Chicago Sun-Times: All posts by Roger Simon2018-01-25T14:38:00-06:00https://chicago.suntimes.com/authors/roger-simon/rss2018-01-25T14:38:00-06:002019-04-16T07:59:01-05:00SIMON: Does Donald Trump ever lose?
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>The White House will be releasing a legislative framework on immigration Monday. | AP file photo</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>He’s been washed up so many times, you’d think he’d be dripping seaweed by now.</p><p>He’s got more lives than a cat.</p><p>Political bullets bounce off this guy.</p><p>He doesn’t just break the rules, he makes the rules.</p><p>It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Donald Trump!</p><p>Next week he will deliver his first State of the Union address. But it will really be a State of the Trump address.</p><p>And he is not worried. He believes America loves him. Polls don’t scare him. Special prosecutors don’t give him the willies.</p><p>He is Donald Trump, and he never loses.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<blockquote><p>OPINION</p></blockquote>
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<p>Start at the beginning: Major presidential candidates always release their past tax returns. And at the beginning of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump said he would, too.</p><p>But has he? You bet he hasn’t. Why not? Because he’s Donald Trump, that’s why!</p><p>Presidential candidates don’t usually insult racial and ethnic groups. In the case of Trump, however, it is hard to find groups he has not insulted.</p><p>Take his announcement speech. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”</p><p>It is pretty clear Trump enjoys attacking. The New York Times has been keeping track:</p><p>On Jan. 3 of this year, the newspaper published an article headlined: “The 426 People, Places and Things Trump Has Insulted on Twitter.” Arrayed alphabetically, it ranged from ABC News — “Fiction writers!”, “Fake News” — to Mort Zuckerman — “dopey,” “has a major inferiority complex,” “dopey clown.”</p><p>But Trump also attacked John McCain. A Navy pilot during the Vietnam War, McCain was shot down over Hanoi, captured and tortured. He served 5 1/2 years in a prison camp, two of them in solitary confinement.</p><p>Trump, who dodged service in Vietnam through a medical deferment for “bone spurs” (bone spurs that did not keep Trump from skiing), was not impressed with McCain.</p><p>“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured…. I think John McCain’s done very little for the veterans. I’m very disappointed in John McCain.”</p><p>What? Outrageous! Repellent! Disgusting!</p><p>Surely now Trump was through. Before he just had been a creepy goof. But now things would change. Politico’s story on Trump’s McCain attack began, “Donald Trump might finally have crossed the line.”</p><p>But he hadn’t. When it came to Trump, there was no line to cross.</p><p>And this drove the media crazy. The New York Times probably set a modern day record for venom when it wrote of Trump in an editorial on Jan. 12 of this year: “Remember, Mr. Trump is not just racist, ignorant, incompetent and undignified. He’s also a liar.”</p><p>Trump ran on a platform, if anything so rickety could be called that, of being a master negotiator. He could make a deal with anyone. “Deals are my art form,” he wrote in his best-selling book, “The Art of the Deal.”</p><p>So in his first major deal as president — a budget deal that would keep the government running even when it had no budget — Trump failed. There was no deal and very little evidence that Trump cared.</p><p>After all, Trump had other problems to swat away, like the $130,000 deal his people had reached with a porn star to shut up about his affair with her a few months after the birth of his son in 2006.</p><p>And then there was the wall. Remember the wall? Trump was going to build a border wall, and it now looked like it would cost a staggering $21.6 billion or, in Washington terms, one and a half aircraft carriers.</p><p>Master deal maker Trump wanted Congress to vote for the funds to pay for the wall.</p><p>Except, wait. Didn’t Trump promise that Mexico would pay for the wall?</p><p>But Mexico was refusing to pay. Some deal. Some deal maker.</p><p>There are those who say Trump came to power because his opponents did not take him seriously.</p><p>But Hillary Clinton took him seriously.</p><p>“Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different — they are dangerously incoherent,” Clinton said in a June 2016 speech in San Diego. “They’re not really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies…. He is trying to scam America the way he scammed all those people at Trump U.”</p><p>But even though Hillary got more votes than Trump, he slithered into office via the Electoral College.</p><p>Trump’s next deal could be very, very big. He is going to be questioned by a special counsel investigating possible criminal acts committed by members of the Trump administration, including Trump himself.</p><p>“I’m looking forward to it, actually,” Trump said Wednesday.</p><p>So are the rest of us.</p><p>Send letters to: <a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" >letters@suntimes.com</a>.<br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/1/25/18404122/simon-does-donald-trump-ever-loseRoger Simon2017-12-21T15:53:00-06:002019-04-15T17:56:13-05:00ROGER SIMON: The big boys panic, fear doom
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Arnold Schwarzenegger and President Donald Trump |<br> / AFP PHOTO / THOMAS SAMSON AND JEFF KOWALSKY</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>It is a quiet panic, but it is a panic nonetheless.</p><p>It is going on in cities large and small, but especially in megacities like New York and Los Angeles, and power centers like Washington, D.C.</p><p>It is men who are panicking. Important men with important jobs. They are examining how they treated women. Not only last week or last month, but decades ago.</p><p>Did they ever slap a secretary’s behind? Did they pinch an intern? Grope a woman looking for a promotion?</p><p>And how many years do these men have to worry about?</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<p>Ask yourself how many years women have been sexually harassed, assaulted, demeaned and treated unfairly. There’s your answer.</p><p>It used to not matter. This is hard to believe, but true.</p><p>In 2003, actor and body-builder Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to run for governor of California, the nation’s largest state.</p><p>Less than a week before the election — a special election in which the incumbent governor, the widely disliked Gray Davis, had to be recalled before Schwarzenegger could be elected — the Los Angeles Times began printing chillingly and disgustingly detailed accusations by women that Schwarzenegger had groped and improperly touched them.</p><p>His poll numbers dropped.