Ted Cruz: No Atheist Is Fit To Serve

Start Every Day with a Prayer

You Want to Be Lied To?  Ask the man about his religion.

And I want to warn everyone in the press and all the voters out there, if you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to. They won't all lie to you but a lot of them will. And it will be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes. So, every day until the end of this campaign, I'll answer any question anyone has on government, But if you have a question on religion, please go to church."
--Arnold Vinick, West Wing


In one of it's typically prescient moments, in the the West Wing's sixth season is a confrontation at the end of an episode called, "In God We Trust" where the Republican presidential nominee, Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) responds to a question about whether or not he will attend a church meeting to which he's been invited and this Republican, who knows where his base is, but who can no longer tolerate the hypocrisy, finally commits a "gaffe" which is to say he tells the truth as he sees it, that when politicians start talking about religious faith, they lie.

This episode aired 10 years ago, but like so much of West Wing, it is eerily current.

Yesterday, Ted Cruz said that no atheist is qualified to be President and furthermore every President ought to begin his day with prayer.

There are other little examples of God being imposed on our secular state:  our pledge of allegiance contains the phrase "Under God"  which it did not have originally.  The "under God" part was added at the height of the McCarthy Red Scare, when everyone was eager to be fighting Godless Communism.

The whole pledge of allegiance thing started in the 1870's as "patriotism" following the Civil War started to fade and school kids were in control of adults so it was in school kids learned a pledge.  Things really got rolling in the early 1940's, during World War II when WASP America distrusted Orientals who might prefer Imperial Japan or German Americans, so we had kids doing the American "Zeig! Heil!" in their classrooms.

Zeig! Heil! America! USA! USA! Oh, puke.

Easy patriotism, learned in school. Later, with all the Hitler youth holding out their arms straight, we went to putting the hand over the heart, as Herr Hitler had pre-empted the straight arm salute.

With all the examples of religion causing havoc in the world, of irrational, rabid belief causing people to kill and destroy, one would think the dangers of introducing religion into our putatively secular society would be obvious, but no, not in the Bible Belt where people cling to their guns and their religion, as Obama was honest enough to observe, and he rued the day he was that honest. 

The only politician I can imagine with the guts to say what Arnold Vinick said is Bernie Sanders, who is just irascible enough to sputter in his best Lewis Black tone, "You want to be lied to? You want to really be played?  Just demand your political leaders profess their undying love of God, and you'll get just exactly what you deserve!"

The Donald: The New Yogi

"If you would listen to Sara Murray, you would think there were three people standing in the atrium of Trump Tower. Either she's a very unemotional person or she's not a very good reporter."
--Donald Trump from Politico

I loved Yogi Berra.  He said things which resonated with me:  "Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical."  I knew exactly what he was talking about.

But The Donald may eventually rise to that level as well. Just consider his take on a reporter, Sara Murray, who was present at a book signing and apparently, in The Donald's estimation she underestimated the number of people present for this important event. 

"She's either a very unemotional person or she's not a very good reporter."
So if she were more emotional she would have got closer to the correct number?
Now this is a revelation, for me at least. I always thought of numbers as the essence of objectivity over emotion. You can think a crowd is big because you react emotionally to the image of its size, but if you want to hew to accuracy, you simply report a number. 

Thinking more deeply, perhaps she said it was a small crowd but she missed the emotional vibe of a very enthusiastic crowd. I'll have to find exactly what she said, but that two sentences taken as they are presented present a wonderful opportunity to look into the mind of someone who wants to be our next President.

Here is the conversation I imagine could have been, if only Yogi were still alive: I can just see the two of them sitting on Yogi's porch in New Jersey, beers in hand, feet up,  thinking big thoughts about the world and just sharing wisdom and insights:

Yogi:  You can observe a lot by just watching
Donald: They [ISIS] just built a hotel in Syria. Can you believe this?  They built a hotel. When I have to build a hotel, I pay interest. They don't have to pay interest, because they took the oil that, when we left Iraq, I said we should've taken."


