Zeus-like Cheney in his parallel universe

Re-posted from Plunderbund


It's so  appropriate that in the week  that Economist magazine carried a glowing obituary of  leading fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett, one of America's leading fantasists,
Dick Cheney,  went on another rant.  It may be rude to link fantasies  here.  Pratchett, after all, wrote books that sold in the millions (in 37 languages), a series featuring oddly named characters and events brought together in his literary conception of Discworld.   A man of humor, Pratchett even brushed off talk that he had found God.  Unlikely, he said,  because he couldn't even find his keys.

On the other hand, Cheney, a pulseless  surviving elder of the Bush era, moves in his own fantasy world on Fox News, hurling thunderbolts at President Obama.  His latest brain fart  accused Obama  of working to  "take America down".  Golly. Sounds a lot like treason to me.

In his words:  "If you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama's doing."

But we do find humorous  his assertion that Obama was leaving a "terrible  burden" for the next president. Like his buddy George W. Bush's recession and the ongoing mess that Obama faced when he entered office and they're still trying to clean up in Iraq?

When you're living in the Fox parallel universe, those questions  don't come up from the host, nor will they ever, pulse or no pulse. .


















firecracker

Birds of a feather (in this case hawks)

Everyone under the hawks' cloud these days should have this Newsweek cover from Feb.9, 2004 to post in each room of you house.  I would add one more with Tom Cotton,  the creepy senator who wants to bomb Iran six or seven  days to end  any question of that country's hostiities.  (below: AP photo from Salon)

Iran deal: Worst - or best - of times?

The most insightful and concise view of the Iran nuclear framework deal appeared in the recent piece by Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman.  Of the pushback by Republicans with help from some soft-shoe Democrats, Chapman wrote:

"The critics are haunted by two nightmare scenarios.  The first is that Obama has made a bad deal with Iran.  The second is that he made a good one."

Hedrick Smith: Income disparity our major problem

Scientific American magazine once quoted George Carlin as  joking that "the reason they  call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it."

And why not?  In terms of economic inequality, the same article noted that the United States is now "the most unequal of all Western nations".   The Carnegies, Goulds, Astors and Vanderbilts, among other plutocrats  from the gilded 1800s,  may be  gone, except for the history pages, but today's wealth is in such imbalance that President Obama has described the income gap as the "defining challenge of our time.:"

Hedrick Smith thinks so, too.  The Pultizer Prize-winning journalist-author sharply brought  that message  to the Press Club-Bliss Institute luncheon as well as a Bliss student class and Cleveland City Club.

If you doubt its validity, Smith will remind you that one percent  of Americans own five times that of the other 99 pct. Or, as Scientific American noted, the "Walton Family, for example,  has more wealth than 42 percent of American families combined."

The  problem , as he sees it , of which I agree, lies in the inattentiveness of the media to make a big deal of it.  Twenty-four hour news cycles serve us blips of fragmented information while newspapers remain wedded to soft feel-good features as the Akron Beacon Journal's sweeping  stop-the-presses  front-page pieces on cupcakes  - or as Bill Maher once twitted, TV newscasts that end with a warm tale about a "blind, black bus driver". Feeling better about life in general?

Sorry, Rick .  The paper didn't report your talk at Quaker Station.

Is the dark playbook that drives so much money to the GOP's preferred candidates hopeless?

Could be. As Smith, the author of the must-read  Who Stole the American Dream? , laments that nothing can change until Americans have shown more in demanding that change with a hefty grassroots response that has effected other changes in our society.  Until then, if ever, we remain victims of a 'broken political system" in  the grip of Wall Street.

"We don't have an active citizenry," Smith said. "We can't sit back and say it's terrible." Meantime, he complained that the media "continues to do a superficial job."

Smith also didn't have much hope  that politicians will  correct the evils of gerrymandering. Safe districts are "how they get elected," he said.

There once was a guiding spirit in my profession that newspapers should "afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted."  I think of that when I recall the cupcakes story.

So, yes, the mountain is high to restore the American Dream.  But it does help to know that a guy like Hedrick Smith, a journalistic giant, hasn't  given up.

The brutal bio of Tom Cotton - Kristol's guy.

Reposted from Plunderbund


The New York Times Sunday magazine  added to  freshman Sen. Tom Cotton's scrapbook rise to celebrity with a full-page interview and tall photo  of the young Arkansas Republican who fatuously wrote the letter to Iranians warning them of a bad outcome for the deal supported by the U.S.

The vital statistics of the man included his NBA dream team (which, alas, did not include LeBron James!)  and his non-answer as to whether he is dreaming about more trivial matters as a vice presidential candidate on the GOP national ticket in 2016.  He cryptically answered: "I am focussed on the work that the people of Arkansas sent me to do."

