By H. N. Burdett
Over her far too brief lifetime, Molly Ivins proved time and again that she had more bite in her inkwell than a pack of hounds chasing the scent of a nearby sausage factory. During the reign of Bush the Younger, she dropped this stunning pearl: "Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be President of the United States, please pay attention."
Never mind that the advice of this heir to American iconoclasts Twain and Mencken would have disqualified her friend Ann Richards, the onetime Lone Star state governor some of us felt was most worthy of one day occupying the White House. The point is that two Texans are vying for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. And, despite their denials, they are both vulnerable to the charge of racism.
First it was the revelation about the name painted on a big old rock at the entrance of Texas Governor Rick Perry's hunting camp. That name - "Niggerhead" - was so off-putting that it all but negated the accomplishments Governor Perry has managed in order to either prove that he is genuinely color blind, or is interested in attracting African American voters. These include appointing Wallace Jefferson, the state's first black state supreme court justice and later appointing him chief justice, and appointing more minorities to statewide positions than any governor in Texas history.
Perry claimed that the racial epithet had been painted on the boulder before his family acquired the property. Besides, he insists, he had the offensive title of the camp removed. Much later, his detractors retort.
Now it is libertarian Ron Paul's turn to get his buns singed - by the light shed on all of those newsletters bearing his name when the voters in his congressional district temporarily retired him from Congress. He allows as how he was just too busy making a living practicing medicine to read, much less edit, those bile-filled publications.
But, according to Reason magazine, Paul and his wife were not too busy to serve as officers of Ron Paul and Associates, the corporation that published the newsletters and which earned an income of nearly $1 million in 1993 alone. James Kirchick, writing in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, said, "If this figure is reliable, Paul must have earned multiple millions of dollars over the two decades plus of the publication's existence. . ."
By this time, millions of potential voters in next year's presidential election have read excerpts from the unmitigated tripe contained in the Ron Paul publications he was too preoccupied to write, edit, or even read:
EXHIBIT 1: "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for blacks to pick up their welfare checks."
EXHIBIT 2: "Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 per cent of all black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
EXHIBIT 3: An article on disturbances in Washington's Adams Morgan neighborhood was entitled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo."
EXHIBIT 4: Martin Luther King Jr. was characterized as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours" and "seduced underage boys and girls."
EXHIBIT 5: After Ronald Reagan signed legislation to declare Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, the newsletter said: "We can thank him (Reagan) for our annual Hate Whitey Day."
EXHIBIT 6: One of the Paul newsletter's reported that "gangs of black girls between the ages 12 and 14" roamed the streets of New York injecting white women with syringes that were possibly HIV-infected. Another argued that AIDS patients should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because "AIDS can be transmitted through saliva." (Editor's Note: It cannot.)
EXHIBIT 7: A 1990 newsletter speaks of "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to work for the Mossad (the Israeli secret service) in their area of expertise."
EXHIBIT 8: Commenting on the World Trade Center attack, a Paul newsletter said: "Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad. . .or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little."
In response, Ron Paul has stated: "The quotations. . .are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name."
A response to an article on the Paul publications in Washington Monthly had it on target by noting: Three choices: (1) Ron Paul is or was a racist; (2) Ron Paul published racist rants which he didn't believe for political or financial advantage; (3) Ron Paul published a newsletter named after himself for decades, but didn't bother to find out what was in it.
Paul's defense is not much helped by the fact that he was the only member of Congress in 1999 to oppose the issuance of a Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks, and only last May said in an interview that he opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Ron Paul is now running third in the national polls of GOP presidential candidates. Whether he sinks or rises in these snapshots of Republican opinion in the wake of the exposure of what appeared in his newsletters may expose the dark underside of the nation.
A shameful segment of American society still does indeed exhale what Gerald White Johnson some 70 years ago called "the moldy breath of bigotry." Just how large this portion is cannot be known. Nor can it be reasonably argued that everyone casting a vote for either Ron Paul or Rick Perry is a bigot. What can be said without fear of contradiction is that if either Paul or Perry is the Republican nominee running against an incumbent African American president, it will be the ugliest, most chilling election in the history of the United States.
###
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
TWEEDLEDEE, TWEEDLEDUM LOCK HORNS
By H. N. Burdett
With a tip of my 80% wool cap to that sultan of satire, Mort Sahl: George Washington could not tell a lie, Richard Nixon could not tell the truth, and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich cannot tell the difference.
After Herman Cain departed the primary arena, Gingrich shot past his Republican opponents in the polls like Silky Sullivan, the legendary little horse that could. Back in the late 1950s, Silky ran from 25 to 30 lengths behind in race after race to garner comeback triumphs. Previously mired in single digit perdition in the polls, the former House of Representatives Speaker whizzed by second-place Romney and landed some 20 points in front of him. But the apparent endless volatility of Republican voters has once again surfaced. The latest Washington Post/CBS poll shows Gingrich and Romney running neck-and-neck.
The wonder of the Gingrich surge is that repeatedly mentioning his association with Ronald Reagan, which the current GOP flavor of the month does with monotonous regularity, continues to carry weight among the party's conservative faithful.
Distracted from his focus on the January 10 New Hampshire primary by the down-draft of Gingrich's resurrection from dead in the water to front-runner, Romney dug into his deep pockets to pour $3 million into the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus, which he had previously written off with the nonchalance of a Sunday church-goer shaking free from all vestiges of sanctimony on Monday morning. Four years ago, the Iowa caucus winner was Mike Huckabee, who by Super Tuesday of 2008 became the political equivalent of the proverbial golf ball lost in the tall grass.
On the next Super Tuesday, March 6, 2012, eight states - Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia -- will hold presidential primaries, and two - Alaska and North Dakota - will stage caucuses. Barring a photo finish, the GOP will have unofficially nominated its candidate for president.
For all of his posturing as a "consistent conservative" - forgetting that he held contrary positions on virtually every core Republican anathema, from government health insurance to gun control and a woman's right to have an abortion, while winning the governorship of the Bay State - amnesiac Romney has openly observed that whenever he travels around Iowa, he keeps running into loyal Ron Paul supporters.
Though Romney now finds himself, lo and behold, with an unlikely fighting chance to win the Iowa caucus, he recognizes that a victory for him in the Hawkeye state would be nothing short of a miracle on par with the parting of the Red Sea and the virgin birth combined. But he further believes it is prudent to shell out three Very Big Ones not so much to win there, but to prevent his current nemesis from doing so. Should Gingrich capture the Iowa caucus and, after Romney's expected victory in New Hampshire, also carry South Carolina on January 21 and Florida on January 31, he would gain formidable traction for Super Tuesday on March 6. And only last summer, the campaign staff of the nation's most prominent unregistered lobbyist was bailing out in droves.
Concluding that Ron Paul has nowhere to go after Iowa, Romney would welcome a victory there by the libertarian Texas congressman who has little faith in government solving anything but continues to claim himself to be the only GOP candidate who truly reveres the United States Constitution, which, oh by the way, just happens to be the blueprint for U.S. government.
Gingrich's delusional self-esteem audaciously permits him to wager his candidacy on the shaky premise that he can convince voters he is a historian rather than the lobbyist that he obviously is. And Romney banks on his patrician countenance, even when he is garbed in real-folks flannel shirt and blue jeans, to enable him to lock eyes with voters and enunciate scripted nonsense about being a consistent conservative. Both have daringly shrugged off the timeless wisdom of Abraham Lincoln's celebrated observation: You can fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
Even George W. Bush, who won the presidency in 2000, then proceeded to wage two off-the-books pre-emptive invasions and occupations of Middle Eastern countries yet still managed to win re-election, has ultimately learned Lincoln's lesson. Disengaged though he may be, Bush 43 must still wince some in his realization that scant few Republicans would defend him against being flung into the dung pile precinct of history, where James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson currently reside, as among easily the three worst U.S. presidents.
Gingrich stretches beyond hubris in his claim that he was hired by Freddie Mac - the same entity he felt Barney Frank should be jailed for supporting - and collected $1.6 million for his services as a historian rather than the lobbyist he was. Romney promptly challenged Gingrich to return the money that made him the highest paid historian ever.
"There are two kinds of light," James Thurber once observed, "the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures." While politicians too often rely on the latter to blind consituents from their various misdeeds and other embarrassments, once they reach the top of the polls they are, thankfully, exposed by the former. Romney and Gingrich are learning the humorist's theory of light the hard way.
This, of course, does not dissuade historian Ginrich one iota. He goes right on trying to sound professorial, which apparently works some with less educated voters, though the polls reveal that more educated Republicans tend to be more skeptical about his shameless, self-styled pedantry. As one pundit observed, whenever Gingrich freely peppers virtually every sentence he utters whenever any cockamamie thought pops into his head with four-syllable words, like "fundamental," supporters confuse his shoot-from-the-lip rhetoric with erudition.
As for Gingrich's claim to consistency on conservative values, he is on record as favoring amnesty for undocumented immigrants, as well as single-payer health insurance and he believes, or once believed, climatologists whose research shows that the planet is actually becoming dangerously warmer - positions diametrically opposed to GOP anti-science orthodoxy.
Romney has also mastered politics as the art of the preposterous by robotically staring down the television camera and declaring himself to be the only "job creator" among the GOP candidates. His claim harks back to his days as the manager of Bain Capital, Bain & Company's private equity operation.
Though Romney did not invent the high stakes game of leveraged buyouts, he was certainly among its more masterful practitioners. Bain Capital acquired or heavily invested in such companies as KB Toys, Domino's Pizza and Sealy Mattress. "Job creator" Romney would just as soon forget the 3,400 jobs lost before KB Toys declared for bankruptcy reorganization, the 2,500 jobs lost after Bain Capital's buyout of Clear Channel Communications, or the hundreds of jobs lost after its buyout of Sensata Technology and the 700 workers fired in the wake of the merger of steel companies Bain Capital arranged to form GSI Industries.
The thousands of people who lost jobs as the result of Romney's wheeling and dealing in the legal larceny of leveraged buyouts and sundry other manipulations will not be much cheered by the recent New York Times revelation that Romney is financing his current presidential campaign - as he did his last one four years ago - with the millions he continues to rake in annually from Bain for a job well done years back.
Marc B. Walpow, who as a managing partner at Bain worked closely with Romney for nine years, says, "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation. The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for its investors." Indeed Romney deserves high marks in accomplishing the goal described by Walpow.
Gingrich's boasts of consistent conservatism and Romney's "job creator" claims bring to mind H. L. Mencken's observation that a politician, upon learning that he has cannibals for constituents, will offer them missionaries for dinner. Amen.
###
With a tip of my 80% wool cap to that sultan of satire, Mort Sahl: George Washington could not tell a lie, Richard Nixon could not tell the truth, and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich cannot tell the difference.
After Herman Cain departed the primary arena, Gingrich shot past his Republican opponents in the polls like Silky Sullivan, the legendary little horse that could. Back in the late 1950s, Silky ran from 25 to 30 lengths behind in race after race to garner comeback triumphs. Previously mired in single digit perdition in the polls, the former House of Representatives Speaker whizzed by second-place Romney and landed some 20 points in front of him. But the apparent endless volatility of Republican voters has once again surfaced. The latest Washington Post/CBS poll shows Gingrich and Romney running neck-and-neck.
The wonder of the Gingrich surge is that repeatedly mentioning his association with Ronald Reagan, which the current GOP flavor of the month does with monotonous regularity, continues to carry weight among the party's conservative faithful.
Distracted from his focus on the January 10 New Hampshire primary by the down-draft of Gingrich's resurrection from dead in the water to front-runner, Romney dug into his deep pockets to pour $3 million into the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus, which he had previously written off with the nonchalance of a Sunday church-goer shaking free from all vestiges of sanctimony on Monday morning. Four years ago, the Iowa caucus winner was Mike Huckabee, who by Super Tuesday of 2008 became the political equivalent of the proverbial golf ball lost in the tall grass.
On the next Super Tuesday, March 6, 2012, eight states - Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia -- will hold presidential primaries, and two - Alaska and North Dakota - will stage caucuses. Barring a photo finish, the GOP will have unofficially nominated its candidate for president.
For all of his posturing as a "consistent conservative" - forgetting that he held contrary positions on virtually every core Republican anathema, from government health insurance to gun control and a woman's right to have an abortion, while winning the governorship of the Bay State - amnesiac Romney has openly observed that whenever he travels around Iowa, he keeps running into loyal Ron Paul supporters.
Though Romney now finds himself, lo and behold, with an unlikely fighting chance to win the Iowa caucus, he recognizes that a victory for him in the Hawkeye state would be nothing short of a miracle on par with the parting of the Red Sea and the virgin birth combined. But he further believes it is prudent to shell out three Very Big Ones not so much to win there, but to prevent his current nemesis from doing so. Should Gingrich capture the Iowa caucus and, after Romney's expected victory in New Hampshire, also carry South Carolina on January 21 and Florida on January 31, he would gain formidable traction for Super Tuesday on March 6. And only last summer, the campaign staff of the nation's most prominent unregistered lobbyist was bailing out in droves.
Concluding that Ron Paul has nowhere to go after Iowa, Romney would welcome a victory there by the libertarian Texas congressman who has little faith in government solving anything but continues to claim himself to be the only GOP candidate who truly reveres the United States Constitution, which, oh by the way, just happens to be the blueprint for U.S. government.
Gingrich's delusional self-esteem audaciously permits him to wager his candidacy on the shaky premise that he can convince voters he is a historian rather than the lobbyist that he obviously is. And Romney banks on his patrician countenance, even when he is garbed in real-folks flannel shirt and blue jeans, to enable him to lock eyes with voters and enunciate scripted nonsense about being a consistent conservative. Both have daringly shrugged off the timeless wisdom of Abraham Lincoln's celebrated observation: You can fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
Even George W. Bush, who won the presidency in 2000, then proceeded to wage two off-the-books pre-emptive invasions and occupations of Middle Eastern countries yet still managed to win re-election, has ultimately learned Lincoln's lesson. Disengaged though he may be, Bush 43 must still wince some in his realization that scant few Republicans would defend him against being flung into the dung pile precinct of history, where James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson currently reside, as among easily the three worst U.S. presidents.
Gingrich stretches beyond hubris in his claim that he was hired by Freddie Mac - the same entity he felt Barney Frank should be jailed for supporting - and collected $1.6 million for his services as a historian rather than the lobbyist he was. Romney promptly challenged Gingrich to return the money that made him the highest paid historian ever.
"There are two kinds of light," James Thurber once observed, "the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures." While politicians too often rely on the latter to blind consituents from their various misdeeds and other embarrassments, once they reach the top of the polls they are, thankfully, exposed by the former. Romney and Gingrich are learning the humorist's theory of light the hard way.
This, of course, does not dissuade historian Ginrich one iota. He goes right on trying to sound professorial, which apparently works some with less educated voters, though the polls reveal that more educated Republicans tend to be more skeptical about his shameless, self-styled pedantry. As one pundit observed, whenever Gingrich freely peppers virtually every sentence he utters whenever any cockamamie thought pops into his head with four-syllable words, like "fundamental," supporters confuse his shoot-from-the-lip rhetoric with erudition.
As for Gingrich's claim to consistency on conservative values, he is on record as favoring amnesty for undocumented immigrants, as well as single-payer health insurance and he believes, or once believed, climatologists whose research shows that the planet is actually becoming dangerously warmer - positions diametrically opposed to GOP anti-science orthodoxy.
Romney has also mastered politics as the art of the preposterous by robotically staring down the television camera and declaring himself to be the only "job creator" among the GOP candidates. His claim harks back to his days as the manager of Bain Capital, Bain & Company's private equity operation.
Though Romney did not invent the high stakes game of leveraged buyouts, he was certainly among its more masterful practitioners. Bain Capital acquired or heavily invested in such companies as KB Toys, Domino's Pizza and Sealy Mattress. "Job creator" Romney would just as soon forget the 3,400 jobs lost before KB Toys declared for bankruptcy reorganization, the 2,500 jobs lost after Bain Capital's buyout of Clear Channel Communications, or the hundreds of jobs lost after its buyout of Sensata Technology and the 700 workers fired in the wake of the merger of steel companies Bain Capital arranged to form GSI Industries.
The thousands of people who lost jobs as the result of Romney's wheeling and dealing in the legal larceny of leveraged buyouts and sundry other manipulations will not be much cheered by the recent New York Times revelation that Romney is financing his current presidential campaign - as he did his last one four years ago - with the millions he continues to rake in annually from Bain for a job well done years back.
Marc B. Walpow, who as a managing partner at Bain worked closely with Romney for nine years, says, "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation. The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for its investors." Indeed Romney deserves high marks in accomplishing the goal described by Walpow.
Gingrich's boasts of consistent conservatism and Romney's "job creator" claims bring to mind H. L. Mencken's observation that a politician, upon learning that he has cannibals for constituents, will offer them missionaries for dinner. Amen.
###
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
THE NARCISSIST VS. THE WAFFLE KING
By H. N. Burdett
Albert Einstein's definition of insanity was to do the same thing the same way over and over and expect different results. The Einstein maxim applies to the rigid insistence by Congressional Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
By framing the one percent of Americans at the top of the economic ladder as "job creators" - rather than the job outsourcers and job killers they have been in recent years - GOP lawmakers have closed their minds to the fact that, despite a decade of the tax cuts they hold inviolable, unemployment has risen to near double digits.
Contrarily, when the wealthiest were paying something somewhat closer to their fair share, during the Clinton administration, 23 million jobs were created. As President Obama said in his recent major economic address: "That is not politics. That's just math." That he happens to preside over one of the more math deficient countries in the western world probably discounts the probability that he will adopt those lines as a campaign slogan.
While Republicans stand firm - even on the fault line of economic collapse - when it comes to party orthodoxy, they appear to have narrowed their 2012 presidential nominee choice to one between a pair of political meteorologists, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who can re-position themselves in an eye blink whenever the winds shift. Both are endowed with sufficient ideological cynicism to vow their allegiance to conservative purity.
The Hobson's choice confronting Republican voters - at least this month - is one between Romney, who has made more waffles than the entire Denny's restaurant chain, and Gingrich, who makes Narcissus, the Greek mythological figure hopelessly in love with his own reflection, look like the Elephant Man.
Despite his well-advertised turnarounds on core right-wing issues, from gun control to abortion to same-sex marriage, Romney shows up in polls as the candidate most likely to give President Obama a run for his money.
Should Romney emerge as his party's standard-bearer, the health care program adopted when he was governor of Massachusetts and was the model for the national health care restructuring Republicans revile as socialized medicine, is likely to give the GOP faithful some pause. Equally interesting would be Romney's defense of the reversal of his position on the federal bailout that rescued the automobile industry from near extinction. In Michigan, America's automotive capital and a swing state where his father served as the chairman and CEO of the American Motors Corporation before he was elected governor of that state, voters may have a problem with Mitt Romney lambasting the Obama bailout.
Gingrich, the poster boy for unregistered Capitol Hill lobbyists, marital infidelity and egomania, has a flipflop problem of his own, on top of his habit of saying anything that pops into his mind at the precise moment when he should say nothing at all. Gingrich's inability to suppress his obsession with the microphone and the television camera may be particularly difficult for Republican voters to digest whenever they view those playbacks of his sitdown with Nancy Pelosi warning of the inconvenient truth of climate change - another Republican ideological no-no. He, incidentally, calls that abandonment of the GOP reservation the "dumbest" thing he ever did. But he might want to reassess that judgment after he has felt the full impact of the fallout from his proposal that students living in poverty be given school janitorial duties to learn lessons in the American work ethic.
