Shouldn't GOP draft Cheney as its candidate?

For the herd of Republican presidential candidates who are desperately looking for a way to throttle Donald Trump, we have a proposal:  oil up Dick Cheney's mechanical heart and draft him as a candidate. It would instantly draw the national media into a new Twilight Zone because, like Trump, Cheney has never been at a loss for dumb things to say. Besides, unlike Trump, who grabs your attention with  theatrical rants, Cheney is Mr. Cool  in projecting his wildest lies. The Republican herd badly needs coolness these days.

It probably wouldn't be a hard sell to recruit Cheney.  He and his daughter Liz have just written a book  titled "Exceptional"  that he could autograph like baseballs along the circuit.   (You'll be hearing more about it on the more exciting TV news talk shows, I'm sure.)

I've only read the excerpts and there's apparently nothing new in it that would cause me to spoil the ending.  For a man who enjoyed five draft deferments because he said he had "other priorities,"  Cheney remains on the top tier of hawks who drove us into the bloody failed invasion of Iraq.  At the time, he insisted that the enemy was in "the last throes" of the insurgency; that the conflict would go "relatively quickly, weeks rather than months";  and  in the end we will be "greeted as liberators". Don't know whether any of that is in the book.

Speaking of liberators, he writes about  the brave Americans who fought in our military battles,  and defends our use of atomic bombs as an example of this country's "fundamental decency."

But he saved his biggest fantasies  for his assaults on President Obama, literally accusing him for ushering in ISIS and everything else  that has gone wrong in the Middle East for centuries.  He frets that in books, tests and classroom instruction   "our children are too often being told that the legacy they have inherited is shameful".

That is partly true, if you consider that the shameful legacy of Iraq only refers to a draft dodger and worse, Dick Cheney.

Yep,  with Trump on the loose the  Republican also-runners could satisfy their own core values with a  freshly laundered   fantasy from Cheney, who is not a fundamentally decent man.

(Reposted from Plunderbund)

Zeus-like Cheney in his parallel universe

Re-posted from Plunderbund


It's so  appropriate that in the week  that Economist magazine carried a glowing obituary of  leading fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett, one of America's leading fantasists,
Dick Cheney,  went on another rant.  It may be rude to link fantasies  here.  Pratchett, after all, wrote books that sold in the millions (in 37 languages), a series featuring oddly named characters and events brought together in his literary conception of Discworld.   A man of humor, Pratchett even brushed off talk that he had found God.  Unlikely, he said,  because he couldn't even find his keys.

On the other hand, Cheney, a pulseless  surviving elder of the Bush era, moves in his own fantasy world on Fox News, hurling thunderbolts at President Obama.  His latest brain fart  accused Obama  of working to  "take America down".  Golly. Sounds a lot like treason to me.

In his words:  "If you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama's doing."

But we do find humorous  his assertion that Obama was leaving a "terrible  burden" for the next president. Like his buddy George W. Bush's recession and the ongoing mess that Obama faced when he entered office and they're still trying to clean up in Iraq?

When you're living in the Fox parallel universe, those questions  don't come up from the host, nor will they ever, pulse or no pulse. .


















firecracker

Cheney raging at Obama from his Cluck Dynasty

Dick Cheney has emerged from his Cluck Dynasty on Fox News  to condemn President Obama for taking a vacation while the planet is still spinning.  Although it's true that no president ever takes a real vacation from  troubles (got that, Maureen Dowd?),   Cheney is outraged that Obama wanted to get in a round of golf.

To Sean Hannity's everlasting delight, Cheney, a helpless liar, hissed that there's new evidence every day that Obama prefers to play golf rather than  deal with weighty  problems.

Here's the rest of the story from National Memo:

To date, President Obama has spent 150 days on vacation since taking office in 2008.  But George W. Bush, Cheney's designer  boss, spent 1,020 days at his Crawford,Tx. ranch and 43 at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Me.

There's a difference in context , too.  During Bush's term, the world was serenely at peace and America's economy was booming.  And even though Osama bin Laden was still lurking somewhere, Dubya dispatched concern by saying he didn't know where the guy was and couldn't care less.

As for  Cheney, you you must understand that one of a cluck's liabilities is they can't do the math.  Nor do they want to.

Dick Cheney for president? Will lunacy triumph?

Re-posted from Plunderbund


Like Mack the Knife, Dick Cheney is back in town.  He and his daughter Liz have announced a new non-profit group called Alliance for a Strong America to shame Barack  Obama's presidency.   And if your thing is the Theater of the Absurd then you have to believe that every rich Obama hater in the land with some loose change will drop a few coins  in his cup.

