SHAMELESS SCHUMER’S FLAPPING MOUTH GIVES AWAY DEM CAUCUS’ GAME PLAN.

                                        Shameless Schumer.
      Just as the oracular  Hudson Valley radio voice of Franklin Roosevelt came across in accents unduplicated… was it eastern, eastern with a veneer of Groton’s Headmaster Endicott Peabody…or just indiscriminate rich-patrician? After FDR’s death it was never to be heard from again and actors can’t resurrect it…Brooklyn’s Chuck Schumer’s is indelible:wise guy New Yawk not unlike Joe Pesci’s in My Cousin Vinny but harsher, more guttural, than Pesci’s, that of a smart guy street hustler, overpromising, drawing you to his lips one minute, winking at a anticipated deal the next, then upraised grating like a fingernail running down a blackboard—morally offensive to listen to, illustrative of one who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
      The Senate is well used to that carnival barker, self-assertive one minute but, turning his head to see if he’s overheard,ready like a street peddler to grab his portable table and merchandise and trot down the street before the cops come.  The other day he told his caucus members what to say…how to deceive…unaware that his words were being piped out to them.  Born without intellectual ballast he is a super-con and at last it has come out.
        Nothing that Chuck Schumer said to his equally-cynical caucus members shocked the media but it at least nullifies the validity of his “talking points.”   Republican cuts are always….always…”extreme.”  He has orchestrated a calculated effort to divide the GOP from the Tea Party.  It was obvious all along but Schumer explains it away by maintaining he has said this all the time. 
       That’s why the truth isn’t in him. 

THOUGHTS WHILE SHAVING: Hey, Let The Donald Run. He’ll Liven Up the Joint. More.

                                     The Donald.
        My feeling has always been that the Republican field of presidential possibilities should expand—hence it’s endemic that Donald Trump should be invited to speak all future cattle calls of for GOP candidates.
        I like the passion he puts forth in support of his ideas..and particularly the lack of equivocation he applies.  So far I like everything about his appearances—especially his uncompromising stance on The View where he lectured the heavily stacked (I mean this in  the ideological sense) largely Leftward female talk show.
  Everybody else seems to go tippy-toe over the birth certificate question.   I’ve always thought we allowed the Dems to intimidate us into silence on the question.  When Hawaii showboat Gov. Neil Abercombie stepped forth and was going to find the birth certificate but could not,  the issue moved from non-discussant to permissible.
       If Trump badgers Obama to release it, it will be a great service. But my guess is that he can’t and there’s really something there.
             The 3 Liberal Witches’ Brew.
      The other day I wrote about feminists’ contention that three women in the Obama administration were responsible for getting Obama to stop vacillating and intervene on “humanitarian grounds” in Libya….Samantha Power a 40-year-old Irish beauty who feels so-o-o-o strongly about international issues from her slot as a presidential assistant at the White House…Hillary Clinton…and Susan Rice, UN ambassador.
     If feminists were ready to savor this as a scenario of how the three women trounced three men for the president’s favor…the secretary of defense Robert Gates….the national security director Tom Donilon… and counter-terrorism chief John Brennan it was ruined yesterday by the red-tressed dynamo Samantha Power.    She went overboard patting her boss Obama for seizing the initiative….which statement was to gild the lily with him and get herself a little press by larding up the flattery.
       But she was rudely put in her place by Rice who said the credit should go to the Libyan insurgents.   Hillary was mum.
       I’m told Hillary called Rice about Power who is several notches down in the power grid and threatens to scale her way  up to gigantic media attention….her staff trying to get their boss on Sunday talk shows…and said: 
      “What the hell is this? We’ve got a showboat here!”
     Rice said she’d take care of it—and she did.  You’ll never hear much more from upstart Power again except an announcement in the next few months that she has decided to accept a new University berth at Harvard that is too good  to turn down.
                     Grading the Female  Cable Network Anchors.
       The other day I was lunching in Gene & Georgetti’s and amid the clatter of knives and forks,  I glanced at the TV screen where an unusually intense, hollow-cheeked woman was grilling some guy and saw it was CNN.  See, you don’t have to look at the network ID to know—the taut, overstressed-looking librarian like female could only be hired by CNN. Let’s say she resembled Ruth Buzzi on Laugh-In, the straight-stick type carrying a heavy purse who was always being assaulted…why, nobody knows…by Arte Johnson playing the old, overcoat-wearing pervert.
      That’s the female anchor type they continually put forward on CNN. Then there’s MSNBC who keeps playing…why in God’s name…the wife of Alan Greenspan—the old liberal warhorse Andrea Mitchell whose nose is so big they seem to have to go widescreen… who if she ever entertained a conservative idea she’d have a cerebral hemorrhage.  I have always wondered about Alan and his so-called economic tastes after seeing her with him.
        But you can always tell a Fox Newscast by its gorgeous, young, attractive female…all blonde… anchors—Megan Kelly…Martha McCallum….and especially my favorite Shannon Bream.  And they’re high octane intelligent as well.  

DO READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO THE CAPITOL FAX…BUT YOU’LL HAVE TO PAY YOUR DUES. MORE.

       If you read Capitol Fax and its blog which I urge you all to do because as said here many times, it is indispensable for anyone interested in Illinois politics which it covers like a blanket, you have to realize you must pay your dues.
       Dues come in four parts.
      First understand that it is a wholly owned compliant lip-synch subsidiary of the Democratic Left and a handmaiden to the unions—particularly public ones.   Private companies are avaricious…profits, especially huge ones, are unjustified and rip-offs… but unions are the most beneficent gift that has come to man. Mike Madigan’s wisdom ranks with unknowable certainties of the universe. His Republican counterparts are retards, not conversant with the issues.  His daughter is untouchable like a Sistine chapel  Madonna and is not to be criticized only beheld with unrestrained awe. 
        Second, death.. which must come to all of us…is  devastating to the publication even occasionally when it hits some Republicans—but especially when it removes  cherished seedy Dem lawmakers and scruffily fragrant (from long times away from bathtubs, soap and hot water) Springfield rock singers and 3-string guitar strummers whose dead bellies still gurgle with beer bought by the gallon.  That’s when the publication yields its most timeless, ethereal and lachrymose philosophy. No absolutes, mind you—just rivers of relativism ending with a nihilistic rock song film clip questioning the meaning of it all. 
      Third, you have heard it said by Jefferson and Lincoln that all of us are equal.   Not so. All minorities are more than equal—as are these members of the downtrodden: gays, lesbians, transgenders—but not to be given any separate recognition are the unborn whose supporters come close to violating the sacred tradition of separation of  church and state and allowing the pollution of the secular world with religiosity in contradistinction to the founders’ wishes.
        Fourth, there are few things not obvious to the publication. It is prescient and healthily suspicious of political motivation—but when it comes to the obvious, it is often bafflingly obtuse.   Example: Caterpillar’s CEO wrote to Gov. Quinn saying that higher taxes might make it necessary to relocate.   The publication has frequently dismissed this contention….but the letter was leaked to the media—obviously by Cat.   When the media contacted the giant firm it said nothing is written in stone.  This statement seems to baffle one Barton Lorimer an intern who in the absence of its editor contrasted the definite sounding letter with the more evasive comment by a Cat flack—saying “you got me.”
       Evidently Lorimer means there’s a contradiction. But there is none.  The publication simply cannot fathom nuance in this case and ignores economic reality.  Like intern like editor.

