Zambia’s president Edgar Chagwa Lungu addresses the U.N. General Assembly on September 25, 2019. (Lucas Jackson / Reuters)

Impromptus today brings you the usual smorgasbord, down to Jack Nicklaus and Mariah Carey (with Barry Switzer thrown in for good measure). I begin with the Electoral College — about which Democrats aren’t so pleased. Elizabeth Warren has pledged to abolish it, or try to.

Democrats have been stung in the Electoral College twice in recent years — first in 2000 and then in 2016. Each of those years, they won the “popular vote.” To lose in the Electoral College is a bitter pill.


On Election Night 2012, it looked for a while like President Obama would lose the popular vote but pull it out over Romney in the Electoral College. And Donald Trump was a-tweetin’.

“This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” “He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!” “The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!” “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.”

Etc., etc.


Four years later, of course, Trump was elected president by that very mechanism: the Electoral College. And now Trump and his camp think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

What if the 2016 election had gone differently? What if Trump had won the popular vote — what if The People had chosen him — but Hillary had taken it in the Electoral College? What would R’s be saying about the college now? What would D’s?


To ask the question is to answer it.

In my column yesterday, I said that I had grown cynical about back-having: “I’ve got your back”; “I’ve got his back”; “I’ve got their backs.” Back-having is highly selective, strictly situational. Some backs are gotten when it’s convenient; other backs go completely ungotten.

I am equally cynical about the debate over the Electoral College. (“Debate” is not really the word; we have more like personal blurtings.) There are probably five people in the country who have a principled position on the college — I know one or two of them. Everything else is just partisan and tribal.

So it is with the Senate filibuster and countless other matters. Does a president you hate play a lot of golf? What an outrage. How about a president you like? Hey, no problem!



Also in Impromptus today, I have a note about Zambia. Zambia? Yes, indeed. Our ambassador there created a row, and he has in fact been recalled. He is Daniel Foote, a member of the Foreign Service. I don’t know whether he is controlled by Soros.

In a recent interview, Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, said that Marie Yovanovitch, our former ambassador to Ukraine, is “controlled” by George Soros. “He put all four ambassadors there,” said Giuliani, meaning Ukraine, evidently. “And he’s employing the FBI agents.” Moreover, “he’s elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States.”

Holy-moly. Soros is really pullin’ strings.

Anyway, Ambassador Foote is Soros-free, as far as I can tell. What happened in Zambia is this: The country’s high court sentenced a gay couple to 15 years in prison (for sex). Foote criticized this sentence, sharply. He also unloaded about U.S.–Zambia relations.

“Let us stop the facade that our governments enjoy ‘warm and cordial’ relations,” he wrote. “The current government of Zambia wants foreign diplomats to be compliant, with open pocketbooks and closed mouths.”

Yowza. This passage is quoted in a Washington Post article. I will now quote the article itself:

He also lamented that the United States provides Zambia with $500 million in aid each year but that he has struggled to schedule meetings with the president and faced criticism for raising concerns about corruption. “Both the American taxpayers, and Zambian citizens, deserve a privileged, two-way partnership, not a one-way donation that works out to $200 million per meeting with the head of state,” he wrote.

Yowza again. Needless to say, the Zambian president, Edgar Lungu, was ticked off. He declared he could not, would not work with Ambassador Foote. Also, the ambassador’s physical safety was threatened. So we recalled him.

Many, many Americans are very, very grudging about the $391 million we (finally) sent to Ukraine — a struggling democracy that is trying to fend off Putin’s Russia, which annexed part of its territory and is now making war on the country. (More than 14,000 people have been killed in this war.)


Before Congress authorized military aid to Ukraine, the Pentagon certified to it that Ukraine had made sufficient strides against corruption to warrant receipt of the aid. Ukraine, of course, has long been afflicted by corruption, like all post-Soviet states — including Russia, naturally.

Anyway: We sent $391 million to Ukraine. We are sending $500 million a year to Zambia. Maybe people could concentrate their ire on that, and give Ukraine a break for a week or two.

Not to mention Egypt, whose government is laughably corrupt. We send that government about $1.5 billion a year. Moreover, this is a government that has effectively abolished civil society. You utter a peep, you’re in a dungeon, with electric prods in painful places. But that is another blogpost . . .