Live from New York! It’s the Republican Clown Car whining for attention!

Republican presidential candidates

demand the right to the same public

air time NBC gave another clown

Where is Dr. Freud now that we need him?

It seems like an increasing number of Republican presidential candidates are now suffering from a pathological case of Trump Envy. 

They are whining out of the mouths of their press agent that they want all the attention that Trump has received. Well, not the attention that he received everywhere. Just the attention he received when he was a guest on Saturday Night Live.

Or so we must believe if we read Variety, increasingly the newspaper of record concerning the orgy of showbiz and political miscegenation that characterizes the general Republican ethos these days. Well, the New York Times has also covered this, but the rest of the press? Hah! Anyway, back to the story:

As you may remember, Donald Trump appeared for  twelve minutes and five seconds on Saturday Night Live l recently. Since Trump can be charitably regarded as an entertainer, although not really as either a politician or a serious presidential candidate, his appearance, for all of those twelve minutes and five seconds, made a kind of sense. He's a clown. The SNL cast clowned around with him.

But now some of Trump's rivals in the Republican clown car are demanding their own twelve minutes and five seconds of fame, too. That’s less than the 15 minutes of fame the late Andy Warhol said everybody would eventually enjoy. But it’s exactly, down to the last second, what the law says they’re entitled to.

Pause here to mention the five attention-hungry whiners. They’re George Pataki, John Kasich, Lindsay Graham, Mike Huckabee and Jim Gilmore. Jim Who? Well he’s on the ballot somewhere-or-other, so he’s entitled to twelve minutes and five seconds, too.

See under FCC rules…well, let Nick Cosanti of the New York Times explain it.

Federal Communications Commission regulations state that other candidates for president are entitled to “equal time” on the network when a broadcast event isn’t a “bona fide newscast,” “bona fide news interview,” “bona fide news documentarty” or “on-the-spot coverage of bona fide news events. 

By law, NBC is not required to give [the candidates] exactly the same treatment as that received by Mr. Trump, meaning that there will probably not be a Mike Huckabee-hosted “S.N.L.” anytime in the neat future. The network is just required to give equal time for the candidates to reach a relatively equal audience.”

So Pataki the forgotten governor, Kasich the other governor, Mike the Huck, Lindsay the G, and Whatsisname may be negotiating a deal for free advertising time on various affiliate stations. The pressure is on NBC and its affiliates, but not on Saturday Night Live, which caused this headache for the people who broadcast their show.

Seems to me the broadcasters are passing up a huge opportunity here, the 21st Century equivalent of locking malefactors in the public stocks in the town square and letting people throw eggs at them. 

The broadcasters should lean on SNL to put each on of these clowns on their show for exactly twelve minutes and five seconds. This would deliver just about precisely the same audience, in exactly the same time slot, which gets the fairness issue out of the way.

As a comedy show, SNL was able to dictate to Donald Trump exactly what it would or would not allow on its show. (Trump was free to accept or decline.) SNL should do the same with The Five Clowns. In fact, I like that concept.

For example, each of the whining Republicans could be required to wear a clown suit while appearing on the show. Costumes would be chosen by the producers of Saturday Night Live. And the skits?

Well, I think Mike the Huck should judge a wet T-shirt contest, during which some shapely women and Mike would be wetted down with hoses while the women dance. Mike would be entitled to preach about abortion and same sex marriage while the hoses are on him and the wet dancers are gyrating. Maybe we could get a few gay dancers in there, too.

Pataki’s clown suit act should include a dunce cap. He should be made to write on a blackboard 100 times, “I will not have the unmitigated gall to run for President again.”

Lindsay the G should be fitted with an elaborate Pinocchio nose, which grows longer as he recites his litany of complaints against President Obama.

John Kasich should be required to repeat his not-quite-famous lame “joke” about abolishing teachers lounges, while members of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers throw cow pies at him.

And Whatsisname could explain who he is.

What if the candidates refuse to accept? Well, they were offered equal time, to do comedy on the same program. The obligations of NBC, and for that matter of SNL will be discharged.

But I do hope SNL makes the offer. And I can’t wait to see who accepts and what the show looks like.

I just got back from Paris and the news makes me want to puke

This is what comes from what I see in
the newspapers, not from French food.

Hey, I had a perfectly nice time in Paris. I ate runny, stinky cheese. I ate deliciously creamy butter. I ate baguettes by the basketful. I ate pommes frites. I ate extremely fatty liver with the consistency of velvet. I ate  meat that was doing the butterfly stroke in deep pools of obscenely rich sauces. 