“YOU KNOW,” SAID FDR TO GEORGE MARSHALL, “I THINK I’M GOING TO TALK TO BARBARA WARD ABOUT THE HUMANITARIAN ASPECTS OF D-DAY. A LITTLE GENDER DIVERSITY CAN’T HURT, YOU KNOW?”

       So now we know how this presidential pillar of  uncertain, quivering Obama Jello reacts (I wouldn’t dignify it by calling it thinking). He was definitely against entering Libya on any pretext until three women pressured him—the most notable being the orange-haired ex-journalist, 40-year-old Irish born Leftist Samantha Power director of multilateral affairs at the National Security Council (the wife of economist Cass Sunstein of the U of C)…about whom that legendary arbiter of Washington power NPR’s feminist Nina Totenberg said trilled about the women changing the presidential intention: she’s brilliant you know.   All three of them are!  Referring to co-producers of the Libyan engagement, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice UN ambassador.
          Indeed the three women brokered the deal getting the insouciant Obama to agree as he noodled over the NCAA matchups….and did it over the opposition of three men!   This titillates Totenberg…setting it up as a slam dunk for the women over Defense Secretary Robert Gates, national security adviser Thomas Donilon and counterterrorism chief John Brennan validating her lifelong labors to prove the superiority of women.
. Yesterday on ABC-TV you saw both Hillary and Gates sitting side by side, Gates not backing down from his contention that the humanitarian intervention is not of direct priority for the United States which is already engaged in two Middle Eastern wars.
       Just as Barbara Ward aka Lady Jackson,  was an idealistic disciple of rich nations sharing  their wealth with the poor…exhibiting a theology the depth of a pie-tin…she was revered as she lived as an authentic liberal Catholic saint….albeit her religious ideals had no quantitative measure attached just basic altruism.
        But while she lived she was mighty. She consulted with  Adlai Stevenson, JFK and LBJ.   Regarded as a great Catholic intellectual she evidently had a rupture with the Church and ordered herself buried in an Anglican churchyard.
         Samantha Power is the latest liberal intellectual to come kicking down the sawdust trail advocating that wherever human rights are trampled anywhere in the world and genocide exists, there the U.S. should be flexing its power.  Of course as an over-privileged good looking young female intellectual, she has gone on to great fame in liberal circles….writing a book that secularly canonizes a visionary UN staffer who vowed to fight injustice and who was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq,Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira del Mello and the Fight to Save the World.  He was supposed to be a candidate for chief staffer of the  UN which adds a passionate wail to the book—things the left does particularly well:  Oh what we have lost!
         Chasing the Flame…and the Fight to Save the World.  Nice passionate title, isn’t it?  Powered by the media organs of the Left it won many prizes and faux intellectuals vie to be seen on New  York trains coming in from the suburbs with it in tow.   Another book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide won the Pulitzer for nonfiction in 2003 and quickly topped Sergio Vieira del Mello whom all those in the know wink at each other knowingly hoping that some dumb cluck will ask them who he was….thereby allowing them to show off their erudition.
         The three feminists scored a coup of sorts by turning Obama around.   When questioned about the coup by Diane Sawyer Hillary resorted to her first line of defense and lied volubly.  
        “Hillary and Susan Rice were key parts of this story,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert working with the Center for American Progress which has close ties to the Obama administration.  “Hillary got the Arab buy-in,  Susan worked the UN to get the 10 to 5 vote which was no easy thing” and the passion to intervene on humanitarian grounds came principally from Power who was the African adviser to Bill Clinton when he failed to stop the Rwanda genocide because public opinion turned against it here.
        Other things helped, too: such as Hillary’s spoiled child petulance saying she won’t serve in a second term and her incorrigible leaking to put heat on Obama despite the fact that the three men argued intervention has no military significance and that the Libyan rebels are unknowables and could well have ties to al Qaeda.   Talking with Sawyer. Hillary ratified the conclusion of the author of the finest book extending from the beginnings of Whitewater to the denouement of the Lewinsky, a book with an awful name—The Death of American Virtue by law school dean Ken Gormley… who concludes that the prosecutors were at the verge of giving up trying to nail Bill Clinton…far more captivated by the tissue of lies and deception surrounding Hillary’s fraudulent actions when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and they reverted back to Clinton—thus allowing this latter-day Mme. Defarge to move on up to our secretary of state.
        But Samantha Power (Harvard Law JD) who taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School and won the Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction in 2003 and the J. Anthony Lukas prize for and did columns for Time is refreshingly passionate about these things squeaked Totenberg on this week’s Inside Washington. She has devoted her entire coverage of the Supreme Court to gender wars; it was she who sprang the Anita Hill surprise on Clarence Thomas and is the closest journalist to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.    Charles Krauthammer on the panel fretted what does it matter what gender these people share?
     Looking at Totenberg’s uncomprehending little pig eyes set too closely together on her 67 year old face  you get the unmistakable answer: Oh but it does! It really does!
       She’ll change her tune when it is discovered that by entering this imbroglio to spare racial slaughter, we may trigger more of it.  She likely will blame the male soldiers not the three women who pushed it. That’s because liberals never…ever…learn anything.     

IS IT JUST ME OR ARE WE IN SYNCH ON THESE PREJUDICES?

  

                        The Gesticulating Window Crowds.

