Caribou Barbie to rebrand?

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/283661-sarah-palin-to-address-cpac

This should be interesting, Ms Palin is at a political nadir right now, so what will she do? She can double-down and become ever more focused on the TEA Party / Bircher / Birther side of the Republicans, or she can reinvent herself. The second option would require some work though and I have always found Ms. Palin to be basically lazy in that regard. Her ambition was and is enormous but her work ethic has always been something less than fabulous. Who will show up at CPAC, the politician that rocked the staid male world of Alaska, or the grifter / bearded lady freak show that appeared on Fox? 

Ack!!

http://gaw.kr/KEydx4

Romney Won’t Speak to Donald Trump’s Assertion That Obama Was Born in Kenya.

 http://wapo.st/LEvGAl

Asked Monday to weigh in on Trump’s support for the so-called birther movement, Romney declined to condemn Trump’s latest suggestion that Obama was born in Kenya.
“I don’t agree with all the people who support me. And my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in,” Romney told reporters before flying from California to Colorado Monday evening. “But I need to get 50.1 percent or more. And I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”

{Break}

Is it possible that Mr Magic Underwear Man could get any sleazier?  We have all the way to November to find out.

Sweet Baby Jesus On A Pogo Stick, that is going to be an eternity.

Joe Biden’s Gay Old Time.

What a mixed blessing Joe Biden is to Team Obama. The man has some serious foreign policy chops, especially when it comes to the Graveyard of Empires. Biden’s small bore, laser-focused, strategy of taken out Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden is the only reason we may finally exit Afghanistan anytime soon. By turning OBL into shark chum, a kind of victory can be claimed, and a dignified departure made. But with all the gravitas off shore the VP can sometimes be rather “colorful” domestically. Biden can be quite the loose cannon.

I’m wondering how that loose cannon, and the friendly fire it provided, finally changed the environment around Barack Obama. The shell that Joe fired into Obama’s tent a few  days ago was nice bit of Darwinian natural selection; forcing the final “evolution” of Barack on Same Sex Marriage.

That was some hole the VP blasted in the lines gentle reader. Goodness, it was painful to watch Team Obama scurry around and attempt to reform the old position on Gay Marriage. Troops scurried hither and thither, battle flags were waved, much screaming and shouting occurred, and the Press Secretary got shredded by incoming shrapnel.

But the damage was done, Joe Biden’s off the cuff remarks left little wiggle room and no real walk back. Seriously gentle reader, if there was a way to walk back the VP’s statement, Barack Obama would have found it.  Instead, what was offer for two news cycles was the undignified flop, twitch, flail and fail of Team Obama’s messaging.

The final push from the VP was actually a blessing in disguise. Few things in politics are  truly inevitable, but some times the tectonic shifts in political landscape make some positions totally untenable. The Obama fudge, the safe harbor of Civil Unions, is gone. A huge shift in national attitudes has made that middle ground a tiny spit of land. The majority of US citizens have come to accept Gay Marriage; political break point has been achieved.

North Carolina not withstanding, over fifty percent of US citizens now support same sex marriage. They do so because a grand bargain has been struck. Both philosophical liberals and philosophical conservatives have strong reasons to support the proposition. For liberals it is all about supporting human rights and human liberation. For Conservatives it is all about the stability marriage offers. For those Homosexuals that have bought into the institution of marriage, the whole romantic love leading to a house, to children, and to a minivan (or SUV), the doors have been open.

This not to say all doors are open, or that a minority dose not want those doors shut and barred; nothing of the sort. North Carolina proved that reaction is still alive and well. In a primary election the evangelical vote can still get its gay bashing on. The muddled middle of the voting population has not quite signed on to the idea of every gay person being able to marry, just the ones they know. It is still far too easy to buffalo so called “moderate voters” into supporting really reactionary and really toxic legislation, especially in low turn out elections.

Still we, as a nation, have turned yet another corner. The President of the United States has made a stand. As the leader of one of the major two parties, this sets a new bar. It will be very hard for the Donkeys to walk away from this one;  it will be near impossible for them to play coy. A battle flag has been planted, a territory marked out, politicians that run as Democrats must either man the barricades, or go over to the other side; no middle ground now exists.

For all of that, I still wonder if Obama really wanted to play the part of Happy Warrior for Marriage Equality. Forgive me for being churlish, but I am not about to thank him for taking three years and change to finally come to Jesus as it were.

Thanking Obama for finally coming around to this stand is a lot like expecting a recently  abused wife to be happy when her her husband remembers to give her flowers on her anniversary. Should that wife really be forced to smile only day after he ne'er do well husband gave her a black eye?

I admit to being down on Barack. His leadership, or more to the point his lack of leadership, on the economy has been appalling. The subservience Obama has shown to the Wall Street crowd has been nauseating to behold. It has also been amazingly counterproductive. The one bit of distemper that Obama the Wall Street lap dog showed was enough for The Street to abandon him for the shining Mitt on the hill.

Couple that with his continuing of the Bushite assault on basic civil liberties and it has been a very bleak three years for those of us who take out basic constitutional rights seriously. Trading off the protections of the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments for Marriage Equality seems to me be a bad deal. Please don’t get me started on that meme, because I have more than few things to say on that line and on Obama’s abject failure to support the basic rights of women. Gays can marry but women will be stripped of the right to control their own bodies? Tell me how that is rational trade off. Same sex couples can marry, but their homes and effects can be subject to no-knock or sneak and peek warrants, this is “progress”?

It is a good thing that Obama has finally made a choice to fish or cut bait, I will grant that. It is a good thing that Joe Biden’s ever flapping lips provided the final push for that decision. Still, it is really is not up to Obama, or the Executive, to provide the final answer.

The Supremes are going to provide the last word, for good or ill, for at least a generation. With only a smattering of states sanctioning Marriage Equality, and over half of them blocking it outright, it will be the nine who sort the mess out. You can not have a marriage that is created in Massachusetts being made null and void in when the couple moves to Texas; that way lies madness. The Constitution is fairly clear on the matter in Article IV Section 1, which is why the homophobes keep yammering about an amendment so they can keep the gay-bashing going.

Forgive me gentle reader, but I’ll wait for how the Supremes to weigh in before I put on my party hat. I will also wait to see how deep, dark, and dirty Team Obama goes into this newly “evolved” state before I give any kudos for that new stance. Is this something that Obama and company will shout to the rooftops from now until November, or was this something that Barack and his political team did to bury a distraction? News cycles are news cycles gentle reader, and the recent move by the President definitely spiked a controversy that had some serious legs.

Personally, I do hope that Barack H. Obama comes out large and in charge on Marriage Equality; he might as well because the Republicans are going to try to beat him from pillar to post on the issue. Obama would be wondrous wise if he came out swinging and kept right on swinging until November. Follow Uncle Joe Biden here Mr. President; once more, Uncle Joe knows best.

Blind Man’s Bluff.

Or how to have people forget about Osama Bin Laden in one easy step.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17930131

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng says he gave up his refuge in the US embassy in Beijing after Chinese authorities made threats to family members.

He initially appeared to accept assurances of a safe future with his family, but later said he feared for them and now wanted to leave China.

The US said it had no knowledge of Chinese threats and that Mr Chen had at no point asked for asylum.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Beijing for high-level talks.

[Break]

Well, Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton are neck deep in it now. Leave it to the Middle Kingdom to utterly screw up your day.

It all began less than a week ago when Chen Guangcheng managed to escape from house arrest in China. How does a legally blind man manage to evade the security state that is modern day China? Well gentle reader, that is the question now racking great minds in both Beijing and Washington. There have been some very odd and extremely murky goings on in the People’s Republic of late.

Take for instance the precipitous fall of Bo Xilai in Chongqing. (Older individuals may remember this city as Chungking, the WWII capital of China) God knows the leaders of China would love you to take Mr Bo far, far, far away and perhaps bury him with Jimmy Hoffa. The tangled tale of Bo Xilai, his wife, the murder of a British business man, and some high level phone tapping reads like the bastard child of a  Charley Chan movie and a John le Carré novel.

{Break}

( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17752064 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17673505 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17690925 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17390723 )

{Return}

This has much to do about the ten year refresh the CPC is about to undergo. Being China, and China still being a Communist State, there are many guesses about who is doing what to whom plus where the “real” power lays. Somewhere in Foggy Bottom, some poor, benighted souls are trying to unravel that mystery on way too much coffee and far too little sleep.

Enter our blind protagonist escaping under the watchful gaze of Chinese State security. He had help from friends of course; but still, somewhere in the corridors of power in China, heads are rolling.

So where else would this epic mess finally end up than the confines of the U.S. Consulate? You just knew that once Chen Guangcheng had flown the coop, he would end up in the lap of Barack Obama. Extra bonus for this happen right during some very critical, and very dicy negotiations, by Team Obama with Team Middle Kingdom. Nothing quite like a very large box of agitated, extremely poisonous, scorpions and pit vipers dumped in one’s lap in the middle of tense negotiations to queer the “No Drama Obama” presidential meme is there?

Neither Obama nor Clinton have exactly covered themselves with glory in this exercise. At day six it clearly looks like Obama and his SoS tried a quick and dirty solution that then exploded in their faces like a trick cigar.

We now have Chen Guangcheng making some serious allegations about how the deal was done, and State playing defense on those charges. Obama does not need this one day after his Afghanistan announcement. As Mitt Romney would say “I’m trying to get reelected here, for Pete’s sake!”

Did Team Obama sell out the Chinese dissident so they could then move on to “the real business at hand” ? The answer depends how you feel about Obama. My bias toward Obama makes me say “yes, it is entirely possible Obama shafted / pressured Chen Guangcheng.”  It’s not like Obama is some great Civil Libertarian. It is not like Obama is going to stand on principle. No Drama Obama is going to find a compromise that gets the negotiations back on track with China; business is business,  there are “big” issues of trade, and security arrangements, that need to be resolved.

