LaRose/Celeste civility crusade faces huge odds

Civility in  politics.  That's the laudable  goal of  two men who have engaged the subject with earnest hopes of  ending  the toxic trash talk by some politicians  and their dobermans within hearing range.

State Sen. Frank LaRose, the Copley Twp. Republican ,  and Ted Celeste, a Democrat who once served in the Ohio legislature, recently delivered  their ongoing bipartisan message to Akron Roundtable to lay out their vision of a gentler political class.

While commending them, I think the idea has as much chance of working in the real world as Rush Limbaugh confessing that he's a closet socialist.

Having worked the trenches of  political combat for more years than I care to remember, I bring to the witness stand no evidence that political discourse is anywhere near  the Sunday pulpit.  I can also report that it's  even worse in the back rooms and there's not a damn (Sorry!) thing anybody can do about it.  The stakes are too high, the partisan grievances too aflame. And since a black man entered the White House,  the notion that all men are created equal is too besieged to survive pervasive racism in the souls of some combatants who can't contain their primitive biases. I should add from all of that there are too few profiles in courage from wannabe achievers .

Has it ever been different?  Not really.  Should we  remind ourselves that in May 1856 Sen. Charles Sumner, Massachusetts Republican who opposed slavery, was savagely  caned on the Senate floor by Rep. Preston Brooks,  a  South Carolina  Democrat.

A half-century earlier in 1804, Aaron Burr fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel (wouldn't TV have loved that one today?) In Fiorello LaGuardia's day, it was not uncommon to see his enemies quoted in the press assailing him as a "little Wop".   And much later, didn't Rep. Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican, erupt with a
"You lie!" as President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress?

Or how about Rep. Steve King's  reference to  Latino children with calves as  big as cantaloupes swollen with smuggled drugs.  Or Limbaugh calling a young woman a "Slut" because he knew he could.  Damn right he did.

Even as the congressional denizens refer to each other as "the distinguished senator  from...."  they  are already in gear to consign the colleague to hell.

You could fill a book.  And fill another book with  the incivility of politics that has become more than empty lore.

Now, up in Michigan,  the Republican national committeeman, Dave Agema, a nasty  human being to put it kindly,   continues to stir up his GOP nest with repeated sliming   of gays and Muslims, accusing gays of being "filthy" and the critics of Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson's anti-gay remarks "LBGT Gestapo speech police."

Michigan's GOP National Committeeman said that?  

If LaRose/Celeste really want to dig into the problem with a living  target,  do you think they should invite Agema to lunch?  A very long lunch.

Let's have a moment of silence for poor Iowa

WHAT MUST LIFE be like in Iowa to wake up each morning, turn on the radio and be told that Michele is back in town. Michele Bachmann, that is, the Minnesota congresswoman who is doing her part to move the Hawkeye state closer to a theocracy that she defines as freedom and liberty and such. Most recently, she again took on Planned Parenthood, now effortlessly describing it as the "LensCrafters of big abortions."

We can't be sure how that will go over with the execs at LensCrafters and whether they would rather that Michele drop her metaphors on a rival company. You can fairly ask why she chose an eyeglass company over, say, the "General Motors of big abortions" or the New York Yankees. Now we're beginning to make a little sense. Besides, what are big abortions, anyway?'

Poor Iowa, where there are some very nice people who don't need all of this silliness for the many months leading to the Republican presidential caucuses. They already have Rep. Steve King, whose dumb utterances arrive daily like the bong-bong of a grandfather clock. He will be remembered many decades from now as the fellow who said that if the government had followed his advice to abolish the IRS, one of its buildings wouldn't have been standing in February 2010 to tempt a crazed pilot to crash into it.

Nothing to be gained by mentioning that Mike Huckabee is working on another tent revival to carry him through the caucuses now that he has explained that he was misunderstood when he cast president Obama as a Mau Mau. Wanna bet that there won't be flyers tucked under automobile wipers on caucus day repeating Huckabee's original idea?

And it has to get worse before it has any hope of getting better. Donald Trump is scheduled to speak to a Republican Lincoln (!) Day dinner in Iowa in June. Will the thrice-married developer be inclined to speak on family values? Or will he still not have exhausted his mad crusade to expose Obama as, what? A darkly tanned Siberian?

Again, poor Iowa. The state deserves something better - and there's no chance that it will get it.

Is there no end to Steve King's loony babbling?

