Top of the Ticket

Two of the the country’s most prominent Republicans gave serious, eloquent speeches this week. The man who never shuts up, President Trump, was not one of them. Instead, he was the thinly veiled target of both.

On Monday, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, Arizona Sen.

Sexually aggressive creeps like Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and — yes — Donald Trump seem to think harassing women to the point of unwelcome groping or worse is a male prerogative. It’s just boys being boys and men being men the way nature intended. Maybe they are right if we believe men have not advanced beyond primitive cave dwellers.

It is hard to imagine anything less alluring than the sight of portly, hirsute Harvey Weinstein naked in the shower, but the Miramax movie mogul offered actress Ashley Judd that dubious erotic opportunity when he lured her up to his hotel room back in 1997.

Donald Trump is a salesman who has never let truth get in the way of peddling a product. As president, he tried unsuccessfully to sell various schemes to repeal and replace Obamacare by using the same technique he used to sell the bogus curriculum of Trump University: make outlandish claims of value and quality that are nowhere close to the truth.

Now he is applying the same approach to tax reform.

In the middle of a pool game in the back room of the Flying Bull tavern, my new friend, Jarrod Stout, pulled me aside. He wanted to make sure I had his back if things got rough. As soon as he’d come into the bar he had gotten glaring looks from some of the white patrons, and now a grim-faced guy with a custom-made pool cue was acting a bit strange.

At this small town at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, there is a history that is well-known and a history that has been hidden.

The familiar history is the story of militant abolitionist John Brown, who on the night of Oct. 16, 1859, came with a party of 22 raiders to seize the United States arsenal.