Obama and the Bad Boys

Can’t the President get mad at anybody? At his press conference, Barack Obama observes that Vladimir Putin has “that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom” and Republicans are in the grip of an “ideological fixation...The idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million people from getting health care is a bad idea.”

Nonetheless, he continues to present himself as a reasonable antagonist for the Russians and the Tea Party, a position that may reflect reality but is not getting him much traction in foreign relations or domestic policy.

Even his admirers are left to wonder whether Obama’s even disposition and professorial bent are handicapping him in the White House. Would being more devious and willing to get down into the mud with antagonists work better?

Politics has never been rational but is now less so than ever. To be effective in this atmosphere, you have to be more than right on the issues. A bit of the low cunning of LBJ and even Nixon, without their failure to understand boundaries, might not be amiss.

Take the Snowden flap, for example. Why did the White House from the start inflate his importance rather than dismiss him as a low-level criminal and concentrate on the issue rather than the man? Wasn’t it foreseeable that Putin might use him as a pawn?

Take the Tea Party for another. Against all odds in 1948, Harry Truman lambasted the “do nothing, good for nothing” GOP Congress and won an unlikely election. Can’t Obama see that, in politics, you can blast your opposition but keep smiling for photographs while trying to make deals with them off camera?

When Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed 20 years ago that we were in an era of “Defining Deviancy Down,” he was understating where politics was going.

“We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us,” the late New York Senator wrote in his now-famous American Scholar article, arguing that society keeps adjusting for the amount of unacceptable conduct it can tolerate.

He pointed out that, in 1929, the killing of seven gangsters in Chicago became the stuff of legend while half a century later “Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend.”

What Barack Obama might concentrate on now is the difference between being deviant and devious.

He may pride himself on being neither, but as JFK said, life is unfair and you have to make some hard choices to survive politically.  

Update: Maureen Dowd sums up Obama’sapproach: “There is no moral high ground that he does not seek to occupy. As with drones and gay marriage, he seems peeved that we were insufficiently patient with his own private study of the matter. Why won’t the country agree to entrust itself to his fine mind?”

Not until he shows more heart and anger.

For Rhonda on Her 90th Birthday

In the classic movie “Citizen Kane,” a very old man reminisces, “One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.”
 
My girl in the white dress is a movie star of the 1940s and 1950s, Rhonda Fleming, and
tomorrow is her 90th birthday.

One evening in 1955, my best friend Ed Feingersh turned up at our nightly hangout Costello's with a stunning woman with red hair and green eyes.
 
"This is the friend I was telling you about," he said to her and introduced the actress he had been photographing that afternoon. Just divorced, Rhonda had told Eddie she was lonely in a strange city and Eddie must have decided she was too tall for him so he brought her to meet me.
 
We had a couple of drinks, and she was everything a man could want, beautiful, bright, friendly and open, with no Hollywood airs. 
We were getting along fine, but something in my head had other plans.
 
Before dinner, I excused myself to make a phone call. I asked the woman who would become the mother of my children to join us. We had been seeing each other for months, but that night I knew for sure I was going to marry her.
 
Ever since, Rhonda Fleming has been in a corner of my mind, and I still watch some of her 40 movies on TCM. Truth is, she was not much of an actress, but gorgeous enough to be dubbed “the Queen of Technicolor.”
 
In one of her first, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” she played a teen-aged nymphomaniac and her mother, she told me, had to explain what that was.
 
She went on to have six marriages, the longest to a super-wealthy producer and theater owner. As his widow, she became a leading Los Angeles philanthropist, funding both a gynecological and cancer center at UCLA.
 
Alas, she was not perfect. She also became a leading Republican and supported Mitt Romney in the last election, but dream girls can be forgiven anything.
 
Happy birthday, Rhonda, from a ferry that passed in the night.

Witnessing Hiroshima

If you live long enough, once in a while your past goes beyond being irrelevant to the present and comes back to life as history. This week’s remembrance of dropping atomic bombs on Japan 68 years ago is one of those times.

Looking back, I see a 21-year-old foot soldier in Germany waiting to be deployed for a bloody Pacific invasion to storm beaches and fight through cities. Suddenly mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and then Nagasaki ended that dread. For the first time in years, he could wake in the morning without feeling there was an IOU out on his life, held by someone unknown and payable on demand.

Weeks later he learned the moral price for his relief--that 140,000 died within days from that explosion in Hiroshima and another 70,000 in Nagasaki and that his country would forever bear the burden of being the first and only so far to use such weapons of mass destruction.

In August 1963, that boy turned magazine editor interviewed John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office. "Since 1945," he said, "we have gone into an entirely new period of nuclear weapons. Most people have no conception of what it all means. A nuclear exchange lasting sixty minutes would mean over 300 million deaths. We have to prevent the end of the human race."

