Game Over

I felt like posting something about this week in politics, since it has been an extraordinary week. Particularly, the State of the Union address and the “question time” session between President Obama and the GOP have had me thinking about the situation in Washington and what needs to happen next.

President Obama pretty much hit the bullseye by having that public dialogue with the opposition party, and by suggesting that there should be more of these meetings in the future. What a relief it is to have an opportunity to see our elected officials actually discussing something substantive, and bringing some meat to the conversation, instead of rerunning the same old, worn out and meaningless talking points they trot out on the talk shows. That’s not to say that there was no rhetoric during the Q&A session, but there was definitely a higher level of effort made on both sides to act like grownups and at least try to get somewhere.

Yet, it apparently wasn’t enough to make a lasting change in the way things work in D.C. On Meet the Press this morning, there was John Boehner, as unnaturally orange of face as ever, holding firm on the party line and insisting that the GOP have “an obligation to stand on principle”. He explained that the American people expect their representatives to do this, and that this is their primary job on Capitol Hill.

That’s when I started to yell at my TV. How wrong-headed can a guy be, especially after some really clear and obvious signs from the public that we expect our government to step up their game? Part of the problem, it occurs to me, is that the GOP have gotten confused about exactly which game it is that they are playing.

They seem to think that politics is just a big football game. Maybe it’s because of the Super Bowl or something. But they act as if the idea is to have two opposing teams, one playing offense and the other playing defense, with the only objective being to score points for your own team and prevent the other team from scoring.

Which begs the question that, to me, seems pretty obvious: how does that make things happen that need to happen in this country? How does it assist job creation, health care reform, national security, long-term fiscal stability, or anything else? If either party decides to just hold the line and block the other guys for 4 years, waiting until it’s their turn to get the ball back and run the kind of plays they want to run, we get nowhere and nothing gets better. You can’t just say that you are content to bide time until the other team runs out of downs. That’s NOT the job that Boehner and the other D.C. dipsticks were elected to do. They were elected to work out how to fix the problems and meet the challenges that face our nation.

Unfortunately, the GOP feels that protecting their particular ideology is all that matters, and that if the nation as a whole has to suffer a while longer while they protect it, then that’s just how it has to be. Now, I’m not here to say that either side needs to just roll over, abandon their beliefs and make nice for the sake of it. But what I truly believe, especially after watching the Q&A session this week, is that there are probably many more areas of common ground between the left and the right than they care to acknowledge, and that many ideas that might actually work are being shunned by Republicans not because the ideas are bad, but because they are being proposed by the Obama administration or the Democrats.

I guess, according to what Boehner says, the Republicans will look back on the Obama presidency as nothing more than an inconvenient speed bump on the road to their next period as the majority party. It will not be a time during which any progress is made, nor will it be a time where the GOP will assume responsibility for any work that needs to be done. All they’re there for, from what they’re saying, is to stave off as many Democratic efforts as possible and preserve their ideology so it’s ready to go when the next Republican Congress and President show up. If this is their definition of leadership, no wonder this country’s going down the shitter so quickly.

True leadership is about intelligence, open-mindedness and flexibility. Without those qualities, you can’t properly assess a situation, or figure out the best way to deal with it. You have to be able to acknowledge that circumstances are never constant – that there is always some new variable, some unexpected factor, that gets thrown into the mix. An unwavering ideology is never going to be able to provide solutions for all the problems we face. There must be creative thought, there must be cooperation, and there must be mutual effort. Most importantly, that effort must be made on behalf of the nation and not merely to serve a particular party. Otherwise, who benefits? We regular folks just continue to suffer for 4 years while they screw around, and the mess that the next guy (be he a Republican or Democrat) must clean up just gets bigger and bigger. How is this a good result for anyone?

We need to let the GOP know that the football game has to end. We need to change the rules of play entirely to ensure that the interests of the people are what matters, and not the partisan point-scoring. If Boehner and the Republicans continue to defend and excuse their obstructionism by saying it’s what they were elected to do, they will fail to truly serve the people who elected them. And as we are seeing at ballot boxes around the nation, voters are quick to discard the people who fail to serve their interests well, regardless of their party affiliation. No one is safe, and no ideology is sacred. People can’t feed their families or pay their bills with ideologies. The GOP will need to come up with a better game plan than merely being defenders of the faith, because the nation’s faith in politicians who do nothing has finally run dry.

