With the New England Patriots a week away from their umpty-ninth Super Bowl appearance, a number of opinion columns have been written that portray the team in a negative light. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote a scathing denunciation titled “The Existential Hell of This Year’s Super Bowl.”

Here’s an excerpt: “The Patriots perfectly embody our income-inequality era and the tax reform that President Trump recently signed. Their good fortune begets more good fortune. They shamelessly hoard glory. And there’s frequently a whiff of cheating in their success.”

Telegram & Gazette columnist Dianne Williamson wrote a satirical—some would say it was dripping with sarcasm—column about Mrs. Tom Brady (Gisele Bundchen) and her fervent hope that her Patriots’ hero husband will retire before his brains get scrambled by too many concussions.

Many members of Patriots’ nation were outraged at these sacrilegious diatribes against the world’s most wonderful team and its incomparable quarterback. They were so angry they couldn’t see straight.

This raised the question of whether these folks are “fans” or “fanatics” and prompted a look at the definitions of both words.

“Merriam-Webster, the Oxford dictionary and other sources define “fan” as a shortened version of the word fanatic. “Fanatic” itself, introduced into English around 1550, means “marked by excessive enthusiasm and often intense uncritical devotion”. It comes from the Modern Latin fanaticus, meaning “insanely but divinely inspired.”

Here’s a prime example. The other day a baby boomer I know told me that if the Patriots had lost last Sunday to the Jacksonville Jaguars he wasn’t going to watch the Super Bowl. He’d go to Foxwoods instead.

Now I know he’s been watching the Super Bowl for the last 25 years at least, and the Patriots weren’t in EVERY one of them—so why the change?

He’s crossed the line from fan to fanatic.

I wanted to say, “What, are you nine years old? Grow up. It’s only a game.”

As far as I’m concerned, the most positive thing about the Super Bowl is that it’s a secular holiday. It’s an excuse for people to get together and eat, drink, and party. It’s an all-day affair in some cases, and there are no required religious observances to mar the agenda.

But too many people, especially in this part of the country, have made football into a religion. They worship this football team and quarterback Tom Brady, whom they refer to as the GOAT (greatest of all time).

I disagree. When his pass protection breaks down, Brady is just another quarterback. Give him all day to throw the ball and he does a fine job. The real GOAT is Coach Bill Belichick, who provides the players and the plays that make the team a winner. If New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning had played for the Patriots, he might have SEVEN Super Bowl rings by now, the two he won by beating the Pats and the other five Brady won.

It’s only a game, for goodness sakes. We have all these fans who are 50 to 100 pounds overweight, who exercise as much as Donald Trump does, scarfing down beer and pizza and chicken wings, screaming their lungs out over a bunch of behemoths bashing each other’s brains for 60 minutes every Sunday.

How about the helmet-to-helmet hit Rob Gronkowski took in the Jaguars game? Multiply that by all the teams in the NFL for 18 regular season games plus pre-season and post-season. The players make millions of dollars, but is it worth it?

I rooted for the Patriots in 1997 when they lost in the Super Bowl to the Green Bay Packers, and I was wintering in Mississippi when I rooted for them to win their first Super Bowl in 2002. I watched it by myself, because there aren’t any sports bars in the Bible Belt.

But after their third title I figured it was time for someone else to win. Like many people, I like to support the underdog.

“Root, root, root for the home team, if they don’t win it’s a shame” are lyrics from the old baseball song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

That smacks to me as a form of forced patriotism, pun intended. It’s unpatriotic to hope the Patriots lose. As Joe Biden would say, “That’s a lot of “malarkey.”

My life will not change if the Patriots win or lose, but neither will the lives of hysterical fans be any better or worse the Monday morning after the game. They need to get a grip.

Everyone is talking about Michael Woolf’s new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” It has eclipsed a work that came out a few weeks earlier by Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. His book is titled, “Let Trump Be Trump.”

