Ted Kennedy’s Plea

August 20, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2012, Healthcare, Presidents, Republican Party, Senate, U.S. History | 6 Comments 

The absence of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy last week from the funeral of his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, followed by the death on Tuesday morning of columnist Robert Novak, who was diagnosed with brain cancer not long after the lawmaker fell ill from the same cause, has served to remind Americans that the lawmaker’s days, sadly, are numbered. Still, discussion of what is to follow after his passing, politically speaking, has been muted.

That was the case until this morning, when news came that the Senator had sent a message to Massachusetts legislators asking them to reconsider a change in the law they enacted in 2004. At that time, Kennedy’s colleague in the Senate, John Kerry, appeared to have a good chance of attaining the Oval Office. This raised the question of what would happen were he to leave his seat. It was thought by many Democratic bigwigs in the state that Gov. Mitt Romney would appoint a fellow Republican as Kerry’s replacement, if it came to that, to serve until a special election could be called.

Even though no Republican has been elected from the state to the Senate since Edward Brooke was re-elected in 1972, the idea of a member of the GOP joining Ted in the Senate for even a few months was so horrific a prospect to legislators at the Boston statehouse that they enacted a law removing the power to appoint Senators from the governor and specifying that in the event of a Senator’s death or resignation, his or her seat was to remain vacant until it could be filled in a special election within 145 to 160 days – that is, about five months. As for the time in between – well, better, obviously, that Massachusetts be represented by only one person in the world’s greatest deliberative body than that a Republican should take the other seat for an instant.

At the time, neither Kennedy nor Kerry raised any objections to this line of reasoning. But now the senior gentleman from Massachusetts has had second thoughts. His statement informed the Boston lawmakers that, given the likelihood of a razor-thin vote in the Senate regarding health-care legislation, it was imperative that Massachusetts have two members at hand to help decide the issue.

There’s certainly more to this than just health care, however. For fully fifty-six years – over one-fourth of the Senate’s history – one of the two Massachusetts seats has been occupied, with a two-year interruption, by one of two brothers. First, there was John F. Kennedy, from 1953 until he won the Presidency in 1960. He resigned his Senate seat on December 22 of that year, and five days later Benjamin Smith, his Harvard roomate, was appointed to replace him. Smith remained a Senator until Ted Kennedy turned thirty and thus became Constitutionally eligible to be elected. The younger Kennedy won a special election for the seat in November 1962, and immediately after Election Day Smith resigned and Ted took his place.

The start and end of Smith’s tenure were situations where the Kennedy clan felt comfortable with having a Governor make appointments to the Senate, and now Ted seeks to have this power restored to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. So far, the Senator hasn’t specified whether he has anyone in mind to replace him; his wife, Victoria, has let it be known that she does not plan to do so.

But it has been reported that Ted wishes to see another Kennedy reach the Senate, though so far it’s been a difficult wish to fulfill. Regular TNN readers will recall that at the end of last year, when President Obama chose Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the Camelot clan attempted to stir up sentiment for Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg to take her place, resulting in a media frenzy of several weeks before Ms. Schlossberg took herself out of the running after a series of gaffes. A few months ago there was some talk of Robert Kennedy’s son Christopher, the president of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, seeking the Senate seat formerly occupied by Obama, since its present occupant, appointee Roland Burris, has said he will not seek election. But more recently it’s been reported that Christopher Kennedy is eyeing the Illinois governorship.

So speculation, after the Senator’s announcement, has started to focus on former Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, his nephew, as his replacement. The younger Kennedy’s career in the House was not especially distinguished and in a contested election, were he not the incumbent, he’d probably find it an uphill battle, not least because of his ham-handed annulment of his first marriage in the early 1990s. But being appointed to the Senate would give him something of an edge when the special election came around.

But even if Joseph II makes it into the Senate, I wouldn’t bet on his seeking a second full term. By 2012, when Ted Kennedy’s term would have expired, he’ll be sixty, and, even in Massachusetts, the electorate probably prefers its Kennedys to be young and charismatic. And, by that time, four or five of the great-grandchildren of Old Joe and Rose Kennedy will be out of law school and ready for high office. (At the present time, only one member of this generation is over thirty – Robert Kennedy’s granddaughter Meaghan Townsend, a yoga instructor in Los Angeles. And just seven or eight are old enough to join their cousin Patrick Kennedy in the House.) In any event, during the next year or so we’ll find out if Camelot is vanishing into the mists of memory or is ready to begin another chapter – assuming the voters want it.

Rick Perlstein On The Town Hall Demonstrators

August 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Congress, Double Standard Paranoia Quotient, George W. Bush, Healthcare, New Media, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixonland Nitpicks, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin, TV News Personalities, U.S. History | 9 Comments 

A little over a year ago, when Rick Perlstein published his mammoth study of “the American berserk” – the original subtitle of Nixonland – in the years between 1965 and 1972, he concluded his 748-page saga of heated hardhats and howling hippies (or was it the other way around?) by arguing that the culture and political wars of the late Sixties and early Seventies had not only not died, but had never really gone away.

Perlstein maintained that the 37th President’s legacy to the nation was “a notion that there are two kinds of Americans: one kind viewing themselves as “people of faith,” patriots, “nonshouters,” and viewing the other kind – “liberals,” “cosmopolitans,” “intellectuals” – as “un-Americans, anti-Christians, amoralists, aliens [Perlstein's emphasis].”

The book’s final paragraphs read:

Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

When Nixonland appeared, several reviewers criticized that penultimate statement, and said that Perlstein clearly was mistaken to think that the passions of that time still ran as strong.

But that was last year, and now that many of this month’s “town halls” about the proposed health-care legislation across the country have featured very heated rhetoric, not only at the meetings themselves, but among the crowds assembled outside the venues, Perlstein has written an op-ed for the Washington Post that makes it clear that he considers himself vindicated in his argument.

Now, anyone following the town hall meetings closely knows that many speakers at them have been as fervent about single-payer care and the proposed legislation’s failure to incorporate it, though not as visible in TV sound bites as the ones who have been waving pocket copies of the Constitution and arguing against the bill’s big-government tendencies.

But the leftist voices at the meetings count for nothing where Perlstein is concerned. What he sees is nothing less than the return of the right-wing fervor that swept through parts of America during the Kennedy years. And the op-ed’s title, though probably the work of a dependably liberal Post staffer, sums up its attitude toward the liberatarian and conservative voices at these gatherings: “In America, Crazy Is A Pre-Existing Condition.”

Yes, all the objections raised to the mammoth scope of the bill, and to the possibility that it marks the start of a path which will see Americans turn over as large a percentage of their income to the state as was the case in Sweden at the height of its cradle-to-grave system – or perhaps more – yes, all the worries raised by hard-working citizens, in Perlstein’s opinion, are on a par with the fears of almost 50 years ago that fluoride in drinking water would brainwash children into being Communists, or whatever members of the John Birch Society were supposed to have believed in those days.

(I have to admit that sometimes fluoride does worry me a bit. The other night I was gargling with that new Listerine “Whitening Formula,” or whatever it’s called, in which the active ingredient is sodium fluoride. On the back of the bottle I noticed an instruction not to drink or eat anything for 30 minutes after using it. If the idea is to keep fluoride out of my system, then why would it be in my drinking water? But then again, my dentist tells me there’s been an upsurge in cavities because kids don’t drink as much tap water as they once did. End of digression.)

In the op-ed, Perlstein states:

Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror — powerful elites — find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

Why, of course, “crazy-making panic” is endemic only to conservative Americans, otherwise defined, in the world of the Post, as those people who still insist on regarding Sarah Palin as a political force even after her daughter’s former fiance has started dating Kathy Griffin. Those thousands upon thousands (or maybe millions upon millions) of words, many of them still online, which fretted about Guantanamo in the Bush years presaging internment camps for the young and disaffected in the United States? That was legitimate political discourse, nothing irrational about it.