And yet I came home weighing two pounds less than when I left. You can chalk that one up to alluring Parisian streets that almost grab you by the collar and demand to be strolled, and to nearly perfect weather that made the strolling easier. 

Walking around looking for the next place to eat evidently works off more calories than living on dry chicken breasts, or blowing a couple of hours every week in a stinking, sweaty health club. Call it the Crank Diet.

But when I get home, what do I find?

Thanks, Lindsey Graham, for ruining everything

I found the same old same old. Let’s start with Republicans like John McCain and  Lindsey Graham frothing at the mouth to demand we put “boots on the ground” in Syria to “defeat” a bunch of thugs in ISIL. 

Unfortunately, what “boots on the ground” is really code for is “American dead bodies on the ground.” You don’t commit troops to combat without significant numbers of them getting killed, some of them getting gravely wounded, some of them sustaining lifetime psychological wounds. 

None of those troops will be Lindsey Graham. And guaranteed, with the kinds of wars we’re fighting these days, there’s no victory at the end of the conflict

Personally, I’d rather see the U.S. track down and capture the sick-o who did the beheadings of their innocent victims. President Obama took out Osama bin Laden. We can take out this creep, too. Evidently, we and the Brits already have a good idea of who the hooded man with the knife is. 

So sniff him out. Hunt him down. And while I usually oppose capital punishment strenuously, I wouldn’t go into paroxysms of grief if, in the course of some special forces operation to capture the sick bastard, his own head should accidentally happen to fall off. The same goes for his bosses.

A nation of busybodies

Then there’s the business of throwing people off athletic teams for abusing their significant others and their kids, and spending hours of television time discussing it. Hey, don’t get me wrong. I am strongly – very strongly – opposed to either spousal abuse or child abuse. But we seem to be enlisting the wrong people to do the law enforcement. 

Spousal abuse, child abuse, and rape for that matter, are felonies. They should be investigated by the police. 

When credible evidence of who perpetrated such crimes is found, the police should make arrests and prosecutors should prosecute. The guilty would lose their player status simply by virtue of being in prison. 

The same, by the way, goes for college campus sexual abusers. It’s not the business of private institutions, whether sports franchises, or sports leagues, or universities,  to investigate, try, prosecute and punish felonies. When you get amateurs doing this work – and make no mistake, college panels and football commissioners are amateurs – they’re bound, sooner or later, to get it wrong, hurt innocent people, and probably exacerbate the problem. Let’s stop being a nation of busybodies and just call the cops whenever an assault happens.

Justice delayed is, uh…

Who said anything about justice?

Speaking of cops, what’s with the cop who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9th? I’m writing this on September 19th, for the love of Mike! If anybody but a cop went to Ferguson and shot somebody dead, the case would be investigated, an arrest made, the perp charged with the crime and bail set, all likely before sunset. In this case, you’ve got the city of Ferguson dealing with the problem by handing out comment cards. So here’s my own comment:  I want to vomit a second time.

Okay, okay, a small hurrah

If there’s any good news, it’s that Scotland voted not to secede from the Brits. Hip hurrah. Listen, the first I heard of this was two days before the voting began. I have no brief either for or against either the Scots or the rest of the Brits on this. My concern was, and still is, that secession might be contagious. That concern wasn’t at all mitigated when Reuters ran a story saying that one in four Americans are open to their own secession.

I thought we fought a civil war over this. Now what? Do we have to put “boots on the ground” in Texas, too? 

Or maybe we should just go ahead and let Texas secede. But at the same time, we should build a wall on their border with us, impose a tariff on their imports, strictly limit or even prohibit immigration of Texans to America, cut Texas out of the U.S. power grid, and in general treat them with the hostility we generally reserve for, say, Cuba.

Okay, so I’m feeling cranky to be home from Paris and back in the office. You got a problem with that?

Nuclear catastrophes for dummies: I’m talking to you, Lindsay Graham

Required reading for
Republicans and Tea
Party stalwarts

Let me start out with a small dose of whatever the opposite of nostalgia is.

I’m talking about when I was in the fifth grade, or maybe it was the fourth grade, back in Nineteen F….well, nevermind the year. What I have in mind is a day when my teacher, complying with instructions from the New York City Board of Education, which in turn was complying with orders from whatever department ran something called Civil Defense, taught us a life-saving drill.

The drill went like this. Out of the blue, the teacher would shout, “Take cover!” And we nine- and ten-year olds would dive under our wooden desks and cover our heads with our arms. It may have looked silly, but this was going to protect us from a nuclear blast and nuclear radiation. Don’t ask me how. I still haven’t figured it out.