The most interesting bit of information in the latter book relates to our president’s eating habits. It seems that although he doesn’t drink alcohol and doesn’t exercise, he’s also a fast food junkie addicted to McDonald’s. According to Mr. Lewandowski, a typical Trumpian meal consists of two Big Macs, two Filet-o-Fish, and a chocolate malted shake. He also drinks about a dozen Diet Cokes every day.

This makes Mr. Trump a man of the people, because millions of Americans indulge in fast food every day and they can relate. He’s certainly a welcome change from the lean and mean Barack Obama, who worked out all the time, had 10% body fat, and ate stuff like arugula and fruits and vegetables. Who needed someone like him throwing his morally superior diet in our faces for eight years? If that wasn’t enough, his wife Michelle was constantly nagging kids to get off the couch and move and who planted a big garden on the White House grounds. What did that dynamic duo think they were going to accomplish by constantly showing off and alienating their fellow citizens?

Anyhow, I thought it would be a nice change to write about something other than politics, so I got the idea to explore the issue of fast food.

Problem: I don’t eat fast food. I haven’t been in a Mc Donald’s, except for a coffee, since Ronnie Reagan was president.

But I have resources, advisors, and contacts, which is something every writer must have. So I interviewed my friend Pasquale, who’s a “maven” (that’s a Yiddish word meaning expert) on the subject.

Pasquale goes out for lunch most days of the year, and he has critical taste buds and an astounding memory for cataloging the good and the bad. His recommendations, pro and con, come without hesitation and are definite. He tells it like it is.

He gives Papa Gino’s a high rating. They have the best hamburgers and the best pizzas.

Mc Donald’s has the best French fries. His recommendation is to order them without salt. This requires them to make a fresh batch, so you won’t get lukewarm, leftover fries. Then add as much salt as you like. They can be “chintzy” (miserly, cheap) with the portions, so don’t be afraid to go back up to the counter and tell them to fill the container as advertised in their product photos.

Pasquale is negative about Wendy’s. The beef doesn’t meet his standards, but they have excellent chicken sandwiches. He liked their chili, but sometimes they make new chili and pour it over the old chili, and once when he got his there were two different tastes. He called them on that, but they denied doing it. He got his money back. Later somebody found a mouse in Wendy’s chili, so that ended that.

It could have been worse. He read that a brain-boring worm was found in Popeye’s chicken.

Kentucky Fried Chicken used to be delicious, but went it sharply downhill after Colonel Sanders died. Their grilled chicken looks like a pigeon, but they still have the best cole slaw.

The roast beef at Arby’s has a different taste and it doesn’t taste like roast beef. It’s not good. The pastrami is OK.

Five Guys is very expensive, and the hamburgers are so-so. They give you tons of fries, which are also so-so. You get all the shelled peanuts you can eat, but a hamburger, small fries, and a soda for two people will run you about $25, which is ridiculous for fast food.

D’Angelo’s sandwiches are the best. Subway gives you a lot of vegetables—lettuce, tomatoes, onions, etc.—but they’re chintzy on the meat.

Overall McDonald’s and Burger King are the most reliable venues in which to indulge one’s fast food cravings. In the latter restaurant an excellent choice is two Whoppers for $6. As suggested earlier, order the fries without salt.

These are Pasquale’s fast food recommendations based on years of studious research supported by great universities and medical schools.

No doubt other fast food aficionados may disagree or have different opinions. If so, in the immortal words of Frasier Crane, “I’m listening.”

I never know when a blog topic will come my way, but I try to be flexible and make use of every opportunity to address issues as they come up.

In my last blog, “A Haiti Story,” I related an experience I had in that country with a shopkeeper in the hills who took money and promised to send a rocking chair from his location to Worcester. Based on many incidents in many different countries, I felt justified in being cynical about the chair making it north. To my surprise, the man was as good as his word and my female colleague, who was more trusting than I, received a beautiful and comfortable piece of furniture for a ridiculously low price.

Some readers, two in particular, were critical of my cynicism and compared me to Donald Trump. They really know how to hurt a guy.

I asked if either of them even had a passport. They took umbrage and felt insulted, and they accused me of being “thin-skinned.” Apparently in their minds it was a ridiculous question, as if everyone has a passport and it was as if I’d asked them if they’d graduated from high school.