Yogi: You wouldn't have won, if we'd beaten you.
Donald:  Hillary Clinton was the worst Secretary of State in the history of the United States. There's never been a Secretary of State so bad as Hillary. The world blew up around us. We lost everything, including all relationships. There wasn't one good thing that came out of that administration or her being Secretary of State.
You don't even have to like Hillary to know that's not true. 


[Editor's note:  Who knew the Secretary of State controlled world events?]


Yogi:  Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.
Donald: When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

[Editor's note: Well, that last sentence--now I feel much better.]

Yogi:  I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
Donald: The U.S. will invite El Chapo, the Mexcan drug lord who just escaped prison, to become a U.S. citizen because our "leaders" can't say no.!

Wow! El Chapo a U.S. citizen! Maybe he'll run for President on the Republican ticket! Wouldn't you like to see him on the stage with The Donald. 
The Donald would give him such a dressing down! The Donald would beat him, and make it look easy. It would be such a winning for the The Donald. 
I know he'll make America great again, and we'll all be winners. 

Republican Debate: Who Knew? We Don't Need No Friggin Government!

It wasn't as entertaining as prior debates, even with Becky Quick moderating, and she's both cute and bright, so you figure it should have been a winner, but it was pretty tame, comparatively speaking.

I had forgotten Chris Christie was still running. He got off one good shot, telling a questioner that "Even in New Jersey, that's rude." Which was cute because it said that he was aware most people not from New Jersey think people from New Jersey are crass, like the housewives of New Jersey and the Sopranos.  I forget what the question was, or the answer for that matter, but every answer tonight was actually the same answer: Government is BAD! Federal government anyway. If you are a governor (Christie, Bush, Kasich) then state government is good, but Washington, D.C. is bad. 

This means, according to Dr. Carson,  Medicare is bad, because it's federal government and you could do much better with $12,000 than give it to Medicare, because, after all, that $12,000 could cover maybe three days in the hospital. Didn't quite follow that, or anything else he said, except, Washington,DC and government is BAD.

Carly Fiorino also thinks government is bad and has no business in the retirement funding business. In fact, government is bad business, or bad for business or just BAD. She doesn't like Washington, DC much, which hardly distinguishes her from the other candidate, but she is the woman and was wearing a bright dress, red or blue, I forget. But government is BAD. I remember her saying that.

Mike Huckabee had a swell idea: All we have to do to fix Medicare and Healthcare in this country is simply cure four diseases--and here he holds up his hand and counts them off on his fingers- 1. Alzheimer's (thumb), 2. cancer (index finger) , 3. diabetes (middle finger) and 4. heart disease (fourth finger)  and our medical costs evaporate. 

Like what we did with polio. Know how much we spent on polio this year in America? Zero. Well, if you don't count the vaccines, but that's a quibble, and Donald Trump will be the first to say vaccines cause autism. (Or maybe that was Michele Bachmann who was the first to say that, or the woman from the parking lot who told her,  but Mr. Trump was no worse than number 3.) 

But I digress. I really liked Mr. Huckabee's idea. Just cure those four diseases, well those four families of diseases, and we are on easy street as far as Medicare is concerned.  

Now, if I can just get Dr. Tony Fauci from the National Institutes of Health on the phone and ask him why he never thought of that.  Such a simple plan. And nobody denied it, not a single man or woman on that stage or among the moderators. Great idea! So glad I tuned in tonight.

Rand Paul says we don't really need or want Medicare or Social Security, which are BAD because they are federal government programs, but for those who currently depend on these programs (those slackers), we can continue them, as long as we raise the ages of participation and make people with comfortable incomes ineligible. 

He wants a government so small he cannot see it, he says. Didn't he used to say he wanted a government so small he could drown it in his bathtub?  Must have thought that sounded too hostile, which is okay to be in a Republican debate, but they were all working on sounding less truculent  tonight.