The best chance Republicans have for evicting Obama from the White House is to demonize the president for his inability in only three years to clean up the mess of the two off-the-books preemptive invasions/occupations and the economic castrophe he inherited from George W. Bush, the hands-down worst president in U.S. history who held that lease for a full eight years.
Considering that Romney and Gingrich have more baggage than the RMS Queen Mary hauled during its trans-Atlantic voyages, either of these potential GOP presidential candidates would be destined to enter the race from a defensive posture. Even the immortal Sugar Ray Robinson, the greatest counter-puncher ever, would be strongly tested were he placed at that disadvantage.
###
Albert Einstein's definition of insanity was to do the same thing the same way over and over and expect different results. The Einstein maxim applies to the rigid insistence by Congressional Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
By framing the one percent of Americans at the top of the economic ladder as "job creators" - rather than the job outsourcers and job killers they have been in recent years - GOP lawmakers have closed their minds to the fact that, despite a decade of the tax cuts they hold inviolable, unemployment has risen to near double digits.
Contrarily, when the wealthiest were paying something somewhat closer to their fair share, during the Clinton administration, 23 million jobs were created. As President Obama said in his recent major economic address: "That is not politics. That's just math." That he happens to preside over one of the more math deficient countries in the western world probably discounts the probability that he will adopt those lines as a campaign slogan.
While Republicans stand firm - even on the fault line of economic collapse - when it comes to party orthodoxy, they appear to have narrowed their 2012 presidential nominee choice to one between a pair of political meteorologists, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who can re-position themselves in an eye blink whenever the winds shift. Both are endowed with sufficient ideological cynicism to vow their allegiance to conservative purity.
The Hobson's choice confronting Republican voters - at least this month - is one between Romney, who has made more waffles than the entire Denny's restaurant chain, and Gingrich, who makes Narcissus, the Greek mythological figure hopelessly in love with his own reflection, look like the Elephant Man.
Despite his well-advertised turnarounds on core right-wing issues, from gun control to abortion to same-sex marriage, Romney shows up in polls as the candidate most likely to give President Obama a run for his money.
Should Romney emerge as his party's standard-bearer, the health care program adopted when he was governor of Massachusetts and was the model for the national health care restructuring Republicans revile as socialized medicine, is likely to give the GOP faithful some pause. Equally interesting would be Romney's defense of the reversal of his position on the federal bailout that rescued the automobile industry from near extinction. In Michigan, America's automotive capital and a swing state where his father served as the chairman and CEO of the American Motors Corporation before he was elected governor of that state, voters may have a problem with Mitt Romney lambasting the Obama bailout.
Gingrich, the poster boy for unregistered Capitol Hill lobbyists, marital infidelity and egomania, has a flipflop problem of his own, on top of his habit of saying anything that pops into his mind at the precise moment when he should say nothing at all. Gingrich's inability to suppress his obsession with the microphone and the television camera may be particularly difficult for Republican voters to digest whenever they view those playbacks of his sitdown with Nancy Pelosi warning of the inconvenient truth of climate change - another Republican ideological no-no. He, incidentally, calls that abandonment of the GOP reservation the "dumbest" thing he ever did. But he might want to reassess that judgment after he has felt the full impact of the fallout from his proposal that students living in poverty be given school janitorial duties to learn lessons in the American work ethic.
The best chance Republicans have for evicting Obama from the White House is to demonize the president for his inability in only three years to clean up the mess of the two off-the-books preemptive invasions/occupations and the economic castrophe he inherited from George W. Bush, the hands-down worst president in U.S. history who held that lease for a full eight years.
Considering that Romney and Gingrich have more baggage than the RMS Queen Mary hauled during its trans-Atlantic voyages, either of these potential GOP presidential candidates would be destined to enter the race from a defensive posture. Even the immortal Sugar Ray Robinson, the greatest counter-puncher ever, would be strongly tested were he placed at that disadvantage.
###
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
TIP OF AN ENORMOUS ICEBERG
By H.N. Burdett
Full disclosure: I am a college sports fan. As an undergraduate student, I was the sports editor of my college newspaper. As a graduate student, I was a stringer for the Associated Press, covering intercollegiate sports. After military service, during which I'd been sports editor of my army post newspaper before becoming its editor, I was a burnt-out sportswriter. Rather than applying for a position in the sports department, I began my journalism career on the rewrite desk of a metropolitan daily newspaper, later evolving into a political writer and editorial page editor. No more sportswriting thereafter.
Over these last several days of shocking allegations that a Penn State University assistant football coach is a pedophile rapist, I have given considerable thought to my long ago years as a sports reporter and editor. My conclusions are not based solely on the sickening crimes with which Jerry Sandusky has been charged, but the rape of young boys in showers has certainly triggered my reflections of bygone years.
Beyond what the Penn State tragedy has done to the lives of the alleged victims, beyond the termination of the careers and reputations of a university president and a legendary football coach, among others, what cries out for exposure is the entire culture of intercollegiate sports. It is a phenomenon that incites even the most rational and responsible among us to cheer our hearts out for the home team, then look the other way when reprehensible actions of some coaches and some players are brought to light.
As of this writing, no one has accused a single Penn State football player of anything inappropriate, much less anything as heinous as the charges against Sandusky. Still, had I been a member of the board of trustees of that university, I would have vigorously argued for canceling at least the Nittany Lions' game last Saturday against Nebraska, if not the remainder of their football schedule.
To the dyed-in-the-wool fan, this may seem unreasonably harsh - a presumption of guilt against the alleged perpetrator of despicable crimes in a nation that prides itself on the presumption of innocence. On another level, however, it would demonstrate that the university administration and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, consider the Penn State travesty worthy of a deep and serious investigation.
Any such probe must extend well beyond Penn State. It is high time for an in-depth examination of factors that have exponentially multiplied and thoroughly corrupted college sports - grotesquely distorting them into a culture that has spawned myriad circumstances revolving around the mindset that "jocks will be jocks." The Penn State nightmare is but one example of where sports hysteria has brought us.
This is not to suggest that anything as horrific as child rape is a common occurrence at universities, nor that what allegedly happened at Penn State is directly attributable to football. The obsessions that hold up players and coaches as more than campus heroes, but national icons to be worshipped, has a disturbing dark side - one that allows minor and major transgressions committed by these self-same idols to be routinely dismissed without as much as a second thought.
The focus of national attention must be on the irrefutable fact that college sports has become, in today's parlance, too big to fail.
In conjunction with the Sandusky case, we have learned that Penn State's football program raked in $72 million for that university's coffers last year. Multiply this figure by the amounts raised by higher-end Division I football and basketball programs and the overall picture becomes crystal clear. Are there any further questions regarding how and why coaches and players receive what amount to permission slips for getting away with behavior that would never be tolerated from any other faculty member or student?
If top-of-the-line football coaches often enough take home larger paychecks than Nobel laureate physics professors and university presidents, the obvious discrepancy might be answered by the ghost of Babe Ruth. When asked how he felt about being paid more than the President of the United States, the Sultan of Swat once responded: "I guess I had a better year than Hoover did."
When a college's football or basketball program is consistently selected for bowl games or the NCAA tournament, or finishes its season among the Associated Press poll of the top 20 teams in the nation, the profits accrued mount well beyond ticket sales. Proud, well-heeled alumni are eager to assure the continuation of the sports program's success by fueling it with hard cash. Bragging rights about your old school is fun and games, but it is also costly.
Not only is it costly in terms of dollars and cents, it is costly in what the mass lunacy over major college sports is doing to the very fabric of our society - most especially when we hold athletes and coaches to virtually the same meager standard that has been applied in recent years to junk bond pitchmen.
More than 50 years ago, University of Maryland President H.C. "Curly" Byrd was determined to build a state-of-the-art football stadium on the College Park campus. Byrd was widely known for the kind of charm that could coax cats down from fish trucks. The Maryland legislature was the fish truck; lawmakers were the purring felines. When the university president wanted something from the state's General Assembly, it was usually as good as done. Grumbling could be heard from those unable to fathom why the head of a state university might choose to build a football field at a time when the College Park campus library was, to put it mildly, a laughingstock.
When that very question was posed to Byrd, his response was that if the seats were filled in his new stadium, he would build all the libraries any university would want. Once the stadium (bearing his name) was completed, he had a hunch that the football program would be on its way to becoming something special. And he was on target. The Maryland team immediately obliged with an undefeated season, achieved third in the AP's national rankings, and went on to demolish top-ranked Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl.
Over the next few years, the Maryland Terrapins accepted a couple of Orange Bowl invitations. As the football team paved its way to Miami, Byrd Stadium seats were filled to near capacity. But some five years later, the University of Maryland lost its academic accreditation. High on the evaluators' list of shortcomings was the university's woefully inadequate library for which a new and improved replacement had not yet materialized. Byrd, incidentally, was the only university president within memory who had once been his school's football coach. Among his early hires after taking over as the university's president launched the career of one of the most successful and powerful football coaches of all time - the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant.
Eventually a decent library was built on the university campus, under the president who succeeded Byrd, Wilson Elkins. Elkins had been a track star and football player during his own undergraduate days. Unlike Byrd, Elkins's doctorate was earned rather than honorary. Nonetheless, the new university president had no sooner taken the university reins when he felt it necessary to pledge that the strength of Maryland's athletic program was among his highest priorities.
Though there may be no correlation whatsoever, the university's football fortunes, under Elkins and those who succeeded him, have since followed a roller coaster trajectory, but have reached nowhere near the lofty heights enjoyed in the 1950s when Curly Byrd was crafting his dubious legacy.
The worship and coddling of figuratively and literally the biggest men on campus - athletes and coaches - did not happen over night. It has been going on for what seems forever and it has obviously not been confined to the University of Maryland, where, indeed, it did not begin. And this progressive corruption has been anything but a dirty secret clinging to the nether parts of the realm of higher education. It has been a sore festering for decades as television and national advertising sponsors have elevated college football and basketball into Big Business. Outrageously large sums have even been contributed to enshrine the names of corporations on college sports stadiums and field houses for the further glorification of the corporate brand.
It is Big Business fueled by the sports mania that explodes seasonally in virtually every village and hamlet across the land. The tales are many, but those in a position to step forward to relate them are virtually non-existent. A code of silence to protect the guilty is rather obvious. What sports fan or booster club member has not heard stories of college coaches plying prospective athletes with promises of automobiles, pocket money and even willing and eager co-eds? Pressed for more information, those relating such anecdotes frequently respond by saying it is just some rumor, nothing anyone can prove. When such rumors persist, year after year, decade after decade, it is reasonable to at least suspect that where there's all that smoke, there just may be fire.
It is difficult to think of the stories I heard as a student many years back as rumors - particularly those that came from actual participants, or at least individuals who claimed to be personally involved.
In the perfect vision of hindsight, those anecdotes were red flags that should have signaled matters of legitimate concern. Why would anyone with even a marginal moral compass, including myself, not sound the alarm? That no one did is an indictment of the spell that sports mania had already begun to cast.
To argue that it was an entirely different era, a time when reputable media represented by responsible and respected journalists declined to reveal what they knew or had heard about the dalliances of United States Presidents, is at best a wholesale wimp-out. Times were indeed different in countless ways, but do morals and ethics have timelines?
A star basketball player required a passing grade in a composition to be eligible to suit up for the upcoming season. At the eleventh hour, the paper was delivered to the athlete's English professor who gave it a passing grade. There is no way to know whether the authorship claimant had ever read the paper that guaranteed his eligibility. I do know, however, that he did not write it. And I can further report that the go-between, whose concern about his buddy's plight led him to seek out someone capable of writing the paper the campus hero could not, later became an elementary school principal.
That same basketball player received a regular paycheck for part-time janitorial services to the university. His primary duties consisted of turning on the gymnasium lights prior to practice and turning them off after the athletes had all showered and departed for their respective destinations.
There was a professor who informed a couple of students who just happened to be football players that the night before the test was scheduled a copy of the final course exam could be found on the center of the desk in his unlocked office. I have no recollection of any football player that year who was ruled academically ineligible.
An intimidating, no-nonsense dean, known as an uncompromising disciplinarian who would not hesitate to expel or suspend students for relatively minor violations, became marshmallow-soft when athletes appeared on his carpet. A former college athlete himself, that university official chose to act as defense counsel for varsity lettermen rather than as their judge on cases ranging from public drunkenness to property theft to date rape.
As a college student, I was uncomfortable hearing these stories. I was aware then, as I am now, that none of the participants would, on the grounds of self-incrimination, relate what they had told me to either appropriate authorities or the press. Still, it is a lame excuse for not exerting the effort to get them on the record. It is also true that I viewed my position of sports editor as reporting and commenting only on what was happening on the playing field. I might further plead that I was young, inexperienced and poorly qualified for investigative reporting. All true enough and, in the eyes of more than a few, these defenses might have at least a modicum of merit. Today, not so much.
If anyone learning of the aforementioned incidents had an inkling that turning a blind eye to cheating on test papers, receiving copies of final exams before they were administered, shrugging off corrupt university officials, would almost inevitably snowball into something far worse, the alarm might have sounded loud and clear.
Today I am the grandfather of a young man who once participated in youth baseball and basketball. When he was the very same age of the kid who was allegedly sodomized by a coach in that Penn State shower, I attended not only every game my grandson played but every practice, from beginning to end. I had no reason whatsoever to suspect inappropriate behavior by any of his coaches. But I was well aware of scattered newspaper accounts of pedophilia among Little League coaches and Boy Scout troop leaders around the country.
I had read such articles with both anger and sympathy. I wanted to get my hands tightly around the neck of any adult who would abuse any child. My rage built against low-life predators who would misuse positions of authority and trust to satiate their deviant appetites. At the same time, I realized that clouds of suspicion would form around dedicated coaches, often enough parents of players on teams to which they are assigned, who give generously of their time and experience to teach kids sportsmanship, fairplay and the many life lessons that can begin on playing fields. It is easy enough to envision such prospective mentors refusing to have anything to do with youth athletics and even the remote possibility of vicious accusations of misconduct from sports-crazed parents for no reason other than their kid not getting enough playing time.
Horrendous as the Penn State scandal is, it raises the hope that it may teach at least some of us that accumulated small transgressions beget palpably unacceptable larger ones. More than a few of us now know how we would react if we were to witness what the graduate assistant claims he saw in the shower room; we would not even think about calling the police or reporting it to the appropriate link in the academic chain of command. We would take immediate and swift action to stop the rape of a 10-year-old boy.
Had I witnessed a scene similar to the one the graduate assistant saw in the Penn State shower during my college days and done anything differently than what I know I would do today, my self-respect would have been lost, never to be fully regained; my life would have been in shambles and deservedly so.
###
Full disclosure: I am a college sports fan. As an undergraduate student, I was the sports editor of my college newspaper. As a graduate student, I was a stringer for the Associated Press, covering intercollegiate sports. After military service, during which I'd been sports editor of my army post newspaper before becoming its editor, I was a burnt-out sportswriter. Rather than applying for a position in the sports department, I began my journalism career on the rewrite desk of a metropolitan daily newspaper, later evolving into a political writer and editorial page editor. No more sportswriting thereafter.
Over these last several days of shocking allegations that a Penn State University assistant football coach is a pedophile rapist, I have given considerable thought to my long ago years as a sports reporter and editor. My conclusions are not based solely on the sickening crimes with which Jerry Sandusky has been charged, but the rape of young boys in showers has certainly triggered my reflections of bygone years.
Beyond what the Penn State tragedy has done to the lives of the alleged victims, beyond the termination of the careers and reputations of a university president and a legendary football coach, among others, what cries out for exposure is the entire culture of intercollegiate sports. It is a phenomenon that incites even the most rational and responsible among us to cheer our hearts out for the home team, then look the other way when reprehensible actions of some coaches and some players are brought to light.
As of this writing, no one has accused a single Penn State football player of anything inappropriate, much less anything as heinous as the charges against Sandusky. Still, had I been a member of the board of trustees of that university, I would have vigorously argued for canceling at least the Nittany Lions' game last Saturday against Nebraska, if not the remainder of their football schedule.
To the dyed-in-the-wool fan, this may seem unreasonably harsh - a presumption of guilt against the alleged perpetrator of despicable crimes in a nation that prides itself on the presumption of innocence. On another level, however, it would demonstrate that the university administration and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, consider the Penn State travesty worthy of a deep and serious investigation.
Any such probe must extend well beyond Penn State. It is high time for an in-depth examination of factors that have exponentially multiplied and thoroughly corrupted college sports - grotesquely distorting them into a culture that has spawned myriad circumstances revolving around the mindset that "jocks will be jocks." The Penn State nightmare is but one example of where sports hysteria has brought us.
This is not to suggest that anything as horrific as child rape is a common occurrence at universities, nor that what allegedly happened at Penn State is directly attributable to football. The obsessions that hold up players and coaches as more than campus heroes, but national icons to be worshipped, has a disturbing dark side - one that allows minor and major transgressions committed by these self-same idols to be routinely dismissed without as much as a second thought.
The focus of national attention must be on the irrefutable fact that college sports has become, in today's parlance, too big to fail.
In conjunction with the Sandusky case, we have learned that Penn State's football program raked in $72 million for that university's coffers last year. Multiply this figure by the amounts raised by higher-end Division I football and basketball programs and the overall picture becomes crystal clear. Are there any further questions regarding how and why coaches and players receive what amount to permission slips for getting away with behavior that would never be tolerated from any other faculty member or student?
If top-of-the-line football coaches often enough take home larger paychecks than Nobel laureate physics professors and university presidents, the obvious discrepancy might be answered by the ghost of Babe Ruth. When asked how he felt about being paid more than the President of the United States, the Sultan of Swat once responded: "I guess I had a better year than Hoover did."
When a college's football or basketball program is consistently selected for bowl games or the NCAA tournament, or finishes its season among the Associated Press poll of the top 20 teams in the nation, the profits accrued mount well beyond ticket sales. Proud, well-heeled alumni are eager to assure the continuation of the sports program's success by fueling it with hard cash. Bragging rights about your old school is fun and games, but it is also costly.
Not only is it costly in terms of dollars and cents, it is costly in what the mass lunacy over major college sports is doing to the very fabric of our society - most especially when we hold athletes and coaches to virtually the same meager standard that has been applied in recent years to junk bond pitchmen.
More than 50 years ago, University of Maryland President H.C. "Curly" Byrd was determined to build a state-of-the-art football stadium on the College Park campus. Byrd was widely known for the kind of charm that could coax cats down from fish trucks. The Maryland legislature was the fish truck; lawmakers were the purring felines. When the university president wanted something from the state's General Assembly, it was usually as good as done. Grumbling could be heard from those unable to fathom why the head of a state university might choose to build a football field at a time when the College Park campus library was, to put it mildly, a laughingstock.
When that very question was posed to Byrd, his response was that if the seats were filled in his new stadium, he would build all the libraries any university would want. Once the stadium (bearing his name) was completed, he had a hunch that the football program would be on its way to becoming something special. And he was on target. The Maryland team immediately obliged with an undefeated season, achieved third in the AP's national rankings, and went on to demolish top-ranked Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl.