Actually, it was a very legitimate question.

For example, my wife and I have gone to Scotland five times in the last five years, and we’ve talked to many Scottish folks who have traveled to the United States. They mentioned three items really stood out for them as they observed Americans:

(1) The size of the people (obesity) (2) the size of the portions on restaurant plates (3) the number of Americans who DON’T have a passport.

Those observations were in my mind when I asked the question. I was pretty sure that most Americans do not own a passport.
A wee bit of research proved that was correct. Here’s part of an article written by Jack Fischl from Matador Network written in June of 2016:

“Sixty four percent of the population of the richest and most influential country in the world (the United States) have never been abroad. Our citizens can be our best diplomats by showing the world who we really are, but we have to leave our own country first.

According to the State Department… 36% of Americans own a valid passport (and therefore 64% do not)…that means that a healthy majority of the population has never left the United States.”

Let’s break that down. It means that in a room with 100 people, 64 of them do not have a passport. Approximate TWO-THIRDS of Americans are passport-free.

This is sad because Mark Twain once said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

My cousin Luigi, who was born in Italy and visits his home country frequently, said that in Italy 100% of the people have a passport.

We can cut Americans some slack, because there are good reasons for this difference.

From Worcester County we can travel 3000 miles west and 2000 miles south and still be in the US. That’s the reason Americans are monolingual, something Barack Obama said out loud that pissed everybody off.

If you travel around the six-state New England region, that same amount of distance in some parts of Europe would have you crossing the borders of six countries.

It’s more expensive for us to travel because we must cross an ocean to get started. I’m envious of our Scottish friends who travel all over at far cheaper prices because they’re already in the thick of things geographically.

But they have a mindset that includes travel, and they have a curiosity to see the world. Here’s another excerpt from the Matador Network article:

“How we decide to use our time and money are major factors in our failure to get abroad, as is a general lack of travel ambition… According to a 2012 LivingSocial study, three of Americans’ top ten dream destinations are right here in the United States, including Las Vegas and Disney World. Really? Of all the amazing places to go in the world, with seven continents and over 200 countries, we pick Disney World as a dream destination? Let’s dream a little bigger than that.”

I know people who have plenty of money and plenty of time but have no interest in leaving their back yards. Did you know that when George W. Bush was elected president he had only traveled out of the country twice? Prior to riding on Air Force One, Donald Trump hardly went anywhere.

Based on that Mark Twain quote, Republicans need to concentrate on traveling. Perhaps then they wouldn’t be so prejudiced, bigoted, and narrow-minded.

Anyhow, asking someone if they have a passport is not an insulting question, as evidenced by the evidence I’ve provided.

I’m constantly maligned and misrepresented. What are you gonna do? (insert smiley face here).

Back in the 1970’s the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) sponsored trips to warmer countries during the February school vacations. As someone who has always been addicted to traveling, I took advantage of these offers. I went to Jamaica, Acapulco, Curacao, Guadeloupe, and the Dominican Republic. The trips were taken in the last week of February and by the time you got back you were nearly into March, and winter’s back had been broken.

Any MTA member in Massachusetts was eligible to go, and there was always a contingent of Worcester teachers on the plane. The hotels were right on the beach, and if you preferred, as most teachers did, you could relax for a week, sit in the sun, eat and drink, and recharge your batteries after finishing more than half of the school year.

A few of us got bored with lying around and wanted to see what we could see. We would share a car rental and drive around the island we were on, or in the case of Acapulco, take an eight-hour drive to Mexico City and stay there for a couple of days.

The most interesting side trip was from the Dominican Republic. Jim, a high school history teacher, Melanie, an elementary school teacher, and I discovered it was a one-hour flight leaving early in the morning from Santo Domingo to Port-au Prince, Haiti, returning late the same day.

We took a taxi from the airport and walked around Port-au-Prince. Down by the docks there was unspeakable poverty, worse than what I’d seen in India or Nepal, though I didn’t get to Calcutta.