Black and blue under

my old school desk

Drills like this continued through high school. I have to tell you that as we grew older, the desks – the old fashioned kind, standing on wrought iron legs that were screwed to the floor ­ – the desks seemed to grow smaller a. A number of times I banged myself up pretty badly, knocking a knee against the wooden seat, or banging an elbow or a forearm or my head against the wrought iron legs. I had angry black and blue bruises from practicing safety.

And the beauty part was, none of it was worth a tinker’s damn. You can’t protect yourself from nuclear radiation by hiding under a wooden desk and putting your arms over your head like a puppy who’s afraid he’s going to get swatted with a newspaper. What you can do in this position is, you can get very nasty radiation burns on your forearms and eyelids before you go blind and you die vomiting from radiation sickness.

Had war ever broken out, the United States and Russia  would have been as done as a porkchop broiled down to ashes and a charred bone on a barbecue grill. We had something called MAD, which stood not for Mother’s Against Drunks, or something having to do with Madison Avenue and advertising, but for Mutually Assured Destruction.

The ultimate MAD men

MAD was kind of a lunatic deal between the United States and the then Soviet Union: you can launch a hail of nukes at us and kill us all, but before we’re all dead, we’ll do the same to you. The beauty part of the deal was, it worked both in forward and reverse. Whether you were an American or a Russian, the warning was the same: don’t start up or somebody’s going to roast your hide even if you roast theirs.

Eventually, somebody realized that given the inevitability of Murphy’s Law, if we kept relying on MAD, something was going to go wrong, go wrong, go…well, you know. A piece of radar would read an aluminum foil pie plate tossed like a frisbee as an incoming nuke. Or some bored-to-insanity soldier in a silo would press a red button just to break up the day and see what happens. Instantly, somebody would launch a counter-strike. And them…kaboom!

So eventually, we learned to live without worrying much about the Russians, and they, without worrying much about us. It was just too MAD. We instead spent our time invading small Asian and middle-eastern nations instead, and later sending home only the dead bodies of our volunteers because, after Viet Nam, we finally eliminated the draft. 

Smart, brutal gangsters

The Russians, meanwhile starting acting like American gangsters with bigger-than-normal brains. They stole natural resources. They stole entire companies, and when the lawyer for one of those companies, a man named Sergei Magnitsky protested, they arrested him and beat him to death in prison.

Sitting on top of this festering heap of corruption and violence is what I can best describe as a crooked ex-cop, Vladimir Putin, former head of the KGB, or whatever they call it now. Putin has a rogue cop’s mentality. If you want it, grab it. If somebody protests, tune him up ‘till he dies. You want the Ukraine back? Send in the troops.

Putin is a very dangerous excuse for a human being, and what he wants now more than anything is to bring the Ukraine, historically a Soviet republic, back under the control of Moscow. So while his troops in the Ukraine might (or might not) be committing an act of sheer brazen theft, the last thing you want to do is walk up to him and tell him his mother is a diseased hooker, and furthermore he can go pound sand up his butt. 

This is a delicate situation. Mistakes happen. And mistakes breed automatic counter-mistakes, thanks to the MAD system left over from the cold war.

Enter Lindsay Graham,

high as a kite on stupid pills

Senator Lindsay Graham has seized on the current situation in the Ukraine like a fifteen year old juvenile delinquent, trying to find out if it’s really true what they say about gasoline and matches. He’s actually only trying to make President Obama look bad now that Obamacare is starting to work, taking a Let’s-you-and-Putin-Fight stance. But he’s holding a lighted match while standing over an open container of gasoline, and anything explosive can happen.

On CNN recently, Graham declared:

“Putin's on the wrong side of history. He's on the wrong side of the law. Make him pay a price. The Ukrainian people are dying for their freedom. I hope we will stand with them. Not just in words, but in deeds.”

Stand with them and 

do what, die with them?

Even if you’re not really talking about military action, Lindsay, one thing has a way, as they say, of leading to another. Some homicidal yutz assassinated the crown prince of Sarajevo, and the next thing you know, we had World War I. Somebody today blockades Russia and the next  thing you know…kaboom!

Well, the good news is that if people like Lindsay Graham have their way, we can fan the nearly-dead embers of the Cold War back into a nice crackling campfire. In order to arm for that, we’d have to reinstitute the draft. And once the lives of virtually every American son and daughter are at stake, you can bet the voters won’t be putting up with bullshit like Dick Chaney's Iraq invasion again.

However, a warning. One of these days, just by accident, a cold war across a now-rusty iron curtain could get red hot. And if that happens with Russia, happy Nukeday.