Over the next few years, the Maryland Terrapins accepted a couple of Orange Bowl invitations. As the football team paved its way to Miami, Byrd Stadium seats were filled to near capacity. But some five years later, the University of Maryland lost its academic accreditation. High on the evaluators' list of shortcomings was the university's woefully inadequate library for which a new and improved replacement had not yet materialized. Byrd, incidentally, was the only university president within memory who had once been his school's football coach. Among his early hires after taking over as the university's president launched the career of one of the most successful and powerful football coaches of all time - the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant.
Eventually a decent library was built on the university campus, under the president who succeeded Byrd, Wilson Elkins. Elkins had been a track star and football player during his own undergraduate days. Unlike Byrd, Elkins's doctorate was earned rather than honorary. Nonetheless, the new university president had no sooner taken the university reins when he felt it necessary to pledge that the strength of Maryland's athletic program was among his highest priorities.
Though there may be no correlation whatsoever, the university's football fortunes, under Elkins and those who succeeded him, have since followed a roller coaster trajectory, but have reached nowhere near the lofty heights enjoyed in the 1950s when Curly Byrd was crafting his dubious legacy.
The worship and coddling of figuratively and literally the biggest men on campus - athletes and coaches - did not happen over night. It has been going on for what seems forever and it has obviously not been confined to the University of Maryland, where, indeed, it did not begin. And this progressive corruption has been anything but a dirty secret clinging to the nether parts of the realm of higher education. It has been a sore festering for decades as television and national advertising sponsors have elevated college football and basketball into Big Business. Outrageously large sums have even been contributed to enshrine the names of corporations on college sports stadiums and field houses for the further glorification of the corporate brand.
It is Big Business fueled by the sports mania that explodes seasonally in virtually every village and hamlet across the land. The tales are many, but those in a position to step forward to relate them are virtually non-existent. A code of silence to protect the guilty is rather obvious. What sports fan or booster club member has not heard stories of college coaches plying prospective athletes with promises of automobiles, pocket money and even willing and eager co-eds? Pressed for more information, those relating such anecdotes frequently respond by saying it is just some rumor, nothing anyone can prove. When such rumors persist, year after year, decade after decade, it is reasonable to at least suspect that where there's all that smoke, there just may be fire.
It is difficult to think of the stories I heard as a student many years back as rumors - particularly those that came from actual participants, or at least individuals who claimed to be personally involved.
In the perfect vision of hindsight, those anecdotes were red flags that should have signaled matters of legitimate concern. Why would anyone with even a marginal moral compass, including myself, not sound the alarm? That no one did is an indictment of the spell that sports mania had already begun to cast.
To argue that it was an entirely different era, a time when reputable media represented by responsible and respected journalists declined to reveal what they knew or had heard about the dalliances of United States Presidents, is at best a wholesale wimp-out. Times were indeed different in countless ways, but do morals and ethics have timelines?
A star basketball player required a passing grade in a composition to be eligible to suit up for the upcoming season. At the eleventh hour, the paper was delivered to the athlete's English professor who gave it a passing grade. There is no way to know whether the authorship claimant had ever read the paper that guaranteed his eligibility. I do know, however, that he did not write it. And I can further report that the go-between, whose concern about his buddy's plight led him to seek out someone capable of writing the paper the campus hero could not, later became an elementary school principal.
That same basketball player received a regular paycheck for part-time janitorial services to the university. His primary duties consisted of turning on the gymnasium lights prior to practice and turning them off after the athletes had all showered and departed for their respective destinations.
There was a professor who informed a couple of students who just happened to be football players that the night before the test was scheduled a copy of the final course exam could be found on the center of the desk in his unlocked office. I have no recollection of any football player that year who was ruled academically ineligible.
An intimidating, no-nonsense dean, known as an uncompromising disciplinarian who would not hesitate to expel or suspend students for relatively minor violations, became marshmallow-soft when athletes appeared on his carpet. A former college athlete himself, that university official chose to act as defense counsel for varsity lettermen rather than as their judge on cases ranging from public drunkenness to property theft to date rape.
As a college student, I was uncomfortable hearing these stories. I was aware then, as I am now, that none of the participants would, on the grounds of self-incrimination, relate what they had told me to either appropriate authorities or the press. Still, it is a lame excuse for not exerting the effort to get them on the record. It is also true that I viewed my position of sports editor as reporting and commenting only on what was happening on the playing field. I might further plead that I was young, inexperienced and poorly qualified for investigative reporting. All true enough and, in the eyes of more than a few, these defenses might have at least a modicum of merit. Today, not so much.
If anyone learning of the aforementioned incidents had an inkling that turning a blind eye to cheating on test papers, receiving copies of final exams before they were administered, shrugging off corrupt university officials, would almost inevitably snowball into something far worse, the alarm might have sounded loud and clear.
Today I am the grandfather of a young man who once participated in youth baseball and basketball. When he was the very same age of the kid who was allegedly sodomized by a coach in that Penn State shower, I attended not only every game my grandson played but every practice, from beginning to end. I had no reason whatsoever to suspect inappropriate behavior by any of his coaches. But I was well aware of scattered newspaper accounts of pedophilia among Little League coaches and Boy Scout troop leaders around the country.
I had read such articles with both anger and sympathy. I wanted to get my hands tightly around the neck of any adult who would abuse any child. My rage built against low-life predators who would misuse positions of authority and trust to satiate their deviant appetites. At the same time, I realized that clouds of suspicion would form around dedicated coaches, often enough parents of players on teams to which they are assigned, who give generously of their time and experience to teach kids sportsmanship, fairplay and the many life lessons that can begin on playing fields. It is easy enough to envision such prospective mentors refusing to have anything to do with youth athletics and even the remote possibility of vicious accusations of misconduct from sports-crazed parents for no reason other than their kid not getting enough playing time.
Horrendous as the Penn State scandal is, it raises the hope that it may teach at least some of us that accumulated small transgressions beget palpably unacceptable larger ones. More than a few of us now know how we would react if we were to witness what the graduate assistant claims he saw in the shower room; we would not even think about calling the police or reporting it to the appropriate link in the academic chain of command. We would take immediate and swift action to stop the rape of a 10-year-old boy.
Had I witnessed a scene similar to the one the graduate assistant saw in the Penn State shower during my college days and done anything differently than what I know I would do today, my self-respect would have been lost, never to be fully regained; my life would have been in shambles and deservedly so.
###
Friday, November 4, 2011
CANNIBAL TIME REFLECTIONS
By H.N. Burdett
During the first Republican presidential candidate debate of this interminable election season, Newt Gingrich reminded his rivals of Ronald Reagan's admonition: "Thou shall speak no evil of a fellow Republican."
Gingrich knew full well that his cautionary note would fall upon deaf ears. But the former Speaker of the House of Representatives misses no opportunity to identify with Reagan and boast of his own authorship of Reagan's Contract with America.
The question was never really about whether the contenders' long knives would be unsheathed, sharpened and turned on one another, but when. The eight GOP aspirants for the White House participating in these got'cha forums - easily the most entertaining television sitcoms now running - have settled into the down and dirty business of devouring their own.
Cannibal Time has arrived in all of its full glory. And Karl Rove, the all-time heavyweight champion of campaign chicanery, professes not even to have a nag in the hunt. Turd Blossom, as he was lovingly addressed by George W. Bush, the Pinocchio to Rove's Gepetto, is just too doggone preoccupied carrying out his Grand Plan to waste time on these preliminary bouts to determine who will head his party's ticket next year. He is laser-focused on Republican domination of Congress for the next 30-40 years.
If the recipes for missionary stew the GOP aspirants are cooking up for one another do not actually bear Rove's own fingerprints, they sure read like pages ripped from his well-worn playbook. Rove absorbed the rudiments of the fine art of political mischief at the knee of that past master, Lee Atwater, and took it to new depths by guiding the hands-down worst president in United States history to re-election.
This time around, Rove is masterminding American Crossroads, a deep-pocketed, conservative political action group intent upon preserving government of, by and for the 1 percent, by wresting control of Capitol Hill rather than the White House. But just as old firehouse horses snorted and stomped their demand to be hitched up to the hook-and-ladder wagons whenever the alarm clanged, Rove becomes restless on the sidelines of the presidential nomination battle. There's less certainty about which presidential candidate Dubya's onetime "boy genius" favors than there is about the candidate he yearns to destroy. That would be Texas Governor Rick Perry.
Exhibit A: After Governor Perry leveled the charge that Ben Bernanke is guilty of nothing less than "treason" (a crime punishable by state execution), Rove ignored the Reagan dictum by telling the Fox News Channel, "You don't accuse the Federal Reserve Chairman of being a traitor to his country. And suggesting that we treat him pretty ugly in Texas - you know, that is, again, not a Presidential statement."
Exhibit B: When Perry expressed his view that Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme," Rove seized the opportunity to allow as how this was "toxic" evidence that the Lone Star State governor is not a good fit for the White House. Again, Rove might have remained above the fray by using that golden opportunity to say nothing.
Exhibit C: Responding to Perry's comment that he believes President Obama's birth certificate is bogus, Rove interjected: "You associate yourself with a nutty view like that, and you damage yourself." Just as Pavlov's pooches salivated when the dinner bell sounded but before the vittles were served, Rove chose to brush aside the Great Communicator's advice and burnish his own reputation as the grating opionator.
But Karl Rove is not the only Republican intent upon taking down the Texas governor. Beseiged by accusations of sexual harassment by women employed by the National Restaurant Association when he was its chief lobbyist, Herman Cain told his supporters: "We now know and have been able to trace it(dredging up his past) back to the Perry campaign that stirred this up, in order to discredit me and slow me down." A spokesman for Perry held that Cain's suggestion was "reckless and false," then slyly raised the possibility that Mitt Romney's campaign just might be behind the surfacing of allegations against Cain. A spokesman for the Romney campaign simply dismissed this as "Not true."
Even Rep. Michele Bachmann, once the darling of the no-taxes-no-how-no-way Tea Party before she sank like a rock in the polls, got in on the act of trashing Perry. The Minnesota congresswoman took umbrage at the buzz that the tea-baggers are pressing her to exit the GOP nomination contest, then accused the Perry campaign of spreading a false rumor.
With Mitt Romney hopelessly mired at not much above 25 percent in the polls, which approximates what remains of the moderate wing of the Republican party - may it rest in peace - the presumably more authentic conservative Republican candidates are hell-bent on knocking one another out of their path to become the GOP nominee. Their reasoning is that if one paragon of conservative purity can rise from the pack, Romney, apparently at a loss to pinpoint any single core issue on which he has held a consistent conservative position, is toast.
And so Republican candidates are driven to slice and dice the Texas governor, who would have us believe that his candidacy has the endorsement of You-Know-Who. Though Cain and Bachmann have muddled Biblical prophecy with similar claims about the anointment of their own candidacies, the Celestial Powers indeed appear to be tilting the playing field in Governor Perry's favor by endowing him with the advantage of the bulging purses of oil barons.
As the intriguing game of inside politics spins wildly toward a conclusion that can only be guessed, relevant issues are short-changed. And they are, of course, multitudinous. U.S. unemployment and home foreclosures tear at the fabric of American society. The nation is plagued with staggering national debt. Conflicting obsessions with defense spending and entitlement programs remain inviolable. A solid Congressional bloc is pledged to stand firm on not raising taxes at a time when infrastructure deteriorates precariously, the country remains committed to a costly war, and rogue nations with various reasons for despising the United States either have access to, or are at the very brink of, obtaining nuclear weapon capability.
While a segment of rank-and-file citizens under the rubric of the Tea Party rails against wasteful government spending, Occupy Wall Street protestors vent their rage at the greed of bloated corporations and financial institutions that have milked and bilked countless investors dry, placing laissez-faire capitalism at the precipice of dissolution. And members of the two major U.S. political parties are at a standoff, refusing to budge from their respective entrenched positions of protecting the wealthiest, on one hand, and, on the other, preserving Social Security and Medicare while seeking what each and every other industrial nation has: national health insurance.
At the founding of the United States, Thomas Jefferson posited that from time to time the tree of liberty would need to be nurtured with the blood of patriots. Miraculously, only during the American Civil War did such an occasion arise internally. The echoes of that butchery pitting brothers against brothers have resounded so horrifically that nearly 150 years in its wake, grievances between states and regions have been settled at the ballot box rather than on the battlefield. Nonetheless, a global revolution is in progress. It began with Arab Spring in the Middle East, where blood ran in the streets but the uprisings continued undeterred.
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements here are not simply parodies of the revolutions across the pond; they are very real. An enormous question mark looms over their staying power. What will rise from the ashes here is no more known than the ultimate outcome of the outcries elsewhere. What does seem likely is that when the smoke finally clears, a different world may well emerge. Whether it will be a better one or even more dangerous than it is today will ultimately depend on the wisdom and actions of its leaders.
In this country, where confidence in national lawmakers plunges toward non-existent, and where the performance of the executive branch is acceptable to less than 50 percent of the electorate, there are few clues that any of the Republican presidential candidates, or any politicians of either party, are paying all that much attention to the mammoth tasks remaining before whomever is elected to lead the reeling, wobbling country that is known far and wide as the most powerful sustained democracy in the free world.
###
During the first Republican presidential candidate debate of this interminable election season, Newt Gingrich reminded his rivals of Ronald Reagan's admonition: "Thou shall speak no evil of a fellow Republican."
Gingrich knew full well that his cautionary note would fall upon deaf ears. But the former Speaker of the House of Representatives misses no opportunity to identify with Reagan and boast of his own authorship of Reagan's Contract with America.
The question was never really about whether the contenders' long knives would be unsheathed, sharpened and turned on one another, but when. The eight GOP aspirants for the White House participating in these got'cha forums - easily the most entertaining television sitcoms now running - have settled into the down and dirty business of devouring their own.
Cannibal Time has arrived in all of its full glory. And Karl Rove, the all-time heavyweight champion of campaign chicanery, professes not even to have a nag in the hunt. Turd Blossom, as he was lovingly addressed by George W. Bush, the Pinocchio to Rove's Gepetto, is just too doggone preoccupied carrying out his Grand Plan to waste time on these preliminary bouts to determine who will head his party's ticket next year. He is laser-focused on Republican domination of Congress for the next 30-40 years.
If the recipes for missionary stew the GOP aspirants are cooking up for one another do not actually bear Rove's own fingerprints, they sure read like pages ripped from his well-worn playbook. Rove absorbed the rudiments of the fine art of political mischief at the knee of that past master, Lee Atwater, and took it to new depths by guiding the hands-down worst president in United States history to re-election.
This time around, Rove is masterminding American Crossroads, a deep-pocketed, conservative political action group intent upon preserving government of, by and for the 1 percent, by wresting control of Capitol Hill rather than the White House. But just as old firehouse horses snorted and stomped their demand to be hitched up to the hook-and-ladder wagons whenever the alarm clanged, Rove becomes restless on the sidelines of the presidential nomination battle. There's less certainty about which presidential candidate Dubya's onetime "boy genius" favors than there is about the candidate he yearns to destroy. That would be Texas Governor Rick Perry.
Exhibit A: After Governor Perry leveled the charge that Ben Bernanke is guilty of nothing less than "treason" (a crime punishable by state execution), Rove ignored the Reagan dictum by telling the Fox News Channel, "You don't accuse the Federal Reserve Chairman of being a traitor to his country. And suggesting that we treat him pretty ugly in Texas - you know, that is, again, not a Presidential statement."
Exhibit B: When Perry expressed his view that Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme," Rove seized the opportunity to allow as how this was "toxic" evidence that the Lone Star State governor is not a good fit for the White House. Again, Rove might have remained above the fray by using that golden opportunity to say nothing.
Exhibit C: Responding to Perry's comment that he believes President Obama's birth certificate is bogus, Rove interjected: "You associate yourself with a nutty view like that, and you damage yourself." Just as Pavlov's pooches salivated when the dinner bell sounded but before the vittles were served, Rove chose to brush aside the Great Communicator's advice and burnish his own reputation as the grating opionator.
But Karl Rove is not the only Republican intent upon taking down the Texas governor. Beseiged by accusations of sexual harassment by women employed by the National Restaurant Association when he was its chief lobbyist, Herman Cain told his supporters: "We now know and have been able to trace it(dredging up his past) back to the Perry campaign that stirred this up, in order to discredit me and slow me down." A spokesman for Perry held that Cain's suggestion was "reckless and false," then slyly raised the possibility that Mitt Romney's campaign just might be behind the surfacing of allegations against Cain. A spokesman for the Romney campaign simply dismissed this as "Not true."
Even Rep. Michele Bachmann, once the darling of the no-taxes-no-how-no-way Tea Party before she sank like a rock in the polls, got in on the act of trashing Perry. The Minnesota congresswoman took umbrage at the buzz that the tea-baggers are pressing her to exit the GOP nomination contest, then accused the Perry campaign of spreading a false rumor.
With Mitt Romney hopelessly mired at not much above 25 percent in the polls, which approximates what remains of the moderate wing of the Republican party - may it rest in peace - the presumably more authentic conservative Republican candidates are hell-bent on knocking one another out of their path to become the GOP nominee. Their reasoning is that if one paragon of conservative purity can rise from the pack, Romney, apparently at a loss to pinpoint any single core issue on which he has held a consistent conservative position, is toast.
And so Republican candidates are driven to slice and dice the Texas governor, who would have us believe that his candidacy has the endorsement of You-Know-Who. Though Cain and Bachmann have muddled Biblical prophecy with similar claims about the anointment of their own candidacies, the Celestial Powers indeed appear to be tilting the playing field in Governor Perry's favor by endowing him with the advantage of the bulging purses of oil barons.
As the intriguing game of inside politics spins wildly toward a conclusion that can only be guessed, relevant issues are short-changed. And they are, of course, multitudinous. U.S. unemployment and home foreclosures tear at the fabric of American society. The nation is plagued with staggering national debt. Conflicting obsessions with defense spending and entitlement programs remain inviolable. A solid Congressional bloc is pledged to stand firm on not raising taxes at a time when infrastructure deteriorates precariously, the country remains committed to a costly war, and rogue nations with various reasons for despising the United States either have access to, or are at the very brink of, obtaining nuclear weapon capability.
While a segment of rank-and-file citizens under the rubric of the Tea Party rails against wasteful government spending, Occupy Wall Street protestors vent their rage at the greed of bloated corporations and financial institutions that have milked and bilked countless investors dry, placing laissez-faire capitalism at the precipice of dissolution. And members of the two major U.S. political parties are at a standoff, refusing to budge from their respective entrenched positions of protecting the wealthiest, on one hand, and, on the other, preserving Social Security and Medicare while seeking what each and every other industrial nation has: national health insurance.
At the founding of the United States, Thomas Jefferson posited that from time to time the tree of liberty would need to be nurtured with the blood of patriots. Miraculously, only during the American Civil War did such an occasion arise internally. The echoes of that butchery pitting brothers against brothers have resounded so horrifically that nearly 150 years in its wake, grievances between states and regions have been settled at the ballot box rather than on the battlefield. Nonetheless, a global revolution is in progress. It began with Arab Spring in the Middle East, where blood ran in the streets but the uprisings continued undeterred.
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements here are not simply parodies of the revolutions across the pond; they are very real. An enormous question mark looms over their staying power. What will rise from the ashes here is no more known than the ultimate outcome of the outcries elsewhere. What does seem likely is that when the smoke finally clears, a different world may well emerge. Whether it will be a better one or even more dangerous than it is today will ultimately depend on the wisdom and actions of its leaders.