And if anything is deserving of a Saturday Night Live schtick, you could spread the rumor that Cheney, so full of sound and fury,  is again stirring up media coverage because he's actually running for president to restore our unique position as the global sheriff. Sounds silly, I know.  But with  the former veep who always operates beyond the limits of reality, silliness has no meaning.  We  can even envision a scenario in which he attaches Liz to his ticket as his running-daughter. It would dispel the notion among anyone who shudders at his name that he is a cold-blooded lunatic.  Instead, he would come across as a tender loving family guy who merely wants to see his daughter get ahead.

Karl Rove  would immediately predict a landslide victory for Cheney.  And Donald Trump would be thrilled that we finally had a white guy in the Oval Office who was born in America.

 And in swing-state Ohio. the projected turnout  for our new hero on Election Day would be so large in even the smallest counties  that Secretary of State Jon Husted would alert all of the local election boards to remain open around the clock by Labor Day for early voting.

If I all of this sounds too crazy for words, you can't say I didn't warn you.  Did I mention that a lunatic is on the loose again?

Walmart: Gifts that don't keep on giving

The latest heartfelt story fully making the rounds about Walmart is that bins have been  set up at the Canton store that urge Walmart associates to deposit  Thanksgiving food offerings for their needy fellow workers.  Comedian Stephen Colbert found a lot not to like about the idea.  With his finger always on the pulse, he noted that he  couldn't agree with those who accuse Walmart of not doing enough for its employes. "Wrong," he said. "They don't do anything."  

* * * * *

The table tops at the  Summit Mall food court have inset space for posting ads.  The current ones promote Roto-Rooter with the troubling message for fast-food customers:  "Complete plumbing and drain service."

* * * * *

MSNBC's Ed Schultz and Ohio Sen. Nina Turner joined for a Happy Hour assailing the State GOPs multi-pronged attacks on voting rights. Schultz complained that such tactics, with Republican Gov. Kasich at the helm, hardly reveal him as the  political moderate creeping into some national media stories about him as a presidential candidate so many years from now.  Turner is challenging Secretary of State Jon Husted and is making the voting stink a major issue in the campaign. That's an easy case to make.

* * * * *

Why do I get a  headache when Dick Cheney, a Cyborg with a pulseless mechanical  heart, turns up on TV with still more lies?  I thought those days were gone for the unchastened veep after he told us that the Iraq war would end in a matter of weeks - and not a year longer. He also guaranteed the skeptics that  the freedom-loving Iraqi greeters would shower our troops with candy and flowers from their balconies.  Try to remember.

* * * * *

In case you missed it, the U.S. House has now voted 46 times to abolish Obamacare.  At the same time latest poll figures report that Speaker John Boehner is the most unpopular politician in the universe. They needed a poll for that?

Dick Cheney: From chicken hawk to military expert

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, he of the robotic heart,  had some bizarre things to say the other night about President Obama's choice of cabinet members.  Speaking to a friendly audience  of about 300 Republicans in Wyoming, Cheney asserted that Obama has appointed "second-rate people" who can be expected to degrade the U.S. military.

The timing of his cheap shot  left no doubt that he was referring to John Kerry, the new secretary of state, and Chuck Hagel, who is awaiting confirmation as the secretary of defense. Huh?

As the record will show, both of his targets are war veterans who served well while Cheney preferred to comfortably sit out the battlefield with several deferments.  And as a strong infuence in guiding the U.S. into an invasion of Iraq, he demonstrated his profound understanding of warfare by assuring us the conflict might not last for more than several weeks. I needn't tell you  the rest of the story.

A couple of old hawks - in less discreet times

In our laudable effort to say something rude about McMitt Romney, we followed the  press reports of his recent journey to Wyoming, his buddy Dick Cheney's home state,  for a fund-raiser at the former veep's private elderhostel - a thick-walleted Country Club.

It  was good for $1million, we were told, reminding me once again that there are still folks out there who find Cheney irresistibly credible even though he was on the elite first team of Dubya Hawks that led us into the disastrous Iraq invasion, which he insisted would be a very brief conflict..

"It was the right thing," he has boasted.  Do you think there are Gold Star mothers who might disagree?

But Romney is forever impressed by the guy with the cryptic Mona Lisa smile.  "He's the kind of guy I would like to have,  " Romney said when asked of his choices in his administration. He also described him as a "person of wisdom and judgment."    But considering  Cheney's soaring disapproval rating in national polls, there aren't many around who might nod in approval.

That explains why no media photographers were permitted to capture the  two together at the fund-raiser - a version of photo-stopping instead of photo-shopping. It was sort of a case of taking the money and running.