I am being cynical here? Of course I am. My opinion about Obama, ever since his FISA cave all the way back in 2008, is that he is just another soulless, hack politician. My opinion is that Obama is a empty suite with no real agenda other than his political aggrandizement. Obama won’t even protect the human rights of his own citizens, why the hell would he give a tinker’s damn about some blind dissident in China?

Thanks to that attitude Obama is up against it now. His cynical treatment of Chen Guangcheng has just boomeranged badly. If Obama folds on the Chinese dissident now, he raises the old canard of Democrats being “weak” on National Security. One year and a day after OBL became fish bait; Obama has managed to look feckless and weak with the Chinese; Mission Accomplished?

Obama now has to find a way to get Chen Guangcheng and family out of China; this is the only way this incident goes away. This is no longer about Human Rights, nor any other high minded considerations. No gentle reader, this about Obama getting reelected. Chen and company come to the U.S.A. or Obama and family go back to Chicago; no middle ground. Tawdry stuff I know, but politics is always about tawdry considerations.

Commie, Pinko, Bedwetting Socialists

Everything old is new again gentle reader. Not only has the Reactionary Right attempted to drag us back in to the sexual and social mores of the 1950’s. No, not satisfied with wiping out the successes of liberation movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s; they want to return to the politics of the 1950’s.

You may have missed it, but Communism, dead and buried since 1989 is back. Well, at least it is back in the fevered imagination of TEA Party Politicians and Fox News commentators.

It is passing strange that the Red Menace has returned, I thought that the Sainted Reagan had single-handedly torn down Communism, and its Berlin Wall, with his bare hands, in a feat of super-human strength and will. After all, Don Reynaldo had told the evil Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” and Gorby complied. How did the evil, rotten, feral, traitorous, soulless, and no-good Commies come back after the Gipper had stomped them flat? It is a puzzle.

But we have the word of Congressman Allen West that the nefarious Commies, those  termites of liberty, are at again. They have regrouped, they have reformed, and true to character (or is that caricature?) have taken up false colors to fool the unwary. They have gained electoral office and become the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

No, seriously, this is the talking point. I hardly believed it myself. How any person conflate the highly disciplined, ideologically committed, and organizationally brilliant men and women who followed V.I. Lenin with the feckless lot of Congresscritters manning the battlements of the CPC is beyond me. Lenin had a will of hardened steel; the Congressmen and Women of the CPC are political jellyfish.

But this is state of play with the Rigid, Reactionary, Right. This is the authoritarian mind set laid bare. This is “my way or the highway” on steroids. This is the death rattle of the Conservative Movement. Bankrupt of new ideas, seeking only the destruction of their “enemies,” the default has become name calling. The default has become an abandonment of logic or debate. The default has to become political bullies.

This style of politics has a very long pedigree. It is the politics of Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy. It is the politics of resentment; a resentment rubbed raw. It a politics that brooks  no opposition at all. Opposition to the Radical Reactionary Right is seen as illegitimate. The opponents to the right are seen as deliberately evil. The opponents are seen as other.

This ugly messaging of the right has really taken off since the election of Barak H. Obama. At first the messaging was muffled, well as muffled as the Authoritarians of the right could mange-- that is to say not much. Words like “Marxist” and “Socialist” were whispered sotto voce by pundits and others as dog whistle politics to substitute for the politically incorrect “The President is a Ni-CLANG!”

But with the victory of the TEA Party, and their capture of the Republican Party, what was whispered is now shouted from the rooftops. And is no longer just a black president who is catching the flack; it is the entire Democratic Party. When challenged about their toxic messaging, TEA Party types just double down with old canard about “Liberal Media Bias.”

At a certain point outrage is not enough. At a certain point only sarcasm and out-right contempt are an adequate answer. Communism is dead, it exist exactly nowhere: not in China, not in Vietnam, not even in North Korea. Marx is dead. Lenin is dead. Stalin survives in a oddball rouge state that depends on the kindness of strangers to survive. No one in the US calls themselves a Communist, the CPUSA is now the Committees of Correspondence. The CoC is perhaps still Marxist, but even the geriatric Reds of the CoC know that the Old Soviet model is a rotted corpse, and a new ideology, a truly democratic Marxist model, must be built from the ground up.

The mainstreaming of this meme, of the opposition being traitorous Communists, is flat out wrong. The men who give this idea legitimacy by forwarding it are bullies and demagogues; yes, I’m talking to you Bill, the shill, O'Reilly. You are not “cultural warriors.” You are the exact opposite,  Philistines,   uncultured louts. Robert Reich need not respond to Bill O’ Lie-ly and the charge of Communism. The former Labor Secretary of Labor should not engage BIll the Bloat in a debate. Bill does not do debate, he does shouting matches. If the idiot Irishman could not show the President of the U.S. the kind of deference the office demands, do you think he going to show any kind of manners to a Cabinet Secretary?

No, the only possible response is  confrontation with these troglodytes. manners will get you exactly nowhere. Call them out. Get in their grills. Most of all, mock them unmercifully. Turn them into laughing stocks. Point out the absurdity of their talking points. Do not give an inch, give them only push-back. They are not here for a conversation, do not engage them in one. The only response to “you’re a Commie” is “and you are a total idiot.”

Trayvon Martin's death was murder, Rep. Frederica Wilson claims

McClatchy: "MIAMI — Trayvon Martin's death is "definitely" a case of murder, Miami Congresswoman Frederica Wilson told The Miami Herald during a sit-down video interview Tuesday.

Wilson appeared on an online video program hosted by Miami Herald World Editor John Yearwood. In her appearance, Wilson described racial profiling as a pervasive force in this country, and said she fears for the safety of her black son and three black grandsons.

Of the Martin case, Wilson said, "Oh, definitely Mr. Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin ... you can tell from the 911 tapes, and from the girlfriend's conversation. You can tell from Mr. Zimmerman's past."

"He murdered Trayvon," Wilson repeated. "He hunted him down like you hunt a rabbit.""

'via Blog this'

Oh Sweet Baby Jesus On A Pogo Stick, here we go again! Yet another hack pol exploiting this tragedy for political gain. Rep Wilson, let the DOJ and the FL grand jury figure this one out. No need to pour gasoline on an already raging fire.

Santorum rolls over competition in Louisiana primary

 McClatchy: "Rick Santorum won handily in Louisiana's Republican presidential primary Saturday, solidfying his position as Mitt Romney's last credible challenger as the campaign heads into states that will test whether Santorum can broaden his appeal to less conservative voters.

The former Pennsylvania senator had been expected to win, but campaigned heavily in this Deep South state, seeking to widen his margin over Romney and reinforce his message that he is a trustworthy conservative while Romney is a politician with erasable Etch-A-Sketch views.

"

'via Blog this'

Going Along To Get Along.

"My working assumption has been that the only thing that Barack Obama believes in is Barack Obama. With that thought in mind, I'm seldom surprised by anything he's done. For leaders, particularly the kind who should be written of in quotation marks ("leaders"), it's often easier to just go along with what seems to be conventional wisdom in a bureaucracy, and end up losing a fight. When you don't believe in anything, there aren't really going to be many reasons to avoid going along."

Cujo359

...

As true as this may be, it really begs the question "why bother contesting for a leadership position if you are not going to lead?" From Poppy Bush onwards we have been inflicted with empty suits that captured the Executive as resume padding.  It has been all about blind ambition linked to ego gratification; with no real desire to do the heavy lifting the job required. You can see the downward spiral from Pappy Bush, to Bill Clinton, to Shrub and, finally, to Obama.

Each iteration, each candidate, was ever more solipsistic, ever more nihilist, ever more ego driven, ever more the unprincipled political hack. Each was ever more the dog chasing the bus; totally lost when said bus ended up in the dog's possession.

I wish I was a systems engineer, or someone who could discern how systems work. I do not have the mental discipline or the framework to achieve that kind of analysis. I just know that our system of government, especially it's political process is fundamentally flawed. I keep looking at the results of the the process and keep being amazed on how badly it fails at delivering a more perfect union. We are 0 for 3 since Regan as far as leaders go. And let's be blunt, while Reagan was a great leader, where he lead us was truly awful place. The triumph of Goldwater reactionary conservatism has been a disaster for the nation.

There is something very wrong with the rigged political system we operate under. The will of the People, what they voted for, was transformational change. The Democrats and then the nation went way outside the box and voted for something new under the sun; or something at least seen as new. What they got was yet another clueless pol, interested only in his own aggrandizement.

I look at Obama and just wonder. Here is a man who has been angling for the Presidency since Harvard Law. Every move he made since then was made in that effort. He kept his nose clean, and carefully avoided leaving any fingerprints.  And to what end? To sooth his outsized ego? To attain some kind of personal validation?

But more importantly, why is a man like Obama being so richly rewarded? Why do we keep accepting these empty suites to "lead" us? Why are our political elites so feckless, so underwhelming? Does the system have to break as badly as it did in the 1930's for a change to occur? I dread that possibility. Our nation came a lot closer to totalitarianism than was comfortable in then1930's. We got really lucky with FDR, who was able to save Capitalism from itself. This time, we were not so lucky, we got Obama.

And it does not look much better going further, as our choices look like Mitt and Barack for the top job. Neither of these feckless political chameleons can be described as a "leader."   Mittens is Barry's doppelganger, a big pander bear with no core to speak of. Again there is something fundamental wrong with a system that delivers the "choice" of Mittens or Barry.