But not that far away was Habitation LeClerc, an ultra-expensive resort for the rich comprised of 35 villas, each with its own swimming pool, overlooking the sea. We walked around this property, which had once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister, Pauline, and her husband, Charles Leclerc. He had been sent to Haiti to put down a slave revolt, but he failed. Haiti ultimately gained its independence in 1804.

Two of the most prominent guests who had stayed at Habitation LeClerc were Jacqueline Onassis, aka Jackie Kennedy, and Henry Kissinger.

As in many third-world countries, one finds extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

After we left there we hired a taxi with a driver who was willing to guide us around the island. He took us into the hills to some rum distilleries, and I bought a bottle of coconut rum. Then we stopped and walked around a village where Haitian men and women were working at crafts. They’re quite skilled in woodcarving, weaving, straw-work, and embroidery. Jim bought a small, carved wooden flower pot for his mother.

We came upon a half-dozen women who were sitting on rocking chairs in front of a shop doing crafts. The shop’s owner came out and asked if we were interested in anything. Melanie said she wanted a rocking chair like the ones the women were using. They were beautiful, with heavy wood frames and woven straw backs and seats, and they were very comfortable.

The man said he’d have one made and ship it to her. The total for the chair and the shipping was $50.

I took Melanie aside. “Are you kidding?” I said. “We’re in the hills of Haiti. If you give this guy 50 bucks you can kiss it good-bye. What are you gonna do if he doesn’t send it—come back here and yell at him?”

Melanie paid no attention to me, and she gave the man her address and some travelers checks.

We got back to the States, and in the weeks and months that followed every time I ran into Melanie I’d ask her if her rocker had arrived, then I’d chuckle. I may even have joked that she was “off her rocker” to give that Haitian dude the money.

Four months later, in June, Melanie called me. She asked if I’d go with her to the Worcester airport. She’d been notified that a package had arrived for her.

When we got there we saw a large item wrapped in woven straw. A hole had been cut into it. No doubt a customs agent wanted to see if it contained drugs.

No drugs. Just a beautiful rocking chair in perfect condition.

Melanie had that chair for years. For all I know, she may still have it.

I only tell this story because Haiti has been in the news for the past week. I’m not even going to make a comment. Like Fox News, I report, you decide.

Today President Donald Trump renominated three federal judge candidates who had been previously been rejected. All three are known to be hostile to women’s reproductive freedom, LGBTQ issues, and protections against black voter suppression.

This was possible because many Democrats in 2016 considered Hillary Clinton to be a “flawed” candidate, and despite what has gone on in Washington for the past 11 months they still defend what they did that November, i.e., stayed at home and refrained from voting or voted for a third-party candidate who could not win.

In my not-so-humble opinion what they did was bat-shed crazy, and it shouldn’t have mattered who the candidate was when we consider just how bad the Republican Party is and how much they threaten our beliefs and goals of economic and social equality.

I have never been enamored of Hillary Clinton but I wanted to see the election of the country’s first female president. I was never impressed with her until she accepted President Obama’s offer to become Secretary of State. She took the job, traveled to 113 countries (Donald Trump thinks Belgium is a city, but he’s obviously not “flawed”), and didn’t upstage Obama even once. When she left that office her approval rating was 65%. What happened? She decided to run for president, the Republican attack machine came out in full force, there were 32 Benghazi hearings at a cost of $20 million, and though nothing was found wrong the damage was done and her ratings went down, even among some Democrats. Then came another round of craziness and investigations about e-mails, again nothing was found wrong or illegal, lock her up.

Yes, she was a “flawed” candidate, but it seems her biggest flaw was trying to get a big boy’s job in a big boy world, and she had a vagina.

But let’s not talk about Hillary, because there are too many people who can’t see straight when her name is mentioned. For purposes of this thesis, let’s look at the January 2010 special election for Senate to replace the late Ted Kennedy right here in allegedly liberal Massachusetts between Attorney-General Martha Coakley and State Senator Scott Brown.

