GOP R.I.P. – Just the Ticket Wednesday, Oct 9 2013 

Politics , , victorgold 4:51 pm

Six years ago a veteran Washington sage presciently predicted that the Republican Party as he knew it was in its death throes. Well, not that presciently. What our sage observer didn’t foresee was that the party would die a slow death preceded by the onset of dementia.

Too bad. A quick departure, like the Whigs in the 1850s, might have changed the political order without corrupting the system that made our country, in the words of our first Republican president, “the last best hope of earth.”

As things stand in this autumn of our discontent, the lingering corpus of the party of Lincoln is doing his country more harm than good. So much so that it’s time, a veteran Washington sage might say, to either cure or kill the patient. No half-measures, no life support. For 2016, whatever the opposition, let the Republican national ticket be Rand Paul for President and Ted Cruz for Vice President – or vice versa, whatever the kookery of the Tea Party  decides.

PAUL-CRUZ. Just the ticket to clear the air and keep everybody happy: The Democrats because they’d get four more years in the White House; the Tea Party kooks because, after all those years of mealy-mouthed nominees like Mitt Romney, they’d finally won the day (though losing the election because of a backstabbing coalition of party traitors and the pro-Muslim media). But most important for the future, the liberated conservatives who could, like the one-time Whigs of Lincoln’s day, move on to form a New Republican Party of responsible opposition.

Sound bite to remember

“A poker-playing, whisky-drinking, evil old man.”

–Union leader John L. Lewis on Vice President John Nance Garner, back in the good old days when political discourse was civil

 

Virginia’s First Lady of swag Sunday, Jun 30 2013 

Ethics and Language and Politics , , victorgold 2:58 pm

Have you taken notice of the New Language of Culpability? People are no longer guilty of willful wrongdoing. Like Anthony Wiener, the current front-runner – as distinguished from viral front-shower – in the New York mayoral race, they have either been “stupid,” or “dumb,” in their misconduct.

No moral or ethical factor involved, understand, no reflection on the wrongdoer’s character. He – or she, as the case may be – is guilty only of “staggeringly bad judgment,” the staggeringly fatuous phrase applied by The Washington Post to the First Lady of Virginia’s (1) ordering a $6,500 Rolex watch from Virginia businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr. to present to her husband, Gov. Bob McDonnell; and (2) persuading Williams, in the strongest First Lady-like terms, to take her shopping at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan (a “jaunt,” as the Post called it, that “rang up $15,000 on Mr. Williams’s tab”).

This is the same McDonnell couple, keep in mind, that “persuaded” Williams to pick up the $15,000 catering tab for their daughter’s wedding, in return for which, according to the Post, “the known quid pro quos include the luncheon at the governor’s mansion, hosted by Ms. McDonnell, to help launch the signature product of Mr. Williams’s struggling company, and a plug for the same product delivered by Ms. McDonnell at a conference in Florida.”

All of which, the Post concludes, constitute “damaging revelations” that threaten to destroy Bob McDonnell’s “otherwise admirable legacy as governor.”

Too bad, isn’t it? A good governor and his otherwise admirable wife embarrassed – is that the right predicate, or am I being judgmental? – for merely suggesting and accepting what, in my native Louisiana, we call “swag” from favor-seekers.

No, that’s not right. Comparing Bob and Imelda McDonnell to, say, Louisiana’s last great political hustler, Edwin Edwards, is unfair. To Edwards, that is. Fast Eddie would never have had the bad judgment to take a $6,500 Rolex from a favor-seeker. Too blatant. He would have directed the supplicant to give him cash so he could buy his own watch.

Sound bite to remember

“I think any man in business would be foolish to fool around with his secretary. If it’s somebody else’s secretary, fine.”

– Barry Goldwater

 

The Harry Reid Point Spread Wednesday, Apr 24 2013 

Politics , , , victorgold 11:45 am

Contrary to what you’ve been reading and hearing about the Senate’s gun-control vote last week, the Manchin-Toomey amendment on gun registration didn’t lose. Not unless you factor in the Las Vegas point spread.

For those few innocents unfamiliar with how a point spread works, here’s an example: Say Alabama is playing Ohio University in a football game Saturday. Because Alabama is heavily favored, Las Vegas puts out a line encouraging you to bet by giving the Crimson Tide a 24-point handicap going into the game. This means that if Ohio University holds Alabama to only three touchdowns, though the Tide wins the game it hasn’t covered the spread.

