Where Have All the Grownups Gone?

The news this week--mature men and women orating like losers in a high-school elocution contest--is too much to bear.

In the House “debate” on a non-binding resolution and the Senate debate on whether to debate, our form of government is enduring the worst humiliation in memory.

Add to the Bush Administration’s long list of achievements, beyond a disastrous war and the erosion of our liberties, the reduction of our legislative branch to futility and impotence.

Even the comic relief of John Boehner’s tears is not enough to offset his loyalists’ flapdoodle about “victory” and the Democrats’ despair over groping for new ways to restate the obvious.

Do their mothers know what they do for a living?

Bashful Blogtogenarian

As any casual reader must know, my modesty is exceeded only by my technological brilliance.

So herewith, in my ninetieth post, for any reader with a craving to know more about me than any sane person would want to, my first attempt at an embedded link from the Stamford (CT) Advocate 2/15/07. If it doesn't work, you're on your own

Past Forward

George Bush and Dick Cheney have made elder statesmen out of Oliver North and John Dean.

The ghosts of Iran-Contra and Watergate can now be seen regularly on cable TV, telling us where we’re going wrong in Iraq and elsewhere.

Oliver North, who never before saw a military action he didn’t like, is criticizing the Surge on Fox TV and telling us “nearly all” the troops don’t want it. As a Reagan aide in the 1980s, he was caught lying to Congress about selling missiles to Iran and using the money to buy weapons to fight the Nicaraguan Contras.

Dean, who was Nixon’s White House lawyer and went to prison for the Watergate coverup, is now an articulate critic of this “authoritarian” Administration with a book titled “Conservatives Without Conscience.”

When his former deputy, Fred Fielding, was recently appointed White House counsel, Dean called him a fine lawyer but noted “he’s been sipping some of the Kool-Aid lately so I’m not sure how he’s going to come out on this.”

Everybody, it seems, learns something from past mistakes except you-know-who.

For Republicans, Right Is Wrong

In the week of Lincoln’s birthday and valentines, the minority party frontrunners are puckering up to the wrong electoral backside.

Like generals fighting the last war, they don’t realize that George Bush and Karl Rove may have worn out, at least for now, the politics of hatred and division. By any measure, in 2006 Democrats closed “the God Gap” among evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics while widening their lead elsewhere.

Still, here are Giuliani and McCain lurching rightward on the flat-earth theory that The Base is vital to winning, if not the 2008 election, at least the nomination.

Unless they believe that Sam Brownback, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee can revitalize the disheartened Bush-Rove constituency, their contortions on social issues could be damaging them more with traditional Republicans and Independents than winning over right-wing diehards.

After eight years of poisonous polarization, it’s more than the war, it’s the ultra-partisan stupidity that started it and won’t let it stop. America is ready for something else, maybe not sweetness and light, but a little sense and civility could go a long way.

The Romney Legacy

Now that Mitt Romney has gone back to his ancestoral home in Michigan to make his declaration, it seems only fair to recall what the former Republican Governor of Ohio, Jim Rhodes, said about his father's 1968 somewhat erratic campaign for the same position:

"Watching George Romney run for the Presidency is like watching a duck try to make love to a football."

My memory is not what it used to be. Governor Rhodes may not have said "make love."

For the VP: Forgive Me, Rodgers and Hart

Our funny valentine,
Sweet comic valentine,
You make us smile with our heart
Your looks are laughable, unphotographable
Yet you're our favorite work of art

Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak, are you smart?

Are you always in a pique?
Did you find the WMD you seek?
When you see a little beak, should we dart?

Why does your smile look like a glare?
When Bush calls, do you care?
Does everything you say have to be so tart?

Will you ever leave us be?
Is your term till eternity?
Can we ever be free, even when we part?

But don't change a hair for us
Not if you care for us
Stay, little valentine, stay
Each day is Valentine's
Each day is Valentine's Day

Dreamy!

Sleeping on the job is good for you. CBS Evening News reports a study showing after-lunch naps can reduce the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

As a lifelong midday napper, I could have told them that. After half an hour on the couch, I would bounce up with brilliant ideas for articles, catchy cover lines and ways to solve messy office problems. Some of them even worked.

Now companies (CBS showed an ad agency) are encouraging high-tech naps in sleeping pods and reaping rewards in creativity.

