By George, Sherrod Brown an authentic lefty?

 When we spotted a headline on the Beacon Journal's op-ed page that said "Sherrod Brown,  authentic progressive," it appeared to be an accurate  reference to the authentic  Ohio Democratic senator.  So imagine my shock when the columnist was George Will.  Was he really paying homage to the guy that he described as  a "leftist"?

No dear reader, he wasn't. Instead he cleverly  used Brown, as  "rumpled"  and "hoarse" as he may be,  as a wedge to get at his real target: um, gender-crazy Democratic activists who are clamoring to nominate Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren in 2016.

( I will dispense with professional courtesy at  this point and refer to the sniffy conservative columnist only as George because any sentence beginning with his surname  sounds ungrammatical, as in "Will wrote..." or "Will asserted...")

From a point early in his gender diatribe, George  slams both women as phony or theatrical leftists and offers up Brown as the "authentic progressive" to fill in the blank at the top of a hypothetical Democratic ticket.

Oh, the subject has come up more than once.  Brown  deflected an  insistent question from MSNBC's Chris Matthews, saying he is "quite happy where I am but, thank you".   And to the Huffington Post he said: "I have no interest.  I mean zero interest.  I love what I do.  I think if you want to be a really good senator you shouldn't   be looking over your shoulder and running for president. Zero interest.  I appreciate the question but no thanks."

Nothing, of course, is ever final in politics, particularly in George's  tantrums against female lefties.   And Brown's intense fund-raising efforts for Democratic candidates across the land does cast him as an authentic team  that more than a few  of his colleagues will remember down the road.

But George has a widening reputation for his erring punditry.  Item:  Romney would win in a landslide!    So George's readers might conclude that Brown is in fact  an authentic  crypto-right winger.  In this instance, however, we'll stick with the headline. Thanks anyway,George.

George Will: The Clintons squeeze the pockets of the rich

What's that?  George Will, the conservatives' incarnation of  Solomon, has dissed
Bill and Hillary Clinton as being the takers in a maker society.   Adding to the growing Republican alarm that Hillary might well be the Democrats' presidential nominee, the columnist  hissed that the Clintons are nothing more than career politicians who have borrowed  from the rich "all their entire life"  to sustain their quest for public office.

That profound insight,  of course, ignores President Obama's predecessor, George W.
Bush, who was repeatedly bailed out by rich oilmen as his investments went awry in Texas when  his father was president.

Will's snooty political scholarship continues to fail him as a denier of climate change and as the fellow who predicted a 10-point victory for Mitt Romney. Y'think he oughtta go back  to Oxford for a refresher course in credible punditry?  Either that, or write a book on how as a managing partner of the Texas Rangers he let Sammy Sosa get away.

Jindal Bells:Taking sides in the GOP stupidity crises

Bobby Jindal, a potential Republican presidential  candidate in 2016, thinks his party should stop being stupid. That's what  he told the slamfest of the Republican Natiional Committee meeting in Charlotte. "We've got to stop being the stupid party,"  is what he asserted to his stupid audience as the keynote speaker.

His words so stupified some of the stupid committeemen that a couple of them met later over  pitchers  of empowering Gatorade and declared Jindal as being stupid for calling them stupid in his stupid  version of Jindal Bells.

Indeed, one of the members' wives, who tagged along to carry her stupid husband's luggage, even thought it was inappropriate for the stupid Louisiana governor to ruin a nice break from the routine to take some stupid tours of Charlotte - all underwritten by the host city.

One delegate even confronted Jindal, eyeball to eyeball, and blurted:  "You're stupid!'

To which Jindal replied, "No, sir, you're stupid!"

"No,  you're stupid, governor!"

That playground exchange lasted a good 20 minutes  before they thought it would help if they took a break from the hostilities to  slip over to the Gatorade bar for a stupid nightcap. (Real men actually need Gatorade as a cheap high for their testosterone.)

Frankly, we don't know what the fuss is all about.  Two of the party's deepest thinkers tried to rally them with good news.  George Will , who is best remembered for his stupid TV prediction that Romney would win in a landslide, assured stupid Republicans that President Obama's inaugural speech was nothing more than stupid "rhetorical cotton candy - sugary and mostly air''. Conservatism, he argued,. is alive and well - no matter the polls that show Obama and Americans aligned on major issues.

Paul Ryan, the stupid vice presidential loser, was once again upbeat, scrubbing pots and pans that had already been scrubbed, and  declaring that if given half a chance, stupid Republicans will show they can govern despite the stupid outcome of the November election.

When last seen, all of the stupid  committeemen went out and cracked open another keg of Gatorade.

Even Mitt Romney stupidly declared elsewhere that he will be back.

Moral:  Stupid is as stupid does.  Did we really need   Bobby Jindal to tell us that?



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News from the battlefield

     FROM THE POST-ELECTION LEFTOVERS:

There's nothing that would snap our brief euphoric holiday from the presidential election more than the  report in the Columbus Dispatch that Gov. Kasich was asked at a news conference whether he would consider running for president. Well, as the Dispatch, Kasich's adulatory voice in the capital city, recorded his response:

"I haven't announced this yet but I have full intentions of running for re-election and I have a great job here as the  governor."

Sort of a non-denial denial, don't you think?   At least that's how it was interpreted down there with the paper noting: "He didn't rule it out."