Enter Nevada’s Harry Reid, the senator for Las Vegas. Before the roll is even called on the gun law – or a court nomination, or a Cabinet appointment – Reid makes a deal with his opponent Mitch McConnell that in order to get anything through the Senate it will take not 51 but 60 votes. A nine-vote spread.

That means that even when an amendment like Manchin-Toomey passes by a comfortable margin (54-46), McConnell’s team comes out grinning, while Reid (hypocritically) fulminates.

Why does Reid agree to handicapping his team in this way? Senate Club rules, old chap. Comes the day that Democrats are in the minority, Reid will be grinning while McConnell (hypocritically) goes away fulminating.

It’s been said, by no less an observer than the President of the United States (a former member of the Club), that Washington is broken. Right. And if I were to pinpoint the fracture, it would be in the wing of the U.S. Capitol that calls itself the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.

World’s Greatest Debilitated Body would be more like it. See you at the game.

Sound Bite to Remember

It doesn’t take a genius to understand football. You don’t have to be a Norman Einstein.

– Washington Redskins quarterback/Notre Dame graduate Joe Theismann

 

REOPEN THE WHITE HOUSE DOORS Sunday, Mar 17 2013 

Politics , , victorgold 5:33 pm

REOPEN THE WHITE HOUSE DOORS

–Headline, Washington Post editorial, 3/14/13

According to presidential aides, the decision to shut down visitor and student tours of the White House because of the sequester was made by the Secret Service. Along with “I did not have sex with that woman,” this stands as one of the most disingenuous statements coming out of a president’s office since Richard Nixon was in full cry.

To believe this line, we have to visualize the head of Barack Obama’s protective detail entering the Oval Office to announce, “We’re eliminating White House tours until further notice,” the President looking up to say, “Oh? Sorry to hear that.”

Somehow I don’t think that’s the way it came about. More likely, at a morning session of the Obama staff gathered to consider how best to embarrass Republicans for bringing on the sequester, one of Obama’s prime Spin Doctors, in balloon-floating mode….but let’s listen in on the colloquy:

SPIN DOCTOR: We could close down the Washington Monument.
CHIEF OF STAFF: It’s already closed down for repairs.
SPIN DOCTOR: What about cutting off Saturday mail?
CHIEF OF STAFF: So what? Who’ll miss it?

Long pause. Then….

SPIN DOCTOR: What say we cut off White House tours?
CHIEF OF STAFF: What’s that got to do with saving money? People come in, move out, no charge.
SPIN DOCTOR: But doesn’t the Secret Service have to –
CHIEF OF STAFF: Screen them. Right. Great idea.

So it was, by my way of thinking, that the Secret Service, once the most unpolitical agency of the government, was brought in to flack for the White House, its spokesman explaining that by eliminating White House tours, they’ll save up to $2 million between now and September, the remainder of the fiscal year.

Two million dollars. Let’s see. That’s about what the President’s new political PAC picks up with a five- – no, make that two-minute phone call. But that’s another issue for another day.

For now, let’s leave it at this: If you’ve lived in Washington as many years as I have, the White House is a familiar part of the landscape. But for millions of Americans, most especially young people who come to their nation’s capital to touch history, a visit to the home where Madison, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan lived is an unforgettable experience.

For the current resident, who once spoke of “empathy” as being a key part of leadership, to shut down White House tours as a political ploy isn’t, as some would say, disappointing. No. A more appropriate word is revealing.

Sound bite to remember

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

–David Mamet, dialogue from “State and Main”

 

Friday, Mar 8 2013 

Politics victorgold 11:12 am

NORTH KOREA THREATENS
NUCLEAR STRIKE
AGAINST “AGGRESSORS”

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Thursday threatened a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States and other purported aggressors, describing Washington as a “criminal threatening global peace.”

– Online article, Washington Post, March 7, 2013

Isn’t it about time for some historical revision? As a veteran of the Korean War, permit me to say: MacArthur was right – Truman, Acheson, Marshall and the know-it-alls at the State Department were wrong.

Sound bite to remember
“There is no substitute for victory.”
– General Douglas MacArthur, 1951

 

Sports heroes (and more) Saturday, Jan 26 2013 

Sports , , victorgold 1:47 pm

(Reader advisory: What follows is not about Lance Armstrong or Manti Te’o.)

Though we live to become old-timers, we still see our sports heroes, as my college friend Roland Swardson once mused, through pre-adolescent eyes; which, I guess, is why some sportswriter with a sociological bent (or a sociologist with a sports bent) came up with the term Role Model.