</p><p>So Schwarzenegger called on his powerful friends to do damage control. Just before the election, Jay Leno said in one of his nightly monologues: “You’ve got Arnold, who groped a few women, or Davis, who screwed the whole state.”</p><p>It got a big laugh.</p><p>But Schwarzenegger could be an unbelievably crude guy, especially when it came to violence and women. While promoting “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” he gleefully told Entertainment Weekly: “How many times do you get away with this — to take a woman, grab her upside down, and bury her face in a toilet bowl?”</p><p>How many times should you get away with this? How about none?</p><p>While Schwarzenegger was getting big crowds and big laughs, his accusers had to live shattered lives, lives in which their misery continued long after the physical assaults stopped. “Did he humiliate me?” one told a newspaper. “You bet he did.”</p><p>Before the election, Schwarzenegger issued one of those meaningless blanket apologies. And he later pledged to hire a private investigator to look into the accusations against him.</p><p>[Maybe he was going to hire the same investigator O.J. Simpson was going to employ to find the murderer of his wife and her friend.]</p><p>In any case, Schwarzenegger decided not to hire the shamus. Why should he? The public was on his side. He was an actor and he knew how to act innocent.</p><p>I once asked Schwarzenegger about the role that acting played in his political life. “Franklin Roosevelt once told Orson Welles, ‘We are the two best actors in the country,’ ” I told Schwarzenegger. “Are there things you learned from your acting career that you have used in politics?”</p><p>Schwarzenegger was eager to answer: “In the close-up on the screen people can read your eyes and your honesty and the same is in politics. People look at you — many times they forget the words — but they look at you and they walk away and they say, ‘I believe this guy.’ ”</p><p>Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected to the governorship. People believed this guy. Or else they didn’t care if he was lying or not. Flash forward to 2016.</p><p>This is part of a transcript from a taped interview by Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood” and business mogul Donald Trump, who was running for President of the United States.</p><p>Trump: “Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”</p><p>Bush: “Whatever you want.”</p><p>Trump: “Grab ’em by the p—y. You can do anything.”</p><p>This was the guiding principle of Donald Trump’s life: When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.</p><p>Even though the tape and many, many crude comments Trump made about women, as well as accusations from women, were well known before the election, Trump was elected anyway.</p><p>Today, the public mood has changed. Women are using Twitter and other social media to speak out.</p><p>The list of alleged molesters and abusers of women seems to grow every day. Some men have admitted their crimes and others haven’t. Some have resigned from office. Others have been forced out of cushy jobs.</p><p>Whether this will continue — and I hope it does — is anybody’s guess.</p><p>But there are a lot of panicky men out there. And they are panicky because they know their doom may be only one tweet away.</p><p><i>Send letters to: </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><i>.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/12/21/18317614/simon-the-big-boys-panic-fear-doomRoger Simon2017-11-21T16:28:00-06:002019-04-16T08:17:58-05:00Roger Simon: What's to be done when every real scandal in America becomes a joke?
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Al Franken and David Letterman helped raise campaign cash for Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., back in 2015.</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>I couldn’t find anything to watch on TV Monday night, so I ended up viewing one of the weirdest shows in the history of PBS.</p><p>It was the “Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.” Shows like this are usually agonizingly unwatchable, but this one had potential.</p><p>This is not a great time to be honoring humorists in America. The first problem is finding one who has not committed sexual assault.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<p>This year’s Mark Twain prize was given to David Letterman, which is pretty funny in itself, since Letterman was forced to announce on air in 2009 that he had had sex with several female employees, which was news to his wife.</p><p>So how do you deflect attention away from that? Hey, how about booking Al Franken for the show? Which PBS did.</p><p>The show was taped in October, before Franken’s unwanted groping and kissing became news. As soon as it did, Franken was edited out of the show that was broadcast on Monday. Only at the very end did sharp-eyed viewers see Franken mingling on stage with the other performers.</p><p>I think what Franken did was stupid and terrible, but nobody has quite figured out what the punishment should be. (There could be a Hallmark card that says: “I thought you were my friend until you turned out to be a monster!”)</p><p>We’ve got quite a range of miscreants to choose among, from Louis C.K. to Charlie Rose to Glenn Thrush to Jeffrey Tambor to Kevin Spacey, to Michael Oreskes to Mark Halperin, to Leon Wieseltier to Harvey Weinstein.</p><p>Take Letterman himself. As the longest serving late night host in history, he became an industry giant. He is the winner of oodles of Emmys, a Peabody Award, a sponsor of the $21 million David Letterman Communication and Media Building at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., and — oh, yeah — the lover of several young women on his show. He apologized to his wife and his staff in October 2009 and said: “I do terrible things” and called what he did “creepy.”</p><p>Letterman did not get fired. And, in fact, he was the object of much sympathy, especially since one of his affairs became the subject of a failed blackmail attempt, in which the blackmailer went to prison after Letterman testified before a grand jury.</p><p>Years later, Letterman retired with dignity, got the coveted Mark Twain Award, and did not raise a fuss when Al Franken got cut from the show.</p><p>In September, before allegations of sexual misconduct became public, Franken sat down with John Harwood of CNBC. Franken was in the midst of a national book tour and was beginning the long run-up to a possible presidential candidacy in 2020.</p><p>Harwood: “Let me ask you about Trump in particular. You allude in the book a couple of times to the idea that there may be something wrong with him.”</p><p>Franken: “I’m not a psychiatrist, but I do think that his actions have been well outside the norm for a president and, in many ways, for a human being.”