Don't Forget Tisha B'Av!

I have had it with liberals of all advocacies whining, as they do on Facebook, “Whyyy didn’t we learrrrnn about THISSS in school?"

Well, maybe it’s because history is infinite. It is not just one thing; all things are connected. You learn basics in elementary school, more details in middle school, concepts and linkages in high school, and particulars in college. In fact, you never stop learning about history if you read. So all these things that snowflake bozos bitch about not being taught are not unknown. What they want is a history curriculum attuned to their desires, which of course would not be history at all but curricula of cultural superiorities.

If history teaches anything, it teaches that there is no single accurate viewpoint, but a patchwork of ideas, movements, and individuals that rose to an occasion for better or for worse.

Is there a single person reading this who did not know about Juneteenth until George Floyd was killed? Yet apparently we need a national holiday so Republicans can have something to claim they did for African-Americans. We have Lincoln’s birthday (subsumed into President’s Day), we know when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, we all know about the beginning and end of the Civil War and Reconstruction. We know about Bloody Sunday at Selma and we celebrate MLK’s birthday as a national holiday.

By all means, take note of Juneteenth, as we might note St. Patrick’s Day, Pulaski Day, and, yes, Columbus Day. Without Columbus, we wouldn’t be here to complain about the kind of oppression that has gone on since the beginning of time and conducted by every single nation-state and ethnic group. But do we need national holidays for Americans of Greek, Turk, Czech, Polish, German, Armenian, or Palestinian descent?  (I am very sensitive to national “days” because out of 365, only one commemorates nothing – “National Nothing Day,” which falls on my birthday.)

So we do know stuff because we are exposed to history texts, teachers, and books, not to mention "Jeopardy." What many of us learn about our own heritage is done through religious and family instruction. Must everything with a political following be made into a national observation? Maybe so, and then watch for “Juneteenth” mattress sales. But stop the mewling that “the white power structure didn’t teach us what they wanted hidden.” There is only so much to teach in schools and only so much to be absorbed by tiny minds that overpopulate social media.

Now, what about Tisha B’av? (Pssst, it's July 29-30.)

Hit the Road, Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi, it is time for you to go, you weak whimpering feckless piece of antiquity. Here you are on  Trump: It’s the fault of the press, not of a Democratic party that couldn’t organize its own memorial service.

From an interview with Politico:

"What of Hollywood’s role in making Donald Trump a reality TV star? Do you blame the industry for the current state of U.S. politics as it relates to Trump?”

 “Well, let me say I’ve never seen his reality show, so I don’t know if it was any good or what. I do think that he was assisted by the communications industry, not just Hollywood, but the press as well, because all they do is enable him, and that is really a sad thing.  “I’ve said to many of my friends in the press, ‘You’re accomplices, whether you want to be or not,’ [and they say,] ‘If he’s saying it, then it’s news.’ I don’t think it’s news, but it monopolizes the airwaves. So there is a lot of responsibility to go around in terms of the creation of whatever that is in the White House.

“But he has a tactic, one that is used by autocrats, which is, ‘Just as long as they’re talking about me, no matter if it’s bad, then you’re not talking about my opponent.’ When [the press was] talking about him, they weren’t saying what Hillary was going to do about health care, to make our economy fair.”

As Col. Potter would have said, “Horse hockey!”

A couple of points, old lady:

1) Anything a president says is news. Period. Because if it isn’t, you and your Democratic minions would have no idea a) what is going on or b) what you can complain about. 

2) The press, by reporting what he says, should be an agent for change, but most people don’t want to act on the facts so why don’t you just say what you  mean – “the public is too stupid and hateful to do the right thing.”

3) The press WAS reporting what Hillary (oh only a woman can demean her by using her first name?) said on health care. But nobody fucking cared!!! And I dare anyone now to state succinctly what her plan WAS. Even if you can, what was and is needed is a short nasty memorable slogan and the gumption to fight dirty. Michelle Obama was dead wrong about “going higher.”

4) By declaring that the press didn’t explain what Clinton was doing “to make our economy fair,” you load the issue with the false trope of fairness. That was Clinton’s job, not that of the press!

5)  You handed Trump a campaign victory by agreeing to a trade deal, which, whether good for the country or not, will give him an accomplishment that will further energize his base and peel off Democrats.

I know people will say “look at what she did for women in politics, in regaining a House majority, and standing up to Trump.” All that is old-school machine politics at best, and at worst gaining power only for the purpose of exercising it, not for any larger vision. She has now cravenly adopted the autocrat’s real mantra: Blame the messenger.

Let's Blame the Victim This Time

I have read both that left-wing scold Thomas Frank’s “Listen, Liberal” screed and J.D. Vance’s autobiographical “Hillbilly Elegy,” both of which excoriate left-wing elites for ignoring the pain of hillbillies, blue collar worker and white working class. Vance, however, despite his redneck upbringing and subsequent Yale law degree (he now works for Trump enabler Peter Thiel) was honest. Much of the problem is that these people (mainly Scots-Irish) are very much responsible for their own circumstances. They have been trouble for several hundred years, and wallow in their checkered ancestry.

