Romney and the Dog

It may not be the most pressing question of the 2012 campaign, but I have to ask: Just how did the story about Romney tying his dog to the roof of his car come out?

Gail Collins, who is reliably droll, sane and a writer of great restraint, cannot restrain herself. It just keeps bubbling up from her primative cerebral centers, and it seems to come out of nowhere and she just cannot stop it. It appears in nearly every column, no matter how unrelated to dogs or cars or travel or even taxes or the economy.

I mean, there is only one possible source I can imagine, unless a policeman stopped him and created some sort of record.

But short of police involvement, or a some really improbable person with a cell phone camera, the only source for that story could have been Romney himself or someone in his family.

Any way you slice it, the fact the story came out at all is the really bizarre part.

I know I could look this up on the internet, and likely, some day I will. But right now, reading Gail Collins about this is just too much fun.

In fact, every discouraged Democrat ought to simply link to Gail Collins and Paul Krugman and start each day reading them. It's almost enough to make one believe there are well springs of truth, virtue and reality still percolating up through the scum and muck of the Republican vituperation and disingenuousness which passes for thought on the right.

Wah Wah Republican Follies

I missed the candidates' debate last night. Detroit was playing Texas. But I heard the headlines and the sound bites this morning.

It seems they all agreed on the big issue: The economy is in the doldrums because--one guess now, and remember these are Republicans talking: Oh, yes! It's the government!

Not just the government, the federal government.

Forget about those bankers making loans to deadbeats and people who were well meaning but incapable; forget about those Wall Street sharpies who were selling securities using those really worthless mortgage loans as security; forget about the European union implosion; forget about, most of all, those two big whirlpools over there called "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" where we spent in one week what it would cost to fund healthcare for every American for about a year.

Naw, none of that even exists--can't hear about it, can't see it and sure cannot talk about it, because Republicans stick to the script. Have been doing that since they discovered a guy named Reagan who was just great as long as he stuck to the script. And ever since then, they all do.

Except maybe for Chris Christie, who is, as Mara Liasson tells us is, "Authentic." Which means he does stray from the "Government is bad. Government is the problem not the solution. Government regulations are the problem killing the economy. Government is discouraging the almighty Job Creators." Sometimes he says something that doesn't sound as if it came out of the Republican/Fox News word processor, something you haven't heard on Rush or Glenn or Sean.

Speaking of which, did you know Elizabeth Warren is a parasite who doesn't care about her host?

That is, as opposed to all those parasites who are quite considerate of their hosts.

And here I thought Ron Paul was the designated authentic Republican.

But I'm not done with Mara Liasson. During the last presidential campaign I listened to NPR every day and whenever Mara Liasson came on I kept thinking my radio had somehow jumped the dial to Fox News. Her reports had sixty second sound bites from Sarah Palin (you remember Sarah) and a three second snippet from Barack Obama sounding as if he was choking on a biscotti. She is the great stealth bomber of the Fox News crowd. Apparently, she has the zealotry of the convert: In high school, growing up in Scarsdale, New York (fertile Fox News spawning ground) she helped form the Scarsdale Alternative School, which sounds like some kind of Hippie response to the button down privileged elitist environment of Scarsdale, but what's in a name? Then, after Brown, where they actually have a transgender dormitory, she shipped out to San Francisco, where she was, one can only imagine, traumatized by the liberal scene in Haight Ashbury and so flipped out she ran right over and joined Fox News and hasn't looked back since. Somehow, I suppose in some guilt ridden attempt to add "Balance" to NPR news,NPR hired her back which is like Abraham Lincoln hiring Jefferson Davis as his press secretary after the war, in an attempt at "Balance." Anyway, Mara thinks Chris Christies is "Authentic." That's like calling snake oil "Natural," and you know, natural is always healthy and good for you.

One thing which was really fun was hearing Michelle Bachmann tell Herman Cain that a 9% sales tax would lead to a value added tax, which came out of the same orbit as her friend who told her HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. Mitt Romney, ever the centrist, said the simple 9-9-9 formula is, in fact, simplistic, and simple answers to complex problems are often ineffective. Now that, coming from a Republican, is news.

How about the simple answer: The problem with the economy is the government. Just get the government off the backs of the people and we don't have to do anything else. Is that not the Republican line? Very simple. Joe Sixpack can learn that right quick. We don't want to stray to that Democratic quamire called "Complexity," now do we?

Here's a simple formula: Vote for Brain Dead Republicans, they may be zombies, but there is very little batch to batch variation and you know what you are getting.

Wah-Wah Republicans: Given 'Em Hell, Barry

Here among my friends in New Hampshire precious few know the name Eric Cantor. Which means, of course, too few follow Jon Stewart or the essential Stephen Colbert.