I no longer see any cure within the system for what ails it. My thin reed of hope lies with the Occupy movement and its very smart decision to stay far away from the siren song of our political duopoly. The worst thing the Occupy movement could do is become an arm of the Democratic Party. As long as Obama holds the Oval Office the Donkeys are irredeemable. Even after Obama leaves, the Progressive base has to undergo a total rebuild. Obama's tenure has been an absolute disaster for the Progressive base. The supposed high minded and principled base has degraded itself to fan politics and the cult of personality during Obama's term in  office. The Progressives have cheer-lead Obama's continuation of Bush policies; policies that the Progressives would have absolutely opposed if those same policies were attached to a President McCain. It seems that hypocrisy has a bipartisan appeal as both TEA Party and Progressives are more than willing to soak in it.

Fortunately Occupy is not a "progressive" movement, or maybe it is the only real progressive game in town. Either way, Occupy is the first grass roots movement for systemic change I have seen since the heyday of the 1970's liberation movements. Interestingly Occupy does not claim any leaders but depends solely on participatory democracy to set its agenda. That is smart move, seeing as the leadership class we have is so underwhelming.

Faith, Fundamentalism and The First Amendment

I have been away from this blog for more than a week. I’ve been sitting and waiting for the results of MI and AZ to wonder in like drunken sailors from a liberty port. The last few days have seen the polls stagger, careen, and career about like a very abstruse chaos theory calculation. The results may be close in Arizona and Michigan, or maybe not. Who knows? The primary season has lost all sense of narrative arc, degenerating into a tale that is all sound and fury. But, Sweet Baby Jesus On A Pogo Stick ,the shear idiocy and stark raving insanity of the Elephant tribe has been unnerving to watch.

Just when I think the Republicans could not dig a hole any deeper, they break out the heavy equipment to bore through the political bedrock. In pandering to the crazy, the Mighty Mormon and Mr. Unfortunate Google Result have attempted to take a wrecking ball to the separation of church and state.

It was no great surprise that Rick Santorum went all Theo-Con radical on the subject. That Santorum would make a totally inappropriate comment about JFK’s fifty year old statement on the subject of church-state separation seems by now par for course.

It would take another post to tease out how wrong Santorum's musings were. Let’s just say that his religious beliefs are in no way “oppressed” when others block his attempt to force his special brand of theocracy down their throats.  Let’s us also say he has is Constitutional understandings of the First Amendments at a ninety degree opposition to reality. I could continue on this vane, but I want to move on to more pressing matters. There is a lot to cover, and only so much time. Let’s move on, shall we?

One of those matters was the rotting corpse of the US Catholic Bishops doubling down on contraception, along with Daryl Issa. I’m way late to this particular party, please forgive me, I was just unable to recover from the jaw-dropping idiocy of the whole tempest in a tea pot.

Of all the “cultural” conflicts that the Elephants could attempt to gin up outrage on, they choose contraception? And they did it in such ham-fisted way that the proceedings outraged anyone with a vagina or a functioning male brain? (I know, I know, a “functioning male brain” is an oxymoron)  

Riddle me this, how do the Elephants intend to win any national election with only 30% of the female vote? Yes, vote for us, the party that wants to take your BC pills, IUDs, diaphragms, etc, away from you! Vote for the barefoot and pregnant party! Wow, that’s a sure-fire winner; why has no one come up with that before?

But it gets better, or worse depending on your point of view. In the latests bit of Republicans pointing out, “if you haven’t noticed, the President is a black man,” Mitt channeled his inner, soulless, pander-bear and made noise about Obama’s lack of a proper Christian faith. Run that by me again oh magic underwear man, you have questions about Obama’s Orthodoxy? You who tote around a extra-special “Additional Gospel of Jesus Christ” want to get into a discussion of The One True Faith?

Exactly when did a candidates Christology become a matter of political speculation? When did a grubby, face-shifting, flip-flopping, political hack gain the right to smear any other candidates’ faith? What part of “no” in the constitution’s no religious tests for office did the seagull worshiping Romney fail to understand?

Honestly, that bit of pander by Willard floored me. It was so skeevy, so typical, so calculated, this slandering of Obama’s faith. It was a transparent bit of flummery tossed to the evangelical, fundamentalist, born-agains. It was Mitt saying “hey I can be an utterly intolerant jackass. I can do this racist, dog-whistle, political gamesmanship just like Mr. Sweater-vest and the Icky Amphibian can. See, I’m a narrow-minded, exclusionary, bigoted, Christian-In-Name-Only, mouth-breather--just like you!” How low has the Mitt man fallen. In the six years Willard Romney has pursued the goal of the Republican nomination for president, he has lost the thread, he has definitely forgotten Matthew 16:26.

I’m not even going to bother attempting to offer a rejoinder to the talking point that Obama is a bad or fake Christian. I have no idea what the term “Christian” might mean.* Give me the common thread that joins Orthodox Christians worshiping in one of the great basilicas built in post Soviet Russia ,and the Appalachians handling snakes in some shot gun shack in the middle of nowhere; then we can talk. Tell me what the link is between the mass of Syriac Orthodox Church and glossolaic utterances (Speaking in Tongues) of  Pentecostals --in twenty five words or less-- and you will rate as a super-genius in my book. No points for saying “Jesus” or “the Holy Spirit”

(* I know there are plenty of helmet-haired freaks of nature more than willing to blabber on ad infinitum, and ad nauseum, about their pet theory of what Christian and Christianity entails: “give your heart to Jesus, and blather, blather, yammer, yammer, jaw, jaw, etc.” That is not Christian nor Christianity. That is a very narrow interpretation of what Christianity might be. It is the not the first interpretation, nor will it be the last. It is most certainly not the only interpretation.)

As one who has read far too much history for normal functioning, I can tell you nothing good comes out of a debate about who the, “proper Christian” might be. The same question recast as , “who is the proper Muslim” is also incredibly problematic; just ask the Shia and Sunnis about that little conundrum. This is why we in West decided to give the entire thing a miss, and went for secularism.

I can see why the entire notion of secularism frosts Santorum’s corn flakes. For a Theo-Con like Santorum, secularism is the barred and bolted door that prevents him from achieving his theocratic state. Secularism is the big fat fortified mountain that Rick must overcome before he can shove his heretical notions down the rest of the nation’s throat. Secularism is real freedom contrasted with Santorum’s freedom to run the land as autocrat and Pope.

Our system of secularism did  not spring up as some evil plot hatched by Christ-hating, evil Liberals in the 1960’s. It was set up by the bitter lessons of two centuries of civil-religious warfare. It is the results of the hard lessons learned in Continental Europe, then In Cromwellian England and then finally in the wretched excess of the Puritans in New England. The founders wanted no part of any established faith, they had a belly full of the Church Of England and wanted no repeats.

In one respect the yammering of the Republican hopefuls is spot on, this election is a defining choice. Not because the shape-shifting, transactional Obama may win or loose a second term; it is not about Obama. What it is about is the over-reach of radical TEA Party ultras. It is about the over-reach of Theo-cons and other radicals who want to remake the nation into a regressive fantasy of a US that never existed. It is an attempt to negate not only the liberations of the 1960’s but also every bit of racial, social, and gender justice carved out since the New Deal. And once that work is complete the reactionaries will shred both the New Deal and that Commie pinko TR’s Fair Deal so they can properly relive the glory days of the Gilded Age.

The right is freaking out about the twin liberations of women and blacks. They want their white patriarchy back and don’t who gets hurt in its restoration. They mau-mau the Constitution on the way to shredding it into a fine confetti. This concern tolling about “religious liberty” is nothing more than Orwellian doublespeak. It is not about liberty, its about oppression. It is the attempt of a small cadre of reactionary evangelicals imposing their notions, their will to power on the rest of us.

The Trivialization Of Impeachment Long Form Edition

A very depressing thought came to me the other day; there is no way Barack Obama can win the 2012 election. What is depressing is not that Obama will loose the General Election, no, what is depressing is that there is no way Republicans will accept a Obama reelection. There is no way the Republican will not attempt to invalidate any result that has them loosing to the man they so irrationally hate. Two articles convince me that Republicans will attempt to nullify a Obama reelect by any and all means at their disposal. First it is the over-the-top and visceral hatred of Obama that the Republican base indulges itself in. When Republican primary voters start talking about a Obama reelect being a disaster that will result in a one thousand year dark age you know you have left the rational, facts base world and entered a parallel universe. You, or at least I, wonder if you can take these people seriously. Do these Republicans actually believe this hyperbole, and if not, why did they say such over-the-top nonsense to begin with? Obama is the most cool, almost cold, center-right politician ever to claim Democratic Party Pedigree in the modern era. He could be a younger Colin Powell, if Powell had gone to Harvard Law instead of West Point. The political DNA is almost exactly the same: moderate Republican, Beltway Establishment, no sharp edges to speak of. Yet Obama still manages to freak out core Republicans in ways that makes me scratch my head. The fire-breathing rhetoric about Obama does match the cool, no drama, politician who keeps marching to right to find a mythical middle ground with the Elephants. I’m not going to speculate about the specific phenomena of Obama Derangement syndrome, I’m going meta, and linking it to the Republican apoplectic response to the two terms of Bill Clinton. Ever since the face-plant of Jimmy Carter’s Administration and the twelve year run of Reagan-Bush that it brought about, the Republican Party has considered the office of President its exclusive purview by divine right.

Actually the Republican Party considers the entire Federal Government is patrimony until the end of time. Thus any Donkey ascendancy is by definition illegitimate. This is why Republicans bang on, and on, and on about voter fraud. They cannot accept the numbers when they lose. It does not match their assumption about their god-given right to rule the nation indefinitely as the only “real Americans.” As Republicans are the only “true” majority, any Democratic victory at the polls has to be obtained by massive fraud. Never mind that even in the Bush Administration it was impossible to find any actual voter fraud; it has to be true. The lack of evidence only proves how nefarious “Democrat” groups are in sneaking in their illegitimate, illegal, hoards into the voting booths. Which is why Grover Norquist can already plant the seed for an Impeachment move against Obama if the President can win a second term. “Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach.” Exactly how letting the Bush Tax scheme lapse rises to “High Crimes and Misdemeanors is never explained by Mr. Norquist. Not that Mr. Norquist seems bothered by the very thin logic of Impeaching Obama over tax policy. Mr. Norquist knows his base, and he knows how to set the table for them. The Impeachment of Barack Obama would be pure wingnut theater.