In a new century of short memory spans, that young soldier still lives in the recesses of an old mind along with JFK’s warning. The urge to bear witness remains.

The McDonaldization of Media

Old titles were being bought and sold in the past week at the speed of light. The Washington Post, Boston Globe and Newsweek all changed hands in an eyeblink.

Print journalism is morphing into the plaything of, respectively, the owners of  Amazon, the Boston Red Sox baseball team and an international digital corporation.

The direction has been clear for decades. News is instantaneous now on the Web and 24/7 cable, and waiting for context and coherence until the next day or weekend does not appeal to impatient new generations anxious to tweet or text their reactions.

The President explains his closure of embassies under Middle East terror threats to Jay Leno, with the certainty that Americans will learn what he has to say within minutes.

In the past century, the social critic Lewis Mumford observed that journalism was moving ever faster and creating “deprivation by surfeit.”

Like other assembly-line industries that concentrate on speed and productivity, the manufacture of news has ignored “the need for evaluation, correction, selection and social assimilation.”

Hand-made objects are a thing of the past. We get news like fast food and with just about the same amounts of nutrition and flavor.

As we congratulate ourselves for being so quickly well-informed, do we ask, “Of what?”

As old media names slide toward quaintness and irrelevance, we might give a passing thought, or tweet, to whether or not we will miss what they used to bring us.

Update: All this old-media shuffling prompts Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company to announce emphatically that the Times itself will remain in the hands of his family into “our global and digital future.”

In an interview, he slaps his palm on a table to emphasize that the paper is “Not. For. Sale.”

Not. Yet. 

"Pride of the Yankees"

They won’t be making any movies with that title about A-Rod. His tawdry downfall won’t ever be mentioned in the same breath as Lou Gehrig’s accomplishments or allowed to sully that heroic figure in the Stadium’s Monument Park.

“I’m fighting for my life,” Alex Rodriguez told reporters yesterday. “I have to defend myself. If I don’t defend myself, no one else will.”

Against what? Too facile to see him only as the archetype of a me-generation that overrides any team sense in sports or life, driven by a bottomless need for more adulation, more money, more women into pointlessly breaking all the rules in pursuit of some cosmic more to burnish his image for the ages.

Now, as all that blows away in self-made ashes, A-Rod’s total self-absorption morphs into a kind of moral stupidity unknown in previous times.

Contrast him with Gehrig in 1939, dying at age of 36, reducing a Yankee Stadium full of fans to tears, “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement...

“When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that's the finest I know.”

The Gehrig who died with such grace left behind on the playing field a record of accomplishment that A-Rod never matched and now never will.

“It can all lead to a contract that surpasses the gross domestic products of some nations,” writes Doug Glanville, a former player turned columnist. “But as the drugs give your stats greater value, they take away everything else...Numbers mean nothing when you stop knowing what they are actually counting and why.”

David Brooks adds: “Locked in a cycle of insecurity and attempted self-validation, their talents are never enough, and they end up devouring what they have been given.”

As so many parse A-Rod’s prideful downfall, a healthy dose of Lou Gehrig’s grace and humility could help restore our sense of balance.  

The Existential Terrors of August

For someone with a grandchild due home from the Middle East next week, the State Department Alert about “potential for terrorist attacks” there this month is no abstraction.

“U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling,” the government says. The safety measures are not specified.

As this warning chills millions of American hearts like mine, Edward Snowden is now free to roam the streets of Moscow, secure in the certainty he has struck a blow at government invasion of our privacy. One may be forgiven for not finding his criminal efforts on behalf of individual freedom vs. communal security heroic.

Once again we are in the grip of irrational fear bequeathed by bin Laden on 9/11 and a subsequent loss of social trust that has leaked into American life over those dozen years and poisoned our confidence that we can wake up every morning and, within existential limits, control our lives.

The news tells us that, beyond our daily existence, nothing is manageable in either the worlds of nature or man. Weather upheavals are matched by the political, and we are transfixed by freaks of nature like Ariel Castro, Anthony Weiner and their ilk.

In the past century, Americans may have been more naïve about the hidden motives of people as individuals or in political concert, but they shared a vision, however flawed, of their ability to fumble through to a better community.

Now, with 24/7 cable news and unlimited Internet gabble, we “know” so much more but have no context and no coherence for any of it.

As we spend this month under an official Travel Alert and no Congress in Washington to pretend that someone is running the country, what will shape our picture of the world is an existential anxiety that will fuel despair over what used to be called the Silly Season for news.

No one will be laughing.  