I had heard Martha Coakley interviewed monthly for several years on the Jim & Margery NPR radio talk show. She was witty, knowledgeable, and quite likable.
She had been elected district attorney in 1998 and attorney-general in 2006.

She was the logical replacement for Kennedy in this Democratic state. But something happened during the shortened campaign, and her lead in the polls evaporated in the same way the Atlanta Falcons 28-3 lead over the Patriots disappeared in last year’s Super Bowl.

Martha Coakley turned out to be a “flawed” candidate. Why? Because she didn’t want to stand out in the cold in front of Fenway Park and shake hands, and she couldn’t identify Red Sox hero Curt Schilling.

Let’s put this in perspective. There are 323 million people in the United States. Here’s what that looks like in digits—323,000,000.

Out of those 323,000,000 only 100 achieve the honor of becoming a United States senator. A mathematician could tell you what that percentage would be.

In a Democratic state, with a chance to elect its first female senator, a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans and women voters outnumber male voters, Scott Brown, an intellectually-challenged dullard who wore a barn jacket and drove a pickup truck, defeated a highly qualified female attorney-general.

BECAUSE SHE WOULDN’T STAND OUT IF FRONT OF FENWAY AND DIDN’T KNOW WHO CURT SCHILLING WAS (he’s a right-wing wacko who’s been fired twice as an analyst on ESPN for making obnoxious comments and who stiffed the state of Rhode Island for millions of dollars when, shades of Donald Trump, he filed for bankruptcy on a loan it gave him for a video game business).

Democrats had a 60-vote majority in the Senate, which they lost because Martha Coakley was a “flawed” candidate.

There are two words to describe the voters in Massachusetts who allowed this to happen: (1) senseless (2) masochistic

Bill Clinton said, “It all depends on what the definition of “is” is.”

We need to analyze what the definition of “flawed” is, and direct that analysis toward the electorate.

It’s the electorate, stupid, it’s not the candidate.

It dawns on me that the liberals I know who are suffering from Trump-inspired depression need to chill out a wee bit, no pun intended, in the midst of the historic cold we’ve been experiencing.

Just as the cold wave will eventually break and spring will inevitably arrive in a few months, Donald Trump’s presidency, which may be hanging by a thread depending on what cable news network you watch or newspaper you read, will also inevitably disintegrate and disappear.

We shouldn’t count on impeachment, because whatever Special Counsel Robert Mueller proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, a Republican congress will not vote to depose their president, and his supporters won’t believe anything in the way of proof. There are Trump fans who can put a positive spin on guilty pleas by the president’s aides and who consider anything negative about their hero to be “fake news.”

Trump may be gone by the end of this year, and if not there’s the 2020 campaign to stop his re-election, which looks promising unless Democrats fail to get their act together, stop their internal progressive vs. moderate warfare, and coalesce behind a viable alternative presidential candidate.

Who that candidate might be is anyone’s guess, but the suggestion here is it should be someone white, male, Christian, straight, moderate, and no older than 60.

And if Democrats can regain control of the House and Senate it won’t take long to undo everything the Trump administration has done and reinstate every Obama-era policy that’s been repealed. Trump’s obsession, undoing everything done by Obama, can be emulated by the next Democratic president. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Donald Trump loves to be flattered.

What’s been deregulated can be re-regulated. Consumer protections and environmental restrictions will come back, we’ll rejoin the Paris climate accords, tensions between the United States and Iran, North Korea, the Palestinians, and all of Europe will be smoothed over once this lunatic is out of office.

The individual mandate on Obamacare will be mandated once again, sanctuary cities and the Dreamers will be safe, the tax bill will be amended, and any wall—more likely a barbed wire fence—will be torn down.

Sanity will reign once again.

The only permanent damage that will have been done is with Supreme Court and federal judges who are appointed for life. Because he has the House and Senate behind him, Trump has been able to appoint over 30 right-wing federal judges and one right-wing Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch.

A Republican operative was interviewed on MSNBC and was asked why religious evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. He said they hated to do it, but there was one reason and one reason only—the Supreme Court. They wanted justices appointed who would overturn Roe v. Wade and gay marriage.

