Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership. Resume Subscription We are delighted that you'd like to resume your subscription. Please click confirm to resume now. Sponsored Offers. Most Popular News. We are the first generations of man that actually expected to find happiness here on earth, and our search for it has caused such-unhappiness.
The reason: If you do not believe in another, higher world, if you believe only in the flat material world around you, if you believe that this is your only chance at happiness—if that is what you believe, then you are not disappointed when the world does not give you a good measure of its riches, you are despairing.
In a Catholic childhood in America, you were once given, as the answer to the big questions: It is a mystery. As I grew older I was impatient with this answer. Now I am probably as old, intellectually, as I am going to get, and more and more I think: It is a mystery. I am more comfortable with this now; it seems the only rational and scientific answer.
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief or existential despair, chose … marijuana. Now we are in our cabernet stage. Jung wrote in a letter that he saw a connection between spirits and The Spirit; sometimes when I go into a church and see how modern Catholics sometimes close their eyes and put their hands out, palms up, as if to get more of God on them, it reminds me of how kids in college used to cup their hands delicately around the smoke of the pipe, and help it waft toward them.
Is it possible that our next step is a deep turning to faith, and worship? Is it starting now with tentative, New Age steps? It is a commonplace to note that we have little faith in our institutions, no faith in Congress, in the White House, little faith in what used to be called the establishment—big business, big media, the Church.
We have contempt for the media, but we have respect for newscasters and columnists. We respect priests and rabbis and doctors. Sometimes I think there is a tinny, braying quality to our cynicism. We are like a city man in a Dreiser novel, quick with a wink that shows we know the real lowdown, the real dope. This kind of cynicism seems to me … a dodge. Skepticism is healthy, and an appropriate attitude toward those who wield power.
But cynicism is corrosive and self-corrupting. But our cynicism is also earned. Our establishments have failed us. I imagine an unspoken dialogue with a congressman in Washington:.
I hired you to go to Congress to make hard decisions to help our country. Take your term, do it, and go home. We meant it to be a pain in the neck, like jury duty.
Take a chance! Watergate pales, Teapot Dome pales. It is what was behind the rise of Perot. The voters think Washington is a whorehouse and every four years they get a chance to elect a new piano player. They would rather burn the whorehouse down. They figured Perot for an affable man with a torch.
They looked at him and saw a hand grenade with a bad haircut. Crime, the schools, the courts. Watch Channel 35 in New York and see your culture. See men and women, homo- and hetero-, dressed in black leather, masturbating each other and simulating sadomasochistic ritual. Then talk to a pollster. Remember your boomer childhood in the towns and suburbs. You had physical security. You were safe. We slept with the windows open!
Neither do most of Mitt Romney's. It's all so subdued. You may change your billing preferences at any time in the Customer Center or call Customer Service. You will be notified in advance of any changes in rate or terms. You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service.
Skip to Main Content Skip to Search. There's a sense in which there are some just indecent people in the White House. And that when we think about the melodrama of this reality show that is the West Wing, that is the White House itself, it keeps coming back to the question. Why are these people, these particular kind of people in the White House? People who beat women, people who seem to have questionable financial dealings, folks who seem to have really noxious views about people who are different than they are?
Folks who seem to be insensitive to other people who are suffering? It just brings up the question of character. Who are these people and why would they choose-- and are they a reflection actually of the president himself?
You know, it's interesting. I've talked to people inside and around the White House who have said, because I wrote the other day that maybe it is time for General Kelly to go, but if so, a lot of other people as well. They're all like, "Please don't. That's the problem. You know, there's a side issue here of why was Rob Porter able to have such a long Senate career with all of these happening as well with the Republicans?
What's going on in the House and the Senate? You know, I get what what Marc Short was saying, that we looked at this guy, this doesn't comport to what we knew of him.
I feel the same way about John Kelly probably did that. If it's true that he acted responsively immediately upon learning the information, 40, 40 minutes later, or whatever he was gone, why did it take so long for General Kelly to find out the information? But again, there are people in the White House who really feel like General Kelly's being set up to be pushed out the door. They say, "Look, we got something done on tax reform.
Keeping the president in line to some extent. And so they're concerned, and I have to say, having covered the White House It seems they're both chaotic. This administration started out in chaos and disorder. It evolved to chaos and disorder. It is in now chaos and disorder. The president brings chaos and disorder. I think he thinks he flourishes well in it. I think no one else really does. But we've been able to get major legislative packages does with General Kelly as chief of staff, including tax reform that we weren't able to get done ahead of time.
