This Too, Shall Pass

 When Lincoln reflected on the state of the nation in 1859, the bloody internecine warfare in Kansas and Nebraska over slavery, the outbreaks of violence in the chambers of Congress itself, he said,  "This to shall pass." and he added, "How consoling in our depths of affliction." Of course, there were more travails to come. But he was right: Eventually, the nation rode out the dark times.

Should Romney and the Republicans prevail tomorrow, despite our best efforts to deny them, we can remember this.

There have been some odious Republican Presidents, and some odious Republican presidencies, but even in them, some good things happened.  As sleazy as Warren G. Harding was, he was one of the first presidents in the 20th century to speak out, at least mildly, for improving the lot and rights of African Americans. Nixon tried to institute extensions of health care coverage. 

We cannot know what Romney will do--which is a very good reason to vote against him. He simply tells each audience whatever he thinks they want to hear.  He is a man for whom truth is always mutable,  and he can convince himself the only thing that really matters in this world is what happens to him. In this, he is a classic sociopath, without any real capacity for genuine sympathy or connection with other people.  In that sense, Gail Collins got it right when she encapsulated her concept of Romney the man, as the guy to lashed his dog to the top of the car--it worked for Mr. Romney, if not for the dog.

He has played people for fools his whole life, and made a fortune doing it. We'll see if he can play enough people for fools tomorrow.

The Redskin Rule: Intimations of Defeat

"Redskins" 11/4/12 uniforms: 1937 Throwback Uniform

Real Redskins Uniforms

Bone Fide Redskins in Uniform

The Redskin Rule, as anyone who grew up in the Washington, DC area knows, or as anyone who follows sports knows, has held true since 1937, the year the Redskins moved to Washington, DC. The rule states that if the Redskins win their last home game the Sunday before the Presidential election, the President who is the incumbent  (or the candidate of the party of the incumbent) will win the election; if the Redskins lose, the incumbent President will lose.
Since 1937, 18 games have been played and only once (Bush vs Kerry 2004) has the rule failed to predict the outcome of the election.
So, if you believe in inexplicable correlations, Mr. Obama can start packing his bags.
Personally, I am superstitious. 
On the other hand, one might ask, did the Bush vs Kerry (2004) outcome establish a new norm? 
The rule worked, once again,  for the 2008 election.
One might say, as Governor Cuomo did, we are now seeing 100 year storms every other year.  The exceptional case in 2004 was followed by a normal year in 2008, so we might be due again.
Or, one might argue, the Redskins did not play this Sunday. Look at the uniforms. Are those real  Redskins? Everyone knows the uniform is the team; it is the brand. Just ask the owners when they suited up replacement players in authentic uniforms during the players strike and the stadiums were packed. People cheered for the guys on the fields running around in the uniforms which were the franchise uniforms. They carried the colors.

So, while Mad Dog quakes and is downhearted, learning of today's Redskin outcome,  he will still wait on line for hours on Tuesday to sail against Fate. If it is written, it is written. But as Lawrence of Arabia (or Peter O'Toole) said so eloquently, "Nothing is written." 

The Tangled Woof of Reality

Benjamin Franklin was a man, who, in his time would have severely disappointed most of his countrymen had they known more about him.  He was a first rate intellect, a gifted politician, a man who questioned and experimented, who discovered the electrical nature of lightning, an inventor of practical things like spectacles. But he was also an unfaithful husband, who enjoyed his mistresses while serving as a diplomatic envoy to France, and his womanizing would have scandalized 18th century America. D.H. Lawrence, looking over Franklin's public endorsement of prevailing American Puritanism, while practicing the libertine life in Paris, thought Franklin a moral reprobate for his hypocrisy, not for his behavior, but for his duplicity.

Lincoln, the greatest of our Presidents by several leagues, was a man of his times and of his place. He signed the order hanging Indians in the Midwest. He shared the view that Negroes were likely not the intellectual equal of whites, and he suggested that the most intelligent Negroes might, eventually, be allowed to vote. When the Great Emancipator issued the Emancipation Proclamation he said, "If I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I would do it. If I could save the union by freeing none of the slaves, I would do it.  If I could save the union by freeing some and leaving others in bondage, I would do that."  In the end, he took the third choice: He freed slaves only in states currently in rebellion against the federal government. So slaves in Maryland and other border states which remained "loyal" were not freed.  But he also said, when looking back over his tenure, summarizing during his second inaugural address, the war had been caused in some way by the existence of slaves in the South. Everyone wanted to deny it, he said, everyone wanted to think otherwise, to think some solution short of complete abolition was possible, but it was not possible, and so the war came.  Thinking back on all the carnage, Lincoln, not a man inclined to embrace organized religion, still thought in mystical terms postulating the war may have been God's price, God's requirement that to pay for the 300 years of bondage, a drop of blood had to be shed on the battlefield for each drop of blood drawn by the bondsman's whip.  A man with little or no formal education, no Harvard degree, became the 19th century's greatest American writer, its greatest political scientist and one of its greatest philosophers.

