Obama foes shout fire in empty theater

April,  as T.S. Eliot once wrote, is the "cruellest month..." and nobody needs to remind President Obama of that sad tale. As everybody knows by now, he's the guy who lured those Secret Service agents into sexual encounters against their solemn will.  And as Joe the Plumber, nee Samuel Wurzelbacher, the Man from McCain and Republican congressioanal nominee against Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, now convincingly  reports, the president's parents were Communists.  Let Obama deny that one!

Finally, for April at least,  it is now fairly certain through subsequent DNA tests that Obama ordered the Seals to waterboard Osama Bin Laden before forcing him to drink the Kool-Aid,  a hilarious voodoo stunt he learned as a community organizer for  the Muslim Mafia in Chicago's southside.


As if that isn't enough to convince you that we have a failed president, as Mitt Romney repeatedly assures us, there's the awful news about the thousands of dead fish in the waters of Cleveland Metroparks this week.  And who was cleverly campaigning around the country on Air Force One  when the mysterious fish-kill occurred? Right!  Some of Obama's critics would remind you that Al Capone was never on the scene when the worst was taking place in Chicagoland under  his remote control.

The great outpouring of these undeniable truths will guard the nation from doing anything foolish all the way to November.  It is reassuring to know that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and their countless operatives  can continue to make a damn good living by shouting fire in an empty theater.



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The balloon boy: the televised version

FRANK RICH, the New York Times magisterial op-ed essayist, observed Sunday that America's fascination with the "balloon boy" episode reflected a media-driven society with a willing audience seduced by the latest hoax du jour. TV hustles spectacles. Millions of unthinking viewers buy into them. Think not? Oh? If you weren't among the glazed viewers watching an empty saucer-shaped balloon wafting for miles with voice-over, there was something nagging you that Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" was a put-on that, in one form or another, still exists in the tawdry tourist shops along the New Jersey boardwalks not that far from where the Martians landed.

Fantasies are the lifeline of television, from escapist reality shows to the soberly empty helicopter coverage of celebrities heading to the courthouse for still another hearing. That we were hustled by the balloon boy's dad was no more cynical than the meteoric rise of Joe the Plumber as a man hawked as a spokesman for the millions of unrepresented citizens (as well as a handy crowd-pleaser for John McCain.) And as some Americans wanted to believe, Sarah Palin's family was the moral equivalent of Ozzie and Harriet. (Some males went still farther and fantasized about Sarah.)

The fantasies never stop for today's Thumb Generation. Aim the remote at the screen and you may soon find an 800 telephone number that will end your labors and worries. Pyramid schemes abound with the fantasies of overnight riches. We go to war in the Middle East being told that the end of Saddam Hussein will take no longer than a few weeks or a few months - at most. The empty balloon made more sense.

Talk about gullibility. There's also a fellow named Arthur Ray, a mega-promoter of a fantasy that he calls" vision quest" that for upward of $10,000 he will literally roast you with heated rocks in a tent in Sedona, Ariz., to purge you of toxic invaders of your mind and body. His latest venture ended with three deaths among the 21 persons rushed to the hospital by emergency crews. Did some really believe they would survive the ordeal to help them overcome claustrophobia? You bet.

Also, despite the proven lies from the right-wing megaphones, there are still a sizable number of gullible folks who do not hesitate to believe that the earth is flat or that melting icebergs do not affect sea levels. The fiction may be stranger than the truth, but it sells to a wider audience, which is how decisions are influenced in the media. The once sacred network evening news reports are now limited to 22 minutes, some of which are superficially dedicated to whatever fantasies we are expected to believe. (Two minutes for the latest jobless figures? Ninety seconds for the hokum that health care reform is either dead or now ready for passage, depending on which lobbyist source is dishing it out?) And the Sunday morning panels have little more depth than boring coffee klatches. I confess: I don't think George Will, Cokie et al are ready for their own compelling reality show.)

The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures upstage the fantasy hours on TV with harsh numbers: Newspaper circulation from April through September this year fell 1o.6 pct. from a similar period in 2008. While news rooms are shrinking, we must await the next made-for-TV journey into la-la land, or at least to the breaking "news" arriving in Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room. Some situation! But I don't expect any attitude adjustments. As Norman Lear pointed out on the Huffington Post, the balloon boy's parents were seduced by the networks into believing that "they are - even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax - entitled to their 15 minutes."

With today's coverage of fantasies, it seems more like weeks.. During the Halloween season, at least we have long known that Linus's "great pumpkin" was harmless child's play.