Wilson lied. Period.

In case you missed it, non-partisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact has weighed in on Representative Joe Wilson’s commentary. You can click here to read it – http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/09/joe-wilson/joe-wilson-south-carolina-said-obama-lied-he-didnt/ – or you can scan the bottom line right here:

The Truth-O-Meter Says:

“You lie!” (in response to President Obama saying health reform would not insure illegal immigrants.)

Joe Wilson on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 in the audience at a joint session of Congress

Joe Wilson of South Carolina said Obama lied, but he didn’t

….so who’s the liar now? Please, let’s all recognize that there’s no other way to spin this: Representative Wilson may have been impassioned and emotional, but he got the facts wrong and he chose the wrong avenue to lodge his complaint. Many people have written to political sites today to support Wilson, because they say he “spoke truth to power”.  Well, if it WAS truth he was speaking, then we might take that into consideration. But his anger was based on his personal interpretation of language in the bill, and from all objective accounts, there is no intent on either side to provide government-funded health care coverage to illegal immigrants. If the language in the bill is still ambivalent on that point, then Representative Wilson and others who share his concern can hammer those details out before the final measure is written, and they can vote against any bill which they feel they cannot support. That’s how to solve the problem – not shouting out in the middle of a speech.

More importantly, his intentions do not excuse his actions. We cannot, and should not, throw civilized discussion out the window because we believe that the end justifies the means. Why should Representative Wilson get a pass for being out of order during a joint session of Congress? He’s there to do a job, and the halls of Congress are his workplace. Just like any other workplace, Congress has certain guidelines for conduct. If you break the stated rules regarding conduct at any job, you get a warning, at the very least. Representative Wilson should be no different and anyone who wants to excuse his error is just inviting a huge, unruly mess. If spontaneous, disrespectful outburts are OK for him, then it needs to be OK for everyone else to do the same. His supporters have to tell America, straight out, that there is no longer any room for rules, manners, decorum, tradition, order or common courtesy in American government. It’s a free-for-all, and everyone who is angry enough about something can just yell at everyone else until the cows come home.

That’s great, but just remember, it’s not just conservatives or republicans that get angry. Liberals were angry when we organized in support of Barack Obama’s campaign. We were angry when we pulled in a record number of young voters, Hispanic voters, and other voters who had not traditionally chosen to vote (or to vote for Democrats) in previous elections.  We were angry when we raised record sums of money for the campaign. We were angry when we rose up as a majority and asked the Republican party to get out of the White House before they started any more wars based on false information, ran up any more foreign debt, burned bridges with any more of our former allies and took away any more of our civil liberties. We were angry – and we won. We won BIG. Not by trying to shout down the opposition, but by outworking them, and by addressing people’s concerns instead of stoking people’s baser instincts. It was a good strategy then and it’s a good strategy now, but if those on the right simply cannot keep their rage in check long enough to do the work that’s needed for their side, as we did last year, they will not be able to connect with the majority of Americans.

So if conservatives are changing the rules of the game, and declaring that it’s all about who can shout the loudest from now on, they should remember that they are not the only ones with something to shout about.

The GOP’s amnesia epidemic

Wow – this GOP furor over the president’s upcoming speech to school kids is making me realize that we have some reeeally short memory spans here in the US. And it seems as if the problem is growing at an alarming rate.  Strangely, this amnesia epidemic seems to be limited to those in the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican party.

As a public service to those unfortunate folks, I’d like to spend a little time refreshing their memories. So gather round the monitor, my GOP pals, and come back with me in time….

We’ll begin our journey in 1787, at a time when our founding fathers were struggling to create a suitable governmental framework for the United States of America. They had a strong desire to prevent the type of tyranny and oppression which the original colonists had endured under the monarchy of Great Britain. The Constitution was drafted with this goal in mind, and in the hopes of convincing the individual states to ratify it, a series of essays known as the Federalist Papers were published.

