J.D. Rhoades's Blog, page 8
November 15, 2015
Carson: Not Ready for Prime Time
thepilot.com:
Ben Carson is not ready. He’s not just unprepared to be the president. His behavior in the last week or so has shown us he’s unprepared to even run for the office.First, the press began questioning Carson’s claim, made in books and public appearances, that the former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, met the 17-year-old Carson at a dinner in Detroit on Memorial Day 1969 and was so impressed that the young man was soon offered a “full scholarship” to West Point.Except, as investigators from the online news site Politico pointed out, West Point doesn’t work that way. You have to apply to be nominated, preferably in the spring of your junior year. Then you undergo a “rigorous vetting process,” and if you’re accepted, the government covers all the costs.You don’t just get offered a scholarship after dinner, even if that dinner was with a four-star general. In any case, there’s no record of Carson ever applying. Oh, and as it turns out, records show that Westmoreland was in D.C. that Memorial Day of 1969, not Detroit.Pressed by reporters, Carson’s campaign backpedaled, telling Politico that Carson’s meeting with Westmoreland was “brief,” and that he “couldn’t remember it with any specificity.” As for the date, they said, well, maybe it was February 1969, not May. Except as Esquire reporter Robert Bateman pointed out, the spring of Carson’s junior year, when the process would need to have begun, was in 1968.Even more bizarre was the controversy regarding other claims Carson has made about his youth, when his “violent temper” caused him to try to attack his mother with a hammer and, on one occasion, to attempt to stab a classmate.A CNN investigation, however, found no one from the area or the time period who could remember Carson being such a violent kid or recall any of the incidents he described. So then we were treated to the surreal spectacle of a major political campaign trying to insist that the candidate was TOO a murderous little thug, and they could prove it, but they didn’t have to — so there, liberal media.It seems that, faced with the type of scrutiny one should expect when one becomes a front-runner for the most powerful job in the world, Carson immediately fell back to the old tactic of whining about how he’s being picked on by the “liberal media” and then added the patently ludicrous claim that no one ever says anything bad about President Obama.“I do not remember this level of scrutiny for one President Barack Obama when he was running. In fact, I remember just the opposite.” Carson went on to say that “no one wanted to talk about” figures from Obama’s past such as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Jeremiah Wright.If Dr. Carson thinks that, then all I can say is he must have been locked away in surgery every moment of the years 2007-2012, and that operating room must have been on a desert island with no TV, radio, or Internet. He also doesn’t seem to realize that the fact that all those names come so quickly to his lips directly contradicts the idea that nobody talked about them.In fact, the so-called liberal media talked incessantly about all of those people, along with questioning Obama’s religion, his college drug use, his grade school, his father, his father’s friends, his sexuality, even whether he was a native-born American. As I’ve pointed out before, when a wingnut complains that Obama was never “vetted,” what he or she is really saying is “nobody bought into the ridiculous stuff we made up about Barack Obama.”It is absolutely true that, during the now-eternal presidential election cycle, the media engage in a frenzied search for the scandal or gaffe of the week. It is true that they obsess over trivia, to a point so extreme that it’s almost impossible to parody. Remember “Tip-Gate,” when the “serious” pundits were all abuzz about whether Hillary Clinton left a tip in a diner, or whether the tip was too big? Remember Chris Matthews’ shock that Barack Obama ordered orange juice instead of coffee in a diner?I will agree, it’s all very, very stupid. But that stupidity gets directed at every candidate, and how you deal with it is one of the tests of your ability to lead. To cry that you’re the only one being picked on when it happens to you is the sign of a rookie. An amateur. Someone who’s not ready to play in the big leagues.And this week, Ben Carson proved that he is not ready.
Ben Carson is not ready. He’s not just unprepared to be the president. His behavior in the last week or so has shown us he’s unprepared to even run for the office.First, the press began questioning Carson’s claim, made in books and public appearances, that the former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, met the 17-year-old Carson at a dinner in Detroit on Memorial Day 1969 and was so impressed that the young man was soon offered a “full scholarship” to West Point.Except, as investigators from the online news site Politico pointed out, West Point doesn’t work that way. You have to apply to be nominated, preferably in the spring of your junior year. Then you undergo a “rigorous vetting process,” and if you’re accepted, the government covers all the costs.You don’t just get offered a scholarship after dinner, even if that dinner was with a four-star general. In any case, there’s no record of Carson ever applying. Oh, and as it turns out, records show that Westmoreland was in D.C. that Memorial Day of 1969, not Detroit.Pressed by reporters, Carson’s campaign backpedaled, telling Politico that Carson’s meeting with Westmoreland was “brief,” and that he “couldn’t remember it with any specificity.” As for the date, they said, well, maybe it was February 1969, not May. Except as Esquire reporter Robert Bateman pointed out, the spring of Carson’s junior year, when the process would need to have begun, was in 1968.Even more bizarre was the controversy regarding other claims Carson has made about his youth, when his “violent temper” caused him to try to attack his mother with a hammer and, on one occasion, to attempt to stab a classmate.A CNN investigation, however, found no one from the area or the time period who could remember Carson being such a violent kid or recall any of the incidents he described. So then we were treated to the surreal spectacle of a major political campaign trying to insist that the candidate was TOO a murderous little thug, and they could prove it, but they didn’t have to — so there, liberal media.It seems that, faced with the type of scrutiny one should expect when one becomes a front-runner for the most powerful job in the world, Carson immediately fell back to the old tactic of whining about how he’s being picked on by the “liberal media” and then added the patently ludicrous claim that no one ever says anything bad about President Obama.“I do not remember this level of scrutiny for one President Barack Obama when he was running. In fact, I remember just the opposite.” Carson went on to say that “no one wanted to talk about” figures from Obama’s past such as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Jeremiah Wright.If Dr. Carson thinks that, then all I can say is he must have been locked away in surgery every moment of the years 2007-2012, and that operating room must have been on a desert island with no TV, radio, or Internet. He also doesn’t seem to realize that the fact that all those names come so quickly to his lips directly contradicts the idea that nobody talked about them.In fact, the so-called liberal media talked incessantly about all of those people, along with questioning Obama’s religion, his college drug use, his grade school, his father, his father’s friends, his sexuality, even whether he was a native-born American. As I’ve pointed out before, when a wingnut complains that Obama was never “vetted,” what he or she is really saying is “nobody bought into the ridiculous stuff we made up about Barack Obama.”It is absolutely true that, during the now-eternal presidential election cycle, the media engage in a frenzied search for the scandal or gaffe of the week. It is true that they obsess over trivia, to a point so extreme that it’s almost impossible to parody. Remember “Tip-Gate,” when the “serious” pundits were all abuzz about whether Hillary Clinton left a tip in a diner, or whether the tip was too big? Remember Chris Matthews’ shock that Barack Obama ordered orange juice instead of coffee in a diner?I will agree, it’s all very, very stupid. But that stupidity gets directed at every candidate, and how you deal with it is one of the tests of your ability to lead. To cry that you’re the only one being picked on when it happens to you is the sign of a rookie. An amateur. Someone who’s not ready to play in the big leagues.And this week, Ben Carson proved that he is not ready.
November 1, 2015
Orange John Does the GOP a Favor
Opinion | thepilot.com
You know, I’ve been hard in the past on John Boehner, the weepy, carrot-colored soon-to-be-former speaker of the House. I’ve mocked him as perhaps the most ineffectual politician ever to hold that high office.
I was making fun of him as far back as his tenure as minority leader, when he whined that he couldn’t get Republican votes for Dubbya’s $700 billion bailout of the financial industry because Nancy Pelosi said something mean about his caucus. I jeered at him when he couldn’t even get the House GOP to vote “yes” on their own bill to keep the Department of Homeland Security open. And so on.But now, as he prepares to step down from his position, I’ve got to hand it to Orange John: For once, he’s managed to keep his party from shooting itself in the foot, something that they were apparently just aching to do.At issue was yet another wrangle over the twin issues of averting a government shutdown and raising the debt ceiling, that arguably unconstitutional imaginary cap the Congress puts on our ability to actually pay for things for which they’ve already authorized spending. Failure to raise the ceiling when needed would lead the United States, the greatest country in the world, to default on its debt like some Third World banana republic. Shutting down the government would result in an interruption of vital services.Nevertheless, the fiscal terrorists of the far right have repeatedly threatened to bring these disasters down on our heads if their demands were not met. This time, they started pressuring Boehner to threaten a shutdown if Planned Parenthood wasn’t defunded. That, however, was apparently dropped in favor of convening a House Select Committee to investigate the already debunked accusation that Planned Parenthood clinics are illegally selling baby parts. After all, they need a new multi-million-dollar bogus witch hunt to get the rubes all worked up about after Hillary Clinton handed them their behinds over Benghazi. Again.Enter the so-called “Freedom Caucus,” a group of Republican congresscritters so bold and forthright that they will neither confirm nor deny who’s actually a member. This shadowy cabal scotched the bid of California Rep. Kevin McCarthy to take over Boehner’s seat and made a list of demands to any other candidate wanting their support. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell prepared his own ransom note. Both demanded, among other things, serious cuts to Social Security and Medicare as a condition of keeping the government open and avoiding default.Then Boehner, much to everyone’s surprise, committed an act of actual governance. He and other Republican leaders negotiated a deal with the White House that raises the debt ceiling far enough that it doesn’t have to be addressed again until 2017 — after the next election. It also averts the possibility of a government shutdown until at least the end of the Obama presidency. And it did both without draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare.The Teahadists, of course, had a conniption. The deal was a sellout, they claimed, and shows just why Boehner has to go. “I think the process stinks,” fumed Paul Ryan, who’s in negotiations with the Freedom Caucus that might just allow him to take Boehner’s place as speaker without the daily fear of getting their knives in his back. Yet most political analysts think there’s not enough time for the deal’s opponents to stop it.Inwardly, however, Ryan and the few sane Republicans must be breathing a sigh of relief. Because here’s the thing: Every time there’s a shutdown or a threat of default, their party’s image takes a walloping in the polls.For example, in 2013, after even a partial shutdown, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 8 out of 10 Americans said they disapproved of it, 63 percent had an unfavorable view of the Republicans in Congress, and “4 in 10 had a strongly unfavorable view of the GOP.” That’s not the kind of damage a party who wants to hold the Senate and take the White House can absorb in an election year. Ryan at least is bright enough to know that.For all the kvetching and calls of “betrayal” directed against soon-to-be-former-speaker Boehner, he’s handed his party — and the country — a gift on his way out. Most of them are probably too delusional to realize it, but Paul Ryan ought to send Orange John a case of his favorite Scotch for Christmas.