</p><p>Harwood: “We’ve got a celebrity-driven culture. And people are very used to back-and-forth between politicians. And I wonder if you think that humor provides a different dimension to that that would be valuable either for you or for somebody else running for president?”</p><p>Franken: “Yeah. I think a sense of humor is great in life. I think that and I’ll tell you, you know, I’m funny. And I’ve bonded with, especially, all my colleagues.”</p><p>Harwood: “So, it’s valuable.”</p><p>Franken: “Yeah, it’s valuable. Your life would be better if you got a sense of humor, John.”</p><p>Harwood: “I’m working on it.”</p><p>We are, indeed, a celebrity-driven culture, which is why, before his first election as governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, can be accused in grisly detail of assaulting 15 women and still win the race.</p><p>And why Donald Trump, a professional performer, can admit on tape to physically forcing himself on women and still win the presidency.</p><p>And why nobody should underestimate the chances of Roy Moore to win the Senate seat in Alabama as he performs on the stage of public opinion there.</p><p>And keep in mind that everything in America can be made into a joke.</p><p>Nobody had done more devastating comedy on Moore than Stephen Colbert. But sometimes you have to wonder if it is hurting Moore or helping him.</p><p>Colbert quoted Moore recently as saying: “I don’t go on dates with anyone without the permission of her mother.”</p><p>“Wait a minute,” said Colbert. “She’s a 14-year-old girl, not a field trip!”</p><p>Funny stuff? Or a sad commentary on American politics?</p><p>Then there is this quotation by Mark Twain that was cited by Letterman on Monday at the end of his tribute: “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”</p><p>Is anybody laughing?</p><p><i>Send letters to: </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><i>.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/11/21/18406420/simon-in-our-celebrity-driven-culture-don-t-count-out-roy-mooreRoger Simon2017-10-19T20:51:00-05:002019-04-15T23:28:55-05:00SIMON: Who thinks late night comedy is still about fun?
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>As American politics have become more contentious, Jimmy Fallon has struggled to catch up with an edgier approach to comedy. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Hand in Hand/Getty Images) </p></figcaption></div>
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<p>“Life is too important to be taken seriously,” Oscar Wilde said. Which is why late night TV was invented.</p><p>After a hard day, after watching the crisis-packed local news reprise the disaster-filled national news, it was time to kick back a little. Hear a joke or two. Watch an interview with a movie star or a sports celebrity. And then fall asleep in your La-Z-Boy.</p><p>The host was generally funny and generally amiable: Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno. And then there was Jimmy Fallon. He was a new-wave host. He could play instruments, sing, dance and do impressions. But he wasn’t too different. He was still generally funny and generally amiable.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<p>His politics were not easily discernible, which was also a late-night tradition. He appeared to be somewhere in the middle. He wasn’t interested in eviscerating anybody.</p><p>Which is why he got in so much trouble.</p><p>“We live in an era now where if you don’t take sides, both sides hate you,” Jay Leno told the New York Times. When Leno was doing late night TV, the times were simpler. “Bush was dumb, and Clinton was horny,” Leno said. It wasn’t all that vicious. It was just television.</p><p>And then Donald Trump came along. And he was as serious as the plague. Mexicans? Wall them out. Muslims? Deny them visas. Waterboarding? “I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.” He believed that Arab-Americans cheered on 9/11, Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and climate change is a hoax.</p><p>He groped women and “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by [their genitals]. You can do anything.”</p><p>And so what was a comedian to do with a piece of work like that? A piece of work that quickly began winning primaries and then the Republican nomination and then the presidency.</p><p>Here’s what a comedian does about that. If you’re Jimmy Fallon you make jokes like this one: “Donald Trump was recently being interviewed, and said that he’s not a fan of the man bun trend, and wouldn’t want to wear his hair that way. You know it’s bad when even Donald Trump is like, ‘I’m not putting that on my head.’”</p><p>Maybe it makes you want to chuckle. Trump and his hair was not exactly breaking new ground, but late night was not a new-ground kind of place.</p><p>Until Donald Trump came along and the wolf pack smelled fresh meat. Stephen Colbert, pretending to address Trump, said: “Sir, you attract more skinheads than free Rogaine. You have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a sign language gorilla that got hit in the head. In fact the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c— holster.”</p><p>Very tough stuff. The kind of stuff that made people reach for their iPhones and text: “R u watchen Colbert?”</p><p>And even when Colbert was milder, he wasn’t very mild. “Is it possible that we’ve all been groped by <a class="Link" href="https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/?fref=mentions" target="_blank" >Donald J. Trump</a>, but just didn’t feel it because his tiny baby hands?” Colbert tweeted.</p><p>Still, Fallon was doing fine. Until the roof fell in. He booked Trump, and Fallon, because he was Fallon, thought the highlight would be asking if he could mess up Trump’s hair.</p><p>Trump said “go ahead,” and Fallon messed up his hair. The audience roared, and it made Trump look like a regular guy. Which he is not. And even if he were, it’s no longer the role of late-night comics to play nice with politicians.</p><p>“Yes, Trump is unstoppable,” Colbert said. “He’s like Godzilla with less foreign policy experience.”</p><p>Colbert got it. Fallon had come from the milder world of “Saturday Night Live” and Colbert had come from the mean streets of cable TV. Fallon had no politics, and Colbert had enough politics for both of them. And Colbert started beating Fallon in the ratings.</p><p>Vanity Fair wrote: “As [Seth] Meyers put it, both Jon Stewart’s ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ changed the TV landscape in the mid-aughts by proving that ‘audiences did like hearing what a host’s point of view is.’”</p><p>Fallon was devastated as the wolf pack turned on him. Sonia Saraiya of Variety wrote: “Who wouldn’t Fallon interview with such fawning, giggly acceptance? Where would he draw the line? How long will it take before American audiences lose all their faith in him, as an honest person they can watch every night?”</p><p>Fallon said of the hair mussing’s aftermath: “I was devastated. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just trying to have fun.”</p><p>Fun? Where did he get the idea that comedy was still about fun?</p><p>Will Rogers once said: “Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.”</p><p>Works for me.</p><p><i>Send letters to: </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><i>.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/10/19/18349634/simon-who-thinks-late-night-comedy-is-still-about-funRoger Simon2017-09-28T14:42:00-05:002019-04-16T04:32:12-05:00ROGER SIMON: Hefner spent a lifetime looking for the girl next door