Eighty-five such essays were published in the year following the drafting of the Constitution. One of the most important was Federalist No. 10, written by James Madison, who went on to become our 4th president and the man generally credited as the “Father of the Constitution”. In this essay, Madison lays out the case for a government based on the needs and wishes of a majority, instead of on the desires of smaller groups.  Madison acknowledges that it is human nature to divide into groups rather than to unite, and points out how differences among groups can blind people to the common good:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

Hmmm…sound familiar? Madison goes on to state that, though these conflicts will always remain, the governmental model proposed in the Constitution will prevent a minority of citizens, however outspoken they may become, from imposing their will on the majority:

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution…To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.

You still with me, conservatives? That means, in a nutshell, that even when you decide to wage war against the other party, and even when you do it in your loudest voices and with your most militant attitudes, you cannot overrule the majority. When an election takes place, you have the opportunity to send your chosen party into power. But if that election ends in a majority win for the other guys, you are obligated to accept it and to wait until the next election. In the meantime, your attempts to obstruct the the democratically-elected president from doing things you personally don’t agree with are EXACTLY what the framers of the Constitution were trying to prevent, for the good of the nation. You have become the tyrannical faction against which the American majority must defend itself.

Alright, our next stop in time is 1988, where we find then-President Ronald Reagan addressing a group of middle-school students. Let me repeat that: a sitting president is giving a speech to schoolkids!  How outrageous! And yet, nobody was making any unholy stink about this at the time. I’m sure it didn’t sit well with everyone, but it never became a subject of public outcry.

Chances are, people who didn’t agree with Reagan’s agenda could have been grinding their teeth when they heard his comments; much of it sounded like an ad for his administration, and for the GOP. The topics addressed included taxes, gun control and the deficit – all highly politically-charged topics, and all being discussed solely from a Republican viewpoint. To read the complete transcript of Reagan’s speech, click on this link: 

http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1988/111488c.htm

So, conservatives, was Ronnie’s little talk an attempt at “indoctrination” of our nation’s youth? Was his sinister agenda really to brainwash our children into adopting the GOP party line? And if you don’t think it was, then why is President Obama’s desire to address schoolchildren making you all froth at the mouth so much? Yeah, he did ask for the speech to be televised…but Reagan’s speech was also carried nationally on C-Span and the Instructional Television Network. It was available for any educator who wanted to share it with the class, just as Obama’s will be. The key word here is “available”. No mandate exists from the White House, and everyone is free to do as they please with regard to watching or not watching the speech.

In addition, you folks don’t even know what the president intends to discuss. He plans to make the content of his speech available before he goes in front of the cameras. Wouldn’t it make some sense to check that out and find out what he’s actually going to say before you pop off in public about how this is all about “indoctrination”? At the very least, realize that this is not the first time a president has spoken directly to young people in this country, and that it has never been an issue before, so you may want to tone down the moral indignation just a notch or two, to avoid looking like total wingnuts.

Our third stop is earlier this year – January of 2009, to be precise. In the week just before George W. Bush was due to leave office, the Gallup organization analyzed his favorability ratings over the course of his presidency. They had his approval rating as 31% at that time, and they posted his 2nd-term average as being 36.5% over the last 4 years of his presidency.

Now, I’m not a math whiz, but it seems to me that all those people who were unhappy with Bush couldn’t just be Democrats or liberals. Statistically speaking, there had to be a large number of Republicans and conservatives who disliked the way he was running the country. So I tend to get a bit confused when I see all the noise in the press from the right-wingers of this nation. Are we supposed to believe that they really feel we’d be better off keeping things the way they were under Bush? That the attempts Obama is making to steer things in a different direction are worse than how things were going when the GOP had the run of the place? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Our last stop in the time machine is a vague period in the past…it’s hard to tell when it began or when it ended. All we know is that it is, most definitely, a time gone by. It was a time when Americans were Americans, even more than they were Republicans or Democrats. It was a time when civil discourse was actually civil, and where opposing views could be heard and debated without the threat of bullying, violence, or rabid anger. It was a time when we wanted things for the betterment of our nation as a whole, and found ways to work together in order to make those things happen. It was a time before TV and radio personalities told us what to think, say and do, and when we were proud to think for ourselves instead of being part of a mob mentality. We were reasonable people once, with a great spirit and a real sense of shared purpose. It’s a shame we’ve left that behind in the name of win-at-all-costs political partisanship. But maybe you conservatives can remember that time from the past, and recognize your better selves in those memories. Don’t you think you owe it to your country to be that better self once again?