You know, I’ve been hard in the past on John Boehner, the weepy, carrot-colored soon-to-be-former speaker of the House. I’ve mocked him as perhaps the most ineffectual politician ever to hold that high office.
I was making fun of him as far back as his tenure as minority leader, when he whined that he couldn’t get Republican votes for Dubbya’s $700 billion bailout of the financial industry because Nancy Pelosi said something mean about his caucus. I jeered at him when he couldn’t even get the House GOP to vote “yes” on their own bill to keep the Department of Homeland Security open. And so on.But now, as he prepares to step down from his position, I’ve got to hand it to Orange John: For once, he’s managed to keep his party from shooting itself in the foot, something that they were apparently just aching to do.At issue was yet another wrangle over the twin issues of averting a government shutdown and raising the debt ceiling, that arguably unconstitutional imaginary cap the Congress puts on our ability to actually pay for things for which they’ve already authorized spending. Failure to raise the ceiling when needed would lead the United States, the greatest country in the world, to default on its debt like some Third World banana republic. Shutting down the government would result in an interruption of vital services.Nevertheless, the fiscal terrorists of the far right have repeatedly threatened to bring these disasters down on our heads if their demands were not met. This time, they started pressuring Boehner to threaten a shutdown if Planned Parenthood wasn’t defunded. That, however, was apparently dropped in favor of convening a House Select Committee to investigate the already debunked accusation that Planned Parenthood clinics are illegally selling baby parts. After all, they need a new multi-million-dollar bogus witch hunt to get the rubes all worked up about after Hillary Clinton handed them their behinds over Benghazi. Again.Enter the so-called “Freedom Caucus,” a group of Republican congresscritters so bold and forthright that they will neither confirm nor deny who’s actually a member. This shadowy cabal scotched the bid of California Rep. Kevin McCarthy to take over Boehner’s seat and made a list of demands to any other candidate wanting their support. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell prepared his own ransom note. Both demanded, among other things, serious cuts to Social Security and Medicare as a condition of keeping the government open and avoiding default.Then Boehner, much to everyone’s surprise, committed an act of actual governance. He and other Republican leaders negotiated a deal with the White House that raises the debt ceiling far enough that it doesn’t have to be addressed again until 2017 — after the next election. It also averts the possibility of a government shutdown until at least the end of the Obama presidency. And it did both without draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare.The Teahadists, of course, had a conniption. The deal was a sellout, they claimed, and shows just why Boehner has to go. “I think the process stinks,” fumed Paul Ryan, who’s in negotiations with the Freedom Caucus that might just allow him to take Boehner’s place as speaker without the daily fear of getting their knives in his back. Yet most political analysts think there’s not enough time for the deal’s opponents to stop it.Inwardly, however, Ryan and the few sane Republicans must be breathing a sigh of relief. Because here’s the thing: Every time there’s a shutdown or a threat of default, their party’s image takes a walloping in the polls.For example, in 2013, after even a partial shutdown, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 8 out of 10 Americans said they disapproved of it, 63 percent had an unfavorable view of the Republicans in Congress, and “4 in 10 had a strongly unfavorable view of the GOP.” That’s not the kind of damage a party who wants to hold the Senate and take the White House can absorb in an election year. Ryan at least is bright enough to know that.For all the kvetching and calls of “betrayal” directed against soon-to-be-former-speaker Boehner, he’s handed his party — and the country — a gift on his way out. Most of them are probably too delusional to realize it, but Paul Ryan ought to send Orange John a case of his favorite Scotch for Christmas.
October 25, 2015
Yay! A New 'Star Wars' Trailer
thepilot.com:
So everyone’s watching (as of this writing) to see if Joe Biden’s in, out, or still dithering. The Donald and JEB! are exchanging nasty remarks because Trump pointed out, quite correctly, that JEB!’s bro was president on 9/11, something that was once considered treason when a Democrat dared to say it (which few did). It’s all very wearisome.
So of course, what I want to talk about is: YAY YAY YAY, THERE’S A NEW “STAR WARS” TRAILER OUT!I can’t help it. I’m a huge “Star Wars” geek, and have been ever since the day back in 1977 when I sat with my best buds in the Town and Country Cinema in Aberdeen and watched that enormous white Star Destroyer slide ominously into view, seemingly from overhead and behind us, blasting away at the plucky little Rebel ship.Even the tremendous disappointments that were the last three movies (the “prequels”) haven’t diminished my affection for what I’ll always think of as the real “Star Wars”: the tale of Luke and Leia, Han and Chewbacca, Obi-Wan and that bad, bad Darth Vader.Sure, they were hokey. Sure, some of the dialogue was laughable. But those movies drew me in to a fascinating, complex universe full of heroes and villains and great stories, and they haven’t let me go yet.All that said, after the aforementioned prequels (about which the less said the better), it’s hard for a fan not to feel some amount of trepidation over the idea of a new trilogy. Especially since they’re being directed by J.J. Abrams, whose “Star Trek” reboots were so ludicrous and full of logic holes that I can only get through them by regarding them as comedies.So, like hundreds of thousands of others, I went to one of the numerous sites running the new trailer for “Star Wars Episode VII-The Force Awakens”, which releases December 18th . I crossed my fingers, took a deep breath, then played the trailer. Actually, I played it several times. Not too many. Twenty, thirty tops.So far, I have to say, I’m encouraged. It looks like the Millennium Falcon’s back, along with Harrison Ford as the wisecracking, reluctant hero Han Solo. So is his friend, the giant hairy Wookiee Chewbacca.I’m pleased to say that after the somewhat ridiculous baddies of the prequels (not even the great Christopher Lee could make a character named Count Dooku less than ridiculous), this villain looks truly villainous, in the Vader mold.In fact, he seems to have a bit of a thing for ol’ Wheezy, since the trailer shows him looking down at a smashed and battered Vader mask and vowing “I will finish what you started.” It looks like the improvements in visual effects are put to good use in what appear to be epic TIE-fighter vs. X-wing battles.Obviously, a mere rehash of the old movies wouldn’t be satisfying, so the trailer gives us a glimpse of some new characters: a plucky young woman with a staff on her back and a cute little rolling droid that looks like a soccer ball with a soup bowl on top; a tormented-looking black dude who appears to be a former stormtrooper-turned-Jedi; and a mysterious X-wing pilot played by Guatemalan actor Oscar Isaac.Of course, no “Star Wars” movie release would be complete without some ridiculous controversy. Remember the fuss that erupted back in 1999 over whether the character Jar Jar Binks was a racist caricature, instead of just incredibly annoying? Well, this time, it seems to be white people complaining.The casting of a woman, a black Englishman, and a Latino in the lead roles led to an eruption on the Internet using the hashtag “#BoycottStarWarsVII” and claiming the movie “is anti-white propaganda promoting #whitegenocide.”Seriously. “White genocide.” At first I thought it had to be a joke, and there’s some evidence that that’s how it started out. But then it got picked up by actual racists decrying the “race mixing” in the film and referring to director Abrams as “Jew Jew Abrams.” #SMH, as the kids say on the Interwebs (it means “Shaking My Head”).No matter. I’m not going to let a bunch of racist trolls ruin my enjoyment of Star Wars. There’s only one person who can do that, and his name is George Lucas. When the time comes, I’ll be there in the theater with my heart full of hope and my bag full of popcorn, ready to feel that sense of wonder and to be swept again into a galaxy far far away.
Don’t mess this one up, Mr. Abrams.HATERS ARE GONNA HATE: The comments in today's Pilot show that, no matter how lighthearted or innocuous the topic, so-called "conservatives" are going to be dicks about it. Like this one from Mark/Francis: "Under the guise of a satirical article and sharing with all as you reminisce those days of your childhood, eating popcorn and stuffing yourself with concession stand goodies, once again you have cleverly stirred the pot in an attempt to create racially motivated comments, it seems to be the subject you get most enjoy and one that gives the most return to feed that ego. Try using a bigger spoon."
Get that? I'm not really a fan, I'm just "cleverly" disguising my real intent: to get "racially motivated" comments to feed my ego...comments which Mark/Francis can't keep himself from making. What must it be like to live inside a mind so profoundly fucked up?
So everyone’s watching (as of this writing) to see if Joe Biden’s in, out, or still dithering. The Donald and JEB! are exchanging nasty remarks because Trump pointed out, quite correctly, that JEB!’s bro was president on 9/11, something that was once considered treason when a Democrat dared to say it (which few did). It’s all very wearisome.