Somebody should wake up our Congressmen and tell them. They might dream up a way to get us out of Iraq...

No, wait. Let me take a nap and come up with a better punchline.

The X Factor for '08

During the 1960 campaign, John Kennedy said he sometimes felt sorry for Richard Nixon: “It must be hard getting up every morning trying to decide who you’re going to be that day.”

That could be the X Factor for 2008. Since Kennedy, few politicians have seemed so comfortable in their own skins. Ronald Reagan and Mario Cuomo come to mind, but Reagan was an actor and Cuomo refused to go through the political meat grinder in 1992.

Next year, after the longest campaign ever, voters will be starved for authenticity, the sense of a real person behind all the packaging.

Thus far, prospects are poor.

In fifteen years, has anyone seen Hillary Clinton in an uncalculated public moment?

Will John McCain stop reinventing himself before or after his party’s primaries?

What, if anything, is behind John Edwards’ eager-to-please smile?

When will Mitt Romney stop tripping over his past positions?

Who will emerge as the real Rudy Giuliani from his purloined playbook? Even this early, he is repudiating versions of his former self.

As voters puzzle over the meaning of such ink-blot candidates, will they start yearning for someone who is actually there for them to see?

That desire is part of what’s behind Obama’s early surge, but even he had to tell Tim Russert with a worried smile that his wife and friends think he’s still there behind all the hype. Can he stay? On 60 Minutes last night, he said the “attempt to airbrush your life...is exhausting.”

Earnest men like Dennis Kucinich and Tom Vilsack are trying, without much luck, to be seen and heard.

In our age of super-blather, we have time for a long, hard look at the next President in debates that go beyond catch phrases and gotchas.

We can take clues from “Honest Abe,” everybody’s favorite President this month. (Obama steeped his announcement in a Lincolnesque aura, and Rudy Giuliani in New Hampshire has been comparing the Great Emancipator with, no joke, George W. Bush.)

In 2008, 150 years after the Lincoln-Douglas debates helped decide the 1860 Presidential election, we can create their equivalent for our era. Lincoln and Stephen Douglas went at it seven times for four hours each so voters could see the men behind the rhetoric.

We can insist that today’s contenders stop conning us and confront one another in comparable give-and-take.

Or will we just settle for a rerun of those “American Idol” campaigns that spewed out George W. Bush?

Iraq: The Clash of Cliches

Politics stops at the water’s edge.

Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.

Bush’s opponents are rats deserting a sinking ship.

Bush’s supporters are lemmings rushing off a cliff.

Pick any platitude from any era, and somebody in Congress is uttering some variation of it right now while evading the hard work of figuring out how to stop the bloodshed in Iraq.

As Mike Nichols and Elaine May used to say in their nightclub act: “It’s really a moral problem.” “Yes, and moral problems are so much more interesting than real problems.”

But they weren't being paid to solve real problems. These jokers are.

Pillorying Hillary

This weekend in New Hampshire, Senator Clinton again evades a yes or no answer to whether her 2002 vote to go to war was a mistake.

As a constituent then, I wrote, begging her: “Don’t give President Bush a blank check to invade Iraq.” I got back a canned letter, with a tortured rationale for the vote she eventually cast.

But enough is enough. Whatever her reasons to avoid the word “mistake,” the spectacle of her now being pilloried by John Edwards et al, who voted the same way, is disgusting.

As the first woman with a real chance to occupy the Oval Office, she is under pressure to seem as resolute as, say, George Bush. She is making a tactical mistake in not uttering mistake, but her reasons are understandable. What matters now is how forceful she will be in ending all this needless bloodshed.

Her detractors seem to be in the same league as those who wanted John F. Kennedy to assure them he wouldn’t be taking orders from the Pope. They should find subtler ways to express their prejudice.

Dial M for Magic

Many Americans of a certain age (mine) would confer media knighthood on Ted Turner for giving us back our youth with those wonderful old movies on TCM.

That bizarre thought is prompted by news this week of another kind of immortality for an old friend, Frederick Knott, who wrote one of the best thrillers of all time, “Dial M for Murder.”

Knott was a spare writer but meticulous plotter, and now his notes, sketches and production papers are on view at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, CT, donated by his widow, the actress Ann Hillary.

