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This blog post is not an essay but a comment on my morning reading. If you want something more substantive read something else. Here goes...

Not watching television has altered my view of America. I read newspapers, books, and an occasional  magazine. Every morning I read online the New York Times, Fox News, the Washington Post, Bloomberg and a bunch of technology websites. This morning I got a good laugh from one of the articles in the Times and was once again surprised at the foolishness of Fox news. If you want to get an idea of the difference between Fox News and the New York Times, just look at their online front pages. Today Fox had an article about Kavanaugh and his accuser, an article about Keith Ellison and the accusations of domestic violence, then articles about a murdered golfer, wooly mammoths, and the Emmys. So two sexual abuse charged cases, murder, mammoths, and the Emmys. On the New York Times front page one finds Kavanaugh, new tariffs on China, hurricane Florence, Anita Hill, the Missouri senate race, on and on. The Cape Cod shark attack didn't make the front page.

The editorial tone of Fox News is clearly right wing. Everyone tells me, especially Fox and Trump, that the NYTs is left leaning, but to me it seems neutral. Its opinions are based on information and not ideology. Because their opinions are rational and not faith-based it gives them, what some people call, a left-leaning attitude. This is correct. The left, the Democrats, use their heads to think about issues. They use information to make their decisions. The Republicans have stopped debating and use stonewalling because of their majority, to get their opinions made into policy. So, I guess, if using logic and information to make decisions is left leaning then the NYTs is left leaning.

Today in the NYTs Paul Krugman said about the Republicans what I believe is true and have said so before on this blog.

“Bad faith” is, by the way, a legal term, referring to “entering into an agreement without the intention or means to fulfill it, or violating basic standards of honesty.” In politics, it usually means pretending to be committed to principles you abandon the moment they become inconvenient. And bad faith in this sense pervades almost everything the modern G.O.P. says and does.

When the Republican took office they took an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic". When Obama got elected they must have considered him a threat to the constitution, in spite of the fact that he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I say this because the Republican leaders of the house and senate said their main job was to make Obama fail as a president. Either they did what Krugman said they did which was to abandon the oath they swore to uphold, or they considered Obama a threat to the constitution. In my opinion they have abdicated their responsibility and should be kicked out of office for doing so.

The laugh I got from the NYTs today was the article titled "Trump’s Growing Legal Team Has a Problem: It’s Operating Partly in the Dark". What a joke! Of course they are operating in the dark; they have Trump for a client. As has been clearly demonstrated by the continuous monitoring of his public lies, he is a compulsive liar. As of August 1, 2018 Trump has made over 4,000 demonstrably false public statements, according to the Washington Post. Listening to him speak, it is clear to me that he neither cares nor knows whether what he is saying is true or not. He says what he thinks will benefit him the most. And I'm sure he does the same with his lawyers. He is not interested in the facts coming out or he would have released his tax returns years ago. Trump is a delinquent child trying to stay out of trouble for stuff that he did that he now knows was against the law but probably didn't know when he did it. But, as we now, ignorance of the law is no excuse.