Surveillance, Security and Sanity

From his watery grave, Osama bin Laden is still punishing America. What he did on 9/11/01 still has us at one another’s throats over homeland security, arguing bitterly over tradeoffs between personal liberty and national safety.

 "All we have to do," he bragged back in 2004, "is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note."

In the atmosphere he created, we are tearing ourselves apart over how to be both safe and free.

Glenn Greenwald and his puppet Eric Snowden publish a secret 32-page summary of the N.S.A.'s XKeyscore program, which mines Internet browsing information the Agency is collecting at 150 network sites, and the government is forced to declassify the document.

To assuage fears over invasion of telephone privacy, the Agency also releases documents describing the collection of “telephone metadata.”

Two cheers for transparency as politicians deplore such invasions of privacy while the Administration fails to offer satisfying proof of their efficacy in preventing terrorist attacks.

Over all this, what Osama did on 9/11 still hovers to gaslight America into self-destruction, a term derived from a World War II movie describing intimidation and psychological abuse through false information that clouds the victims' perception.

As we commemorate our hard-won freedoms of the past century, with friends like Snowden and Greenwald to demagogue the issue, who needs enemies like bin Laden?


Update:  Snowden is sprung from the Moscow air terminal, at least for a while, as the White House fulminates. The ancient among us may wonder if the Russians will shelter him in the apartment that JFK-assassin-to-be Lee Harvey Oswald occupied there more than half a century ago.

Hillary and Bill, Huma and Anthony

Can the past help make sense of the Clintons and Weiners today?

Breaking up is hard to do, sang Neil Sadaka half a century ago, but go back further to Karl Marx, “History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.”

Or as Hillary and Bill try to distance themselves, the more apt Marx may be Groucho: “I don’t want to belong to any club that takes people like me as members.”

True, as Maureen Dowd chirps, Weiner is off the charts: “Aside from being a gift to clowns, hacks, punsters, rivals and the writers of ‘The Good Wife,’ Carlos Danger is also a gift to political-scandal survivors. His behavior is so outlandish and contemptible--the sort of thing that used to require a trench coat and park--that it allows Eliot Spitzer and Bill Clinton to act huffy.”

Yet, if a politician’s sex life should be judged on how it affects his performance in office, the former Comeback Kid and now most popular ex-president on the planet has more to answer for than any of his fallen comrades.

In 1992, Clinton, with Hillary standing by her man, went on 60 Minutes to weather the story of a 12-year-affair with Gennifer Flowers (who had tapes of them together) with a slippery near-confession, “I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage.”

After winning the White House, he got himself impeached over Monica Lewinsky and her semen-stained dress, but forgotten now about that nasty episode is how it may have contributed to a failure to take out Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

Back then, the New York Times has noted that "during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled."

In 2007, Clinton reacted with fury to a TV mini-series portraying him as so distracted then that he failed to focus on the emerging threat of bin Laden. Yet, the program's advisor was 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean, and there was evidence that Clinton might have done more about bin Laden if not for fear of public reaction that attacking him would be seen as a "wag the dog" diversion from impeachment.

In judging Weiner and lesser bozos of both parties, this kind of connection between public and private is as apt as seeing JFK’s sexual peccadillos as allowing J. Edgar Hoover to blackmail him and stay in office to hound Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

JFK and Bill Clinton are now rightly regarded as among the best of modern presidents, but their “private” sexual behavior was not the kind of joke that Weiner, Spitzer and their ilk are now.

Time to stop laughing and get back to serious issues.

Growing Cracks in Tea Party Cups

You can’t hold your breath and say no forever. As the President turns his back on Congressional tantrums, some sane Republicans are starting to gasp for breath.

The national political debate is slowly shifting from Tea Party vs. Obama to an internal GOP rift over avoiding defeat in 2014 and 2016.

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn predicts that shutting down government to block funds for ObamaCare could destroy his party. “The strategy that has been laid out is a good way for Republicans to lose the House,” he says.

It’s “the dumbest idea I've ever heard,” adds North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr.

Meanwhile, the White House concentrates on taking its case to the country and avoiding another fiscal cliff on the debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew insists there will be no negotiations this fall to avoid a default such as those that led to a downgrade of the nation's credit rating in 2011:

"Congress is going to have to pass a debt limit that can reach bipartisan consensus in the Congress and that the president can sign into law."

The President himself tells New York Times interviewers he is concentrating on those “who are working really hard, are trying to figure out how they can send their kids to college, are trying to make sure that they can save for their retirement.”

If Congress is willing to work with him, he is ready but if the Republican response is “no on everything,” he won’t “sit around and twiddle my thumbs for the next 1,200 days.”

