From mayoral to presidential discourse, a lot of HUHS?

The story lines in this season's political discourse have been stranger than normal for a bunch of would-be achievers at the local and national forums.  For starters, the seismic effect on the Akron mayor's race by Don Plusquellic's  volatile departure after 28 years has dug deeply into the viscera of not only his opponents but also his supporters.

Seismic?  Three Democratic  mayors  in a blink? Hardly time to change all of the official stationary at City Hall to bear the name of Jeff Fusco, Democratic county chairman until a moment ago who stepped aside for county Councilwoman Sandra Kurt.       At that he will only serve out his battleground commission until another mayor is elected in November, doubtless the survivor of the Democratic primary.

Among the odder  rollups to the mayoral filing deadline was veteran State Sen. Tom
Sawyer, once Akron  mayor himself 30 years ago.  He' told the Beacon Journal that his filing of petitions didn't mean, as he approaches 70,  he would actually run for the office.   (At that moment, a reporter should have done the routine follow-up by asking what the hell did that mean?  ) He now says he wants to be part of the "conversation" as the "grownup".

Shift the discussion  to Jeb Bush, who is trying to set a record for fund-raising by an unannounced presidential  candidate.  He was on TV the other day saying he's not campaigning for prez.  At what point, it's fair to ask, will he borrow a term from his brother by declaring "Mission Accomplished"?

But we did jot down for historical purpose the presidential  insight  added ay another candidate, Lindsey Graham.  Since he's a confirmed bachelor, he was asked about the rare moment in presidential history when there would be no First Lady.

Easy to fix, Graham breezily allowed, with his sister and a lot of friends posted on a rotating basis to serve as First Women.

I didn't make any of this up.




.

Lindsey firmly trapped in a bizarro world

Once upon a time when political dissent was only expressed on Capitol Hill by rationally nasty opponents,  we labeled such flareups as high-tempered loyal opposition.  It's different today.  Much different.  There  is a loud and visible gang of elected congressmen who wake up each morning vowing to hate President Obama rather than disagree with him.  It is seeded in the reality that Obama is a black man who has twice defeated politely acceptable Republican candidates that were fully expected to win.  How could this occur in the  white guy's America?  Only people who do the math can offer a persuasive explanation.  That means that if you cannot  defeat Obama on Election Days, you commit yourself to destroying his legacy for generations to come.

So the Masters of Delusion  of the Republican Party remain on the loose on Capitol Hill, just as they were throughout Obama's first term, preparing always for their next visit to Fox News.  And today we have moved Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator and whiner-in-chief,  to the head of that group. His clash with the Milwaukee Chief of Police Edward Flynn at a Senate committee hearing on gun control said little about loyal opposition and quite a bit that he is  becoming more bizarro every day.

Poor, Lindsey.  With the Tea Party and sociopaths on his back, he is left with few options if he intends to win his next election in South Carolina.  Profiles in courage these days are not the stuff of job security in his conservative state.

Hence, Lindsey has described Hillary Clinton as a murderer.  He is adamant against any form of gun control.  His inquisitional  attack on the police chief, which has been filmed-clipped over and over on TV,  was based on his fear that with cutbacks in police budgets, there will be fewer cops on the street to protect folks deprived of their guns.  Speaking from the experience of  law enforcement, the chief riddled Lindsey, not with bullets, but with the everyday knowledge of an officer's life in the trenches.

It got noisy.  But Obama-hate works its ways into all of the president's initiatves from the Masters of Delusion. So may I repeat:  Bizarro!

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.

Today's GOP: a group of leaderless old white guys

The Obama Inaugural festivities are now over and the reviews are in.  While many national pundits  parse every sentence in the president's rousing speech, one thing is certain:  For the grim Republicans and their fellow-snivelers, there is no joy in Mudville.  The Grand Old Party  is neither grand nor a party.  It is rather a chaotic collection of old white guys in vain search of a leader.    Twice defeated by an African-American Democrat  - the latest by  5 million votes! - who has deftly connected with a new generation of voters,  woebegone Republicans have only a beleaguered John Boehner to try to put his House in order in a cave teeming with Tea Partyers.  

Still, there is no evidence that Obama's opponents have learned anything  as they whimper that the "foxy"  Obama  must come out of the chicken coop to meet them halfway in solving the nation's problems.  Of all things, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is demanding compromise - a word that collides with his notorious  earlier mission for his routed party after Obama's first victory:

"The single most important  thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president"

The quote even made page 190 of the Mann-Ornstein best- seller, It's Even Worse than It Looks.  And that was published before  the 2012 election. Can anyone now guess what Mitch's second most important thing is?