Oh, the picture above was taken in better days when they didn't  mind being seen with each other.  Funny how such photos can't ever be etch-a-sketched away.

* * * * *


By the way, McMitt's demands that President Obama apologize to him is like blaming the bank for bouncing your bad check.

Eric Cantor: Boehner 's Dick Cheney

WITH SO MUCH media attention directed at Rep. Eric Cantor's back- channel influence on House Majority Leader John Boehner's teetering debt policy, it's reasonable to suggest that Cantor , the House whip and No.2 man under the speaker, has evolved into Boehner's Dick Cheney. Cantor, who has praised the Tea Party as the "surge protector" against big government, is getting cozier each day with the teabaggers in his hard line against compromise with President Obama. Still, as an overreaching zealot he is more troublesome to Capitol Hill Republicans than he is to the president, who happens to be much savvier than Cantor and will take the Virginia congressman to school in the the current debate.

Cantor has been here before. A rabid Zionist, he didn't hesitate to publicly endorse Israeli hardline prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the latter arrived in Washington to express his deep differences with Obama on Middle East policy. Cantor told him: "I'm with you, not my president" and promised that the majority House Republicans would "serve as a check on the administration."

He's probably guaranteeing the Tea Party the same allegiance in his attempt to guide Boehner away from any kind of deal on raising the debt limit. In his own misguided way to keep Boehner in tow, he's making life miserable for a lot of people in and out of government. But in the end he will find that life can get just as miserable for opportunists scheming their way to the executive suite. Even conservatives like David Brooks and the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal are finding little to cheer about in the mess that the Republicans are creating for the country. It's a bit premature for Cantor to take a bow for his own self-absorbed work on Capitol Hill to educate his colleague John Boehner in the demands of the Ranting Right.

Iraq, auto industry: No praise of GOP folly

I HAD ONCE THOUGHT that the worst flogging of reality occurred in the days following the invasion of Iraq. It was the hollow reassurance by the hawkish Bush Administration officials that likened the war to a brief walk in the park. A few reminders as the pro-war hucksters paraded through the TV talk shows to validate the grand design to bring instant peace to the world:

"I think it will go relatively quickly. Weeks rather than months." - Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003.

"I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that." - Donald Rumsfeld , Feb. 7, 2003.

Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, two key Bush hawks that helped design the war plans, inisted that American troops would be treated as liberators by the Iraqis. Perle even went so far as to say that within six months of the invasion, a plaza in down Baghdad would be named in honor of Bush.

How could so many apologists for a single destructive plan be such villains?

Well, some of the untidy elements of that failed group have been showing up in the rebirth of the American auto industry. Thanks to Dick Polman, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, whose work appeared today in the Beacon Journal, we can review the psychotic response by the right-wing Ninjas on Capitol Hill who lashed the Bush-Obama bailout of once-bankrupt GM and Chrysler as a dangerous leftwing government invasion of private industry.

A few of his examples will serve the point on how these Republicans ganged up on President Obama as a reincarnation of Lenin. Or was it Hugo Chavez, who's still around?:

Sen. John McCain, who remains the GOP's media star-in-waiting, declared: "Anybody who believes that Chrysler is going to survive, I'd like to meet them." (Have you thought about taking a walk along Chrysler's assembly lines these days, John?)

Or Rep, Eric Cantor, John Boehner's Little Sir Echo, except that he smiles more than Number One, who warned that Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid were trying to build a car that he wouldn't want to drive. Why? The Obama crowd will "run it into the ground." (The limo's waiting, Eric.)

Can't overlook Boehner, the Man of the House: The rescue effort "guarantees failure at taxpayer expense."

Sen. Richard Shelby, Alabama: "'I wouldn't loan them any money. General Motors...is headed down this road to oblivion. Should we intervene to slow it down, knowing it's going to happen. I say no."

Fortunately for the country, guys, it wasn't your call and we can understand why you'd prefer to say nothing and move on to other things. As Polman notes, both companies are now out of bankruptcy and showing profits. He notes that President Obama's intervention saved many livelihoods. Since 2009, the auto industry has added 52,900 jobs.

So where are these critics to concede their job-killing errors? Oh. there's still ObamaCare. And abortion. And, well,...you know the drill. There's always something, right?