      The vacuous, dull-eyed  crowds waving, jumping up and down and behaving like celebrity-drugged animals, braying with their moon faces and pressing their snotty noses to the studio windows of ABC 7, NBC 5 and CBS2 each night when the 10 pm news ends.
    Can anyone tell me what it means to them to be seen by a statewide audience behaving in this idiotic fashion?   Are their lives so cheerless that they actually believe they can snag off a piece of individuality in this way?  Can a psychiatrist figure it out? Am I right that this behavior is a pathetic striving to be noticed and recognized…the yearning to be somebody—anybody-- distinct from the mob? That and their (I feel) consuming fear of swirling down-and-around like a cigarette in a urinal into anonymity.   Is this what comes from being o’d on TV entertainment?     
                        The Oh so Sly Biases on Chicago Tonight.
         I’ve told you how Elizabeth Brackett and the uber-editor Mary Field load the deck for the Left when Brackett moderates a panel.   When the show considers education reform, she will have three different advocates of higher spending for schools and one hapless guy who supports vouchers.  When she comes to the vouchers guy and he begins his spiel,  she says hold that thought and we’ll come back to it and asks the guy why he is against a higher level of spending .   At the end of the session, she comes back to the voucher guy and says now apart from vouchers, what reforms do you advocate?
          The other night Brackett as Nurse Ratched discussed the first year’s anniversary of ObamaCare to the wide-eyed naif host Phil Ponce. For a line of support  she had a bureaucrat from the state Department of Insurance—Pat Quinn’s administration—whom she introduced in objective terms as an “expert.” Hmmm.  Well Pat Quinn’s bureaucrat performed as expected….delivering the verdict for ObamaCare as a slam dunk.     Then Nurse Ratched delivered the counter-argument herself…saying “in contrast, the  Republicans say.” Get the drift?   Stolid professional government expert saying it works and “in contrast, the Republicans say--.” Meaning: opposition is partisan; support is nonpartisan.
         This is crooked, vile idea manipulation to say the least. In the days of John Callaway there would be the state Insurance guy matched with a Heartland Foundation free market  guy.  But Fields and Ratched cannot allow that to happen.  That’s why the Mary Fields operation all the way up to that dumb $450,000 a year front man Dan Schmidt is so crooked intellectually it can’t lie straight in bed.
        One is right to assume Ponce is a tabula raza pawn between the station’s three powerful feminist women—Field, Ratched and the russet haired duenna of the Left, Carol Marin…and his inhalation from the Left fumes showed itself last night as he interviewed the two women candidates for alderman of the 41^st ward.   His first question was how does Chicago get the increased revenue it needs to meet its governmental requirements?  No recognition that the question also should include expense paring.
        Listen Mr. Schmidt: if you want to spare your station the ignominy of NPR you ought to get next to yourself and provide some balance.     

THE ARROGANCE OF DALEY FAMILY POWER. “THEY’RE NOT LIKE US.”

   What did F. Scott Fitzgerald mean in The Great Gatsby where he has the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway tell the mysterious stranger Jay Gatsby (who changed his surname to Anglo from the Jewish Gatz):  “The rich are not like us. They don’t care who they hurt!  They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth more than the whole damn bunch put together!”
       He meant that encrusted arrogance runs roughshod.   That arrogance of course pertains to the Daleys who have lived like a royal family here since the Old Man was elected in 1959.   What’s most offensive is Richie’s princelng attempts to avoid being pinned down with explosions of juvenile bluster.  When asked whom he voted for in the mayoralty the short, squat little bully boy walked over to the offending reporter and tapped his forehead:  Knock-knock!   Who’s dere?  Anybody home?  Supposed to be funny.
      What’s not remotely funny is how the Cook county states attorney is cooperating with our royal family to quash details theSun-Times has produced that cries to heaven for vengeance and at the very least an independent prosecutor to pin responsibility for a death that occurred after a drunken encounter outside a Division street bar on April 25, 2004 that led to the death of David Koschman following a punch thrown by a Daley nephew, Richard J. Vanecko.   Koschman fell backward, hit his head on the sidewalk and died 12 days later. 
       Verifying Carraway’s assessment that the powerful have ways to evade responsibility is the stalling that has taken place in the Chicago Police Department….the fact that for 12 days witnesses were not interviewed…and that law enforcement officials from States Attorney
Anita Alverez to the CPD to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan to U.S.  attorney Patrick Fitzgerald—no one has the guts to break the impasse…hoping that it will all go away.
        It is clear that by not responding Alverez appears to be and maybe  is a glaring fraud and political hack who’s covering up…the liberal sweetheart of the Illinois political media, Lisa Madigan appears to be and maybe is unconscionably cowardly …and that Fitzgerald who may be named the next U.S. attorney general appears to be and maybe is spectacularly gutless: Having prosecuted a bevy of lesser lights who committed spectacular patronage abuse  crimes by following orders, he ignored the responsibility of  dirty little Richie and now seeks to give the family a pass.  
       The next time our little Blusterer meets the press somebody ought to rap his forehead and say…Knock, knock! Who’s dere?  Why are you running a cover-up for your bully boy nephew,  Richie? 

OBAMA CAN THANK HILLARY’S STATE DEPT. SOFT-NOSES FOR GETTING HIM IN LIBYA.

          Q.  Wait a minute—the mainstream media say No Drama Obama made a brilliant decision there—not too warlike,  not too pacifistic…the porridge not too hot, not to cold but like in the Three Bears “just right.”
        A.   The same liberal Katie Couric-style media that saluted Lyndon Baines Johnson early in Vietnam and which turned on him with a vengeance when the coffins started arriving.   If there’s a distinguishing characteristic of modern liberalism, it’s that its relativistic, can turn on a dime—can extoll humanitarian causes and betray them overnight.   Take a look at recent events of “humanitarian” military incursions and how they backfired.
      Q. Refresh me.
      A.  Before we get to that…understand that the emotional Left…rootless of principle, relativist to the core… has been the trigger in all war involvements starting with WWI’s make the world safe for democracy…continuing up to WWII and propagandist  William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies White the small town Kansas editor (bankrolled by Wall Street interventionists) …notice how these programs extolled by White rolled off the tongue?...Lend Lease…Cash and Carry… then the savageness of Pearl Harbor, caused by FDR’s tightening the embargo noose that made an attack on us a possibility (although “journalist” White was winding down then) …then in 1950 the crusade by the Luce  press,spare  heroic, doughty little South Korea from invasion by the awful Red North ...in the late `50s  from of all papers The New York Times urging Ike to do what the French failed at by defending South Vietnam from the hideous North…All these wars were originally validated by the idealistic Left; then suddenly the Left swung back to non-involvement—not so much with Korea but certainly with South Vietnam.  
         Now to the “humanitarian” causes.
        Q.  Yes…
       A.  In 1992 there was the issue of children’s starvation in war-torn Somalia and after taking a poll Bill Clinton rushed aid to it.   But not long after TV pictures came back here showing American casualties there was a sudden reversal from liberals. Clinton withdrew and nixed a similar overture concerning Rwanda.  Then later in the Clinton years the Left cheered our intervention in Kosovo because of Milosevic’s genocide—led by The New York Times and dewy-eyed Katie Couric—but when the pictures came back there was a sudden dissatisfaction from the Left and Katie, the revisionist Times reporting…guilt-induction being a great tool of liberaldom…that we by being involved contributed more to ethnic cleansing than any other bystander nation.
       Q.  Your point…
       A.  My point is that now we have a great arbiter of wafer-thin  liberal sentimentality—greater than Katie Couric ever hoped to be—Jon Stewart the faux anchor on Comedy Central who has turned against Libya.  Minister Louis Farrakhan on Cliff Kelley’s WVON thundered to Obama  last week “You can’t order him [Gaddahi] to step down and get out! Who the hell do you think you are?”    That magnificent heavyweight documentarian Michael Moore saying to Obama “return the Nobel peace prize!” Denny Kuchinich whose lopsided Alfred E. Neumann visage gives us a glimpse of his inner feelings, trying to cut the Libya appropriation.  Hardly was Farrakhan and Moore out of the box than the vituperative 71-year-old crank of the Senate spoke out…with electrically charged white hair standing on end like a mix of Leopold Stokowski and Albert Einstein as played by Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown in Back to the Future—Vermont’s nutty Bernie Sanders who said it’d be good for liberalism if Obama had primary opposition.
        Q. You detect  the first smoke of revolution?
        A.  I do—but it’ll fizzle out quick if Crazy Denny has anything to do with it.  The guy to do it is Evan Bayh who can take up the role of Gene McCarthy. Here’s the timeline.  On Nov. 30, 1967 McCarthy filed in New Hampshire.  March 12, 1968 he gets 42% of the vote but loses to LBJ as a write-in. Four days later on the 16^th Bobby Kennedy enters the race. On March 31 Johnson announces he’s out. 
      Q.  Who does Obama have to thank for this—the Pentagon?
      A. Not at all.  Bob Gates went on record as quoting MacArthur saying that if one preached a land war at this instance, he should have his head examined. No—Obama has Mme. Fat Legs shrouded in a pants suit, the overgrown but still immature Wellesley graduate Hillary Clinton and her State Department ultra-soft noses to thank for it, recognizing that these are the very people who will be off the reservation shortly….Hillary saying coyly she won’t serve in a second term.  You get Evan Bayh running in primaries and while Obama wins, he’s toast…the liberal base  is shattered—for which he can say to his historic old enemy: Thanks Hillary!

