Michel(l)e Bachmann, how could you abandon us?

Somehow, I'm going to miss Michele Bachmann.  It has taken me so long to remember whether she spelled her name with one "l" or two, as in Obama and Pfeiffer.  (I didn't always succeed in print!)

For the lifespan of my  Grumpy Abe and Plunderbund posts , she  provided bizarre "content" when everything else seemed to be on the serious side while Sarah Palin, Louie Gohmert  and Rand Paul were taking the day off.  You may recall that it was Gohmert, the wacko Republican representative from Texas who advanced the notion that immigrant women bear children  on American soil so  that the kids will grow up to become terrorists.  (If you don't recall it, you've  lost nothing, folks.)

You could always count on the Flat-Earth Goddess of the Tea Party  in the U.S. House to say something scarily entertaining even though it didn't make sense.   But. alas, she announced during a tour of Russia - see how comedic this can be? -  that she will not seek another term from a Minnesota district in 2014.

You would have thought that Queen Elizabeth had  abdicated and moved to Ireland. The Bachmann  news reverberated across Big Media, if not shopping malls, baseball games and garden clubs.

Still it's  hard to imagine a planet without  Michele's wisdom,  the preferred sweet-sounding voice of the Flintstones.  The immediate buzz was that she will be offered a fat contract by Fox News to continue her unofficial  labors for much that is wrong about political life in America.

In a melancholy mood, I  offer a few Bachmannisms as a going-away cache  from the Micel(l)e archives.:

She accused President Obama of spending $200 million on a trip to India.

During her overreaching presidential campaign, she promised the electorate that as president she would let Americans  choose their own  light bulbs.

She insisted that an aide to Hillary Clinton was "affiliated" with the Muslim Brotherhood.

She thought it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu outbreaks in the 1970s and again in 2009 occurred during Democratic presidencies.

Michel(l)e, how could you leave  us bloggers when you have so much to offer on those days when we have nothing more to think about but the hapless Ohio legislature?

Pumpkins: the GOP treat-or-treaters

A PHOTO IN Sunday's papers told us more abut the divinely-inspired GOP presidential candidates who are fervently attempting to lead America into the grasp of evangelical

Christians. Seated at a round table were Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich (and doubtless others not shown.) Unfortunately, by the reported tone of the discussion, it hardly measured up to the level of the lively Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s, the daily luncheon group at the Algonquin Hotel that included such nimble minds as Alexander Woollcott and Dorothy Parker.

By all accounts the presidential wannabes that met for a "values" discussion in Iowa each swore allegiance to taking down the liberal miscreants of the modern world to fill in the ranks with people as spiritually pure as they are. It never stops.

Even the table props sent a message of the wholesome family affair. In full view was a pumpkin. How appropriate for the trick-or-treaters seated for the photo-op. Pumpkins? Were the panelists sitting in judgment of the pulpy seasonals as to whether a pumpkin is a blowfish or a vegetable? This isn't as silly as it sounds. There is a precedent on Capitol Hill. Many on the GOP side have already dared us to consider pizza a vegetable to placate their lobbying frozen -pizza friends.

But let's get even more serious: Reports from the values auditions for the Iowa caucuses in January said several of the candidates tearfully(!) described their own trials in life (Example: Michele Bachmann told of becoming a true Christian after the awful divorce of her parents). What is it about sobbing in this party? I thought Boehner had claimed that value for himself.)

I should also report that Rick Perry signed a pledge by Bob Van Der Plaats, the head of the Family Leader, which sponsored the event. Perry vowed never to support same-six marriage.

But when the pledge bullies ask the candidates to put it in writing, do you get the feeling there is a limit to their trust in the pols' informal promises?

Now can we get back to the nation's economy and the haloed candidates' promises to create jobs? Halloween is over.

Footnote: As long as we're on the subject, Republican icon Thomas jefferson, whose name still adorns the menus of the party's dinners, once said this:

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.

But oil companies don't want to drill-baby-drill!

FROM A READER comes a report via Politico that Michelle Bachmann is promising to lower the cost of gasoline to below $2. Of course, that's her facile way of blaming President Obama for today's gas prices as she she trots around her carefully managed ecosystem as a fully clothed Lady Godiva in pursuit of the presidency.

