David Brooks’ goes off the political deep end

David Brooks' idea of a

crazy, left-wing, wild-eyed,

radical modern leftist

Normally, I ignore my fellow progressives when they foam at the mouth about David Brooks, the New York Times columnist who is sort-of, not-quite-exactly, more-or-less-rightish-leaning,  semi-kinda-conservative.

Not that I’m likely to recruit an army to march behind him. As a general rule, Brooks makes bland but not really offensive comments that are well short of outrageous, and likely to have all the impact of a marshmallow colliding in outer space with a powder puff.

But today he made my head explode. 

Brooks first observed that the traditional political power centers are fracturing.  Then he speculated. “Instead of just R’s and D’s there will be a Trump-dominated populist nationalism, a more libertarian Freedom Caucus, a Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren progressive caucus, a Chuck Schumer/Nancy Pelosi Democratic old guard.”

Fine, so far. But then he pressed the detonator button that blew up my brain by declaring, “The most important caucus formation will be in the ideological center. There’s a lot of room between the alt-right and the alt-left, between Trumpian authoritarianism and Sanders socialism.”

What!  Huh? Bernie Sanders is “alt-left?” Brooks has the blind temerity to tell me that Sanders and Warren are the over-the-top equivalent in extremity of neo-fascist, race-baiting, torture-supporting, mass-arrest favoring,  gun-toting, Medicare and Social Security-busting, business-deregulating Trump supporters?

That’s beyond outrageous! That’s teetering on the edge of criminal libel.

What does Sanders favor? He favors income redistribution by creating well-paying jobs that would more closely resemble what we had in the 1950s and 1960s, before America ceased being “great again.”

He favors free public education, such as what we used to have at the City College of New York — once "the poor man's Harvard" and at  other public institutions.

He favors Medicare, including Medicare for all. And he favors regulating corporate power so that a handful of people cannot control — not to mention strangle — Democracy.

He favors conservation and the environment over private and corporate interests.

Know who first came up with that stuff in America? President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, at the dawn of the 20th Century. It’s about as far left radical as your great grandmother's rocking chair.

What has happened is, this country has lost its mind and moved so far to the right that we can’t even see any more where we used to be without a high powered telescope So shut up and listen, David Brooks.

There is no left wing in this country any more, assuming there ever was one with any serious power. Sanders is the center. Schumer and Pelosi are somewhere to the right of that. The  Conservatives, and the “Freedom” Caucusers, and the Neo-Conservatives and the Neo-Nazis around Trump are off the right  edge of the right wing, floating in crazy whack-o land.

And evidently, so these days, are you, David Brooks. 

America’s Raiders of the Lost Ark election

Have you noticed the similarity between this year's elections and a certain movie?

It finally occurred to me what’s going on in this nation. We’re not really having an election. We’re having a movie.

It’s a a movie of the thrill-a-minute, surprise-at-every-turn genre. A kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark, edge-of-your-chair piece of outrageous and totally improbable entertainment.

First a Stone Age Insult Comic insults his way to the top of the Republican ticket in a presidential race.

Meanwhile, the Wife of the Former Leader is challenged by Yoda (wrong movie, I know, but you get the idea) for the hearts and minds of the people. Yoda’s cause seems hopeless, but then suddenly it's not hopeless and he seems to be gaining on her until….

She shoots Yoda’s horse from under him. He falls, but then pledges fealty to her. Whereupon it’s discovered that her evil advisor, Lady Debbie of Thuglia, has been necromancing Yoda’s campaign.

But then  the Wife of the Former Leader and the Stone Age Insult Comic have three duels of words. He falters. He is injured. He is about to fall of his horse and onto a row of sharpened pikes.

But no, thanks to the previous machinations of Weiner the Lance, a gremlin from the past of the Wife of the Former Leader,  the Stone Age Insult Comic is saved from certain doom. He is wounded. But he’s struggling back to his feet. And next…

Well, we’ll have to see what happens next. Perhaps the Prehistoric Insult Comic will light a bomb and accidentally blow himself to kingdom come.

