Doomsday Liar's Poker in DC

Maureen Dowd offers a Planet of the Apes scenario for 2084 America, while Gail Collins goes the other way in a Frankenstein revival with Ted Cruz as you-know-what.

All well and good for reason-strapped observers, but future and past parodies can’t match what the Shutdown is doing now. In South Dakota at Mt. Rushmore, those huge stone heads of Presidents past are averting their eyes as cones are placed on the highway below to keep tourists from stopping to ogle them. Only a Black Hills blizzard gets the National Park Service to take them down temporarily.

No news about the nearby historic saloon in Deadwood where Wild Bill Hickok was killed holding those famous aces and eights.

Back in Washington, nobody has a winning hand, but John Boehner refuses to fold, raising the ante with yet another threat of default if the President doesn’t throw in his cards.

Call it Doomsday Liar’s Poker, the ultimate version of insanity in Michael Lewis’ 1989 book portraying how greedy, reckless Wall Street morons were inflating the stock market and heading it toward ruin. Only this time the game is being played in Washington, and the stakes are the nation’s economy.

Even some of the players are the same. The New York Times describes how Tea Party plotters planned the current impasse with Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese III leading the way. Meese was a bad apple even back then, who resigned his post after involvement in the Wedtech scandal, a bid-rigging scheme was uncovered by an independent prosecutor. Now Meese is a “Conservative” icon.

The infamous Koch brothers are back too, with a group linked to them disbursing over $200 million dollars for the anti-Obamacare campaign.

Stakes are enormous now, but at bottom, it’s still the same old Liar’s Poker Game. Except that this time it will be American taxpayers paying the tab for generations to come.

A Medal for Michele Bachmann

Years ago, a drug-addicted employee used a passkey while I was away and stole stuff from my apartment, including a Purple Heart. That feeling of violation comes back as Michele Bachmann and her Tea Party comrades, after shutting down government, strike poses and remove barricades for veterans at Washington’s war memorials.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Boswell tells us that Samuel Johnson said about such hypocrites in the eighteenth century. Nothing has changed. GOP poseurs are willing to take food from the mouths of children of furloughed employees but won’t stand for obstruction in parks that celebrate sacrifice for the good of country.

I yield to no veteran on patriotism, but I insist that the park police do their duty, including a few whacks on the backsides of those barricade breakers.

Then they can go back to Capitol Hill and award themselves Purple Heart for injuries suffered in the line of duty. 

Why Did Miriam Carey Die?

A 34-year-old woman suffering from post-partum depression was killed in Washington this week, leaving behind a child, bottles of medication and a human mystery.

If I were still editing a magazine, I would have a reporter spend the next few weeks finding out all about Miriam Carey, what brought her to that televised car chase and what her life and death can tell us about mental health in America, hers and ours.

The resulting article might start with that riveting moment when police, guns drawn, surrounded her automobile. As it has occurred to me during hundreds of movies, I would want to know why officers of the law fired at her rather than just shoot out the tires and end the chase. What were they thinking?

From there, I would want to go back and read all about how Miriam Carey lived as dental hygienist in Stamford, Connecticut, got pregnant and had her baby, became increasing erratic at work, acquired a medicine cabinet full of antidepressant and anti-psychotic drugs and began a downward spiral that took her to her televised fate.

Her life and death surely hold clues about how little we really know about a mental-health industry that has been taken over by pharmaceutical companies with their cheery TV ads ending with small print about terrible side effects.

Her story should be told, not to indict the psychiatric profession but to dramatize what’s behind the easy generalizations of the TV talking heads that always follow such bizarre behavior. If those titled doctors have anything more prescriptive to offer than descriptive afterthoughts, it would be comforting to know it.

Meanwhile, we are all in a darkness about such matters. If Miriam Carey’s full story can shed even a little light, it should be told.


Update: Now Miriam Carey’s sister, a retired New York City police officer, emerges to question the police use of deadly force, saying there was "no need for a gun to be used." She is not alone in feeling that way.

Oxymoron? Wiser GOP Heads Arise

With Republicans and the nation still held hostage by a Tea Party brat pack, there is finally a stirring of sanity among party elders. Wiser heads are starting to push back about life beyond Boehner.