They resent “outsiders” -- like Northerners, blacks, Hispanics, educated people etc., but turn to an elitist who double crosses them by pretending to be an outsider. They are strung out on meth, they lie in bed when they don’t feel like showing up for work, disdain school, and get government handouts while blaming minorities for taking “their” livelihoods.

These hillbilly redneck racist dropouts who voted for Trump may not be able to tame the Wall Street or media Jews (and anti-Semitism is what is really behind a lot of this), but they certainly have had plenty of opportunities they bypassed for getting an education and saving money rather than bowling, boozing, and having multiple marriages and affairs. And that, friends, is the only thing that binds them to Trump – cavalier sex and financial irresponsibility.

So, I would ask the liberal and Democratic pundits who blame themselves for ignoring the white working class to shut up and actually, this time, blame the “victim.”

I was strongly opposed to Sanders on grounds of governing competence and temperament. But now, in weighing whether he could have beaten Trump, I realize that he was a terrible campaign strategist, too.  He SHOULD have cared about her “damn emails.” Doing so would either have defeated her or inoculated her.

Hillary won more votes than Trump but in the wrong places,  so “we” ARE in the majority, and maybe we should divide up and move to swing states. In the meantime, the evil that lives after us is named “white working class.”

Hypocrites, Thieves and Bullies -- Observations on the 2012 Election

People who should know better sometimes ask me what I think is going to happen in an election. I used to give my predictions with a certainty born of pure guesswork. Now I am wiser, and my answer is, “How the hell should I know?” 

You have the same information as I do, my predictions have been wrong in the past and conventional wisdom has been wrong in the past, too. 

But I do have some observations about the 2012 election, stated here just in case I predict something correctly and can say, “I told you so.” 

 

Here are some near certainties: 

1) – If the election is very close, Republicans will use their governors and their federal judges to steal what they need to install Mitt Romney. 

2) – If Romney loses narrowly, it will be because Obama is a nominal Christian but Romney is a full fledged Mormon. As Chris Rock put it, “Do we want the son of a Mexican immigrant or an American who is the son of a white mother?” 

3) – If Obama loses narrowly, it will be because he is black. This country has never gotten over its racism and latent fascism. Romney is rich, white, handsome and utterly amoral -- usually a winning observation.  

4) – If Obama loses, it will also be because enough black and minority voters are too stupid or lazy to vote. On every major issue, blacks, minorities and a large portion of white establishment voters outnumber Republicans and conservatives. Therefore, Democrats should win every national election. But Republicans are very good at frightening people into voting against their own interests after lying about what those interests are. 

5) – The outcome of some Senate race heretofore thought to be a walk in the park for some incumbent will stun everyone, most notably the guy who was defeated. (Here, I share one of my favorite post-upset comments. It is from one of the true ignoramuses to ever hold a Senate seat, Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, who said, “All campaigns are sloppy. Winning campaigns have their slop moving in the right direction.”) 

6) – Early voting is a disaster and will be responsible for court challenges and ambiguous outcomes. Voting should occur for 24 hours on the appointed day, the same 24 hours from Maine to Hawaii, followed by announcement of the results. Absentee ballots should be allowed, as in the past, only for sworn reasons of expected absenteeism from one’s residence.  

Here are some guesses: 

1) – Romney will win the popular vote. If Obama wins the electoral vote, Republicans will be in the streets and courts, unmindful of the 2000 election. That is because Republicans are hypocrites, thieves and dastardly bullies who have no regard for their fellow man or for democracy.

2) – No matter who wins, he will be held in contempt by most of those who voted for him. As Democratic strategist Paul Begala once said, “Campaigning is about screwing your enemies. Governing is about screwing your friends.”

3) – If Obama loses, Democrats still will never realize they have to fight dirtier than Republicans. If Obama wins, he will continue to govern as a centrist Republican.

4) – About six months into a Romney presidency, people will wonder just what it is that he meant when he said of his business background, “I’ve done it and I will do it again.” The last presidents whose background was business were George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover. It was Calvin Coolidge, remember, who said, “The business of America is business.” What followed was the Depression.

5) – If Romney is elected, tens of thousands of Americans, many of whom voted for him, will die unnecessarily because of his foreign policy and health policy. 

6) – The largest demographic group in America consists of stupid people. But in a perfect manifestation of the democratic ideal, they are usually governed by  stupid people. It is because people vote not on issues or direction of the country but on who makes them feel good about themselves. We have survived this far, but had we as a people voted for the smarter and better human being most of the time, we would not be as close to terminal decline as we are at this moment. 

 

Because I wish to continue to feel good about myself, I will not be voting for president.

(Disclosure: My vote will not matter because the abominable Electoral College makes it meaningless anyway.) I am more concerned about whether my state will flush its history, good name and decent politics down the toilet of casino gambling. Vote No on Question 7.

 

 

 

 

Killer Congressmen

The following current, retired, defeated or dead members of the U.S. Congress voted in 2009 to kill a U.S. Park Service ranger. The murder, by a brave wounded warrior of our heroic wonderful armed forces, didn't happen until Jan. 1, 2012 in a national park -- which had been opened up to loaded weapons by the following defenders of freedom.

I wonder if Gabby Giffords would change her shameful vote now.

