Carlson: A one-man death panel for Vick

I MUST ALWAYS wonder about anybody who begins a comment by saying "I'm a Christian but..." as a rite of passage before launching into a brutal attack on someone else. It happens quite often these days to remove any doubt about one's faith before the awful zingers are flung. Not that I really care whether a person is a Christian or a Moghul. Please, just tell me what's coming next. Blessing people is not really my line of work.

Take, for example, the latest mini-confession by Tucker Carlson while subbing for Sean Hannity on Fox News. Carlson 's Ivy League look always makes him sound a lot more intelligent than he really is, Christian or not. He teed off on Michael Vick, the pro football quarterback who was sent to prison for a couple of years for his involvement in a dog-fighting ring. Vick also went into bankruptcy and was released by the Atlanta Falcons.

As a peace-loving dog-loving being, I can't think of any uglier treatment of animals than dog-fighting. Still, Vick's misbehavior was fully considered by a judiciary system that knocked him out of action for a long time before the Philadelphia Eagles hired him. Star? He will be a starting quarterback in the NFL Pro Bowl.

Obviously, the system decided that the punishment fit the crime. As for Carlson, you can't fool me with your bow ties and glib declarations of a certain faith. Execution? Repent, I say,. before you utter another hellish word.

Arshinkoff, Robart gang up on Coughlin

AS ANYBODY who has given no more than cursory attention to this blog could safely assume, outgoing State Sen. Kevin Coughlin, a conservative Republican, and I were seldom on the same page politically. Still, in the years that I've known him, I always found him to be accessible. articulate and willing to go the mat to defend his positions. So it was of particular interest to see a couple of longtime Republican opponents gang up on him in the Beacon Journal's front-page report on his exodus from the Ohio Senate.

The comment that shot from the page was issued by Cuyahoga Falls Mayor Don Robart, whose room and board at City Hall have gotten convenient long-term shelter from county GOP chairman Alex Arshinkoff. "He [Coughlin] is a very vindictive person He tried to hurt us...", the mayor opined.

Given the fact that his partner Arshinkoff has a long history of vindictiveness that was once aimed at one of Robart's top cabinet members, I do think that the mayor could have found a more plausible account of his displeasure with Coughlin. Alex has spent most of his career spreading ugly rumors about his opponents, even taking on a major Akron law firm - Roetzel and Andress - as being nothing more than a Democratic cell. The same is true of his whispering campaign against Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic. Or his harsh treatment of some of the workers at the Summit County Board of Elections. Don't' get me started.

And please, let's hear of no more boasts by the chairman that he led the county to sweeping victories in November, a Republican day in which Donald Duck could have been elected across the state.

Alas. In some cases, he was.

Gay casualties in war: A fact of death

TODAY'S NOD for mindless courage under fire goes to Elaine Donnelly, founder and president of the Center for Military Readiness. Her group has been in the front lines (Gettysburg formation) of the assault on Don't ask, don't tell. In a pep talk to her crowd after DADT was repealed by the Senate, she said:

"CMR will continue to support the troops, and our mission has always been to advocate high standards on a variety of issues, and that will not change."

To which I would humbly ask Ms. Donnelly: "And what 'standard' would you advocate for a gay soldier who gave his or her life in dutiful military service?"

Buz Lukens: when the cheering stopped

THE NEW YORK TIMES Sunday Magazine (Dec. 26) carried its annual Lives They Lived sketches of noteworthy persons who died in 2010. The brief bios carried many familiar names that included an ubiquitous congressman from southwest Ohio whose career will be best remembered by his moral recklessness that finally sent him off to federal prison for 30 months in the mid-1990s for bribery. But that was just the tip of the iceberg for Donald "Buz" Lukens, the Hollywood-handsome, right-wing Republican who freaked out young women in his Middletown district with his youthful crew-cut looks and engaging wit. He had, after all, been convicted earlier of a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl and there were reports that he tried to fondle a young woman elevator operator in Congress. With Lukens, where there was smoke one could usually find fire.

As a political writer at the time, I was always on alert for the next Lukens scandal. There were so many instances of his misbehavior, even for a pol of his stripe. He had generated a Life magazine story linking Gov. James Rhodes to the mob, but when I reported it in the Akron Beacon Journal he hustled Ohio newsmen together on the the Capitol steps to denounce me as a liar. However, a source had confided that Lukens had read the galley proofs before the article was published - which he finally admitted to me. Such sharing of texts was not common for a major magazine. There had to be more to the story.

