The Shadow and the Tree

"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."
--Abraham Lincoln





There's a wonderful story line in The Wire, which concerns the newly elected Mayor of Baltimore, Tommy Carcetti, who has to choose between getting five million dollars for the crumbling Baltimore schools, which would come at the price of personal humiliation, because he would be taking it from a Republican governor, who would free the funds but only on the condition the state would control their use, saying the Democratic city government could not be trusted to use it wisely. Carcetti spurns the money, to the disgust of his most valued aide, Norman Wilson. Later, Wilson drinks in a darkened bar with the former chief aide to the mayor Carcetti and Wilson had defeated. Wilson finds a sympathetic audience in his former rival and counterpart. "No matter how good they look at first," the aide tells Wilson, "They never stay that way." Wilson agrees, "They will always disappoint you."

Life is imitating art with the presidency of Barack Obama, as he has to make choices which disappoint his followers.

You can hear Lyndon Johnson on the phone if you listen to the Johnson tape explaining to his good friend, Georgia senator Richard Russell, why he is pushing so hard on the Civil Rights Act and on Medicare, so early in his term.

You're going to burn out, Russell tells him. Let things build naturally.

No, Johnson tells him, he's seen this in presidents before, when you are new to the job, you haven't made all that many enemies, but with each decision, you lose more and more friends. You have to get the most important things done first, because each thing becomes harder and harder, as you pile more boulders on your back with each new decision.

Bill Clinton should have listened to Johnson--he started with gays in the military. A just cause, no doubt, but not the most important thing he had to accomplish.

Obama began with heath care, which showed great judgment. He might be a young president, but he got the most important decision right: Start with the most important thing. Health care costs are dragging down American industry. Other countries take that burden off the backs of their private sector companies. General Motors runs its race with Toyota carrying a hundred pound back pack of health care costs for its workers.

Eventually, you have to get to the other things on the list and Afghanistan and Iraq are not even in second place. In terms of getting re elected, it's the economy, stupid. And in terms of remaining a military power, it's the economy.

But eventually, you have to deal with Afghanistan and Iraq. It's not urgent, true, but it's important. It's not urgent because politicians learned the Viet Nam lesson: You can rape another country, and you can send your own youth off to die, but you cannot do it with a draft. As soon as you involve the uninterested, parochial, ignorant folks who live in all the villages across the land, once you start reaching into the homes of mothers whose only real interest in life are their own children and homes, well then you unleash the furies.

The best way to wake insular American citizens to the harm their country is doing in some far off place is to pluck American children from American homes, from their automobiles, their first jobs, their girlfriends (and now boyfriends) and to send them off and return them in flag draped coffins. Then, those mothers who could not name the speaker of the house, or the senate majority leader, or the secretary of defense, then these blissfully ignorant people become a force and a movement.

So, the government has done the shrewd thing: They've made patriotism a financial proposition--fight for your country, join the military and you've got a steady income, the GI bill for education and housing once you're out, and all you've got to do is take a risk, a big risk, the risk of death in the field, but the body counts have been low. Ten years in Afghanistan and we've lost only a tenth of what we lost in five years in Viet Nam.

According the Marvin Kalb, in today's New York Times, Obama "would occasionally slip into an aide's office, lean on his desk and wonder aloud whether he was making the same mistakes Johnson had made."

As well he should.

A recent National Public Radio piece on girls in Afghanistan prisons brings home the problem. A thirteen year old girl's brother runs off with a neighbor's daughter. The neighbor is outraged, fires shots into the girl's house, stalks the family of this boy who ran off with his daughter. The girl's father offers the girl in marriage to this irate neighbor. The neighbor is placated. He may have lost his own daughter, but now he can acquire a sprightly young wife. But the girl runs away with her boyfriend, not wanting to marry a man who has grandchildren, a man who has terrorized her family, not exactly a potential soul mate. The girl is captured, and sent to prison. Her father shows up and tells her she has disgraced her family by refusing this husband who was selected for her. But she has a surprise for him. She has given birth, in prison, to her boyfriend's baby. He replies, she can still come home, but only if she kills the baby.

There's honor for you, Afghan style.

