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.
###
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