Their  post-inaugural chorus was filled out by many of the usual tattered suspects complaining about the usual irritants that guaranteed them a shot at the usual TV cameras.  Sens. McCain and Graham, a couple of tiresome cronies  from past debacles, expressed their displeasure, to name a few.  And Wayne LaPierre, the NRA megaphone, pathetic as he is, isn't going to let anybody forget that tyrannical government is at the doorstep and you can only be saved by even arming department store mannequins.   Fox News, Rush Limbaugh  and the Tea Partyers were heaped among the vanquished.

These folks will never change.   Their work is too profitable. And as  Tennessee Ernie Ford used to sing: They owe their soul to the company store.

They could only deal in playground dares as Obama reeled off his agenda that was immediately described as liberal but dealt with ideas and programs that a majority of Americans support. It's now OK to mention liberalism in polite circles. And about time! 

There was another aspect of the Inaugural that was lost in the excitement:  Mitt Romney's absence from the historic  event.  Few people asked, and most couldn't care less.  Where  was he? We learned that he was at home in California.

Watching the parade as a broadly-grinning Obama waved and Joe Biden sprinted here and there,  I tried to imagine what the scene would have been if Romney and Paul Ryan had won.  It would have been a dreadful setback for a nation whose people would have been  so well ahead of its new team: a presidential  candidate of whom his son asserted never wanted  the job anyway, and a vice president who is a disciple of Ayn Rand. Neither Mitt nor his Tonto had much to say about the dramatic change underway in America because they didn't recognize it.

 To the vanquished go the snivels. And why not?  It's the only thing that seems to make the losers happy these days.

Graham and McCain: The red, white and blue guys

And so we have another red, white and blue moment in the postbellum world of
Republican politicians - a couple of old white  guys from red states taking out their GOP election blues on UN Ambassador Susan Rice and President Obama.  The woman at the left is Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire (these days Republicans are finding it prudent to have a woman in their photo-ops. It's a start, America. )

So McCain and Graham heigh-hoed  to the TV cameras to angrily revive the McConnell Mambo  in which Sen. Mitch McConnell pledged within nanoseconds of Obama's first election that he would do  everything possible to make damn sure that Obama would be a one-term president.  It was one of the few times that a Republican could be accused of thinking ahead.

Oh, the mambo?  You might recall that in West Side Story there was the wild scene in which the mambo was vigorously expressed with shouts and harsh fingerpointing.

Now we witness McCain, still  in a sulk over his own defeat by Obama in 2008, slamming Susan
 Rice as the potential presidential  nominee for secretary of state.  "She's not qualified!'' growled McCain, growing more erratic by the day.  "I don't trust her!" screeched Graham, McCain's buddy in all of those tours in Iraq when when they were still committed to proving the existence of weapons of mass destruction.  Their tour-group included a hawkish third senator, Zelig Joe Lieberman  who is finally leaving town in January.  One out of three is still better than none out of three.

Susan Rice is being accused of messing up the facts in the ongoing probe of the Benghazi bombing, scripted for her by the CIA since she had no connection to any of it.  The Washington Post's fact-checker gave the McCain-Graham hostility  to Rice two Pinocchios for "mischaracterization" in the case.  The two guys still haven't full explained how they so were charmed by  Condoleezza Rice,  who didn't deliver the goods in the lead-up to 9/ll.  They never will.

But Obama brought his gauntlet this time:  "If Senator McCain and Senator  Graham want to go after somebody, they should go after me," Obama asserted at his own news conference.  It was obvious from his tone that the nice guy was no longer at the podium.

Life challenges on the white-guy track

There's been a lot of attention  given to white guys , the pejorative term for white males,  during this election season.  That's because the polls once again showed white guys strongly favoring Mitt Romney, a self-iconic success story,  over President Obama.  Political thinkers, sociologists and the producers of Romney lapel buttons have all checked into the long-running phenomenon of why white guys prefer Republicans.

Still unsatisfied with the GOP quarry, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina went so far as to complain that "We're not generating enough angry  white guys to stay in business for the long term."  What he fears as a generic white Southern Republican is that minorities will become the majorities in the U.S.over the next decade and where will that leave the white guy party?  Well, where?

A number of theories are around.  The Economist recently reported a paper published in Psychological Science that suggests that muscles have something to do with the political profile of white guys.  Researchers Michael Petersen  (University of Aarthus in Denmark) and Daniel Sznycer (University of California, Santa Barbara) asked their subjects whether  resources should be redistributed to the poor.  Musculature identified those who opposed such redistribution.