So of course, what I want to talk about is: YAY YAY YAY, THERE’S A NEW “STAR WARS” TRAILER OUT!I can’t help it. I’m a huge “Star Wars” geek, and have been ever since the day back in 1977 when I sat with my best buds in the Town and Country Cinema in Aberdeen and watched that enormous white Star Destroyer slide ominously into view, seemingly from overhead and behind us, blasting away at the plucky little Rebel ship.Even the tremendous disappointments that were the last three movies (the “prequels”) haven’t diminished my affection for what I’ll always think of as the real “Star Wars”: the tale of Luke and Leia, Han and Chewbacca, Obi-Wan and that bad, bad Darth Vader.Sure, they were hokey. Sure, some of the dialogue was laughable. But those movies drew me in to a fascinating, complex universe full of heroes and villains and great stories, and they haven’t let me go yet.All that said, after the aforementioned prequels (about which the less said the better), it’s hard for a fan not to feel some amount of trepidation over the idea of a new trilogy. Especially since they’re being directed by J.J. Abrams, whose “Star Trek” reboots were so ludicrous and full of logic holes that I can only get through them by regarding them as comedies.So, like hundreds of thousands of others, I went to one of the numerous sites running the new trailer for “Star Wars Episode VII-The Force Awakens”, which releases December 18th . I crossed my fingers, took a deep breath, then played the trailer. Actually, I played it several times. Not too many. Twenty, thirty tops.So far, I have to say, I’m encouraged. It looks like the Millennium Falcon’s back, along with Harrison Ford as the wisecracking, reluctant hero Han Solo. So is his friend, the giant hairy Wookiee Chewbacca.I’m pleased to say that after the somewhat ridiculous baddies of the prequels (not even the great Christopher Lee could make a character named Count Dooku less than ridiculous), this villain looks truly villainous, in the Vader mold.In fact, he seems to have a bit of a thing for ol’ Wheezy, since the trailer shows him looking down at a smashed and battered Vader mask and vowing “I will finish what you started.” It looks like the improvements in visual effects are put to good use in what appear to be epic TIE-fighter vs. X-wing battles.Obviously, a mere rehash of the old movies wouldn’t be satisfying, so the trailer gives us a glimpse of some new characters: a plucky young woman with a staff on her back and a cute little rolling droid that looks like a soccer ball with a soup bowl on top; a tormented-looking black dude who appears to be a former stormtrooper-turned-Jedi; and a mysterious X-wing pilot played by Guatemalan actor Oscar Isaac.Of course, no “Star Wars” movie release would be complete without some ridiculous controversy. Remember the fuss that erupted back in 1999 over whether the character Jar Jar Binks was a racist caricature, instead of just incredibly annoying? Well, this time, it seems to be white people complaining.The casting of a woman, a black Englishman, and a Latino in the lead roles led to an eruption on the Internet using the hashtag “#BoycottStarWarsVII” and claiming the movie “is anti-white propaganda promoting #whitegenocide.”Seriously. “White genocide.” At first I thought it had to be a joke, and there’s some evidence that that’s how it started out. But then it got picked up by actual racists decrying the “race mixing” in the film and referring to director Abrams as “Jew Jew Abrams.” #SMH, as the kids say on the Interwebs (it means “Shaking My Head”).No matter. I’m not going to let a bunch of racist trolls ruin my enjoyment of Star Wars. There’s only one person who can do that, and his name is George Lucas. When the time comes, I’ll be there in the theater with my heart full of hope and my bag full of popcorn, ready to feel that sense of wonder and to be swept again into a galaxy far far away.
Don’t mess this one up, Mr. Abrams.HATERS ARE GONNA HATE: The comments in today's Pilot show that, no matter how lighthearted or innocuous the topic, so-called "conservatives" are going to be dicks about it. Like this one from Mark/Francis: "Under the guise of a satirical article and sharing with all as you reminisce those days of your childhood, eating popcorn and stuffing yourself with concession stand goodies, once again you have cleverly stirred the pot in an attempt to create racially motivated comments, it seems to be the subject you get most enjoy and one that gives the most return to feed that ego. Try using a bigger spoon."
Get that? I'm not really a fan, I'm just "cleverly" disguising my real intent: to get "racially motivated" comments to feed my ego...comments which Mark/Francis can't keep himself from making. What must it be like to live inside a mind so profoundly fucked up?
October 18, 2015
Hush Up, GOP, The Grownups Are Talking
thepilot.com:
So now the first Democratic presidential debate has come and gone. It was certainly a relief to watch grownups at work for a change.
We saw informed people with actual governing experience talking about their very real differences on issues, rather than amateurs insulting one another, mouthing bumper-sticker slogans, and throwing red meat to the so-called “base.”In fact, the most memorable moment of the evening was when Sen. Bernie Sanders explicitly passed up the opportunity to slam front-runner Hillary Clinton over the latest in the long series of phony scandals ginned up by the Republicans.“Let me say something that may not be great politics,” Sanders said, “but I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!”Sanders then proceeded to try to re-direct the egregiously shallow celebrity “journalist” Anderson Cooper back to what he called the “real problems facing America”: a collapsing middle class; 27 million Americans living in poverty; and job-killing trade policies. You know, like the ones Secretary Clinton was for before she was against.Acting decently toward an opponent and trying to shame one of the cable news talking heads into focusing on real issues. Now do you see why I love this guy?Sanders, unfortunately, exposed a couple of his own vulnerabilities. The left is going to go after him for being “soft” on gun control and voting against the Brady Bill. The right, and Hillary Clinton, are going to go after him for suggesting we should be more like Denmark, even though survey after survey, year after year, finds that the Danes are the happiest people on Earth. But hey, this is America. Who needs happiness?As for the other candidates, none of them really moved the needle in their direction. Former Sen. Jim Webb stood there looking grumpy and alternating his “Democrats should vote for me because I’m most like the Republicans” theme with complaining that no one was paying him enough attention.Look, I give Sen. Webb full marks for his service, both in the military and in government. I respect his dedication to veterans’ causes. He’s also a heck of a novelist. But his perpetual scowl and his pomposity make Bernie Sanders look downright jolly. He makes himself hard to like, and I’ve given up trying.Former Rhode Island Gov. (and former Republican) Lincoln Chafee had a couple of real cringe-worthy moments.One was when he confidently proclaimed himself a “block of granite,” which someone should tell him is not a real dynamic image. The other was when he blamed his vote in favor of repealing the tattered remnants that remained of the Glass-Steagall banking regulation bill (a move which contributed to the rise of banks that were “too big to fail”) by explaining he’d “just gotten to the Senate” where he’d been appointed after his father’s death.That response was just a slow softball over the plate, practically begging for opponents to hit it out of the park: “So, not ready on Day One?” However, by the time he stumbled into that one, Chafee had made himself so inconsequential that no one cared to even try and swing at the pitch.When Clinton was asked later if she wanted to respond to a Chafee attack on her “credibility,” she just smiled and said “no,” which was the worst burn she could have delivered.As for Martin O’Malley — well, when by the end of the debate, I’m still asking “wait, which one is he again?” then his status as an also-ran is pretty much set in cement.At the end, however, it was Hillary Clinton who was, as she put it, “still standing.” Actually, that should probably be her campaign slogan. After all, she has been since 1992 the target of one bogus, politically motivated investigation/ smear campaign after another.Vince Foster’s death, Travelgate, Cattlegate, Chinagate, Filegate, Whitewater, BenghaziBenghaziBenghazi — the list goes on and on. Every single time, her opponents have rubbed their little hands together, cackling with glee and promising everyone that this time, Hillary Clinton’s going to jail, just you wait and see. And in the end, they come away with … nothing.Every time, investigation has ended up with the investigators slinking away, muttering that they’ve found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing after spending years and millions of taxpayer dollars. As I pointed out last week, I’m a Sanders guy, but even I have to give Clinton points for her tenacity and resilience. She was the clear winner of Tuesday night’s debate, but it’s still early days yet.Stay tuned.
So now the first Democratic presidential debate has come and gone. It was certainly a relief to watch grownups at work for a change.
