From the Soapbox/Huffington Post Blog

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TAKING ON BIG WHITEY

Published at The Huffington Post, May 13th, 2010

I keep coming back to Glenn Beck’s preposterous notion that President Obama has “a deep-seated hatred for white culture.” It’s one of those patented GOP instances of preemptive projection: accuse the enemy of doing exactly what you’re doing — in this case being racist — and when they call you out on it they sound like they’re saying, “I know you are but what am I?”

It’s infantile, petulant, straight out of the schoolyard, and dishonest to the core. You know, vintage Beck. It’s also effective, because it panders so well to the divided, warrior-crybaby mindset of the Tea Party crowd, who loudly profess on the one hand that they’re America’s staunchest, bravest patriots, but on the other can never quite keep their deep-seated sense of racial grievance and victimhood under wraps. They wave one fist at the sky (and/or in your face) in 1776-style rage, and use the other to ward off entirely imaginary blows from the massed, marauding hordes of the differently pigmented and the indifferently documented. People whose political ancestors marched with George Wallace in the sixties now appropriate, routinely and shockingly, the rhetoric of the civil-rights movement to bolster the notion that they, Big Whitey, are the real victims of race-hatred now. People whose parents and grandparents marched and died in the sixties for civil rights — a serious, grown-up political movement with the noblest objectives in mind – are left to wonder how it came to this.

Looking back, I suppose the election of Barack Obama was always bound to kick over the stone of American racism and reveal the wriggling horrors beneath, but who really could have ever predicted how bad it would get? We now know there is still that strain — ever-present, apparently ineradicable — of Americans deliriously happy to delude themselves into believing the President of the United States is a terrorist, a Muslim, an illegal alien, a sleeper agent, a communist, a National Socialist, a baby-killer, and so on. We see their shrieking skulls on TV every day, gargling their insane conspiracy theories and crackpot talking points at cable news hosts who all too often let them rant unchallenged. Talk Radio and Fox News in particular are thrilled to encourage and even sponsor these primeval political urges.

But this is America, and racism, as ever, is good for business on the far right and even, more recently, on the near-right. Good for short-term business, that is, but in the long term its political suicide. As whites drift nearer and nearer to majority-minority status, and the loss of their long-cherished political hegemony looms bleakly, the strangest noises and eruptions can be heard from them — like a collective death-rattle. And such eruptions are music to the ears of national and state politicians and their handlers. In Congress and the Senate, many formerly reasonable Republicans are now singing from the Tea Party hymn sheet for fear that insufficient ardency in support of the group’s pet causes will lose them their seats come November. Thus we are greeted with the nauseating spectacle of senators and congressmen throwing up their hands when pushed to affirm the president’s American provenance, or supposed Muslim leanings. “Well, I haven’t done all the research, so I can’t confirm or deny that” is the usual line — when eight seconds on the internet would settle it forever. Without the benefit of knowing how to use “Google”, a very fine line can persist between Harvard liberal elitist and Kenyan witch doctor.

In Arizona meanwhile, the state assembly, inspired by long time race-baiter Russell Pearce – a man who approvingly cites neo-nazi and white supremacists in his fundraising materials – has literally started howling at the moon. With the passage of SB1070, it is now open season on anyone who even looks like a Latino in Arizona. Crime is the reason cited most often, even though crime in Arizona, like in most states, has dropped dramatically in the last decade and a half. And with 51% of those polled seeming deeply okay with these rancid new Afrikaner-style pass-laws, it certainly looks like it’s paying off in the short term.

However, cities and firms nationwide are starting to sever their business ties with the scorching, bankrupt state, and a Major League Baseball boycott is looming. Arizona Governor/Grifter Jan Brewer (Palin, on a diet of meth and sun and even less education) may indeed go down in history for SB1070, but not by signing in another shameful Nadir of American Race Relations. She’ll be hailed as a backdoor civil rights hero by inadvertently ushering in a 21st century civil rights movement that will inevitably lead to comprehensive immigration reform, as did the last Civil Rights Movement in 1965. What the bleached brained, SAT-bereft, radiology tech dropout didn’t learn in “college’ is to what extent the hallowed civil-rights revolution owed to something as seemingly insignificant as major league baseball. That without the billion dollar business of producing heroes for public consumption, whites might never have cared enough about blacks to be bothered by racial injustice (Jackie Robinson, whose inclusion in MLB led this nation into desegregation, was honored at ballparks across the country 10 days before SB1070 was passed).