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Hugh Hefner in 1977. (AP Photo/George Brich)</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>It is about 2 in the afternoon at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, and Hugh Hefner is still in his pajamas for the very good reason that Hugh Hefner is always still in his pajamas.</p><p>He grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Chicago at a time when the nearby suburbs were mostly prairie and he never abandoned the simple dreams of his adolescence: He would wake up late, he would wear his pj’s and his bathrobe all day, he would drink Pepsis whenever he wanted to, and he would sleep with a lot of very beautiful women.</p><p>Go sue him.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<p>He is a down-home, likeable and, in a sense, very ordinary person. In a different era, “playboys” were international jet-setters. They dated screen stars, played polo, drove race cars, skied, sailed yachts, and were a regular features at the parties of the rich and famous.</p><p>Hef likes to stay home. He has always liked to stay home. True, once he became rich, he made sure his homes were magnificent.</p><p>The one in Los Angeles is a Gothic-Tudor castle on six acres. He donated the original Playboy Mansion on Chicago’s near north side to the Art Institute for a dormitory when he abandoned the Midwest for the West Coast. But once inside his home, wherever it is, he doesn’t really like to go out much.</p><p>The Chicago mansion was famous for the bar downstairs, which had portholes cut into one wall so you could see topless bunnies in the pool swim by. “This looks like a tacky Polynesian restaurant,” Hefner said.</p><p>In the era before VCRs and DVDs, he had a giant, professional movie projector set up in his Chicago mansion and when the movies were done playing in the Loop each night, a projectionist would come up to his house and play them for him and his friends.</p><p>He once showed me a room in the mansion filled with electronic equipment, TV monitors and huge tape decks. “I can tape things right off the television and then play them back whenever I want,” he said with the glee of a six-year-old who had gotten his first electric train set. Hefner’s taping set-up, which was way ahead of its time, cost him tens of thousands of dollars. In a few years, you could buy a VCR for a fraction of that. But Hefner didn’t like to wait for his pleasures.</p><p>He almost never dated anybody famous — though a few became at least semi-famous after they dated him — and he didn’t race cars or sail yachts or ski. He bought an enormous passenger jet and painted it black except for the famous white bunny logo on the tail, but he hardly ever flew it anywhere except between Chicago and Los Angeles, where he taped a TV show called “Playboy After Dark.”</p><p>“That’s the reason that I got the Big Bunny, the black DC-9, the coolest private jet ever,” Hefner once told a reporter. “Like a flying apartment.”</p><p>Like a flying apartment. So he would never have to leave home.</p><p>When I went to Los Angeles to do political stories, I would try to stop by the mansion and talk to Hefner. When I dropped by in 1988, he was watching an episode of “Murder, She Wrote” on his VCR, but he stopped the tape long enough for an interview.</p><p>I asked him when he began to really attract women and his answer was so frank, I had to laugh.</p><p>“I had a dramatic change with women as soon as I started the magazine and I started dating the Playmates,” he said. “By the ’60s, I was wealthy. Bunnies were living in the house. I was a celebrity. And I realized that what I was as a senior in high school was a dress rehearsal for my later life.”</p><p>He was a very big deal in high school. Student council. Good dancer. Popular. And then life seemed to go down hill. Because as a senior he was a boy in love.</p><p>“That summer I fell head over heels for a girl,” he said. “She was a jitterbugger, a bobby soxer. I learned to jitterbug with her. But she wanted me as a friend, not a boyfriend. The girl I really wanted wasn’t interested in me.”</p><p>The rest of his life became a search for that girl. Not a flashy screen siren. Not some famous rock star. Just the girl next door. Which is what his magazine was all about. (Assuming the girl next door was willing to take off her clothes in front of a photographer.)</p><p>Hefner hung out with the poorest kids on his block. He got into schoolyard fights defending Franklin Roosevelt. And he was ostracized in the Army during World War II for befriending Jewish soldiers.</p><p>After the University of Illinois, Hefner got married. It was the thing you did almost automatically back then. But it ended after 10 years. He did not marry again until 30 years later, after he began the magazine and had women running all over the mansion and was a celebrity.</p><p>His marriage to Kimberley Conrad, Miss January 1988, lasted 21 years, though there was an 11-year separation, Hef wanting to stay married for the sake of the couple’s two young children. (He also has two children from his first marriage.)</p><p>Hefner got divorced in March of 2010 and on Christmas Eve he got engaged to Crystal Harris, 23, Miss December 2009.</p><p>The media focused on the large age difference between the two – – he was 60 when she was born – – but few stopped to consider what to me was much more significant: Why does Hefner still bother with marriage? To many, especially celebrities, it has become a highly dispensable ceremony.</p><p>But not to Hef. Not to the boy who falls “head over heels.” He has found his girl next door once again, and like the boys of times gone by, he did the right thing by her when they married.</p><p>He sold the mansion in 2016 for $100 million under the condition he could continue to live and work there. He died there Wednesday at age 91.</p><p>He once tried to explain his life to me. “If you don’t commit, you don’t get hurt,” he said very sadly.</p><p>But you have committed. And you are committed now, I said.</p><p>“I am willing to risk it,” he said. “I am willing to be vulnerable. I can put the pompous part of my life, all the masks I used to wear, all the games I used to play, behind me.</p><p>“I am about to write a Third Act to my life no longer troubled by demons. And I am going to make this the most precious part of my life.”</p><p>I asked the man who had written the complex (and seemingly endless) Playboy Philosophy to sum up what it all meant.</p><p>“What this world needs is more hugging and less hurting,” Hugh Hefner said.</p><p>I don’t think he ever really was looking for sex. Sex was just a substitute. He was looking for love. He was not looking for a lot of women; he was looking for just one. One he could love and who would love him in return. He was looking to make all his dreams come true.</p><p>And how very corny, how very all-American, can you get?</p><p><i>Send letters to: </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><i>.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/9/28/18380841/roger-simon-hefner-spent-a-lifetime-looking-for-the-girl-next-doorRoger Simon2017-09-14T17:39:00-05:002019-04-16T03:16:00-05:00SIMON: My South Shore High School, then and now
