There Is No Lie I'm Too Ashamed to Tell

“Hate has no place in our country.”

In between the rallies and the tweets wherein he provokes precisely that, Donald Trump had the gall to put on his sincere face, stand in front of TV cameras and say this in the wake of another racially-motivated mass killing.

Aside from his base, who is he kidding? The Trump-whore has built his presidency on the exploitation of hate.

If hate didn't have a place in our country, Donald Trump would not be president.

And another thing. I hate to go all caps on you, but for those of you rightly disturbed by the fact that we can be shot anywhere at any time (even if we're a hundred-eighty degrees removed from dealing Oxycontin on dank ghetto street corners), know this:

AS LONG AS THE NRA IS WRITING OUR GUN POLICY THIS IS HOW IT'S GOING TO BE.

Think about it. We not only have a president stoking hatred, but a trade group doing everything in its considerable power to put a gun into the hands of every would-be hater out there. It is, after all, good for business.

For their immediate and formidable ability to wreak domestic terror, I'm more concerned about Donald Trump and the NRA than Kim Jong-un and Iran.

Together they are a duo only Republicans deserve. 

If only Republicans were the only ones to suffer.

Wither the Cubs?

A little over four months ago, I gamely predicted the 2019 Cubs would shrug off the weirdness of 2018 and play to their abilities. They would run, hit, pitch, catch and throw like the World Series contenders they are.

Or more specifically, were.

While the Cubs have largely pulled down the curtain on the one-run-per-game act that plagued them throughout 2018, they own one of baseball's worst batting averages with men on base, which gives their brittle bullpen precious little to work with.

Which is why they are among the league leaders in blown saves.

Several Cub notables (former MVP Kris Bryant among them) are barely hitting their weight with the bases occupied.

Never mind what happens when a left-hander shows up on the mound.

Furthermore, the Cubs' 21-33 road record translates to an anemic .388 winning percentage—the winning percentage attained by the much-feared Florida Marlins. Despite killing them at home (.678), their awful road record sabotages any chance they have of winning the division.

Could the Cubs even split their road games, they'd be sitting pretty in the National League Central—and on their way to 95 wins. But that would be doing it the easy way, and as these Cubs have made clear, doing it the easy way somehow corrupts their sense of Cubbishness.

Hair shirts, anyone?

Granted, the Cubs labor under media scrutiny known only to the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Lakers and Notre Dame and Alabama football programs.

But the 2019 Cubs are punching way below their weight. Top to bottom, they are the most-talented club in the division.

Something is very, very wrong.

Unlike the 1969 team, it hopefully won't take fifty-years to figure out what.

Creeped Out

Recent child sex trafficking charges against billionaire hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein have re-ignited interest in him, as well as his high-flying circle of friends.

Prominent among them is current president Donald J. Trump.

When asked about Epstein in a 2002 New York magazine article, Trump said “He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Is your skin crawling yet?

Questioned about the newly-filed charges against Epstein, Trump said “I don't know about it.” His attorney previously claimed in 2017 that Trump “...had no relationship with Mr. Epstein and no knowledge whatsoever of his conduct.”

Sounds a little defensive to me.You?  I mean, how else would Donald have known how much fun Jeffrey was to be with?

Cynics like myself wouldn't normally question Trump's claim of ignorance, given his general cluelessness about, well, nearly everything. But doing the math on his uncensored comments about women, his behavior and those winking comments about Epstein and you have to wonder.

I certainly hope this isn't the last we've heard about Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

My NBA Free-Agent Afterflow

For whatever reason, NBA free-agents do not want to play for the Chicago Bulls. It can't be the weather, as past signings by the New York Knicks, Boston Celtics, Philadelphia 76ers and Detroit Pistons have shown.

The Brooklyn Nets proved it again last Sunday.

It can't be that the Bulls lack credibility, as the legacy of their Jordan-era dynasty continues to resound across the NBA landscape.

So what is it, then?

My two cents says long-time owner Jerry Reinsdorf continues to be perceived as the guy who let unpopular general manager Jerry Krause break-up the Bulls. While this is a vast over-simplification (there was an abundance of blame to share), it remains a free-agent toxin.

Krause's actions said management is in charge here—not you.

Compounding the damage is the fact that with two hand-picked successors still making player-related decisions, this (wrongly or rightly) screams AND WE HAVEN'T CHANGED A BIT!