Using the template provided by Amanda Marcotte, I can see this all too clearly. An impeachment would fit the rabid right check list perfectly.

One, the charges would be utter garbage, total nonsense. Amanda is very clear that B.S. the most important component of any wingnut obsession. And as Norquist is 95% there already with the proposal to impeach over the Bush Tax Cuts, the last 5% is a walk in the park.  

Two, Pettiness. Almost self explanatory. An impeachment this time would not even have the thin veneer of sexual prudery to mask what is actually going on. No, it would be all pettiness, all the time for the Republicans attempting to impeach the president.

Three, selfishness. It is all about them, their candidate, their prerogatives, their tax cut, their America.

Four, Near-psychotic fear of change. Four more years of a dark-skinned, Democratic president is more than these folks can handle. Also, their delusion that they have a right to dictate to the rest of the nation how things will done will be further challenged. No one likes being told they don’t rule the roost any more, but wingnuts will be especially unhappy to find this out.

Five, Paranoia. Amanda links this to Pettiness, and who am I to argue with her? The template she offers is my secret wingnut decoder ring; and it has not failed me yet. Going after Obama because you think he might let a tax policy lapse, is irrational at the very least. You would have to be fairly paranoid to buy into Norquist world view about Obama, or to believe that Barack is on a par with the barbarian hoards the laid low Western Europe from the late 5th Century to the Age Of Discovery.

Six, Angering Liberals. This almost goes without saying. Yet another pointless impeachment, against a sitting Democratic President, for no good reason, would irritate the most mellow of live-and-let-live liberals. The African-American contingent of the liberal cohort would work themselves into a cold fury on the subject of Barack Obama’s impeachment. Who knows, even Obama might work himself up to saying a few discouraging words to Congressional Republicans. And that would be just fine with the wingnuts, because they live to get under their opponents skin. Much of what wingnuts do has the objective of angering, vexing, annoying, exasperating, pestering, and maddening liberals. It is like this is the only way they can get true validation. Red State is not enough, they have to check in with Daily Kos to make absolutely sure they are being perfect jackasses.

As stated in the beginning, I think that a Obama Impeachment is not merely “on the table” but a very live possibility; almost a sure-fire bet. It passes the wingnut challenge with flying colors It fits the pattern of the modern Republican Party and its rightward march. A 2014 impeachment would be perfect way to prime the pump for the post-Obama Republican assault on the White House. It would get the wingnut base energized and the Democrats wrong footed. The politics are perfect;  as long as victory is your only concern.

The second half of a presidential second term is the long, dark, night of the lame duck soul for the man occupying the office; he is a mere caretaker. Nothing is really going on in the fever swamps of D.C., so why not a little impeachment theater?

Who knows the Republicans may be bold enough to run on the fact that they will impeach if elected. It would be great stuff in the red meat, red state hinterlands; the gerrymandered single party enclaves, where only the most extreme survive. The partisan political logic of 2014 impeachment is near air-tight. Mind you, it would be awful for any attempt by either party to govern from 2014 to 2016; but what is two years of rudderless drift in a dangerous world when victory can be yours? It is not like Republicans really care about governance, especially when it's not their guy in the Oval Office.
Republicans only care about power, not about the day to day business of running a nation.

The only thing that may prevent this scenario is a blow-out reelection of Obama. I’m not talking about a Goldwater type debacle, but at least a 55%-45% split or better. A ten percentage point crushing of the Republican candidate (very likely to be Romney) could not be chalked up to voter fraud no matter how hard Fox and Freaks tries to pitch the propaganda. If Obama wins narrowly, mark the summer of 2014 for Republican Run for impeachment. If the Republicans fail to hold on to the House in 2012, the affair may be put off to Winter of 2014/5; Merry Christmas.

Granted I’ve been wrong in my predictions before. I thought that Newt Gingrich’s long history of sliminess would negate any mud tossed his way. I was wrong, voters noticed the new mud tossed by Romney against the background of all that old crusty muck Gingrich was already carting around; bummer. Still I have a good chance of being right this time. At the very least, I have the broken clock's chance. We will see, first Obama has to get reelected, and that is no sure thing in itself. Anything can happen in ten months time. Who knows, we might be all speaking Mandarin by then.

Newt Gingrich, The Distillation of The Modern Republican Party

The March to Mittdom, as Lee Papa calls it has been halted. What was always a dreary trudge toward the crowning of Willard Romney got ambushed in the swamps of South Carolina. It was not even close as the Magic Underwear Man got beaten like a rented mule. The base’s favorite amphibian got forty percent of the vote, while Willard returned to the pre-New Hampshire doldrums of one out of four.

One reason for the rise of Newt has to be that the clown circus of the debates were restarted. While Rick Perry gets a well earned rap for poor debate performances, Mitt is having issues in this area too. Mitt has played defense perfectly. No unforced errors, no oops from Mr. Ice. But, there is no passion, no red meat for the base either. What is worse, is that Mittens has had more than few deer in the headlight moments when his circuit boards shorted. The pander chip failed when Robo-Romney could not figure where to fling the unctuous nonsense. “How to play the voting ex-con talking point? Computer engage! Engage!! Must find the right talking point! Danger! Process failure ... illegal protocol ... reboot ... reboot!!”

Meanwhile, Newt was in his element. God how that sleazy, nasty, piece of work knows how to toss red meat to the Dixie base. If you can get over how god-awful the whole cynical process is, you can almost admire the shear, vicious brutality that Newt appeals to.  Man, he has that Reptile Brain of base dialed in and hard-wired for maximum effect. Be warned, were are about get deep, dark, and dirty on this subject.

Put on your hazmat suites and make sure all openings are taped up snug. Check your respirator seals for proper fit. Recheck those rubber gloves for pin-hole leaks gentle reader. We are about to wade in the toxic super-fund site that is the modern Republican Party for a look-see. We are visiting the very heart of darkness; make sure your papers are in order.

What was amazing about Newt’s South Carolina debate performance is how he performed an astounding act of political jujitsu. Face with the fury of a scorned wife, he was able to flip that charging beast without breaking a sweat. In less than five minutes he delivered master class in pure cynical political opportunism. A lesser politician would have had major difficulty if a former wife came at him with the type of scandal that Marianne Gingrich, wife number two, brought up from the depths of that failed marriage. But Newt hit that baby right out of the park. He shredded the moderator for even bring the subject up; which had the partisan crowd roaring with delight. After beating up the host, and by implication the entire Corporate Media, for their grubby, unwarranted attempt at Lese Majesty, Newton then pivoted for the extra bonus round of blatant misogyny.

If you can somehow deactivate your innate sense of moral outrage, you could then admire how well Gingrich played that crowd for the last gram of resentment and white male privilege. No one does the reprehensible, sleazy, cynical, politics of resentment quite like Newton Leroy Gingrich. It helped that Newt was fully engaged in a little bit of pay-back to Mittens, for the whack job Multiple Choice Mitt’s Super Pac did on Newt in Iowa, plus New Hampshire.

South Carolina was the perfect place for Newt to scuff up Mitt’s perfect hair. Newt knows these voters. He knows the dog whistles that brings them running. Like it or not, he is the real face of the Republican base in all its splendor.

Let me deconstruct that, let’s go a little deeper, into the very center of the toxic heart of the Modern Republican Party. Let’ go to the very radioactive center of the Elephant homeland. It begins and ends with two core items; the liberation (if poorly realized) of African Americans, and the liberation (again, if poorly realized) of women. More bluntly put, a lot of people are well and truly angered by the fact that both blacks and sex have slipped their chains. Ever since Nixon we have seen political blow-back, reaction, to civil rights and feminism.

This reaction is strongest in the south, in the beating heart of Dixie. In the rural, white, south, evangelicals went ballistic, and got political, when the sexual and civil rights revolutions blasted their little slice of heaven to smithereens. The twin pillars of Patriarchy and Privilege where shaken to their core; some one had to pay for that.

It was Richard Nixon, a master of the politics of resentment, that saw the opportunity. It was he who really got the southern strategy rolling. But lets be brutally honest. The south was not just Dixie. We are talking about not only a geographic idea, but a social reality.  Dixie extends far past the old Confederacy, deep into the fly-over states, with outliers as forward deployed as Orange County, California. Best described by the the trinity of guns, God, and guts, its anchors are a deep bigotry, and an even deeper patriarchy. Peel  back the patina provided by the AIE, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover institute and other forms of wingnut welfare, and much Republican philosophy can be distilled to sticking it to the uppity blacks and the wonton sluts. The twin evils of the Republican mind set are femininity and non-white pigmentation; in no particular order.

Getting back to dark prince of dog-whistles, Newt. Mr. Gingrich knows how to really dive deep, dark and dirty into the fetid cesspools of bigotry and misogyny. He provided a master class in bigotry dog-whistles when he teed up against Juan Williams. That no one in that debate audience had any problem sucking down that radio-active bigotry that Newt was serving up; that they treated it like mana from heaven tells you much about the state of the Republican base in 2012. They loved it when the old, nasty white man put the uppity black guy in his place; God, how they cheered.