SENATE

Barrasso (R-WY) Baucus (D-MT) Bayh (D-IN) Begich (D-AK) Bennet (D-CO) Bennett (R-UT) Bond (R-MO) Brownback (R-KS) Bunning (R-KY) Burr (R-NC) Byrd (D-WV) Casey (D-PA) Chambliss (R-GA) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Collins (R-ME) Conrad (D-ND) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC) Dorgan (D-ND) Ensign (R-NV)

Enzi (R-WY) Feingold (D-WI) Graham (R-SC) Grassley (R-IA) Gregg (R-NH) Hagan (D-NC) Hatch (R-UT) Hutchison (R-TX) Inhofe (R-OK) Isakson (R-GA) Johanns (R-NE) Klobuchar (D-MN) Kohl (D-WI) Kyl (R-AZ) Landrieu (D-LA) Leahy (D-VT) Lincoln (D-AR) Lugar (R-IN) Martinez (R-FL) McCain (R-AZ) McConnell (R-KY) Merkley (D-OR) Murkowski (R-AK)

Nelson (D-FL) Nelson (D-NE) Pryor (D-AR) Reid (D-NV) Risch (R-ID) Roberts (R-KS) Sanders (I-VT) Sessions (R-AL) Shaheen (D-NH) Shelby (R-AL) Snowe (R-ME) Specter (D-PA) Tester (D-MT) Thune (R-SD) Udall (D-CO) Vitter (R-LA) Voinovich (R-OH) Warner (D-VA) Webb (D-VA) Wicker (R-MS) Wyden (D-OR)

HOUSE

Aderholt Adler (NJ) Akin Alexander Altmire Arcuri Austria Baca Bachus Barrow Bartlett Barton (TX) Bean Berkley Berry Biggert Bilbray Bilirakis Bishop (GA) Bishop (UT) Blackburn Blunt Boccieri Boehner Bonner Bono Mack Boozman Boren Boswell Boucher Boustany Boyd Brady (TX) Bright Broun (GA) Brown (SC) Brown-Waite, Ginny Buchanan Burgess Burton (IN) Buyer Calvert Camp Campbell Cantor Cao Capito Cardoza Carney Carter Cassidy Chaffetz Chandler Childers Coble Coffman (CO) Cole Conaway Costa Costello Courtney Crenshaw Cuellar Culberson Dahlkemper Davis (AL) Davis (KY) Davis (TN) Deal (GA) DeFazio DeGette Dent Diaz-Balart, L. Diaz-Balart, M. Dingell Donnelly (IN) Dreier Driehaus Duncan Edwards (TX) Ehlers Ellsworth Emerson Etheridge Fallin Flake Fleming Forbes Fortenberry Foster Foxx Franks (AZ) Frelinghuysen

Gallegly Garrett (NJ) Gerlach Giffords Gingrey (GA) Gohmert Goodlatte Gordon (TN) Granger Graves Grayson Green, Gene Griffith Guthrie Hall (TX) Halvorson Harper Hastings (WA) Heinrich Heller Hensarling Herger Herseth Sandlin Higgins Hill Hinchey Hodes Hoekstra Holden Hunter Inglis Issa Jenkins Johnson (GA) Johnson (IL) Johnson, Sam Jones Jordan (OH) Kagen Kanjorski Kennedy Kind King (IA) King (NY) Kingston Kirkpatrick (AZ) Kissell Kline (MN) Kratovil Lamborn Lance Latham LaTourette Latta Lee (NY) Lewis (CA) Linder LoBiondo Lucas Luetkemeyer Lummis Lungren, Daniel E. Mack Maffei Manzullo Marchant Markey (CO) Marshall Massa Matheson McCarthy (CA) McCaul McClintock McCotter McHenry McHugh McIntyre McKeon McMorris Rodgers McNerney Meek (FL) Meeks (NY) Melancon Mica Michaud Miller (FL) Miller (MI) Miller, Gary Minnick Mitchell Mollohan Moran (KS) Murphy (NY)

Murphy, Patrick Murphy, Tim Murtha Myrick Neugebauer Nunes Nye Oberstar Obey Olson Ortiz Pallone Paul Paulsen Pence Perlmutter Perriello Peterson Petri Pitts Platts Poe (TX) Pomeroy Posey Price (GA) Putnam Radanovich Rahall Rehberg Reichert Reyes Rodriguez Roe (TN) Rogers (AL) Rogers (KY) Rogers (MI) Rohrabacher Rooney Ros-Lehtinen Roskam Ross Royce Ryan (OH) Ryan (WI) Salazar Scalise Schauer Schmidt Schock Schrader Sensenbrenner Sessions Shadegg Shimkus Shuler Shuster Simpson Sires Skelton Smith (NE) Smith (NJ) Smith (TX) Smith (WA) Souder Space Spratt Stearns Stupak Sullivan Tanner Taylor Teague Terry Thompson (MS) Thompson (PA) Thornberry Tiahrt Tiberi Titus Turner Upton Walden Walz Wamp Welch Westmoreland Whitfield Wilson (OH) Wilson (SC) Wittman Wolf Young (AK) Young (FL)

Muting the Mawkish

The “mute” button will be my favorite and most used device of the day because TV today, especially the football portion of the schedule, will be dripping with inappropriate, if not fake, patriotic gestures staged by this generation’s Joseph Goebbelses -- reborn as Roger Ailes and Karl Rove.