A special place in Hell for McCain and Palin

John McCain and Sarah Palin both seem to know exactly who can go to Hell.

McCain, while running against George Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries, was incensed that the Bush team had run smear campaigns against him (how funny is that?). He was particularly angered by their attempts to bring his adopted Bengali daughter into the mix, by spreading rumors that “John McCain has a black baby”.  In an interview, McCain stated,  “I believe there is a special place in hell for people like those.”

And just the other day, Sarah Palin misquoted Madeline Albright during a campaign appearance, proclaiming, “There’s a place in Hell reserved for women who don’t support other women.” Albright actually said “women who don’t help other women”, but whatever.

Point is, these two sure do seem to be right with the Lord. They’re pretty confident that they have the moral authority to discuss how other people deserve to burn in Hell. And if the recent tactics against Barack Obama are any indication, they think there’s a spot in Hell for him, too. The fact that he worked on a couple of community projects with William Ayers, who was once a radical extremist – even though by the time Obama met him, he was a respected and law-abiding member of the community and of the educational establishment – is evidence enough for McCain and Palin that Obama is “too risky” to be president.

While listening to the sound bites from McCain and Palin’s campaign stops yesterdaay, and hearing the links between Barack Obama and William Ayers repeated again and again, I realized that the whole thing sounded sorta familiar. I did some quick Googling, and I found what I was looking for.

Here is a description of the life of another important and well-known figure, written by a highly-respected scholar; see if you can spot the similarities between this and the Obama/Ayers discussion:

This person…”was the most active resister perhaps known to history…a troublemaker, par exellance”. He “was not just provocative; his actions were illegal…His entire life led up to the culminating confrontation with the powers of his day…His words were revolutionary…All his actions vary in focus and intensity; all are illegal and draw the ire of the ruling and religious authorities.”

In addition, “[He] dined with a social outcast…fraternizing with the enemy…[He] publicly embraced all those excluded by societal laws…”

So who was this “troublemaker” who, like Ayers, defied the law in order to challenge the powers that be, and who, like Obama, associated with the outlaws of his society? Well, it just so happens that it was Jesus. You know, the Son of God, the King of Kings…that guy. Seems He had a real tendency toward civil disobedience, according to writer and lecturer Father John Dear. The author is a Jesuit preist who, earlier this year, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Dear, in his 1994 book, The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience, writes:

“The Gospels make plain that Jesus regularly mingled with ‘sinners and tax collectors’…By sitting at table with a tax collector, sinners and other public outcasts, Jesus must have shocked everyone.”

Discussing Jesus healing the lepers, Dear says, “This act was civilly disobedient because it went beyond the designated boundaries of society, from those nebulous areas where some people are considered ‘insiders’, to those clear-cut, off-limits places where others are declared ‘outsiders’…Jesus deliberately touched the leper who came begging to him, and in doing so, Jesus broke the sociological and religious barriers of society…Jesus was now a marginalized outsider: he had violated all the taboos.” Hmm, insiders and outsiders…where else have I heard this lately?

So, am I saying that Obama = Savior? Christ, no! But I am saying that one of the basic tenets of Christianity is “Love the sinner, hate the sin”. Which begs the question: why is Obama being castigated by McCain and Palin for associating with a former radical activist? Are men not allowed to work side by side on charity boards because one of them was once a criminal? And if they do work together, do you truly believe that the experience makes the other man a criminal too, by extension?

I thought the GOP were all up on their Bible studies, but I guess they forgot that Jesus had time for everyone, including prostitutes and theives. In fact, Jesus saw fit to accept, as one of His 12 apostles, a man known as “Simon the Zealot“, who was a fierce Jewish nationalist and, as a young man, subscribed to the beliefs of the Zealots. According to Wikkipedia,  “the Zealots objected to Roman rule and sought violently to eradicate it.” But isn’t that philosophy kinda like…domestic terrorism, or something? And yet Simon the Zealot was OK by Jesus, was selected to hang with His posse, and was eventually canonized as a Saint in the Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran Churches. I can only assume that, when “Christians” like McCain and Palin ask “What Would Jesus Do?”, they don’t mean it literally, because if they did, then Barack Obama wouldn’t be catching the crap he is right now.