A shy, almost reclusive man whose work reflected intellectual rigor, wit and insight, his passing in 2002 was a reminder of what is long gone from most of today’s movies. A case in painful point was a shallow, glossy remake of “Dial M” in 1998 with none of Hitchcock’s, or Knott’s, droll quality.

But no matter--thanks to Turner, we can still wallow with Grace Kelly in the 1954 original or Audrey Hepburn in Knott’s equally stunning “Wait Until Dark” of 1967.

Sick

Yeah, yeah, irresistible: A lovesick astronaut in diapers drives 900 miles...etc. etc ad nauseum.

But as inevitable as this week’s media smirkfest over Lisa Novak was, it raises a teeny question: Did any of us go into journalism planning to be as insensitive as politicians or witless as stand-up comics?

In my time, mental illness was sad. It still is, even if we coat it with hilarious headlines and sanctimonious questions about NASA’s screening standards.

Vilsack Revisited

At this stage of the 1976 and 1992 elections, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were little-known governors of small states with infinitesimal rankings in the Presidential polls.

That’s the slim reed to which Tom Vilsack’s 2008 hopes are lashed as the just-retired governor of Iowa makes his way, in media dimness, toward next year’s primaries.

“I’m not a rock star,” he tells you, ‘but I am rock-solid.”

Since we saw him in December, he has raised over $1.1 from admirers including Warren Buffet, made a solid impression at the Democrats’ meeting last weekend as the only candidate to call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and will soon unveil an energy plan calling for a 75 percent reduction from emissions levels of 2000.

In a small room with half a dozen suburban reporters last evening, Vilsack continued to talk sense without notes (as he did last weekend to Howard Dean’s astonishment).

“We’re at the American Idol stage of the campaign,” he told them, but is confident that voters will want answers rather than slogans while talking earnestly and persuasively of his conversation with the Prime Minister of India about the link between literacy and world hunger.

Of course, there are differences between 1992 and 2008, but if Tom Vilsack fails to emulate her husband, “the Comeback Kid,” Hillary Clinton could do a lot worse in picking a running mate to balance her own strengths.

Bush's Other Grandfather

On the Daily Show last night, Ralph Nader told Jon Stewart how his mother, at a reception, refused to release the President’s grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, from a handshake until he promised to look into a civic problem that was bothering her.

If this is Bush Family History Month, I should tell my story about George W’s other grandfather.

In 1953, I went to work as a junior editor for his mother's father, Marvin Pierce, who was president of the McCall Corporation, a publishing and printing company with several thousand employees.

Soon after I arrived, an elderly secretary edged me into a corner. "You're not the first Jew to work here," she said, "only the first one they know about." Years earlier, she had changed her name to get under the radar.

The company had no personnel department, but hiring was vetted by Marvin Pierce's secretary, a formidable woman named Emily Chestnutt, who grilled publishers and editors about the pedigrees of applicants.

A year later, I told a young woman I knew about a staff opening. All went well until her resume reached Ms. Chestnutt. She called Wade Nichols, the editor, to say she was worried about someone named Dorothy Weichel (suspiciously ethnic) who had worked for a trade union (politically dubious) and the United World Federalists (downright Un-American).

Nichols, who had done who-knows-what to get me on the payroll, somehow charmed Ms. Chestnutt into letting him hire Dorothy. Neither knew that her family was suburban Boston Protestant, her mother eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution and the First Families of Virginia .

Marvin Pierce was a genial man with a year-round golf course tan who was always pleasant and approved two promotions for me in the following years. (Redbook had won a national award for opposing McCarthyism.)

When Dorothy, the suspect DAR daughter, and I decided to marry, he even came to our office engagement party.

Before offering a toast, he asked the bride-to-be about her plans. She told him she would quit her job and stay home to take care of me.

Right then and there, George W. Bush’s grandfather made a pre-Feminist joke.

“Why,” he asked, “doesn’t he quit his job and stay home to take care of you?”

Everybody laughed.

Used-War Salesmen

After all those high-tech commercials on the Super Bowl, the U.S. Senate this week is looking like an old-fashioned car lot with politicians lobbing buzz words at us--bipartisan, non-binding, compromise, deadlock, procedural, debate—-in their usual bait-and-switch games.

McCain, Lieberman and McConnell et al are still trying to palm off Bush’s repainted Baghdad jalopy on more than seventy percent of voters who aren’t buying.

