Two Little Words

Retired Army Reserve Colonel Joe Wilson dissed his commander in chief last night.

I can’t think of a famous one-word quote. But with two words, “You lie,” a relative non-entity, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, became deservedly infamous.

In all likelihood, his two words also made him more of a loser in 2010 than he is now. Before he could say “I’m sorry” (exactly the same number of syllables and the cadence of “jack rabbit”), Republican Party leaders were apologizing for him. Before Rush Limbaugh could say, “I was ecstatic when I heard that last night,” the campaign coffers of Wilson’s Democratic opponent in 2010, Rob Miller, had swelled from a reported $150,000 in donations in the first hour after Wilson’s outburst to $500,000 and climbing this afternoon.

Little wonder. In style and substance, by any measure of civility, Joe Wilson was outrageously out of line last night. In sharp contrast to President Obama’s mellifluousness, Representative Wilson shouted. In contrast to the president’s show of respect for all people, the congressman showed unrestrained disrespect for the president who, according to Article II, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, is the commander in chief of the United States—therefore of Colonel Wilson, a four-year reserve colonel and eighteen-year National Guard colonel (ret.). To make matters worse for Wilson, candidate Rob Miller is a former Marine. By shooting off his mouth last night, Wilson seems not only to have shot himself in the foot, but also to have taken direct aim on the other one.

With his two little words, he may have been the one who was lying (Rush the one swearing by it). Obama denied that his health care proposal would cover illegal immigrants. Section 246 of the House Democrats' proposal H.R. 3200 limits "federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States," but it’s inconclusive and still a work in progress. By no interpretation does it give anyone license to point a finger and use such pointedly strong language. Unless license is callously taken by one who deliberately intends to mislead others.

Wilson is apparently known in Congress for giving the briefest of speeches. Last night, he outdid and probably undid himself.

Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie

I thought: if Congress can take a vacation for the month of August, I can too. Except, as I hope you noticed, I came in on Mondays.

This August there were five Mondays. On some of them, it was almost too steamy to get hot under the collar about anything. Almost.

Spinoza’s dictum that “Nature abhors a vacuum” wasn’t an invitation to Rush to fill the void. When Nietzsche postulated, “Man is something to be surpassed,” he meant without DeLay, two-step or goosestep notwithstanding.

In the pulpits, we have men of God who preach hatred of God’s people, but hate only some of them. God isn’t omniscient, it's a homophobic Arizona pastor who fulminates about gays in the ministry and advocates death to the President of the United States who is—and can cite 30 verses in the Bible why God hates everybody.

In communities throughout the country, the golden rule is the Second Amendment and proper schooling is aiming and firing a rifle. These schools are never out for recess.

And in the Capital, we have a majority party that always seems to be in retreat—even when its members are away on vacation—and a minority party for whom a national conversation is “No.”

Rank-and-file members of the current House and Senate pay themselves $174,000 annually. That’s $14,500 a month, including the month of August, when they don’t have to show up for work at all! Leadership receives $193,400 annually and the Speaker of the House, $223,500. (All are entitled to an annual cost-of-living-adjustment.) I don’t want to begin to tell you what kind of month I’ve had. But this being the last dog day of August, I’m letting sleeping dogs lie and laying low.

But For The Last Question

We are a trivial country with a trivial media. We stand at the threshold of confirming the best of what we believe “the land of the free and the home of the brave” stands for, and we are riddled with ADD. With a national health care program clearly in our sights at long last, our eyes dart instead to the sideshows on the sidelines—the C Street hotbeds, the “wise Latina” brouhaha, the blathering Birthers.

So we have the plight of Barack Obama’s press conference expressly “about the progress we're making on health insurance reform and where it fits into our broader economic strategy” upstaged by a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times, Lynn Sweet, who posed the last question to the President—about health insurance reform, of course: “Recently, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you and what does it say about race relations in America?” Obviously, Lynn’s attention must have been riveted by the president’s remarks up to that point.

It didn’t take sophistication or savvy for anyone to realize what the story would be. No matter how the President answered, race was the issue and “that incident” trumped the president’s concern for “the 47 million Americans who don't have any health insurance at all” and the “14,000 Americans [who] will continue to lose their health insurance every single day.” It dwarfed “the woman in Colorado who paid $700 a month to her insurance company only to find out that they wouldn't pay a dime for her cancer treatment” and “the middle-class college graduate from Maryland whose health insurance expired when he changed jobs and woke up from the emergency surgery that he required with $10,000 worth of debt.”