Perhaps, just as the fuse burns all the way down to the bomb, the Wife of the Former Leader will charge the Stone Age Insult Comic with a mace, but the bomb will blow up her horse and throw her into the air while he escapes uninjured.

My favorite scene from the original Raiders of the Lost Ark was when Indiana Jones, using only his bull whip, whipped weapon after weapon out of the hands of various approaching evil beings until finally he tires of this, yanks his pistol from his holster, and shoots the final sword-wielding evildoer dead in his tracks. Perhaps Hillary ought to arm herself with a bullwhip and a pistol.

Or perhaps…

Well, no matter how badly you want another bucket of popcorn, no matter how desperately you need to pee, stay glued to your chair. Because this movie isn’t over yet. And you don’t want to miss even a millisecond of the thrilling action to come.

P.S. I’ve been trying to figure out what I make of James Comey, the strewer of land mines that seem to indiscriminately blow up both sides. Is there any motivation, save his self-interest? I think not. Except that every time he makes a move, he shoots himself in the foot, furthering the impression that he's a total dimwit. So I’m just writing him off as a Keystone Cop character who wandered onto the wrong movie set.

Are you insane enough to be President of the United States?

No matter what happens, the next President of the United
States will be nuts. The question is, how nuts?

Let’s face it, you’ve got to be nuts to want to be President. 

You’ll spend a year in a grueling, voice-killing, health-wrecking political campaign. 

You’ll be lied about and vilified by the opposite side as the devil incarnate, while you throw similar charges at them.

I admit, it's possible that you may undergo all this, and a gauntlet of press scrutiny, and of violently negative commentary, a bit more serenely than most of the Republican candidates for nomination have this year. You may not have to fight a self-evident urge to whip out a ruler, zip down your fly, and measure your penis on television. But you’ll undergo an unbearable ordeal all the same.

Then, if you win the election, you’ll spend four years away from home, sleeping in a public building . That’s almost exactly what homeless people do on freezing nights in New York.

Furthermore, regardless of where you stand on anything, the Other Side will be out to fling mud and manure at you. They will try to wreck your reputation and destroy you by any means possible, some of those means extra-legal.

Your life will be in danger. There will be all kinds of enraged people out to kill you, from stray drunks, and unemployed and politically disaffected malcontents, to Al Queda and ISIS. You, and your family, will need to be guarded day and night by phalanxes of Secret Service agents, some of them so unreliable that when they should be guarding you, their minds are likely to be on booze and hookers.

Little wonder the hair of most American presidents  to date has turned white while they were in office, if it wasn’t already white by the time they got there.

Little wonder that 

Nixon and John F. Kennedy clandestinely filled their medicine cabinets with psychotropic drugs, recently uncovered documents reveal. In fact, Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggested in his journals that several modern presidents were mentally unbalanced; he recorded top aides arguing whether President Lyndon Johnson was clinically paranoid or a manic-depressive, and fretted that there was no constitutional “procedure for dealing with nuts.”

As I said, you’ve got to be nuts. It seems to be a prerequisite of the job.

Donald Trump is so nuts that he has received mental status diagnoses that range from "classic narcissistic personality disorder” to full blown “psychotic.”

Not that Hillary isn’t nuts, too. What’s with her obsessive-compulsive need, as demonstrated by the whole e-mail server brouhaha,  to shoot herself in the foot? And then what's with her other obsessive-compulsive need to tough it out and pretend her toe isn't bleeding, instead of fessing up and putting the whole matter to rest by admitting she made a dumb mistake and apologizing? 

Bernie Sanders? He thinks he can start a revolution of the human spirit. He thinks he can inspire civil behavior, human kindness, and social consciences, by sheer force of will, from coast to coast, right here in the United States of America. Right. And I am the King of England and Slobovia.

Jill Stein of the Green Party? If she gets so much as a significant fraction of one percent of the vote, and the Democratic candidate loses by a similar fraction, she’ll forever after be vilified with the same kind of opprobrium that Ralph Nader suffered when Gore lost to Bush. And yet she insists on running.

So what are we Americans to do?

Here's what. This nation needs to design a presidential insanity scale. It should measure a variety of psychological factors and first of all avoid vetting  for nomination any candidate who is not nuts. That's because any sane person won’t want to run. (Case in point, Elizabeth Warren.) 