When important news isn't that newsy around here

THE PRESIDENTIAL oil-spill commission has reported that Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, had used unstable cement on the deepwater platform that exploded in the Gulf and triggered the worst oil spill in history. Ho, hum. What else is new about Halliburton, which has enjoyed billions of dollars in government contracts for its less than reassuring work. Besides, Halliburton blames BP for not being more vigilant. How's that? If the big gorilla was aware of the weakness, shouldn't bells and whistles have gone off to alert everyone along the line ? Ho hum, again. But you don't call attention to soiled laundry.. Even reports in today's media in northern Ohio seemed to ho-hum the report from the commission. The Plain Dealer stuck a short piece on Pg. 4 and the Beacon Journal ran a single paragraph on Pg. 2. The only informative paper that arrived at my door (that leftist "rag", the NY Times) strung out two accounts on the front page, then jumped inside with the remainder , plus a photo and illustration. It is what it is these days, and I wouldn't look for it to get better.

And what did Daddy do to uphold our honor, Liz?

SHOULDN'T LIZ CHENEY be a tad more selective in her choice of rant against President Obama's foreign policy when she says that it "dishonors this nation and the brave men and women who have fought and died for our freedom ." The loquacious daughter of the former vice president can whip up a conservative audience at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. But it also whips up the fact that hawkish Dick Cheney, hardly a brave soldier, got five deferments from military service because, he said, he had other priorities.

Even Teddy Roosevelt wasn't spared at CPAC meeting

BY NOW, MOST of the hybrid conservative-Tea Partiers have gone back to wherever they went after their Dionysian festival in Washington the past couple of days. From all reports, nobody to the left of the Washington monument was spared a nasty slam or two. But as crowds go, we did learn a few things from their angry behavior, none of which is pleasant for the few hangers-on who still dream of a political process that begins with sanity and ends with social progress.

At least, we saw the wannabes who project their future in the Oval Office and their enablers who insist that America's only salvation is a tax-less society that will somehow encourage all of us to own un-mortgaged homes, assure that everyone is physically fit without health insurance and never have to step outside without a howitzer.

Among the things that I gathered from all of this:

Based on his comments, Massachusetts superman Scott Brown , the GOP's latest hood ornament, is just one more hack to enter the halls of Congress. I mean, would a sensible man mention public anger and frustration over taxes in the same breath with the pilot who flew his plane into the IRS building? It was chilling, too, to hear others find humor in the crash.

While we're in the Massachusetts mode, it seems that Mitt Romney still has some homework to do to win the hearts of right-wing voters who refused to name him their first choice in the CPAC straw vote polls. Such pulse-checking is meaningless, of course, but not to the few like

Romney who wanted to come away with bragging rights. He tried so hard to please the crowd that he added a new description to the Obama Administration: "liberal neo-monarchists." Can you imagine a bunch of people who hardly understand the meaning of socialism trying to digest this mouthful?

We also learned that homophobia is alive and well within the ranks of those conferees. There was a skirmish between a Republican gay rights leader and a sassy kid from the California Young Republicans, and boos on both sides.

The ideological victory parade to the podium included Newt Gingrich, the plodding old warrior who is still trying to work out an uphill slalom for himself. Teddy Roosevelt took his lumps, perhaps by people who mistook him for FDR. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, a presidential candidate on a mission from God (Get in line, Guv!), showed everybody that he was up to speed on current events by arguing that somebody should emulate Tiger Woods' wife and break some windows in big government with a 9-iron. Jeez.

Sarah Palin wasn't there. She may have had the audience's best interests at heart, particularly those older fellows whose tickers couldn't endure much more excitement.

As usual, the final act was reserved for Glenn Beck, who wanted everybody to know that he was a recovering alcoholic - which we already knew. He used a blackboard and no teleprompter

to demonstrate that anyone who is pure can be redeemed, as he was.

The only downer, it seems, was Dick Cheney's rejection of the chants that cried out: "Run, Dick Run." You'd think that somebody would tell them that he's already running, not for president, but from the pursuers that are calling for his hide for his primal role in the torture culture.

P:S: A few posts ago I mentioned how the Tea Party Movement is generically linked to the old Birchers of Robert Welch. Update: I now read that the Birch Society was one of the co-sponsors of the CPAC conference. Hmmm....

Cheney: Where are the redeeming virtues?

BACK WHEN I was a young police reporter (Way back!) who was dispatched to cover horrific traffic accidents and train wrecks, there were always knots of early-arriving onlookers staring at the mess with a certain fascination in the twisted rubble before their eyes. Not a pretty sight. It is the sort of dark curiosity that is doubtless leading the TV news hustlers to haul up Dick Cheney to the cameras every day as a Quasimodo figure without the loving heart. A spellbinding sight, if you like that sort of thing, of a pathetically bitter man who should be spending more time tending to his meds.

