Oh, to be Young

(And Republican)

Young Republicans watching their party lurch from ineptitude to irrelevance with occasional side trips to WhoopeeLand might be tempted by Depression.

Not the kind their party caused (again), but the psychological kind that comes when you can’t win for losing.

After all, there’s a charismatic and intelligent Democrat in the White House, the Congress is controlled by the Democrats, and “accuse,” “indict” and “prosecute” seem to be the words that pop up most in discussions of the last Republican administration.

All of which is solid proof that it is a very wonderful time indeed to be Young and Republican.

Consider:

Most political parties, especially the Republicans, operate on principles that would be instantly recognized by any 15^th-century courtier. All power in the party (or society) flows from the top down. There are three ways to acquire power – favor, inheritance or force.

Favor works best when a retiring leader bestows a warm smile on a selected successor and the opposition nominates a garden gnome. That worked just fine for George H.W. Bush when President Ronald Reagan (on whose name be praise) smiled upon George and the Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts.

Inheritance works when you’ve put in your time for a very long time and it’s just your turn, which is how Robert Dole got to be the Republican nominee against Bill Clinton and won the opportunity to star in Viagra promotions. It also worked for John McCain, the poster boy for continued mainstreaming of Americans with cognitive issues. Hey, he even ran for president!

Force works when members of society can think as they wish but understand clearly that they’d damned well better vote your way or else. Richard Nixon was a master. So, on the other side, was Richard J. Daley of Chicago, the first one, not his kid. Dick Cheney spoke for himself and for George W, Bush, his lips as immobile as their minds.

If you are a young and ambitious Republican and see leaders with any of those three characteristics at the top of your party, then you might as well marry a Democrat and have some fun because there’s an airtight lid on your advancement.

But no – Oh, Good Golly! or whatever young Republicans in ecstasy exclaim – the top is empty today and the open road for advancing Republican principles and at last getting a share of the loot beckons ahead.

Just look at the current contenders.

Mitt Romney was shrink-wrapped at birth, just as soon as his mother checked that there were no wrinkles in his dark suit and that nary a hair was out of place. He is the current favorite of the AE (Almost Embalmed) wing of the Republican party and fills in his time giving shock speeches to the likes of the Heritage Foundation and National Rifle Association in which he slyly mentions that it is the 21^st Century so his audience may gasp in shocked dismay.

Mike Huckabee is a preacher who lost a lot of weight, plays a mean bass guitar and served as governor of Arkansas with no other serious offenses – or accomplishments. He speaks on the Fox News Channel, but Jesus forgave even Mary Magdalene for having to earn a living.

Sarah Palin, former vice presidential nominee and soon-to-be former governor of Alaska by resigning mid-term, followed her resignation announcement by going fishing. Informed sources said she yearned for the intellectual company of equals and spawning salmon filled the need. She appeals to the base of the Republican party that focuses on one issue at a time on account of they don’t hold with all that high-falutin’ countin’ stuff nohow, you betcha.

There you have it, Young Republicans -- the road to opportunity is wide open. Can you walk? Talk? Chew Gum? And all at the same time? You could become a Rising Republican Star. Your destiny awaits – heed its call!

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Gov. Go Go and Sen. Stormy –

Steele’s 2012 GOP Dream Ticket?

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has the unenviable task of shepherding two candidates into what figures to be the 2012 model Obama Republican Shredder, unless he strips away his blinders and sees a winning ticket as Mother Nature made one.

If he keeps the blinders, he’ll only see the likes of Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, to name a few. But if he sheds those blinders, he’ll see the greatest Republican national ticket since Reagan-Bush.

The pulsing, throbbing political passions these two candidates inspire are guaranteed to arouse the Republican base.

We refer of course to a Republican 2012 presidential ticket of Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin and the person many in politics call a real comer, Stormy Daniels, who has an exploratory committee looking at a 2010 race against Louisiana’s Republican Sen. David Vitter.

Governor Palin’s candidacy speaks for itself, which is fortunate since her speaking performance as Senator John McCain’s running mate got mixed reviews. But it introduced her to the national stage you betcha. Her ability to balance the Golden Ager at the top of the ticket with the Miracle of Life provided by her unwed pregnant daughter, all the while keeping an eye on Russia across the Bering Strait and shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue made her the stuff of legend.

Rather than being cowed by national media milking the issues of unprotected sex and Saks, she became the go-to person for lively quotes in the McCain campaign, a Governor Go Go on the national stage.

Ms. Daniels is a veteran of films noted for exceptional wardrobe cost control. She brings excellent face recognition to the ticket, with similar results on all body parts. Although some questioned whether a star of porno flicks could perform in the United States Senate, supporters said her experience and the long list of Senators caught with their pants down would be a good fit.

Ms. Daniels film positions are many and well recorded. For others, she has a forthcoming book, according to her exploratory committee’s website, “Stormblazer! Stormy Daniels and the Triumph of Responsibility.” Her exploratory website splash page doesn’t declare a party affiliation.