And as pointed out earlier, Newt also knows how to play the Misogyny card to perfection as well. It helps that the man is world class cad and male chauvinist pig. He has that contempt for women thing nailed down seven ways to Sunday. It is one of the few genuine bits of his inner being he allows to be seen. As this contempt nicely dove-tails with the base’s same feeling, it is not much of a problem for Newt--at least with right-wing Republicans. It is also not as much of a problem with woman voters as one suspects. As the anti-suffragettes, the Anita Bryant crowd, and the female supporters of Sara Palin prove, there is always a minority to a plurality of woman more than happy to keep the rest of the female gender in chains. Of course, outside the hermetically sealed confines of the TEA Party right, this level of misogyny is a bit of stretch.

But this missive is not about the supine left, or the muddled middle, it is about the rabid, reactionary right. The entire Republican Primary process, and especially the debate process, has made it crystal clear how deep down the Elephants have gone into the rabbit hole of reaction and resentment. The self-nominated partisans of the leading edge of the party have shown their colors at every opportunity in every audience in these debates. They are cruel, vicious, uncaring, mean --and proud of it. They are a cohort driven by their hatreds: their hatred for minorities, their hatred for the poor, their hatred for sex, their hatred for women, their hatred for secular society. Left behind by a modern society that no longer honors white, male privilege, nor its religiously fundamentalist underpinnings, their fondest wish is to reinstate the old order when theocracy was the order of the day. They would gladly reset the nation to not only before Griswold but to before Brown; reestablishing both Ozzy and Harriet conformity and Jim Crow. They want their lilly-white world back, and don’t give a damn who get hurts in the process.

This is why Newt will go deep and far in the Republican Primaries. He gets the resentment; hell the man has a few personal scores of his own to settle. His core nastiness, his bent and deeply soiled soul, is in simpatico with much of the Republican base. The man wants to get even, so does much of the Republican base. The base wants to fold modernity seven ways and do some very painful things with it to their fellow citizens. Gingrich is a little more focused, as he wants to do some very politically painful things to Romney; which is fine with the base because they despise the Mormon Robot almost as much as Newt does. Mittens is an silver-spoon, establishment Republican; and the rural, southern base hates those types of swells on general principle.

I honestly wonder if Romney chose the Republican Party out anything other than filial piety and the very special politics of Massachusetts. The man, quite frankly is a political dinosaur, one of the last of the species of Country Club Republicans who used to rule the political landscape of the North East Corridor.

Those creatures are slowly passing away, being replaced in their former habitat by blue-collar bruisers like Chris Christie. In the south, the Patrician Republicans never found a home, and were replaced by Bourbon Democrat turncoats, who kept their toxic politics while shifting labels. It is exactly the same economic royalists ruling the roost in Dixie, only the name has been changed to protect the guilty. There really is not a dimes worth of difference between the politics of Newton Leroy Gingrich and Lester Maddox. Scratch Gingrich and you still get the scent of sulfur that pervaded Maddox. That is the final bitter truth of the modern Republican Party, and perhaps its epitaph in 2012.

Musings On The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s Monday, the 16th of January, 2012. In the United States that means we recognize the life and times of Martin Luther King Jr. As time passes by the man fades and myth replaces him. I always find this day fraught because in the effort to honor and recognize this exceptional leader and philosopher we have made him so much less than what he was.

If we think about the man at all, if we attempt to reconstruct his sacrifice, it becomes a mangled and flattened  tale about a two dimensional man. The complexities and contradictions of the man are buried with his bones. We forget the humanity. We forget the foibles. We forget the crazy bravery. We forget the failures and the disappointments.

This was an African American of the deep south who found his philosophy in India via New England. This was a preacher of an orthodox, hell-fire and damnation, evangelical church who, most likely, was in his own faith, a Unitarian-Universalist. This was the outstanding moral leader and moral compass of the nation who could not keep faith with his wife.

In this time, when transnational corporate capitalism runs amok, that we miss this visionary man. In his last days King was moving beyond civil rights for the narrowly defined cohort of African Americans, and toward the bigger picture of the depredations of poverty. Could King have found a way to convince the poor rural rednecks of the common cause they shared with the black neighbors that they despised? Could have King found a new Christian understanding that overcame the over-arching, toxic, politics of class and race?

I always wonder what would happen if a true visionary Christian, a true follower of Jesus, was able to capture the national imagination now. Could such a person truly break though the chatter, the fluff and nonsense, the twenty four hour news cycle? Could such a person survive the scrutiny of our celebrity culture? Could they survive the inevitable swift-boating, the calumny of opposition research and fabrication?

In his own time Dr. King had to defect the most vile of accusations. He had to endure all kinds of vituperative attacks. He was accused of being a radical, a trouble maker, a Communist, a saboteur.  On the home front, King was accused in being too accommodationist, too cautious, too much the Uncle Tom. Black Nationalist like Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver had not one good thing to say about the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.

For all of his life King was seen by White America as pushing too hard, too fast; just the opposite of his black peers. Only the very wise, the very politically astute knew better, knew that MLK was more safety valve than stoker of the fire. It took King’s death for the rest of the US to get wise to the tsunami of rage that MLK held back. When King died, the inner cities of the United States burned. It was only with his assassination that the greater nation truly understand how much it would miss King’s preaching of Christian forbearance.

I cannot think of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. without thinking of his spiritual and political heirs Occupy Wall Street. Both are grounded in the strategies and tactics of non violence. Both faced being slandered and libeled by their political opponents. Both have had to come up with a response to the application of police power to their movements. Both have had to separate themselves from the fringe political provocateurs that hung around the periphery of their movements without betraying their inclusiveness. Both face a steep learning curve as the political, economic establishment, and the police power that enforce its whims, respond to challenge, and adapt to the tactics of a liberation movement. OWS does have an advantage in that it can learn from King's successes and failures to craft the new liberation movement for these new times.

To do this the people who give OWS its theoretical heft need to deal with the historical reality of Dr. King and his movement. They have to understand the uphill battle he faced, not from the bigoted minority of the south, but from the mostly indifferent to hostile majority of the entire nation. They need to understand true change is difficult at best, and damn near impossible most times. Opposition to change is like a brick wall, very hard to break down. King spend his whole adult life attempting to punch just a small hole in that brick wall. It was a long, tiring process that garnered little praise, and even less affection.

It is a good thing that we do celebrate the life of Dr. King. It is important that we reflect on the reality of his works and his cause. It is best that we forget the myth that we have been handed and instead remember the true parameters of Dr. King’s liberation struggle. Much of his work is left undone. Much of his work awaits our further action. Can recommit ourselves to the great undertaking of becoming a more human, more humane nation; to become a more perfect union? We have that option; will we avail of it? Or we continue to wallow in the libertarian delusion that there is no we, no common cause, that we are nothing but atomized individuals with no higher aspirations then self-gratification? Do we follow the spiritual lessons of Jesus, Ghandi, the Buddah, and others or do we wallow in the selfishness of Galt? There is a choice between compassion and casual cruelty; that is the final lesson of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I hope we, as a nation, learn it before it is too late.

The Myth Of JFK And The Beginning Of The Cult Of Personality

I’ve been thinking about JFK. It all began as a sidebar conversation with one of my favorite blog buddies Cujo359. He wondered if the present generation of Kennedy generation was living up to the standards set by the Jack, Joe Jr. , and Ted. This progressed, or perhaps degraded, into a conversation about the relative merits of John F. Kennedy vs. Lyndon Baines Johnson.

It is brutally hard to do an honest accounting of the charismatic and martyred JFK vs the man who succeeded him. LBJ had none of JFK’s charisma, was quite the brutal SOB, and had the extra large albatross of the Vietnam War hanging around his neck. There is not much love for LBJ. Johnson’s legacy is also shorted because he exploited the death, and image, of his predecessor to twist the arms of politicians, and others, into supporting a specific agenda that was all LBJ, all the time. LBJ was quite complacent in the construction of the myth of John F Kennedy, as were others. I’m going to try to put down my flame thrower and attempt to deconstruct that myth, and its very real, very political effects.

There is a reason that I have to proceed with caution. There is a small cottage industry with the only object of buffing up JFK’s image to a lustrous shine. Topmost is the Kennedy clan. JFK is very much their holy relic, their entre’e into politics, and their get-out-of-jail-free card.

But they are not the only people out there constructing the myth. The Media loves the image of JFK. They love pulling the heart strings of the ill and uninformed. They love diving into the warm, deep,waters of Kennedy bathos and nostalgia. It is a sure-fire way of getting high ratings.

Then you have all the retainers and hangers on that surround the Kennedy clan. The actual people who were attached to Jack’s presidency are fading and passing away, but their are plenty of people willing and able to pick up the dropped banners and carry on the cause. Each and every one of these professionals has good reason to keep the myth of JFK alive, and at the forefront of people’s mind.

So what is the cottage industry at? What are they constructing? What is the product they are selling? It’s an image, carefully crafted, expertly preserved, and mostly bunk. It is the image of a young, vital president, dashing, brilliant and progressive. It is an image of a man of political courage. It is an image of man who brought about massive political and social change. It is an image of a champion for Civil Rights, and a champion of the poor and dispossessed. Most of all it is an image of a great life cut short, brutally ended by murder most foul.

Like any good myth, there is a small grain of truth, a core to build on. Jack Kennedy was charming, handsome, dashing and photogenic. He was the first politician who really understood the then new media of television, and exploited it to the hilt. He really knew  how to use the image of his family, the image of him as young Pater Familias, to great effect. But like much of the JFK mystique, the image and the truth of the matter are very different. JFK did have the beautiful wife, and the large brood of children, but the family dynamics were a lot worse than advertised.

I am not going to go into the long, sordid tale of JFK’s numerous infidelities, it is subject that is far too long to relate. JFK followed one of the iron laws of history and biography: men with out-sized charisma, and out-sized egos, have out-sized sexual appetites. There was a pretense of happily married man and wife. This type of hypocrisy was tolerated in the 1960’s. Even today, the visual image of JFK as virile and dedicated family man still trumps the reality of JFK’s serial, and sometimes reckless, sexual affairs.

