The Art of Preparation & Apology

Sen. John McCain savors the sweet taste of revenge

Many people recognize the oft-quoted motto of the Boy Scouts of America, "Be Prepared" - but not everyone.

It's doubtful Donald Trump was prepared to face the repercussions of his having mocked Arizona Senator John McCain (a former U.S. Navy pilot) for being shot down on a mission over Vietnam, captured then tortured and held as a POW for five years.

McCain had the last laugh this morning as he cast the deciding vote that killed the GOP's last-ditch effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

There's little question that McCain has been carefully preparing for just the right moment to publicly back-hand Trump since July 2015 when the liar-in-chief had the gall to publicly low-ball McCain as a "dummy" not long before an appearance in front of the Iowa Family Leadership Summit when the draft-dodging hypocrite dismissed the Vietnam combat vet by saying, "I don't like losers."

To add to Trump's humiliation today, his newly-tapped director of communications Anthony Scaramucci is being eviscerated by the press today for his shocking, expletive-ridden tirade against the as-of today now-former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus for allegedly leaking The Mooch's financial disclosure statement (and other juicy tidbits) to the media.

Now remember, Scaramucci was hired as the head of communications for what is arguably the most powerful government institution on the planet, right?

So he reads a tweet from Journalist Ryan Lizza that quoted an anonymous senior White House official revealing that The Mooch was having dinner at the White House with Trump, his wife, right-wing nut-job Sean Hannity and Bill Shine - the former co-president of Fox News who was fired earlier this spring for his role in covering up sexual harassment allegations against Bill O'Reilly.

Does The Mooch shrug it off and demonstrate that sometimes silence is the best answer?

The Mooch speaks with the press in stylish shades 

No, he gets pissed and calls up Ryan Lizza Wednesday night, and while being on the record (it's questionable if he really understands what that means), rips into Priebus  - and in the same interview that was published in The New Yorker on Thursday, also suggests that chief strategist and resident white supremacist Steve Bannon is able to sexually self-satisfy himself in a way that suggests the perpetually-unshaven former Brietbart News executive chair has totally mastered yoga in ways I shudder to imagine.

So while it's still unclear to many people why Scaramucci was hired, aside from his near constant fawning over Trump, what is clear is that The Mooch was totally unprepared to take on the role of White House director of communications.

Conservative commentator Ana Navarro was less sparing in her summary of Scaramucci's comments, on Twitter she called him "an unpinned hand-grenade."

Be prepared.

Those two words are much more than a simple slogan.

For the thousands of boys, men (including myself) and women, fortunate enough to have participated in, supported and enjoyed the challenges and experiences of Scouting over the years, those two words encompass an approach to life that spans beyond the BSA experience into how one approaches life from the standpoint of family, work, spirituality and everything in between.

It's too bad Donald Trump used an opportunity to speak in front of thousands of Boy Scouts gathered for the National Jamboree in West Virginia to (yet again) fan the flames of his obsession-hatred of President Obama, denigrate his political opponents as well as Republican members of the Senate, and ramble on incoherently like an obnoxious drunk at a party.

True to his long history as a "Birther", once again, Trump was not truthful in his disparaging comments about President Obama - he told the crowd that Obama had never addressed a Jamboree without apparently realizing that Obama recorded a video message that was played for the assembled attendees of the 2010 National Jamboree.

A speech that was infinitely more substantive, meaningful and inspiring than Trump's was - to say nothing of the fact that, unlike Trump, Obama actually was a Boy Scout.

BSA Chief Scout Executive
Michael Surbaugh 

In response to the anger and outrage over Trump's inappropriate and deplorable comments in front of thousands of Boy Scouts at the National Jamboree in West Virginia on Monday, Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh drafted a well-written but somewhat milquetoast apology on the BSA's Facebook page.

As a former Boy Scout who was one of the 29,765 scouts who attended the National Jamboree held at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia from July 29th - August 4th 1981, and as a writer, I thought the apology should have spent more time addressing what I and many others consider to be the perversion of everything the Boy Scouts of America stands for that Trump's idiotic comments represented.

