Of hurricanes, locusts and Michele Bachmann

THE REPUBLICAN presidential candidates and their kin have been constructing their own Tower of Babble since Annie Oakley arrived from Alaska to lay waste to the Obama Administration. Sarah Palin and her wondrous reflections on everything not verified by textbooks have sort of been orbiting on the fringes of the current crop of carnivores, but it does lead you to wonder whether there isn't some truth to the peril of peaking too fast.

Meantime we've been treated to the grapes of wrath from everyone else carrying the banner of God, Jefferson Davis, Glenn Beck and Grover Norquist. (I've left some others out, but you surely get the idea.)

Some samples of this political theater of the absurd: The President will declare martial law (Mentioned prez candidate Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican) ; The federal government should be "inconsequential'', hotshot (hot flash?) meteor Rick Perry; Obama is overreaching by encouraging children to exercise (Fox & Friends, presidential "advisors".) Obama is only interested in creating class warfare instead of jobs (House Majority leader Eric Cantor) ; Obama is a Communist, socialist and elitist because he put Dijon mustard on his hamburger. (Ready choir?)

And just now, candidate Michele Bachmann has plaintively lamented in response to the hurricane: "I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians."

If you don't mind, Michele, I presume we still have to get to the frogs, lice and locusts. I don't even want to wait for the movie.

Heckuva-job Brownie is back, sort of

EXCEPT FOR PEANUTS, I don't pay too much attention to the comic strips in the papers anymore. Don't have to. A casual check of the day's news gives me enough laughs for one day. Which brings me to Mike Brown, who is in the photo with George Bush, the fellow with his arms crossed. The president is praising his FEMA director in the wake of the government's bungled response to Katrina: ''Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." It still draws a laugh,.

Now, reports ThinkProgress. Brownie turns up at Fox News, the refuge of scoundrels, to complain about Obama's itinerary in Europe as tornadoes pounded the Midwest. Says Brownie: "He went to Ireland for God's sake to visit relatives. It's time to come home...in this case, the perception is that the president is detached. He's more concerned about raising a toast to the Queen. People have died."

As it has been said, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Particularly in Brownie's case. He's not even running for president.

Note to Donald Trump: You're fired!

JUST AS THE national media were preparing to spend the morning dealing with such less compelling issues as tornadoes, Libya and possibly jobs, President Obama released his birth certificate to put an end to all of the silliness that is the fringe's stock-in-trade. It was the only juicy story of the day. Not that the birthers will give up so easily over Obama's big Gotcha Moment. For Donald Trump, the self-appointed Grand Odd Peacock (GOP) of the Republican Party, it was an occasion for him to hold another press conference and take credit for forcing the president's hand.

Trump is nothing if he is not parading his alleged political virtues in states that he may seek out in a presidential campaign. One never expects humility from the puffy guy and he lived up to his narcissistic billing by telling reporters, "Today I'm very prond of myself, because I've accomplished something that no one else has been able to accomplish." But before he entirely closes the case, he says he wants to first look at the document.

Meantime, he's on to Chapter Two in his pursuit of Oval Office scandal. He wants to see the transcripts of Obama's college records. Since half of the gullible Republicans still believes that Obama is not an American, it won't take much for Trump to sell the idea that Obama may have even flunked out of elementary school on his fast track to Harvard. Shouldn't the Republican front office, whatever and wherever it is these days, take The Donald aside and tell him:

"Trump, you're fired!!!"

An overflow of advice without consent

THERE'S A FINE LINE between professional sports and politics, a demarcation that has grown still dimmer these days with the urgent calls to tone down the head butts and trash talk. Calls? In football, our athletic achievers are even being assessed big fines for the appearance of corporal attacks on their opponents. It hasn't reached that pricey stage in politics yet and doubtless never will inasmuch as there isn't that much interest on Capitol Hill for folks to force their "distinguished" colleagues to reach for their wallets over non-violent assaults on their opponents.

