For many years now, Republicans have been calling for someone "not from Washington, not a career politician" to come in and straighten things out. Well, Donald Trump is just that man and his imbecilic incompetence running a presidential campaign illuminates a deeper truth: for all that elected officials are worthy of our scorn, there is indeed a craft to politics, a craft less noticeable in its presence than in its absence. Absence is what we are witnessing now. Or, as one former Cambridge mayor once told me, "People see a politician on the stump and they think to themselves 'That's not that hard. I could do that. I'm better than that bozo.' What they don't realize until they actually try it is, it takes a lot of work to be that bozo."
Meanwhile, the litany of shootings in America continues conjoined with their concomitant deaths ...
- 3 police officers reported shot and killed in Baton Rouge, LA
- 2 people shot and killed in a hospital in Florida
- 2 people shot at while playing Pokemon Go in Florida
- 2 teenagers threatened by gun-toting man in suburban Virginia. The man turned out to be a senior U.S. Navy official, later identified as Karnig Ohannessian