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<p>Everyone looked swell at South Shore High School’s 50th reunion held last weekend nowhere near South Shore High School.</p><p>Some 75 of us trooped to Gino’s East, just off North Michigan, and talked about what you would expect: Donald Trump and hip replacements.</p><p>The deep dish pizza — Chicago’s idea of health food — was very good. When we were students at South Shore, on weekends we would drive downtown to get it. (Though Due’s was our fitness center of choice.)</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<p>We would drive up Lake Shore Drive, one car abreast in each lane, so nobody behind us could get around us. Then we would drive slower and slower until everybody was forced to creep at 5 miles per hour. They would honk and shout foul things at us.</p><p>Laugh, I thought I’d die. And if you think that was fun (and you probably don’t), there was mooning.</p><p>Mooning was when a passenger would stick his bare butt out of the window. If all four windows were filled with bare butts, it was called a Star Cluster. (Do not try this at home. We were experts.)</p><p>Forgive me if I wallow in memories that are a half-century old. John Banville, whom I consider one of the greatest writers in the English language, once wrote: “The past beats inside me like a second heart.”</p><p>The past beats like second hearts inside all of us who went to South Shore. And that’s because all we have is the past. Our South Shore is gone. Discussing it is fraught with controversy. When we went to South Shore High, it was overwhelmingly white and solidly middle class.</p><p>Today, South Shore is overwhelmingly black and economically struggling.</p><p>I took the statistics of South Shore’s ZIP code, which pretty much match up with the entire South Shore neighborhood, and found this:</p><p>The median household income in America is $51,939 a year. In South Shore it is $26,797.</p><p>The unemployment rate in America is 4.3 percent. In South Shore it is 21.3 percent.</p><p>The poverty rate in America is 13.5 percent. In South Shore it is 33.8 percent.</p><p>This creates problems we didn’t imagine when I went to high school. In the South Shore High of 1966 there were a few really wealthy kids, a few kids from families that were pretty close to working poor, and most kids in the middle.</p><p>But I didn’t know any kids who were homeless.</p><p>Today, there are homeless kids not only at South Shore, but throughout the school system. The numbers are in dispute. In the 2013-2014 school year, the public school system said the number of homeless kids was 5 percent of school enrollment.</p><p>That sounds pretty low. (And one teachers union exec told me the rate at South Shore was 20-25 percent.) But if the 5 percent rate is the same today, that would mean more than 19,000 public school students in Chicago are homeless.</p><p>Some are living “doubled-up in the homes of others, often in overcrowded and tenuous conditions,” according to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Others live in shelters. But when I checked the Chicago Public Schools website, it said some homeless school kids lived “in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations or similar settings.”</p><p>Public spaces? Does that mean homeless kids go down to Millennium Park at night and sleep under the Bean?</p><p>Why are there any homeless kids? Why couldn’t Chicago just open the schools at night and let the homeless kids sleep there?</p><p>Nah, makes too much sense.</p><p>I gave a speech at the reunion — the most dangerous place in America is between me and a microphone — and what happened after I talked about homelessness in the school system?</p><p>Did the alums keep chomping their pizza and swilling their beers? Well, yes. But some of them also, on the spot, formed an ad hoc committee to investigate homelessness in South Shore schools and see what can be done about it.</p><p>We may not be the Greatest Generation, but the Children of the Sixties did more than do drugs and each other.</p><p>Today, we would be called bleeding hearts. But that’s better than having no heart at all.</p><p>Some of us have retired or are planning to, and naturally we are trying to decide whether we have achieved anything in the years since we graduated.</p><p>I say we should be easy on ourselves. In the words of Woody Allen: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.”</p><p><i>Send letters to: </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><i>.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/9/14/18372685/simon-my-south-shore-high-school-then-and-nowRoger Simon2017-08-16T16:29:28-05:002019-04-15T18:12:48-05:00ROGER SIMON: The devil and Donald Trump
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>President Donald Trump speaks to the media in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>Our president dances with the devil. He has always done so.</p><p>Trump did not hide his dance. He whirled around the floor, stomping and baying with abandon.</p><p>But some are finally waking up to it. Some have stopped averting their eyes. Others, not so much.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<p>First Read, the morning news aggregator published by NBC Universal, said Wednesday morning: “Trump loses his moral authority after boosting white nationalists: All modern American presidents can use, abuse or lose their moral authority. But just more than 200 days in office, President Donald Trump lost that moral authority — maybe for good — after legitimizing last weekend’s white nationalist protest in Charlottesville in his remarks Tuesday.”</p><p>Trump lost his moral authority? When did he have it?</p><p>When he was saying during the campaign that Mexicans were rapists? That POWs were cowards? That the disabled should be objects of ridicule? That some women should be called “fat,” “disgusting” and “ugly”? That Muslims should be kept out of America?</p><p>Where was his moral authority when he said in that infamous “Access Hollywood” taping: “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. Grab them by the [genitals]!” he howled. “You can do anything!”