(As is, presumably, the post at a left-leaning site I read the other day that compared the present political situation in America to that of Germany in about 1930. Anyone for Obama as the new Heinrich Bruening?)

Although, as I write, it will be several more hours before Perlstein’s piece appears in the antiquated ink-on-paper format, it has already stirred up several dozen responses from across the political spectrum. Matt Yglesias has one of the most thoughtful posts about it on the Left. He focuses on these remarks of Perlstein’s:

You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as “extremist” — out of bounds.

As opposed to the “in-bounds” rhetoric of the SDS and Black Panthers, which got substantial on-air attention. But let’s look at today’s situation. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when President Obama held his town hall meeting about health care this week, William Kostric, a self-described “free stater,” was spotted in the crowd by an MSNBC crew with a sign reading “Time To Water The Tree” (it referred to a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, which concludes “with the blood of patriots and tyrants”) – and a gun strapped to his leg, which he had a permit to carry.

It turned out that Kostric had not simply brought the weapon to provide a headache to Secret Service personnel who had to worry about any individuals who might not be carrying weapons simply to “make a statement.” He meant for the gun to attract media attention and stir curiosity about what he wanted – which turned out to be, presumably like all the “crazies” Perlstein describes, to get on TV.

And which program finally extended an invitation to appear? Was it Glenn Beck’s show, or Sean Hannity’s, or The O’Reilly Factor, or any of the other shows which, as every schoolperson in Santa Monica or Marin County knows, are diabolically constructed by “elites” to inflame the heartland? No, it was Hardball with Chris Matthews, a show which is not usually viewed as a hotbed for “crazies.”. I assume that Kostric chose Hardball because MSNBC was the channel that gave him visibility. (He also appeared on Alex Jones’s radio talk show, a venue more along the lines of his personal views, but certainly not the creation of any media “elite.” Indeed, Michael Savage, singled out as a rabble-rouser by Perlstein, has not had Kostric appear on his program.)

Perlstein doesn’t seem to realize that most of those who are concerned about the drawbacks of the health-care bill are voicing heartfelt and rational objections. They know that every citizen of the country already is shouldering a share of the national debt equivalent to nearly a fifth of a million dollars and they hope that there’s some way to keep it from going to a quarter of a million. They were not happy with the idea of a President doing his best Lyndon Johnson imitation and insisting that Congress pass over a thousand pages of slapped-together taxes and regulations before the end of last month, before it became clear that would not happen. (And compared to the versions of the health-care bill now in the works, even the most hastily drafted bills of LBJ’s Great Society look like they were penned by James Madison or George Mason.)

But that doesn’t matter to Perlstein; for him, “the tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America’s flora.” However, he’s not going unchallenged about this. One of the more impressive retorts so far has come from Stephen Bainbridge, a professor at UCLA’s law school. The professor sums up the op-ed as follows: “we lefties are rational, nice, kind people who are puzzled by conservative crazies. We’ve got no crazies on our side, of course. Just nice rational people like me.” Then Bainbridge lists some “rational” responses to perceived threats from the Right by left-wing organizations, starting with the Weathermen.

Bainbridge’s post got this prompt response from Perlstein, who says: “I hate the Weathermen. Read my book. So does everyone I know on the left.”

Well, it may be that everyone Rick knows on the Left deplores what the Weathermen, as a whole, became, or some of its actions. But individual former members of the Weathermen, whether or not they still think they were justified in what they did, certainly are not hated by many of his colleagues – indeed, quite the opposite, as Bill Ayers’s recent well-attended book tour demonstrates.

And, before I forget: does Perlstein mention Richard Nixon in his article? Yes, he does, classing RN as one of the “vultures” who exploited the fears sprouting from the “tree of crazy” – and, somehow, managed, by doing so, to secure a 49-state victory in 1972.

With a little help from 47,168,710 “crazies.” Count ‘em.

Healthcare – Out Of Pockets

August 14, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Culture, Domestic issues, Healthcare, History, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, U.S. History, economy | 4 Comments 

The other day, I was in the pharmacy at my local HMO facility picking up a prescription. I know you aren’t supposed to listen to what the people up at the window are saying, but this one guy was virtually shouting and was quite hard to ignore. He was upset with the staff member who was trying to talk him through something that was obviously terribly upsetting. Again, it really wasn’t appropriate to eavesdrop, so please don’t pass this along.

It seems that he was picking up a refill on some meds (my thought was that I hoped they were chill pills of some sort) and he was distressed that a previous prescription of 150 pills was refilled with only 75. Now, it wasn’t the capsule-count that bothered him – he just didn’t want to have to pay the same $10.00 co-pay for the 75 that he did for the 150. Never mind that the co-pay scale is pretty well set and that $10.00 is the bottom-line fee. Nope. He thought he should pay less. Or nothing.

The flustered, yet knowledgeable lady at the window then proceeded to show him how much the medicine would cost if he were to purchase it out of the system. Needless to say it wasn’t 10 bucks, but rather several multiples of it. Yet the guy who was buying medicine at a paid-down price still thought he was paying too much.

It’s a mindset – one that seems to be pervasive.

In fact, I suspect he may be one of millions of Americans who seem to think that medicine and medical care should not really cost them personally much of anything. Let the rich people pay for all of us – or the employer, or the government, it’s too expensive for me. Because it costs so much, goes the thinking, I really shouldn’t have to pay. God forbid that any American should have too many out of pocket health care expenses.

The logic is: nobody can afford it; somebody else should pay. Why does that remind me of something Yogi Berra might have once said?

Some time ago, I came to a parting of the ways with an employee. When our human resources person briefed him on COBRA to allow him to continue with health insurance coverage, he balked saying something to the effect: “I’m not paying for that.” Never mind that he had a wife and children and that being uninsured put them all at financial risk, he was unwilling to pay up out of pocket. To him, it was apparently just not something that was a financial priority. At any rate, he had told me and others that he was looking forward to the day when Barack Obama became president and everyone got coverage, whether they worked or not.

Of course, under the Obama plan this man would be fined for not having insurance when it was accessible to him.

I got the same kind of response when I put the health care reform issue out to a talk radio audience recently. I asked specifically for callers who had no coverage – wondering how they felt about the whole megilla. Frankly, I was surprised that so many who did not have health insurance actually had access to it, but really didn’t feel it was worth it to pay for it.

One caller told me that, at any rate, if he got sick he could just go to the emergency room, indicating that if the bill were too big and he couldn’t pay it would be the hospital’s problem. I suspect that more people think this way than we’d like to admit.

Actually, that kind of thing becomes everyone’s problem. And being lost in this national “teachable moment” are concepts like personal responsibility and living in such a way so as not to be a burden on others.

The reason something as integrity-rich as the idea of paying for what you receive is widely resisted when it comes to health care is because it is, in fact, so very expensive. But maybe if people accepted more personal responsibility and resisted the it-costs-so-much-I-can’t-afford-it-let-them-pay philosophy we might see some common sense enter the discussion.

Here’s an idea, why don’t we reform the system by turning it into one where individuals purchase their own insurance. What if every employer stopped providing health insurance as a benefit and instead translated the actual dollars spent on an employee’s plan into straight income – saying, in effect, “Here’s your health insurance money, you shop and buy your own plan.” This would need to be accompanied of course by market-based reform, eliminating the practice where states deny health plans from other states into their markets, and making such insurance completely portable, not tied to where you work.