So, I will have to make an introduction: Mr. Cantor is a Congressman from Richmond, Virginia--you remember Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, then once the feds regulated them out of slavery (the 13th and 14th amendments), they turned their entrepreneurial spirit to the cultivation of tobacco--anyway, he is the latest attack dog for the Republican party.

Yesterday, on the Squawkbox, an insufferable morning show with an officious right wing host who has all the qualifications of a right wing agitator, good hair and a pugnacious style, Mr. Cantor inveighed against President Obama's road trips around the country during which the President brings attention to Republican senators and congressmen who refuse to tax millionaires and who have targeted Medicare and Social Security as public nuisances.

"Stop the campaigning. City after city, yeah. Listen, there's no question that that's what happened. Immediately, the next day after the speech was given, he came to Richmond, my district, and then that bridge in Ohio. Right. It's like somebody going around the country picking a fight. The country doesn't need that. I mean people are angry in this country. Middle class does need to see leadership in Washington. It's not inflaming division but instead focusing on solutions, that's what we're trying to do."

This amounts to what Paul Krugman has called, "The Panic of the Plutocrats," i.e. the politicians and right wing talk show hosts who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent. Mr. Cantor has attacked the Wall Street protesters as mobs who are "Pitting Americans against Americans," and he invokes, as do all Republicans any complaint about not taxing millionaires as "Class warfare."

Stephen Schwartzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared an Obama proposal to close a loophole that lets some millionaires pay absurdly low taxes to Hitler's invasion of Poland.

And George Will inveighed that Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic contender for the current Republican senate seat in Massachusetts, has a "collectivist agenda." Rush Limbaugh went one better, as he called her "a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it."

I defer to Mr. Limbaugh and his Republican cronies, who are the experts on sucking the life out of their hosts.

These are the people, Krugman observes, who are not Steve Jobs. They invented nothing, made nothing. They got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that brought us the wonderful world of financial collapse, and they paid no price. They are like the spider wasps, who suck their host dry, then move on. "Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers...They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees--basically they're still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose...This special treatment can't bear close scrutiny--and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage...So who's really being un-American?"

Honor, Duty, Country

"Stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong."
--Abraham Lincoln

"My country...right or wrong."
--Stephen Decatur

"A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it."
--Henry David Thoreau

"You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it."
--Malcolm X


So, I have opposed these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, just as I opposed the war in Viet Nam, and for many of the same reasons: A war fought for a bogus reasons, with a "Mission" at best ill conceived and at worst, phony.

Actually, I was less adamantly opposed to Afghanistan at first because I was willing to suspend judgment given there was a plausible, if not fully believable story that Osama Bin Laden, who may well have been the instigator, if not the operational commander of the attack on 9/11, may have been sheltered there.

But once the man was killed, I saw, and still see no reason to risk the loss of a single American life in that land.

Certainly, we have no business trying to build a single school or library, no business trying to change those people in any way. They live by their own rules and they suffer the consequences, and we have no business trying to whip any American values on them.

I can understand the psychology of winning. But that does not mean I'm blinded by it. In a previous posting I said my brother was not downhearted about our loss in Viet Nam, having served there. He has since corrected me. He was unhappy about that outcome. He developed no abiding affection, apparently, for the Cong, who fired rockets at him. It's tough, apparently, to remain objective about the motivations of someone who tries to shoot you. He knew and served with people who had died there and it disturbed him their deaths were in a losing effort.

I was arguing however, about Marvin Kalb's punditry in which he echoed that absurd narrative that our country behaved as a defeated man, confidence shattered, head down, never the same man again. Baloney. Our country is too big, and there were as many reactions to that outcome as there were people. Fact is, there were never any vital American interests in Viet Nam and we could simply walk away from that bad mortgage with no damage to our credit.

One of my best friends--I was best man at his wedding--is a career naval officer and he's done several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can't really talk to him any more about my opposition to those wars. He thinks the effort is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.) He has the grunt's eye view: Stupid orders from stupid people who don't understand as the grunts on the ground what needs to be done. But he wants to continue the fight. Because, as Slim Charles says in The Wire, "That's what war is, you know. Once you in it, you in it. If it's a lie, then you fight on that lie. But you got to fight."

I don't feel that way. I never got my own nose bloodied in Viet Nam or Iraq or Afghanistan, and that gives me, I submit, an opportunity to be a little more objective. I can understand once you are bloodied, you have to be pulled off your adversary. You are no longer thinking dispassionately. In fact, you stop thinking, once your blood is up.

But somebody has to pull Sonny Corleone off the guy he's wailing on. Someone who has a cooler head has to be in charge. Sonny flies off and gets ambushed at the toll booth. He's volatile. He's easy to predict, and thus easy to defeat. A leader has to remain cool, to calculate, to be subtle, when it's necessary.