Marco Rubio said Hillary was caught in a lie in those 11 hours of testimony. She told her family the attack at Benghazi was an Al Qaeda attack but then said something else later, or something. I didn't quite follow. Are we still talking about Benghazi? Oh, actually, no, I got that wrong. Mr. Rubio was using that as an example of how "the media" conspires against noble Republicans to misrepresent the truth, and the media said Hillary had performed well at the hearings, when in fact she had been caught in a lie. About Benghazi. Benghazi? Really?

But my favorite was Mr. Trump. He is so blissfully vague. How would he solve the impending Medicare and Social Security apocalypse?  He would just grow the economy, and make everything better and start winning again, and get people rich, everyone, without the government, and he'd hire all the Hispanics to work for him or other private companies would, and everything will be just so great again, America, that is.  Immigration is an easy thing to fix: Everyone will just have to be legal and we will make the system so fair and successful that we will be winning again.  

I especially liked his idea about building a 1000 mile wall along the Mexican border and the best part is he'll get the Mexicans to pay for it. Why hasn't anybody else thought of that? He said if the Chinese could build a 32,000 mile wall, then we could build a 1,000 mile wall. He did not say that if he had been around when the Chinese were building that wall, he'd have got Genghis Khan to pay for it. He didn't have to say that because we all know that's true.

I think I'm quoting him accurately. 

And Ted Cruz spoke up about Washington, DC and how bad it is. I'd almost forgotten he was running. But you know, of all the candidates, he struck me as being the most Halloween appropriate. Something about his face. Just really scary.  The other guys you can look at and sort of laugh, but that Ted Cruz, yikes. 

I feel much better after the Republicans explain things.  Before the debate things like the economy, big banks, the role of the Federal Reserve, ideas about protecting the finances of social security, what to do about education loans, how to correct income inequality and the skewed distribution of wealth, climate change, the need for energy,  what to do about the coal miners, threats to the environment all seem so complex.  But after two hours,  I realized how very simple it all is: Just kill government, the federal government and all those problems disappear. It's like Ronald Reagan used to say: Government is not the solution; It's the problem.

I really miss the Gipper. He made things so simple. And Heaven knows, the national debt and the budget deficits and the economy did so well under him. 

But think of what happened with Clinton, Bill Clinton. Sure he balanced the budget and cleaned up welfare but he also got Don't Ask Don't Tell, passed the Defense of Marriage act and he had very poor taste in young women. 

It wasn't his fault though. He thought Don't Ask Don't Tell was supposed to apply to White House interns.  He got confused. 

Actually, I think I may be confused. Tonight is Wednesday, right? If it were Saturday, then I'd know why I found myself laughing and thinking, "Oh, this can't be for real," because then I'd know I had been watching Saturday Night Live all along. 

But it's  not Saturday and anyway not even Saturday Night Live could lampoon the folks on that stage tonight. 

Select Committee Dumbs It Down

Uh, What's So Funny? I Don't Get It.

Apparently, I was not the only one to notice Martha Roby's line of questioning when she attempted to demonstrate how uncaring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been by asking about when Ms. Clinton walked out of her office at the State Department, the night of Benghazi, who she had left behind. 

"Was so and so still there, when you walked out?" 
And when Ms. Clinton said it was likely so and so was still there, but she could not remember specifically who stayed, but pretty much the entire staff was still there when she left.

 Ms. Roby was not appeased, asking about each one by name, as if each name was another nail in the coffin of Ms. Clinton's reputation. "Was Ms. Mills still there, when you left?"
"Well, yes, since she was one of the staff, I imagine she was still there."
"Was Ms. Jones still there?"
And so on, like that.

Very much the prosecutor, setting the trap for the defendant.

You fled the scene of the crime! 
Leaving your loyal abandoned workers behind you! 
The workers, the underlings you abandoned, just as you abandoned Ambassador Stevens (to whom you never even gave your cell phone number). 
Oh, the callousness!

