With all these felons in Trump entourage, it’s ESPN that’s at fault

Years from now, when we look back at this Age of Trump and try to comprehend just how nonsensical the era was, this week has the potential to be the height of ludicrousness.

TRUMP: Evading reality?

Particularly Tuesday, which was the day that former campaign chair Paul Manafort was found guilty of eight criminal offenses, while former attorney Michael Cohen avoided going to trial by pleading guilty to several offenses. Many political observers are going so far as to call it the “worst day” of the Trump presidency.

SO JUST HOW does Donald J. Trump respond to all of this?

He ventures down to West Virginia to speak to the partisans, and engages in a rant against ESPN – the cable television sports channel that winds up accounting for a significant part of one’s cable TV bill.

Specifically, Trump complained about how the channel – which these days has the Monday Night Football national broadcast rights – is refusing to include the playing of the National Anthem as part of the game broadcast. It is ESPN’s way of not drawing attention to those football players who try to protest their causes during the anthem’s playing.

They’re taking the same attitude we used to take back in my police reporter days when it came to writing about crime involving street gangs – we tried to pretend they didn’t exist on the grounds we didn’t want to glorify the gangbangers.

MANAFORT: Eight convictions

TRUMP APPARENTLY WANTS the anthem played, and every protesting football player caught on camera. Perhaps he thinks there can be a “hit list” of sorts against athletes who try to express their thoughts on issues.

ESPN’s attempt to downplay the issue bothers Trump because it is the very phony issue that he’s been trying to play up – largely because it gives him something to complain about rather than have to acknowledge the serious issues confronting our society.

Such as the growing number of Trump-types who are finding themselves in legal trouble and, particularly in the case of Cohen, could find themselves having to testify someday against the “Big” man himself – the one whose many critics deride him as “the big Cheetoh” on account of that ridiculous fake tan he has.

COHEN: Pleaded guilty to avoid trial

Complaining about ESPN and professional football is so much easier than having to acknowledge all the things going wrong on his watch.

NOW I KNOW some are going to want to point out that Manafort actually was not found guilty of many of the charges he faced, as though that works in his favor. The reality, however, is that all it takes is one “guilty” verdict for the “convict” label to apply. I also heard one legal observer explain that in cases where there is potential for a “hung” jury on certain counts, juries can be persuaded to go for the guilty verdict on some issues, and let everything else up in the air.

Which for the prosecutors who are trying to build up a conviction rate, that works well enough. Manafort is going to go into the history books as a corrupt government official just as much as any other political person who wound up being found guilty.

But Trump? He’ll continue to evade responsibility, acting as though it’s irrelevant.

Which will be made possible by the number of Trump supporters determined to believe in him – largely because they like being able to offend the sensibilities of those people who back in 2016 cast their ballots for having a responsible government in place.

HECK, IN WEST Virginia on Tuesday, there were Trump backers engaging in a “Lock her up!” chant – bringing back memories of the ’16 campaign rhetoric of how a “President Trump” would have opponent Hillary Clinton incarcerated.

Trump thinks the problem lies here

Rather ironic they’d chant that on a day when it’s the Trump allies who literally face a stint in the federal Bureau of Prisons.

But I’m also sure the people making the chants don’t have a clue what it was that Manafort or Cohen have done. They probably think that such details are “Boring!” and that paying attention to them is what is wrong with our government these days.

I understand that some people are just lacking in interest, and that they have a right to be that way. But the fact we have such people, and enough of them to elect a chief executive, IS the reason we are in this Age of Trump, and why it will get even uglier before it’s all over.

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What should we think of Byrd in Klan?

It has been a staple of the conservative ideologue attack rhetoric – whenever somebody of the GOP says something incredibly stupid, we get reminded that “Robert Byrd was once in the Ku Klux Klan!”

It is supposed to imply that nobody should assume all the nitwits are of the conservative faction that has become all dominant in the Republican Party. After all, the senator from West Virginia was a southern boy who resisted the trend of his many regional colleagues to shift allegiances to the GOP.

BUT NOW, BYRD is gone, with funeral services held Friday at the Statehouse in Charleston, W. Va. In line with his stature as the longest-serving senator, he got an incumbent president and the previous Democrat to hold that office. Both Barack Obama, the first biracial president whose existence in that post would have been anathema to Byrd when he began his political career, and Bill Clinton even eulogized the man.

Both are getting hit with charges that they’re being hypocritical because of the way they addressed Byrd’s long-ago membership in the Klan.

Obama described Byrd as a man with “a capacity to change, a capacity to learn, a capacity to listen. A capacity to be made more perfect.” Clinton, the boy from Hope, Ark., said that a Klan tie was something that can be found in people who were “country boy(s).”