In this country, where confidence in national lawmakers plunges toward non-existent, and where the performance of the executive branch is acceptable to less than 50 percent of the electorate, there are few clues that any of the Republican presidential candidates, or any politicians of either party, are paying all that much attention to the mammoth tasks remaining before whomever is elected to lead the reeling, wobbling country that is known far and wide as the most powerful sustained democracy in the free world.
###
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
A TALE OF TWO DIAMOND LEGENDS
By H. N. Burdett
My two favorite baseball managers were featured in major sports page articles on the same day this week. One capped a 33-year career the right way: leaving his job three days after capturing his third World Series title. The other, though a year older than his retiring colleague, had signed a contract to manage the 2012 Washington Nationals, commenting that he did not plan to hang on for just one season but was in it "for the long haul."
Departing St. Louis Cardinal Manager Tony La Russa, 67, told the press it was time for him to do other things. After this past storybook season, there is indeed little else for Tony Terrific to prove. His Cards battled from 10 1/2 games behind Atlanta for a playoff spot as late as August 25. Saint Louis squeezed into the playoffs on the last day of the National League season. The club then proceeded to upset both Philadelphia and Milwaukee and, in one of the more thrilling comebacks in baseball annals, got up from the mat and vanquished the explosive Texas Rangers in the World Series.
Washington National Manager Davey Johnson, 68, will never even come close to La Russa's 2,728 major league victories, which place him third on the all-time list behind legendary skippers Connie Mack (3,731 wins) and John McGraw (2,763). In fact, Johnson has managed 607 fewer games than La Russa's teams won.
Nor is Johnson likely to match La Russa's record of six league titles - three each with the Oakland A's and the Cardinals. But, considering that La Russa has managed for three decades plus three years and Johnson for only 15 years, the Nationals' manager has a .561 winning percentage to attest to his ability. And Davey does have one World Series title to his credit, with the 1986 New York Mets that won 103 games.
Johnson also guided the Baltimore Orioles into the American League playoffs in 1996 and l997. Contrary to his cozy relationship with the Washington front office, Johnson could not stand Oriole owner Peter Angelos. The two stopped talking with one another. And, in the most preposterous blunder of Angelos's turbulent ownership of the Baltimore team, he fired Johnson on the very day he was named 1997 American League Manager of the Year.
There are many stories about Johnson, who may be one of baseball's last truly colorful characters. My own favorite DeeJay anecdote harkens back to when he was an Oriole second baseman and the team was managed by the redoubtable Earl Weaver. A computer nut, Johnson had put together a litany of statistics to prove that Weaver's lineup was all wrong. Davey brashly took his computations into Weaver's office, dropped them on the desk and informed his manager that the numbers proved conclusively that he should be batting clean-up. Without favoring the stats with as much as a glance, Weaver gathered them together in both of his hands, crumbled and tossed them into his wastebasket. Johnson said he then left Earl's office, but he was confident that once the door between them was shut that Weaver went straight to the basket to have a closer look at the numbers.
The gods of baseball are a vengeful lot. Where boneheaded decisions by team owners are concerned, their vengeance is especially cruel. There's no need to remind the Boston Red Sox faithful of this fact. The day after Christmas 1919 is one that will live in infamy in the land of the bean and the cod. For on December 26 of that year, the Sox, sold pitcher George Herman Ruth to the New York Yankees.
During the eight years Ruth toiled on the mound and began hitting baseballs to distances denied mere mortals, the Red Sox racked up four World Series titles. Ruth's most significant contributions to those years of glory were with his arm rather than his bat. Wearing the Boston uniform, he had won 94 games against a mere 46 losses. In the 1918 World Series, Ruth's string of 29 1/3 innings without relinquishing a single run set a Series record thought to be unbeakable. And it held up for a full 43 years before it was eclipsed by Whitey Ford, who posted 29 2/3 scoreless innings in the 1961 Series. Had the Babe, who finished his career with 714home runs, not hit a single ball out of the park, he was a lock to have entered the Hall of Fame as a pitcher.
After Boston discarded him, Ruth, of course, went on to become the greatest baseball player ever. Conversely, the Red Sox toiled a full 85 years without winning another World Series until 2004 when they swept the Cardinals in four games.
But if Peter Angelos had even heard of the Curse of the Bambo, his outsized ego blinded him to its cautionary message. Not only have the O's not won a World Series since 1983, they have not had a winning season in the 14 years since Davey Johnson was sent packing. Call it the Curse of DeeJay.
But Angelos did have a chance to redeem himself from the notorious Johnson debacle. There were reports that the Oriole owner attempted to hire none other than Tony La Russa to manage his team.
Angelos, a celebrated class action litigator who readily admits to not knowing much about baseball, was said to have felt he would be more comfortable with another lawyer guiding his team on the field. La Russa, who has never practiced law but does have a law degree from Florida State University, sensibly and politely declined Angelos's offer.
While Davey Johnson is convinced he has a 2012 National League pennant contender in the nation's capital, as well as a front office that both understands baseball and tolerates his myriad idiosyncrasies, some 30 miles to the east of Washington the Orioles continue to struggle under the Curse of DeeJay. And the gods of baseball are doubling over with laughter at what they hath wrought.
###
My two favorite baseball managers were featured in major sports page articles on the same day this week. One capped a 33-year career the right way: leaving his job three days after capturing his third World Series title. The other, though a year older than his retiring colleague, had signed a contract to manage the 2012 Washington Nationals, commenting that he did not plan to hang on for just one season but was in it "for the long haul."
Departing St. Louis Cardinal Manager Tony La Russa, 67, told the press it was time for him to do other things. After this past storybook season, there is indeed little else for Tony Terrific to prove. His Cards battled from 10 1/2 games behind Atlanta for a playoff spot as late as August 25. Saint Louis squeezed into the playoffs on the last day of the National League season. The club then proceeded to upset both Philadelphia and Milwaukee and, in one of the more thrilling comebacks in baseball annals, got up from the mat and vanquished the explosive Texas Rangers in the World Series.
Washington National Manager Davey Johnson, 68, will never even come close to La Russa's 2,728 major league victories, which place him third on the all-time list behind legendary skippers Connie Mack (3,731 wins) and John McGraw (2,763). In fact, Johnson has managed 607 fewer games than La Russa's teams won.
Nor is Johnson likely to match La Russa's record of six league titles - three each with the Oakland A's and the Cardinals. But, considering that La Russa has managed for three decades plus three years and Johnson for only 15 years, the Nationals' manager has a .561 winning percentage to attest to his ability. And Davey does have one World Series title to his credit, with the 1986 New York Mets that won 103 games.
Johnson also guided the Baltimore Orioles into the American League playoffs in 1996 and l997. Contrary to his cozy relationship with the Washington front office, Johnson could not stand Oriole owner Peter Angelos. The two stopped talking with one another. And, in the most preposterous blunder of Angelos's turbulent ownership of the Baltimore team, he fired Johnson on the very day he was named 1997 American League Manager of the Year.
There are many stories about Johnson, who may be one of baseball's last truly colorful characters. My own favorite DeeJay anecdote harkens back to when he was an Oriole second baseman and the team was managed by the redoubtable Earl Weaver. A computer nut, Johnson had put together a litany of statistics to prove that Weaver's lineup was all wrong. Davey brashly took his computations into Weaver's office, dropped them on the desk and informed his manager that the numbers proved conclusively that he should be batting clean-up. Without favoring the stats with as much as a glance, Weaver gathered them together in both of his hands, crumbled and tossed them into his wastebasket. Johnson said he then left Earl's office, but he was confident that once the door between them was shut that Weaver went straight to the basket to have a closer look at the numbers.
The gods of baseball are a vengeful lot. Where boneheaded decisions by team owners are concerned, their vengeance is especially cruel. There's no need to remind the Boston Red Sox faithful of this fact. The day after Christmas 1919 is one that will live in infamy in the land of the bean and the cod. For on December 26 of that year, the Sox, sold pitcher George Herman Ruth to the New York Yankees.
During the eight years Ruth toiled on the mound and began hitting baseballs to distances denied mere mortals, the Red Sox racked up four World Series titles. Ruth's most significant contributions to those years of glory were with his arm rather than his bat. Wearing the Boston uniform, he had won 94 games against a mere 46 losses. In the 1918 World Series, Ruth's string of 29 1/3 innings without relinquishing a single run set a Series record thought to be unbeakable. And it held up for a full 43 years before it was eclipsed by Whitey Ford, who posted 29 2/3 scoreless innings in the 1961 Series. Had the Babe, who finished his career with 714home runs, not hit a single ball out of the park, he was a lock to have entered the Hall of Fame as a pitcher.
After Boston discarded him, Ruth, of course, went on to become the greatest baseball player ever. Conversely, the Red Sox toiled a full 85 years without winning another World Series until 2004 when they swept the Cardinals in four games.
But if Peter Angelos had even heard of the Curse of the Bambo, his outsized ego blinded him to its cautionary message. Not only have the O's not won a World Series since 1983, they have not had a winning season in the 14 years since Davey Johnson was sent packing. Call it the Curse of DeeJay.
But Angelos did have a chance to redeem himself from the notorious Johnson debacle. There were reports that the Oriole owner attempted to hire none other than Tony La Russa to manage his team.
Angelos, a celebrated class action litigator who readily admits to not knowing much about baseball, was said to have felt he would be more comfortable with another lawyer guiding his team on the field. La Russa, who has never practiced law but does have a law degree from Florida State University, sensibly and politely declined Angelos's offer.
While Davey Johnson is convinced he has a 2012 National League pennant contender in the nation's capital, as well as a front office that both understands baseball and tolerates his myriad idiosyncrasies, some 30 miles to the east of Washington the Orioles continue to struggle under the Curse of DeeJay. And the gods of baseball are doubling over with laughter at what they hath wrought.
###
Monday, October 31, 2011
Re-winding to 2007 and Beyond
By H.N. Burdett
In terms of candidates in the race for the 2012 presidential nomination, Republicans now find themselves in a spot not unlike the one they occupied four years ago: firmly wedged between a rock and a hard place.
Back in 2007, the conservative faithful were less than delighted with the front-runner, Rudy Guiliani. Yes, it was impressive that a Republican had got himself elected mayor of New York, an urban bastion of liberalism. And, yes, he had national recognition as a tough guy committed to the fight against terrorism in the wake of 9/11. But deeper right-wing thinkers wondered how much he had to bend and bow to progressivism to win the office. While he might know plenty about winning over liberal-leaning undecided voters, how would this transfer into national governance?
As it turned out, the Guiliani boom fizzled into ballot box bust once the state primary elections began. At that time, Arizona Senator John McCain was entrenched at around 15 percent in the polls. He was also having problems patching and re-wiring his faltering campaign. He fired some of his campaign staff and others were on their cell phones trying to learn what other campaigns might have a spot for them.
It is understatement to recall that McCain was hardly the darling of either the GOP hierarchy or its rank-and-file. Nor is it exaggeration to suggest that no elected official at that time raised the hackles of his party brethren more than he did.
His positions that ran against the grain of the party included support for gun control, liberalizing immigration policy and, most particularly, co-sponsoring campaign finance reform that would limit corporate contributions, thereby plugging the mother's milk of GOP candidates. Compounding his plight, McCain was viewed as a mite too friendly with the Senate's liberal poster twins Ted Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Uttering McCain's name was, to put it mildly, enough to make avowed conservatives gag.
Then the Republican primaries got underway and a funny thing happened on the way to the Republican National Convention. McCain was winning. He won in Maine, which had been considered low-hanging fruit for either Guilani, an easterner, or Mitt Romney, a New Englander. McCain won in South Carolina, defeating Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and Tennesse Senator Fred Thompson, though it was suspected that the latter two canceled out one another and opened the path for a McCain victory. And McCain won in Florida over Guiliani, the last hurrah for the New York mayor who turned around and endorsed the Arizona maverick.
What McCain had going for him was name recognition, by way of a compelling narrative as an American prisoner during the Vietnam war. He was repeatedly beaten when he refused his captors' offers to be released from the notorious Hanoi Hilton, recognizing that it would be used to both encourage United States anti-war sentiment and suggest that the son of a prominent U.S. admiral was treated in a manner different from other prisoners.
Moreover, McCain was a prominent supporter of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose endorsement was seen as validation of the misguided foreign policy of the Bush administration. The drumbeat of war overpowered all other objections to his candidacy.
What remained of the anybody-but-McCain mantra among GOP conservatives was silenced by his victories in the Pine Tree, Palmetto and Sunshine states. If McCain's detractors had not been metamorphosed into cheerleaders, their objections at least receded at the unlikely prospect of a southwest senator showing clout at the polls both in the northeast and, even more significantly, below the Mason-Dixon Line, where the southern strategy had been a winning formula for the GOP since it was shaped nearly 40 years earlier by Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond.
Today an anybody-but-Romney mentality persists among the dominant conservative element of the Republican party. Though Mitt Romney polls consistently high in the field of eight contenders for the GOP nomination, his numbers are more reflective of the 25 percent of Republicans who remain moderate. For this vanishing breed, the only alternative can hardly be mistaken for viable: former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who most recently plunged to a measly 1 percent in the polls and can in no way be considered a serious obstacle to Romney's race for the nomination.
Though Texas Governor Rick Perry seems to be the most logical choice of conservative Republicans, there's little evidence of pushing and shoving to board his sputtering bandwagon. They are not so much bothered by the fact that Perry was once a Democrat, or even that he headed the 2000 Texas campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore. Fundamentalists and born-agains, who still carry substantial weight in the Republican party, are known to embrace rather than revile converts.
Besides, Perry has offered the startling revelation that the last Democratic presidential contender for whom he voted was Jimmy Carter. It was an admission that he failed to vote for Gore, a candidate whose statewide campaign he led. In the Lone Star state, it is well known that there is no love lost between Perry and his predecessor as governor, George W. Bush. So it is indeed possible that Perry just did not vote for either Bush 43 or Gore in the controversial 2000 election.
Perry's feud with Bush can both hurt and help him. Revisionist history may credit Bush's preemptive war policy with initiating the democratization of the Arab world, should that actually happen. At the same time, Bush's borrow and spend policy to pay for the war and his requesting and receiving higher and higher debt limits are precursors to today's global economic woes.
Furthermore, Perry has been less than a rousing success in the series of Republican campaign debates, to say the least. He compounds the fact that he is rhetorically challenged by announcing that he will be more selective in the future about the debates in which he will participate. By so doing, he could better use the time required to prepare for debates by capitalizing on his flesh-pressing forte. While this may be a wise move by a candidate who thrives on shaking hands, slapping backs and throwing red meat to a like-minded crowd, it also begs the question that if he is unable to tangle with the likes of Mitt Romney, how would he fare against Barack Obama? A chicken wearing a 10-gallon hat and genuine leather boots is less than an inspiring vision.
Meanwhile, conservative Republicans would still prefer not to be left with a choice between Romney, whose philosophical credentials they are unlikely to ever approve, and Perry, who gets slam-dunked routinely by Republican strategists all the way up to W.'s "brain," Karl Rove.
Even when the Texas governor leaves the debate podium, he is known to put his foot in do-do up to his boot tops. After Herman Cain's 9-9-9 abomination brought him back from the campaign exit door and atop the polls alongside Romney, Perry's attempt to roll out his own flat-tax proposal was pushed out of the headlines by his dunderheaded resurrection of the phony baloney about where Barack Obama, three years into his presidency, was born. Thinking Republicans, conservative and moderate, groaned in unison.
Conservative minions had earlier tried unsuccessfully to push New Jersey Governor Chris Christie into the race for their party's presidential nomination. Spurned there, they turned to Cain, who was already in the race. He is personable, a businessman and a motivational speaker adept at both kowtowing to deep-pocketed corporate interests and chiding African Americans for remaining on the "plantation" of the Democratic party. But Cain's staying power remains cloaked in genuine doubt.
There are now rumblings that the next GOP flavor-of-the-month will be Newt Gingrich. While Romney cannot seem to get traction beyond the one-quarter of his own party's rank-and-file, Gingrich has to dig out of a much deeper hole. He has been mired as a single-digit wonder. But Cain's unlikely skyrocketing gives hope to the former Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Yet, despite his loyalty to the memory of Ronald Reagan, whose name he invokes at each and every opportunity while conveniently bypassing the two Bushes; despite his authorship of the Reagan era Contract with America; despite his probable authorship of the Reagan re-election slogan about Americans being better off than they were four years earlier, Newt Gingrich is yesterday's news.
Now that might not be all that bad for a party that still worships Reagan, conveniently forgetting that the Great Communicator's supply-side "voodoo" economics jump-started our current economic catastrophe. But the atmosphere is very different from what it was when Reagan was at the helm.
From the diminishing Tea Party to the emerging Occupy Wall Street movement, the vox populi screams, "We're mad as hell and we're not taking it any longer!" By the grace of a Constitution mandating a nation ruled by law, if there is a revolution it is likely to be bloodless.
At another time, in another place, Gingrich, a former high-profile member of the ruling elite, would be less likely to be seeking to lead his country than he would be frog-marching to the guillotine.
###
In terms of candidates in the race for the 2012 presidential nomination, Republicans now find themselves in a spot not unlike the one they occupied four years ago: firmly wedged between a rock and a hard place.
Back in 2007, the conservative faithful were less than delighted with the front-runner, Rudy Guiliani. Yes, it was impressive that a Republican had got himself elected mayor of New York, an urban bastion of liberalism. And, yes, he had national recognition as a tough guy committed to the fight against terrorism in the wake of 9/11. But deeper right-wing thinkers wondered how much he had to bend and bow to progressivism to win the office. While he might know plenty about winning over liberal-leaning undecided voters, how would this transfer into national governance?
As it turned out, the Guiliani boom fizzled into ballot box bust once the state primary elections began. At that time, Arizona Senator John McCain was entrenched at around 15 percent in the polls. He was also having problems patching and re-wiring his faltering campaign. He fired some of his campaign staff and others were on their cell phones trying to learn what other campaigns might have a spot for them.
It is understatement to recall that McCain was hardly the darling of either the GOP hierarchy or its rank-and-file. Nor is it exaggeration to suggest that no elected official at that time raised the hackles of his party brethren more than he did.
His positions that ran against the grain of the party included support for gun control, liberalizing immigration policy and, most particularly, co-sponsoring campaign finance reform that would limit corporate contributions, thereby plugging the mother's milk of GOP candidates. Compounding his plight, McCain was viewed as a mite too friendly with the Senate's liberal poster twins Ted Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Uttering McCain's name was, to put it mildly, enough to make avowed conservatives gag.
Then the Republican primaries got underway and a funny thing happened on the way to the Republican National Convention. McCain was winning. He won in Maine, which had been considered low-hanging fruit for either Guilani, an easterner, or Mitt Romney, a New Englander. McCain won in South Carolina, defeating Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and Tennesse Senator Fred Thompson, though it was suspected that the latter two canceled out one another and opened the path for a McCain victory. And McCain won in Florida over Guiliani, the last hurrah for the New York mayor who turned around and endorsed the Arizona maverick.
What McCain had going for him was name recognition, by way of a compelling narrative as an American prisoner during the Vietnam war. He was repeatedly beaten when he refused his captors' offers to be released from the notorious Hanoi Hilton, recognizing that it would be used to both encourage United States anti-war sentiment and suggest that the son of a prominent U.S. admiral was treated in a manner different from other prisoners.
Moreover, McCain was a prominent supporter of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose endorsement was seen as validation of the misguided foreign policy of the Bush administration. The drumbeat of war overpowered all other objections to his candidacy.