I’d like to leave you with with the heartwarming conversation between a young infantry private in training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and a grizzled old training sergeant, back in 1962. It was during a lesson  on something called CBR – Chemical, Biological and Radiological warfare. And here, I swear, is precisely how it went.

PRIVATE: Sergeant, what do you do if a nuke goes off say, within walking distance? 

SERGEANT: Son, let me teach you what to do by the numbers. One: Ten-hut! Two: At ease. Three: with your feet spaced eighteen to twenty-four inches apart, do a deep knee bend. Four: stick your head between your legs and push it as far back as it can go. And five: kiss your ass goodbye.

Ahem, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, I’d like to recommend a new roommate for you

I’ll get to Lindsay Graham in a few paragraphs, and to why I can’t seem to stop wishing somebody would punch him in the face. But first, let me explain why New York City has such a big stake in seeing Osama Bin Laden’s son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghayth, put on trial not in Guantanamo, but blocks from Ground Zero.

New York’s stake in

Abu Ghayth’s fate

It seems like every New Yorker knew someone, or at least knew someone who knew someone, who died in the 9-11 attack. And even if you were simply passing through, at the time, you’d have to be devoid of any of your senses not to be aware of the attack’s impact on the lives of New Yorkers.

The walls of many subway station stairwells were papered with scores of heartbreaking home-made handbills, run off on computer printers, showing faces of missing loved ones and pleas to help find them. The handbills would give desperate descriptions: the missing man or woman’s name, age, weight, the company they worked for, the tower they worked in. The photographs alone could make a strong man weep. You’d see a daddy playing with his two little girls. A young couple, close together, clearly in love. A young woman holding her cat. A grandmother. A father. A son. A daughter. 

And after a while you knew they were dead, all dead. Some were lucky enough to die almost instantly. Others were roasted to death in the debris. Or crushed to death. Or burned to death. They were our friends. Our family. Our colleagues. Our neighbors.

Downtown, at the Ground Zero site, firemen, and rescue workers, and ironworkers picking through the debris would find pieces of those people. A severed foot still inside a smoldering shoe. A grotesquely wounded human head, separated from a still-missing body. An arm.  It got so bad for the guys lifting concrete and girders by hand to get to body parts, that in the St. Paul's church where they fitfully napped between shifts on lower Broadway, these big, hardhat working guys had to be given teddy bears to hug as they lay weeping on cots or pews trying to shut the images out of their minds and sleep.

What would a “New York Jury” do?

This week, Sulaiman Abu Ghayth was captured. And transported in chains to New York. And arraigned in a Federal Court to a charge of conspiring to kill Americans – Americans who, in this particular case, were mostly New Yorkers.

New Yorkers deserve the right to listen to the evidence, then declare a verdict, and hand that verdict over to a New York judge who will toss Sulaiman Abu Ghayth into some dark hellhole of a maximum security prison where he can spend the rest of his miserable life rotting in the chilly gloom.

We earned the right to do this. We earned it by losing friends. By losing relatives. By losing colleagues. By living with the horror, and the grief, and the loneliness, and the rage that followed 9-11. And by stepping out of our front doors, for months after 9-11, and smelling the awful odor that was something like burning rubber or melting insulation, coming from the World Trade Center site whenever the wind was blowing in the right direction.

We earned the right to have our proxies on the jury stare narrow-eyed at Abu Gayth, and come back from the jury room, the air reeking this time not of melting insulation but of sangfroid and vengeance served cold.

Senator Graham, butt out

But leave it to the Republicans, not atypically led by the simpering Senator Graham, to complain about trying the accused criminal where the crime was done. Although he and other Republicans fumble for a rationale to lock the guy away in Guantanamo, where he will be perceived by many as a victim of a lawless state, the Republicans’ real reason is simply to make propaganda against the President. Which is remarkably similar to what Abu Gayth did for Bin Laden.

"We believe the administration's decision here to bring this person to New York City, if that's what's happened, without letting Congress know is a very bad precedent to set," Graham sniveled the other day during a press conference with one of his co-snivelers, Republican Senator Kelly Ayote of New Hampshire.

Ayote added, “the last thing in the world we want to do, in my opinion, is put them in civilian court. This man should be in Guantanamo Bay.”

Right. Where he can be either forgotten or perceived as a martyr to a lawless government. Where the world’s press cannot conveniently cover his trial and conviction and help spread word to those who would do us harm that if you choose to destroy us, we will either kill you as we did Bin Laden, or throw you in a hole for the rest of what only a very few would thereafter call a life.

Trust New Yorkers. We will see to it, if America leaves it up to us, thatAbu Gayth will find his hole. It’s just too bad we can’t throw Lindsay Graham in there with him.