Monthly Archives: June 2020

The two online pundits I follow most often who write about foreign policy are the somewhat-Liberal Fred Kaplan and the somewhat-Conservative Daniel Larison. When they agree on something, as they sometimes do, I feel I have stumbled upon something that's as close to the truth as you're ever likely to find on the Internet.

The two men have both now reviewed John Bolton's new book, The Room Where It Happened, which contains the testimony he could have given under oath, transcribed and published to achieve profit and avoid cross-examination. It's less useful to the country that way but it's not without its value

Here's a bit of what Daniel Larison had to say…

Bolton thinks he is scoring a huge hit by saying that Mnuchin worried more about how a policy affects Americans than the "mission" of regime change, which just drives home how fanatical and bad for America Bolton's foreign policy obsessions are. If we learn anything from Bolton's book, it is that Bolton was a terrible and dangerous National Security Advisor, and the country is better off now that he will never again serve in government. But then, like most of the other things contained in the book, we already knew that.

And here's Fred Kaplan…

The Room Where It Happened (out Tuesday) is every bit the flame job that the advance news stories indicated. But it's also, unwittingly, an indictment of Bolton himself — as warmonger, self-aggrandizer, deceiver, at times a shrewd bureaucratic operator, at other times stunningly blind to the politics around him, and, in any case, a man that no future president should hire to walk his dog, much less help guard the nation.

Don't those two paragraphs sound like they were written by the same guy?

A quick surf of Ye Olde Internet this morning shows me lots of stories about how many cities are allowing the reopening of businesses and how many cities that have are reporting record numbers of new COVID-19 cases. I understand but do not necessarily agree with the argument that remaining largely closed down may do more damage than keeping down the virus numbers. For the time being, I'm going to continue to disagree with that argument and stay here in the Fortress of Solitude. My friend Ken Levine well summarizes why you won't find me rushing out to dine in a favorite restaurant.

And my friend Paul Harris well summarizes how I feel about John Bolton. What Paul wrote is short enough that I'm going to steal the whole paragraph…

It's important to remember you can hold two opposing thoughts in your head simultaneously. For instance, you can think, "John Bolton's revelations about Trump make me feel great," while you also think, "John Bolton has always been a douchebag who helped push us into war with Iraq and refused to testify to the House during its impeachment hearings."

John Bolton has always been a terrible, terrible human being who thinks we should be sending American troops to bomb (and die) everywhere. I suppose there's a smidgen of respect that unlike everyone else who cheered on the Iraq War, he's still willing to say it was a good idea and we should have done more of that. But when Bolton and Trump are calling each other names, I can only express amazement at seeing two guys who are always wrong about everything else be right about each other.

Incidentally, I'm waiting for the Lincoln Project to whip up a montage of Trump insulting all the ex-employees he proudly hired not so long ago. Then they close with a clip of him bragging how he's a great manager who only hires the best people.

And that's about all I want to write about Trump for a while. I have to write about better people (some of them, talking animals) this week.

Tomorrow evening, I'm going to be resuming my "Conversations," my one-on-one webcasts. If you come to this blog in search of showbiz stories, you will O.D. on them when Jim Brochu and I get together. I'll post a little more about Jim later today or tomorrow morning. And this Saturday, I resume my Cartoon Voices Panels online. I'll post the lineup a little later. Off to work —!

A month from tomorrow, were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of us would be arriving in San Diego for the 2020 Comic-Con International. When it was wisely called off in the middle of April, a few folks on the 'net posted messages about how this was a mistake because the virus would be virtually extinct by the end of May. Yeah, right. Sure. Nice going, fella.

And as you may have heard, the San Diego Convention Center has been housing the homeless and displaced. Here's what it's like in there these days…and I sure hope for those folks' sake, the food is better.

Groucho on a very old Dick Cavett Show singing songs about fathers…

There were all these predictions about Trump's rally in Tulsa being packed with maskless Trumpers who'd infect each other while giving the man the ego tongue-bath that he seemed to crave so. And a lot of the predictions involved violent demonstrations outside and people being clubbed and beaten for the Federal Crime of not loving our current president. Someone must have predicted an anemic turnout but I didn't see anyone forecast that even though it makes a certain amount of dramatic sense.