The income used for health insurance could be tax exempt. If it wasn’t used to purchase insurance, it could be taxed – creating incentive. And if someone refused to spend the money they had on actually accessible insurance because, say, they wanted to buy a bigger house or car, well, then put a system in place where the government would help the hospital collect a bill over time, in the event of a costly illness. Pay me now or pay me later. Something like this has been described by John McClaughry president of the Ethan Allen Institute in a recent article entitled: What To Do With The Uninsured.

How many Americans would actually pay for health insurance under such circumstances? It’s hard to say. Possibly, we have been so conditioned to having another entity provide and pay for it that we truly see it as something that should be done for us?

It is axiomatic. Failure to act responsibly leads to the intervention of other parties, in the health care case – that would be the government. This intervention always means less autonomy and liberty.

Health insurance as we know it has only been around for about 80 years. With the rise of the New Deal and labor unions in the 1930s and then the economic realities during the crisis of World War II, Americans became increasingly accustomed to having the whole health care thing being part of an employee benefits package. In fact, during the war, when wages were somewhat regulated, the one way an employer could give someone a little more was through the benefits package.

Before long it became part of how things were done. You got a job and you got paid in money and stuff like health insurance. Cool.

The problem with it was that it began to put a degree of separation between the consumer and the health care service provider – we moved from a fee for service approach to something much more indirect and impersonal. Someone else was paying the bill. And when the apartment comes with utilities included you don’t look at the thermostat as much. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s no longer a market-driven enterprise.

When I was young boy, my dad had really good insurance because he was a Teamster. It wasn’t really called health insurance, though. It was hospitalization insurance. It was there for the tonsillectomy – not the runny nose. It was there for stitches in the emergency room, not for the yearly physical, or the chicken pox. In fact, when we went to the doctor, mom wrote a check. Doctor visits were not really health insurance issues. Even if people had good insurance, they usually still had to pay out of pocket to go to the family doctor, as with the dentist.

These days, though, with our whole health maintenance and managed care way of thinking, it’s all about minimizing out of pocket expenses. The problem is that this doesn’t eliminate the actual expense – it just takes it from view and increases the costs exponentially behind the scenes. We don’t see the transaction, so it isn’t really there.

Health insurance morphed into a right. Every one should have it and it should only cost those who can afford it. And few can really afford it, so the government should pay. We sure hope they have enough money – oh, what the heck, they’ll just print more. Or tax the rich more. So what if the top 1% of American households fork out more in taxes than the bottom 95% combined.

Our desire never to be out of pocket will one day soon lead to our country being out of pockets.

Putting a so-called public option into the mix is a poorly disguised foot in the door en route to the real goal of a single payer system. And once such a system is in place, it will never go away. Even conservatives in Britain don’t mess with their National Health Service (NHS). It’s part of the national fabric, like Social Security and Medicare are here already. Never mind that cancer patients over there have to wait on treatment so bureaucrats can meet “target” goals or that neurology delays put lives at risk or that some patients will now be paid to go “private” in certain cases.

After all, they have only had 61 years to work the kinks out of a program that is even now facing a funding crisis. Give them time. And surely we’d do better, right?

Just look at the Post Office. Or Amtrak.

Setting The Record Straight On Social Security

August 13, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, George W. Bush, Healthcare, News media, Nixon Administration, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

In this morning’s Washington Post, Paul Begala, one of the architects of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and later a major White House advisor, contributes an op-ed. In it he argues that, although supporters of an expansive health-care policy (single-payer or otherwise) may be thoroughly dissatisfied with whatever legislation ultimately comes out of the Senate and to President Obama’s desk, they’d be well advised to bite their tongues and support it. As an example he cites the original Social Security legislation of the New Deal, which was quite limited in scope:

No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt’s original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers — a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn’t even cover the clergy. FDR’s Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn’t work, you got nothing from Social Security.

If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist. Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start. We added more people to the winner’s circle: farm workers and domestic workers and government workers. We extended benefits to the children of working men and women who died. We granted benefits to the disabled. We mandated annual cost-of-living adjustments. And today Social Security is the bedrock of our progressive vision of the common good.

The phrase “our progressive vision” may be taken by some to suggest that the expansion of Social Secuirty was strictly the doing of Democrats, in which case the Post’s Ezra Klein wishes to correct that misconception:

The original Social Security legislation wasn’t “perhaps” a “cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist” program. It simply was those things. But it was something else, too. A start. Over the next 50 years, it was built upon. But not only by Democrats. Some of the largest advances came when Republicans saw political opportunity in strengthening the entitlement. Begala implies that progressives eventually added cost-of-living increases to Social Security. In fact, it was Richard Nixon who signed that bill. Similarly, whether you like the structure of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit or not, it was a massive expansion of an entitlement program, and it was proposed and signed by George W. Bush.

Rules For Witnesses

August 7, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Cold War, Congress, Domestic issues, Economic issues, Faith, Healthcare, History, Movies, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Public Opinion, Religion, U.S. History | 15 Comments 

There is a scene early on in the movie Patton, where the feisty general watches the forces under his command do battle with those led by the legendary German Panzer leader, Erwin Rommel. To prepare for this particular skirmish, “Old Blood and Guts” studied the writings of his adversary, prompting the memorable line uttered in a gravely voice by actor George C. Scott: “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”

Later, the general found out that Rommel himself had not actually been present for the confrontation, but he is comforted by an aid: “If you defeat Rommel’s plan, then you defeat Rommel.”

It is a fascinating thing when an adversary ironically uses a methodology that was previously owned by an opponent – especially when he does so with surprising effectiveness. When a football team known for its excellent running game throws the bomb on the first play from scrimmage, when a home run hitter bunts, and when a political adversary takes a page from the book of the other guy, well – you gotta love it.

Under any credible definition of the phrase “dazed and confused” there now appears the look on Nancy Pelosi’s face. Yes, that one. That, “we are the good guys, why are people giving us a hard time, they must be Nazis, or just nuts” look. Surely you’ve seen it. I have had a persistent “where-have-I-seen-that-look-before?” feeling when seeing the speaker’s visage on the screen, but it took me a while to make the connection.

The date is December 21, 1989 – the place Bucharest, Romania. Nicolae Ceauşescu, the man who had ruled his country with an iron first for a couple of decades, was on his balcony trying to address an increasingly unruly crowd. It was a moment of truth for the dictator. The look on his face – one of complete incomprehension – was one of the Kodak moments capturing the scene at the end of the Cold War.

That look might be described by my grandkids as: “clueless.” Others might simply say that it is a facial expression that begs the question, “what the?” But it is a look that is botoxed in place for Ms. Pelosi. And that same expression has recently been found on the faces of many members of the House and Senate as they have gone home to meet with constituents.

Sadly, the time has come in America where recess is no longer any fun.

What Nancy Pelosi is seeing is her side being on the receiving end of some of the kind of methodological medicine the left has been forcing down the country’s throat for quite a long time. I recently got around to reading Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals. Yes, I know I should have done so long ago, but I thought I had a good enough grasp on what the man said back in 1971 via the thorough treatment his musings have received from the conservative punditry.

I was wrong. My bad. Every American should read it. It’s chilling.

I believe what we are now witnessing is a case of people being, as the saying goes (and as is actually used in Alinsky’s book) “hoisted with their own petard.” Fire is being fought with fire. The reflexive dismissal of angry citizens showing up at town hall meetings these days to give Washington insiders a piece of their mind as somehow orchestrated, notwithstanding.

This is not a top-down campaign with a few sinister puppeteers pulling the strings. The opposition to liberal health care machinations and other stuff is very real. What they see as orchestration is actually mobilization. And it is only the beginning. We are, I think, on the verge of seeing one of the great collapses of political popularity and good will in American history. The nation is on the verge of a Network moment, where “Yes, we can” is being drowned out with cries of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

George Washington died because of misguided notions about how getting the bad blood out via leeches would cure his ailment. It was a case of a cure that killed. Sure, his cold was gone, but so was he. In a sense, the draconian measures some would use to remake our nation’s fabric, from health care, to national security, to the economy itself, are somewhat akin to bleeding the nation en route to restoration. All this will do is make us weaker. Or dead.