Then there was Grant, a failure for much of his life, the classic example of the hedgehog as in "the fox is clever and knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one thing and does it very well."   For Grant tenacity, persistence and humility trumped whatever demons brought him to drink, and occasional unpreparedness. He knew one thing:  The war could be won only by destroying Lee's army. Unlike any other union general, he latched on to Lee like a bulldog, teeth sunk into the lip of a bull, and he would not let go. His tactic was the assault, the flanking maneuver, but always keeping South of Lee, allowing him, in the end, no escape.  And when he wrote his magnificent memoirs, Grant showed his career was no accident but an outgrowth of a character of monumental proportions.

When Barack Obama is criticized in the pages of our greatest newspapers and magazines and on line, I can only think,  "who are these midgets, attacking this giant?" It's the attack of the Lilliputians.  The man is not clairvoyant; he can be maddeningly reluctant to engage his opponents; he can fail to see the true nature of the forces arrayed against him, but he is so far beyond the Mitch McConnells, the John Boehners, the Samuel Alitos, the Antonin Scalias, the Maureen Dowds, the David Brooks, the George F. Wills, the Charles Krauthammers, the Rush Limbaughs and the Mitt Romneys and Paul Ryans, the comparison is almost not worth considering.

Win or lose day after tomorrow, it will not be Mr. Obama's failure, it will be a revelation of what sort of nation we actually are.

Try Not to Turn On To/Things that Upset You

Vietnam: The Price of Uncritical Thinking

When I was in college, in 1968, I found myself standing in a bank line with one of my favorite professors, Robert Jay, the anthropologist.  I told him I thought the war in Vietnam would never end. It would just go on and on, at higher and lower volume, until  my own kids, if I ever had any, were fighting over there, too.  My brother, a physician, was already on his way over and any able bodied American male eventually would exhaust his exemptions and find his way on a plane bound for Saigon and parts beyond. It seemed to affect our family without affecting any of our neighbors, back home. For most people, it seemed, just letting it happen, just accepting the idea that we were at war to "defend freedom" seemed to be enough to not get involved, or to embrace ideas which were clearly bogus, like the idea we were over there because the Vietnamese people wanted us there. 

Professor Jay shook his head slowly, "No," he said.  "Eventually, when enough boys from enough small towns die, when enough mothers have to actually face the prospect of losing their own sons, then those parents will actually start thinking, and  the war will end."

As it turned out, he was correct, although it took seven more years for that to happen.

Until then, the uncritical thinkers of America allowed the war to grind on, to consume more lives, American and Vietnamese.  And now, more than forty years later, we still have uncritical thinkers who provide the ballast for the American ship of state. We have people who want to believe Romney is a "businessman" so he will know what to do for the economy, and they believe Paul Ryan is trying to save Medicare by destroying it.

Today, is my last day wandering the roads of Hampton, New Hampshire in pursuit of voters.  As I have previously mentioned, many roads, and most intersections,  in Hampton have no street signs, and now I realize many homes have no visible address. It is as if we live in a village of Hobbits, where addresses and names on homes are considered somehow undesirable.

How the fire department or the police ever finds a home in trouble, I have no idea. 

Outside of one home a deer was strung up by its neck, dangling from a limb, and the home behind it had no address. Neither the deer nor the home was contained on my computer sheets, which directed me to the addresses of likely Democratic voters.

News is that 38,000 more Republicans than Democrats have voted early in Colorado, giving Romney, presumably,  a 38,000 vote lead in that swing state-- pretty depressing.  Florida has similar numbers, apparently.  Voters in likely Democratic strongholds in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have been scattered by Sandy, rendered powerless and likely Obama will not get those votes.

So, two days before the election, things are not looking good. It may take another four, or eight years before things get uncomfortable enough for enough Americans to start thinking critically to ask how we lost Medicare and Social Security and how abortion became, once again, illegal and how the upper 1% became the upper 1/4% and how school prayer become legal again and how gay marriage became illegal, and how all those immigrant kids got deported when they didn' t self deport and how the Tea Party and the Free Staters came to power. 