This is but one of many stories which illuminate why the United States of America has no business in Afghanistan. Maybe we did once, to seek out Osama, but that was a mission we could have done without building schools and libraries for the Taliban to blow up. And once Osama was dead, then we should pull out that strike force and come home and do it within weeks not years.

So why does Obama not do that? Why is he keeping our troops in country at a rate of 70,000 still in Afghanistan even after the 30,000 scheduled for withdrawal in December?

It can only be the Tommy Carcetti calculation. He does not want to be humiliated. Lyndon Johnson said he would not be defeated by a "Raggedy-ass, little fourth rate country." What he did not realize is you cannot bomb a country back to the stone age when they are already living in the stone age.

You have as a mission remaking a country in our own image, whipping a little American industry on them, as George Carlin would say. Problem is, you can build schools and other buildings, but you cannot change culture; you cannot change values for all the money and bombs in the world.

Obama and our generals now talk of "The Mission" in Afghanistan. Well, sure go ahead and tell us what that mission is. Do you re-educate that father about what he ought to do with his daughter? And are the lessons given in English?

Kalb tells us of Viet Nam "The defeat was a humiliation, and it stripped the country of its illusions of omnipotence. From boundless self-confidence, Americans descended into self-doubt."

I know history is one long argument, but I lived through those years, and so it's not history book history to me. I remember all that. I did not feel at all humiliated. I did not see America slink off in a funk and not go to work or not create an Internet or computers or a satellite system or GPS. I went on with my medical training, with great relief. Like all doctors in 1973, when I graduated I knew it didn't matter what my lottery number was. They drafted every single intern the day his internship finished and sent him off to Viet Nam. I was, with all my friends, on the launching pad.

But then the whole thing collapsed. The nation building was wrecked by the invading North Viet Namese army and helicopters lifted the last Americans off the Saigon embassy roof and I jumped for joy. I would not have to go to Viet Nam. My self confidence took not a blow. I never felt omnipotent.

Who are these people who lost self confidence? My brother served in Viet Nam. He never struck me as someone who felt omnipotent. When he returned, and Viet Nam collapsed, he did not skulk around. He was delighted. He was delighted to be home, alive, all limbs intact. He went out and led a very productive life.

In The Way We Were Robert Redford talks about how the passions of the moment wash away, once economies start asserting themselves. "Twenty years from now, we'll be giving them jobs and money and they'll take it because they will need or want the money, and nobody will even remember the way we were."

Our military may have felt humiliated, but I was, at best, just a fan. I was not in that fight. I had no dog in that fight. Like Muhammad Ali, I could say, "I ain't got no fight with them Cong."

Whenever you see words like "Humiliation," or "Honor" or "Self confidence," or "Reputation," your antenae ought to start flashing like a neon light: Bogus.

Nobody ever died of humiliation or lost honor.

Listen to those Lyndon Johnson tapes sometime. Johnson on the phone with Richard Russell, who sounds like a true Georgia cracker, accent so thick and slow he sounds brain damaged to the average New Englander. And Johnson asks his old, best friend, what he ought to do about Viet Nam. He doesn't want to be the first president to lose a war. And Russell, drawls, "Well, you know, Mr. President, them Cong is going to be there forever. They ain't got nowhere else."
"I know, " Johnson says.
"And we got to come out of there, eventually. We don't want to stay there."
"I know."
"Well, thing is, Mr. President," Russell drawls. "They know that too."

Dead Seals

Every morning, at first light, my dog and I walk and run along the beach at Plaice Cove. For the past few weeks dead seals have been dotting the sand. At first it was small seals, infants, I guessed, less than two feet long. There were also more dead gulls, five or six every few days, washing about in the surf.

Today, we found a four foot long adult seal, halfway down the beach. It was high tide, and he had washed up right next to the big boulders protecting the houses above, and he was the color of the boulders, and it was still dark, so when Tug sniffed at him, I thought it was just a boulder some dog had marked. Then, I realized it was a full grown seal, his coat dappled like the rocks around him.

We walked down toward North Hampton, and near the North Hampton line, beyond that last flagpole, lay a six foot fish, at least 250 lbs, I don't know what kind of fish. Tuna maybe. It's fins and body had been chewed. Birds, maybe. Maybe sharks, but smaller bites, birds more likely.

Seals have been washing up from Maine to Massachusetts and the New England Aquarium is doing necropsies to figure out what is killing the mammals. So far, no answers.