Good grief!

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We clipped and saved Glenn Beck's pre-election communication with God in setting the stage for a presumed President Romney: "I believe Mr. Romney prays on his knees every day.  I believe he is being guided [and his election Tuesday] would be a sign from God."  Shouldn't Beck have checked first with Nate Silver?

                                                        * * * * *

The Economist recently quoted the late  Ronald Reagan's view of Latinos thusly:

"Latinos are Republicans," Ronald Reagan is supposed to have said.   "They still don't know it yet."

Update to the iconic Gipper after the Latinos massive turnout for President Obama on
Tuesday:  They still don't.

                                                      * * * * *
 The conservative gurus, apparently carried away by wishful thoughts,  simply crashed in  their predictions.  George Will forecast a 321-217 electoral vote victory for Romney.  And alleged  analyst Dick Morris predicted a landslide for Mitt.  For high-paid talking heads, this was worse than embarrassing.  It might even be considered a defining moment for their political insights.


                                                       * * * * *
   
Finally, a picture is worth...


   

Republican attack of "vibrations of weirdness"

ARCH CONSERVATIVE George Will's discovery of "vibrations of weirdness" within the Republican Party is hardly news to liberals who have been scorned for saying the same thing for a long time. He was reacting to presidential wannabe Mike Huckabee's insistence that Barack Obama has evolved from the Zombies that we've been hearing so much about these days. By the way that he continues to make a fool of himself in the media, it's evident that he is increasingly immodest about his credibility....Meantime, Sen. John McCain was back on the Sunday morning talk shows, which is the equivalent of staring into the same cage at the zoo for hours while ignoring all of the other attractions. The networks simply won't allow him to back-pedal into oblivion.

And how about this one: the Republican House Speaker in New Hampshire is upset because hordes of young people register and vote on the same day. He wants the practice to end and there's a Republican bill in the legislature that would do just that. Says Speaker Bill O'Brien of the tads: "They don't have life experience and they just vote their feelings and they're taking away the town's ability to govern themselves." Gee. I thought that's what adult voters do.

Pick up the phone, Guv. Guess who's on the other end

COLUMNIST GEORGE WILL has been on an odyssey to herald the new generation of conservative governors that could pass a screen test as, say, a presidential candidate. And he is doing it with extraordinary grammar. I know of no other national pundit who would dare begin a column, as he did today, with the word "Hitherto". But that's George Will for you, ramping up the language to charm those who have no clue about the points that he's trying to make. He's lately added Govs. John Kasich and Scott Walker to his honor roll, going so far as to compare Walker to Ronald Reagan. It's a common Republican desparture point in elevating a current prospect to the Reagan legend.

There are instant benefits for guys like Kasich and Walker. As a national columnist,

Will's often inscrutable insights reach readers - at least those who still find their way to an Op-ed page - from coast to coast. With the columnist's endorsement, they might close ranks on a consensus for the next fellow in the White House. He praises Walker for being "serene in the center of this storm" as the governor sits for an interview beneath a portrait of Ronald Reagan. And later he declares being impressed by Walker's "calm comportment" in this crises.

Will's in-and-out visits to crises spots satisfy his pedantic yearnings to create a medieval America in which only the fittest survive. He's attracted to the modern version of Republican governors these days much as hungry sperm whales use echo location to find their fish.

As for Walker's crisis in attempting to dislocate public employe unions, he attempts to create the silly argument that everything in Wisconsin would be fine if those out-of-state union hacks weren't crossing borders to create havoc. As I've previously noted, his own out- of- state sponsors are the billionaire Koch brothers, whose money has been turning up quite often in political campagns. The Koch front group, Americans for Prosperity, has just bought $342,000 worth of TV and radio ads in Wisconsin asking people to "stand with Walker", while bashing unions and President Obama.

But even Walker's crusade, marked by the religious fervency of a man who is a son of a Baptist minister, can run off the highway in times like these.. A New York blogger, BuffaloBeast, tricked him into a 20-minute phone conversation in which the blogger pretended he was David Koch. During the conversation, Walker openly described his plans to crush the union.

To the credit of George Will's brief but studied assessment of the governor, Walker was serene throughout the phone call.

George Will's world of fine men and women

(Fourth in a series )

That's George Will in the photo. He is a conservative columnist. He once defended Arizona's immigration law by writing that most Americans only know Hispanics as "fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them in restaurants, not as illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m." He went out to Las Vegas to interview Republican nominee Sharron Angle, the Lady Gaga of the Far Right. He was impressed and prudent, offering carefully chosen words about her in his column in order not to offend the right-wingers who attempt to fathom his infinite wisdom. Have you noticed that he seldom smiles even though he lives in a comfortable world of fine men and women.

So who's the racist?

HEY, STOP trying to confuse me!   I began the week reading comments from such conservative Olympians as Limbaugh, Will and Buchanan (Pat, not James!)  that the reason Colin Powell endorsed Obama was that - need I say more? - well, it was racially motivated.  Both, in case you didn't know,  are African-Americans who have doubtless shared  a lot of time after hours in billiard parlors touting their bookies' latest odds on NBA games.  Still, I must ask whether the same conclusion would apply to a retired white general who would endorse THAT WHITE ONE for president because he wanted the election to be in his own colorless comfort zone?