Not to take anything away from “Skip” Gates, a distinguished scholar who happens to be among my intellectual heroes, nor from the appalling appearance of possible racial profiling in the Cambridge police’s handling, or mishandling, of the iconic Harvard professor, but regrettably, as the highly-charged situation became the distraction not only of the day, but easily of many a day to follow, the consummately important issue of our time, health care reform, faded from sight for a time, essentially unnoticed.

I’ve yet to see the Cambridge affair dubbed WaterGates, but don’t hold your breath. I saw a clip of Rush Limbaugh fuming, “The president’s reaction was not presidential… we got the militant black reaction.” I watched Chris Matthews, who opens his hour on MSNBC declaring, “Let’s play Hardball!” but often as not doesn’t even lob softballs to guests like those on Thursday night’s show. Before him sat the newly- and likely briefly-famous Lynn Sweet, but instead of using the opportunity to ask her why she veered from the press conference’s vital subject matter and changed the subject—particularly after she had said she found it “remarkable… that Obama decided to engage in the question in a very animated way…”, he concluded his non-inquiry of her by telling her, “Good question last night! Talk about makin’ noise in this country!” Guess he wants her back on the show.

Midway through the hour, Matthews introduced G. Gordon Liddy, a leader of the Birthers, those tiresomely-dogged agitators who refuse to accept evidence that Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen because they refuse to accept that a man with black skin and an African name is the legitimate President of the United States. (Matthews might have asked why the American people didn’t ask George W. Bush, or Teddy Roosevelt for that matter, to prove their citizenship, but he didn’t.) Quite a show, right? Liddy said that Obama’s “Certificate of Live Birth,” issued in Hawaii and certified by the state’s Republican governor and everyone else but the right wing-dings, wouldn’t qualify him for an American passport. (Note to Chris: why didn’t you ask Liddy to explain how Obama traveled all over the world long before and ever since he entered political life?) So we were treated to the spectacle of a convicted felon accusing the President of the United States of being an illegal alien.

Just hours ago on “Hardball,” radio talk show host Michael Smerconish said that after twelve hours on the air over the past two days, the Gates/police/Obama issue “is the only thing the American people want to talk about.” As for health care? God Bless America.

Now Let Me Get This Straight

This is me at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, trying to see Russia.

Let me get this straight. Sarah Palin can parade her progeny over the flat screens of America without anyone noticing her family is comically dysfunctional. She can be a soccer mom with a ready sucker punch, but a succor-seeking simp when anyone else strikes. She can see Russia from Alaska, but can’t see how in over her head she is.

IF I understand Rush Limbaugh—and please note that’s a big IF—he holds President Obama responsible for South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s infidelity. That’s right, yesterday’s Gospel According to Rush is: if the President had been handling the economy better, and if, according (I think) to Rush, the governor hadn’t gone through the strain of having to turn down the federal stimulus money he was offered for his state, he wouldn’t have two-timed his wife with his Argentine Inamorata. I get it, Rush—it was principle over principal! So how is it, I want to ask, that Mark Sanford can turn down 700 million dollars for his state, but can’t turn down a piece of ass?

So let me get this straight. The Party of NO, formerly known as the party of “family values” (mostly to itself), can say no to everything but extra-marital sex. “Just Say No”—to all vices, as Nancy Reagan would have it—only pertains to Democratic legislation these days.

I’m trying to sort this out. Republicans are angry because they had unchecked power for eight years, abused it, and left the world much worse off than the way they found it. They’re offensively on the offensive because they’re defensive because they were misgoverned by the world’s most narcissistic, elite left-behind child, a president who didn’t really want to preside over anything but the workouts he blithely put before work, and through thick and thin mostly went AWOL on his country.

Now let me try to get this straight. George W. Bush, a man whose most complete sentences end in non sequiturs, is writing a book. Will he go absent without leave by Chapter Two? I try to get into W’s head to imagine who could edit such a book, and… By George, I’ve got it!—Brownie could do a heck of a job!

