With debates, enough already!

Have they gone yet?

I mean the ten-some who appeared on Project Runway Thursday to assure us that they  had all of the critical answers for the planet.

Adulthood has never failed its pretenders more.   They talked of the future with the cliches of the  past.  Tax cuts.  Border controls. Nuclear holocaust.  Miracle work.  Resumes filled with self-glorifying hype.  Guidance from God to lead America out of Plato's cave.  Gravitas,  an earlier presidential standard, has yet to surface.

Exception:  Donald Trump, who has demonstrated by his  mugging force field  how a  once major political party has lost its immune system from hellish billionaire  invaders. He stands smugly in the center ring with all of the others consulting  their Ouija boards for adequate responses.  Until they do, which may be never, Trump remains the towering Republican experience through whom all  talk show  blessings flow.

Still, can you possibly imagine how many hours, days, weeks this crowd  spent rehearsing for their prime time show?   It appeared they all sat in the same  classroom learning to say how much they despised Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Iran,  the IRS, Obamacare, abortion, gay marriage,  job-killing other stuff.  At some point in the encounter staged by Fox News , they could have changed places before the rostrums and you would have been hard-pressed to know the difference.

Finally, holiness has a a lot to do with this sanctified group just as the fire-and-brimstoners have been  wielding threats of eternal damnation against political dissenters for decades.  Indeed, the Republican Party, intimidated by the preachers,  is now on its  knees pandering on social issues.. But Marco Rubio reproted that the GOP candidates have God's blessing.

In the end Thursday night, it was left to the national pundits to decide who was the least craziest, the current barometer that has given John Kasich a slight upward bump.   So there he was camera-wise telling us how much he cared about the less fortunate among us by supporting medicaid in another  rehearsal for his moment at the Pearly Gates.  Kasich , who has long boasted of his Ohio Miracle, stood up forthrightly and described America as "miracle" country and he wanted everybody to have a piece of that action.  The Guv already has witnessed enough miracles to qualify for sainthood.

Have they all gone yet?  Good.


  

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.

GOP: Obama socialist, communist, Hitler,Stalin, or what?

There's nothing more effective in advancing the  Republicans toxic mental breakdown than a speech  by President Obama.  An occasion such as the annual  State of the Union address, first administered by Obama in 2009,  has been  the party's proven emetic ever since, although the response  seems to have gotten  even worse this week.  Struggling to find something imaginative to say, Fox News' iconic analysts even questioned the news value of a 102-year-old woman's efforts to vote in Florida.

You sense a pall of desperation over the GOP brood as they resort to their familiar assault weapons as a means of replacing serious policy with quackery.  Even before the speech, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina referred to Hillary Clinton as a murderer and threatened more nastiness on the Benghazi issue.  We should probably excuse this sorrowfully whining  guy because it is being widely reported that he could face a stiff challenge in the Republican primary  from a Ron Paul libertarian loyalist.

Some other expletives  from the Right:

"Dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Obama" (Limbaugh).

"A Castro-like-speech" (Conservative author Mark Levin on Fox)

Obama's gun-control efforts a "disaster":  (Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe)

Obama nominee Chuck Hagel may be on  the payroll of overseas radicals (Texas Sen. Ted Cruz)

Obama is against free enterprise (read: dictator) obsessed with raising taxes (Florida Sen. Marco Rubio)

But none of this rises to a higher intellectual level than Fox News Psychiatrist (honest!) Dr. Keith Ablow,  who unpleasantly accused Obama of being "psychologically predictable".

"He does not surprise." Ablow   opined.  "Having been abandoned as a boy by his father and then his mother, only to then learn that his grandmother feared people of his race, he seems inherently to distrust initiative and intention and to place his trust only in the collective."

Sounds a lot like a reference to a socialist or communist to me.   I wonder how much they pay Ablow to give Fox News such a much-needed soaring sense of panache.  I also wonder whether they'll get around to having him do the 50-minute hour on the  couch for Limbaugh.

Confirmed: Crocodiles are great swimmers

The New York Times reports that 15,000 crocodiles escaped from a South African farm. Having watched some of the  Republican senators swarm  Hillary at the hearing, I can tell the farmer where some of his missing crocs are hanging out.

As a matter of fact, Sean Hannity isn't

Fox News host Sean Hannity plays with facts the way that TV ads for Viagra guarantee a lifetime of sexual bliss for erectile-dysfunctional men. His latest conspiracy theory on Hillary Clinton's testimony at the Senate committee hearing on Benghazi went something like this:  Her brief emotional  burst was hardly spontaneous but rather it was a staged moment that had been devised long before the session to win sympathy for her.  Who knew?  And how did Hannity know?

Well, let me tell you:  Sean didn't know, but he is paid well for not knowing a lot of things.  A limp mind is a terrible thing, too.

Note: My column on Gov. Kasich's  reach to give his State of the State speech in Lima has been posted on Plunderbund.   

Lose or lose, the crocs go after (president) Hillary

Having been thwarted in their four-year mission to make Barack Obama a one-term president, Republicans have now embarked on a new mission: Make Hillary Rodham Clinton a no-term president.  If you checked in on Clinton's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, you may have gotten a whiff of Campaign 2016 even though not a soul has yet announced his or her candidacy to succeed Obama.

Given the chance of the Capitol Hill TV version of Project  Runway to get to the root of the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans, the GOP side pounced on her testimony with a story line that Hillary is an incompetent "Madam Secretary" and a phony at that.