The bulk of the apology read like more of a shopping list of all the positive things that had taken place over the course of the Jamboree.

Which is fine, but the problem is that the parents and scouts don't need a rundown of why the Jamboree is a good thing.

Scouters of all generations know the kinds of amazing experiences, activities and personal interactions that take place at the Jamboree - memories that I can tell you from personal experience last a lifetime.

The overall tone of Surbaugh's apology seemed more like he was more concerned with protecting the "brand" of the Jamboree, rather than focusing on more definitively distancing, and distinguishing, the values of the BSA from the repulsive and inappropriate comments Trump gave last Monday.

To be fair, Surbaugh obviously had to walk a fine line in drafting a written apology.

My father was an executive for the Boy Scouts of America for over 25 years, finishing his career as the executive director of the BSA's Northeast Region, which covers 11 states, the northern part of Virginia, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico and the Trans Atlantic Council (Western Europe).

So I know quite a bit about the internal workings and culture of the BSA's professional executive ranks, and I can tell you that it's populated by many politically conservative individuals from what we would call "Red States" - the BSA is headquartered in Irving, Texas.

That doesn't mean everyone who works for the BSA is a Republican, far from it, but the overall culture of the organization tends to lean right, a reflection that many of the values espoused by the BSA could be regarded as "conservative" in the traditional sense.

Don't take my word for it, if you want to get a snapshot of how members of the scouting community reacted to Trump's speech and Surbaugh's subsequent apology, you may find it instructive to read through some of the hundreds of comments posted on the Boy Scouts of America's Facebook page.

It reveals cultural and political divisions within the scouting community that are reflective of the divisions in the broader American populace - (and within the White House if Trump firing chief of staff Reince Priebus this afternoon is any indication).

Divisions exasperated by a man for whom the necessity, and art of preparation, are elusive concepts.

A man who, like his new communications director, is clearly not prepared for the rigors of working in the White House - let's hope General John F. Kelly knows the Boy Scout motto better than his new erratic boss does.

Spicey & The Mooch: Surrealism At 1600

Anthony "The Mooch" Scaramucci & Sean Spicer

Last week as I watched the strange, and lengthy, introductory press conference of newly-tapped White House Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci, it seemed as if I was watching the presidency slip even further down the rabbit hole live on CNN.

It was during my lunch break at the gym so I was on an exercise bike watching on a screen with closed captions instead of sound.

Even still, Scaramucci's statements came off like a deafening confirmation that Donald Trump is determined to further insulate himself from reality by hiring yet another overbearing sycophant slash-Washington outsider who's willing to pledge loyalty to a widely-despised president saddled with a 35% approval rating - and no major legislative or policy accomplishments.

One whose administration is defined by crisis, incompetence and unprecedented political buffoonery.

Just hours after the embattled press secretary Sean Spicer submitted his resignation, Anthony Scaramucci stepped to the podium of the White House press room before the cameras and gathered press like some contestant plucked from a reality show audition.

Here's a guy who left law school to take a job at Goldman-Sachs before starting two different Wall Street firms (who's known affectionately to his peers as "The Mooch"), waving his hands and gesticulating and literally professing his love for Donald Trump in the press room of the White House.

It was like a Salvador Dali painting (with sound) come to life in a White House that was already considered surreal by many observers.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders glowering as The
Mooch gets chatty at his press conference 

The Mooch's hiring was openly chided by multiple members of the top White House staff because of his lack of communications or political experience and his reputation as a slick salesman.

Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, senior strategist Stephen Bannon and the now ex-press secretary Sean Spicer all opposed Scaramucci's hiring.

As the Daily Beast reported last Friday, "other top aides worried that the Scaramucci hiring would perpetuate the notion of 'Amateur hour' in the West Wing."

But The Mooch seemed genuinely intoxicated by being in front of the cameras, and as he gleefully took question after question and preened, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders actually walked out to the podium and stood a few feet from him with a scowl on her face to politely try and hint that he needed to wrap it up.