And since we are, in a way, discussing JFK’s image of virility, now is as good a time as any to drill down into the reality of JFK’s health. Be warned it is not a pretty picture. I really feel for the medical professionals that had to deal with JFK. I also really feel for the patient who those professionals attempted to treat.

If there was one true cross JFK did have to bear, it was his bad health. Where to begin? Do I begin with his war injuries? If so, how deeply do I go in to the symptoms of his ruined back? I’m not going to go too deeply because it is a truly awful thing to contemplate. We are dealing with unbelievable pain and suffering; chronic in nature, with no real end in site. The heavy duty meds Jack was given were only palliative, they temporary eased the pain, but never dealt with the underlying medical issue. There were other work-arounds, other palliative measures, a laundry list actually, but they were equally unsatisfactory. For Jack Kennedy, and many others who shared his type of traumatic back injury, you don’t look forward to a cure to the condition, because the only real cure is the grave.

The back was only one of JFK’s problems. He also suffered from Addison’s disease. As this disease affects the bodies hormone balance, it causes a plethora of symptoms in the sufferer.  Unfortunately for JFK, he had to deal with this disease back in the days when the treatment options were just plain awful. Medicine has advanced since that time, and the management of Addison’s is quantum leaps better. In JFK’s time, the treatment for Addison’s had barely advanced from the stone knives and incantations stage. The health care professionals did the best they could with the tools provided, but JFK was often in ill health.

The contrast between the image of a young vital JFK, and the reality of chronically ill, and often debilitated man could not be more stark; yet we cling to the images of youthful vigor, while ignoring the medical reality. As with so much with JFK, image trumps reality.

Having dealt as best and sympathetically as I can with the actual man; let me attempt to deal with the politician as sympathetically as I can. Be warned though, in attempting any such consideration my default is, “results matter.” The one true light I will follow is what JFK achieved in his own lifetime; in his tragically truncated presidency. I am not going to deal with counterfactuals, with could-of, should-of, would-of. The only honest appraisal of any person, but especially a politician, is what they achieved during their time in office; not what was achieved after the fact.

By this measure I must be honest, it really does not look good for the home team. What JFK actually achieved while alive places him, for the most part, in the presidential category of “above average.” He was brilliant in the Cuban Missile Crisis, avoiding nuclear Armageddon, but domestically he was middling.

Granted I have the advantage of hindsight that JFK did not enjoy, but on the core moral issue of Civil Rights, both Jack an Bobby did not cover themselves in glory. They were an improvement over Ike, a step above, they did move the game forward, but not in the way that is now advertised.

Like Ike, the two brothers were mostly dragged into the Civil Rights struggle by other parties. Let us zero in on the Freedom Rides as a prime example. The brothers did everything in there power to make this issue just go away. In this regard they were not alone. Even Martian Luther King Jr. was initially opposed to the idea of the Freedom Rides. But the movement took a life of its own, and as it progressed the awful images of Freedom Riders being beaten, abused and harassed forced Jack and Bobby to do something. It became a matter of protecting US citizens right to life and limb. Jack and Bobby had to act in the face of Southern attempts to nullify Federal protections.

They did the absolute minimum. JFK and RFK negotiated a peaceful extraction of the first set of Freedom Riders from Louisiana and called it a day. But when the second set of Freedom Riders upped the political pressure, Jack and Bobby finally brought out the sledgehammer of Federal Power. This particular sledgehammer happened to be the ICC, but all the same it got the job done. The segregationists of the south howled in pain, but they were not about to challenge the brute application of Federal prerogatives.

JFK dedication to the advancement of Civil Rights is a fraught subject. He did make motions in that area. He did make incremental gains in Civil Rights during his time in office. Unfortunately, it gets really difficult to measure the real amount of political capital he invested, and was willing to invest, because LBJ muddied those waters so thoroughly after JFK was assassinated.

LBJ flogged the image of the holy, sainted, martyr for the last bit of political advantage possible. JFK might have set up the political chess board of Civil Rights, but LBJ and MLK pushed those pieces around to brutal effect. Both LBJ and MLK were grand masters of that political game. King provided the moral force and the outside agitation, wile Johnson provided the inside game of brow-beating and cajoling the Senate into action. Together they steamrolled the recalcitrant Dixiecrats in the Senate.

I just do not see the partnership of JFK and MLK working in the same way. Even if JFK did bring his A game to the effort, how does a second term of JFK match the first term of LBJ in effectiveness? LBJ had a deep knowledge of the Senate, he had a historic mandate after the1964 election, and he had the image of the martyred JFK to use as a holy talisman. Again, I just do not see either the Great Society, nor the Civil Rights happening as they did without that triple threat that LBJ brought to the political table. I sure do not see JFK racing ahead of MLK the way LBJ did.

I’m sorry this took so long. It has been a very long and twisted shaggy dog story; even for me. I’ll try to drive to end of this narrative as best as I can. History matters gentle reader, you can’t discuss were we are without setting up how we got here. I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the history and biography of JFK, on the chasm between that myth and that reality for a reason. I think that it is with Kennedy that our present toxic cult of personality in politics began. It is in the manipulation of image, the choice of surface over substance, that the John F. Kennedy myth began, that our present political woes find their source.

We have made this choice gentle reader, and we have doubled down on our preference for style over substance every time we, as a nation, have been offered the chance. We did it with Nixon, if barely, accepting a very complex and angry man as a moral defender of a mythical silent majority. We did it, in a way, with Jimmy Carter, thinking that somehow an “outsider” could cure all the ills of a post-Watergate USA. We really went in for myth when we voted for Don Renaldo; the sunny, affable cowboy who would make all things bright and shiny again. What Reagan actually did was a whole different matter, best left for a different discussion. With Pappy Bush, we took a bit of a breather before diving back into the calming waters of myth with the man from Hope. After Bill Clinton departed, we wildly gyrated from the faux cowboy presidency of Bush Jr. , who we could have a beer with, to the professorial Obama, who offered Hope and Change.

It is with Obama we have reached an apex of sorts. The myth of Obama, and the reality of his presidency have been at such odds, that to even contemplate such things brings on nose bleeds. As I would rather not bleed over my keyboard at the moment, I will let that discussion pass for now. I will also leave the epic cult of personality his supporters indulge themselves in for other times as well. Obama did not create the present cult of political personality, as much as he has both exploited it and enlarged it. The cult of personality is quite the 800 pound gorilla, is quite the dangerous, lumbering beast.

It is this tendency toward political cultism that I find so toxic. The willingness of voters to  cling to an image, while ignoring the reality beneath, is distressing. It becomes almost farcical when you look at the present election of 2012. The fluffing up of both WIllard “Mitt” Romney and Barack Obama by their partisans is disconcerting, to say the least. Both these men are ethically challenged empty suites, political operators and hacks. But to their supporters, they walk on water; and possess an overarching  competence that is sadly lacking in reality. It is all smoke and mirrors, and we are without Toto to provide the helpful parting of the curtain.

Sorry, to end on such a down note. Sorry, to end the discussion with such a flame-thrower of invective. Our nation is in a bad way, and our refusal to do the hard work of due diligence with our political class is a big part of why our nation is in such a lamentable state. What to do? What to do?

The Adams Conundrum

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

I’ve been thinking of that quote for a while now, gentle reader. It does a fairly good job of distilling the central problem with the office of the President of the United States ever since Saint Ronny of Ray-Gun cleaned the old peanut farmer’s clock in 1980. It is hard to take a political process seriously when a grade B movie star, and professional political crank, manages to grab the brass ring.

But it has been even more depressing this election cycle because of the clown car primary process the Republicans have inflicted on a weary republic. I watch these proceedings with an ever rising sense of panic and melancholy. Is this really the best we can do as a nation? Is this really the top tier of political professionals? I would not trust this lot of politicians to run a McDonald’s, never mind the Hyper-power that is the USA.

Granted, it has been darkly humorous to watch the Conservative base swoon over one white knight after another; only to have them self-immolate before even doing battle with the hated dragon of Multiple Choice Mitt Romney. From Bachmann, to Perry, to Cain, to Gingrich, and now to Mr. Man-on-Dog-Sex Santorum, it has been an exercise in flail and fail. Each of these prospect proved beyond a shadow of doubt that they “should on no account be allowed to do the job.”  You would do better with a trained monkey.

Not that the Donkey Party is doing much better. They have their own issues to deal with, most under the heading of Barack Hussein Obama. The rank ambition of the man, linked with absolutely no moral compass, has been disastrous for the Democratic Party.  Obama’s “lets make a deal” transactional style of “leadership” has perverted everything the Party of FDR stood for.

The J’ accuse against the Obama lead, and feckless, Democratic Party is long and depressing. The “Progressive” wing of that party has been especially inept. Faced with a President who is essentially doing Richard Nixon in black-face, the Democrats in Congress have caved on every center-right talking point their leader has ever uttered. Spineless leaders, Pelosi in the House, Reid in the Senate, have followed the President in a Bataan Death March further and further to the right. Like their President they have followed the corporate money, and kowtowed to the wishes of the New Robber Barons. The special interests of big pharma, big business, and the Insurance Industry were coddled. The masses were toss the odd stale crumb to feast on, but only after reproductive health rights were trampled on by the usual gang of sex-phobes and religious reactionaries.

That even a stalwart leftist and self-proclaimed “Socialist” like Bernie Sanders begged off a legitimate challenge to Obama’s rightward lurch tells you everything you need to know about the Democratic Party. The Republicans are right; the Donkeys are, “surrender monkeys.” The Democrats keep folding to the power of the Corporations, to Wall Street, to the rich and connected, to their donors. They cannot even be bothered to go through the motions of fighting Corporate power.