This being a political blog, I suppose I should point out that citizens at times like these, turn to their government for answers. There's no profit in doing the labor to figure out what is happening to the seals. But as citizens, as human beings, we want to know. and personally, I'm happy to think of my tax dollars going to pay for some marine biologists to figure out these things. But this is a digression, really. This event transcends the Tea Party dolts and the right wingers who bleat daily about what is wrong with the world. This is so much more important than their stupid, ignorant anger. The seals don't care about Job Creators or big government. They just live their lives out there beyond the surf, not bothering us or even letting us know they are out there.

It's depressing, but why is it depressing?

Drowning polar bears are depressing, but that you can say is depressing because we can feel guilty about the polar bears if we, as human beings have played a causative role in their demise.

The seals, so far, are not our fault. It's possible, like the dead birds Rachel Carson tied to insecticide in The Silent Spring, mankind may have played a role in the death of the seals, but so far we are not prime suspects.

The seals are just washing up with no explanation.

Whatever it is, it's not just mammals affected. Those dead gulls and that enormous fish attest to a cross species event. I thought it might be something to do with a bad storm at sea, but my wife assures me fish do not die in ocean storms, seals maybe, if they cannot catch a breath, but not fish. Maybe she's right.

There is always the possibility they are a harbinger--like the dead rats which precede outbreaks of the plague, the Black Death, Yesina Pestis.

But even if it's not anything ominous for humankind, the dead seals thing feels wrong. It's as if nature is out of whack.

I don't know why I don't like it. But I don't like it.

QED: Republican Voodoo Economic

"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people."
--Abraham Lincoln





This morning the Portsmouth Herald carried a letter from Patrick Abrami who is a delegate to the New Hampshire House of Delegates for Stratham, Exeter and North Hampton. Mr. Abrami argues to over ride a veto of a bill called "Right To Work," saying that the American People have voted with their feet, by leaving states which do not have a Right to Work law and resettling in states where such laws exist. He then spiffs up his otherwise lame argument with a Latin maxim: Quad erat demonstrandum, which means "We have proved the proposition we set ou to prove."

I am guessing he's a Republican.

How could I know he's a Republican?

Because he engages in that pathognomonic (from the Greek) behavior of Republicans to draw their conclusions not from whence their data leads them but from their own fantasy of how life should be and then to search out data, however bogus or irrelevant to "prove" they are right. (Pathognomonic in medicine is a sign or symptom of the disease so characteristic, it makes the diagnosis.)
This is the classic case of True/True/Unrelated.
But first, let me digress. One thing you have to admire about Republicans is their capacity for naming. The tax on the wealthy which claims back for the society a portion of wealth which society helped the individual create is not called "The Estate Tax, "but Republicans call it "The Death Tax," as in, "This tax is the death of the economy," or the "Death of the Republic tax."
Now to Mr. Abrami's argument: He sets out in detail which states lost population and thus Congressional seats in the last census, and because 11 states with a Right to Work law gained seats and only one state which had rejected this type law gained, while 10 states which reject the law lost seats.

Then, triumphantly, Mr. Abrami exults: QED, I have proved my point! People moved from Non Right to Work States to Right to Work states and voted with their feet.

Of course, he makes the classic mistake the uneducated man makes: He fails to look at other possible explanations for the migration. He so badly wants the reason each of those families migrated to be his reason, he is blind to all other explanations.
Let's look at those states: People moved away from Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio.

Can you think of any other reason people might have left Louisiana? Can you spell Katrina?
Michigan, well there's this thing called the auto industry which, had the Republicans had their way, would have totally imploded, but for the action of the Democrats (which gave rise to the Republicans derisive name Government Motors--oh they are so good at names.)
Then there are those "rust belt" states, which have been ravaged by the shift of manufacturing from the USA to China, well before the economy tanked, a trend which dates back decades through good times and bad.

And, oh yes, there's Massachusetts, which, if anything should give Mr. Abrami pause, it's a state where the economy has been relatively untouched by the hard times, but people are still fleeing pockets of poverty.

Let's look at the states which are growing: Texas, ah yes, Texas. Rick Perry is currently claiming his shining state is drawing in workers like a giant job magnet. Of course, 25% of Texans have no health insurance and most of the jobs there are low wage jobs for the desperate, many of them the flooded out victims from New Orleans.