And then, the coup de grace! 
"When you went home, did you spend the night alone?" 
"Did I spend the night alone?" Hillary repeated. "Yes."
"The whole night? Alone?"

Wait, did she just ask me who I slept with?

This took a moment to sink in, but when it did, Ms. Clinton saw the absurdity and laughed. Did this bimbo Congresswoman just ask me if I went home to a lover? In a Congressional hearing?  

They talked the whole night through!

If I had, would she expect me to say, "Well, yes, now that you ask, and I have wondered why nobody else has asked, after all this time, through all these hearings:  I spent the night in bed with General Petraeus, and he was very good indeed. We talked about Paula, and how the young women can be fun, but they just don't seem to be able to keep their mouths shut. No discretion, those youngsters. Tend to brag a lot to their friends and get jealous and possessive. No, wait, was it Petraeus that night or Brad Pitt? I'll have to check my diary. Did you know I kept a diary?"

Let's just send in a plane full o f  heroes. That's sounds good.

But if Ms. Roby was simply a simpleton, then the prize for sleaze went to Congressman Lynn Westmoreland, who at least gets points for craftiness, as he amiably allowed he didn't give a hang about the emails, but then he did want to ask about the guys who wanted to organize a rescue flight which the Secretary had thwarted; he set up the fact that a team of non State Department Americans had set up an airplane trip to Benghazi, but Secretary Clinton did not give her okay.

 Ms. Clinton had  previously testified they were sending a State Department team but there "was not a State Department person on that plane."  

Well, true enough, Ms. Clinton pointed out, but that was an unarmed expedition Mr. Westmoreland was talking about and Ms. Clinton had scrambled some actual armed people who would be more likely be be effective and less likely to get killed. 

Really, from under what rock did these members of Congress crawl?  
Does the state of Alabama not have a better woman to send to Congress than the dim witted Ms. Roby?  I'm not sure where Mr. Westmoreland is from, but just looking at that guy, he makes Richard Nixon look as wholesome as  Howdy Doody. 

NOTE TO MR. WESTMORELAND: If your party had not sequestered funds for embassy security, or if Congress had taken that $20 million this Congressional committee spent on  investigating Ms. Clinton, and spent it instead on building stronger walls and more security for State Department facilities in dangerous places, maybe Mr. Stevens would be alive today.

Republican Rogues' Gallery

What is that animal on her head?

Representative Susan Brooks really thought she had Hillary Clinton:  She had this tall pile of paper which she said was the stack of emails Hillary Clinton had sent about Benghazi or something before a certain date and then a tiny stack which was what she had sent after that date, which, she said showed very clearly how Secretary Clinton had simply stopped thinking about her exposed Ambassador in Benghazi, because she stopped emailing about Benghazi.  

Ms. Clinton responded emails were a poor measure of her concern about Benghazi because the State Department actually deals mostly in secure diplomatic cables, secure phone lines, personal conversations and a whole set of lines of communications which had not been piled on the Congresswoman's desk, thus demonstrating Ms. Clinton actually knows what she is talking about when it comes to how the State Department functions, unlike Ms. Brooks, who is not really interested in details like that. 

Undeterred, Ms. Brooks asked whether Secretary Clinton had given Ambassador Stevens her personal email, her home phone number, her personal cell phone, Bill's cell phone, or had him over for tea at her house.  Well, no, Ms. Clinton had to admit, that's not the way she communicated with the 270 ambassadors she had to deal with, although every ambassador has a fail safe direct cable to State and this gets bumped up to her as dangers arise. 

Ms. Brooks announced Secretary Clinton ignored Ambassador Stevens as he was fighting for his life because the Secretary didn't care about her Ambassador or any of her people, as you could clearly see from those two stacks of paper and from the fact she had never given him her personal email, her cell phone number, or ever had him over to dinner. How inaccessible can you get. Just build a wall between you and every ambassador in the line of fire! In fact, building a wall is a Republican specialty. Republicans like walls, when they are built across the Mexican border, but they abhor them when built around Ms. Clinton.

