I really hate this stuff. I am so sick of it, so disgusted by it. It is enough almost to get me thinking about watching football again. But the Year Without Football has been too sweet. So, energized by another weekend of seeing no one kneel in disrespect to my flag, here goes:

1. President Donald J. Trump is occasionally very crude, a boor. A bulvan. The kind of person whom many mothers a century ago would bring into a bathroom and wash his mouth with soap — and real soap, a solid bar of ivory, not the fragrant liquid soaps of today. The thing is, American voters knew all of this well in advance of electing him to be the 45thpresident of the United States. We knew about the size of his hands — because he told us. We knew about his plumbing — because he told us. That is who he is. There were so many debates, so many speeches. No one honestly can say “I had no idea that the man speaks like this.” We all knew — and the American people, after balancing the pros (Trump) and the cons (the Clintons), elected him.

2. Trump Tower may be in Manhattan, but the man is not “of Manhattan.” He is from Brooklyn and Queens. In Brooklyn and Queens, people tawk differently from the way they communicate in Manhattan. I grew up in that ’hood. The horribly vulgar and offensive term “sh*thole” isnota racist term. In Brooklyn and Queens parlance, it simply is not. It refers to the typical New York subway station, to three-quarters of the neighborhoods, to the homes of friends who beat you at poker or in games of flipping baseball cards when you lose. It refers to the home of anyone who beats you in anything. Any Mets or Yankees player who has had a bad week is assumed to hail from such a residential aperture. Outfielder Jay Bruce, when he first arrived at the Mets two summers ago and had a miserably inauspicious run, heard any numbers of encouragements from Mets fans to return to the “sh*thole” whence he came. In fact, he had come from Cincinnati, a lovely city on the majestic Ohio River, home to some of the finest cuisine in America, and at least as elegant as Bensonhurst, Brooklyn or Jamaica, Queens. But, with his unproductive summer, New Yorkers at CitiField urged him to return to whatever sh*thole he came from. Thereafter, in the following year, Mr. Bruce played magnificently for the Metsies, and the fans loved him. Indeed, when he was traded to Cleveland late last season, they mourned his departure — so much that the team just bought him back from Ohio for the next three years at a cost of $39 million. That is the meaning of that vulgarity. It is used too easily, too matter-of-factly, to describe everything from a snooty 5-star restaurant that will not permit the male patrons to dine without a proper coat and tie, to a school that assigns homework over Christmas. So, a bit of translation is in order.

3. Mitt Romney never would speak like that. That is why so many of us Republicans would rather see our children grow up like Mitt Romney than like Donald Trump. We would hope that our daughters would marry a fellow like a Mitt Romney rather than like a Donald Trump. Mitt Romney bears himself with dignity. He speaks with gentility. He is, by every definition, a refined statesman. One other thing: He also lost the 2012 Presidential election, partly because he was too polite and well-mannered to call Candy Crowley out for cheating during the critical third presidential debate. Donald Trump? One shudders — or giggles — just to imagine how he would have handled Crowley’s cheating during that debate. By contrast, Romney handled it like a gentleman — and that is why Obama was reelected in 2012 and empowered to continue damaging the American economy, weakening and imperiling American security overseas, and promoting the decline of American culture. Had the 2012 Republican candidate showed courage and presence of mind at that crucial moment in that third debate, today there would be no Iran nuclear program with a ridiculous treaty that saw us secretly flying $33 billion in cold cash to pay ransom to the mullahs. The achievements of the Surge in Iraq would not have been squandered. The tax cuts and reform could have been implemented four years ago. No salsas and sell-out to Havana and the murderous Castros. Five brutal savage butchers would not have been let out of Gitmo for Bowe Bergdahl. The Cliven Bundy nonsense would have been avoided. The Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline would have been approved years ago. We would have been spared John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Susan Rice. The federal appellate courts and federal district courts would have been cleaned up years ago. Alas, the Republicans instead ran a refined, genteel candidate, and he lost an election that he should have won.