Since he left office more than a year ago, Cheney simply hasn't shut up, twisting and turning fact into fiction to anyone with the grit to listen. (Contrast that to Al Gore, who won the popular vote but was denied the Oval Office by the heavily partisan Supreme Court! Instead of acrimony, Gore turned with grace to his work on the environment. )

If you were unfortunate enough to bump into the ex-veep at a party, Cheney's first words would be that Obama is a weak-kneed screw-up who will be responsible for the next terrorist attack on America. He says it so often that you have to wonder whether he wants it to happen sooner than later to prove his transcendent knowledge of the unknown while he is still alive to claim bloody credit. But while his attacks on Obama appear to be less about the welfare of the nation than his personal enmity toward the president, there may be something else festering in what's left of his soul. It may be his overwhelming fear that his legacy will continue to be sullied as it already has been in Jane Mayer's best-seller, The Dark Side, a remarkable account of how he personally and vengefully took control of the Bush Administration's War on Terror. In so doing he became a white-collar terrorist himself, inventing the rules as his schemes grew well out of sight of the public.

There are ongoing attempts to bring Cheney to account, but so far he remains standing, or at least hunched in front of a TV camera with no redeeming virtues.

What a specimen of public service gone awry! When Darwin spent all of his time with the finches on Galapagos, he failed to isolate another species that eventually morphed into Richard Cheney.

Maybe it would alert the TV crowd to the downside of the menacing spectacle they are offering to the viewers every day.

Health care reform: halfway home

WELL, THE SENATE finally passed the damn thing. It wasn't easy, nor perfect, given the opposition from a handful of Democrats and all of those politically correct core-value Republicans ambling around the halls of congress on their knuckles, snorting that the end of the world was near.

This was the disloyal opposition at its worst, from the racket of "death panels" to Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn's unspeakable appeal to Americans to pray that someone would not show up for a vote to block a Republican filibuster. It didn't take a second or two to realize that he was tallking about Sen. Robert Byrd, the ancient and infirm Democrat, to either lapse into a deep coma or pass 0n to wherever Democrats go when they die. (As the talks now move to the House, the Coburn Prayer will still be on the table if and when an accord is reached to pass the bill.) I wonder when a U.S. senator last prayerfully called for a colleague's absence. Fortunately his avenging angels decided to sit this one out.

The nearly year-long debate was a made-for-TV (and cable) extravaganza in which fiction far overwhelmed fact. It was often played out by role-players who saw little reason to speak in behalf of rational differences. If you are looking for an explanation of how so much of this got out of hand, remember there is no better way to secure your 15 minutes of fame than to to sit in front of a TV camera arguing that health care reform doesn't necessarily turn on its axis and could easily knock the whole planet out of whack.

I couldn't resist thinking of Dick Cheney, recently applauded by the ultra right-wing Human Events, as the conservative of the year. The guy has been on the prowl for most of this decade with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator(ICD) that regulates the heartbeat - a device that the doctors figured might extend his life after his four heart attacks and a quadruple bypass. The total cost of his medical bill was reported to be nearly $3 million. But even pampered penny pinching vice presidents have a right to stay alive. One of his aides said his Blue Cross/Blue shield policy would likely cover all of it. Cool.

On the other hand, folks without health insurance are not vice presidents or senators.

As they say, rank has it privilege.

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Grumpy Abe's first anniversary

THE WEEK END MARKED the first anniversary of the Grumpy Abe blog. Not with a patio party and presents or anything like that. Has it been a year already? It has, and nobody anticipated more than I did that at some point I would say , to hell with it, and go about my other business. After all, it wasn't my idea in the first place. I knew nothing about the technology of blogging and cared less. Blogging was for the younger hip writers and chatterboxes. But I finally relented at the urging of friends and 333 posts later - having never taken anybody's advice to shut up - Grumpy Abe will begin a second year.

In many respects. it was a reprise of my newspaper/magazine years. The only difference, I suppose, is that I once got paid for what I now do for nothing. It's also been an educational experience that connected me daily to the absurdities of the political world , some of which I could not express in a family newspaper. Big-name infidelity and the domination of Rush Limbaugh, the Great White Whale, over the Republican Party always trumped all else in the national media.

My initiation into blogging occurred a few days before the Democratic Presidential convention and it immediately raised a few eyebrows that it was nothing more than an ad hoc deliverance of liberal propaganda to my conservative friends. The word propaganda morphed into socialism among right-wingers who often struggle with their command of the language. To that extent, I fooled them. Call it what you will - but it wasn't ad hoc. The year also further isolated me from all of the moderns who spoke mostly with tweets when they should have been reading a good book.

