The Parable of Republican Fiscal Responsibility

A Republican goes on vacation.  A thousand miles from home he decides he wants a bacon sandwich.

So the Republican spends thirty dollars renting a car.  He spends an hour of time and and three gallons of gas searching for a supermarket.  At the supermarket he spends ten dollars on bacon, mayonnaise and bread. 

The Republican makes a huge mess in the hotel microwave for the maid to clean up.  She will not be tipped because the Republican presumes her to be illegal, despite the fact that she is blond, 6'6" tall, and named for her legal immigrant grandmother, Inga.

The Republican realizes that he has no method for taking care of the bacon and the mayonnaise, so he drives out to the truck stop and buys a portable cooler for a hundred dollars.

After the end of his three day visit, The Republican has a cooler he cannot take on the flight back, filled with food which, while not spoiled, is more than he requires.

Giving the surplus food to people who haven't got enough to eat goes against The Republican's work ethic, so he sticks it in the commercial waste-collection dumpster at the hotel.  The cooler, likewise, is not something which can be allowed into other hands, for fear that it may be repurposed for some nefarious end.

So the Republican stands at the airport, proud and pleased that the sandwich itself only cost two dollars.  But he wasted $158 to make that two dollar sandwich.

A Democrat is on vacation. A thousand miles from home, he decides he wants a bacon sandwich.  The Democrat walks to a nearby restaurant and asks for a bacon sandwich.  When he is done eating, he gives the waitress about seven dollars, including tip. 

The Republican shakes his head in amazement at how wasteful the Democrat is, when the Democrat could have done the job himself.

When Peace Broke Out

For those who are over, say, 40, this is not a new story.

We sat in front of our analog televisions and watched crappy little Trabants stream through the Brandenburg Gate.  The composite bodies were the same colors that one finds in a nursery, and the masonry wall which had served to protect communism could no longer contain the smoke from the Trabant's little two-stroke engine.

The first protests had been in June, in China of all places.  For nearly two months, protesters called for democracy and liberty.  They built an homage to the Statue of Liberty on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.  Their call was one for human dignity and civil rights. 

And on 4 June, 1989, they were crushed. The organizers were carried off to secret prisons and the protesters were dispersed by tanks and arms fire.  It seemed that the hope of democracy was destroyed on that day.

But it wasn't.  By the end of October, peaceful civil protests were rampaging throughout the Communist bloc. But Berlin holds a special place.

Two years earlier, President Ronald Reagan had exhorted Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, "Tear down this wall!"  It was seen as daring and indecorous, a challenge which was full of the bravado of a victor in battle without a shot being fired.

And on 9 November, 1989, we turned on our televisions and saw a joyously unthinkable event. Germans wielding picks and sledgehammers were bashing the Berlin Wall to smithereens!  They were having a huge party tearing it down.  Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan were nowhere to be found.

It is this memory which informs a guarded optimism.  In the last month, we have watched autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt deposed by popular uprisings.  These are not the uprisings of turbanned fanatics with an extreme interpretation of Islam.

These are young people who use cell phones and the internet.  They are not bent upon retribution for the misdeeds of the autocrats beyond their departure. Aside from their newfound technical prowess, they look like their antecedents in Beijing and Berlin in 1989.

This is beyond huge.  The illusion of universal fanatacism in Muslim countries has now been shattered, although one may still appropriately question as to a Wahabbist connection to fanatical movements. In Cairo, you saw young men who had awful jobs and went to their Friday prayers and behaving peacefully.

If one were to turn on the television, one would see their  Farsi-speaking counterparts in Teheran on the morning of 15 February. Other reports invoke the nations of Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria, Jordan and Syria.  There are no Imams proclaiming fatwas-just people demanding accountability from their leadership.

As it happens when peace breaks out, authoritarians are threatened, but there is no room for their voices.  On the deserts of Northern Africa and Southwestern Asia a new thing as old as the sun has broken free-the desire of people to have choices and liberty to decide what is best for the future.

In fifteen or twenty years, should someone walking into a Saipa dealership in New York or Toronto be curious about the little car built in Iran and ask, they will be reminded of this moment. They will see images of happy Saipa owners driving their cars down the Neda Agha Soltan Expressway in the brochures.

Perhaps there will be old men who remember the day when Iran was a place that terrified them.  They will recall three wars fought to do something which was accomplished with plastic keyboards instead of bullets and bombs.  They will recall the names of places like Fallujah and Kandahar.

While things could still go badly wrong, please remember this: nothing impedes the undesirable like daring to imagine the best possible outcome.  This is the motivation behind higher education and Mega-ball lottery tickets alike.  As of today, positive outcomes have become possible.

This possibility is the greatest gift that the Middle East could have gotten.

State of the Union

It was President Obama versus 298 Republicans in both houses Tuesday night. And that looked unfair to the Republicans.

