Out of the mouths of knaves

ADD THESE POINTS OF interest in your entertainment guide for your visit to Capitol Hill:

Meet Andy Harris, the conservative Maryland anesthesiologist, who will be going to Congress as a big winner with an anti-Obamacare campaign. At a freshman orientation meeting, he declared his confusion over why his federal health care benefits didn't kick in immediately after he was sworn-in in January instead of having him wait until February. Well, it is what it is, Doc. Maybe all of your sleep-inducing has had an effect on you, too.

Meet Sen. John Ensign, Nevada Republican, another harsh opponent of Obamacare, who accepted without protest a $960,000 earmarked grant to the University of Nevada for a primary care residency program. Ensign has opposed earmarks, too.

Meet Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose state of Kentucky has received nearly $1 million in earmarks. He now says he supports a moratorium on ....um...earmarks.

Finally, meet conservative Rep. Darrell Issa, a fun guy from California and the wealthiest congressman in the corps, who went on Rush Limbaugh's show and denounced President Obama "as one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times." When he was challenged later to put up or shut up - Rep. Dennis Kucinich was among those who joined the assault on him - Issa meekly recanted on CNN with regrets about his fumble in his own (Limbaugh's) end zone. "If I had to do it over again, I'd have parsed my words a little more carefully," he said.

"Do I think the president is personally corrupt? No. I should never have implied that or created that in a quick statement on a radio call-in."

Strange things are said with so much adrenalin flowing in the Republican ranks these days.

Nevada Governor: No sex in 15 years!

SHOULD WE FEEL a tad sorry for Jim Gibbons, the 65-year-old Republican governor of Nevada who is relying on his preexisting condition as a defense against alleged sexual assault involving a Las Vegas cocktail waitress? Gibbons insisted in a deposition that he hasn't had sex for 15 years. He apparently assumes that medical science and health insurance companies will take note of his self-imposed abstinence as "living proof that you can survive without sex for that long." Gibbons. who is going through a divorce while running for reelection , is accused of groping a lady friend after hours of drinking at a restaurant . He said he was merely trying to help her get into the car. But nothing seems to be working for him these days. The poor guy has a 10 pct. approval rating by Nevada voters.

Nevada? Isn't that the state represented by Republican Sen. John Ensign, who has confessed to an affair with a campaign staffer? And we might as well add: both of these guys are preachy family values pols. But Gibbons is a remarkable quick-study. After he was accused of sexual assault, he asserted: "...I learned an important lesson, never to offer a helping hand to anybody ever again." From now on, Jim, just open the car door, and get out of the way.

The NFL may call offsides on Rush

MIDWEEK MADNESS:

THE RESPONSE to Rush Limbaugh's bid to become a co-owner of the NFL's pathetic St. Louis Rams has been largely negative so far. Surprise, surprise. The owner of the Baltimore Colts says he doesn't want to play this hand. The NFL's Players Association as well as Commissioner Roger Goodell believe the potential arrival of race-baiting Limbaugh into the muscular world of pro football would hardly be a salutary presence in a league where three-fourths of the players are African-Americans.

Race-baiting? He lost his job an ESPN's Sunday night football after he accused sportswriters of being uncritical of the Philadelphia Eagles' Donovan McNabb because they cozy up to black quarterbacks. He also likened pro football to a contest between "Bloods and Crips," notorious street gangs, without guns. It's even been more obvious since Barack Obama became president. Limbaugh now projects a vision of ObamaWorld, as he calls it, to a daily routine of violent black kids beating up white kids. As he runs into the negatives of his latest dream, Limbaugh should be reminded of the words from Jeremiah: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap". I'm a long way from being a Biblical scholar, but somehow those words ring true to me.

Why am I so amused by the chutzpah of adulterous, sin-hating guys like Republican Sen. John Ensign who are now out to save the Republic from the monstrous fate of a health reform bill? Ensign is the Nevada once-religiously clean political star who paid off his mistress's husband (his former chief of staff) with $97,000 in "gifts" after it was discovered that he had been enjoying a jolly good time in bed with the chief's wife for months. Now that the transaction is complete, an apparently unrepentant and rehabbed Ensign is back on TV hammering the health bill. Can anybody tell me why we should believe him? (By the way, Ensign's lawyer says the gifts were legal because they were within the limits of tax rules. Problem solved.)

Blame me for being a broken record but I admit that the Orly Taitz saga is so fascinating that I can't walk away from it. The latest twist for this Queen of the Birthers is that she says she will refuse to pay a $20,000 fine by a Federal judge who accused her of misbehavior in her many lawsuits challenging President Obama's birthplace. She described Judge Clay Land to TV's Joy Behar as "corrupt and delusional." When a reporter asked her about whether she intended to pay up, she responded:. "You must be kidding."

Careful there, Orly. I've never known judges to kid around in their decisions. In your own deluded trot, you may have taken a step over the cliff.

UPDATE: Rush has been cut from the practice squad by a team of bidders for the Rams. They concluded that he would only "complicate" the deal to buy the team. He's said to be angrier than hell, and you can expect a torrent of invective from him on this issue. He'll have to settle for a seat in the end zone. Maybe he will organize his own league with only white players from Alaska and his idol Sarah regressing to her days as a cheerleader.

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."

A Sanford Chronicle

Late word from Alfred Lord Venison:

Mark Sanford has 'fessed up as a cheat

a born-again who was not too discreet!

He was a Republican star

Like Ensign, primed to go far

Soon, only Sarah will be left to compete.