As he considers the implications of a ticket featuring Palin and Daniels, Steele’s job is probably made easier by recalling that while Daniels is comfortable on top, she doesn’t need to be there to perform well.

The wide-appeal fundraising possibilities alone of a Palin-Daniels ticket make it worthy of serious consideration. Donors could be offered a chance to explore field dressing or undressing with each candidate demonstrating their particular skills.

It’s not known whether anyone has approached RNC Chairman Steele with these ideas before. The Republican National Committee website splash page informs us that “Chairman Steele is listening to social media,” so anything is possible, including Republican wins in 2010 and the big one in 2012.

You betcha.

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Weekend Tids and Bits

 

 

Pravda and RNC Agree On America’s Direction – The Republican National Committee took some heat for calling the Democrats socialists, but they’ve been vindicated by no less an authority than the online edition of Pravda, the famed Russian daily. Stanislav Mishin writes on May 29 that “It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.” You can catch more from conservative Republicanism’s  apparent new soulmate at:

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-1/

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Never Lie to Liars might be advice former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik would find interesting. He’s been indicted by a Washington, D.C. federal grand jury for lying to Bush White House officials who were considering him for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Kerik’s lawyer says his client is innocent. Some speculate the alleged lies were discovered as part of a routine Bush White House search for weapons of mass destruction.

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Clever, Those Open Meetings Advocates – One of the newspaper heavyweights who showed up at a non-publicized  meeting in Chicago’s O’Hare Hilton to talk about “Models to Lawfully Monetize Content” on the web was quoted in Editor & Publisher as saying the meeting wasn’t secret because a sign on the hotel room door said “NAA Meeting.” That could clearly identify it as a meeting of the nation’s top newspaper brass under the umbrella of Newspaper Association of America, with headquarters on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, VA. Of course, it could also identify a meeting of the National Apartment Association (NAA) also with headquarters on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, VA. Or the National Auctioneers Association (NAA), Overland Park, KS., or the National Aeronautic Association  (NAA) of Washington, D.C., or. . .

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Full and Complete Disclosure And Then Some continues to come to Louisiana politics with the latest announcement by porn star Stormy Daniels that she’s formed an exploratory committee to gauge interest for a possible run against U.S. Senator David Vitter. She’s currently on a listening tour. Political insiders wonder whether or not a possible Senate run would falter on face recognition, since that’s the potential candidate’s least-photographed feature.

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Sotomayor and Republican Choices

 

 

President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court shows the president at his most gracious towards the Republicans who bedevil him, giving them a choice and a voice in one of a President’s most enduring decisions.

 

Sure, the choice is like that 20 states give condemned inmates facing execution, allowing them a say in method, not outcome. Hey, it’s a choice, right?

 

And if the voice Senate Republicans get is the kind heard after a warden says “Any last words?”  they still can’t claim being denied a voice.

 

Senate Republicans trying to resist a growing urge to lie down in front of any steamroller they see have limited options in opposing Sotomayor, all of them bad.

 

Republicans can oppose Sotomayor because she’s female. Of course, they wouldn’t say so explicitly, but the party’s Cheney/Limbaugh base, which can only see women in either nighties or cooking aprons, would understand and approve.

 

Women voters, of course, might see it differently. In the 2008 presidential election, Republicans lost unmarried women by a 70-29 margin. And they lost women overall 56-43. Opposing the nominee because she’s female would certainly build on that record.

 

Republican can oppose Sotomayor because she’s Hispanic. In a 2001 lecture, she is reported to have said “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

 

“Racist!” yells the Republican core, which admittedly ought to know, but is wrong on this one. If the idea, as it says on the Supreme Court building, is “Equal Justice Under Law,” than those dispensing justice must at least in some way connect with those judged – and with the likely real-world consequences of their decisions.  That won’t wash with the Republican core, which is made nervous by census data showing Hispanics account for more than 15 percent of the U.S. population, and downright jittery when they look at the 2008 results with Democrats taking Hispanics 67-31. If Republicans seek even more distance from the Hispanic electorate, opposing Sotomayor is the ticket.

 

Republicans can oppose Sotomayor because she’s liberal. Of all the grounds for opposition, this is the least odious. It chucks a scrap to the snarling core that that bays attack when it sniffs the L-word, and at least  spritzes GOP Senators with Eau De Principle. But the record of Supreme Court justices voting the way folks who nominated and confirmed them thought they would isn’t good. Soon to-be-retired Justice David Souter, who was supposed to be a safe and solid conservative appointee of President Bush I, ended his career as a mostly liberal vote on the court. This course won’t cause more self-inflicted Republican damage, but it won’t gain any converts, either.

 

Prediction: Republicans will oppose Sotomayor because she’s a female Hispanic liberal. With a sure instinct to find the worst of all possible outcomes in any recent political situation, the Republican party will manage to offend all possible new constituents while catering to a core that sees Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney as the rising young hopes of tomorrow.