The New York Times reports a GOP Senate lunch erupting into a “lynch mob” against Ted Cruz, with John Cain/Lindsay Graham’s third amigo, Kelly Ayotte, angrily waving a printout from a Cruz-friendly group attacking 25 Republican senators for a procedural vote that it counted as support of Obamacare.

Republican governors are joining the chorus. “This is a huge distraction,” complains Tennessee’s Bill Haslam. “Instead of that being the conversation, we’re talking about the government shutdown, and the average citizen can’t help but say the Republican Congress isn’t helping.”

Another wise elder, former Mississippi governor and head of the National Committee Haley Barbour, adds: “The story people see now is President Obama sinking like a rock for months, and the only thing holding him up are the Republicans.”

Meanwhile, the President himself holds firm. “We don’t expect 100 percent. But...it is not acceptable for one faction of one party in one chamber to say, ‘Either we get what we want, or we’ll shut down the government.’ Or even worse: ‘We will not allow the U.S. Treasury to pay its bills and put the United States in default for the first time in history.’ So the message I have for the leaders is very simple. As soon as we get a clean piece of legislation, that reopens the government.”

He follows that with an even blunter speech: "Speaker John Boehner won't even let the bill get a yes-or-no vote, because he doesn't want to anger the extremists in his party. That's all. That's what this whole thing is about."

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Republicans finally came to their senses and found the President too teed-off to settle with them?

Nah. 

Lawless in DC

This is as close as I come to live-blogging.

As a black car drives wildly through Washington during a crisis of lawlessness in Congress, all eyes turn from the Shutdown to what looks like a shootout in the Capital.

Switching cable channels, CNN seems chastened by Jon Stewart’s takedown during the last massacre and cautiously keeps referring to the driver as the “suspect,” but for at least an hour and a half MSNBC keeps running crawls about a “gunman,” “shooter” and “female gunman” with no evidence whatsoever that anyone other than law enforcement has been firing weapons.

Finally comes the fortuitous tape of the car chase (in Arabic, no less) with police aiming at the vehicle before it starts up again and speeds off. They are pointing guns at the driver, but when the car starts up again, not one has the presence of mind to shoot out the tires.

The babble will go on for hours, as Eric Cantor takes to the House floor to thank those forces of law and order that he and his cronies have been doing their best to defund.

With a little girl in the car and a woman driver, it’s all likely to turn out to be about mental distress, drugs or alcohol or all of the above. But the way things are in Washington now, the car chase is a brief respite from the main lawlessness there.

Stay tuned as the normal madness resumes.
 

Update: The driver turns out to be a dental hygienist who works in Connecticut prisons. In days to come, we will learn more about why Miriam Carey, unarmed, drove a Lexus so wildly through the streets of the nation’s capital and met her death there.

What was in her apparently disordered mind that led her to careen a car through the jumpy streets from the White House to Capitol Hill? In coming days, we will learn more about her inner life so that we can understand more about her than we do about the people who work there. Her small tragedy will be only a metaphor for the larger one being played out in Congress.

  

Women Having It All

At 50, a woman who is a college president, former powerhouse on Wall Street, wife and mother has written a new book, "Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection," to complain that members of her gender are “really shackled by expectations, rather than liberated.”

Duh. As an editor of women’s magazines during the 1960s who employed both Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan without always agreeing with them, I am taken aback by such ingratitude from a generation that benefited from those Feminist pioneers and now kvetches that their efforts did not free them from the human condition.

I have news for President Spar: Nobody has it all, women or men. There is a simple law of physics that applies: You can’t be in two places at once, in a boardroom and soccer game, making business decisions and dinner, nurturing profit margins and kids.

This year Barack Obama is awarding Gloria Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom for a life “dedicated to advancing civil rights” for women. Civil rights offer the oppressed an equal chance at the pursuit of happiness, not a guarantee. President Obama himself can explain all about that.

Ironically, just before Debora Spar is interviewed about her book, the PBS NewsHour has a segment about how young girls in India are sold into virtual slavery by their impoverished families to older men who treat them like domestic animals.