And Your Question Is…?

      WILL THE LIBYAN WAR TURN OBAMA’S 2012 TO TOAST?
     Q.  Will it?
     A.  I think it could, yes, very possibly. When I saw the demonstrators coming down Wacker the other day….mostly white liberals, some pretty old..I calculated how fleeting the liberal consciousness is.  News that similar groups were marching in Washington D.C., New York and San Francisco clinched it for me.  It tells me that if this “humanitarian” approach can still draw such opposition at the outset…before there are any flubs.. it’s not good for Obama.
    Q.  But this humanitarian thing is far different than your old-style George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush involvements that stressed American defense plus  vengeance against Saddam and the fear of his engulfing taking over Kuwait and/or harboring weapons of mass destruction…Nixon’s bombing the Cambodian sanctuaries.
     A.   Exactly. These initiatives were based on a patriotic appeal.  Liberals are suspicious of patriotic appeals and so their delicate little inner mechanisms stirred by years of secular humanism in colleges and universities  are triggered to oppose it….basically because liberals believe in a global patriotism ala Obama.  Even so, with all the namby-pamby window-dressing Obama applied to it, it  is not going over well and could well present a dagger at his throat.  He was really a fool to let his State Department push him into this thing.
      Q.  Explain.
      A.  This deal was crafted by Hillary’s State Department. You remember that the Pentagon’s Bob Gates quoted Douglas MacArthur saying that anybody who recommends anything like a land war in Asia or elsewhere should have his head examined.  That outraged the interventionist neo-con bulls who believe America must stride the world like a Colossus which gives them….sorry to be rather biologically explicit…tumescence.   I refer to the people who dominate Fox News’ Special Report…the ingenious wheelchair-bound Dr. Charles Krauthammer who wraps up his acerbic commentaries with sad, water spaniel eyes…the ever-smiling purring Billy Kristol of the highly influential Weekly Standard…having spread to the National Reviewcrowd which conducts lip-synch with its dead founder, William F.Buckley who years ago purged the Right of anti-Semitism by firing Sobran and refusing to run  Buchanan.
      Q.  Were they in the case of Sobran and Buchanan?
      A.  Yeah.  That’s why you see Buchanan fairly often in close agreement with veteran Lefty the shrill Eleanor Clift on the old “McLaughlin Group.” Sobran was distinctly so.  Buchanan still prattles on in paleo speak dead ringer parsing to assuage the memory of his late father. Bill.
      Q. Do they have a point—that most Neos have a special concern for  Israel that animates their world view and sets up the U.S. as a colossus?
      A.  Indubitably. That’s the case with Krauthammer and Kristol, with Barnes who as an evangelical nurtures biblical ties.   And The Wall Street Journal editorial board though generally WASP is also on board.
These people aren’t of dual citizenship remember—they just see the U.S. as remaining true to the goal of protecting Israel which is surrounded by bitter enemies which want to drive her into the sea.
       Q.  And you?
       A. As a former foreign service officer I have always been supportive of Israel,  do not adjudge Billy Kristol and Charles Krauthammer as anything other than loyal Americans….but at the same time I see them hyper-ventilating about so many threats to our security—urging us to go military when we are already engaged in two wars.   I want them to cool it.   Krauthammer…not Kristol…is one of the reigning intellectuals of the age—a geo-strategist.   I would like to see his measure taken up to the fullest on the panel….not just have the Land of Nod yes, certainly, Charles!  Right once again Charles!...become continue as a Greek ratificatory chorus.
        Q.  Who would you like to see on the panel occasionally?
       A.  Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations and a  former New York Times award winning staffer.
       Q.  Without putting too fine a point on it, Leslie Gelb is Jewish.
      A.  Well let’s do put a fine point on it. He is a critic of the Libyan “humanitarian involvement.”
       Q.  Let’s continue with your and Gelb’s critique.
       A.  Tomorrow.  Time for this octogenarian to go to bed: 11:50 pm 3/21.   

Ask Me Your Questions and I’ll Tell You No Lies…

    THE PHONYNESS OF JAIL-HOUSE JOURNALISM COURTESY NORTHWESTERN…ONCE AGAIN “THE BLIND SEEKER” WRITES A SUCKER STORY. 

                         Northwestern’s Phony Jail House Journalism.
     When this octogenarian was a kid, most of us thought of journalism in heroic terms…the old Call Northside 777 genre of 1948… where Jimmy Stewart’s dogged research frees longtime felon Richard Conte after almost twenty years an unjustly convicted man.
      But since that time liberals have seized upon the craft for redemption and belief in the innate goodness of man separate from the degeneration of the human condition since the fall from Eden…so much so that the pendulum has swung from interest in convict getting the full measure of what evidence shows he deserves…to the preemptory conclusion that criminal justice is sending innocent people away on trumped up evidence—and Jon Burge beat the hell out of all his prisoners since so many of them cry real tears trickling down their faces testifying honest to God I was doin’ nuthin’ when this highly decorated Vietnam War hero-thug cop  beat me into telling lies about myself.
       All the while Sob Sister Carol Marin, the 60ish  avenging angel of self-rectitude, tosses her russet hair on “public supported” (read: significantly taxpayer paid) television WTTW…Wilmette Talking to Winnetka.
        The liberal belief in the unalloyed goodness of man consistent with the importuning of the snake in the garden I tell you, you shall be like God…that racial discrimination, being denied oatmeal cookies in kindergarten…has formed a creature easily exploited by cruel, bad cops…has been in high ascendency of late.
       Lifting the spirits of go-for-the-underdog sentimentality has made Northwestern journalism professor David Protess a big man on campus playing into the cunning hands of Old Watery Eyes Quinn who has a self-conferred doctorate of Catholic theology applicable to whatever he wants to accomplish to get elected (I just think what would Jesus Christ do in this land of Lincoln where everyday and ordinary working families have to get along—and I call out JESUS! HELP ME DECIDE…AH SAY HELP ME DECIDE WHAT IT IS YOU WANT ME TO DO?) leading to naïf Marin’s unjust assailing of a good Catholic bishop for objecting to Watery Eyes’ proclivity to invent on the spot ramifications of the natural law.
       It turns out now that the merry-go-round of always bad cop, always good guy accused offender has at least one possible  scam as the Tribune reports that the “Innocence Project” may not have shared all necessary evidence gleaned in the case of 48-year-old felon Anthony McKinney for a 1978 murder with the prosecution.    It cost the university many bucks to fight prosecutors in behalf of showboat Protess but now having diligently played the role of Sancho Panza, the school has evidently had its belly full of Quixote.  A private lawyer hired by the University has withdrawn his services writing “we believe you have displayed lack of candor with us and have not cooperated with us.” Former U. S. Attorney Anton Valukas has been retained to find the answers…and NU flack Alan Cubbage, fresh from mis-defending the school’s resident sex expert on robo-stimulated female orgasms has more work to do.
       Ah, does this may mean the tender scenes of Protess dissolving into tears as he hugs a released offender…stirring the heady admiration of the kids…may be ending?   Well, for now. Protess has been notified that his course won’t be held this coming semester.  No matter how it turns out, don’t bet that the editorial boards of the two papers will be drawing conclusions about the lesson of eager hot dog journalism professors dealing with memos the kids turn in.
                                        The Blind Seeker.

