Research Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health.

There are a few surveys reporting increased anxiety in adolescents, but these are based on self-reported measures — from kids or their parents — which tend to overestimate the rates of disorders because they detect mild symptoms, not clinically significant syndromes.

So what’s behind the idea that teenagers are increasingly worried and nervous? One possibility is that these stories are the leading edge of a wave of anxiety disorders that has yet to be captured in epidemiological surveys. Or maybe anxiety rates have risen, but only in the select demographic groups — the privileged ones — that receive a lot of media attention.

But it’s more likely that the epidemic is simply a myth. The more interesting question is why it has been so widely accepted as fact.

One reason, I believe, is that parents have bought into the idea that digital technology — smartphones, video games and the like — are neurobiologically and psychologically toxic. If you believe this, it seems intuitive that the generations growing up with these ubiquitous technologies are destined to suffer from psychological problems. But this dubious notion comes from a handful of studies with serious limitations.”

Friedman’s conclusion:

“It’s good to keep in mind that the advent of new technology typically provokes medical and moral panic. Remember all those warnings that TV would cause brain rot? Never happened. The notion that the brain is a tabula rasa that can be easily transformed by digital technology is, as yet, the stuff of science fiction.

So don’t assume that there’s something wrong with your kid every time he’s anxious or upset. Our teenagers — and their brains — are up to the challenges of modern life.”

Thank you Dr. Friedman for your opinon and insight!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This week we saw hour after hour, day after day the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.  It was pure political theater from both sides of the aisle.  A New York Times editorial this morning summarizes the nomination hearings.  The bottom line is that Kavanaugh is fast and loose with the truth especially regarding critical judicial issues such as Roe v. Wade, affirmative action, and an expansive view of presidential power and impunity. Below is the full editorial.

Tony

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Confirmed: Brett Kavanaugh Can’t Be Trusted

A perfect nominee for a president with no clear relation to the truth.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

Sept. 7, 2018

In a more virtuous world, Judge Brett Kavanaugh would be deeply embarrassed by the manner in which he has arrived at the doorstep of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

He was nominated by a president who undermines daily the nation’s democratic order and mocks the constitutional values that Judge Kavanaugh purports to hold dear.

Now he’s being rammed through his confirmation process with an unprecedented degree of secrecy and partisan maneuvering by Republican senators who, despite their overflowing praise for his legal acumen and sterling credentials, appear terrified for the American people to find out much of anything about him beyond his penchant for coaching girls’ basketball.

Perhaps most concerning, Judge Kavanaugh seems to have trouble remembering certain important facts about his years of service to Republican administrations. More than once this week, he testified in a way that appeared to directly contradict evidence in the record.

For example, he testified that Roe v. Wade is “settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court.” But he said essentially the opposite in a 2003 email leaked to The Times. “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so,” he wrote then.

Judge Kavanaugh’s backers in the Senate brushed this off by pointing out that his 2003 statement was factually correct. They’re right, which means that his testimony this week was both disingenuous and meaningless.

As we’ve learned with each new trickle of previously withheld documents, Judge Kavanaugh didn’t start misleading senators just this week.

At his 2004 confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee, he denied any involvement in the vetting of a controversial judicial nominee while serving as one of President George W. Bush’s White House lawyers. The nominee, William Pryor Jr., had among other things called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.” In fact, Mr. Kavanaugh was more than a little involved, as emails from that period — which Senate Republicans had withheld until early Thursday morning — made clear.

In that 2004 hearing and again in 2006, when he was being considered for a seat on the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., Mr. Kavanaugh told Congress, under oath, that he knew nothing about the extensive theft of secret strategy documents from Democratic senators’ computers by Republican staffers. As it turns out, he did in fact receive those documents or summaries of them. But he now claims that he had no reason to believe that they had been stolen, even though one email he got had the subject line “spying” and began, “I have a friend who is a mole for us on the left.”

Then there are the persistent doubts about his truthfulness in telling senators in 2006 that he had no knowledge of Mr. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program or his detainee treatment policy — claims that have been called into question by yet more emails, which showed he knew about both of those things years before they became public.

As Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois told Judge Kavanaugh on Thursday, “You say that words matter. You claim to be a textualist when you interpret other people’s words, but you don’t want to be held accountable for the plain meaning of your own words.”