What remained of the anybody-but-McCain mantra among GOP conservatives was silenced by his victories in the Pine Tree, Palmetto and Sunshine states. If McCain's detractors had not been metamorphosed into cheerleaders, their objections at least receded at the unlikely prospect of a southwest senator showing clout at the polls both in the northeast and, even more significantly, below the Mason-Dixon Line, where the southern strategy had been a winning formula for the GOP since it was shaped nearly 40 years earlier by Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond.
Today an anybody-but-Romney mentality persists among the dominant conservative element of the Republican party. Though Mitt Romney polls consistently high in the field of eight contenders for the GOP nomination, his numbers are more reflective of the 25 percent of Republicans who remain moderate. For this vanishing breed, the only alternative can hardly be mistaken for viable: former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who most recently plunged to a measly 1 percent in the polls and can in no way be considered a serious obstacle to Romney's race for the nomination.
Though Texas Governor Rick Perry seems to be the most logical choice of conservative Republicans, there's little evidence of pushing and shoving to board his sputtering bandwagon. They are not so much bothered by the fact that Perry was once a Democrat, or even that he headed the 2000 Texas campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore. Fundamentalists and born-agains, who still carry substantial weight in the Republican party, are known to embrace rather than revile converts.
Besides, Perry has offered the startling revelation that the last Democratic presidential contender for whom he voted was Jimmy Carter. It was an admission that he failed to vote for Gore, a candidate whose statewide campaign he led. In the Lone Star state, it is well known that there is no love lost between Perry and his predecessor as governor, George W. Bush. So it is indeed possible that Perry just did not vote for either Bush 43 or Gore in the controversial 2000 election.
Perry's feud with Bush can both hurt and help him. Revisionist history may credit Bush's preemptive war policy with initiating the democratization of the Arab world, should that actually happen. At the same time, Bush's borrow and spend policy to pay for the war and his requesting and receiving higher and higher debt limits are precursors to today's global economic woes.
Furthermore, Perry has been less than a rousing success in the series of Republican campaign debates, to say the least. He compounds the fact that he is rhetorically challenged by announcing that he will be more selective in the future about the debates in which he will participate. By so doing, he could better use the time required to prepare for debates by capitalizing on his flesh-pressing forte. While this may be a wise move by a candidate who thrives on shaking hands, slapping backs and throwing red meat to a like-minded crowd, it also begs the question that if he is unable to tangle with the likes of Mitt Romney, how would he fare against Barack Obama? A chicken wearing a 10-gallon hat and genuine leather boots is less than an inspiring vision.
Meanwhile, conservative Republicans would still prefer not to be left with a choice between Romney, whose philosophical credentials they are unlikely to ever approve, and Perry, who gets slam-dunked routinely by Republican strategists all the way up to W.'s "brain," Karl Rove.
Even when the Texas governor leaves the debate podium, he is known to put his foot in do-do up to his boot tops. After Herman Cain's 9-9-9 abomination brought him back from the campaign exit door and atop the polls alongside Romney, Perry's attempt to roll out his own flat-tax proposal was pushed out of the headlines by his dunderheaded resurrection of the phony baloney about where Barack Obama, three years into his presidency, was born. Thinking Republicans, conservative and moderate, groaned in unison.
Conservative minions had earlier tried unsuccessfully to push New Jersey Governor Chris Christie into the race for their party's presidential nomination. Spurned there, they turned to Cain, who was already in the race. He is personable, a businessman and a motivational speaker adept at both kowtowing to deep-pocketed corporate interests and chiding African Americans for remaining on the "plantation" of the Democratic party. But Cain's staying power remains cloaked in genuine doubt.
There are now rumblings that the next GOP flavor-of-the-month will be Newt Gingrich. While Romney cannot seem to get traction beyond the one-quarter of his own party's rank-and-file, Gingrich has to dig out of a much deeper hole. He has been mired as a single-digit wonder. But Cain's unlikely skyrocketing gives hope to the former Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Yet, despite his loyalty to the memory of Ronald Reagan, whose name he invokes at each and every opportunity while conveniently bypassing the two Bushes; despite his authorship of the Reagan era Contract with America; despite his probable authorship of the Reagan re-election slogan about Americans being better off than they were four years earlier, Newt Gingrich is yesterday's news.
Now that might not be all that bad for a party that still worships Reagan, conveniently forgetting that the Great Communicator's supply-side "voodoo" economics jump-started our current economic catastrophe. But the atmosphere is very different from what it was when Reagan was at the helm.
From the diminishing Tea Party to the emerging Occupy Wall Street movement, the vox populi screams, "We're mad as hell and we're not taking it any longer!" By the grace of a Constitution mandating a nation ruled by law, if there is a revolution it is likely to be bloodless.
At another time, in another place, Gingrich, a former high-profile member of the ruling elite, would be less likely to be seeking to lead his country than he would be frog-marching to the guillotine.
###
Monday, October 17, 2011
THE REPUBLICANS' CAIN MUTINY
by H. N. Burdett
"For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." H. L. Mencken
When your competitor or opponent in business or across the chess board or tennis net is self-destructing, the wisest counsel is to not get in the way. The same logic applies to Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain's too dangerous to be considered goofy 9-9-9 tax plan.
Democrats do not have to waste their time or breath on denouncing the former Godfather Pizza CEO's astoundingly regressive notion of tax reform. Other GOP presidential hopefuls are doing the job quite well, thank you very much.
First in line was Jon Huntsman. In the recent debate on economic policy between the eight aspirants for the GOP nomination, the former Utah governor and U.S. Ambassador to China said he thought 9-9-9 was something that appears on a pizza box. Huntsman's evaluation gets my vote for the best intentionally humorous line of the debate cycle (which is short-changing the viewing audience in that respect) to be uttered thus far.
Michele Bachmann, no stranger to looking at the world upside down, noted that from her vantage point Cain's tax proposal translates into the satanic 6-6-6. Everyone understands that Mrs. Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry have been lured into the race for the White House by a Higher Authority. But who knew that personable Cain, the self-made business executive, motivational speaker, tea party favorite and current darling of rank-and-file Republicans who shot up in the polls with rocket thrust, was sent to us by the nether world?
Credited with elevating Cain from an expected early primary campaign dropout into an overnight serious contender, his brainstorm calls for what on the surface seems to be simplicity itself: a 9 percent tax rate on personal income, 9 percent on businesses and a 9 percent federal sales tax.
Political back and forth aside, Bruce Bartlett, former U.S. Treasury official and economic adviser to Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as well as Texas congressman and current presidential nomination candidate Ron Paul and former New York Rep. Jack Kemp, has examined the 9-9-9 travesty more closely. And he has found it to be a nightmare.
"At a minimum, the Cain plan is a distribution monstrosity," Bartlett posited. "The poor would pay more, while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase. Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain's tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill-conceived."
As an example, the 9 percent rate would apply to personal gross income with deductions only for charitable donations, and no mention of personal exemptions. Thus, those who now pay no federal income taxes - 47 percent of all taxpayers - would now pay 9 percent of their total income. The earned income credit would be eliminated, offsetting both their income tax liability and their payroll payment.
Crafted by a Cleveland accountant rather than egghead economists, Cain's plan would have everyone pay a 9 percent sales tax on all purchases - food, rent, health care, automobiles, even pizzas. No exemptions. The result would increase the cost of living by 9 percent, Bartlett reminds us.
The appeal of the 9-9-9 formula is that at first blush it seems so eminently fair: everyone pays the same rate. But just as simplistic campaign rhetoric has been in the past and will be in the future, the devil - and I categorically refute the innuendo that the affable Mr. Cain was coaxed into this race by the prince of darkness - is in the details.
When the smoke has cleared, and the flat-tax scuttled or at very least revised, there is something quite wonderful about the prospect, unlikely as it may be, of two African Americans squaring off next November for the highest office in the land - 144 years after the passage of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution that recognized persons of color as human beings rather than property. Only a dyed-in-the-wool bigot could fail to appreciate the delicious irony.
Such a face-off could well be the tipping point that will lead Americans to once and for all judge fellow citizens as individuals rather than by the color of their skin. The ghosts of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be delighted.
# # #
"For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." H. L. Mencken
When your competitor or opponent in business or across the chess board or tennis net is self-destructing, the wisest counsel is to not get in the way. The same logic applies to Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain's too dangerous to be considered goofy 9-9-9 tax plan.
Democrats do not have to waste their time or breath on denouncing the former Godfather Pizza CEO's astoundingly regressive notion of tax reform. Other GOP presidential hopefuls are doing the job quite well, thank you very much.
First in line was Jon Huntsman. In the recent debate on economic policy between the eight aspirants for the GOP nomination, the former Utah governor and U.S. Ambassador to China said he thought 9-9-9 was something that appears on a pizza box. Huntsman's evaluation gets my vote for the best intentionally humorous line of the debate cycle (which is short-changing the viewing audience in that respect) to be uttered thus far.
Michele Bachmann, no stranger to looking at the world upside down, noted that from her vantage point Cain's tax proposal translates into the satanic 6-6-6. Everyone understands that Mrs. Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry have been lured into the race for the White House by a Higher Authority. But who knew that personable Cain, the self-made business executive, motivational speaker, tea party favorite and current darling of rank-and-file Republicans who shot up in the polls with rocket thrust, was sent to us by the nether world?
Credited with elevating Cain from an expected early primary campaign dropout into an overnight serious contender, his brainstorm calls for what on the surface seems to be simplicity itself: a 9 percent tax rate on personal income, 9 percent on businesses and a 9 percent federal sales tax.
Political back and forth aside, Bruce Bartlett, former U.S. Treasury official and economic adviser to Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as well as Texas congressman and current presidential nomination candidate Ron Paul and former New York Rep. Jack Kemp, has examined the 9-9-9 travesty more closely. And he has found it to be a nightmare.
"At a minimum, the Cain plan is a distribution monstrosity," Bartlett posited. "The poor would pay more, while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase. Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain's tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill-conceived."
As an example, the 9 percent rate would apply to personal gross income with deductions only for charitable donations, and no mention of personal exemptions. Thus, those who now pay no federal income taxes - 47 percent of all taxpayers - would now pay 9 percent of their total income. The earned income credit would be eliminated, offsetting both their income tax liability and their payroll payment.
Crafted by a Cleveland accountant rather than egghead economists, Cain's plan would have everyone pay a 9 percent sales tax on all purchases - food, rent, health care, automobiles, even pizzas. No exemptions. The result would increase the cost of living by 9 percent, Bartlett reminds us.
The appeal of the 9-9-9 formula is that at first blush it seems so eminently fair: everyone pays the same rate. But just as simplistic campaign rhetoric has been in the past and will be in the future, the devil - and I categorically refute the innuendo that the affable Mr. Cain was coaxed into this race by the prince of darkness - is in the details.
When the smoke has cleared, and the flat-tax scuttled or at very least revised, there is something quite wonderful about the prospect, unlikely as it may be, of two African Americans squaring off next November for the highest office in the land - 144 years after the passage of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution that recognized persons of color as human beings rather than property. Only a dyed-in-the-wool bigot could fail to appreciate the delicious irony.
Such a face-off could well be the tipping point that will lead Americans to once and for all judge fellow citizens as individuals rather than by the color of their skin. The ghosts of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be delighted.
# # #
Friday, October 14, 2011
ROMNEY'S AUTHENTICITY DEFICIT
By H. N. Burdett
In a presidential campaign, a month is a lifetime, a year an era. With little less than 13 months remaining before the 2012 election, we now know perhaps more than anyone ever wanted to know about the Republican candidates. But which one will be anointed is still anything but a sure thing.
First it was Bachman. Then it was Romney. Then it was Perry. Then it was Romney again. Now it is Herman Cain. Tomorrow, who knows? Paul? Santorum? Huntsman? Gingrich? Republican voters have an apparent equal opportunity policy when it comes to selecting their nominee in this flavor-of-the-moment farcical sitcom that the party's presidential debates have become.
The one constant is Mitt Romney. The good news for him is that he is solidly entrenched. Well, sort of. He is either at the very top or near the very top of the post-debate polling. The not-so-good news is that he has been unable to rise above 23% in these ratings.
Former Godfather pizza CEO Herman Cain, until recently mired in a single-digit rut and expected to be headed for the nearest exit, is now a full five points in front of second-place Romney.
But during this Cinderella phase of the primary season, the smart money is on the slipper not fitting the purveyor of the 9-9-9 tax policy. It is a reasonable assumption considering that Cain frankly admits he knows nothing of the nitty-gritty, the small print beneath the tax plan that has elevated him into the magnet of the moment for the GOP tried-and-true. And one can hardly wait to learn the pizza guy's thoughts on foreign policy.
The volatile trajectory of the Republican primary at this juncture still favors Romney. With the perpetual yo-yoing of his opponents, consistent support from nearly one quarter of his party's voters is a position to be envied rather than scorned. It is sufficient to bring into his camp a few of the hesitant high rollers who have been persuaded that an eleventh hour entry of a perhaps more acceptable alternative such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush or current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is about as likely as a snowball fight in Key West. To say nothing of Romney's winning the coveted endorsements of such astute practitioners of the political arts as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, himself fresh from spurning fervent invitations to the Big Dance, and Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran. (Favorite sons of the Magnolia State keep popping up in this narrative with frightening regulatory.)
But really now, it is not over until it is over. And Texas Governor Rick Perry's sudden long and loud energy policy pitch is crudely crafted to bar the door and prevent his arsenal of oil industry cash cows from stampeding off and into Mitt's corral.
More evidence of precarious fissures in the solid ground under the boots of the pride of the Lone Star state became even more obvious when his wife was moved to deliver her soul-stirring confession that hubby wanted no part of going to Washington until she got a personal message from You-Know-Who that the presidency was his destiny.
The rift between the Bushes and the Perrys has not prevented the latter from pilfering a few pages from the former's well-worn playbook. When the Word comes from Upstairs, one simply doesn't mess with Texas - not with all those bible thumpers spread throughout the South and beyond. So far not much cowboy shows under the Perry 10-gallon hat, but in this wacky campaign season don't be too hasty to kick in with long odds that he's strictly yesterday's news.
Indeed the smart money is sharply divided in what may well boil down to an apocalyptic showdown for the heart and soul of the Republican party. There are still untold numbers of Republicans preferring to identify with their only two standard-bearers enshrined on Mt. Rushmore, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, neither of whom might find himself entirely comfortable in today's incarnation of the GOP. There are many more Republicans who view Romney as a pseudo-conservative.
Romney earned the distrust of the right as the pro-gun control, pro-gay marriage, pro-choice governor of the People's Republic of Massachusetts. Intractable right-wingers can be excused for their skepticism regarding Romney having seen so much light that he has been moved to reverse all three of these positions and for good measure even backtracked a mite on his 'socialized medicine' state health plan.
Romney now finds himself in a position not unlike that occupied by the once moderate George H. W. Bush in 1980 after he was clobbered by Ronald Reagan in the GOP primary. To mollify remnants of Republican centrism, Reagan chose the elder Bush to be his vice president. Eight years later, Bush 41, previously a dedicated advocate of government-supported family planning and opponent of "voodoo economics," as he labeled Reagan's supply side agenda, rolled over and embraced conservative philosophy in a manner that would have embarrassed the fiercest of grizzlies.
But during the four years of his own presidency, Bush the Elder first taunted the electorate and the press to "read my lips: no new taxes," and later raised taxes. Furthermore, after soaring in popularity with his Desert Storm operation to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi onslaught, he pulled up short of the gates of Baghdad allowing Saddam Hussein to continue his madness. Consequently, H. W. justified his conservative doubters and for him it was four years and out.
Presidential candidates are all about convincing voters that they will transform their stump rhetoric into Oval Office action. To paraphrase that sage for the ages, George Burns, authenticity is the key and a candidate who can fake that has it made.
Therein lies the rub for Citizen Romney. His most challenging task is to mesmerize Republican voters into believing that when they peel back his layers of liberalism - his previous stands on gun control, gay marriage, abortion and state-sponsored health care - at the core he actually is one of them.
It is not an easy sell. Maybe right-wingers could give Romney a Mulligan for going off course on an issue or two, reasoning that a couple of compromises were a fair trade-off for getting himself elected governor of a hardcore blue state. But opposition to an entire package of Republican anathema begged the question of whether he, as Bush 41 did earlier, would at some point during his presidency revert to his old lefty ways.
Romney is doing his doggonedest to show that his chameleon tactics are over and done with, that he will toe the line and do their bidding. He is at very least a far different candidate today than he was when he sought his party's nomination four years ago.
Maeve Reston of the Tribune Newspapers recently caught up with the erstwhile Bay State governor in New Hampshire, where he has a commanding lead in state polls, 38% to 20%, over Herman Cain. Reston recalled that in 2007, Romney was not only defensive about his switches on all of those aforementioned conservative issues but that he had "irritated voters by spending lavishly on television commercials long before anyone cast ballots" and that "some dismissed him as scripted and robotic."
By contrast, the reporter described him as "loose and confident" and "rather than rush out the door after events, he now often mingles with voters until just a few stragglers remain." Reston concluded that Romney is running a more financially prudent campaign with a smaller entourage, even boasting of flying budget airlines.
This time around Romney has apparently taken seriously Coco Chanel's observation that "hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity."
The extent and validity of his transformation may be problematic, but his heretofore inability to push his poll numbers northward and the difficulty in determining the true strength of moderate Republicans make it all but impossible to judge how well he might do as his party's candidate to upend President Obama, whose favorability rating has slipped below 45% - a position from which no incumbent president has been re-elected.
In the end, Republicans, who are getting a whiff of the enticing aroma of victory, might just be in a mood to cast their ballots for a feline carcass if it were the party nominee.
###
In a presidential campaign, a month is a lifetime, a year an era. With little less than 13 months remaining before the 2012 election, we now know perhaps more than anyone ever wanted to know about the Republican candidates. But which one will be anointed is still anything but a sure thing.
First it was Bachman. Then it was Romney. Then it was Perry. Then it was Romney again. Now it is Herman Cain. Tomorrow, who knows? Paul? Santorum? Huntsman? Gingrich? Republican voters have an apparent equal opportunity policy when it comes to selecting their nominee in this flavor-of-the-moment farcical sitcom that the party's presidential debates have become.
The one constant is Mitt Romney. The good news for him is that he is solidly entrenched. Well, sort of. He is either at the very top or near the very top of the post-debate polling. The not-so-good news is that he has been unable to rise above 23% in these ratings.
Former Godfather pizza CEO Herman Cain, until recently mired in a single-digit rut and expected to be headed for the nearest exit, is now a full five points in front of second-place Romney.
But during this Cinderella phase of the primary season, the smart money is on the slipper not fitting the purveyor of the 9-9-9 tax policy. It is a reasonable assumption considering that Cain frankly admits he knows nothing of the nitty-gritty, the small print beneath the tax plan that has elevated him into the magnet of the moment for the GOP tried-and-true. And one can hardly wait to learn the pizza guy's thoughts on foreign policy.
The volatile trajectory of the Republican primary at this juncture still favors Romney. With the perpetual yo-yoing of his opponents, consistent support from nearly one quarter of his party's voters is a position to be envied rather than scorned. It is sufficient to bring into his camp a few of the hesitant high rollers who have been persuaded that an eleventh hour entry of a perhaps more acceptable alternative such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush or current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is about as likely as a snowball fight in Key West. To say nothing of Romney's winning the coveted endorsements of such astute practitioners of the political arts as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, himself fresh from spurning fervent invitations to the Big Dance, and Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran. (Favorite sons of the Magnolia State keep popping up in this narrative with frightening regulatory.)