It was her right of passage into South Carolina's conservative audiences, which were made aware of her unyielding support of domestic oil drilling. But as my source noted:

"Why does Bachmann think the oil companies are interested in investing billions just so they can LOWER the price of gas a buck & a half a gallon? The companies already own thousands of leases on land they're not drilling. For a free market capitalist she has no idea on how things work. Moron.''

Bada-Bing!

A letter to update Abe Lincoln

Open Letter to Abraham Lincoln:

Dear Mr. President:

It's been quite awhile since we've heard from you and I thought it might be a good time to bring you up to date on your party (Now old, but hardly grand these days.). Sadly, you would not recognize it, even though local pretenders still hold Lincoln Day dinners in a blatant annual exercise of identity theft. Whatever works for a night out, I guess.

Would it be too much to ask the Lincoln Day hosts what attributes are shared with you today? Yes, I guess it would.

You have been remembered throughout the years - even in a few textbooks in South Carolina and Georgia - as a great leader who kept the Union from dividing. How times have changed! A new generation of Republican governors is now plotting at several levels with plans that not only divide their constituents but divide us as a means of conquering the unions themselves. Rapacious members of your party, from Washington to state capitals, have created such havoc that the deep political wounds to the national interest will linger for many years to come.

I'm sure that you recognize the ninjas among us today with their talk of states rights, nullification and secession that is making the rounds. John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis would have felt quite at home with this gang, right?

But there's more to illustrate that despite your heroic efforts at governance in troubled times, the GOP is giving up its soul daily with scandalous theatrics that have nothing to do with how we live together as the Republic that you saved at your own peril. Yesterday, Rep. Peter King of New York staged a reprehensible McCarthy-like hearing in congress that singled out one group of Americans as the enemies of the people. Peter King, for God's sake, the devout supporter of the IRA across the ocean. The show trial against Muslims was such a pathetic political farce that it should have embarrassed every American while serving to dishonor all of the Tea Party- inspired robots on Capitol Hill.

There was nothing to be gained from it in meeting the challenges of modern terrorism. It was strictly for show, and nothing at all was learned from it. How shameful, don't you think, Mr. President?

You have also missed the clinical madness of several Republican presidential pretenders. Let me update you.

Mike Huckabee, a former preacher mining his audiences along the yellow brick road, has tried to associate President Obama with a Mau Mau childhood. And Crazy Guggenheim (aka Newt Gingrich) ludicrously explained his adulterous married life (on the Christian Broadcasting Network, no less) on forces that were well beyond his control. He said his powerful libido was partly driven by his deep passion for his country. He was standing in front of big American flag when he said it.

And up in Wisconsin, the billionaire-owned governor, Scott Walker, is proudly proclaiming a victory on the backs of public worker unions, fibbing that it was all about budget deficits. From all that I have read about you, Mr. President, I'm convinced you were a sensitive man, quite conscious of the welfare of other human beings. If you were here to see this fellow Walker, you might agree with me that he is a deadpan with motionless eyes who never makes eye contact with anybody else. It's creepy, don't you think?

Finally, since every Scatterbrained Republican on the TV news each night is considered to be presidential (dead) timber, there's a gal up in Minnesota, Rep. Michele Bachmann, who has lowered herself to be the queen of the congressional Tea Party Caucus. It is her right of passage to Fox News and other right-wing asylums(and you think you had it bad!) where she can pursue her certainty that President Obama is the capo di tutti capi of a gangster government.

I should leave you for now, Mr. President. It's too depressing to continue. I want to tell you however, that I will best serve your honorable leadership by staying away from those Lincoln Day Dinners. They have become nothing more than show trials, too. Meantime, you and I can both ask of these troubled troublemakers: Is that all you've got?

Respectfully,

Abe Zaidan , AKA Grumpy Abe

At this rate, the future was yesterday

HOW OPTIMISTIC can we be about the future of a nation that refuses to act decisively on its most critical domestic issues? Ho, Ho, Ho. Not very. The issues are plain to see: the raging costs of health care, global warming, the environment, education, the widening gulf between rich and poor, Wall Street - all of these and others have have created a caustic political divide that won't be bridged in this generation, nor maybe the next.