Then there are the rest of the states, all Sun Belt states in the South or Southwest, to which people have been streaming dating back to the Carter administration and beyond. The reasons for this migration have been the subject of academic theses and fodder for PhD's for decades. Explanations have ranged from the better weather to places with low cost of living and attractiveness to retired people, who are not likely to be much concerned about whether or not unions or Right to Work laws exist there.

Fact is, some people do follow jobs, but the reason jobs went to the Sun Belt is the factories in the North and Midwest closed down as America lost manufacturing to Asia, not because unionized workers made companies uncompetitive but because nobody could compete with the slave wages paid in China, India and Indonesia.

What Mr. Abrami does not touch upon is what exactly the Right to Work law means: I cannot claim to know its details. I have to confess to judging it mainly by knowing Republicans like it so it's probably bad for the common man. I suspect it's an attempt to eviscerate the unions, probably by saying to prospective employees, well you don't have to join the union, we have both types of workers in this factory. But, of course, you know which type of worker we want to hire.

What really strikes me is the nature of Mr. Abrami's mind, as revealed by his argument. New Hampshire is a state of roughly 1.3 million people. For this small state, there are 460 members of the House of Delegates, who represent roughly 3,000 citizens each. One would think those 3,000 citizens of Exeter, Stratham and North Hampton could have come up with someone better educated than Mr. Abrami. Someone who has some clearer understanding of cause and effect.

Then again, I live in Hampton and our House of Delegate representative once explained at a meeting of citizens his plan to solve the budget crisis in New Hampshire: He would lower the cigarette tax. See, what this would do is it would lower the cost of a pack of cigarettes, so people would buy more cigarettes and the state would make more money. Why, he exclaimed, people from Massachusetts and Vermont would flood across the border to buy our cheap cigarettes and we could solve our fiscal crisis quickly.

Then someone asked: So you want to solve our money problems by exporting cancer to Vermont and Massachusetts? And what about New Hampshire smokers? Don't we have to pay for their lung cancer? Well, no he explained, only in Massachusetts does the state have to worry about paying for its citizen's healthcare. But, he responded brightly, what's the problem? Cigarettes are legal. We might as well profit from the trade.

Talk about having lost a moral compass. But then again, in the world of commerce, where the Republicans live, maybe a moral compass is not something they much need.
In the end, this Republican said, "Look the voters have spoken. They sent us to the legislature to cut taxes, pure and simple and we are going to do that."

There you have it: cause and effect. He knew what those votes meant. Everyone else is still trying to figure out what that vote meant, but he knew what he wanted that vote to mean and that's his story and he's sticking to it.

Pathognomonic.

Bill O'Reilly And the Big Bad $16 Muffin

Bill O'Reilly and some of his friends at Fox News jumped all over the latest example of government wasting money: He claimed a conference for Justice Department "Nitwits" spent $16 for each muffin eaten by the conference attendees.

This was based on an government audit done by the office of the Inspector General.

Actually, it turns out, the 5 day conference, like most conferences I go to, provided coffee, fruit and soft drinks during breaks between lectures and the cost per person for all this was $14.72, which is 2 cents over the allowable Justice Department limit.

But O'Reilly didn't bother to wait for the response from the hotel's accountant; this was just too good a story, a Heaven sent example of how government "nitwits" live it up on his dime and your dime and mine. Oh, we are just supporting these welfare Queens with $16 muffins, while we slave away at our TV stations. This story is "About a federal government that doesn't give a hoot about how much money it spends," and "President Obama wants more tax money to buy more muffins."

Now, you might expect O'Reilly would be a little abashed, learning the truth, but no.

This is a classic event--and Rush Limbaugh is the king of this sort of disinformation. You get the headline, erupt in righteous indignation, proclaim this just "proves" you have been right all along about that big bad federal government and that evil, foreign born President Obama, and move on to the next story without a shred of shame.

Fact is, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck--none of them has ever really put himself on the line for his fellow citizens. They are the yell leaders. They are wimps, every last one, without even enough mental rigor to check out a story. They so want the story to be true, they cannot bear the thought that more investigation might undermine it.

That's how they do.