But really now, it is not over until it is over. And Texas Governor Rick Perry's sudden long and loud energy policy pitch is crudely crafted to bar the door and prevent his arsenal of oil industry cash cows from stampeding off and into Mitt's corral.
More evidence of precarious fissures in the solid ground under the boots of the pride of the Lone Star state became even more obvious when his wife was moved to deliver her soul-stirring confession that hubby wanted no part of going to Washington until she got a personal message from You-Know-Who that the presidency was his destiny.
The rift between the Bushes and the Perrys has not prevented the latter from pilfering a few pages from the former's well-worn playbook. When the Word comes from Upstairs, one simply doesn't mess with Texas - not with all those bible thumpers spread throughout the South and beyond. So far not much cowboy shows under the Perry 10-gallon hat, but in this wacky campaign season don't be too hasty to kick in with long odds that he's strictly yesterday's news.
Indeed the smart money is sharply divided in what may well boil down to an apocalyptic showdown for the heart and soul of the Republican party. There are still untold numbers of Republicans preferring to identify with their only two standard-bearers enshrined on Mt. Rushmore, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, neither of whom might find himself entirely comfortable in today's incarnation of the GOP. There are many more Republicans who view Romney as a pseudo-conservative.
Romney earned the distrust of the right as the pro-gun control, pro-gay marriage, pro-choice governor of the People's Republic of Massachusetts. Intractable right-wingers can be excused for their skepticism regarding Romney having seen so much light that he has been moved to reverse all three of these positions and for good measure even backtracked a mite on his 'socialized medicine' state health plan.
Romney now finds himself in a position not unlike that occupied by the once moderate George H. W. Bush in 1980 after he was clobbered by Ronald Reagan in the GOP primary. To mollify remnants of Republican centrism, Reagan chose the elder Bush to be his vice president. Eight years later, Bush 41, previously a dedicated advocate of government-supported family planning and opponent of "voodoo economics," as he labeled Reagan's supply side agenda, rolled over and embraced conservative philosophy in a manner that would have embarrassed the fiercest of grizzlies.
But during the four years of his own presidency, Bush the Elder first taunted the electorate and the press to "read my lips: no new taxes," and later raised taxes. Furthermore, after soaring in popularity with his Desert Storm operation to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi onslaught, he pulled up short of the gates of Baghdad allowing Saddam Hussein to continue his madness. Consequently, H. W. justified his conservative doubters and for him it was four years and out.
Presidential candidates are all about convincing voters that they will transform their stump rhetoric into Oval Office action. To paraphrase that sage for the ages, George Burns, authenticity is the key and a candidate who can fake that has it made.
Therein lies the rub for Citizen Romney. His most challenging task is to mesmerize Republican voters into believing that when they peel back his layers of liberalism - his previous stands on gun control, gay marriage, abortion and state-sponsored health care - at the core he actually is one of them.
It is not an easy sell. Maybe right-wingers could give Romney a Mulligan for going off course on an issue or two, reasoning that a couple of compromises were a fair trade-off for getting himself elected governor of a hardcore blue state. But opposition to an entire package of Republican anathema begged the question of whether he, as Bush 41 did earlier, would at some point during his presidency revert to his old lefty ways.
Romney is doing his doggonedest to show that his chameleon tactics are over and done with, that he will toe the line and do their bidding. He is at very least a far different candidate today than he was when he sought his party's nomination four years ago.
Maeve Reston of the Tribune Newspapers recently caught up with the erstwhile Bay State governor in New Hampshire, where he has a commanding lead in state polls, 38% to 20%, over Herman Cain. Reston recalled that in 2007, Romney was not only defensive about his switches on all of those aforementioned conservative issues but that he had "irritated voters by spending lavishly on television commercials long before anyone cast ballots" and that "some dismissed him as scripted and robotic."
By contrast, the reporter described him as "loose and confident" and "rather than rush out the door after events, he now often mingles with voters until just a few stragglers remain." Reston concluded that Romney is running a more financially prudent campaign with a smaller entourage, even boasting of flying budget airlines.
This time around Romney has apparently taken seriously Coco Chanel's observation that "hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity."
The extent and validity of his transformation may be problematic, but his heretofore inability to push his poll numbers northward and the difficulty in determining the true strength of moderate Republicans make it all but impossible to judge how well he might do as his party's candidate to upend President Obama, whose favorability rating has slipped below 45% - a position from which no incumbent president has been re-elected.
In the end, Republicans, who are getting a whiff of the enticing aroma of victory, might just be in a mood to cast their ballots for a feline carcass if it were the party nominee.
###
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
THE EERIE POLITICS OF SURREALITY
By H. N. Burdett
Not too many moons ago I blew off political conspiracy theories as extensions of delusional tendencies fostered by all governments, even democracies. A bright young colleague from my newspaper days once gravely confided: "It's not paranoia if it's true."
When coincidences pile up, as they often enough do - for example, in the bizarre and well-publicized procession of sudden violent deaths of persons of interest, as they did following the assassination of John F. Kennedy - it has to give pause to those who would like to think of themselves as rational adults.
Forgive this perhaps overwrought introduction to a friend of a friend - a disarmingly charming and obviously intelligent woman known to me only as a telephone voice. To protect the guilty, she will be hereafter referred to as Penny Forthought. You'll have to accept as blind faith that Penny exists. She really does.
Penny was on the phone only minutes after a recent debate between the Seven Dwarfs (I keep forgetting to count the number of Republican presidential nominee hopefuls who line up on the stage during these intriguing forums). She insisted that this sad collection of unworthies for what is repeatedly called the highest office in the free world are all Democrats in disguise. Or else, she continued, how could they possibly be expected to be taken seriously as candidates for the presidency of the United States? Nope. Penny is confident that they are incognito Democrats pulling off an elaborate political dirty trick.
Here we must pause to remind faithful readers that, at this writing, it is nearly 14 months before the next quadrennial presidential election - a time when mischief, deliberate or not, and confusion, readily comprehensible, run rampant across the length and breadth of this great nation. And while the incumbent occupant of the White House sinks in the polls, vilified by the formidable GOP propaganda machine as lacking any semblance of leadership whatsoever, and dismaying hand-wringing liberal Democrats as the very pillar of appeasement, Republicans find themselves vacillating weekly if not hourly between the nonentities who have thus far offered themselves up as their most probable challenger in the 2012 presidential election.
A strong sign of the depth of Republican desperation is that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was the early favorite to be the party's last candidate standing. Viewed by hard-core conservatives as far too moderate for their taste, his viability seemed predicated on the premise that virtually anyone professing to be a Republican would be preferable to a second term for Barack Obama.
Then again, was not the laboratory for that GOP anathema, health insurance reform, the People's Republic of Massachusetts under the governorship of none other than Comrade Mitt?
Romney has begged to differ with that too-obvious-to-be-true assessment. In one debate with his fellow aspirants, he claimed to be just itching to cast Romneycare as nothing even close to Obamacare. The erstwhile governor suggested that the overriding difference is that the Bay State model would be best adopted state-by-state rather than imposed by the federal government. The plausibility of this contention is, in fact, secondary to the conventional wisdom that in politics the explanations seldom catch up with the allegations.
And even if Romney's conception of Romney-care were to be miraculously accepted by that portion of the electorate that gets the heebie-jeebies about "socialized medicine" and "the European model of socialism," the former New England governor would be squandering his advantages of telegenic countenance and articulate argumentation on fighting from a defensive posture. No less an authority than that master military theorist Karl von Clausewitz told us back in the early 19th century that the most ruinous losses are suffered by the retreating army.
No sooner would Romney make his case for Romneycare, than he would have to come up with acceptable explanations for his turnabout from a pro-choice governor of liberal Massachusetts to an anti-choice candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. With even more inconsistencies between his gubernatorial performance and issues he espouses on the presidential campaign trail, hapless Mitt would be destined to the fate of a counter-puncher throughout the campaign season. Political prizes are seldom awarded to those battling from a defensive stance. Of course, conventional wisdom does not always hold up, but backroom strategists would certainly roll eyes and shake heads at the prospect of running a horse weighed down by such a hefty handicap.
Not that political pinwheeling necessarily disqualifies Romney as GOP presidential material. George Herbert Walker Bush, the successful party nominee in 1988, and John McCain, the party's standard-bearer in 2008, were both believed to be too moderate to satisfy decidedly more conservative Republicans. To win their respective nominations, each eased away from his less than conservative legislative record.
Decent church-going Republicans, who believe in the redemption of sinners, were not overly concerned about the discrepancies between the relatively moderate performances of Bush and McCain as legislators contrasted with the conservatism to which they gave lip service as presidential candidates. Had not some of the most powerful contemporary preachers confessed to having found their salvation after Perdition-bound lives devoted to draining whiskey bottles and scandalous wenching? Indeed a few televangelists have been shown in recent years to have more of a fixation on their respective collection plates than on the souls of their parishioners.
Hard-nosed Republican political observers were less certain that Bush 41 and McCain's changes of heart were indicative of actually seeing the errors of their old ways or merely transitions of convenience. In the end, of course, Bush 41 was ousted after only one term and McCain never got to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Valiant fighter that he was, McCain's presidential aspirations became an all but hopeless quest when he had the audacity as a U.S. senator to co-author campaign finance reform, a notion that still sends shivers down the Republican party's corporate spine. Unsurprisingly, during McCain's presidential campaign, he refused to support strengthening his own campaign finance reform bill lest he sew up his party's deepest pockets. Still, his presidential race seemed more like running in place on a treadmill against a spirited sprinter daring to dream that he could be the first African American president of the United States.
After one term, Bush 41's presidency went down the tubes for violating two tenets of contemporary Republicanism. He raised taxes after challenging America to read his lips as he solemnly pledged that he would never stoop to such a dastardly deed. And he was perceived to be no better than just another liberal jellyfish when he allowed Saddam Hussein to bounce off the ropes and live to fight another day by halting our troops at the gates of Baghdad with the plea that there was no exit strategy.
Then, of course, there was George W. Bush, who indeed defied all logic by getting elected to two terms. In retrospect, maybe Bush the Younger gets a Mulligan for his alleged theft of the 2000 presidential election against Al Gore. If historians choose to make that contest the exemplar of contemporary stolen presidential elections, for the sake of objectivity they cannot simply overlook those suspiciously tardy Cook County ballots in Illinois that gave John F. Kennedy his victory margin over Richard M. Nixon 40 years earlier.
Nonetheless, Bush 43 no sooner signed his White House lease than the nation was shocked and stunned by the heinous 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bush the Younger famously responded by launching his vengeance tour - the good son finishing the job Poppy was too timid to carry through and never mind that his counter-attack was against a country never proven to have anything to do with the suicide air attacks that horrified the world.
The brilliantly crafted rationale for the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was that the United States was declaring "war on terrorism" - a dazzling non sequitur that resonated seamlessly with angry Americans eager to barrage anyone or any country with lethal retribution for the unprecedented attacks on continental U.S. soil. Never mind that wars are hostilities between nations and cannot be waged against "isms," where there are no white flags to wave much less swords to surrender.
Thus with the 9/11 attacks, the Bush 43 administration had stumbled upon a possible formula for the continuity of GOP executive and legislative power, considering the unlikelihood that the electorate would be much up for changing presidents or shifting political party power in the middle of a war. The reasonable assumption was that perpetual war, as a war against an "ism" dictates, would translate into longevity of power for the incumbent Republican administration.
Riding the unbridled steed of patriotism - in which testosterone invariably trumps reason - the reckless Bush 43 had the solid backing of his wisest counsels, a preposterous pair of flag wavers, Vice President Dick "I had other priorities" Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who never made a mistake he couldn't pin on someone else.
Basking in all of this glory, Karl Rove, Bush 43's one-man braintrust whose audacity might cause the Florentine sage to turn emerald with envy, wagered that there was no way Americans would switch national administrations in the middle of a war. Rove felt that World War II rather than the infusion of New Deal socialism, in the guise of recovery programs from the Depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash, held the real key to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's three terms as president. The fantasy of perpetual war was a dream come true for Rove, whose stated life goal is a generation of GOP domination of both the White House and Capitol Hill.
But, alas, Rove, a proud American history buff, unforgivably forgot or chose to ignore Abe Lincoln's dictum that some of the people can be fooled all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Thus, while at least part of Rove's high stakes wager held up, Bush 43 having been re-elected, blood continued to spill on the two selected battlefields of the purposefully misnamed war on terrorism, even as a novice Democratic party politician trounced a combat-tested, genuine Republican war hero in the 2008 election.
Compounding the long-standing smoke-and-mirrors myth that the GOP is both the party of fiscal responsibility and far tougher than weak-kneed Democrats in dealing with enemies foreign and domestic, Bush the Younger left the White House destined to be remembered as easily the worst president ever to hold that office. Not only was the confessed perpetrator of 9/11 still at large, presumably hopping through the treacherous terrain of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border with the apparent agility of a mountain goat hooked up to a dialysis dispenser, the U.S. economy was left in shambles with global markets following closely behind.
That Bin Laden was finally shot, killed and dumped at sea on Obama's watch is an inconvenient truth Republicans would prefer to expunge from recent memory, if not the history books. To accomplish this seemingly improbable feat, they pile more and more garbage at the President's doorstep, all the while shouting through talk radio megaphones that the incumbent in the White House has, in less than four years, not wiped up the malodorous mess and all of its indelible stains that over eight years was created, packaged and distributed by Bush 43/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice et al.
Not Penny Forthought, nor anyone else can make much sense of this nightmare narrative. But Penny watches the contingent of prospective Republican presidential nominees straining and struggling to have the electorate believe utter nonsense: the lunacy that two wars can be fought for 10 years financed by maybe the Tooth Fairy, but not, by golly, by taxing upstanding, patriotic wealthy Americans; that, though the nation is suffering from near double-digit unemployment after 10 years of Bush the Younger's corporate welfare, that two-percent of the nation's wealthiest individuals deserve tax breaks because they somehow qualify as "job creators," knowing full well that more often than not they are job-killers and job-outsourcers.
So Penny watches the Republican debates and the only possible sense she can make of them is that they are behaving as caricatures of politicians that would be far too off-the-wall for any respectable editorial cartoonist to draw. In fact, the appeal of onetime front-runner Mitt Romney, on all sides of virtually every issue, was so flimsy that whispers that none of the candidates was cutting it rose to prayers that were not muttered but screamed.
All of which prompted yet another sheriff to saddle up and lift the hopes of the born-agains and flat-earthers, the lunatic fringe believed by more than a few Democrats to be the very heart and soul of the GOP.
Prior to Rick Perry's one-man stampede, imbecilically devout Republicans had only Rep. Michele Bachmann, who claims a Higher Authority as her personal political guru, as the only star who was worthy of hitching their wagons that remain filled with skepticism about science, evolution and anything else they are unable to find in the holy scriptures.
That Governor Perry more truly represents the wishes of the Supreme Province than Ms. Bachmann is a decision more likely to emanate from his home state's considerable oil and defense industry interests than by righteous bible thumpers, who can be trusted to fall into the beat of the all-too-familiar corporate cadence.
Anyone foolhardy enough to attempt to use this narrative as an outline for a a novel or even a slapstick movie comedy would not only be rejected by agents far and wide but declared candidates for rubber rooms in the nearest funny farm. So, as I was starting to say up front, I no longer shrug off the conspiracy theorists as pitiful creatures gone bonkers in a weird and crazy world they never made.
These days I tend to sympathize with those who find imagination, illusion and fantasy a preferable alternative to confronting today's realities in a forthright and serious manner. Then, too, it is absolutely true that during the last 10 years or so of my professional life in Washington, I toiled from an office that had previously been occupied by none other than JFK conspiracy weaver extraordinaire Mark Lane. When my telephone pal, Penny Forthought, learns of this, we'll have much more to discuss.
Not too many moons ago I blew off political conspiracy theories as extensions of delusional tendencies fostered by all governments, even democracies. A bright young colleague from my newspaper days once gravely confided: "It's not paranoia if it's true."
When coincidences pile up, as they often enough do - for example, in the bizarre and well-publicized procession of sudden violent deaths of persons of interest, as they did following the assassination of John F. Kennedy - it has to give pause to those who would like to think of themselves as rational adults.
Forgive this perhaps overwrought introduction to a friend of a friend - a disarmingly charming and obviously intelligent woman known to me only as a telephone voice. To protect the guilty, she will be hereafter referred to as Penny Forthought. You'll have to accept as blind faith that Penny exists. She really does.
Penny was on the phone only minutes after a recent debate between the Seven Dwarfs (I keep forgetting to count the number of Republican presidential nominee hopefuls who line up on the stage during these intriguing forums). She insisted that this sad collection of unworthies for what is repeatedly called the highest office in the free world are all Democrats in disguise. Or else, she continued, how could they possibly be expected to be taken seriously as candidates for the presidency of the United States? Nope. Penny is confident that they are incognito Democrats pulling off an elaborate political dirty trick.
Here we must pause to remind faithful readers that, at this writing, it is nearly 14 months before the next quadrennial presidential election - a time when mischief, deliberate or not, and confusion, readily comprehensible, run rampant across the length and breadth of this great nation. And while the incumbent occupant of the White House sinks in the polls, vilified by the formidable GOP propaganda machine as lacking any semblance of leadership whatsoever, and dismaying hand-wringing liberal Democrats as the very pillar of appeasement, Republicans find themselves vacillating weekly if not hourly between the nonentities who have thus far offered themselves up as their most probable challenger in the 2012 presidential election.
A strong sign of the depth of Republican desperation is that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was the early favorite to be the party's last candidate standing. Viewed by hard-core conservatives as far too moderate for their taste, his viability seemed predicated on the premise that virtually anyone professing to be a Republican would be preferable to a second term for Barack Obama.
Then again, was not the laboratory for that GOP anathema, health insurance reform, the People's Republic of Massachusetts under the governorship of none other than Comrade Mitt?
Romney has begged to differ with that too-obvious-to-be-true assessment. In one debate with his fellow aspirants, he claimed to be just itching to cast Romneycare as nothing even close to Obamacare. The erstwhile governor suggested that the overriding difference is that the Bay State model would be best adopted state-by-state rather than imposed by the federal government. The plausibility of this contention is, in fact, secondary to the conventional wisdom that in politics the explanations seldom catch up with the allegations.
And even if Romney's conception of Romney-care were to be miraculously accepted by that portion of the electorate that gets the heebie-jeebies about "socialized medicine" and "the European model of socialism," the former New England governor would be squandering his advantages of telegenic countenance and articulate argumentation on fighting from a defensive posture. No less an authority than that master military theorist Karl von Clausewitz told us back in the early 19th century that the most ruinous losses are suffered by the retreating army.
No sooner would Romney make his case for Romneycare, than he would have to come up with acceptable explanations for his turnabout from a pro-choice governor of liberal Massachusetts to an anti-choice candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. With even more inconsistencies between his gubernatorial performance and issues he espouses on the presidential campaign trail, hapless Mitt would be destined to the fate of a counter-puncher throughout the campaign season. Political prizes are seldom awarded to those battling from a defensive stance. Of course, conventional wisdom does not always hold up, but backroom strategists would certainly roll eyes and shake heads at the prospect of running a horse weighed down by such a hefty handicap.