Nor should anybody who is one of  the wildly, totally, unstoppably  out of control whackos be permitted to run, because that person might, during his first 72 hours in office, sink the United States economy, loot the U.S. Treasury, set off a nuclear bomb, unleash a nuclear war, and get us all incinerated. (I’m lookin’ at you, Donald Trump.)

No, what we need is somebody who is certifiably half nuts. Crazy enough to run. But not crazy enough to do  more than a generation or two of lasting harm. And we need a diagnostic scale to measure that person by.

Psychiatrists, do your stuff!

Ted & Donald & Bernie & Hillary & Very Cranky Me

Eeuwwwwwwww!

Sheer laziness aside, one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much lately has to do with the recent slew of primaries. There are just too many of them. And there are too many news reports about them. Simply glancing at the news is exhausting.

I prefer the days when  “too many” referred not to primaries, but to the list of Republican presidential wannabes. 

...the biggest boor to run for the White House since America was founded.

And now look what we’re left with. On the Republican side it’s Trump or Cruz. Either should be easy for the Democratic nominee to beat. If not, Hillary’s going to have some explaining to do. I’ll get to her a bit further on, but first this about the leading Republican candidates.

On the one hand, we have the biggest boor to run for the White House since America was founded. Some make comparisons between Trump and Andrew Jackson, also a populist. But that comparison is fallacious. 

Jackson was born poor, not with a silver spoon in his mouth. Unlike Trump, who sat out Vietnam because he managed to find a doctor who found a bone spur somewhere, Jackson was a war hero. And Jackson served in the U.S. Senate while Trump served as Grand High Poobah of the Miss Something-Or-Other beauty contest.

...after three minutes of listening to Cruz I feel the need to take a shower.

On the other Republican hand we have Ted Cruz, who just may be the most oleaginous personality to appear in American politics since most people gave up vying to catch greased pigs. I have no personal experience with the man, but I take the Republican law makers whom he disgusts and repulses at their word.

I don’t know what it is — perhaps it’s  his self-righteous lectures, or his self-satisfied smirk, or his faux choirboy look, or his willingness to smear his opponents and New York with equal impunity, or the disgusting causes he backs — but after three minutes of listening to Cruz I feel the need to take a shower.

Bernie Sanders? I love him. I still support him, at least in spirit. I agree with the New York Times assessment that his candidacy has been a gift to Democrats, forcing us to raise our ambitions for America’s future.

Alas, Bernie is most probably a lost cause. And that brings us to Hillary.

A friend recently described Hillary as “not really a Democrat; she’s a moderate Republican.” She certainly is, or perhaps even a bit to the right of moderate Republicans in the context of the 1950s, when Republican Dwight David Eisenhower ’s campaign platform included this:

We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs—expansion of social security—broadened coverage in unemployment insurance —improved housing—and better health protection for all our people. We are determined that our government remain warmly responsive to the urgent social and economic problems of our people.

As I keep reminding people, I’m a 1960s middle-of-the-road Democrat whose political opinions have not changed one iota, but who now finds that his centerist 1960 opinions mark him as a flaming left wing radical. 

That said, one thought of what just one arm of government — the Supreme Court — could become if any Republican gains the White House is enough to make me hold my nose and make sure I vote for Hillary in the general elections.

 I ... cringe at the thought that some Republican operative has a copy of one of [Hillary's] speeches and will release it after her nomination is set in stone

But I must admit to a nervous twinge. And that relates to Ms. Clinton’s refusal to release the content of her speeches before the likes of Goldman Sachs. Somewhere in the back of my mind lurks the thought that the speeches do contain something that would incriminate her, not as a felon, but as a willing and perhaps even eager maidservant of Wall Street interests.

And I further cringe at the thought that some Republican operative has a copy of one of those speeches and will release it after her nomination is set in stone — thereby turning vast sectors of the electorate against her and throwing the election back into the arms of the Republican Party.