Today, players of Hispanic descent make up about 30% of team rosters, due in part to immigration legislation enacted by Dubya and Congress in 2006 that fundamentally abetted and facilitated the process by which MLB could obtain P-1 visas for foreign-born minor league players. This self-serving reform allowed for increased numbers of visas for non Americans, from which the MLB reaps tremendous financial gain in the way of increased access to foreign talent. If “Arizonans” think the multi-billion dollar industry of Major League Baseball is going to lose one penny, let alone the next Roberto Clemente or Albert Pujols — because of 3 hillbillies gone mad with power, then they have whatever form of rabies John McCain has. Anyway, it’s not the most noble of human traits, but we do tend to be more outraged by indignities against our sports and entertainment heroes than by the actual atrocities and constitutional perversions committed against our housekeepers and our gardeners. And without baseball, Arizona is just, well, Thunderdome.

It’s been a whole 23 years (that’s 161 in hillbilly years), since Pontiac dealer, impeached criminal, pickaninny apologist and Arizona Governor Evan Mecham made his first act in his new job the erasing of a MLK paid state holiday. Within a few months, nearly $4.6 million was lost.  A few months later, this polarizing <em>non-white oriented one day a year caused the cancellation of 45 conventions to the tune of $25 million in lost revenue. One of these was an NBA convention in Phoenix. Mecham’s response?  “Well, the N.B.A., I guess they forget how many white people they git comin’ to watch them play.” The NFL Players Association was none too keen on playing their showcase game in a state that refused to recognize a national holiday solely because the guy was black, and the NFL removed Super Bowl XXVII from the hideous and aptly named Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe and put it in the lovely and quaint Rose Bowl in old town Pasadena.

Racism’s negative effect for Republicans has not yet been seen outside of protest rallies. Racism has woken the sometimes dormant giant of future American politics, an increasingly vocal and active Latino voter demographic, much of it located in precisely those border states most prone to racist agitation over border security and illegal immigration, states where those of Hispanic origin often lived until deep into the 1970s in a state of virtual “Juan Crow.” When that group asserts itself in the polls, the right will have to relearn the grim lessons that did for CA Gov. Pete Wilson in 1994, after he backed the racist and discriminatory Prop 187 (so classy of them to name a ballot initiative after the police call-sign for homicide). The Republican Party has been in a minority in California ever since — and it’s a long time since we heard a peep out of Pete Wilson.

The good news is, it’s suicidal! Maybe the only creditable thing (besides his humanizing addictions) about George Bush was his determination to bring as many Hispanics into the GOP as possible. Karl Rove may be a fat creep, but he knows where the electoral future lies in the Sunbelt/Southwestern states — and it isn’t just with white folks any more. Alienating Latino votes is the political equivalent of slitting your wrists in the bathtub. But the party of Rove and Bush — largely thanks to Rove and Bush’s disgraceful, divisive and demonizing rhetoric on so many other topics — just can’t seem to help itself. It can’t bring itself to denounce the racism evident at every tea party rally, and often seems to defend or downplay it. In the face of a Malthusian slo-mo alteration of the political landscape by Latinos, Arizona’s politicians went almost immediately with their lowest gut-feelings. Rile up the mob for a few extra votes in Nov ’10, then lose everything in 2012.

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GOT COMMON SENSE?

Published at The Huffington Post, November 16th, 2009

So Glenn Beck and his Teabagging minions — never the sharpest students of American history — have now appropriated Thomas Paine, the staunchest radical of the American Revolution and later a persecuted moderating figure in the French one, for their own rancid and incoherent purposes. At the Beck-backed 9/12 rallies and the various Tea Party whine-offs nationwide, historically-challenged high school dropouts have been donning revolutionary motley and declaiming the words of the Founders, men whose ideas, if studied in any kind of depth, would most likely repulse and repel them. Hell, most of these people – the supposed neo-Paine-ists – wouldn’t get ten pages into Paine’s anti-clerical tract The Rights of Man, without feeling the urge to build a pyre and burn it to satanic ashes.

The buffoonish Beck has recently given a platform to one Bob Basso, an eccentric motivational speaker (he claims to have created “laughter-therapy”), and onetime Hawaii Five-O recurring guest star who went viral on YouTube when, dressed up as a speechifyin’ Paine, he threw in his lot with Beck’s 9/12 and Tea Bag mobs, and called for a “Second American Revolution.” A former TV sports anchor from Hawaii, Basso once delivered the news stark naked and, on another occasion, from atop a pile of manure, which means that he comes from the same idiotic, “look-at-me, Ma!” local-market, drive-time media hothouse that gave us self-professed “rodeo-clown” Beck. No wonder they get along so well.