Thus Obama gets to rest up and keep his powder dry, waiting for Mitt the inevitable to emerge from the toxic swamps of the Republican Primary process. Is anyone else having a severe case of acid reflux over this result? Is anyone else utterly disheartened that the final results of this process, which looks like two political hacks with no core beliefs fighting an epically dirty campaign from May to November? I know I don’t want to watch this unravel. I would rather dig my eyes out with rusty spoons.

Yet that is what we as a nation are up against. It is the end result of an utterly corrupt system melting down into absurdity.  Team Obama is shooting for a one billion dollar war chest. Romney will likely meet or exceed that amount. It is an open auction for the Unitary Executive, and you are not invited. In this bidding war, ordinary citizens do not have a prayer of having any influence.

And what of the contenders? What type of person is willing to whore themselves out for a billion dollar price tag? What type of person is willing to dial for dollars, to beg and wheedle for filthy lucre? What kind of promises, subtle or not, will they have to make? How is someone willing to grovel in such a shameless way qualified to hold any kind of office, never mind the Presidency?

Mark Twain once observed that history does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes. I’m seeing that. I’m seeing a rhyme with the “Bearded Nonentities” of the late 19th Century. Starting with Bush Sr. It has been a sorry lot. None of the post Reagan Presidents rose above the low bar of mediocrity, and one fell far below it. We are living in a contradiction not seen often; an executive that has almost limitless powers institutionally, run by men who’s effective power is weak. Maybe it’s because they should never had gotten the job in first place. “[A]nyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” Sad, but ever so true.

Musings On "Outsiders" Running For President

As Our Most Sacred Lady Of The Tastefully Appointed Pant Suite pointed out, the Presidency is not an OJT job.

I have always hated the idea of an "outsider" because, first, it is pure BS when the job of President is being contested. Only the top tier of Professional Politicians go for the Presidency.

No one who runs for the oval office is an "outsider." Obama was on the national radar, and a hot item for the National Democratic Party from 2004 onwards. How do you think he got the nod for the Kerry Keynote address? He was a player, he was angling for national recognition / office from at least 2004. Add to that, he was a player in Illinois politics for years; and that he played in the sharped-elbowed politics of Chicago. He was no neophyte. He was no outsider. He was a professional politician looking to climb the ladder as high as he could. By performing due diligence, you would have found more than enough data to prove what a political animal was, and how he deliberately crafted an image that had no correspondence to reality at all.

Secondly, any top leadership job is a poor fit for the unprepared. I spent ages in the Navy, and they, plus the rest of the military, do not let untrained, unprepared men or women into critical positions. It is a slow progress to the top, and a ferocious weeding process. You don't want some clueless newbie running a CTF, or a Air Wing, or a battalion of infantry. The same goes for the Captains of Industry. DOW or AT&T are not going to hand the keys over to some joker who only ran a push cart; they want someone who has had experience in running a large institution. Only in politics do we expect a person with next to no executive experience to hit the ground running. It is one of the reasons our national politics are so messed up. We keep voting for "outsiders" who have little to no executive experience, and expect them to perform miracles.

I don't care who the politician is, two years in the Senate (actually less in Obama's case) is not enough time to gain any top level experience. I had problems with HRC's claims of competence, she was a lot less ready for the job than advertised; but Obama was even more unprepared than HRC.

And it shows, Obama has flailed in the toxic swamps of DC. He was utterly unprepared for the lock step opposition of the Republican Party. Far too many times he has played Hamlet in matters domestic and foreign, unable to fish or cut bait. He has reacted to crisis, been caught flat footed far too many times. His messaging has been plain awful, just mailing it in for far too long.

He blew one of the most lopsided advantages a Democratic President had viz the Legislative branch in a long time. His rank incompetence made 2012 a year of mass slaughter for Donkeys, both nationally and locally. He gifted right-wing cranks like Sara Palin with one of the most tone-deaf PR campaigns ever seen.

He was AWOL for most of the health care debate. He was AWOL from most of the stimulus debate. He utterly failed to do the spade work, and back-slapping, required to get Congresscritters in line. He made the political and managerial mistakes you would expect of a rank amateur. He did these things because he did not spend enough time in DC to really understand how that snake pit really works. 

Like it or not, the politics of DC require you to know certain players, and to have personal connections to them. There is a level of comfort and bonhomie required, an ability to rub elbows and engage in idle chit-chat. Obama utterly lacks this gift. (Clinton, on the other hand, had it in spades.) Obama's high-minded, cold, professorial personality is like fingernails on a chalk board for most DC pols. The only way he could have countered that was to put more time into the personal relationships that are the real grease that runs DC. Two years is not enough, maybe even HRC's time in Senate was not enough.

There are bare minimums required to handle a high level executive job. There are real world, experience hurdles that need to be cleared. I'm not sure that the institution of Senate offers these experiences. The moving parts of the executive branch are not the moving parts of the Senate.

Institutionally speaking, a governor or a cabinet head is better choice for the Chief Executive than a member of the Senate. Granted, the actual person occupying those job descriptions matters immensely. Still, all other things being equal, a man or woman who has run a state or the Cabinet Department is going to be a better bet to be a competent President, than a man or woman who has solely occupied a legislative office.

The worst possible choice for the office of President would look a lot like Obama, or Palin: a person who cut out of a responsibility to pursue other goals. Please note that both pols cut loose after only two years in office; one to gain filthy lucre, the other to gain the White House. Oh, and both claimed to be an "outsider," despite an entire life spent in politics.

I have no truck, and no patience, with the notion of a white knight "outsider" riding into the castle keep of a corrupt DC, and making things all shiny and new. There is more than enough data out there to show that this notion is pure pig swill. We have tried "outsiders" ever since Jimmy Carter and have rolled snake eyes with each and every one. DC is just too chock-a-block filled with man traps, tiger traps, bear traps, and other assorted snares for the uninitiated to survive. It would be better to just fall on your own sword and be done with it. No real "outsider' is going to slay the dragon that is the Beltway, they are only going to end up as a light snack.

That Obama actually thought that he could rescue the maiden fair from the evil clutches of the Beltway Beast was the worst kind of foolishness I have witnessed in a long time. It was an exercise in epic egomania, and excessive self-regard. It showed an utter disregard for the facts, and for Obama's own inadequacies. Politicians are a rather un-self-aware lot, but Obama took that common fault and put it on human growth hormone and anabolic steroids. I have never seen so intelligent a man so blissfully unaware of his own real faults.

In the end though, the fault does not lie with Obama, it lies with us. We keep electing "outsiders" to the office of President. We keep rolling the iron dice, and are surprised when the "outsider" does a face plant in office. It is insanity as defined by Einstein: doing the same thing over, and over again but expecting different results.

On Class Warfare

I am irritated gentle reader. I have been watching, reading and listening to the news and I keep running into this notion of “Class Warfare.” To quote the great Spanish Philosopher Inigo Montoya, “I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.” Placing a extra tax on millionaires may be class conflict, it may be punishing the job creators, that is debatable; but it is no way, shape, or form is it Class Warfare.

I wish I could round up every politician and political pundit that vomits the term into the public debate and have them actually endure Class Warfare. When those who survive tell their stories of what real Class Warfare looks like, then we will be done with the hysterical drama queen and drama kings who toss this term about like so much confetti.

First Class Warfare involves real warfare. We’re talking people with murder in their hearts, and the tools to bring their heart’s desires into reality. In much of history this went by the term of “Peasants’ Revolt.” If you have the stomach for such thing, peruse any history book that you might fancy. Those books will be chock-a-block full of harrowing tales of slaughter and rapine indulged by the lower orders, and the counter-reaction by the nobility. Such tales are soaked in blood.

But if clubbing and swordplay are not your milieu, perhaps something from the wrongly named “Age Of Reason” is more to your liking. Wander about the descriptions of the French Revolution, it's a barrel of laughs. Don’t forget to think about the horror of what Napoleon's “whiff of grape” really meant.

But if being shredded by shrapnel spat out of cannon does not sound very pleasant, you can always fast forward to the Russian Revolution, and the horrors performed by both the Red and White forces. Now that Lenin, he really knew how to do class warfare on an industrial scale. Stalin learned from the master, and wiped out millions of class traitors and other undesirables as routine.

But that is wholesale matters, in our own great nation of the United States, we were strictly retail about such things. There were the sundry butchering of the odd Labor member, or the judicial lynching of the odd anarchist, but the US preferred the slow genocide of Slavery and the fast genocide of the First People to the messy business of class warfare.

If brutal murder was needed to keep the lower orders in line, the elites could always fire up a race riot.  Divide and conquer was always the preferred method in the US, where the lower classes did not enjoy the homogeneity of the European agricultural workers.

The institutionalization of racism also explains why a true class war never broke out in the United States. Poor whites could always look down on the blacks and find false kinship with the Captains of Industries that shared their Caucasian coloring. Toxic racism, and even more toxic misogyny insured that the poor whites always had someone they could look down upon, and who was in worse state then they were.

But there are limits to such skulduggery. Looked at in the perspective of Class War, one can see the US Civil War as such a phenomena. At the end of the struggle a whole class of people, the Plantation Slave Owners, were crushed. For almost a generation enormous social, political, and economic changed occurred because this block had been eliminated.

Eventually the progress ended, and the next uprising did not occur until the turn of the Century with the excesses of the Gilded Age in clear view. Granted, the anarchists of the Victorian Age made things very dicey for the political leaders of the time, but they never set off the revolution that they dearly desired. Class conflict got brutal, but there was never a real danger of class warfare until the Bolsheviks popped up in Russia.

Ironically, it is with the end of the Communist regime in Russia that class warfare became a talking point again. When the only nation in the world that could actually foment real class war was tossed into the dust bin of history, the threat became alive again--passing strange.