          All the while happy hot-dog priest Michael Pfleger continues once again to make a fool out of the archdiocese as he has done since Francis Cardinal George got here…winning a humanitarian’s award for social justice despite, among other things,  shouting over a bullhorn to a legally constituted gun dealer ala Jimmy Cagney come out of there I say or we’ll drag you out like the rat you are! We’ll snuff you out!..Pfleger collecting his plaque, professing contriteness then once he returned home charged the archdiocese forced him to confess which confession he now repudiates, the Tribune’s simple Manya Brachear who bills herself as ”The Seeker” fell into the clutches of the media operative Chancellor again to write a glowing review of George’s tenure minus mention…except in only the most terse, controlled way…of the details of Dan McCormack, the Mundelein rector’s declaration he would ordain this pedophile yet again and loss or destroyed seminarians’ records.
       Earlier after the McCormack thing broke she was taken to an Upper Room and given an interview to which the Holy Spirit was not an accountable party…to the effect that since the Chancellor has the job of watching out for pedophilia all troubles will be over—not understanding that he had this mission all the time.
           Pfleger is leading the archdiocese on a merry chase—rather like a cat playing with a retarded mouse. Please-please, would you surrender the keys to Saint Sabina’s which you’ve had for thirty years while all other pastors have to observe term limits…and would you condescend to take a leadership role at nearby  Leo High School? 
          All the while the insouciant  Pfleger is holding the Archdiocese hostage while he “decides”…organizing his minions to march in his behalf…making monkeys of ecclesial authority.  What would he teach the kids at Leo…how to organize news conferences?...how to thumb their noses at Church doctrine and tradition in the same manner he has so ingeniously flouted?   
        Be that as it may, Pfleger has served a useful purpose to illustrate how flaccid, weak, pusillanimous, timid and indecisive the bishopric is here.   Not that we’ll ever hear that from the religious media here with which Manya Brachear is so representative.

UNCLE SAP: Until We Shed This “Moral Authority Over the World” Stuff that Dr. Krauthammer Pushes, We’ll Continue to Be the World’s Fireman.

        I call it the Charles Krauthammer we’ll fight `em on the beaches, we’ll fight `em on land, on the sea, in the air to demonstrate America’s greatness Disease—named after the undeniably brilliant..nay genius…Pulitzer prize-winner, the wheel-chair bound-(since a diving accident at age 22)  commentator, former chief physician of Massachusetts General  and psychiatrist.  Krauthammer has just fired the first shot…memorably phrased…on Fox’s award-winning “Special Report”…sitting there listening to colleague Billy Kristol rephrase his views—Kristol with a hemorrhoidal smile pasted across his wide lips…purring so softly like the conductor of a Kennedy School seminar… you have to turn up the TV gain… (at least this octogenarian has to).
           Kristol apes His Master’s Voice.    Everyone defers to Krauthammer on the panel and now Herr Doktorcocks his head affirmatively to approve Billy’s words.   The words and thoughts are Krauthammer’s; the megaphone goes via Kristol and his excellently packaged Weekly Standard to the incurably interventionistWall Street Journal editorial page equipped with its own special column’ing pleader, Bret Stephens, deputy editorial page editor, editor of The Jerusalem Post at 22.   The other Fox panelists are human echo chambers…except occasionally Juan Williams who’s no contest and who is usually battered down in self-contradiction.
       Don’t get me wrong: I love this show, gasp at Krauthammer’s droll, succinct handlng of the language….buy the Doktor’s formulae for international and domestic politics far more than I did others of two generations ago—Lippmann, the Alsops, Grafton.
       I subscribe to Billy Kristol’s magazine; I am an admirer of its staff—Fred Barnes, Stephen Hayes, John McCormack especially.   But it’s terribly predictable: There’s utterly nowhere in the world where we should NOT fight…and I mean FIGHT…with dollars, globe-striding belligerence,  troops, broad-scale interventions…to assert American dominance of the world.   I have been with them on most things in the past.  After all, as an aide to Walter Judd in the House, ranking on Foreign Affairs, (1958-61) I absorbed his fervent anti-Communism….as a foreign service officer at the Peace Corps (1970) I shuddered at JFK-instilled v   naivete…as a Reagan follower I savored his picking up the marbles when Gorby demanded we stop SDI, Reagan saying curtly “com’on George [Shultz]!” and breaking off negotiations to the wailing of The New York Times.  I am second to none that Obama is a non-patriot, a denier of national exceptionalism, a rootless nihilistic dumbbell educated beyond his intelligence.
      And yet…and yet…when I see Krauthammer preaching that we should get involved in Libya with those sad puppy-dog eyes of his, a glint in them reminds me of Peter Sellers playing Dr. Strangelove. I think: Is he mad or not? Here we are engaged in not just one war but two….we’re head over heels in over-commitment in domestic spending!   We’re on the verge of going nose-to-nose on a government shutdown!   And you mean to tell us that we…ONLY WE…can spare genocide in Libya?
       The 22-nation  Arab League, France and Britain called for a no-fly zone over Libya weeks ago.    They say if it isn’t done there will be a moral collapse in the Middle East.  Well, in the name of God why didn’t they do it, then?   They have hundreds of fighting jets and mainline bases.  Why didn’t they do so weeks ago? Simply because they knew the UN Security Council would veto it and save their bacon.  Back home here “conservatives” were calling Obama Hamlet; Hillary Clinton looking like she just had a good cry—who obviously wanted us to plump in early—said she wouldn’t serve a second term as secretary of state or defense secretary either.
        For the first time ever I kind of agree with Obama.  I come back to the original contention of Robert Taft. He was not an isolationist. His presidential father was a pioneer internationalist.  Bob Taft went to Versailles with Woodrow Wilson.  But where in hell was it ordained that we…only we…are mandated to save civilization when the others have the power but wink-wink-wink and wait for us?   Why are Hillary and John Kerry who voted for us to invade Iraq and then weakened are now pushing for us to invade or ban fly-overs of Libya?  Why didn’t the administration tell the Arab League, France and Britain: You got the planes—do you it?   Boy does the rest of the world have our number: 1-800-Uncle SAP.
       You can bet that when the first airman dies everyone…Clinton…Kerry…McCain…will be rushing to news conferences to wipe their eyes free of false tears.
      And back at the Fox Special Report desk Dr. Krauthammer will have that sad beagle-hound expression and say….as Little Sir Echo Billy Kristol murmurs assent…because we did not act fast enough Iran will conquer the Middle East…the Egyptian insurgents will collapse and tyranny will rule there…the people of Bahrain will raise the white flag and dash hopes for democracy.
        But if we get involved once again there will be happiness at the anchor desk among those who want us to act like an empire.
        Oh not like the denouement scene in “Strangelove” where Peter Sellers playing the lead arises and screams “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!” But almost like that.