The scholars didn't say so, but it does seem that one clue to the white guys'  preference for Mitt Romney could be their  desperate  remedy for erectile dysfunction against groups of rivals.

It comes down to fear of losing the dominance that only Republicans can offer in their campaign bombast about success in a rapidly changing marketplace.    Will, for example, the white guys'  traditional cookout role of grilling steaks  be diluted by pushy females who escape from the kitchen?  Or as Executive Chef Elisabeth Karmel asks: Is the grill the last bastion of masculinity?

As one who grew up in a family with many cousins of Republican toughs with Popeye arms,  I can say that yes, there is anger  and resentment over minorities and women's roles  that have been coming on for decades.  A college professor once complained to me that female professors were  getting too sassy around him.  And a former boss didn't know how he could survive  after his company had placed a woman executive above him.

Stricken by such thoughts of servitude to The Others, some fearful white guys still rely on holstered sidearms, barbells and hairy chests to prove they are not sissies.  How else can they disguise their resentfulness and insecurity over the threats to their masculinity?  To them, seeking refuge in the brave old world of Republicanism would at least give them a temporary  safety net.

America's new era of enlightenment

IT WASN'T until New York Jets kicker Nick Folk missed his third field goal against the Browns on Sunday that I suspected Sen. John McCain of being a Cleveland fan. McCain has acquired such a reputation of changing his mind on issues that some discourteous reporters have now accused him of moving the goal posts when cornered with questions about his contradictory positions. Even his wife Cindy is now in the habit of doing it. She, first endorsed the repeal of don't ask, don't tell, and then joined hubby in opposing it.

To recap, McCain first held out against the DADT repeal until he heard from a commission that had been created to study the effects on the military. When word got out that it would support ending such restrictions, McCain complained on Meet the Press Sunday (Does he have a contract as a permanent guest?) that the commission didn't go far enough, so he is demanding further studies until the commission gets it right. The goal posts were moved into the hotdog concession.

I'm trying to acclimate myself to the boldly declared arrival of the breast-plated Republicans in January, although it is apparent that some have already arrived. There is hubris everywhere in the greatest upheaval in proprietary claims since the the Indian Removal Act against the Cherokees in 1830.

In Ohio, the Senate president, Republican Bill Harris, has already vowed to block any appointments to the Ohio Casino Control Commission by departing Gov. Ted Strickland. He told the Plain Dealer: "If they don't resign, then we'll take action." On the other hand, Gov.-elect John Kasich is said to have mixed emotions about gambling and thinks it would be prudent to study it more. Further study? How uncharacteristic of him!

The stakes are much higher at the national level, where there will likely be still greater resistance to Administration policies .South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, has become so forcefully bold in the party's winner circle that he wants to bomb Iran. For a time, I thought he and his fellow Republican in the Senate., Tea Party hero Jim DeMint, were leaning toward bombing Ft. Sumter. But if memory serves, that's already been tried to no one's benefit.

Other changes are expected to elevate Rep. John Shimkus, Illinois Republican , to a commanding chair on environmental policy. Shimkus is the fellow who denies global warming with the rationale that only God can destroy the earth. Corporate lobbyists are delirious that we may have staved off Obama's socialism and will no longer have to apologize for Wall Street bonuses. No one is more delirious than Dick Armey, the former Texas congressman, who is credited with being the chaperone of Tea Partiers into seats of power with his lobbying operation called FreedomWorks. Not being a shy person, he invited a number of the new congressmen to a meeting where he explained to the neophytes how the system works.

Be prepared to witness the new era of enlightenment.

Change the 14th Amendment? Just another scam

IN CASE YOU HAVE been trying to dodge the thunderbolts from Fox and other Olympian gods, there's one quaking burst that you can discount as an appetite killer. It's the ridiculous effort by some congressmen and their allies who should know better (but seldom do these days) to rewrite the 14th Amendment guaranteeing birthrights. Indeed, it's a scam by Republicans planning a new Gingrich-type Contract with America after they sweep the November elections.

In this instance, the dirty work is being done by a veteran team of "mainstream" GOP plaintiffs that includes Sens. McCain (will he ever get over his humiliating defeat in 2008?) and his over-the-shoulder buddy, Lindsey Graham, as well as Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, a pathetic soul who will go down in history with far less grandeur than Colonel Sanders' fried chicken.

For good reason, none of them is talking about the geological time frame for an amendment. First, as these three amigos are saying they must have hearings, and we all know how those things go. Then it must pass both houses with a two-thirds vote, which in these times would

be akin to pushing the Queen Mary up Mt. Everest.

