The GOP convention is wrapped up in short order. We think they will adjourn today or tomorrow, but all the big news and messaging is already done.
Candidate Trump is now the official nominee, and appeared bandaged with his running mate, the first Millennial and first former enlisted Marine to be on a major ticket. This will be interesting with messaging all over about his background, the book about it, his admission to Yale, which had been one of the foremost universities in America…and now, at 39-years of age, with a half lifetime remaining, the possibility of changing our collective world.
Or something. So, good and positive news from and about a man who had been a sniper target a few days ago, some mildly surprising news about a young man who had once opposed him in the race for the White House.
And disarray in the party of the incumbent. The swirl of messaging that followed the debate revealed the complicity of several institutions in portraying a truth that wasn’t. So, in addition to party confusion there is institutional re-grouping in the press establishment. Traditional “print” media- newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines- were fading, with Papers of Record like the New York Times and Washington Post struggling to keep their doors open.
Broadcast media was confounded by the medium in which it operates.
Viewers (and listeners, for those in their autos, or walking with their phones outstretched,) could see things plainly that had to be explained as fakes even as they displayed them.
So, all the background streams of information had to be incorporated into the larger and more important messaging. Senator Bob Mendendez has a story that weaves through the legal swirl. He was found guilty on 16 felony charges the other day in his second big trial for corruption. He escaped with an “innocent” verdict on the first one, but now must face a sentence that could amount to 200-years, or around three life-times behind bars.
He says he was not operating as a foreign agent while also serving as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “All a misunderstanding,” he said. In all the other static in the message streams, the narrow majority in the Senate then became a matter of some controversy that dragged in Majority Leader Schumer.
The trial had dragged on for two months, and the Senator was up for re-election. He did not suspend his candidacy, but rather announced he would no longer stand for the party which he had represented for the better part of two decades. He announced he was now an “independent.” That seemed to allay some concerns on the part of Senate Management, but then came the guilty verdict.
There was some laughter about that, since only members of the other party would be subject to righteous calls for resignation from the media machine, still reeling from the disclosure that they are not purveyors of truth but actually just the mouthpiece for those in power.
The Senate Majority leader is now calling for “resignation,” which would leave the governor of New Jersey in the position of naming a relief for the three months until the next election. Phil Murphy is an unusual Republican in that position, so his ability to appoint another one contributes to the controversy. Or maybe it is something different that requires an election and Constitutional law expert to decipher.
But that gets back to the big struggle in which the Chief Executive, both chambers of Congress and future appointees to the Supreme Court are at stake. The President has announced a big new initiative to impose new limits on the court. Those are supposed to include “Amendments,” which can take years even to reach no conclusion, so it appears more theatrical than legal. But still part of the messaging in progress.
Part of that are the downstream consequences of the Supreme Court decision of the “Chevron” deferral doctrine. That is a symptom of a court attempting to deal with technological and social change. This one reverses an earlier intervention which had provided for “expert” interpretation of laws deemed “unclear” by the government charged with enforcing them. That resulted in the out-sourcing of all sorts of profound and expensive decisions by unelected and sometimes partisan civil servants. Now, Congress is charged with fixing itself. It may take a while, and like the overturn of Roe v. Wade, lead to more emotion and controversy about a matter not identified in the founding documents.
Meanwhile, unfolding events, accusations and raw chance, or Acts of God are in play. The Shooting has evolved from the initial shock to a search for the causes and the guilty. So, Let us get this straight: the woman who vowed to transform the Secret Service workforce to 30% female may have been trapped in a resource problem. We do not know if assets who might have prevented the shooting and captured the assailant were diverted elsewhere, and coordination with local law enforcement was insufficient for mission accomplishment. And the revelation of an Iranian plot against Mr. Trump which resulted in a “beefed up” security posture for the Butler appearance that appears to have been anything but meaty is another mystery.
We know, at the moment, that “manning” the interior of a building from which the unmolested shooter took position on the exterior poses the threat may be either a resource or leadership challenge. There apparently were warnings of a possible optical sighting device carried by a young man, who then used a ladder to climb to the top of the building where he was imaged crawling toward a firing position.
This positioning was in progress, by some reports, for as much as a half hour before any shooting. In part of it, the shooter was confronted by a Butler County law enforcement officer, not regular Secret Service. There may be training and coordination issues, since local police may not be fully integrated into Secret Service doctrine and procedures.
Somebody may be held responsible, an unusual occurrence of late, and possibly unfair to the scapegoat for an organizational problem that actually reveals a deeper problem on how our government is now run. Parts of it no longer seem to be working for us, but rather for itself.
So, forgive us for trying to keep it all straight. We are only sure of one thing. It is like to start getting complex, you know?
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com