I do plan to watch football and check the news at the appointed hours to see if there is anything I need to know.

What I don’t need to know is what a zillion talking heads think about 9/11 or what the anniversary means. What I did need to know, I got early in the day from a documentary run on all the History Channels, consisting of raw footage of that morning 10 years ago. No narration, just an assemblage of contemporaneously live home video, with a minimum of TV news blather.

The universal instantaneous reaction seemed to be that no one knew what was happening. They seemed to know why (Arab terrorism) but not what” -- which is the normal human reaction to the incomprehensible. Yet 10 years later the United States still does not know what to do. The morning paper carries the impossible-to-believe news that the Obama administration is about to sign a pact with Turkey for the basing of American drones – the purpose being for the Turks to crush the Kurdish minority, who a few short years ago we were defending from the predations of Saddam Hussein.

We still think Pakistan is our friend, and we still think we can make Afghanistan a democracy. On foreign policy and national security issues, a president of color with a Muslim name is no better than the playboy prince he succeeded.

The aforementioned morning newspaper sports section carried a full page (thus, expensive) ad from the devil himself, Redskins owner Dan Snyder, depicting a Redskin charging across the national Mall carrying an American flag like the upraised sword of a crusader. The page tells us that the Redskins “thank and salute our heroes” and that the Redskins “will always remember.” Did I mention that it also says “God Bless America?”

One more reason I hope the Redskins lose every game they every play under the ownership of this monstrous height-challenged ninny who, it was reported elsewhere in the section, was under the influence of alcohol when he decided to hire the current coach.

We each have our own remembrance of and meaning for 9/11/01, and no one’s is any more valid than another’s. One thing that is a lie, however, is that “nothing would ever be the same.”

It won’t be the same for families and friends of the dead, but for the rest of us, life (except for airport security) is pretty much the same as ever. Football on Sundays (Mondays and Thursdays as well as Friday nights and Saturday afternoons), a warlike national mentality guided by a foreign policy that dooms this country to slow demise and the unwillingness of enough young people to enlist and carry it out.

The only area of national life that has changed was that George W. Bush’s prosecution of two misconceived wars, George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and George W. Bush’s stewardship of the mortgage bust made this generation and the next one poorer than the ones that preceded it.

Watching the raw footage of what happened 10 years ago today can certainly inspire hatred and wishes for revenge, and I am as hateful and vengeance-minded as the next

American. But those twin towers of viscera should be directed at Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and every other Islamic government that harbors terrorists. We know who they are, and so do they.

So spare me the crock of “heroes” and “unity” and “God.” No “hero” sacrificed his or her life to protect my freedom. If God had truly blessed America, it means He has damned everyone else. We have not been this disunited as a nation since the Civil War. Because of 9/11, I have less freedom today than I did 10 years because while we were weakened as a nation, it was more a result of our own government’s reaction to it than by the precipitating act itself.

Tradition and Treacle

Just spent a glorious Fourth, as a always, listening to military bands, the National Symphony Orchestra and America’s top musical artists, while watching the most spectacular fireworks display over the Washington Monument. The only thing better than being there is where I was – on my couch in an air-conditioned family room watching the whole Public Broadcasting System’s “A Capitol Fourth” on a wide screen HD TV.

I was proud to be an American until I was exposed for the first time to the vomitorious sack of treacle known as Josh Grobin. That he is as famous as he was said to be reminds me again of H. L. Mencken’s dictum that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

(Note: The filthy ratbastard Republican leadership shown enjoying itself on the Capitol Lawn was partaking of an event broadcast by the PBS it wants to eliminate and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is also wants killed. On the other hand, the broadcast ended by thanking for financial support “viewers like you” and adding, of course, that the whole shebang of cannonfire and aerial explosions was “brought to you by the Boeing Corporation.” As were most of the wars of the past 70 years.)

I am still such a peacenik that I detest the ubiquitous public adoration of “wounded warriors” -- because if we stopped honoring morons who sign up to be shot at and then are surprised that it hurts, we wouldn’t have the forces to invade the half of the world we don’t like at any given time.

But I am still a sucker for small town parades, bombs bursting in air and the 1812 Overture, although I am amused that the most jingoistic day of the year must be accompanied by the strains of the Russian and French national anthems.

I also found it somewhat discordant, but amusing, to have as the penultimate act of the concert on the Capitol Grounds the proudly degenerate Little Richard (that’s Little Dick to you, Mark Halperin) singing the joyous filth of Fifties rock’n’roll while toddlers danced with their oblivious flag-waving parents and grandparents.

Is this a great country, or what!

The Chicago Code

When my public affairs career at FDA came to an abrupt end, I blamed the Chicago machine politics of Barack Obama for putting in place incompetent kids who had no clue as to media relations, personnel management or general qualities of being human.

More evidence comes from this account earlier this week by a reputable suburban Chicago newspaper of new Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s press secretary. The Rahm administration was inaugurated just as the one TV drama that captured Chicago corruption so well ("The Chicago Code") was canceled, even though it was on Fox.

It is no longer clear to me whether Emanuel was a creation of Obama or vice versa. In any event, here is one more example of Obamachine contempt for transparency -- and here is one less Democratic vote for president.