No sentient human being who lived through the twentieth century would deny that most American women back then did not have full freedom to fulfill their potential. In some ways, some still don’t and Ms. Spar’s complaints will resonate with them.

"Women of my generation,” she writes, “got feminism wrong, seeing it as a route to personal perfection and a promise of all that we were now expected to be. Because we could do anything, we felt as if we had to do everything."

In an imperfect world, nobody reaches perfection and those who get close might want think twice before grousing about it.

Obamacare Blowback Begins

On its first day, millions of Americans flood web sites and phone lines to ask about health coverage the Tea Party has shut down the government to destroy.

Technical glitches aside, have Boehner’s bullies been hoisted by their own petard or, to be less Shakespearian, shot themselves in the foot?

The Affordable Care Act, with all its imperfections, looks less like tyranny to those millions than an opportunity to get health insurance for themselves and their families at reasonable rates. Messy as the process may be, they seem eager to embrace what the GOP radicals promise to oppose with their dying breaths.

As ugly as the shutdown is, it will be seen more as farce than tragedy if voters start enrolling in large numbers for Obamacare. Or is that what its Tea Party would-be destroyers have secretly been fearing all along?

As Ted Cruz apologizes to Filipino veterans for comparing the Act to the Bataan Death March in his pseudo-filibuster last week, negotiations go on for a face-saving exit from the Congressional impasse.

But Democrats may not be eager to cooperate as Sen. Dianne Feinstein sees her party gaining more leverage in the debt-limit fight as the  shutdown lengthens. Of the GOP buffoons, she observes, “They are effectively hurting themselves big time.”

Meanwhile, the surge of eager applicants for Cruz’s Death March goes on not only at the federal level but in states that have not hobbled the new law.

At the end of the day, the funeral is much more likely to be for the Tea Party than Obamacare.

World War II Vets Crash the Shutdown

One thing about the Greatest Generation: When we needed to overrun an enemy position, we seldom hesitated. Remnants of our troops did it again in Washington today, crashing barricades set up by the government shutdown and occupying the position.

The image tickles me. As all national parks remain closed by Tea Party insurgents in the House of Representatives, 91 octogenarians storm the World War II Memorial and take it.

True, guards stood aside while the vets, some in wheelchairs, crashed through, but the symbolism is inescapable: A generation that put its lives on the line when the country was under siege was not going to be deterred from a mission by today’s pissants on Capitol Hill.

While the old-timers did their stuff, the other bit of good news in DC was the delight of some government workers at being declared essential while the madness prevails. “Good for the resume,” says one.

And, as Walter Cronkite used to sign off the news, “That’s the way it is” in our world today.

Notes from a "Breaking Bad" Laggard

Thanks to one son and two grandsons, I was whizzing through seasons of “Breaking Bad” on Netflix as millions savored the finale last weekend and now carry on a philosophical debate over its power and meaning.

Partial ignorance may not be bliss, but still under the spell of multiple episodes, I venture to join the discussion.

Is Walter White more than a logical successor to Tony Soprano and Don Draper, anti-heroes who fascinated us with an unexpressed dark side of our own natures from a safe distance?  

Yes, maybe but, as White progresses from doomed good to demonic, our sympathies move with him by increments from compassion for his original plight to condoning behavior we deplore. His first intentional killing is justified by the victim having a concealed shard of plate with which to attack him, but from then on, we are off to the bloody races.

Just as White is freed from constraint by sure knowledge of his own mortality, viewers are liberated to make the journey with him while, for relief along the way, being invited to scoff at brilliantly satirical scenes of PTA meetings, baby showers and boring family dinners—-the dull flotsam and jetsam of dailyness that fills most lives.

At advanced age, I am fascinated by how new generations in real life are lulled into feeling immortal and acting with a selfishness that justifies cruelty while scoffing at empathy as sentimental weakness. Being in the know, like Walter White, trumps all other values.

The political world reminds us daily of that. How badly do we need the fantasy release from all of it of feeling all-powerful and enjoying evil while reassuring ourselves it’s only entertainment after all?