And we may be asking how sending an army of American boys and girls to fight in Iran happened, and how that became another fight to protect our freedom.

Sprint to the Finish: The Last 15 meters

November 3, 2012.  Even the indefatigable Gail Collins sounds tired, in her last column before Nov 6. 
My swimming coach used to say races are won in the last 15 meters, when you are really burning out, arms like lead, legs dead, and there's that finish wall ahead, can you hold your breath and burn your last few molecules of sugar and ATP?

It has all come down to who is more motivated, Democrats or Republicans. Who is willing to wait on line. That is all democracy demands of its citizens in this nation. And for some, even that inconvenience will be too much to ask. They will stay home and watch it on TV. They will have excuses for why they did not need to vote or did not want to vote.

The choice can be crystallized into a simple proposition: Do you believe in the possibility of good government or do you believe in no government? 

Or, if you are one of those who votes on "the man" rather than the issues:  Do you believe in President Obama or Mr. Romney?  

Mad dog admits to a certain color blindness on this one:  Mr. Romney is the ultimate con man--look up "con man" in the dictionary and they'll have a picture of Mitt Romney right there. He is a complexity of hating government regulation, except when he doesn't, banking in off shore accounts and accusing Mr. Obama of apologizing to the world for America (as if an offshore account is an endorsement of America), of bragging about Romneycare until it became Obamacare, when it became an anathema.  The list goes on... and on. The fact is, this guy is not even a Republican. He's a fast-talking, slick used car salesman, selling not cars, because he insists American car companies are shipping jobs to China. No, he is selling fantasies, or, put less delicately, lies.

If I were a Republican, a Republican who had voted for Ronald Reagan, for George H.W. Bush, for Gerald Ford, for Eisenhower, I would still be unable to bear the stench emanating from Mr. Romney. Couldn't do it. 

But for Mad Dog, the basic proposition is are you more afraid of Big government or of Bad government. You surely will get Bad government from the Republicans, by design. Even if you get Big government from the Democrats, well, maybe, sometimes, that's not so bad. Like when you have a really big problem, which covers the entire Atlantic seaboard.

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle

Republicans: Thugs R Us

Mitch McConnell, Republican, Kentucky 

Here's what passes for punditry now a days.  David Brooks, deep thinker that he is, the man who has power lunches with all the movers and shakers in Washington, the man with inside information closes the door to his study and thinks about how he can get to the conclusion Mitt Romney ought to be elected.

Brooks has to get past certain, ahem, problems, with Mr. Romney: Namely, that he has no character, if you define character as what you do when you think nobody is looking. The only thing that matters to Mr. Romney is who is looking: So he says government regulation is all that is standing between America and prosperity when he is speaking to the Republican right, but when he is speaking to a mixed crowd, he is the new champion of government regulation--can't live without it he says.  The man is the definition of an empty suit: No conviction, no courage, just a con man doing the soft shoe trying to sell you a used car he knows is a lemon but he figures he'll be gone by the time you figure it out.  This truth about Mr. Romney poses certain, not disqualifying issues for Mr. Brooks. 

So, here's how Brooks comes to his grand insight.  Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate states, baldly and honestly that he has never and will never vote for any bill which might improve the U.S. economy because that might improve the chances Mr. Obama will be re-elected. He says so on national T.V., and it runs on The News Hour. In one sense, this is not surprising: It is exactly what the entire Republican House of Representatives has been acting like. It is clearly the strategy Republicans have reached in their caucus, behind closed doors. It is the ultimate scorched earth policy.  

So, Brooks reasons: Well, the Republicans are die hard partisans. They don't care if they burn down the whole building, as long as they take Mr. Obama down with them. His destruction is their only goal. Given that mind set, the only way to govern this country is to elect Romney and then the Republicans in the House and Senate will behave in the interests of the country and they'll undo the gridlock, and we'll have a functioning government again.

So, the question Mad Dog wishes to put before his thoughtful readers is this: Do you see anything wrong with this picture?



P.S.:  Unrelated but wonderful cartoon

Matt Davies, Tribune Media Services

FEMA: Big Government's Got Your Back

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 

Mitt Romney said the Federal  Emergency Management Agency ought to be dismantled and it's work given to the states, or better yet, to private industry.

All the Tea Party folks cheered. 

The private sector is always better, more efficient Mr. Romney says.

Keep your government hands off my Medicare Joe Sixpack roars.

We don't need government. We need to shrink government until it's small enough to drown it in my bathtub. That's the Republican line. 

Don't want no govment. Until we need it.