Not that political pinwheeling necessarily disqualifies Romney as GOP presidential material. George Herbert Walker Bush, the successful party nominee in 1988, and John McCain, the party's standard-bearer in 2008, were both believed to be too moderate to satisfy decidedly more conservative Republicans. To win their respective nominations, each eased away from his less than conservative legislative record.
Decent church-going Republicans, who believe in the redemption of sinners, were not overly concerned about the discrepancies between the relatively moderate performances of Bush and McCain as legislators contrasted with the conservatism to which they gave lip service as presidential candidates. Had not some of the most powerful contemporary preachers confessed to having found their salvation after Perdition-bound lives devoted to draining whiskey bottles and scandalous wenching? Indeed a few televangelists have been shown in recent years to have more of a fixation on their respective collection plates than on the souls of their parishioners.
Hard-nosed Republican political observers were less certain that Bush 41 and McCain's changes of heart were indicative of actually seeing the errors of their old ways or merely transitions of convenience. In the end, of course, Bush 41 was ousted after only one term and McCain never got to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Valiant fighter that he was, McCain's presidential aspirations became an all but hopeless quest when he had the audacity as a U.S. senator to co-author campaign finance reform, a notion that still sends shivers down the Republican party's corporate spine. Unsurprisingly, during McCain's presidential campaign, he refused to support strengthening his own campaign finance reform bill lest he sew up his party's deepest pockets. Still, his presidential race seemed more like running in place on a treadmill against a spirited sprinter daring to dream that he could be the first African American president of the United States.
After one term, Bush 41's presidency went down the tubes for violating two tenets of contemporary Republicanism. He raised taxes after challenging America to read his lips as he solemnly pledged that he would never stoop to such a dastardly deed. And he was perceived to be no better than just another liberal jellyfish when he allowed Saddam Hussein to bounce off the ropes and live to fight another day by halting our troops at the gates of Baghdad with the plea that there was no exit strategy.
Then, of course, there was George W. Bush, who indeed defied all logic by getting elected to two terms. In retrospect, maybe Bush the Younger gets a Mulligan for his alleged theft of the 2000 presidential election against Al Gore. If historians choose to make that contest the exemplar of contemporary stolen presidential elections, for the sake of objectivity they cannot simply overlook those suspiciously tardy Cook County ballots in Illinois that gave John F. Kennedy his victory margin over Richard M. Nixon 40 years earlier.
Nonetheless, Bush 43 no sooner signed his White House lease than the nation was shocked and stunned by the heinous 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bush the Younger famously responded by launching his vengeance tour - the good son finishing the job Poppy was too timid to carry through and never mind that his counter-attack was against a country never proven to have anything to do with the suicide air attacks that horrified the world.
The brilliantly crafted rationale for the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was that the United States was declaring "war on terrorism" - a dazzling non sequitur that resonated seamlessly with angry Americans eager to barrage anyone or any country with lethal retribution for the unprecedented attacks on continental U.S. soil. Never mind that wars are hostilities between nations and cannot be waged against "isms," where there are no white flags to wave much less swords to surrender.
Thus with the 9/11 attacks, the Bush 43 administration had stumbled upon a possible formula for the continuity of GOP executive and legislative power, considering the unlikelihood that the electorate would be much up for changing presidents or shifting political party power in the middle of a war. The reasonable assumption was that perpetual war, as a war against an "ism" dictates, would translate into longevity of power for the incumbent Republican administration.
Riding the unbridled steed of patriotism - in which testosterone invariably trumps reason - the reckless Bush 43 had the solid backing of his wisest counsels, a preposterous pair of flag wavers, Vice President Dick "I had other priorities" Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who never made a mistake he couldn't pin on someone else.
Basking in all of this glory, Karl Rove, Bush 43's one-man braintrust whose audacity might cause the Florentine sage to turn emerald with envy, wagered that there was no way Americans would switch national administrations in the middle of a war. Rove felt that World War II rather than the infusion of New Deal socialism, in the guise of recovery programs from the Depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash, held the real key to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's three terms as president. The fantasy of perpetual war was a dream come true for Rove, whose stated life goal is a generation of GOP domination of both the White House and Capitol Hill.
But, alas, Rove, a proud American history buff, unforgivably forgot or chose to ignore Abe Lincoln's dictum that some of the people can be fooled all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Thus, while at least part of Rove's high stakes wager held up, Bush 43 having been re-elected, blood continued to spill on the two selected battlefields of the purposefully misnamed war on terrorism, even as a novice Democratic party politician trounced a combat-tested, genuine Republican war hero in the 2008 election.
Compounding the long-standing smoke-and-mirrors myth that the GOP is both the party of fiscal responsibility and far tougher than weak-kneed Democrats in dealing with enemies foreign and domestic, Bush the Younger left the White House destined to be remembered as easily the worst president ever to hold that office. Not only was the confessed perpetrator of 9/11 still at large, presumably hopping through the treacherous terrain of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border with the apparent agility of a mountain goat hooked up to a dialysis dispenser, the U.S. economy was left in shambles with global markets following closely behind.
That Bin Laden was finally shot, killed and dumped at sea on Obama's watch is an inconvenient truth Republicans would prefer to expunge from recent memory, if not the history books. To accomplish this seemingly improbable feat, they pile more and more garbage at the President's doorstep, all the while shouting through talk radio megaphones that the incumbent in the White House has, in less than four years, not wiped up the malodorous mess and all of its indelible stains that over eight years was created, packaged and distributed by Bush 43/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice et al.
Not Penny Forthought, nor anyone else can make much sense of this nightmare narrative. But Penny watches the contingent of prospective Republican presidential nominees straining and struggling to have the electorate believe utter nonsense: the lunacy that two wars can be fought for 10 years financed by maybe the Tooth Fairy, but not, by golly, by taxing upstanding, patriotic wealthy Americans; that, though the nation is suffering from near double-digit unemployment after 10 years of Bush the Younger's corporate welfare, that two-percent of the nation's wealthiest individuals deserve tax breaks because they somehow qualify as "job creators," knowing full well that more often than not they are job-killers and job-outsourcers.
So Penny watches the Republican debates and the only possible sense she can make of them is that they are behaving as caricatures of politicians that would be far too off-the-wall for any respectable editorial cartoonist to draw. In fact, the appeal of onetime front-runner Mitt Romney, on all sides of virtually every issue, was so flimsy that whispers that none of the candidates was cutting it rose to prayers that were not muttered but screamed.
All of which prompted yet another sheriff to saddle up and lift the hopes of the born-agains and flat-earthers, the lunatic fringe believed by more than a few Democrats to be the very heart and soul of the GOP.
Prior to Rick Perry's one-man stampede, imbecilically devout Republicans had only Rep. Michele Bachmann, who claims a Higher Authority as her personal political guru, as the only star who was worthy of hitching their wagons that remain filled with skepticism about science, evolution and anything else they are unable to find in the holy scriptures.
That Governor Perry more truly represents the wishes of the Supreme Province than Ms. Bachmann is a decision more likely to emanate from his home state's considerable oil and defense industry interests than by righteous bible thumpers, who can be trusted to fall into the beat of the all-too-familiar corporate cadence.
Anyone foolhardy enough to attempt to use this narrative as an outline for a a novel or even a slapstick movie comedy would not only be rejected by agents far and wide but declared candidates for rubber rooms in the nearest funny farm. So, as I was starting to say up front, I no longer shrug off the conspiracy theorists as pitiful creatures gone bonkers in a weird and crazy world they never made.
These days I tend to sympathize with those who find imagination, illusion and fantasy a preferable alternative to confronting today's realities in a forthright and serious manner. Then, too, it is absolutely true that during the last 10 years or so of my professional life in Washington, I toiled from an office that had previously been occupied by none other than JFK conspiracy weaver extraordinaire Mark Lane. When my telephone pal, Penny Forthought, learns of this, we'll have much more to discuss.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
A TIME FOR REFLECTION
By H. N. Burdett
With apologies to Woodrow Wilson's Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, what this country needs is a hell of a lot more than a good five-cent cigar.
The emergence of a seriously progressive political party that would at least do for the Democrats what the much-maligned Tea Party is doing for the Republican party - that is to say, shake them up - would be a positive start toward getting where the country needs to be.
If there is one thing on which overwhelming consensus might be reached in this bitterly divisive political era, it is the proposition that the lawmaking apparatus of this still great nation is broken. Furthermore, Americans cling to the understandable conceit that their legendary know-how can fix damn near anything and everything that requires repair.
So why in the name of Jupiter can't we put together that great Humpty Dumpty that had a great fall: the United States Congress? It won't take all the king's horses and all the king's men to put old Humpty back together again; an army of squirrel shooters provided that service way back in 1776. Fourscore and seven years later, rivers of native blood drenched great battlefields to preserve the union.
In 1789 in Philadelphia, the Founding Fathers, spearheaded by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton with the infinitely wise Ben Franklin offering his singularly sage advice leavened with wit and humor, wrote and the 13 original colonies subsequently ratified a masterpiece blueprint for democratic governance conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.
Don't look now but the country stands at the brink of a crisis unparalleled in its more than two centuries of existence.
Confidence in government has plunged to a level unrivaled since the Civil War. Back then an unlikely self-educated rail-splitter named Abe Lincoln was steering the ship of state. Some say it was an act of divine providence
That Lincoln was in the right place at the right time in American history, is indisputable. It is one case that might give pause to the most avowed atheist who ever walked the earth. There would be monumental difficulty in refuting the intervention of a Higher Authority to anoint a Lincoln when he was most needed. Consider that Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, was among the more inept souls ever to reside in the White House - one who would certainly be included among the five to 10 worst disasters ever to serve in the office of the presidency. And the Great Emancipator's successor, Andrew Johnson, also qualifies for that less than distinguished roll call.
At this current juncture in United States annals, the so-called two-party system has become such a rigidly partisan mess that a resolution praising motherhood and apple pie might trigger a party call and generate a maelstrom of uncivility. A mere 12.3 percent of the populus attest to having faith in their own national lawmakers. Easily remedied, one might wrongly opine. At the next election, just toss the rascals out and bring in fresh faces to set things right.
The glaring fallacy of this premise stems from the fact that it is unlikely to happen. Obviously the majority of some 87 percent of the electorate convinced that Congress has lost its way believe their own representatives are just fine; it's all those other nut-jobs, dunderheads and incompetents who are fouling up the works. And there's nothing to be done about correcting the inferior judgment of voters in other states and other congressional districts. To say nothing of there being no guarantee that fresh faces will be anything other than just that and that alone.
Evidence of competence can only be measured after it is too late to undo the damage done behind voting booth curtains. Only after the office has been won, the new member of Congress settles in and begins to legislate do we know what we have. The crystal ball and astrological charts have yet to be designed that can accurately predict whether those we elect will be an improvement upon what we have turned out.
This calls to mind the response of former Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin when he was once asked the eternal question of whether judges should be appointed or elected. McKeldin unhesitatingly posited that there is but one way to ensure the ascendance of the very best judges: immaculate conception.
For all the hooting and hollering about how the Tea Party is muddying political waters, which were rather thoroughly polluted before the teabaggers rode into town, the contribution of these brash interlopers has been to force Republicans to become more introspective about their own values.
Tea Party supporters may have various stands on any number of issues, but they are united in their insistence upon whittling down government to its bare bones, as well as either vastly reducing or, preferably, eliminating federal taxes. And, incidentally, this is a departure from the credo of the Boston Tea Party with whom the contemporary incarnation proudly identifies. The original Tea Party, those who donned native American garb to dump tea imported from Mother England into beantown's harbor, did not rail against taxation per se, but rather taxation without representation - a condition most worthy of taking up ball and musket to challenge.
So just as the Tea Party has provoked the Republican party into examining what it stands for - presumably, small government and drastic reduction if not complete elimination of taxes, and the like - is it not time for a progressive counterpart to stand up and test the frigid feet of the timid Democratic party against the flames of self-revelation?
It is high time for Democrats to determine whether they remain committed to their traditional roots: a fair shake for working people; allegiance to concepts like social justice and equal protection under the law that they are more likely than their more conservative brethren to regard as sacrosanct rather than flowery euphemisms for pie-in-the-sky claptrap; a dogged belief in the revolutionary notion that health, education and assistance to those struggling to put roofs over the heads of their families, food on the table and clothes on their backs and playing by the rules are at least as much a slice of the same American Dream as the lust for ever greater profits and making a few killings on the market.
Holier-than-thou investors and venture capitalists succeed in pawning themselves off as courageous saviors of the American way, the risk-takers, whose kissing cousins at blackjack, craps and roulette tables from Vegas to Atlantic City engage in the same basic activity only under somewhat less respectable guises. In the end, both are are doing what they do: gambling, a pastime to which all too many are addicted and for which psychologists and psychiatrists have licenses to treat. The difference is that at least in the casinos there are rules and if you don't abide by them you get thrown out with an invitation not to return.
On Wall Street and in corporate board rooms, the consensus preference is for no rules, keep government off our backs, the market can only seek its own level unimpeded by nuisance regulations and the sky's the limit because, as any fool can plainly see, they are above and beyond the law. After all, they are the 'job creators,' the crowd whose high-stake wagers fuel the entire economy.
The truth is that there are decent folks at both ends of the economic spectrum, but there will always be another element: those ever seeking ways to tilt the playing field in their own favor, to game the system for their own advantage and at the expense of others.
The bad apples in the three-piece suits at one end will always try to dream up new variations on the Ponzi scheme, as will, operating from the lower end, welfare queens, grifters, three-card monty dealers and other street-smart sharpies out to pocket the fast buck from those of whom it is said are born every minute.
If and when they are caught, the difference is that the suits always seem to have sufficient emergency funds and a valid passport stashed away for a quick flight to the tropics or to hire the services of clever mouthpieces who make their living assisting and advising clients in the fine art of avoiding and evading taxes and which often enough allow them to swagger off into the sunset with, at most, out-of-court settlements. At the other end of the scale, the penalty is more likely to be stiff fines or jail time.
With all the nonsense spoken and suggested by the fear-mongers who wring their hands and express concern about the United States going the way of dreaded "European socialism," the simple truth is that the last best hope of capitalism does indeed rest with its ability to swallow hard and accept sensible regulations.
The challenge of government is to seriously enforce these regulations, to revisit the Glass-Steagall Act, which worked well from the Great Depression to prevent banks from engaging in multiple mischiefs that are morally untenable and unacceptable.
When Glass-Steagall was overturned in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley cabal, the drawbridge was lowered, the gates of economic peril opened wide; it was the game-changer that led inevitably to the malaise that the experts now tell us we'll be digging out for another five to 10 years at minimum. The Dodd-Frank bill, at very best Glass-Steagall lite, is tantamount to tending to a hangnail when open-heart surgery is required to save the patient.
For the Democrats another kind of surgery is required. They urgently need a spine transplant. If they could only find a way to acquire the DNA of arguably the two toughest presidents this nation or any nation has ever known, and they were both Democrats: Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman. Old Hickory and the Man from Missouri must be pinwheeling in their graves at the shocking transformations that have evolved in the party they revered. The backbones of these men would be just the ticket to resuscitate this flailing and floundering shipwreck of a political party.
As for that fellow Lincoln, does anyone honestly believe that were he alive today he would even consider registering as a Republican? The party that fights any real effort at health care reform tooth and nail? The party that would eliminate the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as the exemplar of government profligacy? The party that covets and fawns over those at the upper 2 percent of the economic scale with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs?
From the vantage point of his memorial at one end of the National Mall, Lincoln peers toward the Capitol to the east. His heart is heavy. Were his hands not sculpted from marble, were they flesh, blood and bone, he would raise them to hide his eyes, his long, thin frame trembling with grief. The words carved into the stone on the wall to his right begin: "With malice toward none, with charity for all. . ."
###
With apologies to Woodrow Wilson's Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, what this country needs is a hell of a lot more than a good five-cent cigar.
The emergence of a seriously progressive political party that would at least do for the Democrats what the much-maligned Tea Party is doing for the Republican party - that is to say, shake them up - would be a positive start toward getting where the country needs to be.
If there is one thing on which overwhelming consensus might be reached in this bitterly divisive political era, it is the proposition that the lawmaking apparatus of this still great nation is broken. Furthermore, Americans cling to the understandable conceit that their legendary know-how can fix damn near anything and everything that requires repair.
So why in the name of Jupiter can't we put together that great Humpty Dumpty that had a great fall: the United States Congress? It won't take all the king's horses and all the king's men to put old Humpty back together again; an army of squirrel shooters provided that service way back in 1776. Fourscore and seven years later, rivers of native blood drenched great battlefields to preserve the union.
In 1789 in Philadelphia, the Founding Fathers, spearheaded by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton with the infinitely wise Ben Franklin offering his singularly sage advice leavened with wit and humor, wrote and the 13 original colonies subsequently ratified a masterpiece blueprint for democratic governance conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.
Don't look now but the country stands at the brink of a crisis unparalleled in its more than two centuries of existence.
Confidence in government has plunged to a level unrivaled since the Civil War. Back then an unlikely self-educated rail-splitter named Abe Lincoln was steering the ship of state. Some say it was an act of divine providence
That Lincoln was in the right place at the right time in American history, is indisputable. It is one case that might give pause to the most avowed atheist who ever walked the earth. There would be monumental difficulty in refuting the intervention of a Higher Authority to anoint a Lincoln when he was most needed. Consider that Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, was among the more inept souls ever to reside in the White House - one who would certainly be included among the five to 10 worst disasters ever to serve in the office of the presidency. And the Great Emancipator's successor, Andrew Johnson, also qualifies for that less than distinguished roll call.
At this current juncture in United States annals, the so-called two-party system has become such a rigidly partisan mess that a resolution praising motherhood and apple pie might trigger a party call and generate a maelstrom of uncivility. A mere 12.3 percent of the populus attest to having faith in their own national lawmakers. Easily remedied, one might wrongly opine. At the next election, just toss the rascals out and bring in fresh faces to set things right.
The glaring fallacy of this premise stems from the fact that it is unlikely to happen. Obviously the majority of some 87 percent of the electorate convinced that Congress has lost its way believe their own representatives are just fine; it's all those other nut-jobs, dunderheads and incompetents who are fouling up the works. And there's nothing to be done about correcting the inferior judgment of voters in other states and other congressional districts. To say nothing of there being no guarantee that fresh faces will be anything other than just that and that alone.
Evidence of competence can only be measured after it is too late to undo the damage done behind voting booth curtains. Only after the office has been won, the new member of Congress settles in and begins to legislate do we know what we have. The crystal ball and astrological charts have yet to be designed that can accurately predict whether those we elect will be an improvement upon what we have turned out.
This calls to mind the response of former Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin when he was once asked the eternal question of whether judges should be appointed or elected. McKeldin unhesitatingly posited that there is but one way to ensure the ascendance of the very best judges: immaculate conception.
For all the hooting and hollering about how the Tea Party is muddying political waters, which were rather thoroughly polluted before the teabaggers rode into town, the contribution of these brash interlopers has been to force Republicans to become more introspective about their own values.
Tea Party supporters may have various stands on any number of issues, but they are united in their insistence upon whittling down government to its bare bones, as well as either vastly reducing or, preferably, eliminating federal taxes. And, incidentally, this is a departure from the credo of the Boston Tea Party with whom the contemporary incarnation proudly identifies. The original Tea Party, those who donned native American garb to dump tea imported from Mother England into beantown's harbor, did not rail against taxation per se, but rather taxation without representation - a condition most worthy of taking up ball and musket to challenge.