I shared a sermon last Sunday at my church based on a haunting passage from the writings of the prophet Jeremiah called, A Dying Nation At A Crossroads. The prophet was a patriot, but he knew that sometimes patriotism involves even more than waving a flag – a stand must be taken. His message was:

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” Jeremiah 6:16 (New International Version)

Jeremiah was speaking to a nation at a pivotal moment – a time that called for clear thinking and action. They had been on a slippery slope for a long time and the clock was running out. Nothing short of a return to what made them strong – even great – in the first place would correct the problem.

The week Winston Churchill traveled to diminutive Fulton, Missouri to deliver his most famous speech – the one that talked about a sinister iron curtain born of Soviet expansionism – Time Magazine published a review of two recently publish books. One was a work by Frederick L. Schuman, the Woodrow Wilson professor of government at Williams College, called Soviet Politics. It was basically a defense of the Soviet system. The other was by Saul Alinsky, who had written Reveille For Radicals, the spiritual ancestor of his 1971 work. The title of the review was: Problem Of The Century.

The reviewer suggested that, “the dominant problem of the 20th century is the reconciliation of economic liberty with political liberty.” He saw this issue resolved in Schuman’s book by simply “liquidating political liberty.” He saw Alinsky’s ideas in a little more favorable light, suggesting that it was written with a “burning honesty” and that the author had “glimpsed a vision which is greater than his ability to put it in practical terms.”

In other words, the review for Time saw something constructive in what Alinsky was saying in those days immediately following World War II and as the Cold War was just barely being noised about. But he indicated that only time would really tell.

In fact, that reviewer did not live long enough to see the fruit of Saul Alinsky’s attempt to put his vision into those “practical terms” in Rules For Radicals. He died 10 years before that. His name was Whitaker Chambers.

He never got to write a review of that book, but he did write one of his own and it became a classic called simply, Witness. It was his treatise as a man who had once been a communist, even an agent. Then he had seen the light and spent the rest of his days fighting, at a great personal price, his former faith. Along the way, he exposed a traitor or two, gaining him the wrath of the liberal elite in America, though he has long since been vindicated as a truth-teller by many infallible proofs.

He began his book with a letter to his children, letting them know the nature of the struggle and the craftiness of the enemy:

Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world.

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world.

The Communist vision has a mighty agitator and a mighty propagandist. They are the crisis. The agitator needs no soapbox. It speaks insistently to the human mind at the point where desperation lurks. The propagandist writes no Communist gibberish. It speaks insistently to the human mind at the point where man’s hope and man’s energy fuse to fierceness. The vision inspires. The crisis impels.

Too bad Mr. Chambers didn’t live to see the demise of such thinking. But then again…

Dr. House And Mr. Obama

July 24, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Obama administration, Religion | 3 Comments 

If healthcare reform, Obama style, gets traction and becomes the new reality in America, one completely overlooked consequence will be that the highly-popular television show, HOUSE, will have to say “yes, we can” and go off the air.   Or at-the-least, the program will have to be shortened to one act, focused completely on a waiting room and with the only dramatic tension being just which one test the team will choose to run.  

If you are not a regular viewer, what you need to know is that the fictional Dr. Gregory House, played by British actor Hugh Laurie, is a medical genius.   He heads up a team of brilliant diagnosticians at a New Jersey teaching hospital and each episode necessarily involves a quest, via many tests and approaches, to figure out what usually-obscure illness threatens the life of the patient du jour.

It’s Sherlock Holmes in an emergency room stuff – sort of a “what done it?”

A few years ago, I had some pain in my chest and went to a local emergency room.   I was admitted to the hospital for some tests.  They put me on a treadmill, wired me for sound, and later did this thing called a “chemical stress test.”  That’s code for: “Injection of weapons grade uranium into patient to cause meltdown.”  There was one more test they could have done.  In fact, one doctor strongly recommended it.  It is called cardiac catheterization. A doctor inserts a thin plastic tube into an artery or vein in the arm or leg. From there it can be advanced into the chambers of the heart or into the coronary arteries.

The test is really the gold standard when it comes to diagnosing a heart problem.  It’s also apparently quite expensive.  Alas, the good doctor who wanted to see it done was overruled by my HMO – I won’t mention the name of the company, let’s just say it sounds a little bit like “Permanent Czar.” 

I passed all the tests – no heart problem – and headed home.  But my wife and I had a nagging question: Would that heart catheterization test have been a smart thing to have?

Over the next several days I received calls and emails from friends all over the country and I began to notice an anecdotal trend.   I heard testimony from people who had gone through what I had experienced, with all tests coming back fine, only to do the heart catheterization and find a serious arterial blockage requiring emergency surgery.

One such call was from my favorite liberal Democrat and good friend, Bob Beckel.  He told the same story – test after test came back negative, then the heart cath and a trip to multiple by-pass land.   He and others told me to pitch a fit with my czarist (Germanic form) health insurance company and keep doing so until they agreed to pay for the test.  So I did.

Already-too-long story short, I had the heart catheterization test done four months after my hospitalization, and thankfully it also indicated that there was nothing wrong; except for the stress of having to go through that period, fighting all the way, to get what could and should have been done during my prior hospital stay.  That would have saved time, maybe even a little money.  

Now, here is my question:  How is health care reform ala Obama going to do anything other than make it even harder to get such a test done? 

Does anyone without a power-grab agenda seriously believe that government-run health care will make it more likely that an expensive test will be run after several others have indicated no problem?  Calling Dr. House, Dr. Cuddy, Dr. House – I mean, really?

Many doctors already have to fight hospital administrators and health insurance companies en route to quality patient care.   Just ask them.   Will placing another level of authority over them, ceding more local turf to the feds, make things better? 

Frankly, when I take a look at what health care could become in America if we don’t collectively say “No, we can’t,” I find myself pretty cool with my HMO.  I know they get a bad rap, but if we don’t watch it, there will come a time when we look back and nostalgically refer to right now as “the good old days.” 

Sure, some stuff is broken and needs to be fixed.  Why not start with tort reform?  Why are we not hearing about this from the White House and the Democrats in Congress? 

Follow the money.  

I actually think the whole issue is being framed incorrectly and therefore it is easily subject to misunderstanding, even manipulation.   We don’t need health care reform.  Our standard of care is pretty good.   No, what people are really talking about is health coverage reform.   But no plan on the table right now is able to even suggest the broadening of coverage to include those millions who don’t now have insurance, without compromising the quality of care.

We are at a crossroads on this issue as a culture.  And many Americans – certainly many politicians – seem more than willing to trade our high standard of quality care for a model that dumbs it all down.  We are on the verge of selling our national soul for a mess of perilous pottage, and in the end we will all suffer.  Most of that suffering will be in long lines or crowded waiting rooms.

Has there ever been a situation in our history where increased government involvement in the actual running of something (not mere oversight, but managing the details day to day) has turned out to be a cost cutter?  Anyone? Anyone?

Creating a system whereby a significant number of people can get a service for free that others must pay for does not tend to keep overall costs down.  In fact, they skyrocket, placing an even greater burden on those who pay.  It’s misguided compassion and inherently based on class-envy. 

And don’t even get me started on the whole privacy-medical-records thing.  Recently, I had a conversation with a family – military people – and they have been looking forward to a particular promotion.   The problem was with a visit to the doctor a while back and the casual mentioning of “anxiety” to the physician. This led to the insertion of a comment on the computerized record that found its way to a decision maker on the promotion issue.  Bottom line, the advance was nixed.  Not because of any real issue, but because an annotation carelessly made, and subject to misinterpretation, became part of the record extant.  