Like when the Coast Guard (federal government) picks you up out of your floundering yacht.  The billionaires get that service for free. No, wait, their taxes pay for it, or their taxes would pay for it if they paid taxes--but their money is in the Cayman Islands, untaxed.

Romney: Sending Those Jobs to China

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle

GM spokesman,  Greg Martin, said,  "We've clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days and no amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country," 
--Huffington Post

Ah, it's Karl Rove time.  The tactic is to attack the opposition at its strength. So President Obama saved General Motors and Vice President Biden pricked Mr. Romney with the quip, "General Motors is alive and Osma Bin Laden is dead."  So Rove and his Republicans simply say, well, "GM being alive is not such a good thing for America--they are sending work to China."

Of course, it doesn't have to be true, you just say it, and you've got autoworkers calling up their union to ask whether or not it's true.

You can say President Obama was born in Bagdad, and his father was Sadam Hussein, and all that stands between America and prosperity is government regulations and women who are legitimately raped will not get pregnant and anything you want and Rush Limbaugh will believe it and broadcast it to 15 million willing believers.  

I prefer the Republican, Lincoln, who shares only the name with the current bunch of reprobates going by that name:  You can fool all the people some of the time; and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Amen, Mr. President.

The Calm: No Drama Obama

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 

Ryan Lizza, writing in The New Yorker explains why the strategy of the Obama team was high risk from the outset, and why Romney's "surge" is in a way, predictable.

What they did was to "front load" the campaign, with a ton of $ spent on attack ads in September to discredit Mitt Romney (not difficult), knowing there would be fewer dollars left at the end.  The same thing was done by Karl Rove to John Kerry, effectively.  The risk is that when Romney appears to be capable of rubbing two neurons together in the first debate, and when the Koch brothers start spending massively in October, the advantage will erode, and this may be the reason the advantage Obama had in the polls existed in the first place, and predictably would erode as Nov 6 approached.

So, it may not be the turning point was one poor performance in the first debate, but the tide was due to come in eventually.

That's grand strategy. 

The ground game is the worm's eye view and I'll be out there again, stepping around downed branches, this weekend.

Republican Response to Sandy: Give to Charity

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 

When George W. Bush was asked what Americans could do to help, after Katrina swept through, he said, "Contribute to the Red Cross."  

This is, of course, the Republican response. Government is BAD. Don't even think about using the government. Use the private sector.  This notion was articulated by Ronald Reagan's famous quip, "The nine scariest words in the English language: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." 

So what we rely on are the churches and charity. That way we owe nothing to our fellow citizens. What is required of us is nothing. What we give is only what we want to give. Painless charity.

Mr. Romney today is organizing a charity relief for victims of Sandy. This shows how big hearted he is.  Heaven forbid he should mention the Federal Emergency Management Agency is on the job, helping, restoring, responding.  We Republicans don't believe in government. We believe in charity.

At least, that's what today's Mitt is saying.

Wind swept New Hampshire

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 10.24.12

Yeah, I know, two posts in one day. This man must have too much time on his hands, or he is really gone around the bend.

A little of both.
They sent us home from work. The governor of New Hampshire told everyone to get off  the roads by 3 PM. Apparently not even health workers were exempt--word came down from the hospital, get out.

There's a big storm blowing up the East Coast and into the heartland Midwest. It's howling and it's threatening.  My father called that kind of thing, "Pathetic fallacy" which is what the storm in King Lear is,  when it reflects the storm in the king's mind. 

And now we have the end of this election approaching and there is a big storm blowing.  It's shaking the windows and rattling the walls,  as the new bard (Dylan) would say. 

And it all seems pretty appropriate somehow. Obama came in to office and just before he could be sworn in the storm hit.  He took office as 2 1/2 million jobs were lost in a year, the stock market collapsed, and along with it the prospects for retirement for many; a tsunami of  foreclosures swept over the land ; evictions exploded; General Motors and Chrysler careened toward the financial brink; banks went up in flames, even the venerable  Lehman Brothers; a Great Depression loomed like a brick wall toward which the entire country was hurtling and Obama had to steer this boat which could not be turned on dime. And that was just the home front: In Iraq things were going from bad to worse, and we still hadn't found Osma Bin Laden, and Afghanistan, which had once been conquered, was now fighting us like the Viet Cong, from behind rocks and crevices. Pakistan was no help, and in fact, turned out to be hiding Bin Laden.

As the editors of the New Yorker (from which the above paragraph is drawn) noted, the Onion 's headline was "Black Man Given Nation's Worse Job."