</p><p>You can do anything when you’re a star. That is the “moral authority” of Donald Trump. (I must say here that First Read is almost always an excellent, even indispensable, publication. I think the devil just slipped in one night and changed the type.)</p><p>It is normal to look for the good in all people. Trump just makes it very difficult to find.</p><p>One of his former goons, Anthony Scaramucci, went on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Monday and said of Trump: “He did condemn the Nazis today.”</p><p>“Two days later!” Colbert shot back. “Does he order his spine from Amazon Prime?”</p><p>On Tuesday after Trump equated the two sides in Charlottesville, David Duke embraced him: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists…”</p><p>Did Trump renounce Duke’s support? No.</p><p>The Southern Poverty Law Center refers to Duke as the “most recognizable figure of the American radical right, a neo-Nazi, longtime Klan leader and now international spokesman for Holocaust denial.”</p><p>During the campaign, Trump denied knowing anything about David Duke. But in fact, on Nov. 19, 1991, on Larry King’s show, Trump analyzed the upcoming presidential race and said, “… if David Duke runs, David Duke is going to get a lot of votes. Whether that be good or bad, David Duke is going to get a lot of votes.”</p><p>Whether that be good or bad? Trump did not know which. Was his moral authority on sleep mode that day? Or maybe he was too busy doing the samba with Satan.</p><p>It is said that the devil’s cleverest wile is to convince us that he does not exist.</p><p>So Trump muddies the waters about what happened in Charlottesville. There was evil on “many sides” and badness on “both sides,” he says.</p><p>These are not the words we would wish from the leader of a great nation. Winston Churchill once said: “I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.”</p><p>But we do not need such eloquence and wit. A mere expression of morality will do.</p><p>“‘Both sides’ did not carry Nazi flags, drive a vehicle into innocent people or bring hatred to the streets of VA. There is no ‘both sides,’” Debbie Dingell, a Democratic congresswoman from Michigan, tweeted Tuesday.</p><p>A few minutes before that, her husband, John Dingell, a former congressman, had tweeted: “If you refuse to denounce these animals, you stand with them. If your elected officials won’t call this what it is, they are unfit to serve.”</p><p>John Dingell had a little perspective on what evil can do when good people fail to stand up to it early and often.</p><p>On Saturday, he had Tweeted: “I signed up to fight Nazis 73 years ago and I’ll do it again if I have to. Hatred, bigotry, & fascism should have no place in this country.”</p><p>Perhaps Michael Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, put it best. He went on NBC News Sunday and said: “When you dance with the devil, the devil doesn’t change. The devil changes you.”</p><p>Send letters to: <a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" >letters@suntimes.com</a>.<br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/8/16/18319147/roger-simon-the-devil-and-donald-trumpRoger Simon2017-07-13T16:56:00-05:002019-04-16T02:42:59-05:00ROGER SIMON: Trump's grand presidential performance
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks Feb. 1 after finishing second in the Iowa Caucus, in West Des Moines, Iowa. | JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>It was in Sioux Center, Iowa, on Jan. 23, 2016, just nine days before the Iowa caucuses that Donald Trump delivered what became one of his most memorable lines.</p><p>He was at Dordt College, a Christian liberal arts school, where a young, enthusiastic crowd sat patiently staring at a large stage that was bare except for a lectern, three American flags and three Iowa flags.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<p>Trump walked out, the crowd rose to its feet clapping and shouting, and Trump opened his arms wide and did a little pantomime of: “Me? Your applause is for me?”</p><p>“They say I have the most loyal people. Did you see that?” Trump asked the crowd. “Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”</p><p>The crowd ate it up and on his way to the next stop, Trump tweeted: “Just left Sioux Center, Iowa. My speech was very well received. Truly great people! Packed house — overflow.”</p><p>He doesn’t mention the “shoot somebody” line, but he doesn’t need to. The internet is already alight with it, as the national news soon will be.</p><p>Throughout the day, tweeters mulled the deeper meaning of Trump’s words. Some would say Trump was admitting that his followers were sheep-like. He could commit a heinous crime and they wouldn’t blink.</p><p>Others thought Trump was bragging that his core was rock solid. And even though Sen. Ted Cruz would edge Trump in the Iowa caucuses, it would not matter.</p><p>And still others complained it was an inappropriate time in American history to talk about shooting people. A few months later, in May, in midtown Manhattan, a “disheveled and agitated man” would grapple with a police officer, produce a knife and be shot dead.</p><p>The New York Times noted an interesting phenomenon: The shooting scene “quickly turned into a public spectacle” with diners deserting their coffee and croissants at a nearby cafe, Pigalle, “and going out onto the street to see what had happened.”</p><p>People weren’t running from the shots — the police had fired off nine of them, hitting a passerby as well as the agitated man — but were rushing toward them. Everything in America was treated like a performance.</p><p>And Donald Trump was very good at performance.</p><p>His general election opponent, Hillary Clinton, was not so good at performing, but was plenty good enough. And Trump was genuinely worried about becoming a loser.</p><p>There was also something eating away at Trump’s gut: He truly believed the election was being “rigged” in Hillary’s favor. It was a word he used time and again.</p><p>His website had a “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” page. And Trump believed the House speaker, Paul Ryan, a Republican, was secretly for Hillary because he wanted to run for president himself in 2020.</p><p>Trump worried that his core supporters, those who would walk through fire for him, were not plentiful enough for him to win. He needed to attract others, but Hillary and her husband were plotting every day on how to steal the election from him.</p><p>When the FBI director recommended she not be prosecuted for the use of her private email server, Trump went nuts.</p><p>And a familiar image returned to his speeches. At a rally in Pensacola, Florida, on Sept. 9, 2016, Trump said: “[S]he could walk into this arena right now and shoot somebody with 20,000 people watching right smack in the middle of the heart and she wouldn’t be prosecuted, OK?”