We saw informed people with actual governing experience talking about their very real differences on issues, rather than amateurs insulting one another, mouthing bumper-sticker slogans, and throwing red meat to the so-called “base.”In fact, the most memorable moment of the evening was when Sen. Bernie Sanders explicitly passed up the opportunity to slam front-runner Hillary Clinton over the latest in the long series of phony scandals ginned up by the Republicans.“Let me say something that may not be great politics,” Sanders said, “but I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!”Sanders then proceeded to try to re-direct the egregiously shallow celebrity “journalist” Anderson Cooper back to what he called the “real problems facing America”: a collapsing middle class; 27 million Americans living in poverty; and job-killing trade policies. You know, like the ones Secretary Clinton was for before she was against.Acting decently toward an opponent and trying to shame one of the cable news talking heads into focusing on real issues. Now do you see why I love this guy?Sanders, unfortunately, exposed a couple of his own vulnerabilities. The left is going to go after him for being “soft” on gun control and voting against the Brady Bill. The right, and Hillary Clinton, are going to go after him for suggesting we should be more like Denmark, even though survey after survey, year after year, finds that the Danes are the happiest people on Earth. But hey, this is America. Who needs happiness?As for the other candidates, none of them really moved the needle in their direction. Former Sen. Jim Webb stood there looking grumpy and alternating his “Democrats should vote for me because I’m most like the Republicans” theme with complaining that no one was paying him enough attention.Look, I give Sen. Webb full marks for his service, both in the military and in government. I respect his dedication to veterans’ causes. He’s also a heck of a novelist. But his perpetual scowl and his pomposity make Bernie Sanders look downright jolly. He makes himself hard to like, and I’ve given up trying.Former Rhode Island Gov. (and former Republican) Lincoln Chafee had a couple of real cringe-worthy moments.One was when he confidently proclaimed himself a “block of granite,” which someone should tell him is not a real dynamic image. The other was when he blamed his vote in favor of repealing the tattered remnants that remained of the Glass-Steagall banking regulation bill (a move which contributed to the rise of banks that were “too big to fail”) by explaining he’d “just gotten to the Senate” where he’d been appointed after his father’s death.That response was just a slow softball over the plate, practically begging for opponents to hit it out of the park: “So, not ready on Day One?” However, by the time he stumbled into that one, Chafee had made himself so inconsequential that no one cared to even try and swing at the pitch.When Clinton was asked later if she wanted to respond to a Chafee attack on her “credibility,” she just smiled and said “no,” which was the worst burn she could have delivered.As for Martin O’Malley — well, when by the end of the debate, I’m still asking “wait, which one is he again?” then his status as an also-ran is pretty much set in cement.At the end, however, it was Hillary Clinton who was, as she put it, “still standing.” Actually, that should probably be her campaign slogan. After all, she has been since 1992 the target of one bogus, politically motivated investigation/ smear campaign after another.Vince Foster’s death, Travelgate, Cattlegate, Chinagate, Filegate, Whitewater, BenghaziBenghaziBenghazi — the list goes on and on. Every single time, her opponents have rubbed their little hands together, cackling with glee and promising everyone that this time, Hillary Clinton’s going to jail, just you wait and see. And in the end, they come away with … nothing.Every time, investigation has ended up with the investigators slinking away, muttering that they’ve found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing after spending years and millions of taxpayer dollars. As I pointed out last week, I’m a Sanders guy, but even I have to give Clinton points for her tenacity and resilience. She was the clear winner of Tuesday night’s debate, but it’s still early days yet.Stay tuned.
October 16, 2015
Sanders: Right On the First Try
Thepilot.com:
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is definitely from the left. He’s a self-described Scandinavian-style “Democratic Socialist.” He’s adamantly pro-union. He’s for single-payer health care.
But here’s the thing. This guy from the left has been consistently right. He’s been right a lot.He was right on the Iraq War. When Democrats such as Hillary Clinton were eagerly swallowing the Bushista WMD story, spun up as it was out of wishful thinking, dodgy reports from questionable informants, and outright fraud, Bernie Sanders was one of the few people going, “Whoa. Hold on there a minute.”Explaining his reasons for voting against an authorization of military force, Sanders, then a congressman, asked, among other things:“Who will govern Iraq when Saddam Hussein is removed, and what role will the U.S. play in an ensuing civil war that could develop in that country? Will moderate governments in the region who have large Islamic fundamentalist populations be overthrown and replaced by extremists? Will the bloody conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority be exacerbated?”So what happened? There was a civil war in Iraq that still goes on, and moderate governments are battling for their lives against Islamic extremists across the region.Oh, and while the Bushistas were assuring us that the Iraq War would pay for itself and that we probably would be there no longer than six months, Bernie Sanders was pointing out in the same speech that “we should be clear that a war and a long-term American occupation of Iraq could be extremely expensive.” And he was right.Hillary Clinton now says her vote to authorize military action in Iraq was a “mistake.” And on that, she is also right. But Bernie Sanders didn’t make the mistake in the first place.He was right about the Patriot Act. While both Republicans and Democrats raced each other to give more and more of our privacy rights away to prove which one could be more committed to the war on terror than the others, Bernie Sanders voted against the Patriot Act and against the numerous bills extending it.And, like most of us who have been calling attention to the dangers of increasing government surveillance powers since 2001, he has been pilloried by the right as a wacko at best and a terrorist sympathizer at worst, while the Democratic establishment has barely bothered to notice him at all.Then Edward Snowden came along and revealed just a little bit of what the government’s been doing with the power we so blithely gave them, and suddenly we’re all Bernie Sanders.As he says today: “Do we really want to live in a country where the NSA gathers data on virtually every single phone call in the United States — including as many as 5 billion cellphone records per day? I don’t.“Do we really want our government to collect our emails, see our text messages, know everyone’s Internet browsing history, monitor bank and credit card transactions, keep tabs on people’s social networks? I don’t.”And he’s right.He was not only right, but eerily prescient on the Wall Street financial collapse that has been dragging this country down since 2008. As far back as 1998, in a blistering confrontation with Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, said that “Americans should be worried about the gambling practices of Wall Street elites.”He warned that, given the sums of money being recklessly gambled by unregulated banks, the actions of even one man could “cause economic disruption and catastrophe throughout the entire world.”In fact, over the years, Sanders spent a lot of time confronting Greenspan for being out of touch with the economic realities of working people.All that time, the Very Serious People in the government (including Bill and Hillary Clinton) and the “liberal” media (including NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, aka Mrs. Greenspan) were treating Greenspan like some kind of oracle and Sanders like a wild-eyed street preacher standing on a soapbox in the park.But it was Greenspan, after the 2008 crash, who had to go before Congress and admit that he had “found a flaw in his ideology.” This is like the designer of the Hindenburg admitting that he’d “found a flaw” with the idea of using highly explosive hydrogen to lift his airship.If, as seems likely, Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, I’ll vote for her, because (1) I agree with her stances on more issues than I do with any of the Republicans, and (2) on the issues we disagreed on, there’s at least the possibility that she’s learned or can learn better (something that I can’t see anyone from the Republican Clown Car ever doing).Until and unless that happens, however, I’m putting my support behind the guy who was right the first time.
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is definitely from the left. He’s a self-described Scandinavian-style “Democratic Socialist.” He’s adamantly pro-union. He’s for single-payer health care.
But here’s the thing. This guy from the left has been consistently right. He’s been right a lot.He was right on the Iraq War. When Democrats such as Hillary Clinton were eagerly swallowing the Bushista WMD story, spun up as it was out of wishful thinking, dodgy reports from questionable informants, and outright fraud, Bernie Sanders was one of the few people going, “Whoa. Hold on there a minute.”Explaining his reasons for voting against an authorization of military force, Sanders, then a congressman, asked, among other things:“Who will govern Iraq when Saddam Hussein is removed, and what role will the U.S. play in an ensuing civil war that could develop in that country? Will moderate governments in the region who have large Islamic fundamentalist populations be overthrown and replaced by extremists? Will the bloody conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority be exacerbated?”So what happened? There was a civil war in Iraq that still goes on, and moderate governments are battling for their lives against Islamic extremists across the region.Oh, and while the Bushistas were assuring us that the Iraq War would pay for itself and that we probably would be there no longer than six months, Bernie Sanders was pointing out in the same speech that “we should be clear that a war and a long-term American occupation of Iraq could be extremely expensive.” And he was right.Hillary Clinton now says her vote to authorize military action in Iraq was a “mistake.” And on that, she is also right. But Bernie Sanders didn’t make the mistake in the first place.He was right about the Patriot Act. While both Republicans and Democrats raced each other to give more and more of our privacy rights away to prove which one could be more committed to the war on terror than the others, Bernie Sanders voted against the Patriot Act and against the numerous bills extending it.And, like most of us who have been calling attention to the dangers of increasing government surveillance powers since 2001, he has been pilloried by the right as a wacko at best and a terrorist sympathizer at worst, while the Democratic establishment has barely bothered to notice him at all.Then Edward Snowden came along and revealed just a little bit of what the government’s been doing with the power we so blithely gave them, and suddenly we’re all Bernie Sanders.As he says today: “Do we really want to live in a country where the NSA gathers data on virtually every single phone call in the United States — including as many as 5 billion cellphone records per day? I don’t.“Do we really want our government to collect our emails, see our text messages, know everyone’s Internet browsing history, monitor bank and credit card transactions, keep tabs on people’s social networks? I don’t.”And he’s right.He was not only right, but eerily prescient on the Wall Street financial collapse that has been dragging this country down since 2008. As far back as 1998, in a blistering confrontation with Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, said that “Americans should be worried about the gambling practices of Wall Street elites.”He warned that, given the sums of money being recklessly gambled by unregulated banks, the actions of even one man could “cause economic disruption and catastrophe throughout the entire world.”In fact, over the years, Sanders spent a lot of time confronting Greenspan for being out of touch with the economic realities of working people.All that time, the Very Serious People in the government (including Bill and Hillary Clinton) and the “liberal” media (including NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, aka Mrs. Greenspan) were treating Greenspan like some kind of oracle and Sanders like a wild-eyed street preacher standing on a soapbox in the park.But it was Greenspan, after the 2008 crash, who had to go before Congress and admit that he had “found a flaw in his ideology.” This is like the designer of the Hindenburg admitting that he’d “found a flaw” with the idea of using highly explosive hydrogen to lift his airship.If, as seems likely, Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, I’ll vote for her, because (1) I agree with her stances on more issues than I do with any of the Republicans, and (2) on the issues we disagreed on, there’s at least the possibility that she’s learned or can learn better (something that I can’t see anyone from the Republican Clown Car ever doing).Until and unless that happens, however, I’m putting my support behind the guy who was right the first time.