The Dangers of Warm and Fuzzy

We had an edifying session among Hampton Democrats the other night. One of us played a Bill O'Reilly, Newt Gingrich, you name it, the generic Republican, spewing forth the Republican Party babble: "Democrat Big Federal Government Regulations are discouraging the Job Creators from creating new jobs, and wasteful government spending is killing the economy and driving up the deficit which our grandchildren will be paying for," and so forth, and various members of the Democrat club tried to respond to this tripe.

At one point, someone said, "You know, when I hear this sort of stuff, I know it's just no use. That person has made up his mind."

Another said, "It is just so demoralizing, I feel badly just having to reply to this."

But that is when I thought, "Qui Tacit, Consentit." He who remains silent, consents. Or, silence implies consent.

Someone pointed out, when Clinton was President, he had George Stephanopolis on TV refuting every one of these insipid Republican talking points, point by point, and firing back with aggressive assertions of his own, and eventually, the accepted truth was not simply the Republican truth, but people began to question all of this Rush Limbaugh braying.

It's exhausting, but it's necessary. It requires persistence, but it's essential.

And it requires a taste for confrontation, which some people simply cannot stomach. But that's what war is.

I heard Newt Gingrich tonight and I listened to Bill O'Reilly and if I closed my eyes, I could not tell one from another, the Republicans have read so long from the same prayer book.

One of them, maybe Bill O'Reilly, was talking to Jon Stewart about $16 doughnuts ordered for a meeting of government "nitwits." (It turned out this dunce had it wrong, the $16 per person covered breakfast, the rental of the room etc., but when has reality ever mattered to demagogues?) And he went on about how he wouldn't mind paying higher taxes, a 40% tax rate but he knew the government would waste his money on $16 doughnuts.

And Jon Stewart pointed out that even if that $16 a person was wasted the total cost came out to about $800 and how much did those Wall Street wild men, those champions of the private sector, who the Republicans so admire cost us?

O'Reilly pointed out he employs dozens of people and if he stopped working, all those people would be unemployed.

Stewart, patient, methodical, confrontational demolished each absurd thrust. Are you really saying you would simply stop working because you would take home not $3.5 million but only $3 million?

That reminded me of an interview I heard with a professor from the Wharton School of Business who was talking about the Republican line you hear constantly that small businesses are the main drivers of employment. Most jobs are created by small businesses (who, the Republicans say are afraid to hire because of federal government regulations.) But, asked the professor, how do you define small business? Below 500 employees. Well, that's a pretty big factory, he said. And then he observed the real small business is a doctor who has maybe five employees, and he cannot hire more, not because of regulations, but because the size of his income stream cannot sustain more employees.

And real innovators, a business start up with ten employees, fail with great regularity, so they are not job creators but job destroyers. They create briefly, then destroy. So that image of the small businessman swamped by government regulations is a false image.

Who exactly are these small harried businessmen? They are always a single person Michele Bachmann met while campaigning in New Hampshire who told her a story, right after the lady who told her the story about her daughter being struck with mental retardation after a government mandated vaccine.

They are the imaginary friends of each of these Republican dupes.

We have to confront the monster.

We have to man up.

One of the Democrats at the meeting told of her brother, who does not read the newspaper, but goes to the bar or turns on the radio and listens to Rush Limbaugh, and he repeats what he hears there and she has to confront each assertion with reality, and it's draining.

But, as unpleasant and draining as it is, it is work that has to be done.

And we can't be too nice about it.

Obama tried that, until he discovered the people he is opposing don't play nice. They see nice as a sign of weakness.

And we should be aware of this. When I hear a story about reforming the prison system, and I hear an advocate start talking about moving prisoners from state penitentiaries to local jails so they can be closer to their families and to rehabilitation facilities, I just shake my head.

That woman's brother who listens to Rush is thinking, there ain't no way to rehabilitate these low lifes. He has no sympathy for them and as soon as you show you're sympathetic you are a bleeding heart.

What you can say is we cannot afford to keep non violent offenders who were locked up for drug possession in state penitentiaries.

Let's stop advocating for the needy, who Joe Sixpack thinks are undeserving. Let's just attack and attack and attack again. We cannot afford being seen as being too sympathetic. The Republicans base their appeal on their own lack of sympathy. We have to show we are just as hard hearted, but we are smarter. We know government is necessary and can be a positive force to rescue us from economic disaster.