Perhaps the McCain folks hadn’t heard the news yet, but there’s this whole “Ten Commandments” thing, and one of the items on that list is, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” Any discussion of how Obama “palled around” with William Ayers, despite a lack of any evidence to support a relationship of that nature, would probably run afoul of that “false witness” idea. I am willing to bet that there’s a very, very  special place in Hell reserved for those who break a commandment in the pursuit of political gain.

It is a sad time for all of us as Americans, because, at a moment when we desperately need a leader to guide us to better times, we are being asked to accept a team of self-serving politicians who would rather point fingers at others than get their own house in order. After years of divisive politics under a polarizing administration, one candidate wants to stick with the status quo and maintain an “us-vs.-them” mentality. I can’t help wondering who could have advised McCain and Palin that hypocritical self-righteousness is a good way to win the hearts of Americans. Now, who could have come up with such a diabolically bad strategy? Hmmm…I don’t know…could it be…

Reality check

This has been a dizzying couple of weeks. The ups and downs of the financial crisis and of the attempts to repair it are coming fast and furious. Congressional bickering and finger-pointing has left us no closer to a solution than we were when this whole mess started. And during this turmoil, the candidates have been struggling to find the right angle to take. I’ve seen a lot of criticism directed at both McCain and Obama, although McCain is getting the lion’s share of it. It didn’t help him to make such a big stink about how he has been “stepping in to solve problems for the American people”, when the bill he was trying to lay claim to got defeated later the same day, causing a massive plunge on Wall Street.

I think the media, and most voters, are truly missing the point here. The candidates are both correct when they try to stress the urgency of the situation, and the need for some feasible agreement to be reached as soon as possible. For each day that the issue remains unresolved, the money crunch worsens and the effects are being felt in businesses and households all over the nation. But the problem comes when we expect the candidates to come up with the answer. Reality check – neither McCain nor Obama has been sworn in as president yet. In case you forgot, there is still a guy named George W. Bush residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and he’s got a lease there until January of next year. This is HIS problem right now, and it is HIS job to rally the administration and Congress to work out a deal. His failure to do so is the problem here, so laying the blame for the bailout’s defeat on either candidate is a bogus move.

What, exactly, do people expect McCain and Obama to do right now? They are senators – no more and no less, and both have been removed from the day-to-day business of Capitol Hill for months now as they campaign for the presidency. How, exactly, are they responsible for leading Congress to the answer for all our nation’s economic woes? After a crash that was years in the making, it is unrealistic to look to either one of them to solve it all in a week or two. They have both voiced their belief that an agreement on a plan is urgently needed, and they have tried to encourage their colleagues to find some common ground. But for either of them to interject themselves into the process in a greater way would be inappropriate right now, and probably none too helpful, if the events of the past several days are any indication.

The McCain campaign has alleged that Obama has been “watching from the sidelines” during this crisis, and has not done enough to rally support for the president’s bailout proposal. Reality check – during yesterday’s vote on the bailout plan, 60% of House Democrats voted in favor of the bill, while only 37% of Republicans did so – despite the McCain camp’s insistence that “It’s really Senator McCain who got all parties around a table to hammer out a deal”. The truth is that Congress is not focusing on the needs of the presidential candidates right now – many of them have their own election bids to worry about, and pissing off their constituents is not on their agenda. They do not answer to McCain, or Obama, and to add the presidential race into the mix is a distraction from the task at hand.

It’s time for the media and the public to recognize that the leadership on this particular issue needs to come from the White House. Admittedly, this is easier said than done. Bush and his cohorts, after years of alienating and disappointing everyone around them, have fallen into the lame duck zone, where their powers of influence are virtually nil. Still, we cannot lay the responsibility for a solution to the bailout issue on the presidential candidates. Not yet, anyway. When one of them is elected, he will need to get his shit together pretty fast and take action to clean up this mess on a long-term basis. But for now, the immediate concern is the short-term needs of the market and of Americans who are scared and strapped for resources. Reality check -the president and the leaders in Congress must be the ones to step up and make something happen. It’s time for everyone to get off the partisan blame train and admit that, even if it’s tough to do, a plan is needed and the time to pass one is now.