Or, as Maud would remind us, the best description was that Mr. Obama had been handed a "shit sandwich."

And it all raged and raged and the captain lashed himself to the mast and did not abandon ship.  He guided us through that storm. And today's storm somehow reminds me, not of Katrina, with the What Me Worry boy himself saying "Great Job, Brownie," but of the storm which swept the nation at the beginning of Mr. Obama's term, and now as we come full cycle, another storm. 

Let us hope, in Lincoln's words, "This, too, shall pass." 
And let us hope the captain will be  given his due.

Worm's Eye View

This weekend, I approached a house with my computer generated list in hand to ask whether or not the woman living there was planning on voting and how she was leaning.  There was an American flag flying from the front porch and a big van with the name of a painting company on it in the driveway.  The husband answered the door and when I asked about the list of voters I had, it had his wife's name and a name I thought was his, but it turned out to be his son's name. His wife was on the phone and his son, he told me, is in the Special Forces and he could only guess the son was in Afghanistan.  I asked which way he thought his wife was leaning. He laughed. "We're all voting for Obama," he said. I was more than a little surprised. He didn't fit my Obama profile. 
"But you own a small business," I said, pointing to his van in the driveway.  "I'd have thought you'd like the businessman, with the business experience."  
He laughed, "I don't believe that bullshit," he said. "He's not been in a business like me. I got five employees. We're doing fine now. It's not easy, but it's getting better."

Down the road from him, I walked up the driveway to another man who did not look promising. He was working on an engine in his driveway. Country music was blasting from a stereo. I don't know why, but the F150 pick up, the work clothes, my Malcolm Gladwell blink told me this was a guy who had grievances. 
He did. 
But not with Obama.
"You tell me who the man is who could have dug his way out of the mess he got handed in four years and I'd like to see him."
Then he added, "They gave him a shit sandwich, when he got in. I'd give him another four years to get past that."

We can only hope there are enough of these people out there, who are not swayed by the advertisements, the catchy slogans, the bandwagons and who can remember where we started, and we can hope they are annoyed enough to vote. 

The "Undecideds": Science vs Intuition Poli Sci 101

There are many ways to acquire knowledge.  

One of them is "polling."  When I was in college, I took a course in surveying public opinion and learned the statistics, limitations and difficulties of using standard questions to assess the opinions of other people.

I had another experience, outside of school, which revealed my own limitations in misreading people.  As an 18 year old, I started an age group swimming team, with a friend of mine, at a newly built community pool. We recruited kids from age 8 to 17 to swim the different strokes and relays required by the county swimming league with an eye toward, eventually, creating a team good enough to enter the least competitive division of the county league. 

We told the assembled kids, before each practice, stories about kids we had swum with, how they failed at first, persevered and ultimately triumphed. The kids looked at us blankly, and I could not see past their eyes. Their expressions were not blank, but, to me at least, they were unreadable. Were they thinking, "Oh, spare me the pep talk, coach.  This guy is just all about himself.  This guy is coaching this team because he needs an audience" or what?
We arranged a meet with another team which had been formed a few years earlier and was now in the county league.   This other team had been pretty well crushed in it's first two summers in the county league, not having won a single meet. We brought over our kids' times from the time trials we had run, and the other coach looked them over and smiled and agreed to swim us. Finally, he had a team his kids could beat.

The morning of the meet, our kids assembled on the far deck, and I stood near the starter's gun at the near deck. When the gun went off, starting the first race, something happened which astonished me: Our entire team, about seventy kids, leaped to their feet and roared.  I looked down the deck to my friend,  and he was as stunned as I, but he just shrugged. 

We crushed them.  Our kids swam times which were ten seconds better than they had done in time trials. Ten seconds in the water is a lot of distance. Eight year olds swam an entire 25 meters breathing only once.  Our kids were, in a word, psyched. 

I had misread the crowd. The other team's coach was not pleased. He thought we had lied to him. He thought we had brought him numbers which were phony, doctored to make our kids look slow and easy to beat. But we had collected and recorded the numbers honestly. What we had not been able to measure was what was in those kids' hearts.

Yesterday, I went door to door with my clipboard and pencil and computer sheets.  At one home  there was an Obama sign on the lawn but I had only one name in the house to ask for: the husband. I'd ask if he was going to vote. Yes. Was he leaning in any particular direction?  No, he said, looking me in the eye, smiling. "Oh, I saw the sign on your lawn."  He looked me in the eye, "That's my wife's sign. You asking about how she's going to vote or about how I'm going to vote?"  That went down on my sheet and into the computer as Mr. Deadeye, "Undecided."