Welcome to your future if the Dems have their way with one fifth of the U.S. economy. 

Finally, as I finish my health care rant, I can’t help but bring up the issue of evangelicals and Obama, at least in the context of so many younger ones lending him their support last fall.  My conversations with many young-Obama-evangelicals suggested that the number one reason they were willing to, in effect, abandon vital conservative evangelical positions such as the pro-life issue, had to do with temporal concerns and compassion, particularly the idea of providing universal health care. 

Now, six months into his administration, and as the details of his plan (or stealthy lack thereof) come into at least marginally better focus, I wonder if some of those hip “values” voters who bought into the mania have any remorse?   And when his plans sink under the weight of their sheer audacity, will it have been worth it? 

Maybe many will be dazed and confused and left to ponder life without utopian fixes and reflecting as Dr. House did in episode number 119: "It does tell us something. Though I have no idea what."

Nuff Said

July 15, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, News media, Supreme Court | 1 Comment 

Everything anyone needs to know about the Sotomayor confirmation hearings was contined in the brief exchange between anchor Robert Siegel and justice correspondent Ari Shapiro yesterday afternoon on NPR’s All Things Considered.

RS:      …It’s not the full-blooded Judge Sotomayor that you’ve been studying….

AS:      Nina Totenberg and I and many others have been studying this woman’s background and her professional work and personal life for months.  The woman we’re seeing in the Senate today bears so little resemblance to that woman that we have been studying….

She is so low-keyed, so boring, saying so may things that any of President Bush’s nominees could have said.  You know, it’s pretty clear that she’s got the votes to get confirmed and is just trying to get right on through.

Magic Number Or Misery For The Democrats?

June 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Comedy, Congress | 2 Comments 

This morning the Minnesota Supreme Court handed down its decision in favor of Al Franken in his eight-month battle with incumbent Senator Norm Coleman over the narrow margin of the election to determine the occupant of Minnesota’s seat in Capitol Hill’s upper chamber. Soon after, Coleman announced that, instead of taking his battle to the level of the Federal courts, he would concede defeat, leaving the way open for the onetime Stuart Smalley to take his seat.

(Richard A. Baker, the Historian of the Senate, was quoted as saying that Franken’s swearing-in would mark the first time a professional comedian had ever become a Senator. It’s hard to read that statement with a straight face. For example, for two terms in the 1950s and the 1960s one of our Southern states was represented by a very amiable gentleman, now deceased, who did not make much of a legislative mark, but was renowned in some circles for his habit of throwing empty bourbon bottles out of the window of his quarters in the Senate Office Building after consuming their contents. If Rick Perlstein can guess who that was, he gets a free steak dinner from me.)

On the surface, Franken’s victory looks like the ultimate triumph for the Democrats. Thanks to Arlen Specter’s defection from the Republican side of the aisle they now hold 60 seats, the supposed filibuster-proof majority. But Franken’s arrival, as no doubt many Democratic senators – perhaps even one as obtuse as Harry Reid – are aware, constitutes a mixed blessing at best.

As I said once or twice at TNN earlier this year, Franken’s career has been spent doing and saying things more or less antithetical to the usual background of a United States Senator. For well over thirty years he made his living being provocative and, not infrequently, insulting. The snide, snarky remark is sure to come more readily to his lips than genial words of consensus. Once he goes on C-Span and opens his mouth – and, indeed, he will be one of the Senators handling the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor – he is sure, sooner or later, to come up with utterances that will provide prime fodder for Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and all their colleagues in the worlds of talk radio and cable TV commentary. Before long, even our Vice President might seem the model of thoughtfulness and discretion.

So a major task facing the Democrats, if they want to improve their numbers come 2010 rather than lose seats, will be to find some way to muzzle old Al at the right moments – before the watchword across the media becomes: “….and doggone it, people don’t like him.”

The Hard Irony of High Expectations

June 12, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Congress, Ethics, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

Here’s a troubling and intriguing story that might otherwise have been buried on the back pages, little noticed, and soon forgotten.

But these are the still the early days of an administration that both claims and proclaims the moral high ground, so this apparently cynical little exercise of business as usual already has some serious legs — and seems to be sprouting more of them by the hour.

Byron York broke it today in the Washington Examiner under the headline “What’s behind Obama’s sudden attempt to fire the AmeriCorps inspector general?”

There are a number of unanswered questions today about President Obama’s abrupt decision to fire the inspector general of the AmeriCorps program, Gerald Walpin. Obama sent letters to House and Senate leaders yesterday informing them that he was firing Walpin, effective 30 days from the date of the letters.

“It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General,” the president wrote. “That is no longer the case with regard to this Inspector General.”

The 30 day requirement is important because last year Congress passed the Inspectors General Reform Act, which was designed to strengthen protections for IGs, who have the responsibility of investigating allegations of waste, fraud and abuse within federal agencies, against interference by political appointees or the White House. Part of the Act was a requirement that the president give Congress 30 days’ notice before dismissing an IG. One of the co-sponsors of the Act was then-Sen. Barack Obama.

The Act also requires the president to outline the cause for his decision to remove an IG. Beyond saying that he did not have the “fullest confidence” in Walpin, Obama gave no reason for his action.

There are two big questions about the president’s actions. One, why did he decide to fire Walpin? And two, did he abide by the law that he himself co-sponsored?

Suffice it to say that the attempts so far to defang the story (from White House Counsel Greg Craig, and  Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform Norman Eisen), have only managed to raise more questions than they have answered.

At least one thing is settled conclusively by this story with its fascinating trail of Updates: Print journalism as we have known it is already obsolete and, before too long, will be deader than a doornail.

She Has Penciled You In For The Twelfth Of Never

June 9, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress | Leave a Comment 

An article today in The Hill starts out describing House Minority Whip Eric Cantor’s unsuccessful attempts to schedule some face time with Speaker Pelosi.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) says he has requested to meet privately with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) this year, but has been repeatedly rebuffed.

In an interview with The Hill, the minority whip said, “I have been told that Speaker Pelosi doesn’t like to meet with Republicans … I would say that is the case in my instance. I have put in requests to meet with her and have yet to be responded to.”

But it segues into a fairly long and not unadmiring profile of the young Virginia congressman, supplemented by excerpts from the reporters’ interview.

Harry Reid’s Day (Way) Off

May 19, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, News media, Senate | 1 Comment 

Last week, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, stumbled her way through a chaotic press conference in which she tried to explain why it was that her account of her briefings by the CIA six years ago differed so much from the accounts of others who were present.

Today, it was the turn of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to embarrass himself before the press. Speaking to assembled members of the Fourth Estate, he was asked about the absence from the Senate chamber of Sen. Ted Kennedy. Reid stated that the senator was continuing to undergo treatment for brain cancer. Asked if the cancer was in remission, the gentleman from Nevada replied in the affirmative. Reporters checking with Kennedy’s own office later were pointedly told that the office would not confirm that statement or make any other response, and even before the conference ended Jim Manley, Reid’s own spokesman (and a longtime Kennedy staffer in years past) was retracting the statement.

Reid was also asked about the status of ailing Sen. Robert Byrd. He told the reporters that the 91-year-old legislator was to be released from the hospital sometime this week – a statement promptly denied by Byrd’s own spokesman.

Speaking about President Obama’s plans to close Guantanamo’s prison and transfer its inmates to American facilities, Reid declared: “We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.” As Laurie Kellman observes in this AP account, no one at the White House had been advocating that terrorists run wild around this nation – another gaffe that Manley had to clarify.

All of this brings to mind the process by which Sen. Rod Burris finessed his way into his seat after Reid repeatedly declared he wouldn’t. Can the Democrats afford to keep Reid as Majority Leader until November of next year?