October 4, 2015
Orange Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (With the Usual Idiotic Poo Flinging by the Right Wing Monkeys)
The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion
On Friday, Sept. 25, Speaker of the House John Boehner stunned everyone (including, it seems, members of his own staff) when he announced that he was resigning not only his speakership, but also his seat in Congress, effective at the end of October.Perhaps the most revealing thing about Boehner’s resignation was the way he approached the podium to announce it. The man best known for bursting into tears at the slightest provocation strode jauntily to the podium, nearly skipping, smiling as he literally sang, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”“I used to sing that on my way to work every morning,” he added.From the way he said it, it’s clear he hadn’t done so in a long time. And who can blame him? I’ve frequently slammed Boehner for being the most ineffective speaker of the House in that body’s long history. But I’m not sure that there is any way to actually lead a caucus that’s contained such egregious looney tunes as Michele Bachmann and that still plays host to paranoid whack jobs like Louie Gohmert and Steve King. Not, at least, without a tranquilizer dart gun and a 55-gallon oil drumfull of antipsychotic medication, both of which I’m pretty sure are against the House rules.I mean, how do you realistically lead people who sincerely tell themselves and each other that “even though it’s never worked before, if we shut the government down this time, the Senate will go along, Obama will cave in and allow Planned Parenthood to be defunded, and everyone will love us. And after that, we’ll hold yet another vote to repeal Obamacare”? If insanity is defined as doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then this Congress is indeed the country’s best-dressed lunatic asylum.Then again, maybe I’ve been exactly as hard on Orange John as he deserves. Compare his leadership, for example, with that of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She has had some wild-eyed, die-hard fanatics in her caucus. Dennis Kucinich and Bart Stupak come immediately to mind. And yet, when the crucial vote for the Affordable Care Act came up, Pelosi could get her people lined up and deliver the votes for a bill some of them had previously said they hated and wouldn’t vote for.Whether you like Pelosi or loathe her, that’s what an effective speaker does. In fact, I strongly believe her effectiveness is exactly why the right-wing howler monkeys start screeching and flinging poo at the mere mention of her name. Boehner, in contrast, can’t get his people to stop grandstanding and posturing long enough to vote for things as simple as keeping the government open and paying the debts the country has already incurred.So what happens now? Well, as the old song goes, “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” Since Mr. Boehner will soon shake the dust of the place off his feet and put the crazies in his rearview mirror, it looks like he’s going to dare to work with both Democrats and the few sane Republicans in the meantime to pass a “clean” funding bill that keeps the government running for a little while longer. You know, do some actual governing.After that, however, things might just get ugly. There don’t seem to be any candidates for the speakership, at least as of this writing, who have the gumption to sit their people down and go, “Look, we’re not going to do another show vote to repeal Obamacare, we’re not going to shut down the government again because that just makes us look stupid, and let’s face it, if the longest special committee investigation in congressional history hasn’t hung the Benghazi murders around Hillary Clinton’s neck by now, it’s not going to happen. So can we actually try to get some stuff done, even if it means trying to get some Democratic votes?”No, I fear that the Republican-“led” House of Representatives is going to sink further into delusion and anarchy. There’ll most likely be another threat of a government shutdown and maybe even default when the next funding bill runs out, just in time for Christmas. They may actually figure out a way to drive Congress’s approval rating into negative numbers.Yeah, that’ll show that rascal Obama.
THE HOWLER MONKEYS SHRIEK AND PROVE MY POINT: The idiot who calls himself "Lenny Bo" once again weighs in to tell an uncaring world how much he hates the column he faithfully reads every week:Dusty,
I am one of millions that loathes the mindless Nancy Pelosi. If she is your model of a good leader, then we are all in trouble.As usual, the howler monkeys prove my point with every comment.Obamacare was cited as an example where she got all the dems in line for a vote. How exactly did she do that? Well, she herself said that the bill had to be passed before they read it! Some leadership skills - keep the sheep in the dark and feed them BS.And get ready Dusty - when the committee busts the lid off of 'ol Hellery's antics, I expect you to write a similar column on her leadership skills.You know, the wingnuts have predicted Hillary Clinton's downfall since 1992. She's been investigated and investigated and investigated again, over "Travelgate," Vince Foster, Whitewater, Benghazi etc, etc, and...nothing. But with the conviction of the truly obsessed, they tell us THIS one, by God, will get her. As I said above, they're "doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result." And that's why I call them wingnuts.
Frequent fuckwit "fugitiveguy" weighs in:
DR doesn't seem inclined to write about Hillary. If I remember correctly he supported her over BHO in the early going in 2007.
What utter bullshit. I supported Obama from the beginning, and I've written a lot about Hillary, not a lot of it complimentary. Once again, it seems that "conservatism" is a form of brain damage wherein they lose the ability to remember anything.
On Friday, Sept. 25, Speaker of the House John Boehner stunned everyone (including, it seems, members of his own staff) when he announced that he was resigning not only his speakership, but also his seat in Congress, effective at the end of October.Perhaps the most revealing thing about Boehner’s resignation was the way he approached the podium to announce it. The man best known for bursting into tears at the slightest provocation strode jauntily to the podium, nearly skipping, smiling as he literally sang, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”“I used to sing that on my way to work every morning,” he added.From the way he said it, it’s clear he hadn’t done so in a long time. And who can blame him? I’ve frequently slammed Boehner for being the most ineffective speaker of the House in that body’s long history. But I’m not sure that there is any way to actually lead a caucus that’s contained such egregious looney tunes as Michele Bachmann and that still plays host to paranoid whack jobs like Louie Gohmert and Steve King. Not, at least, without a tranquilizer dart gun and a 55-gallon oil drumfull of antipsychotic medication, both of which I’m pretty sure are against the House rules.I mean, how do you realistically lead people who sincerely tell themselves and each other that “even though it’s never worked before, if we shut the government down this time, the Senate will go along, Obama will cave in and allow Planned Parenthood to be defunded, and everyone will love us. And after that, we’ll hold yet another vote to repeal Obamacare”? If insanity is defined as doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then this Congress is indeed the country’s best-dressed lunatic asylum.Then again, maybe I’ve been exactly as hard on Orange John as he deserves. Compare his leadership, for example, with that of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She has had some wild-eyed, die-hard fanatics in her caucus. Dennis Kucinich and Bart Stupak come immediately to mind. And yet, when the crucial vote for the Affordable Care Act came up, Pelosi could get her people lined up and deliver the votes for a bill some of them had previously said they hated and wouldn’t vote for.Whether you like Pelosi or loathe her, that’s what an effective speaker does. In fact, I strongly believe her effectiveness is exactly why the right-wing howler monkeys start screeching and flinging poo at the mere mention of her name. Boehner, in contrast, can’t get his people to stop grandstanding and posturing long enough to vote for things as simple as keeping the government open and paying the debts the country has already incurred.So what happens now? Well, as the old song goes, “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” Since Mr. Boehner will soon shake the dust of the place off his feet and put the crazies in his rearview mirror, it looks like he’s going to dare to work with both Democrats and the few sane Republicans in the meantime to pass a “clean” funding bill that keeps the government running for a little while longer. You know, do some actual governing.After that, however, things might just get ugly. There don’t seem to be any candidates for the speakership, at least as of this writing, who have the gumption to sit their people down and go, “Look, we’re not going to do another show vote to repeal Obamacare, we’re not going to shut down the government again because that just makes us look stupid, and let’s face it, if the longest special committee investigation in congressional history hasn’t hung the Benghazi murders around Hillary Clinton’s neck by now, it’s not going to happen. So can we actually try to get some stuff done, even if it means trying to get some Democratic votes?”No, I fear that the Republican-“led” House of Representatives is going to sink further into delusion and anarchy. There’ll most likely be another threat of a government shutdown and maybe even default when the next funding bill runs out, just in time for Christmas. They may actually figure out a way to drive Congress’s approval rating into negative numbers.Yeah, that’ll show that rascal Obama.
THE HOWLER MONKEYS SHRIEK AND PROVE MY POINT: The idiot who calls himself "Lenny Bo" once again weighs in to tell an uncaring world how much he hates the column he faithfully reads every week:Dusty,
I am one of millions that loathes the mindless Nancy Pelosi. If she is your model of a good leader, then we are all in trouble.As usual, the howler monkeys prove my point with every comment.Obamacare was cited as an example where she got all the dems in line for a vote. How exactly did she do that? Well, she herself said that the bill had to be passed before they read it! Some leadership skills - keep the sheep in the dark and feed them BS.And get ready Dusty - when the committee busts the lid off of 'ol Hellery's antics, I expect you to write a similar column on her leadership skills.You know, the wingnuts have predicted Hillary Clinton's downfall since 1992. She's been investigated and investigated and investigated again, over "Travelgate," Vince Foster, Whitewater, Benghazi etc, etc, and...nothing. But with the conviction of the truly obsessed, they tell us THIS one, by God, will get her. As I said above, they're "doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result." And that's why I call them wingnuts.
Frequent fuckwit "fugitiveguy" weighs in:
DR doesn't seem inclined to write about Hillary. If I remember correctly he supported her over BHO in the early going in 2007.
What utter bullshit. I supported Obama from the beginning, and I've written a lot about Hillary, not a lot of it complimentary. Once again, it seems that "conservatism" is a form of brain damage wherein they lose the ability to remember anything.
September 29, 2015
Ben Carson: Gump Republican
The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion
Dr. Ben Carson is not a stupid man.