I remember how before the full thrust of Watergate, we'd wake up and think, before we so much as looked at the news, "Well, what evil, unethical thing will Nixon do today?" At some point, it morphed into, "Well, what piece of terrible news will Nixon get today?" We seem to have made that turn with Trump. Last week had to be the worst week of his presidency and maybe his life. Next week when the polls start reflecting this past week won't be so great, either.

I'm not much for mind-reading people from afar or even up close…but you have to think he got through that week of bad Supreme Court decisions and leaks from John Bolton's book and other body-blows by thinking, "Saturday night in Tulsa is when I start turning this all around." And then that packed hall was suddenly looking like a Padres home game against the Rockies or a meeting of The Bill Cosby Fan Club.

I'm waiting for the commercial that the Lincoln Project group must be making even as I type this, probably featuring that quote of Trump's about ordering that the testing be slowed down. If you were running for public office, you'd pray for your opponent to say something in front of a camera that was as self-destructive as that.

Have you seen their ads? Absolutely devastating…and it finally dawned on me why they're doing them. Their goal isn't really to elect Joe Biden. They may help accomplish that but their immediate mission is to drive Donald Trump out of what's left of his mind. And not that these bother him that much because they don't air on TV shows he watches but just imagine the video that Randy Rainbow is cobbling up at this very minute. Too bad he already did a parody of "Oklahoma!" to skewer Omarosa.

The one thing Trump had going for him was that he looked like a winner. It meant winning occasionally while spinning every single non-win as a win. There's no way he can spin last night as a win, either for him or for his working premise that if we all pretend the virus is over, it will be and he's the hero that beat it. I'm sorry there's even the suggestion out there that the bad turn-out was because pranksters made so many fake reservations for the rally. I would have liked the perception to be that so many seats were empty because even Trump supporters are wising up to a simple truth. It's that COVID-19 ain't a thing of the past and it's brain-dead stupid to not protect yourself and others around you.

In honor of Father's Day, here's a story about my father that I first posted here on June 30, 2013. If you read other pieces I've written about him, you know that my father was a thoroughly decent, honorable man who couldn't have done a better job raising his one and only son. He almost never yelled and the few times he did, he usually apologized. He was very, very good to me and my mother and they had one of those perfect marriages from the day they wed to the day he died. I was a very lucky kid.

The Saturday morning of the very first San Diego Comic-Con in 1970, my friend Steve Sherman picked me up and we, along with Steve's brother Gary and our pal Bruce Simon, drove down to that historic gathering. I was in such a hurry when Steve pulled up outside at a very early hour that I didn't notice that my father's car was not in the driveway. It should have been…since he was still inside, fast asleep. When I returned home late that evening, I learned that some time the previous night, that car — an Oldsmobile with a whole lotta miles on it, I believe — had been stolen.

The police had come by and reports had been filled out. My father was annoyed, of course, more at the inconvenience than at the cost, most of which would be covered by insurance. But it was a pain to get to work the following week. His friend and co-worker Howard had to come by and give him a lift. And it was a pain to go out and shop for another car. His brother, my Uncle Nathan drove him to a couple of lots before he found the right one. And the big pain was that he'd lost his briefcase and a filebox of papers he had in the trunk — papers relating to cases he was then handling in his job for the Internal Revenue Service. All of that had to be reconstructed and replaced.

Around a month later, my father announced that he'd finally, after much struggle, re-created all the paperwork he'd lost. The next day, the police called to say they'd found the car…and all that paperwork.

The vehicle had turned up in Orange County in the yard of a company that bought old, undriveable cars for scrap. You towed one in with a pink slip. They gave you cash for it, no questions asked.

The Oldsmobile had been stripped and its seller did not have a set of keys for it. For some reason, that did not make the fellow at the automotive junk yard suspicious. What did was that the trunk had not been opened. The thieves either hadn't been able to get into it or hadn't bothered.

Someone at the yard pried it open, found all those I.R.S. papers inside and then either called the police who called the I.R.S. or called the I.R.S. who called the police. Detectives did their usual detecting and determined, of course, that the pink slip that had transferred ownership was a total forgery. What's more, they knew who had done it.