And while we’re all waiting to see that book:

If I understand anything, Newt Gingrich is cagily running for president; Mitt Romney is blatantly running for president again!; and Dick Cheney is running off at the mouth again and again. Karl Rove is running in place; Tom Delay is running to find a place; and ill will is running rampant. McCain is running down; Ensign, Craig and Vitter are running on empty; and Sanford will be running for cover.

Does all of the above conveniently exclude Democrats? Not in the least. The distinction is that all of the above includes hypocrites—sanctimonious phonies getting away with hiding in glass houses far too long while hurtling stones wrapped in mock morality and bound with those disingenuous family values.

I intend to continue working on getting it straight.

photo: Amy F.J. Stone

No Republican Left Behind

I keep promising myself and others not to do any more “political” pieces for awhile. Then another Republican opens his mouth.

I’m learning that every time one dunderhead says something dumber than anything I believe I’ve heard before, I can bank on a new one who won’t keep the public waiting 24 hours to say something even stupider. They surface like seaweed.

I know Republicans don’t have a corner on stupidity, but they’re making a grand old effort to make it look like they do.

Enter Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, U.S. Senator. Dumb as grass.

Publicly airing his outrage with the AIG mega-bonus babies, Senator Dumbassly declared:

“…They would make me feel a little bit better towards them if they’d, uh, follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say ‘I’m sorry,” and then either do one of two things--resign, or… go commit suicide.”

But mesmerized by a shiny object—a microphone—he couldn’t stop there.

“It’s irresponsible for the corporations to give bonuses at this time when they’re so suckin’ the tit of the taxpayer.”

Classy doesn’t rhyme with Grassley. (We’ll leave “Chuck” alone.) When the most intelligent thing a man says in 66 words is “uh,” you have to wonder: Why can’t Republicans teach their brethren how to speak? Whenever I encounter Rush Limbaugh gorging on trash talk, I wonder that he puts food in that same mouth.

Some cultures characteristically speak in poetic or flowery phrases—on the face of it a cultured and all in all admirable trait. But I believe they seduce themselves with it. I’ve always thought that was a major part of the problem in negotiating with the Arabs—what they say sounds so good to them as they say it, it becomes gospel. So it is with Republicans, teachers’ pets all, who lingered in the classroom long after the bell tolled, hanging on the precious rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and the absent syntax of George W. Bush with the same awe-baited breath when they should have taken a few extra-curricular speaking lessons from the likes of someone who speaks sense, not spin. Enter Barney Frank.

Fools Rush In

An angry child says, “I wish you were dead.” Even to a beloved parent, in cuttingly measured tones, “I/ wish/ you/ were… dead!” That’s a child speaking.

Every mother and father knows that two minutes later they get their loving, caring child back. Every child knows that in less time than that he or she is forgiven.

In the world of adults, it’s different. Or at least it’s supposed to be. The Sixth Commandment should have a VI-a. to it: Thou shalt not kill off others. People can get into serious trouble by wishing someone dead.

So, what is it with the Republicans?

Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning chose an annual Lincoln Day Dinner (of all occasions) to pronounce Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsberg “half-dead.” As reported by Joseph Gerth in Louisville’s Courier-Journal:

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg … has cancer. Bad cancer. The kind that you don't get better from. Even though she was operated on, usually, nine months is the longest that anybody would live after [being diagnosed] with pancreatic cancer," Bunning said.

GOP-Leader-By-Default Rush Limbaugh polluted radio airwaves again by ranting about the passage of health care reform legislation:

"Before it's all over, it'll be called the Ted Kennedy memorial health care bill.”

Rush-To-Judgment’s dittoheads justly point out that he didn’t specifically mention death. Anyone with half an education should point out to them that memorials are not held for the living. Except, perhaps, for the living dead, under the guise of caucuses (dangerously close to carcasses), conventions and the Conservative Political Action Conference (dangerously close to falling off the right side of the Earth). Which brings us to the Republicans’ death wishes for themselves, and for the once-grand old party.

Is it premature to pronounce the GOP DOA? Probably. Still, there’s a quasi Jim Jones’ Jamestown quality to their rapture.

When Paul Krassner, the creator of the irreverent 60s and early 70s magazine, “The Realist,” was asked on British radio if, based on a satirical piece he had written, he condoned necrophilia, he answered, “Only between consenting adults.”