Judge Kavanaugh was quick to provide lawyerly explanations for all of these discrepancies, but they paint a pattern that’s hard to ignore: He misstates facts under oath, and Republicans cover for him by making it hard, if not impossible, to get the documents proving it. With the help of the White House and a personal lawyer for Mr. Bush, Senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has subverted a long-established, nonpartisan process and hidden more than 90 percent of the material pertaining to Judge Kavanaugh’s time in government.

It’s only thanks to Senate Democrats and others that we’ve been able to see important pieces of the judge’s lengthy paper trail. There is far more that was never even requested. Far from being embarrassed by all this, Judge Kavanaugh is acting like someone who knows there is virtually nothing he can do to imperil his nomination.

Instead, he’s followed his own cynical advice to a 2002 judicial nominee: “She should not talk about her views on specific policy or legal issues,” he wrote in an email then. “She should say that she has a commitment to follow Supreme Court precedent, that she understands and appreciates the role of a circuit judge, that she will adhere to statutory text, that she has no ideological agenda.”

That is more or less how Judge Kavanaugh got through his hearings. But his ideological agenda is well known, which is precisely why he’s been on Republican Supreme Court shortlists for the last decade. That agenda includes, for starters, a well-established hostility to women’s reproductive rights and a stunningly expansive view of presidential power and impunity.

Republicans defend their steamrollering by saying that most Democrats have already made up their minds to oppose Judge Kavanaugh. That’s rich: In the months before the 2016 election, multiple high-ranking Republican senators openly vowed to block any and all Supreme Court picks by Hillary Clinton, period. It’s also irrelevant. The people deserve to know everything possible about nominees to a lifetime seat on the highest court in the land, and they depend on their senators to seek out that information and share it.

The Constitution calls this process advice and consent. Until the last few years, Republicans claimed to take that responsibility seriously. Now they are making a mockery of what is meant to be a careful and deliberative process by playing three-card monte with the American people. They did the same with last year’s tax bill, rushing it through in the dead of night with virtually no debate or review.

The Republicans engage in this sort of subterfuge for an obvious reason: While they hold unified power in Washington, most of their agenda is hugely unpopular. So they hide as much of it as possible out of a fear that if more of it came to light, they will pay at the polls. Come November, voters can make that fear come true.

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News’ Shepard Smith was interviewing A.B. Stoddard, an associate editor at Real Clear Politics and a regular on the network yesterday about the anonymous op-ed published this week in The New York Times that claimed there were people in the White House actively working against Trump. Her reply was not in keeping with Fox News’s coverage of Trump which is 99 percent favorable.

“I think this writer believes that they’re trying to calm down the country and assure everybody who’s nervous about President Trump’s temperament that all’s well,” Stoddard told Smith.

“What this author has done, though, is sort of encouraged probably more paranoia and more rage on the part of the president,” she added. “He’s going to do something to change the topic, so he’s going to do something probably dramatic to get our focus onto something else. He’s likely to purge the people around him… he tends to like to change news cycles with dramatic actions.”

Stoddard also disputed the op-ed’s claim that “the root of the problem is the president’s amorality.”

“It’s not his amorality, it’s his temperament. He’s impulsive and erratic. He changes his mind quickly. He lies frequently. He’s not judicious. And he’s not measured. And he doesn’t have the temperament for the hardest job on the planet.”

Stoddard said that’s the main concern of those around the president.

“It’s not that he’s amoral,” she continued. “It’s that the way that he conducts himself as commander-in-chief makes everyone scared and that’s why they’re thwarting his agenda.”

Thank you Fox News for being “fair and balanced.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Jeffrey Toobin currently a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and a legal analyst for CNN, has an article entitled How Rudy Giuliani Turned Into Trump’s Clown?  It is a lengthy, highly insightful send-up of Giuliani with regard to his relationship with Donald Trump and his current role as a member of Trump’s legal team in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s  investigation.  Toobin reviews Giuliani’s time as a prosecutor, as mayor, and as the face of America’s response to 9/11.   Toobin is most critical in his analysis of Giuliani’s current position as Trump spokesperson. Here are several excerpts;

“Since joining Trump’s team, Giuliani has greeted every new development as a vindication, even when he’s had to bend and warp the evidence in front of him. Like Trump, he characterizes the Mueller probe as a “witch hunt” and the prosecutors as “thugs.” He has, in effect, become the legal auxiliary to Trump’s Twitter feed, peddling the same chaotic mixture of non sequiturs, exaggerations, half-truths, and falsehoods. Giuliani, like the President, is not seeking converts but comforting the converted.