The questions that Emanuel's press secretary won't answer
By CHUCK GOUDIE
Once Rahm Emanuel takes the oath and becomes Chicago' s mayor today, you will be hearing and seeing a lot more of a young woman named Tarrah Cooper. She is beginning the job of a lifetime, even though she doesn't have much life time behind her.

Ms. Cooper (who pronounces her first name as Tair-uh, not Tahr-uh) is going to be the “face” of the Chicago mayor's office, as Mr. Emanuel's newly anointed press secretary. At the tender age of 25, she is certainly a fresh face.

Never having heard of Cooper before Emanuel returned to the Chicago political scene last fall, I was curious to find out about this person who would be responsible for espousing the positions and platforms of Chicago's first new administration in two decades; would be the go-to contact for information about important daily news stories; or, heaven forbid, be the public source in the office if there was a calamity of some kind.

Never having heard of Cooper before Emanuel returned to the Chicago political scene last fall, I was curious to find out about this person who would be responsible for espousing the positions and platforms of Chicago's first new administration in two decades; would be the go-to contact for information about important daily news stories; or, heaven forbid, be the public source in the office if there was a calamity of some kind.

Last month, after learning that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had issued a scathing report against Mr. Emanuel's school superintendent to-be, I contacted Ms. Cooper for a response. The EEOC in Rochester, N.Y., where Jean-Claude Brizard had been running the public schools, determined that he had an age, race and gender bias when firing a top administrator.

I asked Cooper whether this had been known to Rahm Emanuel and why he nevertheless selected Brizard? Had Emanuel not known? Was Brizard's job offer being revoked?

In our very first conversation, rather than simply answer the questions, Ms. Cooper stated that she wished to speak “off the record.” I informed her that I wouldn't have such a conversation, especially not with someone who is in the business of providing public information. Seemingly frustrated by that, she said that she'd have to call back.

During a series of subsequent calls and emails, Ms. Cooper waged a relentless, several-hour campaign to convince me that such a finding by a federal panel against their choice to run the Chicago schools was not a news story. Sounding like a robocall, she persisted in the theme that “this isn't a story.”

As we prepared the report for broadcast, Cooper also sent two emails containing misleading and false information. First she stated that “an independent investigation found that Mr. Brizard did nothing wrong.” But that report was prepared by a firm hired by Brizard's school board and hardly independent.

Next she wrote that “a court of law has proved that he did not do anything wrong.”

That was completely false. A civil suit is still in the early stages. Ms. Cooper, who did not respond to several requests for comment on this column, just graduated from the famous University of Missouri journalism school in 2008, so what she learned should still be fresh.

She worked as a reporter on Mizzou's TV station and interned at MTV in New York.

Before joining the Emanuel for Mayor campaign, she worked at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C., where her bio states “she helped to manage the Department's messaging, priorities and actions for numerous national incidents including the H1N1 epidemic, the December 25th and Times Square attempted bombings, the Haitian earthquake and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.” Based on DHS alerts, it seems she spent considerable time processing forms submitted by reporters to attend agency events.

At city hall, she succeeds longtime mayoral press secretary Jackie Heard, who was paid a salary of nearly $180,000 per year. On April 23, I sent Ms. Cooper a number of questions for this column. They included:

• Is there a set of written guidelines or protocols that you are working from in dealing with reporters and news organizations?
• How involved is Mr. Emanuel in setting the tone for dealing with the press and in what manner? Does each story inquiry get run by him?
• Which of these best describes your view as press secretary in dealing with Chicago's major newspapers and TV and why: Tools for getting out message as we see it; aimed at embarrassing or uncovering negative aspects of the administration; a necessary evil that has to be controlled.
• How will your cooperation with news organizations be based on the nature and tone of their day-to-day coverage?
• Does your youthfulness and lack of experience symbolize what seems to be administration focused on hiring managers under 35?
• What qualifies you to be press secretary for the mayor of the third-largest city?
• How much will you be paid?
• What are your career aspirations?

In more than three weeks she has yet to answer any of the questions. After asking a few times to meet me “off the record,” which I declined, Tarrah Cooper has stopped replying.
It is interesting that the mayor's new press secretary felt no inhibition about displaying hundreds of personal photos on her public Facebook page, showing her partying with friends, in beach attire and at a slot machine.

When you are 25, apparently some things are OK to be put on the record.

Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ ChuckGoudie.

America Going to Hell in a Teabag

As I write, there is still no agreement on a short-term spending plan. But the real danger to the republic was the huge plop in the toilet bowl of discredited ideology from media darling Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Hades. (Separated at birth from Chris Moltisanti).

Ryan unveiled a long-term economic plan that has less to do with sound national financing than with returning America to the turn-of-the-20th-Century for the benefit of white Christians toiling toward their predestination blissfully providing the labor and cash for reactionary plutocrats.

A cabal of neo-fascist (and I use the term in its historical context of militaristic corporatist and ethnic purity) manipulates the lost and loopy Teabaggers as fellow travelers and shock troops who unwittingly are crushing their own futures for the benefit of their slavemasters.