With his death and subsequent election to the Hall of Fame, you could say Krause has successfully rehabilitated his image. It isn't so easy for Reinsdorf. In a player's league like the twenty-first century NBA, how does an owner answer the question how could you fire Michael Jordan?

In retrospect, Reinsdorf's biggest mistake was not creating a buffer between Krause and his players. However gifted Krause was at assessing talent, he was a frequently insufferable human being with a cloying need to be one of the guys.

Despite his considerable sway within the organization, this puppy-like need for inclusion made him an easy target. It exploded into outright derision after his universally-misquoted comment about an organization's role in winning championships.

So without a popularly-accepted transformation, the Bulls remain cast as a management-heavy franchise where even a once-in-a-lifetime player like Michael Jordan was kicked to the curb to suit management's desires.

It's not accurate—or fair. But so little in life is.

So the Bulls go it alone. With a hugely-talented core of young (albeit injury-prone) players and another smart pick at number seven in Coby White, the Bulls again appear on the verge of greatness. Even without visits from Kawhi Leonard and Kevin Durant.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't care that the Bulls aren't the favored destination of big-name free agents, a la the Los Angeles Lakers. My fandom would be made immensely more comfortable if the Bulls needed only to clear cap space and wait for favored suitors.

Alas, that isn't a luxury destined to be theirs.

The Bulls have become something of a (cough) square peg. An outlier. An entity that, when confronted with a very public and very unpleasant bruhaha, held fast to the people it knew best and longest.

In other words, Jerry Krause was a longtime employee of Jerry Reinsdorf. Right or wrong, it was very unlikely he was going to throw Krause under the bus to save the skins of Johnny-come-latelys like Phil Jackson and Jordan.

If loyalty is a crime, the Bulls can give you a line-by-line itemization of the sentence.

In their stints as GMs, Jackson and Jordan have shown their criticisms of Krause to be baseless. Indefensible. Comically ignorant. Neither had (or in the case of Jordan, has) a clue.

Karma is a bitch.

And in their clunky, old-fashioned way, the Bulls' M.O. remains firmly rooted in the past. Much as my antiquated, sixties-liberal, greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number politics do.

So yes, I remain a fan.

Even when their free-agent signings amount to Thaddeus Young, Luke Kornet and Tomas Satoransky.

Lacking the sun-kissed glamor of the Lakers, their crosstown rivals the Clippers and the Miami Heat or the mega-market promotional opportunities of the Knicks and Nets, the Bulls possess just one thing: heart.

As the world of sport is increasingly subsumed by the complexities of contract management and the endless search for new revenue streams, that is something.

Why It's Harder to Run As a Democrat

The most-illuminating moment of the first Democratic debate wasn't Kamala Harris' condemnation of Joe Biden's wildly-misunderstood comment about working with segregationists Herman Talmadge and James Eastland, but her response to a moderator's question.

After giving a lengthy explanation of her health care plan, I believe it was Savannah Guthrie who asked Harris how she proposed to pay for it.

Rising to the bait, Harris fired back. She pointedly questioned why no one asked the same of Donald Trump as he was giving away massive amounts of money to the wealthiest portions of our population.

Her reply shed light on a curious phenomenon in present day American politics: Entirely different things are expected of Republicans and Democrats.

Democrats need to bring actual ideas to the table and get buy-in from a bewilderingly diverse electorate. 

Republicans only need to appeal to gun totin' white guys, rich white guys and angry white guys who essentially hate anyone who isn't just like them, be it because of genitalia, country of origin, political belief, sexual orientation or religion.

Republicans need only to bellow louder than the candidate next to them to gain approval. It's a game called How conservative are you?, and the more obnoxious the answer the better.

Aided and abetted by Supreme Court-approved gerrymandering, it's no wonder defectives like Dick Cheney and Donald Trump assumed the presidency. (Oh—you thought George W. Bush was president? Awww. That's cute.) 

For a Republican, acting like the loudest drunk in the bar is a highly-effective campaign strategy.

As he works to undo the damage his feckless trade negotiations with China have wrought and publicly thumbs his nose at concern over Russia's interference in our elections, the Trump-whore tweets.

Yes, besides being the biggest dick in the room, Trump's most consistent personality trait is his Twitter addiction.