As Clinton put it, “Maybe he did something he shouldn’t have done. And he spend the rest of his life making it up. And that is what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There certainly are no perfect politicians.”

AN APOLOGIST FOR anyone willing to keep a “D” after his name? Or just a realistic view of what life in our society is about?

Now as I have written, it is not a new disclosure that Byrd was in the Klan back in the days before he became an elected official. Based on his rhetoric and writings from the times, it seems that Byrd was delusional enough to believe the line of thought that the Klan still tries to peddle about itself, but that people today have enough sense to disregard.

That “thought” is that the Klan represented American ideals, because naturally real Americans were white people of a Scottish-Irish ethnic background. Some people still try to peddle that line of thought, although they don’t speak quite so bluntly as what was once considered to be appropriate.

There has never been evidence that Byrd kept Klan ties once he became a federal government official in the 1950s, other than the fact that he was a Southern White Male.

IN A 2005 autobiography, entitled “Robert C. Byrd, child of the Appalachian cornfields,” the senator explained his one-time Klan membership as having occurred because, “I was sorely afflicated with tunnel vision – a jejune and immature outlook – seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions.”

I’m not necessarily trying to defend Byrd for his Klan membership of six decades ago. I do find it reprehensible that he could ever have thought that the white supremacist ideology of the Klan represented what this country ought to strive for.

But I do realize that such attitudes were prevalent, in that there once was a time when anyone who pushed for the idea that anyone not White Anglo-Saxon Protestant could have a legitimate place in our society was somehow regarded as being “communist.”

Then again, maybe we haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think we have. How often do we hear rhetoric these days claiming that Obama is a “socialist” because of his stance on health care reform, immigration or, well actually, just because of his existence?

CHANCES ARE THE people who like to spew this rhetoric are the biological descendants of at least a couple of individuals who once put on a robe and hood and claimed their rants against miscegenation were meant to preserve “American” ideals. They’re definitely the ideological descendants of those people.

Which is why it always struck me that anyone who tried to lambast liberal causes in recent years by exclaiming that “Robert Byrd was once in the Klan!” was doing nothing more than trying to misdirect attention away from their own stupid rants.

On this issue, I’m willing to consider the likelihood that Byrd was a Southerner in character (although not all bigots are from the South), but that his attitudes adapted throughout the years. I base that thought largely on the fact that he managed to get himself re-elected every six years since the 1958 elections.

I am enough of a political realist to know that anyone who mentally was still stuck in 1959 would have at-best become a fringe member of the Senate, and would not have risen to the ranks of majority leader.

WHICH MAKES ME wonder if Obama hit this issue right on the head when he said the Byrd story is one that reflects the ability of people to change.

If anything, the fact that some conservative ideologues will try to characterize Obama’s remarks at the Byrd funeral as “a socialist giving praise to a Klansman” ought to be evidence enough of the nonsensical nature of much of the rhetoric that emanates from the far right.

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What a "shock," I got it right!

It appears late Tuesday that Hillary R. Clinton barely won a majority of the vote in the Democratic presidential primary in Indiana, while opponent Barack Obama took a major victory in North Carolina (dispelling the notion that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright left him as damaged goods, politically).

The figure that caught my attention about the Indiana primary was the exit poll statistic reported by WMAQ-TV that 10 percent of all those Hoosiers who took a Democratic Party ballot were actually Republicans.

Are these people just trying to cause political mischief? Or are they realistic enough to understand that the GOP candidate for president has his own electability problems and that the odds are great that the next president of the United States will be a Democrat?

For what it’s worth, 63 percent of women questioned by exit pollsters said they cast ballots for Hillary, while 92 percent of African-American voters said they voted for Barack.

That means either that the trends of primaries past in other states held true (women for Hillary, blacks for Barack), or that Indiana voters took the advice of the late newspaper columnist Mike Royko and lied to the exit pollsters. In which case, the numbers mean nothing.

But if they mean something, it could be that there is great potential for sore losers among the supporters of whichever candidate does not get the presidential nomination. Obama, during his victory speech in Raleigh, N.C., tried to downplay that possibility, saying, “many of the pundits suggest we have created a divided electorate in our (political) party,… (but) I’m here to tell you I don’t believe it.”

Now, the campaigns move on to West Virginia, where the political pontificators suggest that Clinton is the overwhelming favorite (94.9 percent of the state’s 1.8 million people are white) in the May 13 primary, unless Obama can really pull off a Kennedy-esque miracle.

In the 1960 campaign, it was his victory in West Virginia that first gave evidence that this country might be willing to put aside its prejudices against Catholics and elect one as president.

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