We hav e to show it is the Republicans are the wimps because they are paralyzed, unable to do anything. They keep waiting for the phantom small business Job Creator heroes to magically appear and rescue us all. Democrats are the active champions who say, move ahead or move aside. But if you can't lend a hand then get out of the way.

Or, as the bard once said:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled.

Portsmouth Herald Showcases the Republican Song and Dance: Susan Collins Style

Yesterday, the Portsmouth Herald published a 20 paragraph, two columns letter from Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) with some surprising news: Over-regulation by Washington is the reason we are having economic problems.

I wonder where she got that novel insight?

This does sound familiar, as you hear it ad nauseum from virtually every Republican, as if they are reciting Hail Marys.

Why did she feel compelled to repeat these flabby canards?

I was under the apparently mistaken impression our economic woes had something to do which a more complex morass of what was happening in the world wide economy. (Perhaps Senator Collins has not heard of a certain little brouhaha in a place called Europe, and Greece in particular. ) And mixed in that brew are two wars (led by her own party) and a financial meltdown visited upon us by a lack of regulation.

And I seem to recall there a little problem with greedy bankers and stock brokers who sold rotten mortgage backed securities which caused both the housing market and world markets to crash?

If this is true, perhaps the Senator is confusing the disease (greed, and its fellow traveler, unscrupulous behavior) with the therapy (vigorously enforced regulation.)

But now we have a United States Senator, who people have been fond of describing as a "Moderates Republican" screaming about regulations holding down the economy. (Maybe this is like one of those fraternity stunts you have to do to be taken into the club. You know, like running around the quad in your underwear in the snow, shouting, "Beware the Sky is Falling!)

Senator Collins certainly sounds as if she knows: “Crushing new regulations,” are on their way: More than 4,200 new rules 845 affect small business with economic impact of $100 million each costing 90,000 American jobs. Wow! And Senator Collins has been talking to “businessmen” and “Job Creators” who tell her “Uncertainty generated by Washington is a big wet blanket on our economy.”

Perhaps, if she had listened more closely, she’d have realized the kind of uncertainty they are talking about is the kind created when her own party, the Republican party, initially refused to allow FEMA relief payments for flood victims in Vermont and elsewhere. When the Republicans try to control and regulate—no FEMA payments until we cut something from government programs —well that’s just responsible government action. And talk about uncertainty: Let’s spend the summer closing down the government by dreaming up a problem (as if we don’t have enough already) called the “Deficit.”

I keep looking for the specific regulations which are dragging down our economy and Senator Collins offers only two examples: Walnuts and boiler emissions.

Let’s take the case of walnuts; it’s something I actually know about. Senator Collins says, “Washington claimed the walnuts were being marketed as a drug, so the government ordered the company to stop telling consumers about the benefits of nuts.”

Oh, bad government! Down boy! Good walnut sellers. Good boy.

The problem with the Senator’s argument is there are no persuasive, double blind, controlled prospective trials to confirm any of the claims made for walnuts (avoid heart disease, improve blood sugar control in diabetes.) There are lots of claims made for a variety of foods, but these are studies which leave a lot to be desired, scientifically. How many walnuts do you have to eat a day to raise your HDL cholesterol? Is the effect transitory or sustained? Does this actually result in an outcome we care about, like reduced heart attacks? Or do people simply gain weight and start smelling like walnuts?

But the lack of evidence never stopped the walnut purveyors from making those claims. This is part of the culture of commerce, which in this country trumps the culture of science every time. If you have a "scientific claim" which can be turned into cash, the Republican Party and the folks in the money chain are rooting for you, whether or not the claim is phony. Every day I see on TV advertisements for FRUIT LOOPS as being good for your child’s health because of their fiber content! Imagine if the government tried to stomp all over those Job Creators at the Fruit Loop Company for deceptive advertising.

But deceptive advertising is nothing that bothers Ms. Collins or her party. They do it all the time.

Just consider the case of her partner, across the river, Kelly Ayotte who voted to kill Medicare and then claimed the Republican party was not trying to kill Medicare, it was just “Improving” it. Improving it, by converting it into a coupon care program. So you would get, say $8000 a year to spend on whatever your little heart desires for medical care, and you’d save the government a bundle of money and help keep the big bad Deficit away. Of course, if you needed a coronary bypass that year, the bill would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000. But, hey, $8,000 is a start. Your children can chip in. And you could sell your house.