As if anyone were interested, Donald weighed-in with his thoughts on the Democratic debate. Among his profundities were “Boring!” and the incredibly ironic “How about taking care of American Citizens (sic) first!?”

Yes, the same guy who engineered the enormous giveaway to the one-percent and its corporations and routinely scales back work place, environmental and economic protections is now worried about American Citizens (sic).

Hmmm. Perhaps the error is ours that we haven't pressed Donald on his definition of Citizens (sic).

So while we tolerate things from Donald Trump even the staunchest of Democrats would have questioned had they originated with Barack Obama, we make Democrats stronger and weaken Republicans when we hold Dems to a higher standard.

Taking the high road inevitably means working at a higher elevation, and as any sentient being understands, the more-challenging the work-out environment the better the results.

We will use that muscle and kick Republican ass in 2020.

Political Science the Square Peg Way

62,985,106. Wow. That's a lot—of anything.

In this case, that would be t-shirts. Yep. T-shirts. The Square Peg is determined to cut through the acrid campaigning already infesting our nation as an election still sixteen months and change away looms like a poisonous, dark cloud.

After months of rigorous scientific research, our staff has determined that the best way to accomplish this is via humor. Mirth. T-shirts.

It is with this in mind that we have placed the largest t-shirt order in history. Too large for any one manufacturer, several firms have stepped up and offered us remarkable volume discounts.

(We would be remiss if we didn't add that without these generous discounts, this project would well nigh be impossible. Especially considering licensing fees, distribution costs, etc.)

OK. On to the project itself.

We aim to distribute over sixty-two million copies of the t-shirt pictured below to each Republican governor, Republican representative, Republican senator and each of the 62,984,828 folk who saw fit to vote for Donald Trump in 2016.

Then we propose to send the shirt pictured below to the current occupant of the White House: 

 

Lots of people think we as a nation need to lighten up. The Square Peg is the blog actually doing something about it.

The Battle of Hong Kong

I love protests. I love the idea of people leaving the comfort of their homes to peacefully congregate en masse to explicitly communicate their displeasure with the prevailing government, its leader or pending legislation.

Petitions are nice. But nothing beats the visceral impact of hundreds of thousands of people clogging the streets. It's the power of we the people, challenging those who frequently work so hard to subdue it.

Sadly, my fellow Americans rarely agree. Probably because they're jaded. Or because protesting is sweaty. And noisy. And inconvenient. I mean, have you ever tried to find a good parking place near a major demonstration?

We mostly congregate on social media, which isn't quite the same. Unless you're trying to disseminate misinformation about things like measles vaccinations. Or attempting to create panic over fake threats like pink slime or a presidential candidate running a pedophile sex ring out of a Washington DC pizza joint.

But in hi-tech Hong Kong, people understand the power of a good, old-fashioned public demonstration. They have successfully employed them twice in the last decade to beat back the oppressive hand of mainland China.

Most-recently, invasive extradition legislation was suspended after mass protests clarified citizen's feelings about China's would-be ability to pluck residents out of Hong Kong and deposit them in China for any reason the government deems appropriate.

Considering this is a government that has attempted to erase any trace of Tiananmen Square, blocks its citizens from accessing vast swaths of the Internet (aided and abetted by Google) and routinely tramples its citizen's human rights, the good people of Hong Kong decided this wasn't such a good idea and took to the streets in opposition.

Chief Executive of Hong Kong Carrie Lam backed down and suspended the offending bill. But suspending is different than cancelling. Translated, it means we'll wait until this cools down and then attempt to push it through again.

The Hong Kong Chinese get it. Which is why they're continuing their protests, demanding that the extradition legislation be ripped-up and thrown away.

Hong Kong occupies a unique place within the Chinese hierarchy.

If China were a car manufacturer, Hong Kong would be its halo car; the car it likes to point to when it wants to show off its design and engineering capabilities. China likes to use Hong Kong as proof of its benign treatment of its citizens. A gesture to the world that says “See? We're not such bad guys.”

But this is essentially public relations. And with increasing evidence that China (like Trump's United States) wants to move forward on a path of strident nationalism, public relations will likely be among the first of its political victims.

I salute the bravery of Hong Kong's citizens, and wish them every success. Tyranny is the weapon of the weak. Dissent the weapon of the strong.

Godspeed, Hong Kong.