If she has hidden her speeches because they incriminate her and nullify her connection to the American working folks that she says she wants to represent, she had better beware. Once the content of those speeches get out, there may be mobs with torches and pitchforks at her door in Chappaqua, ready to drive a wooden stake through her heart at a crossroads before she ever gets to Washington. 

And if the content of those speeches are part of the reason she doesn’t get to the White House, I’m coming to Chappaqua with my own torch and pitchfork.

Nazis, political smears from The Oxford Club, and Bernie Sanders

Some years ago I began subscribing to a couple of publications from an organization called The Oxford Club. Their subscription mailings were terrific at massaging whatever organ it is that generates intensely overwhelming feelings of greed.

What their publications generally do is recommend stocks to invest in. I’m dredging up the numbers they touted from a faulty memory, but essentially their solicitation mailings were saying things like, “Earn profits of 200 percent, 300 percent, four hundred and eighty-seven percent!” 

Yes, yes, ye-e-e-essss! I thought, as my greed gland went orgasmic and my signature spurted across a check for my subscription.

“Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement,” declared Dr. Samuel Johnson back in the 18th Century. And this was nearly two centuries before the Oxford Club began promising me, without regularly delivering, humongous multiples of my money.

Well, for a while, The Oxford Club did reasonably well by me. No, they never generated 200 percent, much less six hundred and eighty-seven percent in profits. At least not for me. But a couple of their recommendations have increased significantly in value since I bought them, and the stocks recommend in their retirement income letter did, as promised, generate some income.

Of course, that was when the market was going up. Recently, the Oxford Club has been closing out quite a few positions, sometimes at a loss. I have still more beefs with their stock picks and their methods, but that’s for another day. What I’m here to tell you about is the not-so-subliminal message lurking just below the surface — or sometimes right on the surface — of the onslaught of e-mails they send me every week, in addition to my monthly newsletter subscriptions.

Turns out The Oxford Club is a right wing organization with right wing “friends” who spread political opinions, and sometimes considerable misinformation and paranoia among its subscribers. (Sample from a recent mailing that led off with the presidential election, "Your Bank Accounts Will Soon Be Confiscated Whoever Wins!")

I have no way of knowing whether issuing a screed against anything that doesn’t favor the one percent, tax cuts and hatred of government is required writing if you want to keep your job at the Oxford Club. But it seems that, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, nearly all their writers who regularly send me messages have at one time or another bashed the notion that the one percent are anything but God-dispatched saviors of our national economy. And that  — if I may continue a rather racy metaphor that I began some paragraphs back — taxes are the ejaculate of the devil.

But  the Oxford Club went more than a few paces two far last week when Alexander Green, the Oxford Club’s “Chief Investment Strategist” painted Bernie Sanders as the world’s biggest Nazi since Adolph and Eva romped joyfully at Berchtesgaden while Buchenwald gassed Europe’s Jews.

“How a Vote for Sanders Is Like a Vote for Hitler,” declared the headline on an e-mail from The Oxford Club written by Green. And the Oxford Club’s Green Slime ran downhill from there. Here’s what appears to be the nub of this disgusting argument, complete with Green's stereotyping:

Hitler convinced his people that Germany's troubles were caused by just 1% of the population: the Jews. 

In reality, of course, German Jews were a tremendous asset. They were hardworking and successful, particularly in business and finance. They were more highly educated, more affluent and more law-abiding than most, committing few crimes in relation to their numbers. 

Yet Hitler projected every fear, anxiety and frustration onto them. He scapegoated them so successfully, in fact, that ordinary Germans began to detest them, even those who had never met a Jew….

Hitler was a monster. But his fundamental flaw was that he was a deluded and unrepentant bigot. 

So is Bernie Sanders. 

Sanders does not scapegoat an ethnic or religious minority, however. He scapegoats a financial one. He dislikes rich people. 

Listen to a Sanders stump speech, and you'll discover
that folks with money are the bane of our existence. They
have "fixed" the economy, corrupted politics, denied
healthcare to millions, cheated the working class, shirked taxes, created shocking inequality and hoarded the wealth for themselves. 

I must live in an alternate universe.

Yes, Alexander, you very much must live in an alternate universe.