JUST ASKING: Should Republicans Shut Down the Government?...What Should We Do About Libya?...Martin Sheen for Old St. Pat’s Benefit? Huh?

                                         Pull the Plug.

     Q.  Okay, the Republicans campaigned as the party of telling it the way it is on spending and the debt. Now 51 GOP House members oppose Boehner’s short-term spending…and moderate Dems saved the GOP’s bacon. The new CR temporarily excludes defunding ObamaCare, climate change, Planned Parenthood and NPR.   Boehner says he needs short-term extensions to continue negotiating a long-term deficit reduction with Harry Reid.   What should Boehner do?
     A.     Stop the fiddling around with Reid and Schumer who’re laughing up their sleeves at GOP nervousness and go for broke as a good many conservatives advise including the Heritage Foundation.        

     The worst thing you can do in politics is to run a tough campaign and then after election, wilt from doing what you promised to do.  Excessive caution, frenzy about possible negative reaction, characterizes the county club, not true philosophical certainty.

      Boehner should damn the torpedoes and ram straight ahead and move to shut the joint down or he’ll look like an emasculated puppy.  Actually not to do so is to court inevitable disaster. Already he’s being mocked by the Democrats who say (a) House Republicans are so divided they cannot supply an acceptable alternative to the Dems’ budgetary demands—so they….the Republicans…are being held captive by their own innate timidity to follow through…and (b) they’re putty.

       Q.  But-but look what happened to Gingrich in the last shutdown sixteen years ago!
        A.   This is where a perspiring historical revisionism has made the GOP tremble.  There were two shutdowns.  The 1995 one happened twice…five days in  November, 1995 and three weeks between mid-December `95 to early January, 1996.  Actually, while Gingrich was the fall guy it was because of his peppery, arrogant attitude that included being upset because he was relegated to backseat status on Air Force I coming back from Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral.  Also he had a panicky relativistic Senate partner, Bob Dole, who wanted to allay the waters so he could run unencumbered for president in 1996.
     Actually, the Republicans won for the first time in many years renewal of their congressional majority! And the result was four straight years of balanced budgets and retirement of $450 billion of U. S. debt. The Republicans reformed welfare and passed the first tax cut in sixteen years—the very same tax cut that enabled us to balance the budget four years earlier than earlier anticipated.     The resurge of Clinton was due in part to Gingrich’s unpopularity, yes—but his abrasive attitude and his fliberty-gibbet introduction of too many issues for public digestion—including whether or not we ought to reinstitute orphanages instead of day-care.
       I firmly believe that if Boehner flubs this thing up with excessive caution, it will be disastrous and lead to wholesale defections from Tea Party’ers  and possible formation of a divisive counterparty which could have serious consequences in 2012.  Instead of having a slender reed of non-support in the Senate as Gingrich had with Dole—who never did have any fixed philosophy of government beyond saving his own political neck, Boehner has one of the brightest, most principled, firmest Senate GOP leaders of all time in Mitch McConnell.  That’s why I say: Go for it.   There’s really no choice—not to go for it is to court almost certain political repudiation.
   Q.  And now Libya.

1. It’s too late to “save” Libya and that’s okay with me.  More than two generations ago, my political hero Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio) said there should only be two conditions warranting our involvement in any country’s imbroglios—to protect the (a) peace and (b) liberty of the United States.  I can justify our invasion of Iraq because we thought Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction—and while the weapons didn’t turn up there,  the 90-year-old top expert on the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, said it was the only occasion in modern times where we served notice we’d respond in our own defense against Moslem hatred of us with asperity.

       But the frantic idealism of Woodrow Wilson….”to make the world safe for democracy” a hideous concept which translated: force-feed democracy upon the world—was recycled by George W.  Bush and Rummy’s deputy secretary of defense “Wolfie” aka Paul Wolfowitz—to a thoughtless degree.  What’s amazing to me how liberal Democrats are almost always in the forefront of interventionism and then when the going gets tough, bail out.  Sure enough pushing for a Libya no-fly zone and even invasion are…ready?...John Kerry and Joe Lieberman—along with John McCain. I’m glad to note that at least one of our presidential candidates—Haley Barbour—is expressing concern about our seemingly endless slog in Afghanistan. Of course  the same-old, same-old protagonists are pushing for more and more involvement—Billy Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.
       Rumsfeld himself is…and always has been since I first met him when we were staffers on the same floor of what was then called the “New House Office Building” second floor  in 1957—I working for a Minnesota congressman and he for an Ohio one down the hall… a master of dissimulation.  The other day I grabbed his weighty tome and sat for a long time at Barnes & Noble.  I  found it a masterpiece of covering-his-posterior with memos to self and others larded throughout to spare accountability—cutting off any argument that would say what many insiders knew…that he second-guessed the military with as much arrogance as Robert McNamara did on Vietnam, that he opposed the surge, that he punished generals who maintained rightly that more men and materiel were needed in Iraq.  
                        The Spineless Liberal Archdiocese.
           Ah a Celtic fest based on Irish hockum…fit for the well-marketed Mother Church of the Squid where pro-abort and pro-same-sex marriage liberal Catholics can receive the body and  blood of Christ while in mortal sin advocacy, secure that they will not be criticized but will have only their calloused consciences to reckon with under the heretical misstated formulae of Fundamental option!
        Where else but Old St. Patrick’s where no one’s beliefs are challenged…the Daleys…Durbin…the jingos of the left who espouse Obama’s support for near infanticide?  Being Irish covers a multitude of hogwash—no one doing it better than old knock-knock!  Who’s there? Who’s home?Rich Daley who plays the dunce willingly to avoid facing up to his Church’s theology to which he is unfaithful.
       And who else to raise dough for the cynical fomenters of Irish Babylon than a lefty ideologue actor who embraces relativism on abortion  and to get ahead hooked the name of Sheen because he wanted to get return calls which he knew he wouldn’t receive if he left the return name and number of Ramon Geraldo Antonio Estavez?
          In a straight-run archdiocese this embarrassment would be cancelled. Not here.   At least Estavez had the good grace to steal and merchandise a bogus identity...the magic name “Sheen” referring to the late theologically consonant bishop with which he masquerades along with description of himself as “devout.” He fits in very well with the liberal phonies of “Old St. Pat’s”…the shameless apostates…who thinks of the parish as a diamond but which as heaven knows and will ultimately show, is dullish  zircon for flaccid rudderless pragmatism and  archdiocesan parsing larded beyond Catholic theological recognition  by decades of pragmatism, slick marketing and puerile radical left self-justification. 