</p><p>At a campaign rally in Nevada in February, Trump had repeated his claim that he could get away with anything because his people were so loyal. “Even the really dishonest press says Trump’s people are the most incredible,” he said. “Sixty-eight percent would not leave under any circumstances. I think that means murder. I think it means anything.”</p><p>Anything? Did it mean his people could collude with Russian agents to defeat Hillary Clinton? If he could get away with murder, he could get away with a little collusion, couldn’t he?</p><p>In Toledo, Ohio, 12 days before the election, Trump’s mood was one of ebullient confidence. “We should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump, right?” he said. “What are we even having it for? What are we having it for? So when we win, we are going to Washington, D.C., and we are going to drain the swamp!”</p><p>He did win — with the help of the Electoral College — but has he started to drain the swamp? Or is he just changing the cast of swamp creatures?</p><p>On Wednesday, at a confirmation hearing for Trump’s nominee for FBI director — Trump had fired the guy who didn’t want to prosecute Hillary — Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said: “The FBI director does not serve the president. He serves the Constitution, the law and the American people.”</p><p>And maybe I was imagining it, but down at the White House, I thought I heard the sound of laughter.</p><p><i>Send letters to: </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/7/13/18369264/roger-simon-trump-s-grand-presidential-performanceRoger Simon2017-06-14T17:58:00-05:002019-04-15T18:25:45-05:00Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III champions a lost cause — Trump
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Attorney General Jeff Sessions testifies Tuesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about his role in the firing of James Comey, his Russian contacts during the campaign and his decision to recuse from an investigation into possible ties between Moscow and associates of President Donald Trump. | Alex Brandon/AP</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>Getting shot is no big deal in America. About 309 people get shot every day in this country, and most get little attention from the media.</p><p>Unless they happen to be a member of Congress. And wearing a bright red baseball uniform with the word “Republican” in big, flowing white letters on the front.</p><p>In that case, getting shot becomes a very big deal. Big enough to make the president of the United States drop his cellphone long enough to go on live TV and promise that “the entire world” was praying for the congressman and others who had been shot Wednesday in Arlington, Virginia.</p><p>It saddens me to say I kinda doubt it. We are the 50th deadliest country in the world out of 163. Syria is the most deadly and Iceland the least.</p><p>But don’t worry. We have more than 900,000 full-time police officers to protect us. They rank from the humble but essential neighborhood cop to our chief law enforcement officer, the attorney general of the United States.</p><p>And if you really believe the attorney general of the United States is out there trying to save you, I would suggest you move to Reykjavik.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<p>Our current attorney general has a name so deliciously bellicose, I am surprised he does not use it. The full name of our current attorney general is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.</p><p>The name alone is enough to make you envision a man on a white steed, gleaming sword in hand, and plumed hat on his head.</p><p>Sessions’ name, handed down from grandfather to father to him, pays tribute to Jefferson Davis, the first (and happily last) president of the Confederate States of America, and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, born Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, who began the Civil War by shelling Fort Sumter.</p><p>Jeff Sessions is, therefore, named for two champions of lost causes, which is why he may have agreed to be Trump’s attorney general, or, as he is known around Washington, Trump’s first attorney general.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<blockquote><p>Related coverage: Editorial: Jeff Sessions puts his president before his duty Lynn Sweet column: Sessions: No collusion, no stonewalling, no recall</p></blockquote>
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<p>I don’t know many people who think he will last out Trump’s first term. Then again, I don’t know of any people who think Trump will last out Trump’s first term.</p><p>A small man with Kewpie doll cheeks and flyaway ears, Sessions testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, during which he blustered and whined and often pleaded ignorance. That last one was easy to believe.</p><p>“I’m not used to answering so fast,” he groused when Sen. Kamala Harris fired questions at him. “It makes me nervous.”</p><p>Considering how many Democrats think Sessions lied under oath, that is the last thing he has to be nervous about.</p><p>But he was trying to be scrupulous in his answers, even when the questions barely warranted it.</p><p>Sen. Tom Cotton: “Do you like James Bond or Bourne movies?”</p><p>Sessions: “No.” (Pause. Embarrassed grin.) “Yes.”</p><p>Which pretty much covers it. Except for “maybe.” And “sometimes.”</p><p>With such hard-hitting questions, it was difficult to keep in mind the chief reasons for the hearing: To determine if any secret Russian agent colluded with any member of the Trump campaign to damage Hillary Clinton and boost Trump to victory in the 2016 election.</p><p>A little after 90 minutes into the hearing, Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, got down to it.</p><p>KING: Do you believe the Russians interfered with the 2016 elections?</p><p>SESSIONS: It appears so.</p><p>KING: You never sought any information about this rather dramatic attack on our country?</p><p>SESSIONS: No.</p><p>Lightning did not split the sky. Thunder did not boom. This was Washington, where the truth oozes into view rather than crashes.</p><p>And it was fitting that Trump and his press corps were flying back to the White House from an event in Milwaukee and so the president had to catch Sessions in spurts on TV.</p><p>On Air Force One, principal deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders gaggled with reporters. One asked what Trump thought of Sessions’ testimony.</p><p>“He thought that Attorney General Sessions did a very good job,” Sanders said, “and, in particular, was very strong on the point that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.”</p><p>I must have missed that part.</p><p><i>Send letters to: </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/6/14/18320371/jefferson-beauregard-sessions-iii-champions-a-lost-cause-trumpRoger Simon2017-05-10T16:01:00-05:002019-04-15T20:36:04-05:00What’s hiding in the White House shrubs?