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Grumpy Abe's first anniversary

THE WEEK END MARKED the first anniversary of the Grumpy Abe blog. Not with a patio party and presents or anything like that. Has it been a year already? It has, and nobody anticipated more than I did that at some point I would say , to hell with it, and go about my other business. After all, it wasn't my idea in the first place. I knew nothing about the technology of blogging and cared less. Blogging was for the younger hip writers and chatterboxes. But I finally relented at the urging of friends and 333 posts later - having never taken anybody's advice to shut up - Grumpy Abe will begin a second year.

In many respects. it was a reprise of my newspaper/magazine years. The only difference, I suppose, is that I once got paid for what I now do for nothing. It's also been an educational experience that connected me daily to the absurdities of the political world , some of which I could not express in a family newspaper. Big-name infidelity and the domination of Rush Limbaugh, the Great White Whale, over the Republican Party always trumped all else in the national media.

My initiation into blogging occurred a few days before the Democratic Presidential convention and it immediately raised a few eyebrows that it was nothing more than an ad hoc deliverance of liberal propaganda to my conservative friends. The word propaganda morphed into socialism among right-wingers who often struggle with their command of the language. To that extent, I fooled them. Call it what you will - but it wasn't ad hoc. The year also further isolated me from all of the moderns who spoke mostly with tweets when they should have been reading a good book.

One year being a nice round measure of time, I went back over my dog-eared notebooks for a refresher course on what had NOT yet happened when the blog was born. Without trying to arrange history in chronological order - my notes are too scattered - here are some items that I think should make trivial history drawn from the past 12 months:

• The forever accommodating and clownish Rep. Michele Bachmann, the court-jester Republican from Minnesota, monumentally declared that she would vote against the stimulus bill because "we are running out of rich people in this country." At the time, I could only wonder what was the absolute minimum of rich people that the country needed to survive.

• There was John McCain struggling for safe passage to the presidency (a matter of natural selection?) as the GOP's temporary pater familias accusing Democrats of "generational theft," this from the nominee of a party that still claims Abraham Lincoln as its soul in a clear case of identity theft..

• If you really wanted to feel teensy weensy small, you had only to heed Dr. Alan Bess, of the Carnegie Institution of Science, who told us there could be 100 billion planets in our galaxy. And we have all we can do to manage just one!

• This quote from the late John Kenneth Galbraith was somehow revived and would not have pleased the Alan Greenspans of our land: "If all the economists were laid end to end - it would be a good thing."

• It was not until September that we learned that an obscure Alaskan governor, Sarah Palin, might be useful in launching McCain into the White House with a wink and a lack of brain gloss about world affairs. On election day, I heartily thanked Barack Obama for protecting us from the travesty of a hockey mom a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. Why would a major - well sort of major - political party trade on such an unthinkable risk, stooping so low to conquer? And her sponsor, William Kristol, a wily front-and-back channel Neocon, took another hit when the New York Times dropped his column for erratic probity.

• The year also produced a galaxy of names with varying claims to a savaged honor system: Rod Blagojevich, Miss Tia, John Ensign, Bobby Jindal, Mark Sanford, Warner Mendenhall, John Edwards, Joe the Plumber and Wasilla. Jindal, by the way, came and went before I got a chance to really know him.

• George Bush remained the president until January, but by then, he had opted out of the photo-op. He was a reminder of Disraeli's complaint that the British Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, was "sauntering over the destinies of a nation and lounging away the glory of an empire."

• Gadgets called iPhones forced their way into my vocabulary, but I didn't write about them because I could never remember whether the "i" or the "P" was capitalized. Too often I confused the word with a Greek play by Euripides. On the other hand, the only communication that suffered still more the past year was the the slow death by strangulation of the nation's newspapers.

• Some things never changed the past year.Silvio Berlusconi still made light of his young girlfriends, a habit that cost him no more than 2 points in Italy's popularity polls, for which he declared proudly that Italians liked him "the way I am." Can you imagine how the same story would have played if it were an American president?

• One of the winners in the summer months of media attention to health care reform was Dick Cheney, who flew under he radar regarding his ghoulish performance on torture , leaving him apparently still at large.

• The final word on the year cames from George Bush, who boasted in the dismal end that he was happy with how it all turned out for him, explaining: "What matters to me is I didn't compromise my soul to be a popular guy." To which I would respond: "Sorry, George. It wouldn't have worked anyway."

Anyone for a second opinion?