State of the Union addresses have been fun in recent memory. Watching Clinton was easy, because of the theater. “Yeah, you Republican interns. You see this economy? I’m get-ting cre-dit for-it…nanny nanny boo boo!”

For the first twenty minutes of the 2011 State of the Union, it looked like Obama was wayyy off his game. He was generic, competent, and, well, kinda boring. Some of us know that there will be a moment when President Obama has a bad speech. It seemed like this one was going to be it.

This speech was not it.

For those of us who have watched Obama work a room, there are few who can touch him for technique. The New Civility seating arrangement really worked to the President’s advantage. It worked so well, that one wonders if he didn’t consider proposing a tax on Baptist bookstores just to see how many Republicans he could get to clap for it.

For crying out loud, Boehner was clapping for things which will get him a new orifice for excretory function from Fox News. To his credit, Boehner must have gotten hold of a terrific mood elevator, because he only misted up once. But he appeared to be either hammered or lost, like a kid who arrives to take the SAT and realizes about two questions in that there is no way in hell that he’s bluffing his way through this test.

Barack Obama did not have that problem. When he hit the message about 80% clean energy by 2035, he pitched it like a Republican. For twenty years, Democrats have been selling the environment to liberals.

Ask Al Gore how well that works when running for President, sometime. The environment is Crack Cocaine for liberals. It makes the left stupid and willing to do anything for more of it. President Obama took the left to Rehab.

Elections are not won by selling the environment to liberals any more than they are won selling guns to conservatives. Elections are won by making sense to the middle. President Obama started doing something extremely astute by playing to the center.

Invoking the space program, the President’s rhetoric touched on the value of clean energy for defense, education and jobs. In an economy which by circumstance has become much more global than a lot of people would like, the point of grabbing the future from our economic rivals is cogent. The reality that policies embraced by his Republican opposition have put resources in such a place as to place the nation at a competitive disadvantage can, and will make sense to independents and moderates.

There was not a hint of environmentalism to Obama’s treatment of clean energy as a generator of security for the nation, except as a favorable byproduct. That is something the middle has not really heard before.

The Republican Party approached this State of the Union with one of the worst game strategies that they have ever used. They set everything off with a block from their right and sealing all of the routes up the left. That might work on Dennis Kucinich, or Bernie Sanders. If this were football, they would have watched some game film to know that Obama likes to run up the middle.

The Republican Party is also facing a resurgent Obama at a time when their party is in disarray. There is little room for multiple and sometimes differing messages. A divided party will cave in upon itself. It happened two years ago when Sarah Palin wound up on the ticket, becoming the de facto head. It also happened last night.

In the official Republican rebuttal, it became clear, instantly, that the speech was prepared well in advance of Obama’s speech. What was also evident was that whoever prepared the speech had zero grasp of the President’s articulation or capacity. And Representative Paul Ryan, like Charles Boustany and Bobby Jindal before him, was spectacularly ill equipped to compete with President Obama’s polished rhetorical skills.

It did not help that Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen offered the same inadequate speech in Spanish on Univision, albeit with a much stronger rhetorical capacity. Representative Ryan resembled little so much as Topher Grace portraying an adult Eddie Munster.

Representative Michelle “Guano” Bachmann offered a rebuttal for the ever-shrinking ranks of the Tea Party. For a group of people who kvetch incessantly about Obama using a TelePrompTer, you would think that they could mount the blamed thing in the same area code as the camera. Apparently, Rep. Bachmann was sitting in DC, and the TelePrompTer was somewhere on top of the Springfield Interchange in Virginia.

Republicans could scarcely have done worse by letting Sarah Palin ad-lib, and Huckabee might actually have been good.

At the moment, President Obama and the Democrats have altered the game-they are now using the right’s verbiage and tone with the older Center Left message. The last political figure who married his opposition’s tone to his own philosophy? Ronald Reagan.

This just got extremely interesting.

Demographics

If one were to look at the demographics, one will realize that the Left’s absent friend Keith Olbermann will be back on the air quickly. This is because Olby has a market, and Glenn “The Beckwad” Beck had one with less appealing demographics.

Fox found overlap when CNN Headline News carried Glenn Beck over to Home Depot, gave him a hammer and a GPS programmed for the nearest beach, and told him to pound sand. After all, Glenn Beck appeals to quite a few Fox viewers.

Beck connects well to people who live in previously-owned manufactured homes, earn ten dollars an hour when employed, and have no teeth to speak of. There is no real revenue loss for Fox if all of his advertisers go away, because, face it; Beck’s audience has the same disposable income as dirt.

The people at most television networks are not looking for a loss leader. Beck stays because he keeps people (like your Wandering Gentile) who know better at least remembering that Fox is out there and purports to be a news source. One waits, probably not in vain, for Megyn Kelly to offer up that President Obama is actually the legendary “Bat Boy” from the Weekly World News.