Meantime, nothing has demonstrated the link between sports and politics more than the oupouring of advice from the national media on how to score a touchdown or two and what President Obama must do to score points with the public. Throughout the current football playoffs leading to the Super Bowl, miles of copy have been written advising coaches on what they must do to win, or, as it's commonly said, to "put more points on the board." Not that any of this influences the outcome of a game because you can safely assume that a given coach is too busy studying play charts and viewing game films to pay any attention to what the outside world thinks.

That leads us to the flood of advice that many editorial writers and pundits have given to President Obama on what he should say in the State of the Union speech to cheer up sullen constituents in Peoria. No less an authority than the New York Times ran an editorial prepping everyone for the speech (A New Chance for Mr. Obama) with such oratorical directions as telling Americans why job creation and growth are "more important than short-term spending cuts."

Then there was Steven Hayward, a resident scholar at the Conservative American Enterprise Institute, who urged the president to be " more specific and direct than Bill Clinton's famous line declaring that the "era of big government is over." I wonder how many people would remember that if you stopped them on the street. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Hopeful of imperiling any upbeat presidential comments, Rep. Michelle Bachmann, the Tea Party Queen in the House, staged her own defining state of something speech, which led to sotto voce advice from some worried Republicans that could easily be translated into "For God's sake, Michelle, shut up!"

With Obama's rise in the polls (55 pct. approval in the latest CNN tally), shouldn't we assume that he knows how in hell to give a speech without malapropisms? And without everybody telling him to be careful that he doesn't screw it up, or be a fool about the the country's priorities? Of course, he does. But political pundits don't write about pro football, which sort of restricts what they can write about. Besides, I haven't seen a single bit of advice from a sportswriter on what Obama should say about the state of the union. Mention union to the sports world and the only only thing it can come up with is the possible lockout of the gladiators before next season. And to millions of fans, that's something to worry about.

Democrats, Republicans finally agree on something

WELL, WHAT HAPPENED on November 2 when the inmates took over the asylum?

We're in luck. There are no complicated answers!

On this point, there was sort of a political detente with sheathed swords Thursday night as a bipartsan panel of four campaign gurus agreed that the cause of the Democratic demise in Ohio (as elsewhere) was nothing more profound than an ailing economy. Beyond that, the autopsy produced the insiders' look into the cupboard of strategies that both sides employed - the theatrical props that adorn every campaign , from yard signs to polls to negative ads. Still, all of the traditional stuff appeared to be less important than the fixed perception that when a lot of folks are out of work, the only remedy is to fire the incumbents. To the winning sloganeers with their guaranteed fixes, one can only say good luck to that.

The occasion on panel night was the national conference of the American Association of Political Consultants hosted by the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron. The panelists, who would lead various discussions the next day, were Aaron Pickrell, Gov. Strickland's campaign manager; Michael Hartley, John Kasich's campaign manager; Former Ohio Republican chairman Robert Bennett and former Democratic campaign consultant, Gerald Austin. Bliss director John Green served as moderator.

Of the economic baggage lugged by Democrats in Ohio, Bennett observed that "tsunamis don't stop at the state line". That was soon obvious when the flood waters receded in Columbus. But Bennett was cautious about the long-term benefits to his party. He has witnessed too many reversals by the shifting voters over his many years in managing GOP business to be puffed up with overconfidence after this lopsided mid-term.

Meanwhile, Austin noted that all campaigns can be reduced to "good luck and bad luck." For Strickland the story was full of bad luck, some prompted by his own decisions. The governor's fate was sealed when Barack Obama was elected, Austin said, a novel idea that didn't appear in any of the other post-mortems. His reasoning: Strickland could not run against (i.e., blame) Washington because he and the president were both Democrats. With incisive satire, which has been often been associated with his long path through Ohio politics, Austin referred to Strickland's choice of head of the Ohio Department of Transportation from Brown County, a rural outpost in southwestern Ohio, quipping that the new director probably didn't even know where Cleveland was. He cited other things but you get the idea: bad luck.

On the other hand, Kasich arrived on the crest of the economic meltdown and as a friend of the newly emerging anger-philes souped up as the Tea Party. At that, he merely won a plurality in a close race although he has been sounding a lot like an Eliot Ness who ousted the bad guys by acclimation.