WHEN IT COMES to freaky ongoing babble, Iowa Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King is the male counterpart of Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota. Nothing that he has said has made much sense during the Obama years since the Washington media hand-picked him for the Loony- of-the-Month Club. Yep, he's the same guy who referred to torture of iraqi prisoners as nothing more than"hazing"; that illegal immigrants are "stray cats" who end up of on people's porches to be fed; who persists in trash talk against President Obama. As for the health care reform law, he dismissed it as a "malignancy." (His constituents in rural Iowa must share such rubbish from a guy who once ran a construction company.) He blames Obamacare on "leftists" who "can't help themselves" because it's "in their DNA" to be predisposed to government aid.

Get ready for an outpouring of such nonsense, not only from King but also from many of his GOP brethren who share his views despite the fact that the new law is gaining public support. A new TV commercial featuring Mike Huckabee slamming the measure has now appeared. More to come. It is political grandstanding at its worst. But, who can blame a party that is putting its greatest efforts into playing to the Tea Partyers in the gallery with the IOUs from the November election?

This was the week that still is

THE WEEK has been anything but dull, what with the changing of the guard in the House of Representatives and a new crop of freshman peacocks saying how they intend to end Barack Obama's career in 2012. Although their optimism may be premature as polls show public support for Obama growing (13 pts. higher than Reagan's at mid-term) you can't blame the Republicans for wanting to stake out a claim on the White House before the public catches on to their odd ways.

For awhile the GOP narrative will be dominated by condemning job-killing ObamaCare, as some of the New Age philosophers warn us. There will be a lot of talk of death panels and apocalyptic your-grandmother- will-die-sooner end-of-days stuff, the sort of thing that is inspired by having millions more people covered by health insurance. Rep. Steve King, the rural Iowa Republican, even added the insightful thought that ObamaCare, in addition to being unconstitutional, also leads to dead infants turning up in trash cans. A word of caution: You can email King's office that he is one of the more prominent morons on Capitol Hill, but it will only support his contention that evil is rampant in the land.

The part I really enjoyed this week of pageantry was the reading of a laundered Constitution on the House floor that expurgated language reminding folks that it was hardly a perfect document when it came to assessing the value of blacks. The drama rose quickly, however, as a section was being read on the requirement that a person must be native- born to be eligible for the presidency.

That lit a fuse. A woman birther in the gallery shouted "Except Obama, except Obama! Help us, Jesus." Until that happens she may may have to first check with her lawyer, having been escorted from the gallery by police.

A couple of Republican congressmen, one being Pete Sessions of Texas, attended a fund-raiser instead of being sworn in. His cavalier attitude toward the Constitution caused a stir in the House, but was finally resolved somehow, as Sessions, one of the GOP's leading fund raisers, knew it would be.

All in all, the faithfully pledged public- spirited unveiling of the new congress recalled something that Al Capone once said, when his integrity was questioned: "Public service is my motto."

And the earth may very well be flat

VACANT MINDS do have something to offer to others on drab, overcast days. They have a way of easing the load of the calamitous issues bearing down on the world. I find that's particularly true of Steve King, the daffy Iowa Republican congressman whose quotable quotes form a chaotic mosaic of a modern Tower of Babble. Funny, really. His latest offering widens the playing field for America's cult of socialist-watchers with a new dimension of right-wing gibberish. Rep. King warns that same-sex marriage is a "purely socialist idea". Conservative adulterers beware. You're next.

Jim Traficant, the tufted former Ohio Democratic congressman is a free man again and I would think that it should be worrisome to the quotable crackpots in our midst. No sooner did Traficant start showing up in the national media after a 7-year prison term for public corruption than he started dropping massive boulders into Capitol Hill's downspouts, one of which referred to Congress as a "big whorehouse" while apologizing to hookers for the unseemly reference to their line of work. On the stimulus package, he advised President Obama to "stimulate this" and said he wanted to kick the IRS in the crotch. He is obviously mad as hell, spending some of his time at Tea Parties. Democrats should be worried, too. He says he may run for office again, and the reports from the Youngstown area indicate he has an overwhelming following there. How will the Dems manage to live with that?

No wrapup of loony moments can ignore Sarah Palin, who was on a handsomely underwritten visit in Hong Kong, slamming the American government's way of doing business these days to a world conference of well-heeled investors. She wanted them to know that she was delivering the honest-to-God goods from "Main Street USA" - her latest geographical point of departure now that it has been proven that you can't see Russia from her front porch. She seems to be preparing more and more for a third-party presidential candidacy. We can hope.

GOP: The family fight grows louder

THE GOP's Doomsday Clock moved ahead a couple of minutes this week as internecine warfare broke out in force between the defenders of the party faith and, well...the defenders of the party faith.  I mean, when the party's social conservatives start attacking true believing conservatives like Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia , you know that you are in for advancing the end of days.