One year being a nice round measure of time, I went back over my dog-eared notebooks for a refresher course on what had NOT yet happened when the blog was born. Without trying to arrange history in chronological order - my notes are too scattered - here are some items that I think should make trivial history drawn from the past 12 months:

• The forever accommodating and clownish Rep. Michele Bachmann, the court-jester Republican from Minnesota, monumentally declared that she would vote against the stimulus bill because "we are running out of rich people in this country." At the time, I could only wonder what was the absolute minimum of rich people that the country needed to survive.

• There was John McCain struggling for safe passage to the presidency (a matter of natural selection?) as the GOP's temporary pater familias accusing Democrats of "generational theft," this from the nominee of a party that still claims Abraham Lincoln as its soul in a clear case of identity theft..

• If you really wanted to feel teensy weensy small, you had only to heed Dr. Alan Bess, of the Carnegie Institution of Science, who told us there could be 100 billion planets in our galaxy. And we have all we can do to manage just one!

• This quote from the late John Kenneth Galbraith was somehow revived and would not have pleased the Alan Greenspans of our land: "If all the economists were laid end to end - it would be a good thing."

• It was not until September that we learned that an obscure Alaskan governor, Sarah Palin, might be useful in launching McCain into the White House with a wink and a lack of brain gloss about world affairs. On election day, I heartily thanked Barack Obama for protecting us from the travesty of a hockey mom a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. Why would a major - well sort of major - political party trade on such an unthinkable risk, stooping so low to conquer? And her sponsor, William Kristol, a wily front-and-back channel Neocon, took another hit when the New York Times dropped his column for erratic probity.

• The year also produced a galaxy of names with varying claims to a savaged honor system: Rod Blagojevich, Miss Tia, John Ensign, Bobby Jindal, Mark Sanford, Warner Mendenhall, John Edwards, Joe the Plumber and Wasilla. Jindal, by the way, came and went before I got a chance to really know him.

• George Bush remained the president until January, but by then, he had opted out of the photo-op. He was a reminder of Disraeli's complaint that the British Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, was "sauntering over the destinies of a nation and lounging away the glory of an empire."

• Gadgets called iPhones forced their way into my vocabulary, but I didn't write about them because I could never remember whether the "i" or the "P" was capitalized. Too often I confused the word with a Greek play by Euripides. On the other hand, the only communication that suffered still more the past year was the the slow death by strangulation of the nation's newspapers.

• Some things never changed the past year.Silvio Berlusconi still made light of his young girlfriends, a habit that cost him no more than 2 points in Italy's popularity polls, for which he declared proudly that Italians liked him "the way I am." Can you imagine how the same story would have played if it were an American president?

• One of the winners in the summer months of media attention to health care reform was Dick Cheney, who flew under he radar regarding his ghoulish performance on torture , leaving him apparently still at large.

• The final word on the year cames from George Bush, who boasted in the dismal end that he was happy with how it all turned out for him, explaining: "What matters to me is I didn't compromise my soul to be a popular guy." To which I would respond: "Sorry, George. It wouldn't have worked anyway."

The Frankensteins stalk the Rhumba Queen

OVERHEARD AT a meeting of right-wing talk show hosts, a few southern Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee and some lobbyists in a private bar on K Street:

Subject A: Whew! that Soto-mooer is a cool bitch. Nothing rattles her.

Subject B: Yeah, she's one of them wise Latinas herself and ain't like any of them dumb Spics that violate our borders every day.

Subject C: I hear ya. But y'all folks, we're running out of time with the confirmation hearings. We've got to find a way to put the Rhumba Queen in her place. Or it will be just a matter of time before white males are barred from sitting at the counters of one of them cheap diners.

Subject B: Yeah, it crossed my mind. But we don't seem to be making much progress with these hearings. Before you know it she'll be cha-cha-ing on the Capitol steps with Leahy.

Subject D: Gentlemen, gentlemen! We've got some heavy lifting to do. Maybe Pat Buchanan is right. Maybe we should really destroy ol' Carman Miranda with nastier questions.

(pause in the action)

Subject A: How about this? Is there anything in the dossiers to suggest that she is empathetic with Santa Annie's attack on the Alamo? That would play big in my state. Ya know. Like one amigo to another?

Subject E: Hmmm...Interesting point. But I don't know of her doing the Mexican hat dance with Santa Annie.

Subject B: Doesn't have to be true. But we could say it in a way to give it legs on Fox News. They'll run up the flag on anything that pops the libs. Look, we're trying to score some points with our own amigos for the 2010 elections. This in no way will change the outcome of the hearings. . But we should try to get whatever mileage from them that we can. We could have Al Gonzalez haul out the Sonee-Santa Annie link at rallies and ---

Subject A: Whoa, there, Senor. Did y'all say Gonzo? We daren't go there. No way, no how.