Basso and Beck share a blissfully logic-and-facts-free version of US history that should have Francis Parkman and George Bancroft throwing up in their coffins, and it certainly takes a lot of gall to sign Paine up for service in the right-wing Tea Party Militia. Beck says that Tom Paine helped us “take back America,” thus glueing his own nauseating agenda to a thoughtful dissenter who would have fled puking from the likes of Beck and his ululating aficionados. You can quote Paine’s line about “sunshine patriots and summer soldiers” until you’re blue in the face, but one paragraph of his writings, ripped from its context, does not Tom Paine a rightie-wingnut make. Dick Armey’s addled army would run screaming for their mommies and/or the hills if they acquainted themselves with Paine’s radically progressive thoughts on universal suffrage, democracy, free public education and minimum wages and living standards. He hated slavery, monarchy, organized religion and capital punishment, the last two of which certainly feed the more noxious fever-dreams of the Beck-fetishizing far-right. Paine once led his fellow excise workers in England on strike for better wages, scathingly denounced organized religion and church dogma, and ridiculed Christianity in The Rights of Man. Worst of all, he was, like so many of the Founding Fathers, an honorary French citizen (and in Paine’s case, a member of the post-revolutionary French National Convention). Paine was so radical and unswerving, even by the standards of the Age of Revolutions, that only six people total attended his funeral in New York City in 1809 – two of whom were freed black slaves. It’s hard to get a lot of Democrats to endorse him these days, let alone Republicans and their allies on the bleakest fringes of the know-nothing Right.

This isn’t the first time the far right has appropriated the costumes and rhetoric of our Revolutionary forebears. The paranoid and racist Arizona Minutemen of recent years weren’t even the first racist group to besmirch those plucky colonial militiamen by stealing their name. That honor goes to ’60s neo-fascist (and veterinarian-products salesman!) Robert DePugh, whose clandestine anti-semitic, white-supremacist micro-grouplet – another Minutemen, also Arizona-based – had a major boner for heavy artillery and pipe-bombs. (De Pugh, incidentally, was an early member of the loonies-only-please, far-right John Birch Society, which was financially inseminated by Koch Industries, which also backed the group that spawned Armey’s Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity, the two main Tea Party “astroturf” backing groups. Really, this tendency, and its ever-present, immensely wealthy and cynical corporate backers, is harder to eradicate than termites or H1N1.) All I’m saying is, it’s odd to see the 60s-loathing right-wing don the same period clothing that we last saw worn at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and the subsequent Chicago 7 Conspiracy Trial – by Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, people unaffiliated with any known right-wing group or sentiment, then or now.

All this begs one question — which of the Left’s towering progressive heroes will next be appropriated by the wingnuts? I’d like to see them re-brand socialist leader and sometime jailbird Eugene Debs, or perhaps radical anarchist Emma Goldman, with a Red State glaze. Perhaps Sacco and Vanzetti, the Wobblies or the Molly Maguires will be next for the right-wing makeover. Judging by the precedent set by the Paine-theft, it would scarcely matter that they were in fact communists and socialists, anarchists and union leaders (after all, aren’t fascism and socialism the same thing these days – can’t we all get along?). The right seems to have no compunction whatsoever about scrubbing the rhetorical record of everything — except that some context-free sentence that seems, superficially, to endorse the entire Tea Party agenda.

HAPPY PALENTINE’S DAY! I LOVE LETTER FROM ME TO SARAH

Published at The Huffington Post, February 14th, 2010

I thought I really ought to be send you a Valentine’s Day greeting today, because I fear that next year you will be forgotten by all but your most rabid and demented fans. The more we learn about you, the less impressed (and more shocked and often nauseated) we are, the more we harden our suspicion that you really ARE an empty vessel, a vacuous, amoral small-town grifter with an eye for nothing beyond the main chance, the next pay-day and the next photo-op. Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant, and they’re not wrong. But for you, the one most sorely in need of disinfecting, sunlight has the same effect it does on vampires. It eats away at you little by little, rotting you until nothing is left. The next time I address you it won’t be in the form of a Valentine’s Day greeting — it’ll be an anti-panegyric preached over the coffin of your political ambitions.