So just as the Tea Party has provoked the Republican party into examining what it stands for - presumably, small government and drastic reduction if not complete elimination of taxes, and the like - is it not time for a progressive counterpart to stand up and test the frigid feet of the timid Democratic party against the flames of self-revelation?
It is high time for Democrats to determine whether they remain committed to their traditional roots: a fair shake for working people; allegiance to concepts like social justice and equal protection under the law that they are more likely than their more conservative brethren to regard as sacrosanct rather than flowery euphemisms for pie-in-the-sky claptrap; a dogged belief in the revolutionary notion that health, education and assistance to those struggling to put roofs over the heads of their families, food on the table and clothes on their backs and playing by the rules are at least as much a slice of the same American Dream as the lust for ever greater profits and making a few killings on the market.
Holier-than-thou investors and venture capitalists succeed in pawning themselves off as courageous saviors of the American way, the risk-takers, whose kissing cousins at blackjack, craps and roulette tables from Vegas to Atlantic City engage in the same basic activity only under somewhat less respectable guises. In the end, both are are doing what they do: gambling, a pastime to which all too many are addicted and for which psychologists and psychiatrists have licenses to treat. The difference is that at least in the casinos there are rules and if you don't abide by them you get thrown out with an invitation not to return.
On Wall Street and in corporate board rooms, the consensus preference is for no rules, keep government off our backs, the market can only seek its own level unimpeded by nuisance regulations and the sky's the limit because, as any fool can plainly see, they are above and beyond the law. After all, they are the 'job creators,' the crowd whose high-stake wagers fuel the entire economy.
The truth is that there are decent folks at both ends of the economic spectrum, but there will always be another element: those ever seeking ways to tilt the playing field in their own favor, to game the system for their own advantage and at the expense of others.
The bad apples in the three-piece suits at one end will always try to dream up new variations on the Ponzi scheme, as will, operating from the lower end, welfare queens, grifters, three-card monty dealers and other street-smart sharpies out to pocket the fast buck from those of whom it is said are born every minute.
If and when they are caught, the difference is that the suits always seem to have sufficient emergency funds and a valid passport stashed away for a quick flight to the tropics or to hire the services of clever mouthpieces who make their living assisting and advising clients in the fine art of avoiding and evading taxes and which often enough allow them to swagger off into the sunset with, at most, out-of-court settlements. At the other end of the scale, the penalty is more likely to be stiff fines or jail time.
With all the nonsense spoken and suggested by the fear-mongers who wring their hands and express concern about the United States going the way of dreaded "European socialism," the simple truth is that the last best hope of capitalism does indeed rest with its ability to swallow hard and accept sensible regulations.
The challenge of government is to seriously enforce these regulations, to revisit the Glass-Steagall Act, which worked well from the Great Depression to prevent banks from engaging in multiple mischiefs that are morally untenable and unacceptable.
When Glass-Steagall was overturned in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley cabal, the drawbridge was lowered, the gates of economic peril opened wide; it was the game-changer that led inevitably to the malaise that the experts now tell us we'll be digging out for another five to 10 years at minimum. The Dodd-Frank bill, at very best Glass-Steagall lite, is tantamount to tending to a hangnail when open-heart surgery is required to save the patient.
For the Democrats another kind of surgery is required. They urgently need a spine transplant. If they could only find a way to acquire the DNA of arguably the two toughest presidents this nation or any nation has ever known, and they were both Democrats: Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman. Old Hickory and the Man from Missouri must be pinwheeling in their graves at the shocking transformations that have evolved in the party they revered. The backbones of these men would be just the ticket to resuscitate this flailing and floundering shipwreck of a political party.
As for that fellow Lincoln, does anyone honestly believe that were he alive today he would even consider registering as a Republican? The party that fights any real effort at health care reform tooth and nail? The party that would eliminate the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as the exemplar of government profligacy? The party that covets and fawns over those at the upper 2 percent of the economic scale with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs?
From the vantage point of his memorial at one end of the National Mall, Lincoln peers toward the Capitol to the east. His heart is heavy. Were his hands not sculpted from marble, were they flesh, blood and bone, he would raise them to hide his eyes, his long, thin frame trembling with grief. The words carved into the stone on the wall to his right begin: "With malice toward none, with charity for all. . ."
###
Thursday, August 18, 2011
TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY: LBJ, THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE COMPETENCE
By H. N. Burdett
The other day I sent a Houston Chronicle article to a number of Potomac Digest recipients. The piece detailed the creative manner in which Texas Governor Rick Perry balances his state's budget. In response, a former international news agency bureau chief wrote:
"Disciple Perry did not invent the Texas hold 'em game. I really think we should let Texas go back to being a Republic. It has given us some of the worst Presidents (LBJ and one and one-half Bushes), is fat on bloated defense contractors and so on. . ."
To which a retired attorney and onetime alternate delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention committed to anti-Vietnam war candidate Eugene McCarthy, responded:
"Not to quibble, but I think that -- setting aside his failure to bring the Vietnam war to a close (or even reduce it in any meaningful way) there was actually escalation during [Lyndon Johnson's] administration and I don't forgive that -- he was surely one of the greatest presidents on the domestic scene this country has ever had. So let's not throw him out with the Bush Bathwater."
Impressive domestic achievements during Lyndon Johnson's presidency are undeniable.
Among these were his leadership in pushing through Congress such landmark legislation as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing segregation in schools and public places; the 1965 Voting Rights Act, prohibiting malodorous restrictions such as literacy tests that had previously disenfranchised untold numbers of United States citizens; the Equal Opportunity Act, which declared "war on poverty," and the Medical Care Act, which enables senior citizens -- most especially those living on fixed incomes -- and others to obtain medical treatment they previously simply could not afford.
For all the Camelot hype, had it not been for LBJ the all-too-brief Kennedy years might have been remembered for little else than the Cuban missile crisis and hordes of beautiful people sailing, playing touch football, and pushing one another into swimming pools.
Through his personal dedication and perhaps unequaled political acumen and ability, Johnson burnished the Kennedy legacy -- a feat it is doubtful Kennedy, had he lived, would have been able to accomplish.
Moreover, Johnson's knowledge of Congress and the legislative process and his legendary persistence and powers of persuasion were perhaps unequaled in the entire history of the Presidency.
Lyndon Johnson may have been at times a crude and rude, a larger-than-life bully. Who can forget LBJ unbuttoning his shirt to show the press a scar on his belly? There may have been times when he was tempted to turn his back on a White House news conference, drop his trousers and reveal another part of his anatomy.
There is a wonderful story about LBJ being confronted by an old friend who had been the incumbent sheriff of a Texas county. During one particularly difficult election campaign, the worried sheriff pulled Johnson aside and told him he was truly concerned that for the first time in years he might be beaten. Johnson said, "Get the word out that he fucks pigs." The sheriff laughed and said no one would believe it. Johnson countered, "Make that sonofabitch deny it."
Whatever else he may have been, Lyndon Johnson was the consummate political animal. He understood the great game of politics for what it is: the art of the possible. And, when it came to domestic policy, the nation benefited from LBJ's skill at that art as much as it did from any President in United States history.
To place Lyndon Johnson in the category of worst American Presidents is so far off base it is not even in the ballpark. In fact, in many respects Johnson may be the most effective President the country has ever had.
But then we have Johnson's 1964 campaign pledge to not send "American boys to fight Asia's wars." The United States was committed to the defense of South Vietnam by earlier administrations. But Johnson intervened massively in that beleagured country to demonstrate American credibility to allies and enemies alike.
Johnson's call for extraordinary war powers which came to fruition with Congressional passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, opened the floodgates.
The vast widening of the so-called Vietnam "conflict" concluded with the combat deaths of 47,355 U.S. service personnel -- exceeding by 5,181 the combined total of those killed in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Korean Conflict -- as well as 53,303 wounds classified by the U.S. Department of Defense as "not mortal." Allow me to refresh memories.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was adopted by Congress on August 7, 1964. The measure moved swiftly through both houses of Congress in the wake of an August 2 confrontation between a North Vietnamese Navy torpedo squadron and the American destroyer USS Maddox, followed by an alleged second engagement two days later. The latter incident supposedly involved another attack by North Vietnamese vessels on the Maddox, as well as the destroyer USS Turner Joy.
The August 2 and the questionable August 4 engagements together are known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
In 2006, The New York Times reported that a de-classified internal National Security Agency historical study revealed that during the reported August 4 engagement there may not have been any North Vietnamese vessels present.
The document states: "It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. . .in truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two boats damaged on Aug. 2. . ."
Only hours following the disputed second attack on the two U.S. destroyers, President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes -- Operation Pierce Arrow -- on North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases .
In a television address that same evening, President Johnson contended that "the United States. . .seeks no wider war."
Nonetheless, he called for a Congressional resolution "expressing the unity and determination of the United States in supporting freedom and protecting peace in southeast Asia." He said the resolution should express support "for all necessary action to protect our Armed Forces."
Johnson flat out knew better than any President whose name was not Teddy Roosevelt how to use the bully pulpit of the presidency for getting precisely what he wanted: first line up the American people behind you and Congress will have little recourse but to follow.
The result of Johnson's call to arms was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
During the final months of his 1964 election campaign, the President claimed that the resolution would help "hostile nations. . .understand" that the United States was unified in the determination "to protects its national interests."
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was approved unanimously by the House of Representatives and with only two votes in opposition by the Senate. The only "nay" votes in the upper house were cast by Senators Wayne Morse, D-Oregon, and Ernest H. Gruening, D-Alaska.
Senator Gruening, a former newspaper and magazine editor, eloquently objected to sending U.S. troops "into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is being steadily escalated."
Indeed, the Johnson administration used the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as a blank check to vastly increase U.S. involvement in Vietnam, as well as open warfare between the United States and North Vietnam.
Johnson was later reported to have privately commented about the probably bogus August 4 North Vietnamese torpedo boat attack perpetrated on not one but two U.S. destroyers: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting whales out there."
The historical significance of the resolution is that it provided the President with authorization to do whatever he deemed necessary to assist "any member of a protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty" -- including military force.
In her 1984 book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, Pulitzer Prize historian Barbara W. Tuchman recounted a meeting within 48 hours after John F. Kennedy's death between Lyndon Johnson and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., then the United States Ambassador to South Vietnam.
Lodge briefed the new President on the dire situation in Vietnam that showed no promise of improving. Following the ambassador's clearly stated assessment that hard decisions had to be faced, President Johnson's reaction was, according to Lodge, instant and personal: "I am not going to be the first President of the United States to lose a war." The ambassador said Johnson then added: "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went."
Tuchman enumerated several offers by the North Vietnamese over the next four years to negotiate an end to the carnage. President Johnson declined each and every one of them.
Her book recalls that on March 31, 1968, the President finally delivered a public address to announce: "We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations. So tonight, in the hope that this action will lead to early talks, I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict. . .and doing so unilaterally and at once."
Before finishing his speech, Johnson stunned listeners with his surprise announcement that he would not "permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year," concluding with: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
Lyndon Johnson not only vastly scaled up and prolonged the Vietnam war, his obstinate refusal to negotiate a settlement with the North Vietnamese established an indelible stain on his presidency.
Secondarily, his stubborn and wrongheaded decisions, aided and abetted by poor advice from his kowtowing top subordinates, led him to remove himself from consideration for a second term in the office he so coveted.
But there are times when more than a few supporters of President Obama fervently hope and pray that he will somehow acquire at least a smidgen of Lyndon Baines Johnson's skill at the art of the possible.
The current President is known to be a "quick study." He would be well served by studying both how Johnson got things done and the mistakes that denied the 36th United States President a second term.
Every President who has ever served knows that the position is a perpetual learning process in which they are confronted with a new challenge virtually every day, if not every hour. Those who absorb the lessons of their predecessors and have the instincts and intelligence to use this knowledge position themselves for greatness.
The other day I sent a Houston Chronicle article to a number of Potomac Digest recipients. The piece detailed the creative manner in which Texas Governor Rick Perry balances his state's budget. In response, a former international news agency bureau chief wrote:
"Disciple Perry did not invent the Texas hold 'em game. I really think we should let Texas go back to being a Republic. It has given us some of the worst Presidents (LBJ and one and one-half Bushes), is fat on bloated defense contractors and so on. . ."
To which a retired attorney and onetime alternate delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention committed to anti-Vietnam war candidate Eugene McCarthy, responded:
"Not to quibble, but I think that -- setting aside his failure to bring the Vietnam war to a close (or even reduce it in any meaningful way) there was actually escalation during [Lyndon Johnson's] administration and I don't forgive that -- he was surely one of the greatest presidents on the domestic scene this country has ever had. So let's not throw him out with the Bush Bathwater."
Impressive domestic achievements during Lyndon Johnson's presidency are undeniable.
Among these were his leadership in pushing through Congress such landmark legislation as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing segregation in schools and public places; the 1965 Voting Rights Act, prohibiting malodorous restrictions such as literacy tests that had previously disenfranchised untold numbers of United States citizens; the Equal Opportunity Act, which declared "war on poverty," and the Medical Care Act, which enables senior citizens -- most especially those living on fixed incomes -- and others to obtain medical treatment they previously simply could not afford.
For all the Camelot hype, had it not been for LBJ the all-too-brief Kennedy years might have been remembered for little else than the Cuban missile crisis and hordes of beautiful people sailing, playing touch football, and pushing one another into swimming pools.
Through his personal dedication and perhaps unequaled political acumen and ability, Johnson burnished the Kennedy legacy -- a feat it is doubtful Kennedy, had he lived, would have been able to accomplish.
Moreover, Johnson's knowledge of Congress and the legislative process and his legendary persistence and powers of persuasion were perhaps unequaled in the entire history of the Presidency.
Lyndon Johnson may have been at times a crude and rude, a larger-than-life bully. Who can forget LBJ unbuttoning his shirt to show the press a scar on his belly? There may have been times when he was tempted to turn his back on a White House news conference, drop his trousers and reveal another part of his anatomy.
There is a wonderful story about LBJ being confronted by an old friend who had been the incumbent sheriff of a Texas county. During one particularly difficult election campaign, the worried sheriff pulled Johnson aside and told him he was truly concerned that for the first time in years he might be beaten. Johnson said, "Get the word out that he fucks pigs." The sheriff laughed and said no one would believe it. Johnson countered, "Make that sonofabitch deny it."
Whatever else he may have been, Lyndon Johnson was the consummate political animal. He understood the great game of politics for what it is: the art of the possible. And, when it came to domestic policy, the nation benefited from LBJ's skill at that art as much as it did from any President in United States history.
To place Lyndon Johnson in the category of worst American Presidents is so far off base it is not even in the ballpark. In fact, in many respects Johnson may be the most effective President the country has ever had.
But then we have Johnson's 1964 campaign pledge to not send "American boys to fight Asia's wars." The United States was committed to the defense of South Vietnam by earlier administrations. But Johnson intervened massively in that beleagured country to demonstrate American credibility to allies and enemies alike.
Johnson's call for extraordinary war powers which came to fruition with Congressional passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, opened the floodgates.
The vast widening of the so-called Vietnam "conflict" concluded with the combat deaths of 47,355 U.S. service personnel -- exceeding by 5,181 the combined total of those killed in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Korean Conflict -- as well as 53,303 wounds classified by the U.S. Department of Defense as "not mortal." Allow me to refresh memories.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was adopted by Congress on August 7, 1964. The measure moved swiftly through both houses of Congress in the wake of an August 2 confrontation between a North Vietnamese Navy torpedo squadron and the American destroyer USS Maddox, followed by an alleged second engagement two days later. The latter incident supposedly involved another attack by North Vietnamese vessels on the Maddox, as well as the destroyer USS Turner Joy.
The August 2 and the questionable August 4 engagements together are known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
In 2006, The New York Times reported that a de-classified internal National Security Agency historical study revealed that during the reported August 4 engagement there may not have been any North Vietnamese vessels present.
The document states: "It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. . .in truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two boats damaged on Aug. 2. . ."
Only hours following the disputed second attack on the two U.S. destroyers, President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes -- Operation Pierce Arrow -- on North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases .
In a television address that same evening, President Johnson contended that "the United States. . .seeks no wider war."
Nonetheless, he called for a Congressional resolution "expressing the unity and determination of the United States in supporting freedom and protecting peace in southeast Asia." He said the resolution should express support "for all necessary action to protect our Armed Forces."
Johnson flat out knew better than any President whose name was not Teddy Roosevelt how to use the bully pulpit of the presidency for getting precisely what he wanted: first line up the American people behind you and Congress will have little recourse but to follow.
The result of Johnson's call to arms was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
During the final months of his 1964 election campaign, the President claimed that the resolution would help "hostile nations. . .understand" that the United States was unified in the determination "to protects its national interests."
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was approved unanimously by the House of Representatives and with only two votes in opposition by the Senate. The only "nay" votes in the upper house were cast by Senators Wayne Morse, D-Oregon, and Ernest H. Gruening, D-Alaska.
Senator Gruening, a former newspaper and magazine editor, eloquently objected to sending U.S. troops "into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is being steadily escalated."
Indeed, the Johnson administration used the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as a blank check to vastly increase U.S. involvement in Vietnam, as well as open warfare between the United States and North Vietnam.
Johnson was later reported to have privately commented about the probably bogus August 4 North Vietnamese torpedo boat attack perpetrated on not one but two U.S. destroyers: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting whales out there."
The historical significance of the resolution is that it provided the President with authorization to do whatever he deemed necessary to assist "any member of a protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty" -- including military force.
In her 1984 book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, Pulitzer Prize historian Barbara W. Tuchman recounted a meeting within 48 hours after John F. Kennedy's death between Lyndon Johnson and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., then the United States Ambassador to South Vietnam.
Lodge briefed the new President on the dire situation in Vietnam that showed no promise of improving. Following the ambassador's clearly stated assessment that hard decisions had to be faced, President Johnson's reaction was, according to Lodge, instant and personal: "I am not going to be the first President of the United States to lose a war." The ambassador said Johnson then added: "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went."
Tuchman enumerated several offers by the North Vietnamese over the next four years to negotiate an end to the carnage. President Johnson declined each and every one of them.
Her book recalls that on March 31, 1968, the President finally delivered a public address to announce: "We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations. So tonight, in the hope that this action will lead to early talks, I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict. . .and doing so unilaterally and at once."
Before finishing his speech, Johnson stunned listeners with his surprise announcement that he would not "permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year," concluding with: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
Lyndon Johnson not only vastly scaled up and prolonged the Vietnam war, his obstinate refusal to negotiate a settlement with the North Vietnamese established an indelible stain on his presidency.
Secondarily, his stubborn and wrongheaded decisions, aided and abetted by poor advice from his kowtowing top subordinates, led him to remove himself from consideration for a second term in the office he so coveted.
But there are times when more than a few supporters of President Obama fervently hope and pray that he will somehow acquire at least a smidgen of Lyndon Baines Johnson's skill at the art of the possible.
The current President is known to be a "quick study." He would be well served by studying both how Johnson got things done and the mistakes that denied the 36th United States President a second term.
Every President who has ever served knows that the position is a perpetual learning process in which they are confronted with a new challenge virtually every day, if not every hour. Those who absorb the lessons of their predecessors and have the instincts and intelligence to use this knowledge position themselves for greatness.
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