It recalled the days of medieval battles between the Guelphs, who supported the papacy, and the Ghibellines who supported the the Holy Roman Empire, which historians have keenly noted wasn't at all holy, Roman or an empire.  You have to be  just as careful today in assuming too much about names.  The current trouble began when Cantor and John McCain decided  it would be a healthy  sign of progress to form a new group to  save their benumbed post-Whig Party, daringly calling it the National Council for a New America.  

There was really nothing abhorrent about the effort.  People are forever creating new groups with patriotic forward-looking titles to replace similar patriotic forward-looking groups  that somehow never worked.  POLITICO.com quoted McCain's description of the council's goals as an effort to attract moderates and "like-minded Democrats" to a series of public forums around the country.  You may recall that McCain regularly challenged Barack Obama during the past campaign to join him in a series of town hall forums throughout the land. I suspect that his failure to lure Obama into these stuffy compact halls has not discouraged the Arizona senator from his obsession to talk up close to people, particularly those who voted last November.

But it didn't take the party's every-present social conservatives very long to slam Cantor and McCain as abandoning such golden oldies as same-sex marriage,  immigration and abortion.

POLITICO drew this remark from Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who sneered: "The moderates have been saying the same thing all these years and now they're just seeing a renewed opportunity to push their  ideas," which he abhors.

Others jumped into the fray, including the Family Research Council, which also rose to protect "family values" and reminded  Cantor/McCain that Mike Huckabee (hope I spelled that right) was creating "such excitement in the conservative base" while the Republican establishment doesn't draw a crowd.

It was at this point that our old buddy from Ohio, Ken Blackwell, who is quite active in Planet Family Values despite his blistering defeat as a gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, complained to POLITICO  that the Cantor/McCain group does not "reflect a basic reality".   He would know about such realities.

Finally, Rush Limbaugh put his authoritative imprimatur on the anti-National Council for a New America crowd.  He modestly called the council a "scam."

With that, I'm calling upon the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,  which measures approaching catastrophic destruction of the globe with its Doomsday Clock, to move the GOP an additional minute or two toward its own denise.    

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GOP morphing into cult

DEAR REPUBLICANS (wherever you are):

If I may use the vernacular, your party has gone to hell.

Repugnant evidence is growing each day that  the Grand Old Party has become a cult.  It now excludes anybody who is slightly to the left of Planet Limbaugh and therefore has shrunk beyond recognition unless you are an expert in atomic imaging.      The gatekeepers for the cult have placed a premium on losing. 

The events in just the  last few days have demonstrated that the cult is so deeply intrenched in ideological cleansing that it may soon require all true-believing  members to perform  the "loyalty dance"  so popular back in the days of Mao.  

Check these:

• THE REPUBLICAN  chairman of Kent County, Mich. (Grand Rapids) has canceled a talk at a party fund-raiser by Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman.  He's too moderate, the chairman said. My God!  The Republican governor of Utah, a proud red state, too moderate? 
• FOX NETWORK refused to air President Obama's Wednesday night news conference - the only network to lower the curtain -  with the apparent decision to not report so that nobody can decide. Instead the network programmed something called "Lie to Me."(I think Fox should rely more on John Stewart to upgrade its limp attempt for clever humor. )  
• RUSHBO HAS has urged John McCain to become a Democrat, too, and take his daughter with him.  
• SEN. OLYMPIA SNOWE,  Maine Republican, was placed on the right-wing's enemies list after an op-ed piece in the New Y0rk Times that questioned the GOP's exclusivity that drove out Sen. Arlen specter.
• REPUBLICAN representatives leading the fight  against the hate-crimes bill (which passed, despite their rants), declared it was a transparent attempt to protect homosexuals. Sample:  Rep. Steve King, the crackpot Iowa Republican, said of hate crimes, "I, Mr. Speaker,oppose and I defy the logic of the people that would advocate for such legislation the very idea we could divine what goes on in the heads of people when they commit crimes".  (I do have a clue to what isn't going on in King's mind.)
• GREG MUELLER,  a high-ranking Republican consultant, proposes that the party can regain its bearing by dusting  off Newt Gingrich's old Contract with America, and Newt couldn't agree more wherever he goes these days, which is usually Fox News.  
• FINALLY, FOR this hour at least, there's this word from the Cincinnati Enquirer about the Hamilton County Republican chairman, Alex Triantafilou, who shamlessly posted two photos on his blog in reaction to Specter's action.  One was a photo of a bald Specter during his chemotherapy; the other of a bald Dr. Evil from the "Austin Powers" movies.

 Believe me, folks, I don't these things up.  Jonestown next for GOP strays?