The Ryan plan would sizably increase the very national debt that he claims is ruining the country. Over the long run, it would punish the poor and reward the rich. Of course, in the long run we are all dead, but under the wrathful Republicans, some Americans would be dead sooner, especially those who would be denied prenatal services, adequate Medicaid and adequate Medicare. This modern-day Goebbels believes that America’s safety net has “become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” The only able-bodied Americans I know of who thrive on government handouts to live lives of complacency and dependency. They generally work on Wall Street and summer in the Hamptons.

The current fight over this fiscal year’s appropriations is not about budgeting but about the narcotic lollipops for the fanatic right that have nothing to do with the nation’s financial health.

The wretched Republicans not only would cut funding for Planned Parenthood programs that actually would reduce the number of abortions but would institute a dictatorship of the kind the United States does not accept in other countries. That is, the Republicans are using the fiscal and budgetary crisis to ram their murderous, Medieval ideology down the throats of the half million citizens of the District of Columbia. These people pay federal taxes, have no vote in Congress on how it is used and – most important – pay local taxes that the Republicans will not let them spend as they wish. The Republicans, against the will of people who pay for and die for their country, impose on the local citizenry murderous gun laws, public-school-destroying education vouchers, AIDS-spreading prohibition on needle exchanges and limits on abortion. Why? Because they can, and because they know that President Obama won’t fight.

Could Dickens have created a character more perverse than Lyin' Ryan – a phony who is using made-up numbers, gullible ignoramuses and a fawning Washington press corps?

Ryan is nothing but a brainy Beelzebub whose fancy talk masks an agenda of chauvinism, racism, sexism, militarism and corporatism. He is leading this country to hell in a teabag.

Transparent Vindication

As loyal readers may recall, I was suddenly defederalized last October a few weeks short of being legally immune from employer abuse of the kind administered to at least four older workers in the FDA public affairs shop.

Everyone knew the that new boss was not only not the same as the old boss but actually was parachuted in from a planet where “communication” meant silence, “transparency” meant hiding information and “public service” meant “no we can’t.”

Now, however, it seems that either her ability as a manager was exposed to her bosses or she failed to toady enough to the Obama hacks. (I can’t prove anything, but I suspect the former.) She is, I am reliably told, leaving government to join an advocacy/lobbying group run by the state politician whom she worked for before arriving in DC to wreak her damage here. In Washington, departing a high profile job in only one year is not a sign of success.

Anyway, this is not the story of one guy having a problem with one bad boss. I have moved on happily from other ones and survived. This is a story about how what happened in front of my naive eyes seems emblematic of what is going on elsewhere in government -- the wreckage of Obama's pretense of bringing a fresh way of doing things to Washington.

Many of my own observations are confirmed by an op-ed in today’s Washington Post detailing how this administration is more secret and contemptuous of public information than the Bush administration.

In the meantime, I remain one of the uncounted unemployed. Vindication doesn’t put food on the table, but it does taste sweet to announce, “Boss, thy name is ‘Payback.’”

Dim Bulbs

The death of Geraldine Ferraro, juxtaposed with a major political speech by Michele Bachmann yesterday reminds us of how far women still have to go.

My instinct would be to ignore Bachmann, (R-Village of the Damned), but we should not. Bachmann is at once too ripe a target for ridicule and too much of a threat to the generally held ideal that women are at least equal to men. She and Sarah Palin, who have never run anything of substance but their mouths -- do a disservice to women – and men – who would like to see just a shred of intellect in their would-be political leaders.

Oh, Newt Gingrich is scary crazy, too, but at least he changes his mind so often that the law of averages suggests he will be right on a few things, and a little less than far right once or twice. At a time when Republicans like Bachmann are demanding a coherent vision for the country, she is boasting of her sponsorship of something called “The Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act,” repealing the requirement for those new energy-saving bulbs.

How fitting that she chooses to base the opening of her presidential campaign on returning the United States to a nation of the dim bulb that is loopy and has a head that is badly screwed on.

War Powers

How can all the Obama-haters who called him a ditherer for not intervening in Libya now turn around and complain that such action is illegal? The Republicans, including the once-but-no-longer-honorable Richard Lugar, suddenly wonder where Congress’ constitutional power to declare war went.

It went out of business due to lack of use since the U.S. declaration of war against Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria nearly 70 years ago and a subsequent 23 undeclared military interventions. Overnight, Lugar has metamorphosed from a sage foreign policy expert into a teabag ninny pooping in his pants from primary competition from the Clown Right.

And what of Democrats, whose anti-Vietnam histrionics in the 1970s led to passage of the War Powers Act, which had as its chief unforeseen consequence giving any president much more power than he already had. The Act allows him, as commander in chief, to inform Congress and then do anything he wants militarily for 60 days before having to ask for further approval. That he did not officially inform Congress of the Libyan intervention is irrelevant, given the instantaneous nature of political reporting. Only Michelle Bachmann could not have understood what this country’s policy was going to be.

Then there are the middle-of-the-road whiners who ask the silly question, “If we are going to use military force for humanitarian reasons, why not use it against every repressive dictators?” Put aside the fact that other sons of bitches are our sons of bitches, Libya is easy to get to and easy to get out of it. Is something we can do, whether or not we should.