4. After eight years of Obama in office, signing executive orders and bypassing the constitutional legislative process of governing, bragging of his phone and pen, Republicans understood that it would take a bulldozer, or even a bull, to come to Washington and to make American great again. Even Trump has discovered that even he could not just walk in with a mop and bleach, and clean the swamp. No one — not even Trump — even began to realize how deep the Deep State is, what a mess the swamp is. Many were angry at how FBI Director James Comey had acted beyond his proper scope by deciding unilaterally to drop the Hillary Clinton investigation, even as she clearly had perpetrated federal crimes, but none of us then knew how Comey himself actually had been manipulated by a Trump-hater into recharacterizing Hillary’s criminality — gross negligence — as “extreme carelessness.” None of us knew the full dimensions of Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok and his paramour and Bruce Orr and the Orr wife who was working on the inside for Fusion GPS while the Clintons and the DNC were paying Fusion GPS to create a phony dossier that apparently even was used to authorize secret FISA court warrants to tap into the Trump campaign. We thought it was just about Lois Lerner and maybe a bit of Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. None of us knew the FBI was corrupt. We grew up with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. on Sunday nights on ABC, with the FBI protecting us from the crooks. Who knew that the FBI were the crooks? So thewhole thing is a mess,and Americans knowingly elected a bull — a brazen, arrogant, foul-mouthed bull, who also happens to have a sweet heart — to charge head-first into the china shop that is Washington, D.C. and to clean up the mess, even if it means smashing a few displays of tea cups and saucers and stepping on fish forks and finger sandwiches.

5. There is a legal rule, at least in the practice of law in California — and I assume elsewhere, too — that negotiations are confidential. In California, the best known statute on this subject is Code of Civil Procedure section 998. To encourage frank and open negotiations between and among conflicting parties, and to help them bridge gaps and reach compromises, the law says that all such negotiations, talks, and proposals are confidential. That is, no side need fear that a concession, an admission of fault or other wrongdoing, or a willingness to give in or reduce one’s demands will later be revealed to the judge or jury if the talks break down and the matter ultimately goes to trial. That assurance facilitates deal-making and compromises because there are “no holds barred,” and everything safely may be placed on the table. By contrast, it therefore is remarkable that the conversations and words used during a private, closed-door session between and among warring political parties and even contending factions within parties, ended up in the public sphere. The disclosures comprised an ultimate violation of trust and of the sanctity of the closed-door negotiation. Once it emerges that Democrats will go running to CNN and disclosing heated and vulgar words spoken in secret negotiations aiming to find avenues for agreement and compromise, Republicans — and certainly President Trump — no longer can trust the process. They will be more circumspect in the language — yes, a good thing, a very good thing — and they similarly will resist making concessions or offering compromises because they now see, if they did not know it already, that they cannot negotiate with the trust and assurance of good faith confidentiality that is a classic foundational requirement for such talks. So now the parties will dig in even more. And anyone who thought that President Trump would compromise significantly on funding of the wall, ending chain migration, and ending the immigration lottery was the ultimate Dreamer. Like he’s really going to sign a deal reached by Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, and Dick Durbin?

6. On CNN, the usual suspects immediately were calling Trump a “racist” and even saying that he has revealed himself suitable for being a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Really? First of all, we actually had a bona fide leader of the Ku Klux Klan serving as a United States Senate leader in our generation, not that long ago. Kirsten Gillibrand was even a mourner at his funeral. That racist Klansman was a leading Senate Democrat, Sen. Robert Byrd, the hater who also created the “Byrd Rule” that prevents anything from passing the Senate unless it has 60 votes. Byrd actually was a KKK Exalted Cyclops. Really. Second, there is something surreal about watching Al Sharpton, a man who made his name and gained his fame by race-baiting and Jew-hating, even spurring murderous street pogroms, going on television to call Trump a racist. Third, Trump was in the public light for approximately half a century, and no one called him “racist” until he become a conservative Republican President. If he had been associated even with a specter of racism, NBC would not have given him that The Apprentice television program from 2003 to 2015, Oprah would not have been interviewing him on her show all nice, warm, and fuzzy; and Jesse Jackson would not have been palling around with and praising him. Fourth, this “racist” has invited leaders of historically Black colleges to meet with him in the Oval Office, he has flown to attend the opening of a civil rights museum, and he even signed a Martin Luther King Day proclamation the day after the nonsense of what was said at the immigration negotiations the day before. Some racist.

In short, the real shame and tragedy is that, in an era where the mainstream “news” media long ago have revealed their Democrat Left liberal cards and biases, and with CNN and other cable news outlets needing to attract viewers and advertising all-day-long to feed the financial needs of the 24/7 news cycle, news coverage defaults to the lowest common denominator: a missing Malaysian airplane, a sex scandal, a profane vulgarity spoken during a heated negotiating session understood to be off-the-record and with absolutely none of the secondary connotation ascribed to it by a pouncing hypocritical assortment of left-liberal pundits who themselves include among their number outright documented racists and others who abided and even honored the Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan for decades because he was a Democrat.