On another occasion I spent some time in the Middletown area tracking down reports that he was flagging money from his campaign fund to a majorette. He later described it as "scholarship" money. But even a dentist who served as treasurer of the fund (in name only) was mystified by Lukens' relationship to the young woman.

For all of the talk, Lukens was irrepressible. Until he was caught, he had held all of the right cards because he had carefully chosen them to suit his purposes. Even his arrival in a small airport conference room for a press session carried Lukens' orchestrated patriotic fervor. When his aides struggled to place an American flag behind the lectern because the mast wedged against the ceiling, I asked one of them why it was necessary to delay the meeting with such stagecraft. The congressman, he told me , always brings his own flag and wants it to appear in photo-ops.

As writer Francis Wilkinson so keenly noted in the bio:

"Lukens' ideological allies abound. The former Lukens legislative assistant John Kasich is governor-elect of Ohio. The state legislator who defeated Lukens and represented the district is John Boehner, the next speaker of the House. And if Lukens could mingle with the incoming House majority, he'd discover a curious phenomenon: legislators positioned to his right. Lukens' conduct took its toll in personal dignity. But it didn't deny him a powerful legacy."

Buz would probably take a bow for the powerful legacy. But I doubt that a person of his repeated vile behavior would give a damn about such things as personal dignity. It doesn't

come with the territory.

Obama has a better month than the media doomsayers

AS THE NASTY political year winds down with an apparent soft landing, President Obama can claim to have something in common with Mark Twain. Responding to a report of his demise in the New York Journal, the iconic satirist declared: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

Anyone tracking Obama's bumpy career might very well have been carried away by insistent media reports that his tenure in the Oval Office was heading for extinction and that there was no chance for any of his first-tier projects to make it through an impenetrable Republican stone wall. So much for the national pundits, speculators and street corner doomsayers who wanted to be the first to report an administration in quicksand. The generic headlines and talk show experts often declared "DADT is dead", "Health care reforms will be shelved," and "Hopes fade for START nuclear treaty."

They were, of course, wrong. It is something that happened much too often in a media caught up in its own self-absorbed expertise in the split-second Information Age. Much too often.

Meanwhile, President Obama was rising from the purported ashes with a broad smile and a much higher batting average than any of his naysayers came close to predicting. Moreover, the polls were crediting him with rising in public esteem. One late CNN survey showed him to be comfortably ahead of congressional Republicans in his performance during the lame-duck session. His approval rating rose to 56 pct. against the GOP's 42 pct. At the same time a Public Policy poll in Florida reported hs was running ahead of all potential Republican presidential contenders - 14 pts. (52-38) against Sarah Palin.

Well, yes. Things can always change. But you might want to keep in mind how they change in, um, the Information Age.

Kasich: A holiday scolding by the Plain Dealer

ALTHOUGH HE'S not yet seated in the governor's chair, John Kasich already has raised the eyebrows of the editorial writers at the Plain Dealer, which you may recall, endorsed him over incumbent Ted Strickland. The PD decided that Kasich's appointment of of Ohio Inspector General Thomas P. Charles as state public safety director - despite "demonstrable" unspecified "pluses" - has "serious minuses, including family conflicts and a partisan-tinged history involving Charles' recent investigations" of Strickland's public safety officials.

To which we can only append a paraphrase of a former U.S. President: "Johnny, you're doing a heckuva job."

Risch:Stolen Humvees for nuclear arms treaty

SEASON'S GREETINGS to New York Times columnist Gail Collins for telling us of one conservative's unique foreign policy gambit. Her op-ed piece today was all about Sen. James Risch of Idaho. Until deep thinking Republicans come along, we don't hear much about Idaho other than reports that it has a lot of wolves roaming around, potatoes and a very good college football team that plays its home games in Boise on the world's only dark blue astroturf . It is supposed to be an imaginative color coordinated scheme to match the team's uniforms. (I confess to having a bit of trouble singling out the players on TV as they blend and vanish into the dark field.)

But back to Risch. He obviously has no use for the Russians. "They cheat. They are serial cheaters," he declared in his failed effort to amend the START nuclear arms treaty. It was all down hill for him after that. His amendment would block the pact until the Putin gang returned four Humvees to the U.S. that were grabbed by Russian soldiers during the Russia-Georgia war.

• Displaying photos of the monstrous vehicles being driven away, Risch snorted, "You can watch your property right here being towed away by the Russians! Back to Moscow!"