Even before cancer struck, Walter White was not going to live forever. Neither will the politicians in today’s headlines. Nor any of us.

“Breaking Bad” was great commercial art, larded with ads all the way, but as I continue to enjoy it without them on Netflix, part of me is saddened while fascinated.

But true fans need fear not. It may be gone but “Homeland” is back just in time to mesmerize us with more of the worst of humanity.

Will we ever see as well-done a series as either on the subject of “Breaking Good?”

The World Ends Tomorrow

Civilization as we know it has only 24 hours left. Those who doubt that can cling to a faint hope offered by Barack Obama’s favorite physician/writer.

During the health care debate in 2009, the President made his staff read a New Yorker article by Dr. Atul Gawande dramatizing the borderline thievery sanctioned by America’s fee-for-service system: about two communities in Texas, one with the second-highest per-capita Medicare costs in the country, twice those of a neighboring city with no discernible health benefits as a result of doctor-owned hospitals, surgery centers and diagnostic-test facilities.

Now Dr. Gawande reports that “as of October 1st, healthcare.gov is scheduled to open for business. A Web site where people who don’t have health coverage through an employer or the government can find a range of health plans available to them, it resembles nothing more sinister than an eBay for insurance. Because it’s a marketplace, prices keep falling lower than the Congressional Budget Office predicted, by more than sixteen per cent on average. Federal subsidies trim costs even further, and more people living near the poverty level will qualify for free Medicaid coverage.”

As the Tea Party fights to shut down the government over such infamy, whether or not the new law of the land will help the catastrophically sick and uninsured depends on where they live, with some states (California, New York, Minnesota, Maryland) complying and others (Indiana, Texas, Utah, South Carolina) doing everything they can to obstruct implementation.

Now the critical moment is at hand in a clash between John Boehner, who interned sweeping out his father’s saloon, and such as Dr. Gawande, a Harvard professor who directs the World Health Organization's effort to reduce surgical deaths.

As Republicans keep pointing out, it’s still a free country. Choose your own care giver and hope for the best.

Update: In one respect, GOP no-nothings have succeeded: Polls show most Americans know little about the Affordable Care Act, and much of that is wrong.

Less than half of the uninsured plan to get coverage through a state or federal exchange, a low number that may result from lack of knowledge about them, since 7 in 10 say they are “not too or not at all familiar” with these health insurance exchanges.

Those for whom Obamacare could mean life or death have been brought into suicidal confusion by vicious Tea Party lies.

Wake Me When It's Over

While tired Americans hide under the covers, Congress goes to work every day to haggle over going to work.

Why bother? Wouldn’t the country be better off if lawmakers stayed in bed too?

Capitol Hill’s Sleeping Beauty, Michele Bachmann, arises from a two-year stupor to proclaim, "This isn't load limits on turnip trucks that we're talking about. This is...a consequential bill that will impact every American, and that's why you have such passionate opinions. And we're not giving up and we're not caving in that easily."

Unwittingly as always, the former GOP Presidential frontrunner puts her finger on the Tea Party problem. Don’t like a law Congress passed? Filibuster its implementation two years later. Feel oppressed by the White House, Supreme Court, Senate and your own House? Defund everything.

If all else fails, what next? Just wait for the debt-limit debate and start all over again. As Mike Nichols and Elaine May used to say about pretentious poseurs in their act, “It’s really a moral problem, and they’re so much more interesting than real problems.”

Even Nancy Pelosi may be getting tired of the charade, missing one key vote to celebrate her fiftieth wedding anniversary. Why not? They will still be stalling when she gets back.

Meanwhile, real problems will have to wait. All this is a moral dilemma, and politicians can’t be bothered by trivia.

Wake me when it’s over. If they haven’t settled it by then, there will be the World Series to watch. Those games always start on time. 

Cruz/Boehner Timetables Out of Whack

The Speaker is being treated like just another illegal by the now-ubiquitous Texan. If John Boehner can’t keep Ted Cruz’s hands off his caucus, members will be pushed across the border of sanity and Boehner will be out of a job next year.

Cruz himself has a different timetable. Secure in a Senate seat for six years, he can aim his efforts at 2016, which have already borne fruit in early polling of GOP zealots.

