Presidents Past, Present, and Future

            It was amusing—if not pathetic—to see presidential hopefuls Corey Booker and Kamala Harris make fools of themselves at the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings last week.

            Booker played Spartacus in his audition for an Academy Award: he was ready to sacrifice his position as United States Senator by breaking senate rules in daring to reveal confidential information that would prove Judge Kavanaugh to be a racist for supporting racial profiling. There were two problems with that. The confidential memo had already been released (and Booker knew it), and the memo showed exactly the opposite of what Booker claimed: Judge Kavanaugh had written in opposition to racial profiling.  But little details like that didn’t prevent the senator from grandstanding.

            Senator Harris, self-appointed prosecutor of anything Trump, tried to trick the judge into admitting he’d had contacts with someone at a law firm regarding Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s collusion with Russia. She hinted she had the goods on the judge. He flatly denied the contacts and called her bluff. She lost—she didn’t have the goods. Even the Los Angeles Times, normally a supporter of the senator, called her performance a miserable failure.

            Do these senators want to be president so badly they are willing to risk ridicule on national TV?

            Speaking of presidents, Barack Obama returned from a distant planet to attack President Trump in a speech at the University of Illinois in which he claimed, among other delusions, that he was responsible for the booming economy, not President Trump’s tax cuts and reversal of Obama’s job-killing regulations. With utter disregard for the facts, Obama shamelessly insisted the economy was already booming while he was in office.

            It has been accepted wisdom that former presidents should not come out of retirement to personally criticize their successors. But then Obama’s speech was not so much about President Trump as it was about himself, a speech in which he used the pronoun “I” no less than 108 times.  Proof that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton suffer from the lack of yet another kind of wisdom: they just don’t know when to go away.