(pause)

Subject D: Here's an idea...Why don't we call Dick Cheney and see if he knows of a way to have the feminazi Spic waterboarded to answer our questions, like whether she is a Porter Rican lesbo. I've been told lesbos hate white males. So let's play the lesbo card. It couldn't hurt.

Subject C: In executive session, of course.

Subject A: By all means. By all means.

Subject B: Ole! I think it's coming together. We can even ask Rove to reference the lesbo thing on a Sunday morning talk show. Ya know. Just mention it casually to plant a few seeds and let Glenn Beck take it from there. .

Subject D: Right. By golly, it's falling into place!. It's coming together. I think we've got it.

This could cha-cha better than accusing Obama of being born in a rain forest.

Subject E: And by the way, do we rally know where the Tamale Terrorist was born?

All: Call Rove!!!!

Petraeus drops banana peel under Cheney's gospel

A WEEK or so has passed since Gen. Petraeus, once the revered Pericles of the Bush administration,  dropped a banana peel under the right-wing argument against closing Guantanamo while also criticizing our harsh interrogation methods on detainees.  

In case you missed it (it wasn't that big of a deal in the mainstream press) here are  precise quotes of his remarks  during a Fox News interview):

"Well, it's not for a soldier to say (where the detainees should be transferred to).  What I do support is what has been termed the responsible closure of Gitmo.  Gitmo has caused us problems, there's no question about it.  I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has been used by the enemy against us.  We have not been without missteps or mistakes in our activity since 9/11 and again Gitmo is a lingering reminder for the use of  some in that regard. "

And later in the interview regarding ending extreme interrogation - i.e., torture.

"Well, actually what I would ask is, does that not take away from our enemies a tool which again  have beaten  us around the head and shoulders in the court of public opinion?  When we have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions, we rightly have been criticized, so as we move forward I think it's important to again live our values, to live the agreements that we have made in the international  justice arena and to practice those."

Violated the Geneva Conventions!  The very same conventions that Bush Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzalez dismissed  as "quaint"?  Alberto, you have a problem.  

 Except for the carnivores on the the right, who see the general flirting with  the edge of treason,  the response to Petraeus's comments has been strangely muted.  He has dashed the Dick- and- Liz Cheney show's rationale for harshly declaring that President Obama has made America "less safe."  To Obama, must we  now add  Petraeus to satisfy the carnivores?  For Cheney, who is trying save his skin by becoming a TV chatterbox as a bookend with his daughter, I think he would have been better off to quit while he was behind.  

 

McClatchy Bureau and Cheney: No contest

AS THE NEWSPAPER universe continues to shrink, you need only to look to the widely respected McClatchy Washington Bureau to be reminded of the value of professional reporting  in sustaining the life of a free (and informed!) society.   With a handful of reporters the bureau  continues to challenge the iconic New York Times and Washington Post in delivering incisive reports   on stories that might have died on the major dailies'  cutting-room floors.  The McClatchy team was virtually alone when it dug in against the Bush Administration's  virtual free ride in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.    Belatedly, the mainstream media giants  confessed they should have been more attentive to the fine print in the Bush story-telling. But by then, the brief war promised by the White House fiction writers had gone far beyond Donald Rumsfeld's  mere "shock and awe" skirmish in the sands of Iraq to a deadly encounter with unseen opponents that continues to this day. Thank you, McClatchy bureau, for your vindicated effort to warn us.

But here we are six years after the fact and we find Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz touring the network and cable media microphones with their version of how President Obama has made America less safe in contrast to  Bush, Cheney et al who made us more secure.  Cheney, of course is trying to cover his own rear end while looking for a big bankroll publisher to offer him millions in a book deal.   And Liz, it's now being reported, is thinking about running for public office.  In other words, they're just a couple of ordinary folks out to make a living.  

Not so fast,says the McClatchy Bureau. Responding to Cheney's speech to the American Enterprise Institute,  a right-wing outfit that is Cheney's choir for his sermons,  the McClatchy reporters  Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel simply destroyed Cheney's fantasizing about torture and the White House's self-absorbed image of a humane interrogator. The reporters meticulously cut away many of Cheney's statements at the AEI as outright lies.  In example after example, Cheney was shown to be in serious conflict with military authorities, the FBI and other high level sources.  

For instance, in defense of waterboarding and other messy forms of torture, Cheney declared such measures "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent people."  And he quoted Adm. Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence,  to that effect.  But Blair actually said he wasn't sure whether other means  could not have obtained the same  information, adding: 

"The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

There are many others that you can find on the McClatchy Website that show Cheney to be no more truthful than  a sidewalk shell-game artist.  But you must be careful:  He's still at-large, armed with wacky ideas and should be considered dangerous. 