There was a crime boss in Orange County…and if I ever knew his name, I've forgotten it. Let's call him Hal Capone. He had a very lucrative, very crooked operation. Kids would steal cars. They'd take them to one of Mr. Capone's many lieutenants who would fork over quick cash for them. Then the car would disappear into some network that would strip it and sell the strippings here, and the carcass of the automobile there. The cops had had a fair amount of success in busting those lieutenants but they hadn't been able to connect it all to Hal Capone. They knew he ran everything but couldn't prove it in a court of law.

Several detectives came to our house and told my father: "We were able to track the phony pink slip to the guy who bought the car from the kids who stole it out of your driveway. He's new at this and we're not all that interested in him. We want to bust Capone." The lieutenant who'd bought and sold the Olds was willing to plea-bargain. In exchange for probation and no jail time, he was willing to turn State's Evidence against Hal Capone. That would surely make it possible to get a conviction against Capone but not much of one. Capone had no criminal record but did have the funds necessary to hire the best attorneys in the state.

A detective who I recall looking exactly like Norman Fell said, "He'll get six months in jail, tops. He might just get probation. This is a guy who has probably been responsible for the theft of thousands of cars in Southern California in the last ten or fifteen years and that's all he'll get." Then he leaned in closer to my father and said with a serious, dramatic tone, "With your cooperation, we think we can put Capone away for a long time. But it does mean you'll have to testify."

My father was not the bravest man in the world but he instantly said, "Yes, absolutely. Whatever I can do to help."

Hal Capone was arrested and charged with one count of receiving stolen property…or something like that. He scrambled expensive attorneys, they dickered with the prosecutors and a deal was struck. Capone would plead guilty and would serve two or three months in the most comfortable prison in Southern California. In exchange, the state would agree they would not prosecute him any further on this or any related matter.

The day his plea was entered before a judge and he was sentenced, my father went to the courtroom. This, he had to see. I wanted to go with him but I had a final exam at U.C.L.A. that afternoon.

In court, Capone stood and affirmed his guilty plea to the judge. He was sentenced to the two or three months and told that he could go but would have to report within sixty days to begin serving his sentence. As he walked out of the courtroom, Hal probably thought to himself what a crafty, shrewd operator he was. He'd made millions with a huge car theft ring and this was all the law could do to him: Toss him in a luxury hotel with bars on some windows for two or three months. "He had to be feeling pretty cocky," my father told me as he described what he saw that day.

Then a man in a dark suit walked up to Mr. Hal Capone, identified himself as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and placed him under arrest for stealing government documents.

What government documents? Why, the ones in the trunk of my father's car, of course.

Capone had never seen those documents. I don't think he'd even seen the car…but the documents had been stolen along with the rest of the Oldsmobile. And he couldn't very well deny he was a part of its theft and sale, having just pled guilty to that. The state had agreed there'd be no further prosecution of him on this matter but the Feds hadn't agreed to anything of the sort.

I'm a bit fuzzy on some of the details because very little of this ever made the news and all I know from here on is what my father told me and he was fuzzy on some of the details. But the way he described it, they charged the Godfather of Car Theft with crimes that could result in a long, long stay in a small, small room. High-priced lawyers were again scrambled, pleas were bargained and the end result was the dissolution of the entire operation, charges against many involved in it…and Hal Capone did a lot more than two or three months in prison. We later heard it was more like ten years, though he managed parole a few years shy of that. My father did not have to testify but the fact that he was willing and ready was apparently vital to any of this happening.

I told this tale to some lawyers a few years ago and they said, "There must be more to the story than that" because a few parts of it didn't make sense to them. That may well be and you needn't write to tell me that. I'm sure there was more to it than what I've reported here. The important part to me though was that my father was very, very proud of the role he'd played in bringing a very, very bad man to justice. And he really enjoyed describing the look on Hal Capone's face when he was arrested in the courthouse lobby and he suddenly realized that it wasn't over; that of all the stolen cars he'd trafficked in, it was the car of Bernie Evanier that had truly made a Federal Case out of things.

Here's Tony Bennett singing one of his standards from home during the pandemic. And I'll save you the trouble of looking it up. He's 93…

• My doctor told me to avoid crowds. I should've gone to the Trump rally.

• This is a very bad time to be a statue.

One of my favorite restaurants — The Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard — has announced it will be reopening its fabled dining rooms (seen in a great many movies including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) for dinner service on Friday, June 26. A cause for celebration? Maybe. Sort of. I guess.