As for the Tea Partiers , Hartley tippy-toed lightly, describing the phenomenon as the "real deal. You can't play games with the Tea Party." That much was already confirmed by the way the TP's wiped out some Republican incumbents in the primaries. I don't think the old Republican lions know what to say or do about the new political menaces who moved into their neighborhood.

All the forthcoming internecine warfare will keep the speculators quite busy until the next election day. For now, Austin was content to compare winning politics with baseball: "See the ball. Hit the ball." That's not inside baseball either.

.

Michael Gerson: When it takes two snobs to tango

SO TODAY THE Beacon Journal's commentary page carries a column by Michael

Gerson that's prominently displayed with the headline: Barack Obama,what a snob.

Well, I guess that's OK for an op-ed piece from the Washington Post columnist, even for a guy who became a pundit after being President Bush's speechwriter for five years.

But then I came across this paragraph in Gerson's slam at Obama:

There have been several recent attempts to explain Obama's worldview as the result of his post-colonial father or his early socialist mentors - Gnostic attempts to produce the hidden key that unlocks the man.

If he had written such a high-falutin' paragraph in one of Bush's speeches, he'd be spending the remainder of his own highbrow life translating Sanskrit.

Political cash flow: the land of milk and...money.

THERE IS SO much cash flowing this election season that it would be reasonable to refer to America as the land of milk and money. By all accounts there will be a greater transfer of dollars to campaign jackpots than what Americans have spent on sexier abs the past year.

For this record high-finance moment in American history, we can thank the Republican appointees to the Supreme Court who said in the Citizens United (!) case that it would be OK with them no matter how much corporate and union money is spent. Even though they pretended not to discriminate between the white-collar and blue-collar contributors , they didn't get to the high court by being total dummies about who helped put them in their lifetime jobs. Offhand, can you think of any union presidents who are billionaires?

The decision did raise a little curiosity about Clarence Thomas, who unsurprisingly rubber-stamped the 5-4 Republican majority while his wife Virginia was bragging that her right-wing Liberty Central movement would be bigger than the Tea Party. Her anguished cry is that President Obama is a tyrannical leftist, a notion that must have at least casually influenced Clarence to vote the way he did. There are days when being a strict conservative is more persuasive than being a strict constitutionalist.

The justices also were aware that not one of them would be summarily laid off from his seat on the bench during a downturn in the economy. Nobody else can safely make that statement these days.

Some of us had a little trouble understanding George W. Bush when he talked with such enthusiasm about turning the country into an ownership society. How could we have known that he was setting into motion the Supreme Court decision that would allow the fat cats to own a politician for no more than airfare and a comfortable hotel room? When the probable next Speaker of the House (John Boehner) can enjoy pleasure flights to Shangri-la for golf and a 5-star hotel, courtesy of this lobby (R. J. Reynolds) or that one, that's as good a definition of corporate ownership as you'll find. Guys like Boehner are so certain that they are a perfect fit for today's political culture that they see no reason to apologize for their odd behavior.

We're told that outfits like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is spending everything but the kids' lunch money on the elections , is merely protecting American business from Barack Obama's invasive tax policies that soak 2 pct. of the wealthiest Americans. Wall Streeters, meantime, are outraged that anyone would consider government restraints on the highly suspect way that they pocket their profits and bonuses. The news these days, however, tells a completely different story about the Ninjas on Wall Street who managed to cripple the economy with sour subprime mortgages without even reading the documents that drove hundreds of thousands of Americans from their homes. And these are the same perps who are putting up millions to return Republicans to power in the House of Representatives?

Obama is shattering the American Dream of a a no-tax society, or at least one that can be gamed in a way that the gap between rich and middle class/poor continues to widen.

Columnist Gail Collins was so fascinated by the money flying out of the bloated piggy bank of Linda McMahon. the Republican senate nominee in Connecticut, that she had to wonder why McMahon didn't give every voter a car instead.

Yeah, every vote is important, but not quite as important as another cushy golf outing among friends for Boehner et al.

Oh, skip the milk. We are now, without challenge, solely the land of money.