It would be best to rely on the wisdom of Jim Van Nostrand, the McClatchy Web editor, who once told a reporter of how the bureau goes about its honored  business:  

                                "You just have to trust your sense of smell."

A big mop for Wacko America

MOPPING UP:

  Although it would be an insult to serious forensics, do you believe that if Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell debated, they would both lose? 

                                                                        * * *

A salute to the GOP fixer pro tem, Dick Cheney,  for having a practical response to the right-wing furor over President Obama's socialistic teleprompter.  If you saw the former Veep's  talk to the American Enterprise Institute, you'll note that he dispatched the hated teleprompter the old-fashioned way.  With head down and nose pointed down to the lectern,  he read every word from his printed text.  Or was it a hidden conservative  teleprompter? 

                                                                       * * * 

       The roar of the anti-global warming crowd (read: anti-science)  continues unabated, raising the specter of soaring fuel costs managed by that tyrant, President Obama.   The fuel cost warning isn't new; the alarmist slandering of Obama on the environment by the hard core Republican base on the right went into high gear with his election last November.  As vitriolic as the attacks on environmental concerns might be, some spectators are also reduced to sophomoric cutesy pie humor.  Examples abound.  But the most convenient one unfortunately arrived on my breakfast table yesterday from Plain Dealer columnist Kevin O'Brien, an apparent firm believer in church but not state.  Complaining about Obama's projected fuel-efficiency standards, O'Brien blithely  opined: "Obama likes the idea because it is  his."  

 

         Kevin, my boy, where have you been?  Obama's "idea" of fuel conservation  has been around for a long time with variations on the same theme.  A friendly reminder:   You like the thoughts in your column because they are yours, and I like the thoughts in my blogs because they are mine.   That is hardly something I learned in my high school science class.   By my standards, it's a tested evolutionary theory, if you know what I mean.  

    

                                                                   * * * 

With nearly a month until the Akron mayoral recall election, brace yourself for a furious assault on Don Plusquellic with the sort of reckless statements that appeared in a letter to the  Beacon Journal from Warner Mendenhall's neighborhood pal.  Among the badly aimed shots was a new one to me:  That Plusquellic was responsible for a public  school system  that is a "sham, "  thereby forcing "good citizens" to pay "exorbitant fees above their property taxes to send their children to private schools."  Excuse me, but when did the mayor become the CEO of the public school system that has always been the responsibility of the system's  superintendent and duly elected school board? Folks, we're in for a siege of revisionist history, I'm afraid.   

Don't wait for the Morrison trial, et al...

WEEKEND LEFTOVERS:  Take a deep breath but don't hold it.  Once again the pretrial  (May 11, today) hearing and trial date (May 26) for Atty.  Jack Morrison Jr. have been been delayed on motions by  Morrison's lawyer, Paul Adamson.  New dates were not set at this writing.  Morrison, a University of Akron Trustee and advisor to the Summit County Republican Party, was indicted on seven misdemeanor charges arising from his son's purchase and profitable sale of a house on University property that was designated for use in the area that was being cleared for a new football stadium. The case is five months old.   Morrison has ignored calls for him to step down from the Board of Trustees, including one from Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut and the Beacon Journal.  Watch for an update around  Christmas.....

Dick Cheney has made it official:  He prefers Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell as the inspiration for the Republican Party.   Have you noticed that Cheney is much more visible today as the GOP's spiritual leader on talk shows than he was as a  shadowy veep who spent some of his time in a real cave?  He's an old non-soldier who won't fade away...But something else appears to have faded away:  the aggressive PR effort to rehab George Bush's image has fallen silent.  One practical explanation:  It wasn't working.... 

Let's hope that the recall election for Mayor Plusquellic is set for the earliest possible date so that the city can get on with the important business at hand.  The effort by Warner Mendenhall and his pickup army to throw out the mayor will be one of the darker moments in the city's history, Warner's defense of "democracy in action" notwithstanding.  win or lose (he will lose this one) he will have gained some strategic information on the city's demographics should he decide to run for mayor himself.  But at what price to the city itself?

It is amusing to hear the right-wing "profiling" of an imaginary Supreme Court nominee that President Obama has yet to select.  I'm waiting to see protesting GOP  billboards rise with fill-in-the-blank nominees to be named later. 

Finally, does anybody besides Sean Hannity and  his ding-a-ling disciples care that Obama ordered a hamburger with  "elitist" mustard  instead of catsup?  There are days when I wish I could be president for eight hours.  I would  give Hannity an eternity of eyebrow raisers with my exotic Middle Eastern  palate.