I love the food there. I love the atmosphere there…that feeling of "Old Hollywood" which you find in shorter and shorted supply in Current Hollywood. But unfortunately, they've also had to announce a whole lotta rules under which they will now be operating. Here — go read them. It'll take a few minutes.

Back? That was quite a list, wasn't it? I went through less controls when my friend Brad had a heart transplant and they brought me into the recovery room to see him right after the surgery.

None of this is to fault the Musso & Frank folks in any way. I commend them for such a thorough, not-inexpensive list of changes designed to protect their staff and their customers. It's what you have to do now. I just think I don't want to eat there…or probably anywhere outside my home for a while.

We need to accept the fact that "normality," if we can even remember what that was, may be a long way off. New medicines and the passage of time may make a lot of things safer but The Great Pandemic of 2020 will be with us, hopefully in ever-diminishing ways, for a long time. Henceforth, we all use hand sanitizer a lot more than we previously did…and wash our hands more. Henceforth, we will have to weigh any opportunity that involves being in a crowd against the possible risks.

Like I said, I love the food at Musso's but I can find food just as good on my doorstep thanks to Grubhub and contactless delivery. And I love the Old Hollywood air at Musso's but Old Hollywood didn't involve masked waiters and putting on mine to go use the Men's Room, which someone will probably be in there feverishly scouring any time I need in.

Here in my Fortress of Solitude, there are few reminders of The Plague. I can go hours without thinking about it. It just seems to me that "dining out" won't be anywhere near as fun/enriching as it was and I don't like that. Part of me would like to rush to Musso's and other restaurants I love, not only to experience them in whatever means is still available to us but to support them and keep them as viable businesses. But another part of me is thinking, "No, I won't do that for a long time" and the first part of me admits that the second part of me is going to win this one.

I'm hoping that Musso's hooks up with Grubhub or one of the other delivery services so I can at least support them a little. I'm guessing they won't because they figure the Musso & Frank Experience involves actually dining in Musso & Frank's and I'm sure they're right. I just can't see myself enjoying a meal in any restaurant where the bus boys are hovering about as I eat, constantly sanitizing me for my protection.

Here's a nice little music video that's also timely. It's a film by Chris Casady based on a song perfomed by Rick Moranis and the neat artwork is by our friend, Carol Lay. Carol's one of the best cartoonists I know and she's now doing the occasional cartoon for The New Yorker, which is (a) the most prestigious publication to which a cartoonist can sell a gag cartoon and (b) just about the only publication to which a cartoonist can sell a gag cartoon.

Okay, there are a few others left but not many. Here's the video she worked on…

• It's kind of telling that in his threats to "protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes" who show up in Tulsa, Trump does not seem to know that those are not the same thing.

A few months ago, I ordered a batch of supplies from Costco. While searching the Instacart website for things I needed, I happened to spot Organic Chicken Parmesan with Pasta from a company called Ventera Organics. On a whim, I ordered one and when it came, I stuck it in my refrigerator and forgot all about it. The other day, I spotted it in there, noticed the expiration date was just past and decided to whip it up, A.S.A.P.

I've been disappointed by so many packaged meals, I was amazed to find it was pretty good…not as good as Chicken Parm in a fine Italian restaurant but not bad for something I could keep in my fridge for emergencies and whip up in about seven minutes.

When you open the package, you find three microwaveable bags. One is full of cooked penne pasta. One contains a pretty decent marinara sauce. And one has three cooked chicken breasts stuffed with cheese. You microwave each for a specified number of minutes and in about the running time of a Road Runner cartoon, you have enough for three pretty good meals.

Go to the company website and you'll see a whole range of packaged meals. Apparently, most of these are not available most of the time. I wrote to ask them where near me their products are sold because the Costcos around me carry only the Chicken Parmesan and they're currently outta them.

A nice lady from the company e-mailed me back to say that at any given time, they only make whatever Costco orders, which is never the full line. During November and December only this year, Costco will be selling Ventera Chateaubriand with Béarnaise sauce. She says their products freeze well so when they do get the Chicken Parmesan back in, I should buy several and freeze a few. I intend to do that and I'll probably give the Chateaubriand a try when it arrives for a brief visit. End of recommendation.