He’s a world-class pediatric brain surgeon. He’s a graduate of Yale University, the University of Michigan Medical School, and the residency program of Johns Hopkins Medical School. He’s been elected into the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine. The list of his honors goes on and on.No, Dr. Ben Carson is not a stupid man. So why is he talking like one?For instance, although he’s obviously had rigorous scientific training at some of this country’s finest institutions of higher learning, Carson continues to publicly embrace what’s called “young Earth creationism,” a theory which asserts that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, despite the fossil records and the fact that there are observable objects in the universe (such as long-period comets), all of which are clearly much older. He’s described the Big Bang Theory as “part of a fairy tale.”I’m reasonably sure the good doctor is talking about the generally accepted explanation of the origin of our observable universe, not the TV show. The TV show, which tells the story of brilliant but socially awkward nerds who end up having smoking-hot women fall in love with them, is definitely a fairy tale. But I digress.Dr. Carson has also described the Affordable Care Act as the “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”Now, we know that Dr. Carson is far too intelligent a man to really believe that a law that keeps insurance companies from denying you coverage based on pre-existing conditions is exactly like being forced to pick cotton from sunup to sundown under the threat of brutal flogging if you don’t do enough, having your wives and daughters subject to constant rape, and living under the pervasive fear of having your family broken up and sold to someone hundreds of miles away. Only a stupid person would believe those things are even remotely comparable, and we know Dr. Carson’s not stupid.Just lately, Dr. Carson told NBC’s Chuck Todd he didn’t think a Muslim should ever be president. “I absolutely would not agree with that,” he said. Later, he told the online magazine The Hill that a president should be “sworn in on a stack of Bibles, not a Quran.”Now, I’m sure that Dr. Carson, a highly intelligent man who claims to revere the U.S. Constitution, is aware of Article VI of that precious document, which states explicitly that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” I mean, he has to have read the Constitution, right? And understood it?So why is Ben Carson saying all of these silly things? Well, he’s not simple-minded, but the rise of Donald Trump shows us that a substantial number of the GOP primary voters apparently are. They’re what I call the “Forrest Gump” Republicans. Remember that movie? It was another in a long line of stories that have fed and bolstered the uniquely American mythology of the naïve half-wit who’s yet somehow more “wise” than the clever but wicked people all around them. (You can probably tell I’m not a fan of the movie.)Rick Santorum, who you may be surprised to know is also running for president this year, served up that trope with an extra side order of resentment back in 2012 when he told the Values Summit, “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”At one point, it seemed that the GOP was trying to shed that image. It was Bobby Jindal — who, you also may or may not remember, is himself a presidential candidate — who said that the GOP needed to stop being “the stupid party.” We all see where that attitude’s gotten him. He’s polling slightly lower than toenail fungus. So the upper tier of Republican candidates has apparently given up and decided to go full-out Gump.Ben Carson is not stupid. But he needs stupid people to vote for him. And that’s why he says the things he does.
Dr. Ben Carson is not a stupid man.
He’s a world-class pediatric brain surgeon. He’s a graduate of Yale University, the University of Michigan Medical School, and the residency program of Johns Hopkins Medical School. He’s been elected into the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine. The list of his honors goes on and on.No, Dr. Ben Carson is not a stupid man. So why is he talking like one?For instance, although he’s obviously had rigorous scientific training at some of this country’s finest institutions of higher learning, Carson continues to publicly embrace what’s called “young Earth creationism,” a theory which asserts that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, despite the fossil records and the fact that there are observable objects in the universe (such as long-period comets), all of which are clearly much older. He’s described the Big Bang Theory as “part of a fairy tale.”I’m reasonably sure the good doctor is talking about the generally accepted explanation of the origin of our observable universe, not the TV show. The TV show, which tells the story of brilliant but socially awkward nerds who end up having smoking-hot women fall in love with them, is definitely a fairy tale. But I digress.Dr. Carson has also described the Affordable Care Act as the “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”Now, we know that Dr. Carson is far too intelligent a man to really believe that a law that keeps insurance companies from denying you coverage based on pre-existing conditions is exactly like being forced to pick cotton from sunup to sundown under the threat of brutal flogging if you don’t do enough, having your wives and daughters subject to constant rape, and living under the pervasive fear of having your family broken up and sold to someone hundreds of miles away. Only a stupid person would believe those things are even remotely comparable, and we know Dr. Carson’s not stupid.Just lately, Dr. Carson told NBC’s Chuck Todd he didn’t think a Muslim should ever be president. “I absolutely would not agree with that,” he said. Later, he told the online magazine The Hill that a president should be “sworn in on a stack of Bibles, not a Quran.”Now, I’m sure that Dr. Carson, a highly intelligent man who claims to revere the U.S. Constitution, is aware of Article VI of that precious document, which states explicitly that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” I mean, he has to have read the Constitution, right? And understood it?So why is Ben Carson saying all of these silly things? Well, he’s not simple-minded, but the rise of Donald Trump shows us that a substantial number of the GOP primary voters apparently are. They’re what I call the “Forrest Gump” Republicans. Remember that movie? It was another in a long line of stories that have fed and bolstered the uniquely American mythology of the naïve half-wit who’s yet somehow more “wise” than the clever but wicked people all around them. (You can probably tell I’m not a fan of the movie.)Rick Santorum, who you may be surprised to know is also running for president this year, served up that trope with an extra side order of resentment back in 2012 when he told the Values Summit, “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”At one point, it seemed that the GOP was trying to shed that image. It was Bobby Jindal — who, you also may or may not remember, is himself a presidential candidate — who said that the GOP needed to stop being “the stupid party.” We all see where that attitude’s gotten him. He’s polling slightly lower than toenail fungus. So the upper tier of Republican candidates has apparently given up and decided to go full-out Gump.Ben Carson is not stupid. But he needs stupid people to vote for him. And that’s why he says the things he does.
September 20, 2015
Ready To Do What It Takes? Not Hardly
The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion
Folks, I am going to tell y’all a secret, something that will shock and amaze you. It’ll rock your world and possibly cause you to question everything you thought you knew. In fact, if you’re not sitting down while reading this, maybe you should.Sometimes I actually agree with Robert M. Levy.I know, I know, it surprises me too when I look across the page at my staunchly Republican fellow Pilot columnist, read the piece next to mine, and go, “Hmmm, he may have something there.”Oh, it doesn’t happen all the time — in fact, probably not most of the time. But I agree, for example, that we shouldn’t be undercutting the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, even as we disagree on how bad it is. Bob seems to think it’s terrible; I find it merely mediocre. But we both agree that the alternative of no deal at all is worse.I also agree, to a point, with his assertion in last week’s column that there’s a power vacuum in the Middle East that’s making it easier for ISIS to commit atrocity after atrocity, and creating a refugee crisis of a size and urgency not seen since World War II.The question I’d like to address in response however, is why. Bob seems to blame President Obama. I don’t think that tells the whole story. And no, I’m not blaming George Dubbya Bush, either — at least not entirely. I think the problem is bigger and wider than any one president or party.Bob’s column recalls the spectacle of “American and Allied forces liberating Paris” and of the days when “America became the liberator of the free world as kisses were exchanged in Times Square.”So far, so good. But remember what it took for us to do all that. The attack on Pearl Harbor shocked America almost overnight onto a war footing. As civilians lined up to sign up, our homeland standard of living changed drastically. Auto plants switched from making cars to making tanks and other war machines. New tires became nearly impossible to get. Kids collected scrap metal. Gas and foodstuffs were rationed. Buying war bonds became a patriotic duty.
And then, when the last German and Japanese soldiers had laid down their arms, we poured hundreds of billions of dollars into rebuilding their countries, because we knew that impoverished and broken countries were ripe pickings for the Soviets.Can you imagine something like that happening now, in response to ISIS? Dear Lord, when the president endorsed a voluntary national public service program, he was accused of trying to create a new SS. His wife endorsed healthy eating and exercise, and suddenly right-wing pundits were screaming about “tyranny” and declaring it a sacred American right to raise a generation of roly-poly little couch potatoes.We can’t even conduct a military training exercise in the Southwest without a pack of loonies — some of them in the U.S. Congress — taking to the airwaves and Internet to declare that it’s an invasion of the U.S. by its own Army. Oh, and support for “foreign aid”? Fuhgeddaboutit.You want a World War II level response to ISIS butchery? You’re going to need a World War II level of citizen participation, sacrifice, and yes, money. And We the People haven’t been ready to do that for a long, long time.It didn’t begin with the Obama administration. It didn’t even really begin with the George Dubbya Bush reign of error, although we did see quite a bit of the same unwillingness to even ask the people for sacrifice. Even after 9/11, Dubbya suggested we should just go about our lives, go shopping even. In the run-up to Dubbya’s Wacky Iraqi Adventure, we were assured, falsely, that “Iraq will pay for its own reconstruction” (Paul Wolfowitz), and that it was doubtful that the war would last six months (Donald Rumsfeld).But, no, it didn’t start with them. It took years of short, easy-to-win conflicts against laughably weak opponents like Panama and Grenada to lull us into the feeling that the projection of American power and leadership is something that can be done on the cheap, something we could watch from our La-Z-Boy recliners before flipping over to watch “Jeopardy.”So the next time someone compares ISIS to the Nazis and demands that “American leadership” be used to defeat it, take a moment to think about what it took last time and ask them: Will you, personally, make the kind of sacrifices Americans had to make to defeat that enemy? Are you willing to pull together, even under a president you didn’t vote for, to make that happen? If not, then maybe in the words of the old saying, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Folks, I am going to tell y’all a secret, something that will shock and amaze you. It’ll rock your world and possibly cause you to question everything you thought you knew. In fact, if you’re not sitting down while reading this, maybe you should.Sometimes I actually agree with Robert M. Levy.I know, I know, it surprises me too when I look across the page at my staunchly Republican fellow Pilot columnist, read the piece next to mine, and go, “Hmmm, he may have something there.”Oh, it doesn’t happen all the time — in fact, probably not most of the time. But I agree, for example, that we shouldn’t be undercutting the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, even as we disagree on how bad it is. Bob seems to think it’s terrible; I find it merely mediocre. But we both agree that the alternative of no deal at all is worse.I also agree, to a point, with his assertion in last week’s column that there’s a power vacuum in the Middle East that’s making it easier for ISIS to commit atrocity after atrocity, and creating a refugee crisis of a size and urgency not seen since World War II.The question I’d like to address in response however, is why. Bob seems to blame President Obama. I don’t think that tells the whole story. And no, I’m not blaming George Dubbya Bush, either — at least not entirely. I think the problem is bigger and wider than any one president or party.Bob’s column recalls the spectacle of “American and Allied forces liberating Paris” and of the days when “America became the liberator of the free world as kisses were exchanged in Times Square.”So far, so good. But remember what it took for us to do all that. The attack on Pearl Harbor shocked America almost overnight onto a war footing. As civilians lined up to sign up, our homeland standard of living changed drastically. Auto plants switched from making cars to making tanks and other war machines. New tires became nearly impossible to get. Kids collected scrap metal. Gas and foodstuffs were rationed. Buying war bonds became a patriotic duty.