Probably because she reportedly wasn't happy that Trump hired him as her new boss, but also
because his press conference was stretching into 30 minutes, and because his slick camera style and easy banter was making her seem like the humorless, overly-confrontational, one-note right-wing partisan hack that she is.

The Mooch isn't stupid, and he's probably aware that Huckabee Sanders considers herself "Republican royalty" and above him because her right-wing talk radio host-Christian minister father Mike Huckabee ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016 - and she worked for the campaign.

But Scaramucci made his own bones as they say, and as he made the rounds of the Sunday morning news shows like a glowing 17-year-old at a debutante ball, he seemed to fire off a shot at Huckabee Sanders towards the end of an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union, saying: 

"Sarah, if your watching I love the hair and makeup person we used on Friday, so I'd like to continue to use the hair and makeup person." 

Obviously it's not hard to see why Trump likes The Mooch.

Farewell Spicey

Say what you want about Sean Spicer (and I've said plenty), he's always been a committed conservative Republican who is committed to the party, whereas Scaramucci has basically served Scaramucci, opportunistically allowing the winds of change to take him wherever they lead.

He was a finance guy for President Obama's campaign who openly eviscerated Trump on Fox News back in 2015.

Think all that crap he said about "loving" Donald Trump in his White House press conference was genuine?

Just take a couple minutes and listen to some of the things Scaramucci said about Trump in a Fox News interview - what a difference 24 months makes.

The only unfortunate thing was that this transition happened during the summer when Saturday Night Live is on summer hiatus and can't do a skit about this shakeup at the White House.

If I was an SNL writer, I'd play on the obvious tension between Scaramucci and Spicer by pitching one of those faux-SNL commercials for a fictional TV cop series called "Spicey and The Mooch". 

It would be a send up of one of those old buddy cop TV series like Starsky and Hutch.

Spicey would play the hard-nosed always-plays-it-by-the-book cop, married to his high school sweetheart for 20 years who's forced to partner up with The Mooch - the slick wise-guy cop with perfect teeth who never stops talking, plays by his own rules, has been married three times and now lives with his lovable old Italian mother in Brooklyn.

But alas, as amusing as it would have been to have both Spicey and The Mooch in the same White House communications department trying to unite their talents like the Wonder Twins to spin Trump's constant stream of lies, baseless accusations and incomprehensible nonsense ("Covfefe"?), Spicer decided that was enough.

Trump acting like an ass at the BSA Jamboree

While I thought Spicer did a real disservice to his professional reputation by being willing to stand up and defend what he knew were outrageous lies by Trump, he was loyal to him - and Trump may come to miss Spicey in the dark days ahead.

Since the shakeup on Friday, Trump seems to have gone off his rocker, with his blathering display of partisan idiocy in front of thousands of Boy Scouts gathered at the Jamboree in West Virginia.

Where among other things, he mocked President Obama (who actually was a Boy Scout), babbled incoherently about his healthcare initiative and, remarkably, talked about a cocktail party he attended.

The BSA has, justifiably, found itself facing a huge backlash from current and former Scouters as well as members of the public outraged that Trump would use such an occasion to act like a narcissistic jackass in front of thousands of young men.

Of course, as we all know, Trump intentionally says such asinine things to deflect media attention from his son-in-law Jared Kushner testifying behind close doors in front of Senate staffers, as demonstrated by his latest Tweets attacking his own Attorney General for not investigating Hillary Clinton's emails.

Seriously, did he forget that she lost the election in 2016?

Trump is like an elephant rampaging through a crowded mall, only now the job of defending this kind of quasi-delusional behavior falls on the shoulders of The Mooch.

A controversial figure with no communications or political experience, climbing aboard a sinking ship where he is openly despised by top members of an already-divided White House where chaos is the norm, accomplishments are few and the shadow of investigations related to administration ties to the Russian government loom like one of those erie distorted figures in a Salvador Dali painting.

Can this train-wreck presidency possibly get any more surreal?

Probably.