HERE IS A quote headed straight to Bartlett's:

"Joe the plumber - and you can quote me - is a dumb ass. He should stick to plumbing".....................Meghan McCain

Joe the Plumber, or whatever

ENOUGH, ALREADY, of Joe the Plumber, a.k.a., Joe Wurzelbacher. the 15-minute mock hero of John McCain's failed campaign.  Joe Whatever is back on the political trail, this time showing up at anti-union rallies to oppose the legislatively challenged card-check plan that labor supports.  Joe's getting paid for his current tour by a group benignly named Americans for Prosperity and I don't have to guess which  side it is on.  As for Joe Whatever, it's a nice line of work for a guy who isn't a licensed plumber, a detail of  little consequence if one never gets down to the fine print.  In an age when people can become national sensations simply by doing extraordinarily odd things for a brief moment, Joe latched on (or did the McCain people create him from the telephone directory?) to a thematically inspired nom de guerre to deliver the common folks to the GOP.  It will be left to the historians to determine whether he or Sarah Palin - two of McCain's  pathetic first tier miracle workers  - would have served the candidate better if either had decided to turn down the offer.     

Shouldn't JTP leave the nest?

  HOPE IS is fading that Sarah Palin will give up on Joe the Plumber as her runningmate for the presidency in 2012.  She continued to invoke his name at the Republican Governors Conference as the other Republican governors, dark-suited and grim, appeared to react as though Mrs. O'Leary and her cow had just entered the room.   OK, Sarah, we've all had our fun and accept your notion that JTP (as he is now known) is the perfect positive symbol of pro-American, hardworking, small town achievement.  But Americans do have a short interest span, particularly during the football season,  and you might want to consider somebody else to talk about in widening your grasp of domestic and  foreign policy.   On the negative side, instead of regularly mentioning William Ayers in the same breath with Barack Obama these days, have you thought about adding Hermann Goering,  Savanarola or even Guy Fawkes, for starters?  It works for me. 

McCain's October surprise?

DEVELOPING UPDATE:    The New York Times and some other news outlets are now questioning the authenticity of  John McCain's October surprise at last night's debate: Joe the Plumber, aka Joe Wurselbacher,  aka a would-be small  businessman supposedly threatened by Barack Obama's tax proposals, aka the opening chapter in what someone near to me has already labeled Plungergate.    Here's the follow-up to  JTP's hardluck story, which McCain referenced 15 times by name:

JTP is a confirmed Republican and McCain supporter,  works for a  plumbing  business in Toledo, does not earn enough to be higher-taxed by the Obama plan (which actually would cut his tax since he is under the $250,000 cap) is unlicensed as a plumber himself and doesn't belong to the plumber's union, and has a $1,000 lien pending against him. It does raise questions about the man who said Obama tap-danced around a question  "almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr."  It's not the kind of report that the McCain people need back at their dimly-lit headquarters.  

If only some of this is true, you have to feel sorry for JTP.  Either he was recruited for a voluntary  hit job, or the McCain campaign vetted him with no more skill than it applied to Sarah Palin.  

Why not the Maytag repairman?

THE QUESTION du jour as I started my day was whether Joe the Plumber was skilled enough to plug the growing  number of holes in John McCain's foundering Ship of State.  The debate offered a classic example of how one can become an instant celebrity simply by having one's name mentioned 15 times by a presidential candidate (Mc Cain)  in the span of 90 minutes (plus five  times by McCain's opponent, Barack Obama).  JTP was quickly recruited for the morning talk shows to reassure the viewing public that national television does, indeed, report the critical news  that shapes our daily lives.  So now JTP will join other famous pop celebrities in the history books, including the Pizza Deliveryman, Mack the Knife and the Maytag Repairman, none of whom appeared on the TV  chat-arounds  as bona fide news sources.   Are you still with me?

But based on the early reviews, the reliance on an unknown plumber to rescue your campaign failed to impress  the focus groups, which overwhelmingly gave the debate to Obama.  In fairness, however, I  should caution you that McCain had a super observer in his corner. An enthusiastic Mitt Romney went so far to say that "it was a great night for John MccCain." Inasmuch as a Romney was swamped in the primaries I suspect he is still humbly serving out his time for saying some nasty things about Mac in the primaries.  

A final word on Joe the Plumber:  The plumbers union - the United Association - has already endorsed Obama.

McCain, who had earlier promised to give Obama a "whipping" in their final meeting, was tight-lipped tense with a locked sneer that outperformed Bush's smirk during Dubya's theatrical heyday.  Want to talk about the economy?  Great.  Let's do.  What about your friend Bill Ayers?  Oh, you mean the one who served on a board set  up by the super-rich Republican Annenberg Family.  Yeah, I was on the same board.  So what? Next.

Gergen, the political guru, described McCain's demeanor as "almost an exercise in anger management."

All of this occurred on the day that the stock market dropped more than 700 points at the same  time that the McCain campaign was shutting down its operations in  Maine and Wisconsin. 

At this late date in the campaign it would be fair to we ask whether the Maytag repairman,  so much more identifiable  in the public mind with a long history of service,  might not have been a better choice  to revive the angry  senator from Arizona?