It is an operation I think shows Obama at his best. Remember Bush 43 -- say anything, go anywhere, take up arms in a manner guaranteed to cause defeat? As he did in his successful primary and general election campaigns, Obama ignored the hand-wringers who demanded he push some magic button to get tough, quietly put together political alliances, treated the public like adults and won the day.

IF the United States has an interest in supporting democratic movements in the Middle East – and I don’t know that it does – then it has to do so in a way that shows we are acting in concert with other democracies and that does not inflame the people we are supposed to be helping.

I now get to turn the age-old question around and put it to the Lugars, Pauls, Webbs, Sanderses and the rest of the Senate Sandbox – whose side are you really on?

Mourning in America

I will watch the Super Bowl this weekend and try to keep up with events in the Middle East. But I will otherwise keep the television off lest I become convulsed with nausea at the national outpouring of treacle over the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan.

I was a reporter who had the privilege of covering the White House for four and a half years, encompassing the middle of his tenure. I believe I was as fair in my coverage of him as I was in coverage of anything else I reported. And I stood on a street corner to pay my respects as his hearse rolled through the streets of the capital city.

This recollection is merely a futile attempt to command the tide to stop, to speak up against the worship by weak, ignorant people of a saint who did what he could to drown this country in debt, death and decline. In my view, both close up and in retrospect, Reagan was a tool of an ideology that while it did not wreck America, certainly hampered the social, economic and international standing of this great country.

His life story was one of denial – the result of having to mediate between his mother and a drunken father; getting his first professional break by “re-creating” (that is, making things up) broadcasts of far-away baseball games; acting in movies whose lines or plots he would later in life believe to have been true; and moving from a union leader to a shill for one of the worst (or best, if you will) icons of runaway capitalism, General Electric.

Every president makes mistakes of policy, but the lasting damage Reagan did to this country was to advance and repeat the shibboleth that government is your enemy.

He would often tell adoring audiences – almost always all-white and middle-aged –“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” (I am not sure he used that line when appearing before military audiences, which was his wont, because his handlers would never let him near an unfiltered crowd.)

First, let’s review some of the greatest hits of a president who some observer long ago aptly called an “amiable dunce.”

--Voodoo economics
--The Laffer Curve
--Ketchup is a vegetable
--Deficits don’t matter
--Evil empire
--We begin the bombing in five minutes
--Opposed sanctions against South Africa
--Opposed the Martin Luther King holiday as an economic loss to the country, signing it into law only after Congress passed it by a veto-proof majority.
--Opposed the original Voting Rights Acts, and originally opposed its extension in 1982, signing it into law and taking credit for it only after Congress passed it by a veto-proof majority.
--Sent Marines to Lebanon where they took the low ground at the airport and lost 220 of them in a suicide bombing, the Corps greatest single-day loss of life since Iwo Jima.
--Three days later invaded Grenada, a campaign in which more than half the U.S. deaths were from friendly fire and in which more medals were handed out than there were troops on the ground.
--Presided over the most corrupt administration in recent history, with at least 100 appointees tarnished by conflicts of interest, indictments, convictions or firings.
--Five years after vowing “we will never negotiate with terrorists” authorized the trade of arms for hostages, and then sent his hapless vice president out to explain to the public, “Mistakes were made.”

Ronald Reagan believed the government should stay out of people’s lives, except when they were in the bedroom, and he prevented family planning aid from being offered to developing countries that we preferred to keep poor and thus more susceptible to communist influences.

He glorified family values though he was a divorcee and spent six or seven years on the dating market as one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors. I remember the day he met his 2-year-old grandson for the first time -- and called him by the wrong name. His elder son, the adopted one, was sexually molested at camp as a child, but did his father ever know? He had no use for his younger son or younger daughter, who opposed him on most major issues, and when there was a family portrait at Christmas, it looked like a hostage photograph.

He was a union president, but he hated workers, using his presidency to smash organized labor. He was a liberal Democrat but “named names” that put former colleagues on the Hollywood black list.

His hatred of government began only when General Electric started paying him to host “Death Valley Days” and then to propagate the company’s capitalism-uber-alles in lectures to GE employees all over the country. To paraphrase what he later said about the Panama Canal, They bought him, they built him and they were going to keep him. He became a conservative because during World War II, when all the other leading men in Hollywood were actually away at war, he got better and better movie parts, earned more money and had to pay taxes at a historically high level.

As a political performer, Reagan read a script great, keeping you on the edge of your seat waiting from him to drift into a miasma of mental mulch, only to recover in time and complete the sentence with a punch – though the sentences were usually false pieties that rarely made any policy sense.

He told great stories, but the best ones were not true, such as the one about him helping liberate concentration camps, or the one about the heroic Air Force pilot who, after his plane was brought down by enemy fire, comforted a wounded crew member by telling him, “That’s all right, son, we’ll ride this one down together,” leaving listeners wondering which one of the dead airmen related the story in the first place.

Everyone said he was personally warm, but only to those he thought could help him. To the extent that he was even made available to the press or public – which was hardly – I was in his face constantly as part of the press pool. After four and a half years, I am utterly convinced he had no idea who I was, or at least could not attach my name to my face. I bring this up because almost every other politician I ever met had as a chief political asset that very skill. In short, his only political skills were a smile and a shoeshine.