Some in the anti-Hillary camp had  accused her  earlier of faking a concussion to avoid appearing before the virile committee that a mere woman could  not match.    And when she teared  up at the beginning of her testimony, that proved  she was following a script to win public sympathy.  At least, that's what Rush Limbaugh raged to his  own audience that nods like wilting sunflowers at his every word.  She did, however, have her strong moments  against the critics on the panel who, um,  were doing the will of the people.

A few of the Republican darts stood out:

Sen. Rand Paul, the airball from Kentucky,  told Clinton that if he had been president,  he would have  fired her.  (The good news: No danger of this guy ever being president.)

Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, in a blustery melt,  repeatedly declared that the American people are frustrated by the lack of  information about Benghazi. (Translation of this mouthful: Some of the  American people from his southern district.  Wasn't he the guy who once described undocumented immigrants as "vagrants and animals?" )

Tea Party Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin accused her of making excuses for not  taking a  hands-on role in the Sept. 11 attack.    She replied it wasn't an excuse but a fact that she didn't want  to interfere with the ongoing FBI's  investigative role.  When Johnson persisted , she angrily replied, her voice rising:

"Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference , at this point, does it make?"

With a 67 pct. approval rating, this special woman proved it would take more than the crocodiles from the other side to tarnish her profile with the American voters.  Of course, we're still four years away from the next election. So what's the point of the new GOP search and destroy initiative?  That's the McParty's problem. It doesn't have any points these days.

When news becomes news, sort of...

Now  it has been nobly decided that Democrats as well as Republicans will have House Speaker John Boehner to kick around for  still one more term, let's  take a breath and catch up on some real news:

The  term "fiscal cliff" was repeated 2,390,864 times in the media in the weeks leading up to the vote, thereby narrowly  topping the number of shoes that Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel said he wore out campaigning for one political job or another.

If you  felt slightly less significant  from the report that there are 100 billion moons swirling around in the Milky Way, how about the research reported by the New York Times that human beings have a lot in common with jellyfish, chickens, roundworms and fruit flies.  That's the word from the laboratories that humans have no  more than 21,000 protein-coding genes, which isn't  much different from the jellyfish you disrespectfully squish at the seashore.

You may soon add another pill bottle to your medicine cabinet,  the one labeled "effective against bedbugs".   People who ingest the pill, it says here, will exhale an odorous carbon dioxide that will encourage the vermin to bite you - and die.  So your choice will be between bedbugs and red welts from the bites. That's as far as I want to go with this.

As the year ended, we learned of a fresh supply of terms to describe America's folly, among them the insistence by the right-wing loonies that Hillary Clinton had faked a concussion.    Talk of  faked orgasms has  beome so boringly ancient that in Hillary's case, it became something else called the 'Immaculate Concussion".  Former UN ambassador John Bolton, never at a loss to reveal his madness,  started the rant against Clinton with "diplomatic illness" - the term he used to describe her  tactic  to avoid testifying on Benghazi. This much we know: Bolton is not feigning his loopy view of the world.

It wouldn't be surprising if the nation's TV networks had no sense of a recession last year.  The latest round of reports on political advertising in 2012  said TV revenue was as high as $6 billion, an increase over 2008 of 68 pct., according to, the New America Foundation,  thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling to let the money gush.

Isn't it just like nutritionists to rain on the parade of the power-seekers?  Now we are told that all  of those power drinks that give people a kick  have no more punch than a cup of strong coffee. They're caffeine-based and cost more.  Starbucks will be pleased to hear that.

Finally, for the purest  confirmation that the more things change, the more they stay the same:  The cumulative records of the 2012 Cleveland Indians (68-94),  Browns (5-11)  and, currently, Cavaliers (7-26), is  80 wins, 131 losses.  Did you see this first in Grumpy Abe ?

To Sen. McCain: Trust me, Hillary was actually in Cairo!

Mindless.

No, not the two figures in the photo, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Egyptian Prime Minister Mohamed Kamel.

The mindless one contnues to be John McCain, current embittered ranter-in-chief against President Obama.

While  Clinton was tirelessly on board in Cairo working out a cease fire, McCain was of no mind to cease his own fire.  He sneered that although the U.S. once had Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger or James Baker at the scene of a crises,  Obama was merely in "Burma making phone calls",  clear  evidence, McCain huffed,  of a weak foreign policy by the re-elected president even though the leaders of the combatants  were praising Obama's  efforts for a cease-fire.

It should be clear evidence by now that Kissinger and Baker were not the president of their times  but held the same title as Hillary, who as we see in the photo was actually on the scene.    McCain is so off the page  that it's possible he may have forgotten Clinton's name.

A little history for this totally clueless loser to Obama in 2008:

After the elder Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992,  they later teamed up to raise millions of dollars to aid impoverished Haitians.

Following his loss to George W. Bush in 2000, despite the fact that he received a half-million more popular votes, Al Gore devoted his life to environmental projects.

John Kerry, loser to Dubya in 2004, stayed in the Senate to work for his constituents in Massachusetts without raising hell about Dubya  every other hour.

Ah, but John McCain, hopelessly  in a snivel?  Since his loss in 2008, he has pathetically devoted much  of his time to trashing Obama.  He's nowhere close to being the loyal opposition but rather a public figure who is so warped by hatred and despair  that he  needs a lot of help to get him through the day.

Among other things, McCain has pushed another's defined mid-life crises into his mid-70s.

Marathon masochism

IS THERE anywhere to hide from the 24-hour speculation on whether Barack will name Hillary as secretary of state, or vice versa?  The tele-talkers have interviewed virtually everyone with shoes on the ground in Washington to discuss the pros and cons of such an arrangement.  Among the few who are still missing are Brad Pitt , LeBron James and Sarah Palin, the latter being fully  consumed by a sunrise seance with Ronald Reagan.  I did not stay tuned and have no opinion.