When I heard that, my head hurt. All during the summer of 2016 I appealed to ultra liberal Democrats to remember the mantra, “It’s the Supreme Court, stupid” while encouraging them to support Hillary Clinton. It was like talking to the wall.

In the new tell-all book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” Steve Bannon was quoted about the Supreme Court, something to the effect that if Republicans won the election they could possibly appoint three conservative justices and wipe out liberalism forever.

At this point there are two justices over 80 and one who’s 79. If they can hold on until 2020, and if Democrats can take back the Senate and the presidency, an epic disaster can be avoided.

In 2016, with nine months left in his last year in office, Republicans refused to allow President Obama to nominate a Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia. Their rationale was that an appointment should wait until after the November election and a new president takes office.

Is anyone delusional enough to believe that if one of the justices dies or retires in the last year of President Trump’s term and Republicans control the Senate they would refrain from trying to nominate and confirm a conservative judge until after the 2020 election?

This is the political party with which we’re dealing. They’re ruthless and hypocritical, and they aim to win by any means necessary.

But other than the courts, what’s done can and will be undone. So take heart, breathe deeply, and be patient, as difficult as that may be. Single malt scotch helps a great deal.

It took until December 12 for the biggest lesson of 2017 to arrive. That was the date of the special Senate election in Alabama to replace former Senator Jeff Sessions, who had been appointed by Donald Trump as United States Attorney-General.

The candidates were Doug Jones, a Democrat who had successfully prosecuted two men who had killed four young black girls by bombing a church in Birmingham in 1963, and Judge Roy Moore, a Republican who had a history of homophobia and religious obsession, as well as having been charged with sexual crimes involving an under-aged girl.

With all of Moore’s flaws the conventional wisdom was that he would easily win the election because Alabama is not only part of the Bible Belt but also the reddest Republican state in America. A Democrat had not been elected to the senate from that state in a quarter of a century.

At 7:00 PM on the night of the election Moore’s campaign manager predicted the result would be in early and that his candidate would win by eight or nine points. At 10:00 PM it was too close to call, but major network analysts didn’t hold out much hope for Jones, saying they didn’t see where enough votes could come in to bring him victory.

Suddenly the tide turned drastically, and everything broke Jones’ way. He won the election by a narrow margin, but a win is a win is a win, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.

Pundits made their post-game analysis, and they agreed that the turnout was the major factor in the Democratic win, not only the numbers who turned out but also the voter demographic.

In an off-year special election the prediction was that 25% of those eligible would vote. On December 12 40% of Alabama voters showed up at the polls. It was also thought that black voters would not come out to vote the way they did in 2008 when Barack Obama was a candidate. But the black turnout in this election matched the numbers set when a black man running for president was on the ballot.

It was great for liberals in Alabama and for the rest of the country, and now the Republicans have only a two-seat margin in the United States senate.
A wee bit too late, however, by approximately 13 months, to put Hillary Clinton in the White House instead of Donald Trump.

What happened in November 2016 was that too many black people didn’t vote, and too many white liberals either didn’t vote or voted for a third-party candidate who couldn’t win. The votes were there for a Democratic victory, but the voters didn’t turn out.

The lesson here is that it’s not the “flawed” candidate who’s to blame. It’s the flawed electorate. Sixty-two million Americans turned out to vote for the most flawed candidate in history, a candidate who did everything wrong. He insulted a war hero, a Gold Star mother, a handicapped journalist, referred to Mexicans as rapists, and was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

Despite all that his voters turned out. Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” He was right.

What this means is that in 2020 any Democratic candidate— Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Corey Booker, Andrew Cuomo, or one of a dozen others—can be elected if liberals stop their internal war between progressives and moderates, coalesce behind one candidate, and turn out to vote in November of that year. Democrats should divert some of the money used for TV ads to ensure that voting rights for black people in Southern states are not suppressed. That happened in North Carolina in 2016.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” was replaced by “It’s the Supreme Court, stupid” (that was obviously ignored), but in the final analysis
“IT’S THE TURNOUT, STUPID.”