As you probably know by now former President Bill Clinton got into a raucous shouting match with Black Lives Matter protesters while speaking at a rally on behalf of HIllary Clinton in Philadelphia.

To be sure, much of his address was self-serving as was the case when he said this country needed a President "who will tell you the truth." The Clintons have scarcely a passing acquaintance with the truth.

But even the most accomplished of liars occasionally drops a kernel of truth:

I don't know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens .... You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter. Tell the truth. 

I don't think we should be surprised that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani picked Donald Trump over Ted Cruz.

Given that Cruz made a point of maligning so-called "New York values", an endorsement from a former Big Apple mayor would have been a Brooklyn Bridge too far.

Yet when one thinks of Giuliani one invariably thinks of his response to 9/11. Notwithstanding Trump's eloquent statement during a GOP debate about the aftermath of 9/11, he has also blamed former President Bush for the attacks rather than al Qaeda and erroneously claimed thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered on the attacks. Such statements ought to have given Giuliani pause. That he did not is lamentable. 

Merle has looked pretty haggard for years. And, alas, Wednesday he succumbed to illness on his 79^th birthday. Not in Muskogee, Oklahoma, but in California. (Merle wasn’t born in the city he made famous, but near Bakersfield, California, where his Oklahoman family had fled during the Great Depression to escape Dust Bowl miseries.)  If God is a country music fan, which I am convinced He is, Haggard’s reward will be substantial.

A tip of the cowboy hat (though Merle himself seemed to prefer feed-store baseball caps over Stetsons) to Aaron Goldstein for his earlier tribute to Haggard.  Aaron is right to celebrate Haggard’s patriotic songs and his “outlaw” music that set him apart from the standard and more slick Nashville sound. Like so many country stars, Haggard lived his songs before he wrote and sang them. In his early years, the eventual “outlaw” singer did appear to be studying for the gallows. Happily, he finally decided on singing over safe-cracking.  

How surprising! Trump used a classical allusion in calling his chief rival “a Trojan horse,” sent by Republican Party bosses to “steal the nomination from Mr. Trump.”

Did he say “Mr. Trump”? He did. The boastful billionaire has suddenly become more deferential, if only self-deferential — referring to himself in the third person and affixing a “mister” to the stand-alone moniker, as if to underline a newly discovered maturity, a few weeks shy of his 70^th birthday.

However, what is more impressive — coming from a man who has authored more books (16) than he has ever read — is the reference to the great wooden horse, with the bellyful of warriors, which the wily Greeks left in front of the gates of Troy, after failing to conquer the city through a long siege. Does this signal a desire to elevate his language in the final stages of the primary?

But surely Trump does not want to tempt fate by sounding the alarm against a Trojan horse. It was fatal to the first who did it. Perhaps a reader or friend will be kind enough to tell him about it.