Damned If She Did. Now Damned If She Didn’t.

May 19, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Bush Administration, Congress, Domestic issues, Intelligence, National Security, Obama administration, War on Terror | Leave a Comment 

James Kirchick’s provocative lede in his piece —“Is Nancy Pelosi a liar or a hypocrite?”— on today’s Politico pretty much tells the story that follows:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accomplished two unusual feats last week: She got the head of the CIA to call her a liar, and she implicated herself in what her left-wing base must, by dint of its own contrived logic, consider a war crime.

And today in “The Swamp,” Mark Silva reports a new CNN Opinion Research Corp. Poll that can’t have gone down too well in the Speaker’s Office:

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has taken a fall in public opinion, according to a new CNN Opinion Research Corp. poll showing that nearly half of all Americans surveyed do not approve of the way the California Democrat is handling her job as speaker of the House.

The newest results come from a survey taken after the speaker accused the CIA of misleading her about the interrogation tactics that were being used on suspected terrorists several years ago. The CIA maintains that it briefed Pelosi on water-boarding and other tactics in September 2002, but the speaker maintains she was not told waterboarding was being used then. House Republican Leader John Boehner, siding with the CIA on the credibility question, accuses Pelosi of changing stories.

In the May 14-17 survey, just 39 percent said they approve of the job that Pelosi is performing as speaker and 48 percent said they disapprove. Only 12 percent voiced no view. In January, 51 percent had said they approved of the speaker’s performance and just 22 percent voiced disapproval.

And in his column today, Rich Lowry examines the tortuous logic of the Speaker’s position (or at least of one of her several positions) on this subject:

For Pelosi’s account to be accurate, the CIA must have engaged in one of the most baroque and ineffectual conspiracies in the history of Washington. Remember: Pelosi claims that the CIA lied to her in a September 2002 classified briefing and told her that it hadn’t waterboarded high-level al Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah. To support her version, Pelosi needs to stack implausibility on top of implausibility in a precarious Jenga tower of self-justification.

The CIA must have convinced Porter Goss, the Republican congressman (and subsequent CIA director) who was present at the 2002 briefing, to lie and pronounce himself “slack-jawed” at Pelosi’s account. It must have forged the “contemporaneous records” CIA Director Leon Panetta has cited that show Pelosi was told of the waterboarding. It must have either pulled the wool over Panetta’s eyes or enlisted the active engagement of the Obama nominee in a monstrous machinery of deception.

The President At Notre Dame

May 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, California politics, Congress, Culture, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Election 2008, Lifestyle, Media, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Public Opinion, Religion, Republican Party, Supreme Court, Vice President Biden, economy, education | 1 Comment 

Tomorrow President Obama will receive an honorary degree at the University of Notre Dame, the nation’s quintessential Catholic institution of higher learning, and will deliver an address to the assembled graduates. The invitation extended by the school’s president has stirred considerable controversy (and plenty of vocal protests) because of the President’s espousal of the pro-choice viewpoint on abortion throughout his career. (It has been noted here and there that other pro-choice politicians like New York’s onetime Governor Mario Cuomo and the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan appeared at previous Notre Dame commencements without much incident. But it may have helped that they were lifelong Catholics, unlike Obama.)

The Chief Executive’s appearance tomorrow is an opportunity for him to extend a conciliatory hand to the large number of Americans who, whether or not they voted for him in November, are not supporters of some of the radical programs being espoused by a considerable number of Democratic-affiliated groups, such as an expansion of legal abortion, decriminalization of marijuana and other drugs, and gay marriage.

It seems to become more evident by the month that when voters sought “change” in voting for Obama and Vice President Biden last month, a substantial percentage of them were mainly concerned with the economy, health care, and perhaps increased opportunity of education, and were not that keen on the other aspects of “change” as defined in the agendas of MoveOn.org or other groups. This would especially apply to voters in the states surrounding the Deep South, large portions of the Catholic electorate, and churchgoing African-American voters nationwide.

In California, the voters in the latter group helped Obama carry the state, but at the same time provided the margin that passed Proposition 8 which reversed the California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. And it turns out that on abortion, the percentage of voters supporting Roe vs. Wade and the pro-choice line, after peaking during the Clinton years, has steadily been declining, to the point that this week, a Gallup poll revealed that a bare majority of those whose opinion was sampled – 51% – described themselves as “pro-life.”

This strongly indicates that a considerable number of voters – perhaps poised on becoming the majority – would not be looking forward to Al Franken taking his seat in the Senate and locking in a (theoretically) filibuster-proof majority that would then fulfill all the left’s fondest dreams in the social arena.

The events of the last few weeks involving Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean, might prove a harbinger of things to come. A few weeks ago, during the Miss USA pageant, Ms. Prejean, educated at Christian schools, was asked by the online gossip columnist Perez Hilton, one of the pageant’s judges, what her opinion was of gay marriage. The contestant replied that her own view was that marriage could only exist between a man and woman – which is still officially the view of Congress, as expressed in the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by a majority of both parties and signed by President Clinton a decade ago.

Hilton (followed by an avalanche of bloggers and left-leaning pundits) subjected Ms. Prejean to ridicule. But instant polls soon made it clear that most Americans supported her right to express her opinion, and even Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who spearheaded the legalization of same-sex unions in his city, acknowledged her right to free speech.

Ms. Prejean was then ridiculed as a hypocrite, after some rather mild and fairly tasteful photos of her in an unclad state appeared online. But Donald Trump, owner of the Miss USA pageant, rejected pressure to strip her of her crown, and so in recent days the beauty queen has managed to largely prevail in the court of public opinion.

The way this particular controversy has played out has not been conveniently timed for the supporters of same-sex marriage. As I noted last week in my post “Gay Marriage At The Crossroads,”  the District of Columbia city council just voted to recognize such unions as performed in other states. Under the Home Rule Bill, Congress has a right to challenge this decision – and GOP lawmakers have made it clear that they will pursue this option, which means that in a matter of months each member of Congress will have to vote yes or no on this question.

The issues of abortion, gay marriage, and narcotics delegalization will also be prominent when the President selects a nominee to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. It seems less and less likely that any thoroughly liberal, MoveOn-approved choice would automatically sail through the Senate.

So I think that the best approach for the President tomorrow is not to mouth a series of platitudes predicated on the idea that his listeners (or the American public in general) will automatically accept all of his positions, but to acknowledge that there are differences of opinion and to express a willingness to work within the Constitution to achieve a consensus that will bridge these differences. If he does that, and follows through, he may considerably improve the chances of his party maintaining control of Congress in 2010. If he pursues a partisan path, however, the GOP – perhaps as early as the Virginia election this year – could be on the comeback trail.

Hoyer Vying For Speaker?

May 12, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under American Politics, Congress | Leave a Comment 

Yikes! Perhaps Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s political instincts were correct — when two years ago — she tried to railroad Steny Hoyer’s (D-Md) seniority in favor of the incorrigible John Murtha (D-Pa) for the position of House Majority Leader.  Now Hoyer wants to launch an inquiry into Pelosi’s alleged knowledge of the specifities of “enhanced interrogation techniques” before the release of the so called “torture memos” earlier this month:

The House majority leader reluctantly agreed Tuesday that congressional hearings should investigate Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that she wasn’t informed, more than six years ago, that harsh interrogation methods were used on an Al-Qaeda leader.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., called Republican challenges to Pelosi’s assertion a diversion from the real question of whether the Bush administration tortured terrorist suspects. Nonetheless, he acknowledged the controversy should be resolved.

Democrats will hold a series of hearings on Justice Department memos released last month that justified rough tactics against detainees, including waterboarding — simulated drowning — and sleep deprivation.