A Role Model, by definition, is an athlete who in his conduct both on and off the field sets a standard for young people to emulate. The standard in my antediluvian youth was exemplified by those athletes who were game-centered rather than self-centered. They didn’t boast, didn’t taunt, and let their on-field (or in the case of Joe Louis, in-ring) performance do the talking for them.

All of which, for many athletes who came of age after what Tom Wolfe called “the Me Generation,” made for a standard of conduct best ignored or in some cases scorned. NBA star Charles Barkley, for example, let it be known that he had enough on his plate in terms of salary caps and product endorsements without being burdened as a role model for other people’s kids.

Fortunately there are others – even in an age when ESPN exalts a new generation of swaggering I-Am-the-Greatest athletes – who don’t share Prince Charles’ (as Barkley calls himself) view.

In my time I’ve come to personally know two Role Models who fill the bill on standards you’d want your kids to emulate. One is Larry Brown, the Washington Redskins’ great running back, who won the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award in 1972 – a player remembered not only for his hell-for-leather running style but the fact that after crossing the goal line he didn’t spike, didn’t dance, didn’t point to himself or the heavens (as if he were God’s Chosen Halfback). He simply handed the ball to the referee.

The other gifted Role Model I’ve been privileged to know was Stan Musial, the nonpareil St. Louis Cardinal outfielder/first baseman of the 1940s and ’50s who died last week at the age of 92. All I might say in praise of Stan – his gift, his modesty, his humanity – was summed up in the headlines run by the New York Times on Jan. 20, reporting his death. The first read, “Stan Musial, Gentlemanly Slugger and Cardinals’ Stan the Man, Dies at 92”; the second, above an obituary by George Vecsey: “The Star Who Stood Out by Not Standing Out.”

A cherished memory of Stan: Some years ago, after Frank Mankiewicz and I organized the Stan Musial Society, a Cardinals fan club in the national capital area, we traveled to St. Louis for dinner and a baseball game with The Man. All went smoothly until we approached the entrance to Busch Stadium where a crowd of youngsters – my estimate was between 30 and 50 kids, both boys and girls – swarmed in, asking for autographs.

We live in a time, understand, when celebrity signatures go for $25 a shot at autograph sessions organized and promoted by sports stars and their agents. That thought ran through my mind as Frank and I stood by and watched – for 15, 20 minutes – until every kid in that crowd went away happy.

Stan the Man. He remembered, he said, being a kid like that himself, back in Donora, Pennsylvania. Allow a nostalgic old-timer this well-worn cliché: They don’t make them like that anymore.

 

About Lincoln’s Body Language…. Tuesday, Oct 23 2012 

Media and Politics , victorgold 6:56 pm

Wolf Blitzer here with CNN’s elite panel of political experts to dissect what we’ve just seen in the first of seven planned debates between Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, and his Democratic opponent, Stephen A. Douglas.

First we go to our senior analyst David Gergen who, having worked for both candidates at one time or another, is guaranteed to be—

GERGEN: Objective, which allows me to say in all fatuity that while both candidates get high grades for making their case, I think Douglas did a better job connecting with the back rows because of his—

BLITZER: Projection?

GERGEN: Exactly. I don’t know how many times I’ve told Abe he has to do something about that tinny voice—

GLORIA BORGER: I couldn’t agree more, David, but I think Lincoln’s inability to speak from the diaphragm is the least of his worries. I got the distinct impression he felt he was above it all, didn’t even want to be there.

PAUL BEGALA: Yeah, right, I mean pulling out his pocket watch in the middle of Douglas’ peroration was bad enough, but that habit of looking down at his opponent, it’s a definite no-no.

MARY MATALIN: Hey, he’s a foot taller, what do you expect? Though I have to admit, Lincoln’s body language wasn’t all his base could have hoped for. Not to mention that fuzzy reference to a house—how did he put it?

ARI FLEISCHER: A house divided against itself cannot stand. I think that’s what he said. For a moment I thought he was going to get into the housing crisis but—

CANDY CROWLEY: May I say something here? I thought the same thing, that he’d get in a personal touch about growing up in a log cabin with his mom Nancy Hanks, then splitting rails—

JOHN KING: A missed opportunity there, no doubt about it. Our focus group by a 3-to-1 margin gave Douglas the edge in likeability and having a personal narrative more like their own.

BLITZER: Fascinating stuff, John. Next, our CNN poll telling us who won, Lincoln or Douglas, after this brief station break . . .

 

Sound bite to remember 

“You will find out that you cannot do without politicians. They are a necessary evil. But the thing for the school people to do is that if the politicians are going to steal, make sure they steal for the schools.”

–Huey Long to the faculty of LSU, April 12, 1935

 

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