Boehner, weirdly tan as ever, is not visibly blanching at the prospect, but his two-year struggle to straddle the Tea Party and sane GOP horses riding off in different directions has been upset by an interloper from the other House.

“The Republican Party right now,” says New York Magazine, “most closely resembles a Weatherman gathering from about 1969, with various factions debating the feasibility of immediate Communist revolution versus building a working-class movement as a prelude to smashing the state...

“The agenda has largely been driven by the ‘Defund Obamacare’ faction, led by Ted Cruz, which proposes to shut down the federal government until such time as President Obama agrees to abolish his health-care plan, which would of course be never.”

The irony is that his own chamber has rebuffed Cruz with a vote in which 23 Republicans joined all the Democrat by opting for reality, a commodity in short supply in the House of Representatives.

As Boehner’s buffoons respond with a ransom note demanding a one-year delay in funding Obamacare, the standoff continues. Even after this skirmish is resolved, the unprecedented crisis of American self-governing will go on.

“We’ve had enough of the disunity in our party,” Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Boehner’s Iago and panting-to-be successor, tells colleagues. “The headlines are Republicans fighting Republicans.”

As usual, Cantor has it wrong. What we are seeing is Republicans fighting over two centuries of American history. They had better take a second look at that span as they try to extricate themselves from the conflicts in the Cruz-Boehner timetables.

Trayvon Martin's Forebears

Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman... On a suburban library screen, those faces impress two dozen residents of mixed races yesterday with the Mississippi martyrdom of young men 50 years ago.

In a showing and discussion of PBS’ “Eyes on the Prize,” there is a sense of wonder and disbelief at the organized cruelty and mendacity of that time but, for one who lived through it, the pain remains.

News of George Zimmerman, his continuing erratic behavior and wife’s doubts about his innocence, brings up the face of Trayvon Martin, another young man dead before his time in the South.

In Maryland, a University officer bitterly tells honors students that "it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida," resulting in outrage not about what happened there but against the official for saying it.

The election and reelection of Barack Obama reassure America that things have changed. They surely have, but will the second African-American president still have to bear the open and disguised racial hatred that has surrounded the first?

Just yesterday, Arizona’s National Committeeman Bruce Ash confided on Facebook that the President on Obamacare is “shucking and jiving,” echoing Rush Limbaugh who last month called Obama’s Syria policy “Operation Shuck and Jive,” a phrase that dates back to the era when slaves were stereotyped as foot-shuffling simpletons.

The arc of the universe may bend toward justice, as Martin Luther King believed, but it is long indeed.

Popping Pills in a Double Depression

Mental health is keeping statistical pace with the economy. As jobless figures and GNP paint a sickly picture, record numbers of Americans are on antidepressants.

Is there a connection? Or perhaps the better question is: How could there not be?

Just as national leaders stumble around in Washington in a vain attempt to appear rational, individuals doubt their own sanity and doctors around the country, often wrongly, prescribe tons of medication to mask every symptom of unease.

Government is more art than science and so is psychiatry. Both require at minimum the ability to grasp reality and deal with it in a humanly imperfect way, to face painful tradeoffs in life, accept responsibility and get on with it.

Yet on both levels, Americans live in denial. Congress and the White House parry and posture to avoid rational decisions that would keep the economy from falling out of bed while equally bumbling doctors prescribe pills for patients, nearly two-thirds of whom do “not meet the criteria for major depressive episode as described by the psychiatrists’ bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” according to a new Johns Hopkins study.

“It’s not only that physicians are prescribing more, the population is demanding more,” the lead researcher explains. “Feelings of sadness, the stresses of daily life and relationship problems can all cause feelings of upset or sadness that may be passing and not last long. But Americans have become more and more willing to use medication to address them.”

As fights over health care and government shutdown go on in Washington, the President and Congress would do well to stop talking about panaceas and help Americans who are being hurt by economic depression stop masking their reactions with pills that numb them into bearing up under the resulting reality—-or at least in the case of the Tea Party, take some of them themselves.

Right now, the only ones feeling no pain in this American Double Depression are the pharmaceutical companies.