The problem is, sound doesn't travel in a vacuum. Any reasonable attempt to invite the Party of No into the mainstream of rational discussion is futile, as President Obama has finally learned the hard way. When you have a phalanx of racial, religious and broadcast crackpots barging in at every progressive idea on the table, what will change the landscape? I can't think of anything. The old concept of nation-building is now a concept of nation-razing. Is that over-the-top logic? Well, how about this: A recent poll reported that 66 pct. of Republicans say they would vote for Sarah Palin for president. That's the vacuum where sound dies.

Palin and many of her righteous rightists scoff at global warming as evidence mounts that some South Pacific islands live under the constant threat of flooding from rising sea waters. As the Arctic icecap melts, polar bears are slimmer these days as they amble about for food and safer havens. You don't have to be a friend of polar bears to realize that something quite serious is happening. The anti-warming gang sniffs that it is "junk science" when a great majority of scientists insists that an oncoming catastrophe is probable. On the other hand, even the Bible suggests the planet will not be around forever. Should we be planning for that day?

For too many politicians, the future of the planet and your grandchildren doesn't matter beyond the next election as the ascendent cash-flow lobbyists do the thinking for their political recipients. It has been shown that a fair number of senators and congressmen who oppose health-care reform are doing the bidding for their caregivers on K Street. The powerful lobbies will be the last groups standing as the planet disappears.

With few exceptions the national media that once boasted of James Reston, Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite have not only been political patsies within the prescribed ideological guidelines of their corporate owners, but also have fashioned an entirely new world of scatterbrained stars like Palin, Michele Bachmann and Joe Lieberman whose virulent mediocrity has carried them a long way on the national media dole. Bachmann, you may recall, asked her cheering throngs to cut their wrists if that's what it took to stop health care reform. This week she shouted at a D.C. rally that the anti-reform crowd had formed the charge of the light brigade. It became necessary to remind her later that the charge of the British cavalry into the Russian lines was one of the dumbest and most disastrous military decisions on record.

If there is faint hope that the we will survive all of this, maybe it will come from what Conan Doyle dismissively said of the new art of his day: "One should put one's shoulder to the door and keep out insanity all we can."

Well, it's worth a try.

The Republican Four Horsemen

TIME FOR a new assessment of this week's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Award with some familiar names...

REP. MICHELLE BACHMANN. Minnesota Republican,  who suggested that swine flu epidemics only occur under Democratic presidents.  She later had to be reminded that the last one occurred under Gerald Ford, a Republican according to all of the papers at that time. 

        SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, of Kentucky, the U.S. Senate minority leader,  whose fatherly assessment of President Obama's first 100 days was long on criticism and short on praise, while closing with a Republican promise that it would continue the party's "principled support, principled opposition and pragmatic, creative solutions to meet the challenges of the day."   But he also warned that Arlen Specter's defection was a threat to the nation because it would give the Democrats too much power. ( Almost as much as the Republicans had during George Bush's first single-party six years, Mitch?)

       MICHELE MALKIN, simple-spoken columnist who spells her first named differently than does Bachmann,  who has traced swine flu to Obama's visit to Mexico and called the President a "frivolous man" who never goes anywhere without his teleprompter.    She heard about the swine flu source from Rush, who is believe to have heard it from the old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate. She was delighted that Specter bolted the party and advised him to not let the door hit him on the way out. He didn't.  

        MICHAEL STEELE, Republican national chairman who is always in the act, despite growing impatience within his party with his blundering comments about, well...everything.  There's an undertow of feeling that Steele must resign.  I hope they don't get ahead of the curve by the next trading deadline. .  The Democrats already have a chairman.

With enemies like these, Obama and his soaring popularity don't need more friends.  

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And the unemployed aren't doing much better!

TODAY I have no choice but to humbly recognize Rep. Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican,  for my occasional GALL ( Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy) Award with full  knowledge that based on her track record she is quite capable of winning another - and still another - by midnight tomorrow.  During an interview with a conservative talk show host, she said she strongly  opposed the stimulus package because...    

   "We're running out of rich people in this country."