As Seinfeld's Kramer would blurt:  "Oh, Mama!"

All of the commotion about the guy sent me back into the files to learn  how he ended up in the Senate in the first  place from the Razorback State.

Think: William Kristol,  the big-time neocon who merged Sarah Palin onto John McCain's ticket in 2008.  Think of the same neocon whose New York Times op-ed columns were eliminated after the editors finally lost patience with his many factual errors.  Think of the same neocon who seeks relevancy as editor of the  right-wing Weekly Standard as well as the smarmy guest on TV shows. And think of the warrior neocon who was a major figure in calling for the Bush invasion of Iraq and who now supports a re-invasion of  that hapless country.

Now, think of the neocon as a board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel with considerable  sway among other donor allies.  Kristol sent upward of $800,000 to his newly bought and paid for  Tom Cotton, another acquired alter ego (who happens to be a Methodist).

As I learned in so many years in the newspaper world, names make news.    So when you see Cotton's name, you need to know more about what the political world is now talking about, the man who wanted to imprison NY Times editor Bill Keller and two reporters over something the Times printed.

As a congressman in 2013 Cotton also proved he can be damned cruel.   He wanted  to insert an amendment in an Iran sanctions bill (amendment later withdrawn) that would have severely punished anyone who violated the sanctions.  He even levied that on their families  as a "corruption of blood" that automatically included "parents, children,  aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids."

The guy is driven - but do you really want to be a passenger?

Strickland-Portman poll: Early, yes. But...

Plunderbund is reporting that a new Quinnipiac Ohio poll gives former Democratic
Gov. Ted Strickland a comfortable 48-39 percent lead over  Republican Sen. Rob Portman in the 2016 race.  Remembering that early polls can be as fickle as April weather, it is still  interesting that Portman, once the rising GOP star and budget advisor to George W. Bush, is bringing up the rear. Among independents, Strickland leads 50-32!

Although the Cincinnatian spent a lot of time in 2012 tagging along with Mitt Romney in casual togs in the so-called Swing State, he didn't get the nod for veep -  but as these things go, he did draw the attention of  the Columbus Dispatch as  potential (along with Gov. Kasich) presidential  material.

Trouble is, the several newspapers enamored of Portman's blurry self-described "common sense conservatism"  weren't able to project him beyond his current job.   My hunch is that with the exception of the party apparatchiks looking to fill a seat on the dais,  few folks in northern Ohio can pick him out of a crowd.

Bibi says the Iran framework is a "bad deal'.  It takes one to know one, Bibi!

Sometimes, family values can be positive

As one who has  occasionally  complained about the intrusion of "family values" into right-wing  narratives, let me be among the first to recognize two examples of their positive influence in the political arena. When Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he decided to step back from signing  his  state's anti-LGBT "religious freedom" law,  he credited his son with changing dad's mind. And when another conservative Republican, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman,  broke free from his party's mold and supported same-sex marriage, it was simply because he had a gay son. Way to go, family values - no matter how you got there!  

For Tom Cotton, it's location, location, location

Sen. Tom  Cotton of Arkansas, the GOP-tagged rising star and young pop pol who wrote that awful letter to Iran, is back.  In a snooty patriotic sermon  to gays, he said that if they lived in Iran they would be hanged.

"In Iran they hang  you for the crime of being gay. They're currently imprisoning an American preacher for spreading the gospel  of Jesus Christ in Iran," he lectured.

He's also lucky he's not living in Iran because if he had written  a foreign policy letter to American leaders without clearing it with  the front office, he would have vanished, no questions asked.

Note to Pence: The economy trumps all

When Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson wisely refused to sign the state's new "religious freedom" law and returned it to the legislature for repairs, you had to wonder why Mike Pence, Indiana's rattled governor,   didn't do   it sooner before some business and sports world giants  broke down his door as he sputtered for  conflicting answers.

In Hutchinson's case, it was Wal-Mart, the state's biggest employer, along with Little
Rock's Regional  Chamber of Commerce, and Convention and Visitors Bureau that jerked the deal from his desk after he first said he would sign it.

In both states, as well as others that might be trolling, the issue was the same:

IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID!

What Pence painfully learned  in the age of hyper-communications is that he could be instantly rocketed   from his safe chair back home in Indiana to a broken national figure  who admitted that he had fumbled his interview by ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

He was completely unprepared - a governor, for Heaven's sake! -  for his political calamity. Now, despite his own protest that he meant no harm to LGBT's, he was betrayed by his 2000 congressional campaign website, by these damning words:

"Congress should oppose any effort to recognize homosexual's [sic] as a 'discrete and insular minority' entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws similar to those extended to women and minorities.'"

Some things never change.