Ms. Brooks was just outraged at the callous indifference so plainly manifest in the imperious Secretary Clinton, who even now, before the committee had not shed a single tear for the Ambassador while Ms. Brooks burned with righteous indignation at the abandonment of a brave American sent into the fray and left for dead by his faithless Secretary of State. Indignation quavered in the Congress woman's voice, just thinking about those two stacks of paper on her desk.

They wouldn't let me wear my wrestling singlet to the hearing

Next up was representative Jimmy Jordan, who does not wear a jacket but always appears in his shirtsleeves, just to remind everybody he was once a  NCAA wrestling champion, which was the biggest accomplishment in his life, and surely is a big deal. Personally, I would have liked to see him in his wrestling singlet, the one he wore when he won the championship, but there is a dress code in the House of Representatives and you can only push that so far and a tie with the singlet would have looked a bit off putting. 
Mr. Jordan  leaned forward with a pasted on "Gottcha" leer pointing out all the discrepancies between things she had said in March and things she said in August, something about saying she had not sent any classified information in her emails then saying she hadn't sent any information "marked classified." This seemed to be an important distinction in Mr. Jordan's mind. 
I didn't quite follow all this because I was thinking if anybody ever pointed out all the discrepancies between what I said this morning and what I said this afternoon,  it would probably fill a stack of papers which would be higher than both stacks Ms. Brooks had on her desk combined.
Mr. Jordan is a pugnacious questioner. Who can forget his interrogation of the head of Planned Parenthood about why she did or did not apologize for something after those videos surfaced. Mr. Jordan is strongly antiabortion and if he could just shoot a single leg take down on some of those abortion doctors, he could settle this whole issue mano-a-mano. He is particularly manly when questioning women, because he wears only shirt sleeves, so they can get the musky aroma of his testosterone drifting across the hearing room toward them. That really unsettles them. You can just see them shifting in their chairs.

It was curious however, that nobody ever seemed to have an issue with what was said in those stacks of emails, which, apparently, none of these Republicans has ever read.
Ms. Clinton pointed out the system of designating what is "classified" in the government security systems is quite complicated and arcane and she had not to her knowledge or, to this date, to anyone else's knowledge violated security with her emails or in any other way.  Again, she knew more about State secrets than her interrogator.

Look Ma! I can rip paper!

The least appetizing of this trio, however, has to be Peter Roskam, who used some of his personal injury lawyer skills to dramatically illustrate just how little Secretary Clinton cared about all the frantic emails and faxes coming from the abandoned Ambassador at Benghazi, by holding up a piece of paper and saying, "This is the fax from the Ambassador and this is how you handled it!" And with that, he ripped the paper in half, from top to bottom. 
 What moment of high drama! What a brilliant move in the halls of Congress. Oh, a letter from the Ambassador, a cry for help, ripped in half!  This is sure to make Fox News and maybe even CBS or NBC.  It's one of those moments sure to be seared into the memory of the electorate.

I could really use a Starbucks latte about now. 

Secretary Clinton had not listened, was inaccessible, went home from the Department of State, leaving her dismayed, hard working staff leaderless, after hearing of the death of her Ambassador,  the night of Benghazi. The ambassador was dead and she did not organize a wake, or sit shiva or do any of the things people do for the dead. Gone home... 

Gone home,  to...whom?  Was she leaving because she had a late night assignation planned?

Tune in for the next episode when  Congresswoman Martha Roby asks Secretary Clinton if Ms. Clinton spent the night....ALONE!

"As the World of the State Department Turns," will go on and on, longer than "General Hospital" or any soap opera ever.

Or just read about it on the front page of the National Enquirer, available at your supermarket counter later today!!!

Really, can we not do better with the hair?

But really, we have to work on that hair ladies and gentlemen. From Ms. Brooks to Ms. Roby to Mr. Roskam to, especially, Mr. Gowdy, we really have an array of frightful coifs. 
 The Tea Party wears wigs. Think about it.