Back at the office, I was told some people simply take the secret ballot seriously. You cannot be sure how he is going to vote. I may have misread the man.   But there I am, standing there in my Obama hat, and the guy says he hasn't decided, a week before the election. 

Now, maybe, he is like Maud's friend, a man who will go into the booth thinking he's going to vote for Romney and then he'll vote for Obama. Maybe, after all this, he really is undecided, as if he doesn't yet know enough about Romney and Obama. Anything's possible. He may be the long lost King of France.  But I don't think so.

That response, "undecided," seemed like a pretty clear statement to me. The guy is in his own house on a Saturday, and I've pulled him away from whatever he's doing. He doesn't want to engage in a political argument. He just wants to get rid of me. So, fine. But why can I not enter him as a Romney vote? It's clear he is not voting Obama, or he'd tell the guy in the Obama hat that. In fact, he might say he was voting Obama, just to get rid of me. 

People who came to the door, when I was not wearing my Obama hat, who were voting for Obama, would often say they intended to vote, but they left it there, no mention of who they would vote for. Then I'd slide my hand down from the back of my clipboard and the Obama sticker would show through, and they'd smile conspiratorially, almost as if they were admitting they smoked marijuana when they were kids, and maybe now and then, even now. "Oh, yes. I'm for Obama. My husband, too."

So, my intuition about the "undecided" voter  told me I was talking to a Romney voter, or at least not an Obama voter, but science demands more evidence than gut instinct. The question is, does my taking in unmeasured data, a look, a set of circumstances mislead me, or inform me beyond what one measure--what the person actually says--can tell us?

In Malcolm Gladwell's world, did I know in a Blink?

And if this is a problem at the street level, what do we make of our polls?

The professor will tell you, it's all in the numbers. If you sample enough voters, the voters you get misleading responses from will wash out among all those who are straightforward.

We can always hope.  During the election of 1864, General George McClellan, who had been the beloved commander of the union Army of the Potomac (before Lincoln fired him) was a handsome, charismatic man, who would ride down the ranks of his soldiers, waving his hat to the cheers of his troops. He ran against Abraham Lincoln on a peace now platform. The troops loved McClellan,  and they were weary in the extreme. They were bitter, more often defeated than victorious, and one had to ask, why would they vote for the cerebral Lincoln, with his stentorian,  high pitched voice and his top hat?  

But they did. Like that crowd of young swimmers, they had something inside they weren't showing. They voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln; they voted to push ahead with the war, despite all the hard times, to push ahead with the war, which was unfinished and in doubt, and they decided the election and the outcome of the war with  the ballot. 

Those men, who could march twenty miles through the day, then charge across a field with musket and bayonet, who could find strength beyond exhaustion,  were Americans of another time.  They were different from supersized Americans today, who do their fighting on computer games. They were tougher not just physically, but, I suspect, mentally and possibly, morally tougher. 

The Union army had suffered defeat after defeat, had incompetent generals, not just for one debate but for battle after battle. It took over three years to find Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, to get them into position to push the war to victory.  The troops tolerated a lot of disappointment, defeat, government ineptitude and misery, but they could see that Lincoln was pointing them in the right direction, away from a slave nation, away from a divided nation where aristocracy lived on plantations and the 99% lived around them in meager circumstances, away from a world where those who were winners felt no obligation to help those below them, away from a world of meanness and heedless greed.

Every soldier fought for his own reasons. Each voted for the same reason: To go forward.

The nation, as a whole, fought for only two reasons: Ending slavery and preserving the only democracy on earth, the last best hope of man, a government of the people, by the people, for the people. That idea had not been put into any government anywhere else on earth, at the time. The civil war tested whether or not the idea of democracy could endure.

At a White House reception, Lincoln walked up to the diminutive Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. He stooped forward to shake her hand and said, "So this is the little lady, who wrote the book, that started the great big war."

Lincoln knew, as he said in his 2nd inaugural address,  the war was fought for moral reasons, because of ideas.  One hundred and fifty years ago, our people were able to see through the gibberish with moral clarity. I'm hoping today's Americans still can.

