"The Mueller Hearing And The Stench Of Washington," Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times

"The Mueller Hearing And The Stench Of Washington" Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times Robert Mueller was the most reluctant of witnesses at the Congressional hearings on Wednesday, and he sometimes seemed to be desperately hoping that SEAL Team 6 would rush in and extricate him from the tormentors interrogating him. But he still managed to offer glimpses of what sure seemed like obstruction of justice and more — and that’s my column. I was reminded of some of the rather dry Watergate hearings. I was a teenager and I was delighted that my family had purchased our first television, a black-and-white model, to follow the hearings. It wasn’t always clear to me what was illegal or what the remedy should be, but I did have the powerful impression that Richard Nixon was dishonest and abused his powers. I felt that way again as I watched the Mueller hearings, and it was striking that even Trump’s defenders didn’t try to deny the specific facts of his trying to obstruct the investigation. Some Republicans in the early 1970’s passed that leadership test with flying colors: Howard Baker, William Ruckelshaus, Elliot Richardson, Barry Goldwater. But others, like Charles Sandman, vigorously defended Nixon and pretended that Watergate was no big deal. One lesson of the Mueller hearings is that today we have too many Sandmans and not enough Bakers. In the 1970, the blind loyalty to party over country was discredited, and I think it will be again. Here’s my take on the hearings.

A screen-grab of the video where Rashida is walking perfectly in Niger. Skeptics sometimes doubt that foreign humanitarian aid does any good. I always answer that it’s hard and doesn’t always work, but some interventions have a very high success rate. One example is clubfoot: About one out of 800 children worldwide are born with one or both feet twisted in, and if this isn’t corrected the child will be unable to walk. In the U.S. this is routinely corrected, but in poor countries the repair often never happens. In that case, the child is never able to walk, is unable to go to school, never marries, and often ends up a beggar. Yet clubfoot is easily repaired in a poor country for $500 or less. In my book “A Path Appears,” written with my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, we told of a little girl in Niger named Rashida who received this treatment, and the organization involved sent me a great video of her walking along perfectly normally. She’s going to school now and looking great. So this is an age of miracles: For $500, you can help children walk and change their life trajectory. Two organizations involved in clubfoot are HopeWalks.org and Miracle Feet.   Back in the U.S., our problems can't be fixed quite as easily as Rashida's clubfoot. But the Mueller hearings did at least illuminate our problems, and here's my take on the echo of Watergate days and the unfortunate loyalty in some quarters to party over country. Please read, and then leave a comment!

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What I’m Reading At a time when a president is leading nativist chants, the appropriate book is Daniel Okrent’s “The Guarded Gate,” about how America closed the door beginning in the 1920s to so-called inferior peoples such as Italians and Jews. This was a shameful period in our history — the U.S. barred the door to Anne Frank’s family, along with many others who died in the Holocaust — and there are obvious parallels to the xenophobia and demagoguery today.