Reid, Warner, Levin et al keep kicking the tires but can’t get themselves to stop giving him gas money.

Only Feingold and Byrd are muttering about getting the damn thing off the road.

Meanwhile, the Iraqis are seeing a dismal demonstration of the shiny new vehicle we promised them.

Comic Relief

The man who elected George Bush is thinking of running in '08.

No, not Karl Rove, who may be too busy with legal issues arising out of a national security breach.

But his best friend, Ralph Nader, tells CNN he may be available if the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, whom he gallantly describes as "a flatterer and a panderer."

Who does he have in mind for us this time? Sam Brownback?

Hillary vs. Bill Redux

Mrs. Clinton must be having flashes of déjà vu.

Just as she is relaxed enough to make jokes about dealing with bad boys, here comes a bargain-basement Bill Clinton 1992 look-alike nipping at her heels.

John Edwards has clearly read their playbook for beating the Bushes. His “Meet the Press” interview yesterday on Super Bowl Sunday echoed the Clintons on “60 Minutes” after the game fifteen years ago.

Both featured slippery mea culpas. “I have acknowledged wrongdoing,” Bill said then. “I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage” as he denied a 12-year affair with Gennifer Flowers.

Yesterday Edwards used the word “wrong” a dozen times about his 2002 vote on Iraq, but whined that Bush never admits being wrong. Asked about standing by it a year and a half later, he cited pressures of the 2004 race and his wife’s breast cancer while complaining Hillary has still not admitted she was wrong and is “morally bound” to say so or defend her vote.

Between them, Bill Clinton and Bush 43 may have exhausted our patience for the campaign smarm of polite-Southern-boys-you-can-bring-home-to-your-family.

Edwards talks about trust and leadership while updating Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid” with talk of “the two Americas” and a convoluted universal health care plan.

Joe Biden, in a bad week of commenting on candidates, was on the money when he said, “I don’t think John Edwards knows what he’s talking about” on Iraq. “All this stuff is just like so much Fluffernutter out there.”

2008: A Modest Proposal*

Of the many worthies seeking national leadership, one stands apart from the rest.

In these parlous times, with 30 per cent of the populace firmly behind him, his experience in presiding over wars and natural disasters is unmatched.

All and sundry know him as a uniter, not a divider, a decider who does not waver under pressure, a resolute commander who consults a Higher Power rather than mere mortals on life-and-death decisions.

Unlike some, he will never negotiate with our enemies, who are legion. He will never compromise with the Forces of Evil that besiege us. He will never hesitate to pronounce the word “nuclear.”

A sterling judge of character, he surrounds himself with the finest minds of his acquaintance. (A pox on that rapscallion, B. Maher, for japing that he nominated his cleaning lady for the Supreme Court!)

Fellow citizens, let us spare yourselves 22 months of political twaddle by lesser figures and concentrate on repealing the Twenty-Second Amendment to keep at the helm the man for our time who will lead us to new heights of moral glory, George Walker Bush!

*Note to the satire-impaired: Title from Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay on a solution to the Irish Famine: eating their babies.

Menotti on Art and Commerce

Sixty years ago, Gian Carlo Menotti, composer of Pulitzer Prize operas and founder of the Spoleto Music Festival, who died this week at 95, came to the City College of New York to talk to a student body of second-generation European immigrants.

In lilting but imperfect English, he told of the struggles of a young artist to make his way in a commercial world.

During the question period, someone asked: "Why don't you go to Hollywood, write music for a few movies and make enough money to do your serious work for years?"

Menotti smiled. "Ah, yes," he said. "Your family is hungry, so send your sister out on the streets for a while. But when she come back, she never be the same."

The Cheney Charm Offensive

Karl Rove's White House may be more devious than we know.

Reading about their high-school machinations in the Scooter Libby trial raises a question: Why is Cheney out drawing so much media fire that there is talk of impeaching him rather than Bush?

Mark Shields of PBS’ News Hour and I share admiration for Jim Rhodes, a Republican governor of Ohio in the 1960s and 70s, a politician par excellence.

Rhodes had a staff member everybody hated. When supporters urged getting rid of him, Rhodes refused: “Not on your life, never take the punching bag out of the gym.”

If Cheney’s current assignment is to make Bush look lovable, he’s doing a great job at it.