He appealed to the worst in Americans and was venerated because he tapped into the fantasies of white working people who wanted to follow him backwards into some nonexistent golden age when morning in America meant, racism, poverty, war and being what that unctuous Chris Mathews calls “regular people.”

His skill was in adopting simplistic slogans by which he governed. He was, indeed, the godfather of the hate-mongering vermin who now operate the Tea and Republican Parties in his name. He might even be appalled.

So upon the centennial of his birth, all I can say is that Abraham Lincoln was wrong. You can fool all of the people all of the time. The only reason his acolytes want to memorialize him as the greatest ever is because they know he was the biggest goddamn phony ever to rise to the presidency and they are afraid history will judge him so.

Giving Rational Cover to Irrational Acts

What did George Wallace and Ronald Reagan have in common? They are the only two prominent right-wingers who have been targets of assassins.

Were JFK, RFK, federal judge John Wood, the husband and mother of federal judge Joan Lefkowitz killed by right wingers? Not necessarily, but when you add those cases to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and two abortion providers, plus the Oklahoma City bombing and outbreaks of violence in Waco and at Ruby Ridge, a couple of patterns seem to emerge.

• The United States is by far the most violent of Western democracies and among the least politically stable.
• There is a connection between lunatic actions and protected, if not revered, hate speech coming from those in positions of public trust.
• Something must be done about handguns.

Let me elucidate:

According to Columbia professor Steven Mintz, “Nine presidents have been the targets of assassination, along with one president-elect and three presidential candidates. In addition, some eight governors, seven U.S. Senators, 10 Representatives, 11 mayors and 17 state legislators have been violently attacked.”

Including threats of violence, actual vandalism and disruption of public political events, the targets are overwhelmingly liberals, progressives or others on the non-lunatic fringe right wing of discourse.

One cannot connect the dots between conservative conviction, or even hate-filled venom emanating from the jackals at Fox and the EIB Network, with violence aimed at politicians. No rational person -- not even Limbaugh, Beck or Palin – advocates gunning down political opponents. Only the irrational, disturbed persons, do such things. But somehow their paranoid rantings and objects of hate tend to be the government or agents of government that are also the targets of attack from distant voices on radio and television who prey on the fear of naïve listeners.

It is a lie perpetrated with increasing success in this week’s post-Tucson narrative that “both sides” need to tone down the level of debate. There are not two sides here. The mainstream media have always failed when it comes to reporting social or political divisions because of an ingrained fantasy that one side in a controversy has the same facts and moral force as the other side. Because Newt Gingrich and Fox chief Roger Ailes say both sides do it is reason enough to prove that the supposition is false, because their entire careers are built on mendacity. ccasionally a conservative Democrat in Congress may lose his temper and call an irresponsible right-winger a “Howdy Doody-looking nimrod” but the scales of invective are lopsidedly weighted from the Right.

Mine is a life of the word, and still I am undecided as to whether words are just words – used for effect – or whether words have intrinsic harmful effect.

I believe that rhetoric used by rational people is entirely figurative, and that only emotionally unbalanced people take rhetoric literally. In the private sphere, you may be sarcastic, argumentative or even obnoxious to someone of relatively equal mental capabilities. But you would not speak in such a way to a child, a stranger or someone you believe to be intellectually incompetent. And this is what the Limbaughs, Becks, Palins, Savages, O’Reillys, Hannitys and others must comprehend: The bigger their audience, the more harm they can do, simply because as the universe of listeners goes up, the more it contains simpletons. They don’t need me to tell them that because it is the First Commandment of broadcasting – know your audience. And they damn well know their audience, and that is why they do bear some measure of responsibility for ratcheting up the climate of violence. They give what rational cover an assassin needs to perform an irrational act.

Palin – who shoots defenseless moose and wolves for fun – can plausibly deny that putting crosshairs over Giffords’ district was a call to shoot the congresswoman. And Giffords’ last electoral opponent (who said in his campaign, “Get on target for victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M15 with Jesse Kelly”) can disclaim responsibility for last Saturday’s act of political terrorism. But what rational person cannot see the connection? If you are a rabble-rouser, you must take responsibility not just for the rousing but for the rabble, as well.

And what of defeated Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle, who campaigned on a platform of “Second Amendment remedies” for members of Congress she opposes? Had she made that speech outside the Safeway in Tucson minutes before Giffords was gunned down, she might have been in violation of federal law for crossing state lines to incite violence. But what legal remedies are there against speech that is divorced from the act? There are none, and that is the way it should be. People are responsible for their own actions – Jared Loughner and Sharron Angle as well.

As for guns, how ironic that Giffords not only is one of the few remaining Blue Dog conservative Democrats in the House, but she is a strong opponent of gun control. In fact, she boasted recently she carries a 9-millimeter Glock, the same type of gun that felled her, and is a good shot. More ironic is that the NRA gives her a grade of D and spent $39.000 supporting the opponent who wanted to “remove Gabrielle Giffords from office.”

Handguns have no place in any civilized society. But since the Second Amendment seems to have trumped the First (support for gun control is at its lowest ebb ever in public opinion polling) there is little hope of anything being done to ban a product whose one and only purpose is to kill people. My solution is this: Progressives ought to buy guns, join the NRA in hopes of changing its policies, and, in the alternative, learn to shoot.