I have no patience with the meme, as I hope you have gathered. It is an over-the-top bit of hysterical heavy breathing. No one in the US is rallying the lower orders to fetch their weapons and torches to burn down the residences of the new Robber Barons. No one is advocating that the 0.1%, hyper-wealthy billionaires be chopped up into cat kibble. No one is advocating that the women-folk of this subset be raped, or that the even smaller subset of pregnant hyper-wealthy be cut open, or their infants be beaten to death before their mother’s eyes. Wall Street was temporary occupied, it was never burned down to its foundations.

I wonder when or how the super-wealthy became so thin-skinned. When did they come around to the notion that they should never, ever, hear a discouraging word? What weird form of egomania makes them need to hear how marvelous, great, wonderful, munificent, and super sexy they are? When did they become so thin skinned?

I guess it comes from believing in the utter garbage their paid sycophants in the Hoover Institute, the AIE, the Cato Institute, and other organizations feed them on a 24/7 basis. I get the need for the hyper rich to fund wing nut welfare to confound and confuse the masses. I just have issues with the hyper rich actually buying into the bilge water propaganda that Wing Nut Welfare pumps out. The ideological insanity that the Koch brothers fund, and actually believe in, is gob-smacking. Ditto for Richard Mellon-Scaife; and the others of the inner circle. The cluelessness mixed with the excessive self-regard is incredible. It would be the stuff of farce if the damage it was doing to the republic were not so real, so massive.

By blocking minor and popular fixes to the economic disparities that warp and twist our nation, these proud few are actually bringing about the class warfare they decry. With participatory democracy blocked, the pressures will only grow. Society will warp and buckle as frightened citizens look for more radical solutions. We see this in Europe already where the austerity craze is causing the rise of fascist, anti-immigrant, ultra-right wing nationalist parties. The elites insistence on perpetuating bad policy, because that is what “the market” wants, is causing nations like Hungry to go off the rails. By tearing up the social contract, by racing to the bottom, the Transnational Corporatist Elite are undermining the very stability that Capitalism needs to thrive.

I have no idea were this temper-tantrum of the pseudo-libertarian right is going. I have no idea how long the super-rich can scotch the will of the people by purchasing politicians by the bucket loads. I don’t  know how long low-information voters will buy the crap of protecting the “job creators” when too few jobs are being created. Let’s ignore the fact that the jobs being created pay less than jobs that were eliminated; and the middle class keeps getting vaporized, that only adds insult to injury.  I have no idea how long the citizens of the US will put up with no jobs, no benefits, no prospects. That seems the perfect recipe for revolt.

The Fail Of Senator Obama

Barack Obama, was a creature and the apple of the eye of a very specific group of Senate Democrats. They were Hillary phobes, who felt that Ms. Clinton would go down in flames from a well established right wing and Moron Media attack. They did have a point, the Right Wing Noise Machine had its wrecking ball primed for a Hillary nomination.

This cabal always had a thing against John Edwards too. They considered him a total light- weight. As events played out, they were right about Edwards’ utterly uncontrolled narcissism. I cringe to think of what would have happened if the Rielle Hunter debacle had come out with Edwards as the nominee.

So the doyens of the Senate looked around for a anti-Hillary that was not John Edward and, hey presto, Barack Obama! They were gob-smacked by Barry’s Chauncey Gardiner impression. Trust me, Senators just eat up the type of crap that Obama was peddling. Obama’s transactional nature, his tendency to agree, at least in part, with almost anything his interlocutor said, was music to the ears of the self-involved Democratic leadership of the Senate.

The Senators also loved that Obama had no real history in national politics. By design, Obama had avoided all sorts of hot-button issue that usually trip up national Democratic candidates. This made him the most anti-Hillary of any candidate out there, a tabula rasa unencumbered by the baggage of a Kerry or a Clinton, or a Gore, or a Biden.

From the perspective of the Democratic Senate, Obama was their man. Joe Biden’s awkward bit of man love really did encapsulate the love the Senate had for Barack. With the push from the old Senate war horses, Mr. Hope and Change was unleashed on an unwary electorate.

Still as culpable as people as Dick Durban were, a huge portion of the blame has to rest with Obama. Having watched the man go through the motions, detached, reactive, unmotivated, I wonder why the hell he wanted the job in the first place. He worked so assiduously, making no false moves, saying all the right things, leaving no political trace, looking for his main chance to become the first African-American President. And it came to him only two years into his Senate tenure; woefully unprepared and unready for the slot of the Chief Executive.

What kind of egomania combined with cognitive dissonance allowed a man with not even two years in the Senate to think he was ready for the Oval Office? With his studied avoidance of hard political choices, and his constitutional inability to handle any kind of conflict, Obama should have known that his personal defects made him unsuited for the job during a time of hyper-partisanship.

I don’t like using the politically and racially loaded word “arrogant” to describe the Obama, but it is the only word that fits. The man is unbelievably arrogant. He bought into his own propaganda and drank deep his own kool-aid. He really believed that he was a transformational actor, a person for the ages. He believed that his unique gifts would lead the US out of the hyper-partisan hell it found itself in.

But Obama did not want to do the real work, he did not want to confront a Regan legacy head on, but co-opt it. He thought he could do the small bore Neo-Liberal politics of Bill Clinton without the charm and compassion that the Big Dog brought to the discussion. Barack Obama also thought he could do the politics without Bill Clinton’s willingness to scrap. Clinton always saw politics as a way to connect to people; Obama treats politics like a math equation.

Yet for all his faults, Obama was able to snooker the media and then, very narrowly, the Primary voters, into his myth of adequacy. He was able to convince the nation that he was a better option than McCain, which he was and still is. What he was not able to do, was resolve the central failure of our Political Duopoly, and the rabid partisanship it creates. He never had the tools to do that, he never had the foundational principles, he never had the emotional equipment, he never had the grit. Barack Obama only had his exaggerated belief in himself as a man that would use sweat reason and compromise to bring about unanimity. Not having any ideology to speak of, he never understood the ideological underpinnings of the Republicans nor his base. He knew not either himself or his opponents, which is why he keeps failing. Sun Tzu would not approve.

The Less Know December Event Of World War Two, 70 Years On.

The Seventieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor just passed us on December 7, 2011 and there were many remembrances of that date in the press, plus the blogosphere. But almost no one in the U.S. Remembered a much more significant anniversary that happened just a few days earlier, on the 5th of December.

We citizens of the US don’t do history well. We barely do our own history. Other’s history, we don’t do at all. So it no surprise that no one in the US marked December 5, 2011; but I guarantee many Russians did.

While the attack on Pearl Harbor was critical, it brought the US into World War Two and most likely sealed the fate of Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers, the real action was on the Eastern Front. December 5th marks the end of Operation Barbarossa and the beginning of the Soviet counter attack that saved Moscow.

Operation Barbarossa began, in the balmy days of June. Hitler had just put a hurting on Yugoslavia and was now ready to invade Russia. He was aided in the aim by Joseph Stalin, who insisted on doing absolutely nothing to prepare for the assault.

Stalin ignored every last indication of Hitler’s malign intent. He ignored the intelligence. He ignored the warnings printed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He insisted on following every jot and tittle of the Nazi-Soviet pact lest he anger the Nazi regime. He literally helped to supply the invasion that crashed through Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941.

When the invasion did come, Stalin went into a three day funk. He locked himself into his room and took no callers. Most people would have done the same. The first days of the invasion were utter disaster. The Nazis chewed up Soviet men, material, and land at a frightening pace. Most of the front line Soviet assets were gone by day three. The Red Army barely had a pot to cook in. Air power was vaporized on the ground, tanks, artillery, and men quickly followed when they lost air support. The Wehrmacht was turning Russia into their own personal playground, and there was not much the Red Army could do about it-- other than retreat.

Captured Soviet Artillery

And retreat the Russians did, further and further into the homeland. By November Nazi units were at the suburbs of Moscow. But then the greatest and longest serving of Russian Generals intervened: General Winter. The Nazi had no response to this greatest of Russian strategists and tacticians, no invading army since the Mongols did. Nazi soldiers were dying in alarming numbers, felled not by bullets, but by the god-awful cold. The Nazis were lightly clad in summer issue, worthless protection against the fierce Russian winter.

The lack of preparation for the Russian winter, plus the long logistical supply line to the front slowed the Nazis to a crawl. To add to the Nazi misery, the Russians had thrown up a fearsome defensive ring around Moscow that further impeded the Wehrmacht’s progress. Their vaunted Blitzkrieg literally frozen in place, the Nazis were forced to slog out the battles with rife fire and artillery support. It was then that Stalin plus the generals Zhukov and Vasilevsky unleashed a very unpleasant surprise: Red Army forces from the frozen lands of Siberia.

Thanks to the vast Soviet spy network those forces were released Asia to Europe. The Soviets learned that the Japanese were of no concern, so off to Moscow those men went. The Nazis were rather put off when the white-clad, and expert winter fighters, of Siberia came crashing through there lines.

Unfortunately Stalin waisted much of those troops by dispersing them in a general offense all along the front line. Moscow was saved, but the Wehrmacht lived to fight another day. It would be three, long bloody years before the Soviets would finally break the back of Nazi offensive capabilities at Kursk. It would be four years until the Soviets were able to mount an offense of their own. That offensive would see Berlin fall to the Red Army, but only after much pain, destruction and death.

On December 5th, 1941 crushing Hitler was hazy and distant wish of the Soviet people. By the slimmest of margins, Russia was able to save its capitol city from Nazi occupation. By January of 1942, the sacrifice of millions of Russian citizens had bought the Soviet Union a reprieve.  The Germans had been pushed back seventy miles and Moscow had been turned into an armed fortress.

Little did Stalin know that all these preparations were for naught. Little did he know that Moscow would never again be under such a direct threat. Stalin had survived, the Soviet Union had survived; by the narrowest of margins. The next test would come in the south, not in Moscow. It would come in a city that bore the dictators name: Stalingrad.