Charles Blow: White Men and Obama

Mississippi Sheriff Laughs at His Trial for Lynching

A Black Man Who is Smarter and Better Than The Imbecile  Sheriff

Charles Blow, writing in the New York  Times,  cites some truly horrific statistic about the percentage of white men who will vote for President Obama--somewhere in the neighborhood of 30%. 
Having spent today canvasing the town of Hampton, I was both cheered and depressed by the folks I spoke with.  I was also struck by the number of households where the white wife was voting for Obama and had an Obama sign on the lawn, while the white husband is a Romney man. So Charles Blow's statistic rings true, from the worm's eye view.
In the South, white men always got points for simply being white and male, no matter how uneducated or stupid they were. They could get jobs as police, firemen, dishwashers, gas station attendants, construction workers, factory workers and they got them ahead of any Black man or Black woman who might apply. But that advantage eroded in the 1960's with the Civil Rights movement, with federal legislation and with a relentless campaign against white supremacy and advantage launched by federal government agencies. 
The essence of the resentment of the white male, who sees his wife now earning more than he can, who sees educated Blacks now getting better jobs than he can,  is contained in the story told by the son of a white farmer who is driving past the fields of  their black neighbor with his father.  The son remarks about how beautifully the Black farmer has plowed his fields with his new mule. With the old mule, who was getting on in years, the fields looked a little shabby, but with the new mule--well, big difference. The next day,  the son learns his father has shot the Black farmer's new mule. The son is stunned. Why would you kill that mule?  "If I ain't better than some nigger with a new mule, then who am I better than?" His father replies.

If I can see anything, as I do battle in the trenches, that is what I think I see.
Read the New Yorker's simple essay supporting Mr. Obama's re election: The Choice.
http://www.newyorker.com/

 There is no more simple, succinct, compelling argument than what the editors of The New Yorker assemble. The man rescued the economy, General Motors, the banks, the housing market and even Wall Street,  but 70% of white men refuse to see it that way.
They'd rather shoot his mule.

Why We Fight: The Haters on the Right

Mad Dog took a brief trip up Route 16 to clear his head,  hiking about the White Mountains.  Life is old there, and the air is clear. 

But  just north of the village of Chocorua, almost in Albany, New Hampshire,   Mad Dog spotted this.

You just know the guy who owns this Kawasaki motorcycle dealership probably has a VA pension for the hernia he got when he was in the Army and his parents are living on Social Security and using their Medicare. And the road by his dealership is maintained by government taxes on his fellow citizens.  

I did see signs for Carol Shea Porter as far north as North Conway, though more for Guinta. 

Robert Frost would have loved the mountain streams. I'm not sure he'd have been as happy about the Kawasaki dealer.
This is why we have to get out and knock on doors this weekend and next. 
Illigetimum non carberundum:  Don't let the bastards grind you down.

Romney Brings Us Fantasyland

When you wish upon a star,
Makes no difference who you are,
You can give everyone what they desire,
You can set reason on fire,
Oh, cut taxes for the billionaire,
And the middle class doesn't care,
Because we'll cut the deficit, too
Doesn't matter if it's true.

And government regulations make you blue,
Until you need to change your image,
Until you do not need T Party baggage,
And you can dis the Brits and make them mad,
That will not make Joe Sixpack sad,
All he really wants to know,
Is that you are white and you can grow,
The economy with voodoo stuff,
For America, oh, that's enough.

All Is Forgiven: America's Love Affair with Romnesia

"We've Got To Destroy That Village To Save It"

Oh, it was so long ago. Maybe 18 months. Romney said we've got the best medical care in the world--all those uninsured could just go to the Emergency Rooms. Plenty of care there. GM could go belly up. Bankruptcy can be good for a company--bad for the workers, but good for the stockholders.  Medicare can be turned into Couponcare, but never mind if you're over 60; won't affect you, just your kids. Government regulation is BAD, well, mostly, until the first debate, then we were all for it.  We cannot telegraph to the Taliban when we are leaving Afghanistan, sends the wrong signal, well until the third debate. Obamacare is the devil's work. Romneycare came from the angels. They are twins, the good twin and the evil twin. Cut taxes for billionaires. You can believe me: If billionaires pay less, we can build the middle class. Government cannot create jobs, except in Congressman Ryan's district. Obama did the apology tour; I did the stand tall tour--they loved it in London.  And any President would have, could have done what Obama did in taking out Bin Laden. I coulda hit that home run.

Oh, America, what have you wrought?

Remember last month?

Flipper is Drowning! We have to save Flipper!

Romney and Ryan want to kill Medicare. Have made plans to kill Medicare. They Deny it, of course, but that's what they will do.

But in one debate, Mr. Romney has erased that memory from the American voter, as easily as...Etchy Sketch. 

Wow.

What I heard a pundit say tonight is that the Democrats had managed to paint Mr. Romney as a really unacceptable buffoon and all that was undone during the first debate. If one debate is all it took, what does that say about the American mind?

