John T. Reed’s news blog

I just set my DVR to record the new TV series “Designated Survivor” on ABC at 10PM on Wednesday. The review in today’s paper said it’a fantastic.   My new book The Unelected President is supposed to arrive today. Both Unelected President and Designated Survivor are about a non-politician suddenly and unexpectedly becoming President of the United States.   The review buttressed my impression from watching the trailer. The Designated Survivor guy, “Tom Kirkman” is bewildered at becoming president, and remains so for a long time. My guy, “Mike Medlock,” is shocked, but gets over it in minutes.   The...

When he was White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”Well, he’s got one now doesn’t he? They had 90 murders in August, the most in that month in 20 years.When Barack Obama was in college and working in NYC for two years afterward, he decided to go into politics and chose the South Side of Chicago, apparently because it was the blackest district in America. Obama never had any connection to Chicago. He was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia and went to college in Pasadena and NYC.Anyway, he...

It has long been said in DC that the cover-up is often worse than the original bad behavior. True. Ask Martha Stewart. Not the Big Lie, but the Endlessly Repeated Lie But Hillary has created a whole new version. It’s not Hitler’s Big Lie or the real-estate-guru-get-rich-quick Attractive Lie. This is the “if I tell the same barefaced lies enough times, you will ultimately believe me and ignore all evidence to the contrary, even when they keep juxtaposing my lies next to the video clips of the FBI Director squarely calling them false.”It is good that Trey Gowdy is a...

There is a new TV series titled “Designated Survivor” starring Kiefer Sutherland. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_f1v0Nx5Sw) Because it is about a guy who becomes president accidentally and unexpectedly—like “Mike Medlock” in my Unelected President novel—I took a special interest in this. I have not seen the series, of course. No one but insiders have. And there is no need to prove the series is bad to sell my books. Both can be excellent and I hope they are. Success of Designated Survivor might help sales of my book by whetting people’s appetite for this genre—unlikely persons becoming president unexpectedly. But having just written...

When your political base is poor and downtrodden, you must keep them poor and downtrodden forever. The corollary is that your base needs to be dumb enough not to figure that out.That, in turn, means the Oval Office will be filled by people chosen by the least successful who are so low IQ that they cannot see what’s being done to them. Or maybe they are in denial or don’t want to believe it.Whatever the reason, it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad or a country. They don’t need a majority of Americans to be poor and...