PLEASE, GOP—ADD SCOTT WALKER TO PRESIDENTIAL POSSIBLES!

       Ninety-two years ago, in 1919,  Republicans were within a year of a presidential contest to replace a partly-paralyzed, stroke-ravaged Woodrow Wilson…and the list of GOP contestants ranged from dull and competent to charismatic, progressive, terse, non-committal  and highly oracular.
     The top ones were Illinois Governor Frank Lowden who could be compared to Mitt Romney of today—meticulous, competent, good administrator, lots of financial resources.  He married a lot of money—the daughter of George Pullman. That dough enabled him to draft a great number of civic leaders to implement an historic state government reorganization for Illinois that got a lot of journalistic plaudits.
      Then there was Gen. Leonard Wood, a physician to presidents, hero of the Spanish-American war, close pal of Teddy Roosevelt (who died earlier that year), charismatic speaker with a handle on oratory, fervent patriot.  Stem-winder Wood struck some as too ideological...having supported Wilson’s AG who had hunted down Commies and allegedly deprived them of their civil rights.  He was a fire-breather: put him down roughly with Mike Huckabee. People came to hear him and got excited somewhat but inside they thought he was a bit much. 
     Sprinkled down the line were some progressives, vestiges of the TR era: Fighting Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin, pro-labor ex-House member, ex-Governor, ex-Senator who didn’t make much of a dent until he left the Republicans later and started his own Progressive Party.  He’d probably could be equated with Newt Gingrich in terms of spraying peppery,  innovative ideas (remembering that LaFollette’s were liberal and Newt’s conservative: but both species were exciting)…
       …Then came California’s Sen. Hiram Johnson, much like LaFollette, progressive—also an isolationist but intermingled with progressivism. Nobody’s much like him today but John B. Anderson, the sharply-turned liberal…who when he advocated political reform and opposed Vietnam sounded like an Old Testament prophet.   Like Hiram Johnson who steadfastly opposed FDR getting us into World War II, Anderson touted his independence.
        Followed by the great Dark Horse, the apostle of “don’t make waves, speak in generalities and aim down the middle” receptive to Sinclair Lewis Babbitt country (where I spent some formative years in the `50s near Lewis’ “Main Street” aka Sauk Centre, MN, near St. Cloud where I newspaper’ed.  Analogies are never perfect, are termed  either apt or lame but just as Babbitt represented the middle conservative ground and Lindbergh pere and fils were isolationists, so was Warren G. Harding.   He could be compared roughly…very roughly…to white-thatched Sen. John Cornyn of Texas…bland, a smiler, a consolidationist—if you can imagine Cornyn running for president.     
      Then out East was…believe it or not in contradiction to today’s political fiction…one of the most exciting candidates of all—though he was a flat speaker: Gov. Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts.  A little guy,5 foot 9 with chiseled features, hair once red but now turned sandy, born a Vermonter.  It was Coolidge who earlier that  year halted the Boston police strike in blunt, cold Puritan prose.  Because he captured much excitement for what he had done rather than the speeches he had made, his friends launched a favorite son  presidential campaign for him in Chicago where he amassed a total of 34 votes.  He resembles Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana in looks and physical stature—but in actions…as I’ve been following him in Wisconsin over the past weeks… he seems far more aggressive than Mitch. As Bush’s budgeter Mitch was known as “the Blade” but never have I heard him compared to Hitler or Mussolini…and never have Indiana lawmakers fled from the capitol there to deny a quorum to vote.
       But then Mitch, you see, ended collective bargaining in his state by signing an executive order…approved under Indiana law… which he did without much fanfare.   Coolidge had the issue pop up on him and he got into a dog-eat-dog fight with none other than Samuel Gompers the early labor union pioneer and founder of the AFL—to the clash of hot black headlines…Gompers arguing that there at least ought to be discussions about public unionizing and Coolidge saying no-no-no-no-goddamit-I-say-no-the-cops-aren’t justified to strike-against-the-public-safety-anywhere-anyplace-anytime.”
        The whole point of this very imperfect series of analogies is that the 1920 Republicans were torn between candidates but inside they felt strongly that the so-called leaders weren’t quite right.  Gen. Wood and Gov. Lowden rode around Chicago for hours in a car trying to settle who would head the ticket and who would be veep.  They couldn’t agree. They both had lots of delegates—Lowden the country clubbers, Wood the red-hots—but somehow the residue that could carry either over the top weren’t satisfied.
        So as you know in a smoke-filled room of the Blackstone, they settled on the compromise—Harding the accommodationist…not too much this way,  not too much that way.  God, one survivor of that negotiation told me later when I was doing a graduate paper, Harding had all the stimulation of a mashed potato sandwich. Now who would they pick for veep to add some zest…some yeast?   Harding had an idea. He told the smoke-filled room: Listen, I’m pretty stand-pat and there are a lot of people out there who miss Old Teddy.
        They got excited: You want Leonard Wood to run with you if he agrees?  Well, no, said Harding. He’s a nut.  He’s got the Germans mad at him because he endorses the Palmer raids.
      They badgered:  You want Fighting Bob?  Harding reportedly said: God no!  Can’t stand him!
      Okay, they said: How about Hiram Johnson?
     Harding said: We’d never get along. I’d wake up every morning and pick up the paper to see if he’s topping me.
     All right, they said—who?
      Irving Lenroot.
      Lenroot was a politically correct…safe…mushy moderate…senator from Wisconsin…a foe of child labor…on the other hand not a wild man, warmly appreciative of business…sort of a male-counterpart of the League of Women Voters. 
       Here’s the genius of this thing, said Harding.   See, he’s from Wisconsin like Fighting Bob but he’s no-ways a pain in the ass like Fighting Bob—but he’s got the Wisconsin connection. He’s safe I tell you.  He’s not going to embarrass us.  Also he’s got a shirt-tail relationship through his wife to Len Wood.  See the genius of this thing.
         Yeah, everybody groaned,  my long-dead source told me, this ticket is going to rush along like a dead creek (he pronounced it “crick”). We got a bland go-along nominee saddled to a safe vice presidential nominee.
         When Harding trundled out at 3:34 a.m. to go back to his room, take a shower, shave and prepare his acceptance speech, his campaign manager, Ohio’s Harry Daugherty relocked the hotel room door and said:
        The hell with that.
       They said: What do you mean?  The nominee has spoken!
       He has spoken, said Daugherty…and somebody had better go see Lenroot first thing and tell him he’ll be placed in nomination at the express order of the nominee.  And while you’re at it—find out who Warren wants to make the speech for Lenroot.   But--.
       But what?
        We gotta save Warren from his-self.  We got to leave with some excitement here or we’ll have spent this entire week losing the election!
         They chorused: We can’t lose the election, Harry!  Wilson is down the drain and so’s Cox and Frank Roosevelt!
       Daugherty said: Unlike you smarties, I’m not sure. I want somebody to place in nomination Governor Coolidge of Massachusetts.
        They shouted back: Harry—HARRY!  Too damn controversial! Gompers has passed the word he may be with us!  He hates Coolidge!
       Then Daugherty made an obscene reference to Gompers…suggesting a mass round of sexual abuses to him.
       When they adjourned they all agreed.  Harding’s choice would be placed in nomination---but to bring the red-hots to their feet and screaming, they’d see to it that Harding would be repudiated in his choice…for the first time in two generations…and the floor would nominate Coolidge.
      ****************************************************
    My point here is plain.  Scott Walker has achieved a stunning victory. He is not inexperienced.  He was Milwaukee county executive for eight years, a State Rep for ten. The old-old list of possible nominees is largely dull.
      Romney is almost a joke—has started out a liberal pro-abort…no now he’s pro-life…look quick he’s got RomneyCare…no, now he want to repeal ObamaCare and believes he can sell the people on the difference.
     Palin spends her time becoming a celebrity, making a bundle, twittering her enemies…all the while Bristol is known for her long mesh stockings and dancing with guys on TV…having first told Greta that it is impossible for a teen to practice abstinence…then changing and saying no-it’s-not.
    Huckabee the blue-jawed orator Baptist minister looks more like a candidate for the next host of “Grand Old Opry” than president as he strums his 3-string guitar.
     Mitch has ruled out reference to all social issues…which means thousands of evangelical and conservative Catholic volunteers will go 3^rd Party…all the while Obama will use the frenetic pro-aborts and gays to rally the troops.
      And even if Mitch gets the nomination, he can’t escape social issues.Here’s a guy who a few years ago his wife left him…left him and their three young daughters…to get a divorce and marry a doctor in Californial.   Now for the first time since the Andy and Rachel Jackson bigamy issue, you have a grossly embarrassing marital situation…a presumptive First Lady who left her husband and kids. Mitch says…I love this…it all worked  out okay—she’s back!
       Rot.  Here’s the party of family values replete with a possible First Lady who voluntarily abandoned her kids.  At least Happy Rockefeller was denied custody by the court. This one freely gave them up!
        Do you remotely think the liberal pro-Obama press will eschew this…that Axelrod will?  It’s tailor-made for Axelrod to play the Obamas as truly pro-family.
       Republican leaders: Give this party a break. Encourage a Scott Walker candidacy….spur a Chris Christie draft…goose up the Tim Pawlenty drive…encourage a drive for Ohio’s Gov. John Kasich, who when he was House Budget chief under a GOP congress forced Clinton to sign welfare reform…and who when Kasich left the House had paved the way for a$190  billion budget surplus.
       In short, the choices before the party are insufficient.  We must widen the purview.  A twittering ex-governor who gave up her post…a  Baptist minister pursing up his lips like Cheetah as a coaxes cornball music out of a gee-tar…a jowly Mississippi governor with a mouthful of hominy grits that sounds like “you’re in a heap-a-trouble, boy!” next to a Sidney Poitier-llke drawing room creation made possible by a complaint press.  A forlorn governor with a returned runaway bride.
      Please!   Think of what we’re doing to ourselves.                        
    