While Democrats want the hearings to focus on what they call torture, Republicans have tried to turn the issue to their advantage by complaining that Pelosi and other Democrats knew of the tactics but didn’t protest. Pelosi was briefed in 2002 while on the House Intelligence Committee.

Hoyer, asked at a news conference whether Democrats were inviting political problems for themselves by holding hearings, said, “I think the facts need to get out.

Gay Marriage Reaches The Crossroads

May 8, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Election 2008, Election 2012, News media, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion, Republican Party, Senate | 2 Comments 

The Obama Administration enjoyed a number of small triumphs this week.  The Dow stayed well over 8500. Despite an increase in unemployment, the overall economic picture has been showing signs of improvement.  The President announced some budget trims here and there, to the tune of $17 billion – just to make sure that the country understood that, when faced with an obsolete directional system, for example, he was not going to keep it around just because he’s a Democrat.

But on Tuesday an event happened that may well snowball into something that the White House, and Democrats on Capitol Hill, would probably not care to get involved with just yet. But more and more, it is becoming inescapable: after a Presidential campaign in which Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel (neither much of a mainstream figure) were the only candidates to support gay marriage, a situation is looming in which every Senate and House member may have to declare themselves on one side or another of the issue, and very soon.

Last year, there was talk about introducing a gay-marriage bill into the District of Columbia City Council. At the time, the capital’s newspaper for the gay community, the Washington Blade, argued that such a move was premature; it urged waiting until 2009. And so the proposal went unintroduced, as the nation elected a President who expressed support for the civil-union concept for gay couples, but drew the line at marriage.

This week,a few days after NBC News and the Washington Post announced poll results indicating, for the first time, that a plurality of Americans favor gay marriage (49%, with 46% opposed), the supporters of this legislation made their move, and so the City Council of the nation’s capital passed a bill recognizing gay marriages from other states, by a vote of 12 to 1.

The sole dissenting vote was cast by former Washington mayor Marion Barry. When it became evident that he would vote against the bill, this caused some surprise and consternation. For one thing, long before Barry’s drug use and lackadaisical administrative style gained him notoriety, he was one of the founders – indeed, the first chairman – of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee and, in those days, fought for civil rights alongside the iconic John Lewis, who now, as a Congressman, is a vocal champion of gay marriage.

And there’s also the fact that in his early years as mayor in the 1970s and early 1980s, Barry was a friend of gay rights, and his administration’s tolerant attitude had much to do with making the Dupont Circle neighborhood as much of a magnet for gays as Castro Street or the West Village. He also was a firm supporter of the Whitman-Walker clinic in the early days of its fight against AIDS, and Jim Graham, the longtime executive director of the clinic and one of the two openly gay City Council members, pointed this out (as seen in this Youtube clip) as he expressed his disappointment with Barry’s decision against the bill on Tuesday. (Meanwhile, David Catania, the council’s other gay member, represented the no-compromise attitude of younger gays in his remarks to Barry.)

Barry had actually gone on record as a sponsor of the bill when it was introduced. In the Youtube clip he suggests that his staffers had somehow arranged for this without his knowledge, but what is more likely is that strong opposition to recognition of gay marriages from churchgoers and older voters in Ward 8, which he represents, caused him to change his mind.

The council’s vote was greeted with a furious response from several African-American ministers in the area outside the meeting room, and it took the police to restore order, as seen in the clip. But this was far from the end of the story. On Wednesday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a onetime Brigham Young University football star and convert to the Mormon faith (and also to the Republican Party – his Democratic father’s first wife, Kitty, later married 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis), stated that he and other GOP lawmakers stood ready to challenge the new law within 30 days, as the Home Rule Charter provides.

Although the District’s representative in Congress, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, dismissed the idea that Congress will overturn the law, the situation is distinctly a worrisome one for the Democrats. It seems very likely that Republican lawmakers can garner enough support from their Democratic colleagues in the South and in the more conservative areas of the Midwest to force a vote.

And if the House votes to endorse the Council’s action, the next step for gay activists and their allies is plainly to seek the repeal of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed by majorities of both parties and signed into law by President Clinton. Although voters, especially younger ones, seem to be steadily shifting toward support of gay unions, opposition still runs strong in a number of House districts that the Democrats only managed to recapture in the last two years, and in states, such as North Carolina, that were essential to Obama’s victory and which he would need in 2012. Therefore, both the White House and Congressional Democrats are walking a fine line for the next 18 months.

And the gay community is now determined to keep up the pressure, as shown in this editorial by Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff. He points out that President Obama, throughout his campaign, assured voters that he meant to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay service personnel in place since 1993, and this language was repeated on the White House website after his inauguration. But then, the text was altered to refer to the President’s intention to change the policy “in a sensible way.” Following protests, this text was changed yet again, to state that the Admistration’s intention again is to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” – but, to the irritation of activists, the “in a sensible way” phrase was kept. Given the eagle-eyed attention directed at the website’s statements, it’s a sure thing that every statement Obama makes about the District’s new law, when it comes up for Congressional review, will be meticulously analyzed. This may be as thorny a situation as any Obama faces in his first term.

Jack Kemp’s Funeral

May 8, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Episcopal Church, In Memoriam, Nixon Administration figures, Republican Party, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

This afternoon, at a packed Washington National Cathedral, the funeral of all-star AFL quarterback, longtime New York congressman, 1996 Republican vice-presidential candidate, and dedicated economic and social trailblazer Jack Kemp was held. Originally it was planned for his own Presbyterian church, but when it became clear that many more wished to attend the service than that building could hold, it was moved to the structure sometimes called “America’s church.”

And, as was to be expected, this was a quintessentially American service in its inclusiveness; Mary Kate Cary at US News And World Report’s website reports that it attracted “the most diverse crowd I’ve ever seen at a Washington funeral.” An Episcopal priest conducted a Presbyterian service; the Howard University choir sang; and many yarmulkes were seen among those assembled. All races and walks of life were represented: blue-collar workers joined Senators, liberals joined libertarians.

Ms. Cary reports that the most memorable eulogy was delivered by former Nixon White House chief counsel Chuck Colson, who eloquently observed that “Jack Kemp was indomitable as few of us are.”

Indeed, we would be blessed as a nation if our current crop of leaders had more of Kemp’s blend of indomitability, compassion and vision.

The Speaker’s Tangled Web Begins Unraveling

May 8, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, War on Terror | Leave a Comment 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Emily Litella “Never mind” moment regarding her definitive denials of any knowledge of the CIA EIT program may not be that far off now.   Perhaps her selective, convenient, faulty will be refreshed by the wave of documentation that is beginning to break.

Indeed, by the time all the relevant documents have been released or leaked, the question may turn out to be: Who in the Congressional leadership and intelligence hierarchy didn’t know all about the CIA’s EIT techniques and the individuals on whom they were used.

Last night ABC news revealed, and this morning Politico confirms, that forty briefings were held informing the congressional leadership, committee chairs, and ranking members, about techniques and subjects.

An intelligence report sent recently to Capitol Hill shows that members of Congress were briefed 40 times since 2002 on aspects of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” program. Many have decried the techniques used in the program as torture.

The list seems to undercut the claim by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), then-minority leader and ranking member on the House intelligence committee, that she was never told at a 2002 briefing that waterboarding and other aggressive techniques had been used or would be used, only that legal opinions approving of their use had been issued.

The document describes a September 24, 2002 briefing to Pelosi and then-intelligence chairman Porter Goss (R-Fla.) this way: “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed.” 

The Speaker may not be able to slough this off with a mere “Never mind.”  She may have to turn to Captain Renault for inspiration and plead misinformation.

Here is a link to the report.   You may get a crick in your neck reading it, but it raises a lot of questions for some Solons —including Senator Jay Rockefeller— whose capacity for righteous indignation is now exposed as being conveniently untethered to the pesky reality of biography.