This has come at considerable cost to his reputation. As a prosecutor, Giuliani was the sheriff of Wall Street and the bane of organized crime. As mayor, he was the law-and-order leader who kicked “squeegee men” off the streets of New York. Now he’s a talking head spouting nonsense on cable news. But this version of Giuliani isn’t new; Trump has merely tapped into tendencies that have been evident all along. Trump learned about law and politics from his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious sidekick to Joseph McCarthy who, as a lawyer in New York, became a legendary brawler and used the media to bash adversaries. In the early months of his Presidency, as Mueller’s investigation was getting under way, Trump is said to have raged, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” In Giuliani, the President has found him….”

“…Giuliani’s animus toward Mueller precipitated what may be his most notorious recent gaffe. He has objected to the interview by saying that the President’s words may conflict with those of other witnesses, leading Mueller to conclude that Trump is lying—what Giuliani calls a “perjury trap.” This is a contrived objection, since any reasonable prosecutor would look at a range of evidence, especially corroborating witnesses and documents. In an August 19th interview on “Meet the Press,” the host, Chuck Todd, asked Giuliani whether a perjury trap could even exist, since a witness who told the truth couldn’t be trapped. Giuliani responded, “When you tell me that he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well, that’s so silly, because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth.”

Todd responded, “Truth is truth.”

“No, it isn’t truth,” Giuliani said. “Truth isn’t truth.”

Giuliani later claimed that he was trying to say that truth can be subjective, especially when there are conflicting versions of events, but at this point his performance suggests that he may not believe the concept of truth is even real….

….The problem for Giuliani is that his loyalty may not be reciprocated. Since Trump became President, his closest advisers have been humiliated (Tillerson, Priebus), disgraced (Sean Spicer, Bannon), prosecuted (Flynn, Rick Gates), or all of the above (Manafort). At one point, I asked Giuliani whether he worried about how this chapter of his life would affect his legacy.

“I don’t care about my legacy,” he told me. “I’ll be dead.”

Giuliani may be a clown but a dangerous one like Tonio in Pagliacci.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was a political news-filled day with the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump lashing out at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the release of sections of Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller agreeing to accept written testimony from Trump on certain matters regarding his investigation.  However, the day belonged to Boston City Council member Ayanna Pressley who beat 10-term incumbent, Michael Capuano  to win the Democratic nomination for Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District, an upset building on the momentum for progressives sparked by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in a New York primary earlier this summer.

Michael Capuano in a gracious concession speech said “Clearly the district wanted a lot of change,” he told supporters after his loss. “I’m sorry that this didn’t work out.”

With no Republican on November’s ballot for the district, Pressley is all but guaranteed to make history as the first black congresswoman from Massachusetts. Pressley, 44, already broke barriers in 2009 when she became the first woman of color elected to the Boston City Council.

Capuano first won his House seat in 1998. The 7th District encompasses most of Boston and much of Cambridge.

Facing an uphill battle against Capuano ― a poll for radio station WBUR showed her trailing him by 13 percentage points a month ago ― Pressley campaigned on the need to change the House’s status quo.

“I’ve been told to wait my turn,” Pressley said at a campaign event earlier this year. “I’ve been called a traitor for challenging an incumbent, told simply this isn’t the way things are done here.”

But, she added, “When the challenges we are confronted with are this big, this deep, and growing, I can’t and I won’t wait my turn.”

Those rallying to her cause included Ocasio-Cortez, the political newcomer thrust into the national spotlight when she upended veteran Rep. Joe Crowley, a House Democratic leader, in New York’s June 26 primary. Fresh from her win, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “Vote her in next, Massachusetts,” referring to Pressley.

Pressley’s campaign had dispatched staffers to aid Ocasio-Cortez’s get-out-the-vote efforts. And Pressley has called the New Yorker “my sister in change.”

As in Ocasio-Cortez’s race, Pressley was a progressive woman of color challenging a white male lawmaker. Unlike Ocasio-Cortez, who was running against a more moderate Democrat in Crowley, Capuano is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus with a solidly left-leaning legislative record. The race focused less on substantive policy differences and more on whether voters wanted a change in the district. 

Pressley hasn’t accepted donations from corporate political action committees in her campaign. Her platform promotes progressive ideas like Medicare-for-all, debt-free college and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Capuano also touted his years-long support for Medicare-for-all. And he positioned himself as fervently anti-Donald Trump ― refusing to attend the president’s inauguration last year, voting twice in support of impeaching him and frequently calling him out on Twitter. He was also well-known for his progressive views on foreign policy

The Boston Globe, the region’s major newspaper, gave Pressley their endorsement.