Well, the interesting thing is that, you know, we don't want to bring up that horrible book, Fire and Fury, whatever it's called. But remember the palace intrigue. There's a sense in which there's always been a particular segment of folks in the White House who did not want General Kelly there. That's right, they lost power.
When Mr. So there is that. Well, that's right. But I do think in terms of chaos, it's a measure of degrees. During the first six months, it was chaotic every second of every day.
This is the first week we've really seen it devolve to this level of chaos. Yeah, let me play, let me play the thing that sort of, I'll admit, set me off. Here's Omarosa. Not a Saturday Night Live parody. That was not from S. That was real, Erick. Two letters that come to mind are B and S. You know, this is-- she was there the entire time. She was part of the chaos. Remember, General Kelly, one of his first jobs was to keep her out of the White House. And suddenly we have this wave of people now wanting General Kelly gone.
Again, it comes back to we see the chaos on a daily basis. And given the fears of people in the White House, how much worse would it be if he wasn't there? God help us. A quick point, it wasn't scary that she went on that wacky show, it was scary that she had been head of Office of Public Liaison in the White House, a significant job. And she is that person. When we come back, Russia attacked our election systems in and is expected to do so again this year and in So why is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson saying there may not be much we can do about it?
Welcome back. This week, NBC News reported that Russia was able to actually get into voter registration rolls of several states in We saw targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of that 21 were actually successfully penetrated. We can take steps we can take. But this is something that once they decide they're going to do it, it's very difficult to preempt it.
Tillerson's answer prompted some to ask, "what's the Trump administration doing about Russian interference? Does it want to do anything about it? And of course a former F. Watts, welcome back to Meet the Press. Let me start with the basics here. About a year ago, you were on the show, we talked about the Russian interference and you sort of talked about things that needed to be done.
Has anything been done to protect future elections? I--They've worked on the critical infrastructure designation. But the number-one thing we've got to do is ensure the integrity of the vote.
You just said designation. Which means they just were trying to decide what should we try to protect? We haven't even started anything, any actual protections yet? This is the feds reaching out to states and locals that don't have the resources in cyber security and probably can't detect a hack to help them protect the vote.
Because right now, we still can't ensure that the vote is accurate or not changed. We need paper ballot backups. We need to always be able to ensure that the vote is correct. You know, we've learned this week, there had been denials for a year that oh, the Russians sort of, well, they may have tried to penetrate elections systems, but they didn't get there. And then we learned later, well, it was 21 states. You know, first it was a few states.
Now we're learning, well actually they got into, what was her quote, I think was a "small number of states," which is still plural. I found this with Facebook too. Every three months, their story changed about the Russian interference here. Do we have the full story? And I don't know that we ever will. I mean, it's a minimization strategy everyone's using in public relations. It wasn't that bad. If one vote gets changed. We've seen the Russians do this.
They did this in Ukraine. The changed the actual vote. Luckily, Ukrainians caught it before it came out. It's two parts. Make them think the vote might be changed, then influence them about voter fraud election rigs. So they're incentivized to have us almost discover that they've gotten into the voter rolls because they want us to report, "Russia got into the voter rolls. Probe, probe, probe, hit. Take a database down. Have somebody not show up and be able to vote. And then say, "Hey, how do you know the election wasn't rigged for somebody?
How do you know that your vote counted? One of the things you've said that, you know, if we're going to have a collective response here, the administration needs to be on the same page when it comes to Russia. That is something that the administration is not. Take a listen. They have either interfered or they have attempted to interfere in a number of elections.
Russia is engaged in a very sophisticated campaign of subversion to affect our confidence in democratic institutions. I believe that President Putin really feels, and he feels strongly, that he did not meddle in our election.
Mattis, McMaster, Haley, definitive. The president not. Him not being definitive about Russia's guilt. What does that do to our response in We can't make one step forward unless we're at unity at the leadership level.
And we have to be not only in unity, we have to put together a plan and march forward. What is our response? We saw Tillerson say, "Hey, we see what you're doing. You better not do it. You keep pushing until you meet a response. And right now, there is no response. Any other time in our history when we've had a major event or a catastrophic event that impacted our country, we've tried to study it in response. That's not there. But walk me through, if that existed, what do you think the first three or four steps we could actually take this year to at least mitigate what Russia's doing?
First thing we would do is protecting the elections and the vote. This is paper ballot backups, making sure there's no hacking going against the systems. The next part is the tougher part, and that's what Tillerson was talking about, which is influence. Are we looking at how the Russians are trying to influence against Senate candidates or congressional candidates?
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