I don’t know much about boilers, but the Senator from Maine tells me the regulations had something to do with the Environmental Protection Agency, which her party believes to be a Democratic anti business machine and the EPA is at it again, regulating “emissions” from these boilers which will cost 90,000 jobs. I don’t know, maybe she’s right. Whenever she trots out big numbers, you know she must know what she’s talking about.

But then again, think about those walnuts.

Republicans: The Anatomy of Hate

My wife remarked I would have lasted about thirty seconds as a psychiatrist. Coming from her, this was a compliment. During her nursing training she had to do a rotation on psychiatry, in a very famous psychiatric hospital, Payne Whitney, in New York City and she said it was all she could do to stop herself from just slapping some of her depressed patients. "Man up," she wanted to say. "Just stop whining and pull yourself together."

So ours is not a household given to a lot of psychobabble.

On the other hand, when I look at the Republicans who are most prominent, from Rush Limbaugh, to Rick Perry, I cannot help but notice a few shared characteristics which one might describe as a syndrome of the hater.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, all very poor students. All, presumably, told at some tender age they were not the sharpest blades in the drawer, and you can just see them trying to prove all those doubters wrong. You see them struggling to change that past of humiliation.

And Rush, one has to admit, is a man with some pretty obvious reasons for self loathing. He is, after all, grotesque, physically. This is not a kind or socially correct thing to point out, but it's sort of the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to Rush, and for that matter Glenn. Pretty obvious insecurity and inferiority complexes just lighting up like neon.

Rick Perry, ditto. Not because he is physically grotesque. Not because he knows he is not going to walk out of the bar with a woman and he's over compensating for physical unattractiveness, but he was, as he freely admits, a dimwit in school. He tries to get past this by joking about it, as if to say, having been a dunce, well that doesn't mean your not smart, because, obviously, I've written this book which displays just how smart I am. I can see Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and ought to be executed, Texas style.

Rush Limbaugh hates the undeserving poor, the welfare queens who want to rape the system and free load off the hard working American Taxpayer. Mitch McConnell shares that hate and so does Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. All the Republicans do. They hate the poor who are poor because they are undeserving and trying to live like parasites on the American taxpayer.

They are not simply derisive, they actively hate these fellow citizens. They hate criminals who commit heinous crimes and they want to kill them. Rick Perry has never lost sleep over killing prisoners on death row. And he is dead certain (excuse the pun) he has never executed an innocent man, that's how sure he is of the Texas courts.

In his certainty, Rick Perry shares this characteristic with all the big time Republicans, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Glenn, Rush, Sean, Michele. In fact, it is a source of some fascination and wonder to Democrats about just how sure these Republicans are of everything.

But there is nothing new in this.

Just after World War II, Jean Paul Sartre looked at the anti Semite. "Anti Semitism is a way of feeling good, proud even," Sartre observed. "It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than reason." The hater does this out of a "Longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may intervene to cast doubt on it...The Anti Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith."

Democrats over the past three years, have agonized over the inability of Democrats, of the President in particular, to come up with a coherent, cogent and simple response, a catchy little catechism like the Republicans have: "Regulations, tax and spend, driving up the deficits for our grandchildren to pay. Government is not the solution; it is the problem."

Why don't we have a catchy little riff like that?

It's Bertrand Russel's plaintiff question: Why is it the stupid are cocksure, and the intelligent full of doubts?

Well, I guess the answer is, because the Right is always sure it's right. And the Left, well, they are pondering.

But Democrats have got to get beyond all this.

We may not have all the answers, but we do know this: The Republicans, for all their surety are wrong. They stamp their feet and throw tantrums, but what they are really saying is, "We cannot and will not do anything! No!" They are saying government cannot help. No. We will not allow it!

And Democrats, from the time of Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression know that government will fail, but it will try again, and it has to try and keep trying until something works. And eventually, something will work. And we call the successes Social Security and Medicare and The Interstate Highway System and the Internet and the Atom bomb (heaven help us) and a dead guy called Osama Bin Laden.

If you keep trying, eventually, something works.