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Demonstrators gather outside the White House a day after President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, Wednesday, , in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) </p></figcaption></div>
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<p>Q: Will Trump be a one-term president?</p><p>A: Yes. I think he might last that long.</p><p>If only that old joke were true. Less than four months into his presidency, Donald Trump has gone from late-night fodder to a constitutional crisis.</p><p>Did Trump or members of his campaign conspire with Russian President Vladimir Putin to undermine the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton? Have Trump cronies and family members offered to get into bed — so to speak — with Russian oligarchs to promote their money-making schemes?</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<p>How much did Trump know and when did he know it about former FBI director James Comey? And what about Russia? Can Trump locate Russia on a map? How about with three tries?</p><p>Trump lives in a different world than the rest of us, a parallel universe actually. Comey called a news conference on July 5, 2016, to announce that Hillary Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” but that he was not going to prosecute her.</p><p>Why did Comey call that news conference four months before a presidential election?</p><p>And on Oct. 28, just 11 days before the election, Comey announced he had changed his mind and was reopening the FBI investigation of Hillary.</p><p>Democrats thought his meds should be checked. Trump thought he was a profile in courage.</p><p>Trump got elected — though losing the popular vote — and Comey said: “It makes me mildly nauseous that we would have had an impact on the election.”</p><p>Mildly nauseous? I think this guy is more than mildly stupid.</p><p>But he wasn’t through. Not long ago, he told the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, that he needed more money and staff to investigate the Trump and his associates’ ties to Russia.</p><p>A few days later, Rosenstein wrote a memo saying Comey should be fired.</p><p>And President Trump thought it was a really, really good idea to remove Comey rather than investigate Trump. So he fired Comey, thereby freeing up more time to practice putting on the Oval Office carpet.</p><p>Much of the national press corps smelled a rat. David Gregory, who looked overheated enough to fry an egg on his forehead, said: “This is bigger than Trump! This is about America!”</p><p>Jeffrey Toobin said: “This is a dark day in American political history.”</p><p>And there have been a lot of such days to choose from this year.</p><p>It was Conan O’Brien, however, who had the most prescient comment: “Trump just fired Comey. Apparently Trump has not forgiven Comey for making him president.”</p><p>Following the firing, things went slightly nuts at the White House, or more nuts than usual, I should say. White House spokesman Sean Spicer ended up hiding in the shrubbery outside the West Wing.</p><p>Personally, I would have called the Audubon Society and complained that a wild man was disturbing the wildlife. But Spicer finally stuck his head out of the bushes and said to the waiting TV wolf pack: “Just turn the lights off. Turn the lights off. We’ll take care of this…. Can you just turn that light off?”</p><p>So the press turned the lights off — stupid! — and was rewarded with 10 minutes of blather that few reporters believed was true. This is from the Washington Post:</p><p>Q: Did the president discuss Rosenstein’s findings with Rosenstein?</p><p>Spicer: “No, I don’t believe, I don’t know how that sequence went — I don’t know.”</p><p>Q: What was the president’s role?</p><p>Spicer: “Again, I have to get back to you on the tick-tock.”</p><p>Q: When’s the last time Trump and Comey spoke?</p><p>Spicer: “Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know. There’s some — I don’t know. I don’t know.”</p><p>Turn the lights back on.</p><p>CBS News interviewed Vladimir Putin Wednesday night and asked how the Comey firing would affect Russian-U.S. relations.</p><p>“President Trump is acting in accordance with his competence, in accordance with his law and Constitution,” Putin said. “What about us? Why we?”</p><p>Why we? Well, if you ever wondered what a former KGB thug thinks about how well our president is complying with our Constitution “in accordance with his competence,” now you know.</p><p>How will this all end? Nobody knows, but one person on Twitter has jokingly prepared Trump’s exit speech: “Owing to ill health, I must resign my position as president, effective immediately. I look forward to spending more time with my money.”</p><p>I think that was a joke anyway.</p><p><i>Send letters to </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><i>.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/5/10/18333072/what-s-hiding-in-the-white-house-shrubsRoger Simon