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is also looking beyond that time as he hosts Hillary Clinton at a White House lunch today. No doubt one of the subjects of their conversation will be what happens next if the GOP doesn’t get its act together on mending the growing cracks in its Tea Party cups.

Middle East Exhaustion: Tipping Point

If new bloodshed in Egypt is a wakeup call, could Syria be the last straw?

Cairo is aflame again, with scores of protesters killed, bloody fruit of an Arab Spring that keeps yielding more death than democracy. As tolls rise, it is past time to rethink the Bush-Cheney Neocon doctrine of a strong America bestowing freedom on benighted nations across the world.

Now the Joint Chiefs give Congress a report that overthrowing Bashar al-Assad in Syria would be “a vast undertaking, costing billions of dollars, and could backfire on the United States...Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.”

John McCain, of course, dislikes that assessment, but the reality of the past decade is expenditure of American blood and treasure in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan and elsewhere with, to put it charitably, mixed results at best.

No responsible critic would advocate, in the light of a nuclear Pakistan and wannabe Iran, complete withdrawal from the region, but isn’t it past time for a lighter footprint?

Even the President of the Arab American Institute concedes that “the region is on a path leading to self-destruction. What, if anything, can be done to reverse course?

“Syria is committing suicide--tearing itself asunder in a civil war that, with the support and prodding of outside forces, has increasingly become an exercise in sectarian blood-letting. American combat forces may have left Iraq, but the country has not found a way to make peace with itself. Daily terrorist bombings are killing scores of civilians, while a dysfunctional sectarian government appears to be focused more on prosecuting and persecuting its opponents than providing for the needs of its people...

”Lebanon, reeling from the pressure emanating from Syria next door, is once again teetering on the brink of civil conflict. Meanwhile, the conflicts raging around Jordan are having a destabilizing impact with that country receiving yet another massive influx of refugees.”

What the region needs now, the Arab spokesman asserts, is “a unified revolt against sectarian division and recognition of the futility of its self-destructive path.”

Before outsiders can truly help in that undertaking, the US is like a club-footed giant in the region, stumbling around with the best of intentions but more likely to bring damage than democracy with its blundering attempts to be helpful.

Haven’t we reached a tipping point?

Christie Challenges GOP Park-Your-Heart Politics

If nothing else, Chris Christie will be pumping blood into hardened Republican arteries between now and November 2016.

Naming Rand Paul among “any number of people” who project a “dangerous strain” of libertarianism on domestic surveillance, the Governor cites families in his state who lost loved ones on 9/11:

“These esoteric, intellectual debates--I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have...

“The next attack that comes, that kills thousands of Americans as a result, people are going to be looking back on the people having this intellectual debate and wondering whether they put...”

Christie cut himself off, but his comments at an Aspen Institute panel of GOP governors challenge his party’s herd mentality on Obama-bashing, bringing up George W. Bush.

The policy the current President is following, he told them, “hasn’t been different because they [sic] were right and because we haven’t had another one of those attacks that cost thousands and thousands of lives.”

As Republicans "nerve up" to shut down government over Obamacare and the debt ceiling, Christie offers a glimpse of an alternative to another 2016 kamikaze campaign for the White House.

How far he can go in primaries like those of the last presidential election where ideological purity reigned is open to question, but his bluntness is a promising sign.

Sidelining Schmucks

Ideological and ethnic opposites Anthony Weiner and Steve King are redefining shameless stupidity and uniting their own parties against them but, in our media-salivating world, getting more attention than comparatively sane office holders.

Republicans have already moved away from King by dissuading him from running for the Iowa Senate seat next year, but Weiner is still a candidate, even as a New York Times editorial advises him to “take his marital troubles and personal compulsions out of the public eye, away from cameras, off the Web and out of the race for mayor of New York City.”

While President Obama pledges “to use every minute of the 1,276 days remaining in my term to make this country work for working Americans again,” American government is gridlocked by Tea Party politicians as weirdly out of touch as Weiner and King but sounding rational only by totally ignoring reality.

“Congressional Republicans,” reports the Times, “are moving to gut many of President Obama’s top priorities with the sharpest spending cuts in a generation and a new push to hold government financing hostage unless the president’s signature health care law is stripped of money this fall.”

Weiner and King are on the fringes giving new meaning to the definition of “schmuck,” a Yiddishism for the male member as metaphor for stupid, foolish, or simply clueless, and now earn the highest rank in the lexicon of penile designations for unwise, total “putz.”

While Weiner is caught in post-disgrace sexual tweets and King opines that undocumented immigrants have “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” they are only distracting voters from the stupidity of John Boehner’s troops, those lesser schmucks who have to be voted out of more years of disabling Congress next November.

In any language, they all have to be sidelined.