Hitler picked on people because of their ethnicity, arrested them, sent them to filthy concentration camps, turned them into slave laborers, starved them, and gassed them to death when they were;t forced them to dig their own graves before being shot. Whereas Bernie Sanders is mostly proposing to somewhat increase the taxes on the topmost part of the income that very rich people earn. 

There is no comparison. There is no parallel. What there is, it seems to me, is The Oxford Club baiting a Jewish candidate for wanting to make sure that people who work for the one percent receive fair and proportionate compensation to their own contributions to the economy. Calling a Jew a Nazi because of his economic principles and belief in fairness is tantamount to what Dr. Goebbels did — inventing and broadcasting a big , slanderous lie.

In the same e-mail, Green accused Sanders of “preaching class hatred.” No, Mr, Green, it is you and The Oxford Club who are attempting to disseminate hatred. Bernie Sanders is preaching class fairness.

Shame on The Oxford Club for enabling you with a platform to broadcast your trash.

Note: If the Oxford Club hasn’t been embarrassed yet into taking down Green’s vile e-mail, you can find the full text posted here, along with some mostly furious replies by Oxford Club members, many of whom, I hope, will cancel or not renew their subscriptions.

Cross-Posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

Hillary, Bernie, JFK, and the advantage of big ambitions over small potatoes

John F. Kennedy knew how to think big. Bernie Sanders' thinking

is closer to JFK's than Hillary's

The Clinton camp's beef with Bernie Sanders seems to be that Sanders is thinking too big, whereas Hillary is "pragmatic." But look closely and what you will find is that by "pragmatism," the Clinton camp means the hope for a few incremental fixes, achieved without the consent of a hostile Congress. 

Hillary will, um, “improve” the clunky camel of a cobbled together, better-than-nothing Obamacare system, rather than replace it with Medicare For All, as Sanders wants to do. She’ll help make college loans somewhat less onerous, as opposed to Sanders, who seeks to make them superfluous, with free tuition at public colleges.  And so on.

But make no mistake. Congress, or at least the Congress controlled by Republicans, hates Hillary with a vengeance. It has been ginning up hatred of her at least since she was seeking the nomination in opposition to Barack Obama eight years ago. Think about the Hillary-hating catch phrases of the past, and possibly of the future if Hillary gets the nomination. They will rise like zombies from the grave: "Whitewater." "Troopergate." “Vince Foster.” "Liberal." Any move Hillary makes will have to be in spite of Congress, rather than in concert with it.

But won’t Congress oppose Sanders, too? Yes, if it’s the same Congress we have now, they most certainly will. But the wave of the future — as evidenced by the enthusiastic turnout of young people for Sanders — demonstrates that he speaks for where America of the future wants to go, and not for tinkering cautiously with the rattletrap mechanism that is American government today. Inevitably, if enough people make demands, lawmakers will go along in order to keep their jobs. That's why the difference between Sanders and Clinton is so important.

Sanders will fight for change. Hillary, if the publicity is to believed, will fight only for incremental fixes. And that reflects a shameful lack of ambition for the future of our nation.

Can Bernie Sanders deliver all, or even most of what he promises? Probably not, at least not in the short run. But then, it’s also not a sure thing can Hillary can deliver even modest fixes.

Significant change will only come when a mass of voters stand up and shake the walls and the rafters with their demands for change. Yes, change will come slowly even after Americans demonstrate their passion for change. But that was always the case. To quote John F. Kennedy when he spoke of his own huge ambitions for America….

“All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin. “

And that’s why I’ll be voting for Sanders in my own state’s primary. If Hillary gets the nomination? Yes, I'll vote for her in the general election, because even her small potatoes ambitions for America are better than the unconscious Republican ambition to destroy America.

But make no mistake. If America is ever going to change for the better again, it will be Bernie leading the charge, and not Hillary fiddling with the lug nuts.

Who won the first Democratic debate?

An "oracle" who sliced this pigeon open and read

its entrails would be able to tell you who "won" the

first Democratic debate as accurately as most of

the talking heads.

Oi, the pundits are at it tooth and nail. 