His indignant remarks were not a simple case of apples and oranges. They compared nuclear weapons with gas hogs as a reasonable trade. He might have at least sweetened the pot by demanding that the oil-rich Russians also give every American driver a gift card for 10 free gallons at the pump. Now, senator, about that blue astroturf...

Sen. McCain, the loser, adrift in his own universe

IF IT'S MONDAY, John McCain is against something. But I write this on Wednesday. No matter. John McCain is against something on Wednesday, too. Or Friday. Or whatever. Unlike Gen. MacArthur's old soldier, the Arizona senator isn't fading away. Not yet, anyway. He is even said to be angry at his old buddy, Joe Lieberman, for supporting the repeal of the don't ask, don't tell bill that resoundingly passed.

McCain's fury in the midst of measures that are being enacted over his protest, is beginning to worry his Republican friends. Has seething bitterness over his defeat by Barack Obama destroyed his equilibrium? Has his apparent hatred of Obama now surfaced to the extent that he is offering himself as an incoherent public figure, whether he is lashing out against the nuclear treaty with Russia or the don't ask, don't tell act? Or the so-called DREAM act that would have granted citizenship to the children who were born in America to illegal aliens. It mattered not to him that he was a sponsor of the legislation!

Regarding DADT, he scowled: "Today is a very sad day. There will be high-fives over all the liberal bastions of America," noting that cheers would rise from "elite schools that bar recruiters from campus" and the "salons of Georgetown." (Hell, we might as well include in the liberal bastions the wide majority of Americans who supported the repeal, right?

Despite his reckless comments, he has become a pathetic media star, the most favored guest on Sunday morning talk shows, which is usually followed by more coverage in the media of what he said. The national media's fondness for showcasing McCain over the other pols on both sides of the aisle is inexplicable unless they think they must engage viewers by exposing the bizarre side of public affairs journalism.

At 74, McCain is sadly adrift in the depths of his defeats. Isn't it time that the national TV outfits leave him alone so that he can leave all of us alone?

Hal(l)ey's comet takes a hit

HALEY BARBOUR comes across as the generic good ol' boy from yonder Mississippi. Radiating good humor and unthreatening southern charm, he's done quite well for himself as the former Republican national chairman and now the governor of Ole Miss. A couple of years ago, Summit County's Republicans hosted him with an outpouring of amity and praise when he spoke at the party's big finance dinner as the guest of chairman Alex Arshinkoff. Then, as now, there was talk that he was itching to run for president.

After this week's fallout from his rising political fortune, Barbour may want to reconsider. In an interview with the ultra-conservative Weekly Standard, Barbour defended the notorious White Citizens Council as peace-loving business folks who maintained law-and-order against the Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights movement of the '60s. Or as he put it:

"You heard of the Citizens Council? Up North they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."

Historians don't quite remember it as happening that way for the peace of mind of blacks. . Robert Mickey, a University of Michigan political scientist, told the Huffington Post that the Council's primary purpose was to oppose desegregation of schools by intimidating black parents who signed desegregation petitions. The Council even printed the names of signatories in the papers. You can guess what that was all about in the thriving plantation culture.

Time for damage control. Barbour issued a statement saying he didn't think the Councils were at all saintly and, in fact, asserted that their activities in the community were"totally indefensible, as is segregation."

But it was Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant with campaign experience in the south, who stepped forward to defend Barbour. With the usual political finesse, Ayres blithely assured us that Barbour's revisionist account of the White Citizens Council was a "tempest in a teapot."

Problem solved. Or maybe not.

Kasich to reporters: Drop dead

FOR A BRASSY politician who didn't quite claim vict0ry in November by acclamation (49-47) Gov.-elect John Kasich already shown us that there isn't that much that escapes his harsh opinions these days. From his disdain for public unions to guarding the names of applicants for state jobs, Kasich has hit the post-election ground with an autocratic agenda that somehow shouldn't surprise anybody who has followed his career.

His latest stroke sliced the air with an assault on reporters who inquire about things he doesn't think he should have to answer. Such raspy official nonsense occurred, for example, when he was asked whether a certain appointee might have a conflict of interest. Not a yes-or-no moment for Kasich. Instead, he declared such intrusions into one's personal life discourage good people from entering the government. That, of course, doesn't explain why candidates spend zillions of dollars on their campaigns to win elections or happily slide into peachy government positions because of their past lobbying efforts. Can we conclude that these folks aren't the picks of the litter?

Kasich complained to reporters that "I find myself tripping over the anthills on the way to the pyramids" - his version of political correctness and transparency defeating his good efforts.".

I suspect that pyramids could become a growth industry in Ohio.

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