 

If the post-Sotomayor confirmation Republicans are offered a last meal, they shouldn’t be surprised if it’s crow.

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Republican Soul,

Convergent Series

 

Republicans are fighting for their party’s soul, which may be welcome news to those who wondered if it had one, but distressing to whole generations of political journalists who are accustomed to easy work reporting on the squabbles between Democrats and Republicans:

 

 WASHINGTON – Democrats in the House said the moon was made of green cheese today, but Republicans declared it evidence of undue influence by the cracker lobby.  All that kind of political journalism took was pairing an absurdity from the Democrats with another from the Republicans -- and both parties were eager to keep you supplied.

 

Now, political journalists are confronted with a Republican party that seems determined to argue itself out of existence, hell-bent on excluding those whose ideology isn’t pure. The current purity standard is agreeing with the Test Committee’s views.

 

The Test Committee, of course, consists of Rush Limbaugh, a radio commentator whose volume is inversely proportional to his intellect, and Dick Cheney, whose pioneering work on the Adjustable Moral Compass speaks for itself.

 

Now the Test Committee is trying to hustle Colin Powell out of the party, saying his endorsement of Barack Obama over John McCain was the final straw. Informed sources say previous straws included Powell’s belief that the Earth is round and revolves around the Sun.

 

All of which, the Test Committee says, amounts to ample reason for excluding a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State from discussion of serious Republican matters. Even if he says he’s a Republican and all that service was under Republican presidents.

 

So the debate pretty much comes down to whether the Republican party is more comfortable in Ronald Reagan’s Big Tent, where it lived in the 80s, or in the much more exclusive Cheney-Limbaugh Club, the one with the prominent  Members Only sign.

 

The Cheney-Limbaugh founders have made it pretty plain that they don’t want Powell around, and Powell has made it pretty plain that they can stick that in their ear. (Ever rational, Powell chose ears as the receptacle after clear evidence that neither Cheney nor Limbaugh could find the other obvious place with both hands.)

 

Backers of the Cheney-Limbaugh Club say their faction will win the dispute and that the Republican party will become smaller but purer and go on forever. And in that, they may be more right than they know.

 

In 1979, science fiction writer Larry Niven published a story in which a demon intent on collecting a soul may only reappear within the confines of a pentagram -- which the protagonist cleverly draws on the demon’s belly. Every time the demon tries to appear, it’s too big for the pentagram, and so shrinks itself and tries again -- and again, and again, since each time it shrinks itself smaller, it makes its target smaller still.

 

Niven called the story Convergent Series, and there’s squiggly-line math about the concept, but the important thing to remember for Republicans is that it’s a story about eternal shrinking.

 

However big the pentagrams on the Cheney-Limbaugh bellies look now, Republicans should think twice about appearing there.

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A Tortured Republican Argument

 

The United States of America routinely tortured suspected terrorists during the administration of Republican George W. Bush, in flagrant violation of American law and tradition.

 

And it’s all Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault.

 

The Republican National Committee’s website at gop.com, has a page titled “Nancy’s Debunked Denials,” where the text begins in boldface: “New Intelligence Documents Prove That Pelosi Has Not Been Honest About What She Knew And When She Knew It.”

 

The Republican reasoning is that since Pelosi knew about what the RNC stubbornly calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” and failed to stop them, she is complicit in their use.

 

And since she’s complicit in the use of torture, she shouldn’t make it a “political issue,” which is how Republicans prefer to describe conduct that would be a crime if it took place in a police station or jail.

 

The GOP says Pelosi learned about the torture (oops! Enhanced Interrogation) in a Fall 2002 briefing. Pelosi says that briefing’s only mention of water boarding, the torture technique of choice, was that it wasn’t being used.

 

Thoughtful Republicans – there must be a few somewhere – might recall that the “what knew/when knew” query reached its sloganeering peak in the Watergate burglary hearings about another GOP guardian of our liberties, Richard M. Nixon. But let’s not focus on the past, especially the past in which Republican operatives broke the law.

 

We should stay focused on the present in which Republican operatives broke the law because the Democrats failed to stop them.

 

Never mind that Democrats were in the minority in 2002. Today’s Minority Leader John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, is quoted in Wednesday’s New York Times as saying “It’s pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were; they were well aware that they’d been used; and it seems to me that they want to have it both ways. You can’t have it both ways.”

 

Sure you can John. You can do the crime, and when you’re caught, you can blame the cops for not preventing you.

 

Not to be outdone by the John Boehner Theory of Criminal Law, Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri thundered from his web site: “Instead of prosecuting or persecuting, our country should be supporting our intelligence professionals who work to keep us safe.”

 

Senator Bond’s four-paragraph statement made no mention of who would keep us safe from our intelligence professionals.

Let’s just say that when looking for an answer to that question, the present Republican Party doesn’t immediately spring to mind.

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