And then, when the last German and Japanese soldiers had laid down their arms, we poured hundreds of billions of dollars into rebuilding their countries, because we knew that impoverished and broken countries were ripe pickings for the Soviets.Can you imagine something like that happening now, in response to ISIS? Dear Lord, when the president endorsed a voluntary national public service program, he was accused of trying to create a new SS. His wife endorsed healthy eating and exercise, and suddenly right-wing pundits were screaming about “tyranny” and declaring it a sacred American right to raise a generation of roly-poly little couch potatoes.We can’t even conduct a military training exercise in the Southwest without a pack of loonies — some of them in the U.S. Congress — taking to the airwaves and Internet to declare that it’s an invasion of the U.S. by its own Army. Oh, and support for “foreign aid”? Fuhgeddaboutit.You want a World War II level response to ISIS butchery? You’re going to need a World War II level of citizen participation, sacrifice, and yes, money. And We the People haven’t been ready to do that for a long, long time.It didn’t begin with the Obama administration. It didn’t even really begin with the George Dubbya Bush reign of error, although we did see quite a bit of the same unwillingness to even ask the people for sacrifice. Even after 9/11, Dubbya suggested we should just go about our lives, go shopping even. In the run-up to Dubbya’s Wacky Iraqi Adventure, we were assured, falsely, that “Iraq will pay for its own reconstruction” (Paul Wolfowitz), and that it was doubtful that the war would last six months (Donald Rumsfeld).But, no, it didn’t start with them. It took years of short, easy-to-win conflicts against laughably weak opponents like Panama and Grenada to lull us into the feeling that the projection of American power and leadership is something that can be done on the cheap, something we could watch from our La-Z-Boy recliners before flipping over to watch “Jeopardy.”So the next time someone compares ISIS to the Nazis and demands that “American leadership” be used to defeat it, take a moment to think about what it took last time and ask them: Will you, personally, make the kind of sacrifices Americans had to make to defeat that enemy? Are you willing to pull together, even under a president you didn’t vote for, to make that happen? If not, then maybe in the words of the old saying, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
September 13, 2015
Scott Walkback's Comedy Circus
The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion
Scott Walker hasn’t been getting a lot of attention lately, even from the people who once touted him as a serious contender for the GOP nomination.No one’s really paid a lot of attention to what he has to say, because let’s face it, when the circus (i.e., Donald Trump) is in town, no one wants to go to a boring lecture on policy. His poll numbers have been slipping into the low single digits, so it seems that Walker decided he needed to strap on his own clown shoes, stick on the big red nose, and get some attention from the hoopleheads.First, he began suggesting to NBC’s Chuck Todd that maybe we don’t just need a fence on the southern border, to keep out the Brown Horde the Republicans have been using as the bogeyman in this election cycle. We may need one along the even longer northern border with Canada, to keep out the terrorists.Asked, almost facetiously, by Todd about the possibility of a northern wall, Walker suggested with a straight face that that might be a fine idea.“Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire,” he said. “They raised some very legitimate concerns. … So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.”Doggone right. We really should look at putting up 5,525 miles of concrete, barbed wire and guard towers to keep those syrup-sucking back-bacon-eaters from pouring across our sacred northern borders and forcing single-payer health care and Rush albums down our throats.Confronted with widespread derision, even from his own party, on the issue, Walker, fresh off his performance a couple of weeks ago in which he took three different positions on birthright citizenship in two days, began the Romneyesque tapdance of denial and evasion that’s caused me to begin referring to him as “Scott Walkback.”“I never talked about a wall to the north,” he claimed, two days after he’d done exactly that.Then Walker fell back on the time-honored tactic of, “Let’s find something terrible and horrifying and try to blame it on Barack Obama.” He pointed to the murders of police officers Darren Goforth of Texas and Charles Joseph Gliniewicz of Illinois, and blamed the “disturbing trend of police officers being murdered on the job” on Obama’s “anti-police rhetoric.”It should be noted that, as usual, Walker failed to provide any specific statements from the president that are “anti-police” or any evidence whatsoever that these terrible crimes were a result of anything other than plain criminality.“This isn’t the America I grew up in,” Walker claimed.Thing is, though, the America Walker grew up in was actually more dangerous for cops than it is now. There have been fewer shooting deaths of police officers during the Obama administration than there were at this point in the George Dubbya Bush administration, just as there were fewer shootings of cops under Dubbya than there were under Clinton.The trend has been going down, significantly, for years. The Washington Post’s Radley Balko analyzed the numbers and found that “between 1971 and 1975, when Walker would have been between age 4 and 8, an average of 125 police officers were feloniously killed per year. Between 2006 and 2010, the average was 50. In 2013, just 27 officers were feloniously killed. In 2014, it was 51. So far this year, the number of cops killed with firearms is down 16 percent from last year. Two of those officers were killed by other cops.”So why does it seem like there’s a big jump in people killing police officers when the actual number is trending down? The same reason we have a huge shark scare every summer. The sensation-driven national media can make anything look like an epidemic if they report every single instance of it as part of a “disturbing trend” — where before, the individual stories would have been left to local news.The national media profit hugely on fear. And, not coincidentally, so do Republican demagogues like Walker. His only problem is that Trump’s doing it bigger, and with a total lack of boundaries or shame.Maybe Walker can pull himself out of his slide. But if you’re going to try to get the spotlight off Trump, you gotta go big. You’ve got to do something to get the rubes excited. Maybe he could remind us of his track record in Wisconsin by punching a teacher in the face. Wingnuts hate teachers, but they hate Mexicans more. So find a Latino teacher to clobber.
Do that, Governor, and you can get back in there.
THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: As he does nearly every week, Pilot commenter "Lenny Bo" can't wait to tell everyone how uninteresting he finds the column he reads every week:
Walker won't last another couple of months as his poll numbers are dropping fast - he will simply go back to being governor of Wisconsin.
Hey Dusty - how about a similar piece on Hillery - her poll numbers are dropping fast too. Plus she imitates Walker by saying one thing, then doing another (learned this from Bill), she flip-flopped on the emailgate scandal, the list goes on an on. In fact Dusty, if you think about it, there is plenty of material for a dozen pieces on 'ol Hillery.Well, I've done quite a few pieces on Hillary Clinton, and I've managed to spell her name correctly. This is yet more evidence that wingnuts suffer from that weird kind of brain damage portrayed in the movie "Memento" where they can't form memories, since they're constantly bitching "Why don't you write about [insert obsession here]" when I already have. It's the same form of brain damage that causes then to demand why President Obama hasn't said anything about violence to law enforcement officers when he has done so, repeatedly.
Scott Walker hasn’t been getting a lot of attention lately, even from the people who once touted him as a serious contender for the GOP nomination.No one’s really paid a lot of attention to what he has to say, because let’s face it, when the circus (i.e., Donald Trump) is in town, no one wants to go to a boring lecture on policy. His poll numbers have been slipping into the low single digits, so it seems that Walker decided he needed to strap on his own clown shoes, stick on the big red nose, and get some attention from the hoopleheads.First, he began suggesting to NBC’s Chuck Todd that maybe we don’t just need a fence on the southern border, to keep out the Brown Horde the Republicans have been using as the bogeyman in this election cycle. We may need one along the even longer northern border with Canada, to keep out the terrorists.Asked, almost facetiously, by Todd about the possibility of a northern wall, Walker suggested with a straight face that that might be a fine idea.“Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire,” he said. “They raised some very legitimate concerns. … So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.”Doggone right. We really should look at putting up 5,525 miles of concrete, barbed wire and guard towers to keep those syrup-sucking back-bacon-eaters from pouring across our sacred northern borders and forcing single-payer health care and Rush albums down our throats.Confronted with widespread derision, even from his own party, on the issue, Walker, fresh off his performance a couple of weeks ago in which he took three different positions on birthright citizenship in two days, began the Romneyesque tapdance of denial and evasion that’s caused me to begin referring to him as “Scott Walkback.”“I never talked about a wall to the north,” he claimed, two days after he’d done exactly that.Then Walker fell back on the time-honored tactic of, “Let’s find something terrible and horrifying and try to blame it on Barack Obama.” He pointed to the murders of police officers Darren Goforth of Texas and Charles Joseph Gliniewicz of Illinois, and blamed the “disturbing trend of police officers being murdered on the job” on Obama’s “anti-police rhetoric.”It should be noted that, as usual, Walker failed to provide any specific statements from the president that are “anti-police” or any evidence whatsoever that these terrible crimes were a result of anything other than plain criminality.“This isn’t the America I grew up in,” Walker claimed.Thing is, though, the America Walker grew up in was actually more dangerous for cops than it is now. There have been fewer shooting deaths of police officers during the Obama administration than there were at this point in the George Dubbya Bush administration, just as there were fewer shootings of cops under Dubbya than there were under Clinton.The trend has been going down, significantly, for years. The Washington Post’s Radley Balko analyzed the numbers and found that “between 1971 and 1975, when Walker would have been between age 4 and 8, an average of 125 police officers were feloniously killed per year. Between 2006 and 2010, the average was 50. In 2013, just 27 officers were feloniously killed. In 2014, it was 51. So far this year, the number of cops killed with firearms is down 16 percent from last year. Two of those officers were killed by other cops.”So why does it seem like there’s a big jump in people killing police officers when the actual number is trending down? The same reason we have a huge shark scare every summer. The sensation-driven national media can make anything look like an epidemic if they report every single instance of it as part of a “disturbing trend” — where before, the individual stories would have been left to local news.The national media profit hugely on fear. And, not coincidentally, so do Republican demagogues like Walker. His only problem is that Trump’s doing it bigger, and with a total lack of boundaries or shame.Maybe Walker can pull himself out of his slide. But if you’re going to try to get the spotlight off Trump, you gotta go big. You’ve got to do something to get the rubes excited. Maybe he could remind us of his track record in Wisconsin by punching a teacher in the face. Wingnuts hate teachers, but they hate Mexicans more. So find a Latino teacher to clobber.