The Weekly World News was a tabloid, which on occasion offered such scoops as “Bat Boy Found Living In Cave,” and inspired the “Boy Trapped In Refrigerator, Eats Own Foot” headline from Airplane! They also featured a weekly column from a character named Ed Anger, whose far-right rantings presaged Beck by several years. The Weekly World News went under a while back, probably because Fox offered the same thing without the hassle of reading. Or chapped lips.

It is at this point where your Wandering Gentile expresses a deep and embarrassing admiration for the National Enquirer. It is not for their politics or their intellectual posture. The closest one gets to politics is political scandal in the Enquirer. And that is something they do quite well.

Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, several politically connected evangelists, John Edwards and now Todd Palin have all been caught with their trousers down, and the Enquirer is who caught them. Every so often a blind squirrel gets a nut. But it takes one bad-ass squirrel to shake the entire oak tree.

The National Enquirer is one such bad-ass squirrel. The New York Times is not so much of a bad-ass squirrel when it comes to getting political figures in flagrante delicto. It’s called journalism, and who expected it out of Lantana, Florida?

Note to every journalistic enterprise: if an investigative journalist comes to you from the National Enquirer, give that scribe everything they want. If they had been researching your Sunday Crisis megaturd (Apologies to Dave Barry for using his apt term) there would not be 100,000 people in your market who think Pulitzer is a brand of light beer.

While saluting the competent and amazingly non-partisan investigative crew over at the National Enquirer, I totally got away from the point of Keith Olbermann coming back to television.

There are a few little facts about Keith Olbermann’s audience that really got my attention. They are disproportionately well educated, with a majority holding some type of higher degree. Their income level is roughly double that of Glenn Beck’s audience. They are loyal to products and providers who exhibit high quality and good service over lowest prices. And Keith Olbermann is one of very few unique voices in broadcasting.

He is also capable of endearing himself to moderates as well as liberals, because it’s good TV. Keith Olbermann knows this. So does his audience. And if anybody at say, CNN/Time Warner has any blamed sense, they know it, too. Third place is a cold and unhappy place to reside.

Sometime between July and October, there should be a tease spot on CNN, offering what will be the worst-kept secret in Cable TV, touching upon the imminent return of a beloved host to the “Most Trusted Name In News.”

And, um, there will probably be a lot of people TiVoing Rachel Maddow, because Piers Morgan has not really started well, now has he? (Look for Rachel to join CNN just as soon as Crud-I mean COMcast-finishes ruining MSNBC.)

MORE Debunking The News

Some time ago (January, 2009), Your Wandering Gentile posted the original “Debunking The News,” a list of bogus terms and phrases with what they mean in the real world. Your Wandering Gentile was a bit hard up for new material, so he grabbed the dead tree version of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and found a whole bunch of NEW words and phrases designed to camouflage the speaker’s intent.

Able to capitalize on widespread frustration- If we do not get rid of these defectives with ballots, back into civil war we go!

Advocates dispute claims- Hence their description as ADVOCATES. Remember Robin Williams’ bit about redundant?

Arbitrary and capricious- Detrimentally affects my friends and anyone else who might give me money.

Based on a fresh analysis- Somebody found a way to give us an answer we liked.

Could be the administration’s last shot- Is the administration’s last chance, down by 8 in the bottom of the ninth.

Could be viewed as a rebuke- Will be as appealing as a s*** sandwich.

Could complicate efforts- (Screwed) into a cocked hat.

Critics said the vote was rigged- Myanmar, Miami, what’s the difference, really?

Despite difficult conditions while in captivity- Somehow, this never sounded like a week at Club Med in Costa Rica.

Gave a spirited rejection- Spat in the face.

Have become more vocal in their efforts- It’s like talking to a wall, isn’t it?

Improperly issued- Broke about nine zillion laws and rules by saying “okeydokey.”

Is politically toxic- Pisses own friends off.

Lacks confidence in ________- Thinks _______ is idiotic.

Made it falsely appear- Lied their asses off.

Mounting a robust defense- Look at the tense here…this is something you should have done six months ago!

On shaky ground- I don’t care if it eats garbage and pees 93 octane Unleaded gas. This is very bad for me politically and must DIE DIE DIE!

On condition of anonymity- These people I’m telling you about have guns and know where I live.

Organizers condemned the violence- Organizers weren’t caught participating in the violence.

Said in a statement- Phoned it in.

Starting point- There’s the stable, and there’s your teaspoon. Have a ball.

Taken out of context- Oh, crap, that mike was live.

The exact aim of the attack remains unclear- But this does not seem to be your garden variety Sigma Nu prank, though.

The language was a mistake rather than an intentional attempt to mislead- Sure it was.

These findings worry officials- No good can come of this for officials.

They might have disarmed the bomb accidentally rather than by design- Well! His head and hands are still attached! Excellent! Don’t try that again if you don’t know what you’re doing.

The New Reality- Same old Depression.

Ceremonial job- Almost as good a gig as Former Vice President.

Former Vice President- Money for nothing and Dick’s still free???