Follow the Money, Print the Legend

May 6, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Congress, Economic issues, New Media, Richard Nixon, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Rep. Brad Miller is chairing ill-attended hearings on oversight of the $787 billion stimulus. Reports The Washington Times:

“These hearings are titled ‘follow the money’ after the character in the movie – and the book – ‘All the President’s Men,’ ” Mr. Miller said. “The Deep Throat character, he told [reporters Carl] Bernstein and [Bob] Woodward to trace the money back to find out where the corruption began.

“We hope this will not end up as anything as sordid as that was,” he joked.

Mark Felt, the real Deep Throat, never said “Follow the money.” In 1997, Daniel Schorr wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times about his search for the phrase’s origin. When he could not find it in book version of All the President’s Men, he spoke to William Goldman, who wrote the script of the movie version. “I can’t believe I made it up,” said Goldman. “I was in constant contact with [Bob] Woodward while writing the screenplay. I guess he made it up.” Woodward thought that Goldman had made it up. Whoever wrote the line, concluded Schorr, “it was an invention.”

Rude Awakening, or The Edwards Zone Redux

May 5, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Ethics, News media, Nixonland Nitpicks, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Senate | 1 Comment 

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Napoleon (1851)

Most of what Marx said has been proven wrong by history, but that quote still holds up with a vengeance. The opening pages of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland describe vividly the days in which Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, having seemingly vanquished the forces of the Right for all eternity, was on the verge of ushering in a second Era Of Good Feelings (as defined by Democrats and seconded by Rockefeller Republicans) when the Watts riots gave the nation a brutal slap on the face and ushered in a series of violent and chaotic events that brought about the resurgence of conservatism.

In much the same way, as President Obama’s first 100 days closed last Wednesday with Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democrats and David Souter’s notifying the White House of his planned retirement, the stage seemed set for the final triumph of liberalism for this century, if not millennium. All that was needed was for Al Franken’s smirk to materialize in one chair in the Senate, and all would be well.

But alas, in the preceding weeks, a distant rumble of things to come could be heard. Early last month Knopf published How It Ended, the collected stories of Jay McInerney. best known for Bright Lights, Big City. This volume garnered its author the best reviews of his career. And, in some of these, it was mentioned that one of the tales in the book, “Penelope On The Pond,” imagined Alison Poole, the heroine of McInerney’s 1988 novel Story Of My Life, as a discarded mistress of a presidential candidate, biding her time in a quiet cabin somewhere in the Rockies. The reviews further noted that McInerney has often acknowledged that Alison Poole was based on Rielle Hunter.

Rielle Hunter? Wasn’t she involved with that guy who had the most famous hairdo in politics before Rod Blagojevich came along? Didn’t he once run for Vice President or something? What was his name, um…Edwards, John Edwards, right?

Yes, John Edwards, who, in the eight months since I last posted about him, heeded the bidding of the Democratic establishment and faded into the woodwork, appearing in public only at University of North Carolina basketball games, while Rielle Hunter, the mother of an infant girl whose precocious head of hair somehow brought him to mind, was banished from her mansion in Santa Barbara (after the death of her benefactor and Edwards’s finance chairman for his 2008 presidential run, Fred Baron, in October) and exiled to a modest house in South Orange, New Jersey. It seemed a sure thing that neither would be heard from again.

But that was before it was reported that Elizabeth Edwards, the terminally ill wife of the ex-Senator, was about to publish a new book, Resilience, in which she discusses her husband’s affair. And before the Raleigh News and Observer, which has quietly followed the ins and outs of the Edwards scandal ever since the onetime Veep-presumptive bamboozled the paper’s executive editor into killing an article about his affair in late 2007 (by denying it and claiming that such a story would cause needless suffering to his wife), informed America last Sunday that a Federal investigation into the financing of his 2008 campaign was now underway.

Yes, like the most evil genie imaginable, the Edwards Zone, with all its many mysteries involving campaign operatives with a taste for high-stakes gambling (and a propensity to claim parentage of babies whom they then completely ignore), trial lawyers who send their private planes on round trips from Texas to make hour-long stopovers in Caribbean islands noted for offshore banking, and nonprofit foundations that manage to channel millions to LLCs that abruptly vanish, has come back.

In a column to appear in tomorrow’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd articulates the frustration that many liberals in the media must feel. It’s been long understood that John Edwards’s narcissism was close to uncontrollable; it took all the weight of the Democratic establishment to prevent him from touring college campuses last fall and to quietly go back to the Tar Heel State.

But what drives Elizabeth Edwards to go on Oprah Winfrey’s show, as she did today (for a taping that will be broadcast on Thursday), to speculate on how much or how little young Frances Quinn Hunter resembles the man who might have been a heartbeat away from the Oval Office if a few thousand votes had gone the other way in Ohio four and a half years ago? What is going to happen when Andrew Young (not the venerated lieutenant of Martin Luther King and former UN Ambassador, but the aforementioned operative) goes before a grand jury and is asked to explain why his own mother told a reporter she does not believe his claim, made through a lawyer, that he fathered Rielle Hunter’s daughter? Or when such a body ponders the question of why the chartered plane carrying Ms. Hunter and her daughter from California to the US Virgin Islands would make a quick stop in Mobile, Alabama, to acquire a passport for the infant – a passport not needed for travel to those islands, but necessary for, say, a visit to the Grand Turks and Caicos, to which the aforementioned private jet traveled for an hour during Ms. Hunter’s sojourn?

Last year, I wrote a dozen posts on this subject, and posed the questions that I think need to be raised by diligent Federal prosecutors to a grand jury. Some more have arisen, notably regarding the three million or so dollars donated to a nonprofit affiliated with Edwards by Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, the 98-year-old heiress who, until now, has been best known for providing her nation with the beautiful landscaping design that the South Lawn of the White House has had since the Kennedy Administration. (The nonprofit then paid an equivalent sum to an LLC – with the same address as the nonprofit, and which vanished from the records at the same time the nonprofit closed up shop in 2008 – for “consulting” work.)

If the Democrats have any luck, sullying Ms. Mellon’s legacy of Camelot will be the worst that John Edwards will do to the liberal tradition. But I have the feeling that there’s a considerable chance that the true dimensions of the events involving Edwards and his associates between 2006 and 2008 will  emerge, little by little. The question is how many journalists will follow the lead of the News and Observer (and some other North Carolina media) in looking into the scarifying revelations in the heart of….the Edwards Zone.

They’ve Made A Little List

May 4, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress | Leave a Comment 

The Hill asked 99 Senators to name (on the record) their most, and (off the record) their least, bipartisan colleagues.   The results appear on this morning’s front page.  Here’s the executive summary:

THE MOST, AND LEAST BIPARTISAN MEMBERS OF THE SENATE

MOST BIPARTISAN

DEMOCRATS

1. Edward Kennedy (Mass.)

2. Tom Carper (Del.)

3. Chris Dodd (Conn.)

4. (tied) Evan Bayh (Ind.)

4. (tied) Tom Harkin (Iowa)

REPUBLICANS

1. Susan Collins (Maine)

2. Olympia Snowe (Maine)

3. Orrin Hatch (Utah)

4. (tied) Richard Lugar (Ind.)

4. (tied) John McCain (Ariz.)

LEAST BIPARTISAN

DEMOCRATS

1. Patrick Leahy (Vt.)

2. Charles Schumer (N.Y.)

3. Chris Dodd (Conn.)*

4. Dick Durbin (Ill.)

5. John Kerry (Mass.)

REPUBLICANS

1. Jim Bunning (Ky.)

2. David Vitter (La.)

3. Tom Coburn (Okla.)

4. Jim DeMint (S.C.)

5. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.)

*Chris Dodd made both lists.

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