Congratulations to Ms. Pressley!

Tony

Teacher Demontrations in Seattle

Dear Commons Communites,

While most of us were enjoying the long Labor Day weekend, teacher unions in the Northwest were busily negotiating with school district administrators trying to resolve differences and open schools in time for the new academic year. 

Teachers in Vancouver and Seattle have settled their contracts and will be in their classrooms for the first day of school while teachers in Battle Ground Public Schools, Longview Public Schools, the Hockinson School District, the Ridgefield School District, Evergreen Public Schools and the Washougal School District continue their strike.  As reported by CNN:

“School is expected to resume in Vancouver, Washington on Wednesday after teachers reached a tentative agreement for a new contract, according to a statement on the school district’s website.

The Vancouver Education Association will vote Tuesday on a new contract for teachers, counselors and other education professionals that was agreed upon by their representatives Sunday, Vancouver Public Schools said.

“Unlike other districts that only had to address teacher salaries, VEA and VPS had to negotiate an entire contract,” said VPS Superintendent Steve Webb. “I am grateful to the bargaining teams for working very hard together to come to an agreement. And, I especially want to thank our teachers and staff, parents and community members for their patience and understanding as we completed this difficult process.”

The district, which serves 24,000 students, said details of the agreement would be released after ratification.

Vancouver is one of a number of Washington school districts where educators were on strike last week. The Vancouver school district’s announcement of an agreement follows Friday’s news that teachers in Seattle had also reached a tentative deal to start school September 5 as scheduled in that district.

More than 53,000 students will also begin school Wednesday as they had planned after the Seattle Education Association and Seattle Public Schools reached a tentative deal Friday, the district and the teacher’s union said.

The district did not make public the terms of the agreement but said one of its priorities was educators’ compensation.

“We believe our educators and support staff deserve a competitive, fair salary package and as a district we want to be able to attract and retain the very best educators for our students,” the district said in a statement.

Students in grades 1-12 are expected to begin classes Wednesday, while kindergarteners are scheduled to start September 10.

“Our staff are our heroes,” the district said.

The Seattle deal came a few days after teachers voted to give their union the power to call a strike.

The Seattle Education Association said its members will vote on the deal at a meeting next week — but the tentative deal is enough to start school as scheduled.

Disputes over salaries and benefits for teachers remain unresolved at schools in some other Washington communities.

Teachers strikes are underway at Battle Ground Public Schools, Longview Public Schools, the Hockinson School District, the Ridgefield School District, Evergreen Public Schools and the Washougal School District. The strikes prevented schools there from opening this week as planned.

In Monroe, about 30 miles northeast of Seattle, it’s not clear whether school will start as scheduled on Wednesday. Teachers there rallied this week demanding better pay.

…Strikes in Washington follow a wave of nationwide teacher protests last spring. Educators have demanded higher salaries and better school funding for their students to replace crumbling textbooks and archaic supplies.”

We need to support our teachers and our children’s educations.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As we get ready to celebrate this Labor Day, CNN’s Chris Cuomo provided a message hailing the efforts of workers and laborers who grind it out everyday. They are the heroes – “the grind is the glory.”

Happy Labor Day!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday the nation honored John McCain at a memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C.  Luminaries, former presidents and the family of John McCain remembered the late senator in a grand display of pomp and unity in the nation’s capital. McCain, who died at the age of 81 last Saturday after a lengthy battle with brain cancer, was an iconic figure in US politics. The Arizona Republican leaves behind a storied legacy of serving his country in Congress and in the military as a naval pilot.  Republicans and Democrats came together, set aside their differences and paid homage to McCain.  The speeches, homilies and music touched everyone who was there and watching on television.  God Bless America and the Battle Hymn of the Republic touched patriotic hearts the likes of which we have not seen since 9/11.  Renee Fleming’s rendition of Danny Boy brought tears to the eyes of those assembled including McCain’s wife, Cindy.

However, amid praise for the life and legacy of McCain were frequent lamentations of Washington’s current political climate. The man implicitly referenced in those criticisms, President Donald Trump, was asked not to attend at the late senator’s request.

Of all the speakers, the morning belonged to McCain’s daughter, Meghan, who shared emotional tearfulled remembrances of her father. Her comments also included several pointed and unmistakable references to Trump.

“We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness. The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly..” Meghan McCain said.

“The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great..” was greeted with sustained applause inside the cathedral.

She is following in her father’s footsteps.

Tony