On CNN the morning after the debate, they had a "body language expert" who was reading the  shrugs and facial expressions of the candidates. In ancient Greece, they used to have oracles who read pigeon entrails. Personally, I think both are equally valid. Or equally ridiculous.

I'll let the polls tell me what Democratic viewers and the American people as a whole thought of the candidates. Frankly my dears, I don't give a flying fetlock what the talking heads think.

For whatever it's worth, my own opinion is that the real winners were the American people. We saw a debate in which the leading contenders and the not-so-leading contenders kept to focus on facts and on the needs of the American people.

That was a pretty stark contrast to Republican bushwah, magical thinking about the economy, and displays of outrageous narcissism among the I-can't-count-how-many Republican clown candidates for Commander-In-Chief. 

As a Democrat, I'm proud of last night's debate, whomever the commentators decide was the "winner."

Hi, I’m not stupid, but I play it that way on TV to attract Republican voters

So now we have Rand Paul seeking the Republican nomination for President. His stated interest in disengaging the United States from armed conflict certainly has its appeal. As does his interest in ending NSA spying on Americans. If he means it.

Unfortunately he also comes with a truckload of ideas that just sound a little too dumb, or too naive, or too off-the-wall nutty to come from somebody who presumably had the smarts to get into and through medical school.

Some of the deep down insanity of the thinking he purports to believe in bubbled up from the snake pit recently. It happened in Rand Paul's put-down of an attempt by Senator Bernie Sanders to spend more to prevent  starving senior citizens from continuing to starve. 

Take a few mind-boggling minutes to watch Paul's presumbly clueless back-and-forths with Senators Sanders and Franken, then resume reading below.

Sanders had spoken of the Federal “budget consequences” of letting seniors starve during a meeting of the Senate’s subcommittee on primary health on aging, which he chairs. It’s not hard to see what those consequences are. And Sanders pointed them out. Those starving seniors, deteriorate faster than the would if they were reasonably well-fed. Consequently they end up in emergency rooms and nursing homes at public expense, instead of remaining in their own homes.

That’s not a terribly difficult concept to grasp, but Rand Paul either can’t grasp it, or more likely pretends he can’t grasp it.

“It’s curious,” said Paul, “That only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim you’re saving money.”

Right. He can't seem to understand that a $2 billion cork can prevent a $50 billion hole in the dike that will drown half the country.

Well, let’s move the decimal point over a few places and apply this theory to you, Senator Paul. You practice ophthalmology. Do you have a Yttrium aluminium garnet laser to correct posterior capsular opacification? Well, that set you (or somebody) back roughly $140,000.

 Do you have a Tonometer? That set you back about two grand. And those are among the hundreds of instruments and precise lenses and other doodads an ophthalmologist needs to practice. Think of all the money you could save, Dr. Paul, if you didn’t buy all that crap. You could just pry peoples’ eyelids open and remove their cataracts through mental telepathy. Or perform Lasik surgery by staring into their eyes. Or prescribe prescription lenses through intuition.

And that’s just as dumb (or insane) a concept as saving money by letting seniors starve.  Or in thinking, as you stated, that “the nobility of private charity” will somehow do the trick. 

Meanwhile, Paul is out begging his supporters for the money they themselves have saved. He wants their money to help get him into office. 

And oh what plans he has for when he's in the Oval Office. He's going to destroy the "Washington machine special interests," for example. He doesn't say which interests. 

However, you can be pretty sure he's not talking about the special interests that keep eliminating taxes on the rich, who can well afford to pay a few extra bucks, while whacking the rest of us. Maybe there will be a starvation tax, for the privileges of going hungry. 

And he's going to "stop the damage we've seen President Obama and his pals inflict on our country," his fund-raising letter tells me. What damage could that possibly be. Oh, I see –  the damage that's caused when you can't be denied medical insurance because you have a "prior condition." Or that makes sure you get medical insurance in the first place. 

Ran Paul's letter to me also tells me he wants a "money bomb." What he's not revealing is that the only thing his program will actually bomb is the American economy.

Of course, you gotta know that Senator Paul already knows he’s talking nonsense most of the time. And that he’s merely saying what he says because he thinks you’re a rube.

But you're a rube only if you let him get away with it.