He played in a high school band

But he's all grown up now!

So, Hillary: Did you spend the night alone, or with your lover?

Hillary Clinton had many good moments during the 2 hours I watched tonight.
So did Elijah Cummings and most of the 5 Democrats on the Committee, but for my money, Hillary's best moment came with one of the Republican women, Martha Roby,  leading her through a series of questions in the staccato  tones you'd use for interrogating some really vile perpetrator, but the whole thing was supposed to show how arrogant and uncaring Hillary was because she left the State Department the night of the Benghazi blow up, and she left her staff behind. So this Republican Congress woman is asking her name by name which of her staff was still in the office when Hillary left, to show that while all her staffers were so concerned and still on the job, Hillary just waltzed out of the office and went home. Home to her secure phone, where she talked to the President and a number of other relevant people and did not get to bed until 3 AM and got up again around 5 AM. 

Ms. Roby: "So, were you alone?"
Ms. Clinton: "Was I alone?"
Ms. Roby: "Did you spend the night at home alone?"
Ms. Clinton: "Yes."
Ms. Roby: "The whole night?"

Hillary spontaneously starts to laugh.

"Well, I don't see what's so funny," her interrogator fumes.

Well, I did. I bet a lot of people in the room saw what was funny. She was asking Hillary if she spent the night, or what two hours of it she had left,  alone. Did she have a lover at home? Was Bill there? Did she have sex while Benghazi burned?

Hillary, now 9 hours into the show, is a little punchy. 
You want to know if I went home to a lover?  You are actually asking me that? 
The whole idea just tickled her.

Oh, yeah. It was pay back time for Bill, you know. All those women he had. Well, I just chose Benghazi night for a little fun and frolic.

Eventually, she got control and answered, "Yes, I was alone," shaking her head.

The Congresswoman, thick as a brick and dumb as a stick,  was still flustered, still not seeing how ridiculous she looked. 

Really, there is no chance for bipartisanship, for cooperation with the other side, for statesmanship, for any sort of actual governance as long as the stupid parts of America send such stupid people to Congress. 

They are simply too stupid to govern, too stupid to talk to, to stupid to take seriously.

Trey Gowdy: Twit Personified

MERRIAM WEBSTER DICTIONARY:

Twit: n. A stupid or foolish person. 

(See Accompanying Photo)


When the new edition of the dictionary is published, Congressman Gowdy's picture will be right there, next to "twit," I am reasonably certain. No better clarification of the word comes to mind, except perhaps for Mo Brooks or any of the Tea Party "Freedom Caucus," of Congressional Republicans.

One must admit, there was entertainment value to watching Eljah Cummings (D-MD) take Mr. Gowdy apart with help from his friends. When Mr. Gowdy got to raging on about the impropriety of Ms. Clinton receiving emails with advice from a Mr. Blumenthal, who is not a State Department employee--Heaven forbid Ms. Clinton should seek advice from thinkers who are not on the government payroll--Mr. Cummings suggested Mr. Gowdy release the entire transcript of Mr. Blumenthal's testimony, "for the world to see," which caused Mr. Gowdy to erupt in a fury. 

Apparently, Mr. Bluenthal's testimony is embarrassing to the Republican members of the committee and the very mention of  releasing his testimony provoked a frothing, sputtering response from Mr. Gowdy, who pointed out all he was interested in was Ms. Clinton's email correspondence with Mr. Blumenthal, not Mr. Blumenthal's testimony about what those emails meant. 

Gowdy, being the man with the gavel, abruptly and from left field, adjourned the committee, presumably for lunch. 

If ever there was an illustration of the aphorism: The worst thing for a bad product is good advertising, Mr. Gowdy and his committee provide  it.

The most alarming thing about Mr. Gowdy:  173,000 people in South Carolina voted for him in his last election. Can you imagine what those people must be like?