For me question is, how does this war help America?

The answer, once Osama is dead, is then there is no way anything else over there should interest us.

We should be out of there, yesterday.

And don't give me that stuff about denying "them" a safe haven. We could wipe Iraq and Afghanistan off the face of the earth and there would still be Somalia, and Indonesia and some apartment in Berlin or some hotel in Florida or some farm in Oklahoma where Al Queda can train and plot and launch an attack.

Beyond the loss of life, beyond the ruined lives of the amputees and the brain injured, there is the cold hard calculation of the damage these wars have done our economy.

That is where Osama had his real success. He may have killed three thousand on 9/11, but his greatest victory would be he knew his adversary. He knew George II would come out with both guns blazing and George would shoot his own country not just in the foot, but in the gut, and send the economy to the intensive care unit on life support.

We have to be smarter than that.

We have to serve our country with our minds, not as wind up wooden soldiers, but as thinking, smart grown ups.

Or, as Stringer Bell would say, "We got to start acting like businessman. Sell the shit. Make the profit. And later for that gansta bullshit."

Eric Cantor: The Aroma of the Right

"What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself."

--Abraham Lincoln








Eric Cantor was on Squawkbox this morning. They asked him about his opposition, the opposition of every Republican from Kelly Ayotte to John Boehner to the tax on millionaires.

He said, "We've got a terrible wealth disparity situation in this country we have to address."

Hey, I'm with him so far. He can say things like that and then smile brightly as if he just got made Speaker of the House. Yes, I agree with this Republican, we do have a huge wealth disparity in this country. One percent of the people own 20% of all the nation's wealth, and 20% own 80% of all the wealth. I'm with this guy for even acknowledging this as a problem. Haven't heard any Republican do this before.

But wait. He kept talking: "The answer is not to go and take from the one who is successful and give it to everybody else. We want everyone else to be successful."

Well, yes Congressman, we would all have to agree we want everyone to be successful.

"Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict, the man before the dollar."
--Abraham Lincoln

And then the Congressman swings into why we should not tax the millionaires:
"Here's my response to that. We've got to fix the problem on the debt. We've got a debt crisis. And we know what the problem is. The party and the president refused to do that. So now you have a situation where you want to raise taxes and haven't fixed the problem, much. It's like throwing good money after bad."

I must have missed something. I was looking for the part where he explains why it is a bad idea to tax millionaires. If we have a debt problem, by which I think he means a deficit problem, that would mean to most people, we need to find some money to fix it, and as Willy Sutton once said, you go where the money is, But then Cantor flies off, saying we cannot go where the money is, but we ought to go back to blaming the Democratic party and the president for refusing to fix the deficit. But the President says we are going to find money to fix the problem, and some of that money should come from millionaires.

Am I missing something?

And how did he get from taxing millionaires to throwing good money after bad. That expression usually has to do with investing money in a business which is going to fail anyway. The next cliche which usually follows is, "Cut your losses," which is clearly what Mr. Cantor should have done.

But no, he continues, "What is the point of bringing it up other than demagoguing the issue for electioneering and political purposes to start 2012 early in November?"

Oh, those Democrats, trying to get a jump on the political process early in November. We've had what? A hundred Republican debates ever since the fires started burning in Texas, but that was just honest discussion, not politicking.

And he is most indignant about the President giving the Republicans Hell about their unwillingness to tax the millionaires. "Stop the campaigning. City after city, yeah. Listen, there's no question that that's what happened. Immediately, the next day after the speech was given, he came to Richmond, my district, and then that bridge in Ohio. Right. It's like somebody going around the country picking a fight. The country doesn't need that. I mean people are angry in this country. Middle class does need to see leadership in Washington. It's not inflaming division but instead focusing on solutions, that's what we're trying to do."

Oh, I must have missed that, too. I kept seeing the Party of No. Every single Republican stamping his or her feet, saying, "NO! There is nothing the government can do to help the economy or create jobs. Only the small businessman can do that. The job creators! And the government, oh the government and the president, they are so bad and nasty."

So, I would have to infer Give 'Em Hell, Obama has got their attention. Maybe doesn't have the attention, yet, of Joe Sixpack, but one thing you know about the Republican Party, they all attend the same meeting and they speak the Party Line, from Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snow, they use the same phrases, "Anti-business, Tax and Spend Democrats, regulatory burdens, Job Creators. "

So when you hear Eric Cantor complaining about Obama attacking Republicans for being in the pockets of millionaires, you know the whole Republican clique has got together and fumed about it. Wah, wah, wah. These Republicans, they can dish it out, but they cannot take it. What wusses.

Or, as one Republican President once said, "These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people."

Abraham Lincoln, in case you did not guess.

Not hard to guess how Honest Abe would react to what he hears from today's Republicans.

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.