Do that, Governor, and you can get back in there.
THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: As he does nearly every week, Pilot commenter "Lenny Bo" can't wait to tell everyone how uninteresting he finds the column he reads every week:
Walker won't last another couple of months as his poll numbers are dropping fast - he will simply go back to being governor of Wisconsin.
Hey Dusty - how about a similar piece on Hillery - her poll numbers are dropping fast too. Plus she imitates Walker by saying one thing, then doing another (learned this from Bill), she flip-flopped on the emailgate scandal, the list goes on an on. In fact Dusty, if you think about it, there is plenty of material for a dozen pieces on 'ol Hillery.Well, I've done quite a few pieces on Hillary Clinton, and I've managed to spell her name correctly. This is yet more evidence that wingnuts suffer from that weird kind of brain damage portrayed in the movie "Memento" where they can't form memories, since they're constantly bitching "Why don't you write about [insert obsession here]" when I already have. It's the same form of brain damage that causes then to demand why President Obama hasn't said anything about violence to law enforcement officers when he has done so, repeatedly.
September 7, 2015
A Constitutional Inconvenience?
The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion
Right-wingers love to talk about how much they love the Constitution. But while they may love it, sometimes it seems like they don’t like it very much.Bring up the protections of the Fourth through Eighth Amendments, and they’ll tell you that “we give too many rights to criminals.” They’re not all that crazy about the 16th Amendment, which establishes the government’s right to levy income taxes.In fact, the only Amendment they seem to like is the Second, and they treat the first half of that (about the “well-regulated militia”) as if it were an embarrassing relative whom they don’t like to talk about very much.The latest thing the wingnuts don’t like about the Constitution is the 14th Amendment, which provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”That “all persons” provision means that if you’re born here, you’re an American. Period. This Constitutional principle, commonly known as “birthright citizenship,” has become problematic for people who spend most of their waking hours terrified of the tide of Scary Brown People Who’ve Come to Take Our Stuff.Donald Trump, as the current de facto leader of the Republican Party, brought the issue to the forefront. Following up on his famous “they’re rapists” comment, he laid out his plan for dealing with the estimated 11 million people already here illegally: “They have to go.”Asked about what happens to those whose children were born here, Trump, a good family man if ever there was one, claimed we’d keep families together, but “they have to go.” When Bill O’Reilly pressed him on the question of deporting actual U.S. citizens, Trump blithely hand-waved away 147 years of 14th Amendment precedent, telling O’Reilly that “very good lawyers” had told him calling them citizens is “not going to hold up in court.”Yes, folks, you heard right. The 14th Amendment, which clearly states that if you’re born here you’re a citizen won’t survive constitutional scrutiny, according to unidentified “very good lawyers.” In other words, Donald Trump apparently thinks the Constitution itself is unconstitutional.This is, of course, utter claptrap, and deserving of nothing but scorn and derision. But since the majority of the Republican field are like rudderless sailboats that blow hither and yon in the wind that emanates from Donald Trump’s wherever, they began rushing to assure us that they, too, either didn’t believe in birthright citizenship at all or that they thought it needed to be done away with.“We need to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants,” Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign declared on Twitter. Dr. Ben Carson told Breitbart.com that “it doesn’t make any sense to me that people could come in here, have a baby and that baby becomes an American citizen.” Sen. Lindsey Graham took a moment off from gibbering about Islamic terrorists under everyone’s bed to say, “I think it’s a bad practice to give citizenship based on birth.”Former Sen. Rick Santorum insists that we don’t have to amend the Constitution to do away with birthright citizenship. We “merely have to pass a law.” I guess this is true if by passing a statute we can change the literal meaning of the words “all persons born” to “all white persons born.”For his part, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker seemed to be vying for the coveted Mitt Romney Ribbon for Campaign Weaselry. Walker told NBC reporter Kasie Hunt in response to a direct question that we should “absolutely” abolish birthright citizenship. Later, however, he said to CNBC he is “not taking a position on it one way or the other.” Still later, he took a third stance with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, answering “no” when asked if we should “repeal or modify” the 14th Amendment—but only after Stephanopoulos had asked him three times.But remember folks: Only Democrats flip-flop. Republicans “evolve.” Walker’s “evolving” before our eyes like something that came out of an egg in a bad horror film.I well remember the screaming tantrum the Republicans threw when it was revealed that Barack Obama once called the Constitution as originally written “an imperfect document … that reflects some deep flaws in American culture, the Colonial culture nascent at that time.”He was, of course, talking about the way the original document embraced slavery as an institution, but from the way Rush Limbaugh and others reacted, you’d have thought the president had proposed using the sacred text to line the White House birdcage before setting it on fire.Amazing, though, how disposable the beloved Constitution becomes when it comes to getting at the Scary Brown People — and their children. Principles you discard when inconvenient to your prejudices are not principles at all.
Right-wingers love to talk about how much they love the Constitution. But while they may love it, sometimes it seems like they don’t like it very much.Bring up the protections of the Fourth through Eighth Amendments, and they’ll tell you that “we give too many rights to criminals.” They’re not all that crazy about the 16th Amendment, which establishes the government’s right to levy income taxes.In fact, the only Amendment they seem to like is the Second, and they treat the first half of that (about the “well-regulated militia”) as if it were an embarrassing relative whom they don’t like to talk about very much.The latest thing the wingnuts don’t like about the Constitution is the 14th Amendment, which provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”That “all persons” provision means that if you’re born here, you’re an American. Period. This Constitutional principle, commonly known as “birthright citizenship,” has become problematic for people who spend most of their waking hours terrified of the tide of Scary Brown People Who’ve Come to Take Our Stuff.Donald Trump, as the current de facto leader of the Republican Party, brought the issue to the forefront. Following up on his famous “they’re rapists” comment, he laid out his plan for dealing with the estimated 11 million people already here illegally: “They have to go.”Asked about what happens to those whose children were born here, Trump, a good family man if ever there was one, claimed we’d keep families together, but “they have to go.” When Bill O’Reilly pressed him on the question of deporting actual U.S. citizens, Trump blithely hand-waved away 147 years of 14th Amendment precedent, telling O’Reilly that “very good lawyers” had told him calling them citizens is “not going to hold up in court.”Yes, folks, you heard right. The 14th Amendment, which clearly states that if you’re born here you’re a citizen won’t survive constitutional scrutiny, according to unidentified “very good lawyers.” In other words, Donald Trump apparently thinks the Constitution itself is unconstitutional.This is, of course, utter claptrap, and deserving of nothing but scorn and derision. But since the majority of the Republican field are like rudderless sailboats that blow hither and yon in the wind that emanates from Donald Trump’s wherever, they began rushing to assure us that they, too, either didn’t believe in birthright citizenship at all or that they thought it needed to be done away with.“We need to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants,” Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign declared on Twitter. Dr. Ben Carson told Breitbart.com that “it doesn’t make any sense to me that people could come in here, have a baby and that baby becomes an American citizen.” Sen. Lindsey Graham took a moment off from gibbering about Islamic terrorists under everyone’s bed to say, “I think it’s a bad practice to give citizenship based on birth.”Former Sen. Rick Santorum insists that we don’t have to amend the Constitution to do away with birthright citizenship. We “merely have to pass a law.” I guess this is true if by passing a statute we can change the literal meaning of the words “all persons born” to “all white persons born.”For his part, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker seemed to be vying for the coveted Mitt Romney Ribbon for Campaign Weaselry. Walker told NBC reporter Kasie Hunt in response to a direct question that we should “absolutely” abolish birthright citizenship. Later, however, he said to CNBC he is “not taking a position on it one way or the other.” Still later, he took a third stance with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, answering “no” when asked if we should “repeal or modify” the 14th Amendment—but only after Stephanopoulos had asked him three times.But remember folks: Only Democrats flip-flop. Republicans “evolve.” Walker’s “evolving” before our eyes like something that came out of an egg in a bad horror film.I well remember the screaming tantrum the Republicans threw when it was revealed that Barack Obama once called the Constitution as originally written “an imperfect document … that reflects some deep flaws in American culture, the Colonial culture nascent at that time.”He was, of course, talking about the way the original document embraced slavery as an institution, but from the way Rush Limbaugh and others reacted, you’d have thought the president had proposed using the sacred text to line the White House birdcage before setting it on fire.Amazing, though, how disposable the beloved Constitution becomes when it comes to getting at the Scary Brown People — and their children. Principles you discard when inconvenient to your prejudices are not principles at all.