Horses and Bayonets

There was a Monday night football game and a baseball play off tonight, so I'm not sure anyone beyond the crew at PBS was watching, but from my view out here in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama made Mr. Romney look like an inept amateur tonight.

Mr. Romney, as I'm sure most people will hear tomorrow morning, tried to attack Mr. Obama as a wrecker of the national defense, as a man who had weakened America by cutting back on our armed forces. Why, we have fewer ships today than we did in 1910, Mr. Romney said, scandalized.

Mr. Obama smiled slyly and replied, "That's because you have no idea of what real strength is. Yes, we have fewer ships, and we also have fewer horses and bayonets in our armed forces, but that's because we have these things called aircraft carriers and these ships that go underwater, called submarines. You have to know how military forces need to be constructed in the 21st century. "

And another exchange, Mr. Obama remarked, "You want to return to  the wars of the 1980's, the social policies of the 1950's and the economic policies of the 1920's." 

At least, that's the way I remember it.

One thing I do remember is Mr. Romney and his running mate Mr. Ryan both said, quite clearly, during prior debates we do not want to draw a line in the sand and say we will leave Afghanistan at 2014, because then we tell the Taliban all they have to do is wait until that date. But now, with the ever changing kaleidoscope which is Mr. Romney, we are all for a clear date, Taliban planning no longer mentioned.

Romney did what Romney does:  He spun his tale about how everything has collapsed around the world and it's all because Mr. Obama has been a failure as a President.  Those who want to believe that will believe that. 

For whatever reasons, some people want to believe Mr. Romney wouldn't be so bad, and he'd be better than Mr. Obama.

To paraphrase The Wire, Mr. Obama has to be saying to himself, "I can be right about Afghanistan; I can be right about the economy; I can be right about Social Security and I can be right about Medicare, but tomorrow morning, I still wake up Black in a country which isn't."

We'll find out what this country is made of on November 6.

Republican Pie: Romnesia Rhubarb

Once upon a time, there was a lovely Princess named Prosperity, and there was a handsome prince, called Romnesia.   Prosperity wanted to visit every house in the shire, and shower them with goods and services and bank accounts bursting at the seams and F-150 pick up trucks (made in the USA) and Sig Sauer hand guns and Winchester rifles and bottles of beer and long, long vacations. 

But there was an evil spirit in the shire:  Government Regulation and his evil twin, Government Interference, and they stood between the Princess and all her people. Together they worked their nefarious will through something caused "taxes" which made all the good, rich people in the shire afraid to come out and do all the good things rich people like to do, like hire poor people and send over Thanksgiving turkeys and allow everyone to visit their country clubs, right after the proper respect had been paid by mowing the lawns and power washing the decks of the rich people.

But I digress. We were talking about the bad twins, Government Regulation and Government Interference, who tried every day to bring bad things like socialism and  Medicare and Social Security to the people of the shire, who, if those things were allowed to grow would have found themselves turning into worthless, dependent slackers who felt government owed them a living.

Fortunately, Prince Romnesia came along and fought many battles against many nasty foes, like the troll Newt and the wizard RonPaul and the horney toad Pizzaman and the sorcerer Santorum and the winter queen Bachmann. One after another, Prince Romesia slew each with his nifty rightward dodge: Every time one of his foes swung a  blade at the Prince, the Prince jumped to the right, and got behind his foe and kicked him to the ground.

But then, Prince Romnesia had to face the ultimate Radical, who had been born in No Place, and had no birth certificate and who had wandered through youth from parts of the globe where bad thoughts come from: Indonesia, CALIFORNIA, and Hawaii (which isn't so bad, but it's not really America, as Alaska is.)

There was a great tournament and Prince Romnesia stalked the Radical, and the Prince swung his sword many times, and hard and he was very brave. But he was also very clever, because this time, he jumped, not to the right, as he had before, but to the left. And he made friends with Government Regulation, and he said we all should love Government Regulation, because it is necessary for free markets. And the Prince split the alliance between Government Regulation and Government Interference, and he was smart to do this, because you can divide and conquer.

So, the Prince became the great champion of Government Regulation and he even said he would make sure the rich people did not pay any less in taxes. But what he really meant was the total percentage of all taxes paid by the rich would not be any less. This did not make the rich people afraid because Prince Romnesia said he would make everyone pay less in taxes and the proportions would all stay the same. 

And while he was cutting taxes, he would swing his magic sword and cut the deficit into little, little pieces. 

And everyone lived happily after.

"I'll Be Happy To Guard Your Henhouse"