Then the proposed amendment would have to work its way through state legislatures for

approval while the locals are busy trying to figure out how to deal with such minor distractions as budgetary holes.

Although the Supreme Court once ruled that all of this nonsense must be completed within a "reasonable time", anybody want to define reasonable?

Folks, fools are playing us for fools. The move is aimed strictly at you-know-who with various shades of skin color other than pasty white. (Not even Boehner favors that color.) But I would bet my office computer and treasured old Steelers towel that we will have a Hispanic president long before this ploy reaches the GOP's promised land.

Jim Duh-Mint, back to the pulpit

While Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is under attack from the conservative Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), accusing him of being a closet gay, Graham's Republican colleague in the Senate, Jim DeMint, shown at right, is busying himself defending the tea party movement as being, blessed be, a "spiritual revival". DeMint, who is known for saying a lot of silly things, (He predicted a year ago that the health care reform bill would fail and would be President Obama's "Waterloo"), now opines that government is failing because it has "turned its back on God." Hear him out:

"I think some have been drawn in over the years to a dependence relationship with government and as the Bible says, you can't have two masters and I think as people pull back that they look more to God. It's no coincidence that socialist Europe is post-Christian because the bigger the government gets the smaller God gets and vice-versa. The bigger God gets the smaller people want their their government because they're yearning for freedom."Apart from the non-sequitur bit about freedom, might somebody remind DeMint that when the French revolted to rid themselves of oppressive royalty to, um, gain their freedom. they also buried religion, too, sending many clerics to the guillotine. It had nothing to do with socialism and much to do about putting food on the table.

But here I go again, preaching secularly to a South Carolina politician. I don't have a chance.

Hail to loony...um...linguistics!

TODAY I AM starting an occasional posting in a series with the acronym GALL:  Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy, awarded to a dump on incoherence by people you'd think would know better. It will be a steep uphill climb from George Bush's historic non sequiturs (which we kinda sadistically miss) but, as they say,  you have to start somewhere.  So today's groundbreaking award goes to Sen . Lindsey Graham, one of the noisiest opponents of the President's stimulus bill.  Asked by Wolf Blitzer whether he would continue to attack the spending in the bill and not accept  money for his impoverished state of South Carolina,   Graham pearlized this response: 

"I think that, yes, from my point of view, I ---you don't want to be crazy here.  I mean, there's going to be money on the table that will help my state,  but I've got a job to do up here, and that is to try to help people and not damn the next generation."  

The joy of miserable statecraft

WHEN PRESIDENT Obama offered to extend his hand to America's enemies if they unclenched their fists, he may also have been preparing to encounter an army of Republican clenched fists in Congress. And that's exactly what he has faced in trying sell the stimulus bill to the minority Republicans still locked in a failed pre-election mode.  The most militant  voices emerging from their gated community is Obama's old nemesis, John McCain, who was fond of saying in measured avuncular tones how he could accommodate Democrats on Capitol Hill.  But without the aid of a full moon, he has since morphed as  a textbook example of bipolarity in assuming his party's leadership role in his frenetic attempt to scuttle the bill. 

McCain's idea of a progressive, economically sound America is hardly a newly assembled work-in-progress.  In fact, it's not even original with him but is lifted in its entirety from George Bush's playbook.  He wants an extension of Bush's tax cuts plus a lot more added on.  To a fellow like me, who still has penny wrappers in my office cabinet,  I don't know how it would help much to extend the tax cuts that only made matters worse under Bush.  If you think otherwise, just one figure should discourage you: 598,000 jobs lost in January alone.  

Still, there was Maverick McCain rising to the Senate rostrum to declare: "This bill has become nothing more than a massive spending bill. To portray it as  stimulus flies in the face of reality."   If he had said he was sore because the president had endorsed the Steelers against McCain's home state Cardinals, I could understand that.  In professional football, there are never any hands to extend across the aisle.  Trash talk is socially acceptable.  Now that's the face of reality.

But McCain was denying the obvious in the stimulus bill, and Obama felt it  necessary to correct the senator about the goal of the bill.  Of course, the president said, it was a spending bill.  Always has been  and always will be. 

McCain hasn't fought the battle alone. South Carolina  Sen. Lindsey Graham, who tagged along with McCain throughout the campaign and was probably responsible  for making  sure that the shirts got to the laundry on time, was ungentlemanly graphic. "This bill stinks," he barked.   He also accused Obama of being "AWOL on this bill,"  which must have deep roots in a southern dialect because nobody's sure what the senator meant.  

Asked why he plays so many grim operatic roles, Placido Domingo said, "I like being miserable on stage."

That may also  explain where we are with McCain-Graham these days.