Oh My! Lynn Sweet is So-o-o Happy to Cover the Gridiron! It’s All One Big Lefty Family!

Short Takes.

How Sweet it is to be covering your friends—as lefty faux “analyst” but in reality stenographer Lynn is paid to do and…working for the slavishly partisan liberal Democratic, pro-union Sun-Times… not having to do the onerous tasks of reporting the counter news! Her paper has decided not to report murder threats to Wisconsin state legislators from the union goons….and the waffling Tribune, its moistened finger raised cautiously to the wind doesn’t do much of that stuff either. How I’d love to see a real paper here.

Grossman Calls Himself an Intellectual.

The Tribune’s Ron Grossman who is a Ph.D has no compunction about calling himself an intellectual as he did straight-facedly in a column run by the paper March 11 which nearly caused me to choke on my ice tea at Panera’s. How unlike the rest of us poor slobs who have a tad of modesty that deters us from larding our intellect with self-praise. Doesn’t bother Grossman and his self-defined status is emblematic of a paper that strives to be a wannabe New York Times.

Get the logic here which would set anyone else concerned with disciplined thought screaming with outrage at the pompous, visceral self-satisfaction of this pap.

“Why do I listen [to NPR]?” this self-anointed member of the Ruling Class spouts.

“Because NPR’s programming is tailor-made to my personal specs.” Oh. And what are they, Ron? “The website of the Florida Public Broadcasting System boasts that of NPR’s audience, “73% consider themselves intellectual. I fall within that demographic.”

I see. You listen to NPR and are intrigued to learn that 73 percent of the listeners are intellectual—so that makes you one. And why do you think you’re an intellectual, Ron? “I share NPR’s take on things.”

And what is that take may I ask?

“…a preference for innovative ideas over blind adherence to tradition. I’m a liberal with a white collar job and a comfortable income.”

Listen up my fellow dumb slobs! This guy says he’s an intellectual not because he seeks to discover unseen unity and order demonstrated by the near-infinite variety of physical nature…but because he’s a liberal who loves NPR and has a white collar job and a comfortable income. Also he has a preference for innovative ideas.

We can apply that same instinct to morality and aesthetics. What do you mean by innovative ideas? Should the appetites govern and choose those innovative ideas? Yet since they do not look ahead should the will, harnessed by the intellect do this? The danger of democracy as Plato, undeniably an elitist, said, my dear Dr. Grossman, is that the appetites may seize control and rule. Have you thought of that? I’m sure you have since you call yourself an intellectual.

Your intellectual statement up there, Grossman, tells me you decline to be advised by “blind tradition.” Can you delineate what is blind? Or tradition?

Do you mean by this to rebuke the distilled experience of our ancestors—or some of that experience? Little of it? Or none? Are there absolutes in your reckoning at all, Grossman? The Greek Sophists embraced relativism, arguing contradiction—that there is no certainty…about which they were fervently certain. Do you know what you believe, Grossman, or what you feel? Does your paper know? Ah but it sounds like as a follower of NPR you accept its conventional wisdom in all manner of things…art, sociology, morals, social policy…because conventional wisdom is not absolute.

But then you’re a conventional intellectual, Grossman. You’re sure of that are you…in a world where truth is relative and you feel comfortable listening to it because you’re a white collar worker and have a comfortable income? Deep stuff…deep-deep stuff “doctor.”

Well, buddy, you’re sure as hell working for the right paper.