About that secret memo: Why would anyone care?
For all the hype, the not-so-secret “Nunes memo” will rank in historical significance right up there with the opening of Al Capone’s vault.
The lead-up was entertaining, but ultimately there’s not much to see.
For you youngsters, Capone’s supposed secret vault was discovered beneath a Chicago hotel in the 1980s. Geraldo Rivera got wind of it and had it opened in a live TV special, hoping to find untold loot and the earthly remains of the gangster’s enemies. Imagine his disappointment when what turned up instead were a few empty bottles.
At least the ratings were good. Outside of Washington, the memo controversy played to a mostly empty house.
Clear away the smoke, and what you had was a one-sided “investigative” document engineered by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, written by GOP staffers and edited by the Trump White House.
In other words, a news release.
At its most shocking, the House Intelligence Committee’s memo may indicate that the FBI got played by a former British intelligence official with political motives, who supplied half-baked tips that contributed to the feds’ decision to conduct surveillance of a Team Trump campaign official.
I can understand why the FBI wanted the memo deepsixed. Even if it left out some context and contradictory conclusions, as Democrats suggested, it’s not flattering to the agency.
What I can’t understand is why the Democrats fell into Nunes’ trap by treating the memo’s release as something akin to the Pentagon Papers. Rather than feeding into the stupidity, they should have calmly dismissed it as Republican propaganda and said nothing further.
Most people in the real world don’t care one way or the other about the memo, mainly because its central allegation is impossibly nuanced — bad intelligence led to a secret court warrant to spy on someone who may have been involved in some unspecified way in Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Getting in a fight over that is like screaming back at some nut on the sidewalk who screams at you. The smart thing is to keep walking. Yell back, and all the world sees is two loons shouting at each other. How is that a win? The memo did inspire one good line. A guy came up to me at the Fairmont on Friday and said, “You know why it took so long to release the Nunes memo? They had to lose all the words with more than three syllables so Trump would understand it.”
Losing patience: After years of compassion, could it be that San Franciscans have had their fill of homeless people on the street?
I witnessed two incidents in two days last week in which people were screaming at someone splayed out on the sidewalk. Both happened on Mission Street, and in both instances the screamers were well-dressed women.
In the first case, a woman wanted to know why the homeless person was lying there. It was a decidedly onesided conversation — clearly, the ranter’s target wasn’t listening. To my ears, it sounded like the woman just wanted to vent.
In the second incident, two women were shouting at a couple of guys running what looked like a bike chop shop near Second and Mission.
“You stole those bicycles,” one yelled as she pointed to the remains of several bikes. “You should be ashamed of yourselves.” It’s going to be interesting to hear how the mayoral candidates running to shake up City Hall plan to deal with what people are seeing every day.
Who’s that guy? Donald Trump went out of his way to sound presidential for his first State of the Union address and succeeded in putting half the country to sleep.
There were no off-the-cuff attacks, no Caesar-like self praise. Just an overly long bedtime story.
Afterward, many news outlets dutifully did a fact-check on the speech, and concluded it was riddled with misrepresentations and misstatements. So what else is new? Not that the Democratic response was much better. Typical of the current ineffectiveness of the national party, there were five separate responses, with no common theme or connection between them.
The one that got the most attention came from Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass., and it was marred by what appeared to be melting Vaseline on his face.
Young Joe should get a new makeup artist and maybe a new speechwriter as well. He appeared to be talking mainly to Bernie Sanders fans, whose national significance is dwarfed by their estimation of their national significance. Tuning out: My trip to the Grammy Awards ceremony in New York wasn’t nearly as exciting as the trips I’ve taken to L.A. when the Grammys were held there.
Not because of the location, but because of the music.
Yes, I’m “older,” as my grandkids say. But I was seated at the same table as Gladys Knight, and while I may be old, I bet everyone reading this knows “Midnight Train to Georgia.”
Ask someone to sing a Jay-Z tune. Good luck.