I will miss you when you’re gone. Your entertainment-value quotient is off the charts, especially for “over educated”, cultural-elitist snobs like me. There’s the maddening little sing-song delivery of your speeches, with those weird, unmotivated upticks and misplaced emphases that suggest you are literally reading “your own words” for the very first time. For anyone who appreciates real oratorical skills, like those of Churchill, MLK or Pliny the Elder (you can google all these names, sweetie), it’s like having knitting-needles kicked into one’s ears over and over again. There’s your matchless ability to grind grammar and syntax into a non-intelligible word-pulp containing the odd sharp, indigestible fragment of John Birch (“Bomb Iran!”) or Jesus-Freak (“More Divine Intervention!”) insanity, the frequent cheap slurs against your political enemies — who, I can’t help noticing, are sprouting up even in the madder precincts at your own end of the political spectrum — and the usual genuflections towards Boy Jesus and Saint Ronnie (who I bet wouldn’t touch your ass with a forty-foot pole). And then there’s your sorry history of climbing towards the top over the corpses of the people who helped get you into office in the first place.

It’s like a pathology you can’t seem to conquer. I don’t think there’s a step you’ve taken on your long (albeit short) march to infamy that hasn’t featured the wholesale betrayal of the most recent tier of your erstwhile political mentors — the corpses of the disgruntled and thrown-over now surely make up a substantial percentage of the Alaskan electorate. No wonder you quit your job.– the corpses of the disgruntled and throw-over now surely make up a substantial percentage of the Alaskan electorate. No wonder you quit your job.

And I love your unmatched ability to pick fights with almost anyone, especially your own team members and handlers during last year’s election. There’s enough resentment and loathing among that group to guarantee you’ll have a hard, nasty ride in the primaries come 2012 — except I don’t for one minute believe you will run for President. Deep in your cold, flinty little excuse for a heart, you know as well as anyone else that you’re not fit to boss a taco truck, let alone hold the reins of state. Your Nixonian hatreds and resentments are part of the public record — remind me what your state-trooper brother-in-law’sname was, or the name of that guy you fired for not breaking the law and firing the bro-in-law for you? — and sooner or later, even your least discriminating, most intoxicated aficionados will take note of them and feel their gorges rising — as no doubt they have whilst watching your yoga-like, palin-defends-limbaugh-use-of-the-word-retarded, pretzel-bending exertions in re: Rush Limbaugh and “Retarded.”

And talking of aficionados and all that “Run, Sarah Run!” jive, did you happen to notice that the room you addressed last Saturday was only half-full, with a mere 600 souls gathered there — for the price of $549 dollars a pop — to hymn, laud and exalt you? They were the ones devoted enough to pay to hear you speak, who didn’t care about the massive speaker’s fee you pocketed (with vague promises of using it to support Tea Party-ish candidates — promises you’ll soon break, like all the other promises you make), the folks who really are dumb enough to believe that “someone just like me” is capable of running the country, the ones who laughed at the “TelePrompTer” joke even as you used a TelePrompTer of your own, and the ones who think that scrawling a cheat-sheet on your palm is a sign of genius and guts (and not a primitive, pre-digital version of a TelePrompTer — irony not being one of their/your strong suits).

The polls are starting to reflect a growing weariness with all your white-bread, small-town scams and poisonous airhead utterances. Last week a republicans-only poll of likely contenders for 2012 showed you in a distant second place to robotic Thunderbirds puppet Mitt Romney.He has spent billions of his own ill-gotten buckage to secure the princely figure of, oooh, 14 percent support for his putative presidential bid. You on the other hand, limped into second place with seven percent of the tally, barely beating out all the other scurrilous, ice-hearted has-beens and never-will-bes on the list (Huckabee, Gingrich). And another poll showed unfavorables towards you that should put paid to any presidential ambitions you might harbor — and here I reiterate my certainty that you will find the note-perfect, “I’m too pure for this” rationale for NOT running, and instead resuming your role as right-wing America’s pallidly-pigmented equivalent of Oprah.

Given that your insatiable, almost neurotic appetite for ink, flashbulbs and headlines hasn’t flagged for one second since you were plucked from the frigid tundra 18 months ago, it seems that the more we get to know you, the less we want to know.

Americans are finally waking up to your game, girl, and fewer and fewer of them display any inclination to play it. Happy Palintine’s Day, Sarah, there won’t be another.

XXXOOOO

How Much Longer Can the GOP Maintain Credibility When all They Say is “No! No! No! No! No”!

Published at The Huffington Post February 10th, 2010

Link: The Party of NO!

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JUNIOR G-MAN JAMES O’KEEFE. IS HE STUPID? OR EVIL? BOTH!

Published at The Huffington Post January 27th, 2010

I’m delighted to see that the feral children of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove are at it again – and that this time their antics may land them in the Federal Pen for a long time.

The last time we heard from right-wing boy-wonder James O’Keefe, or as I call him, L’il Nixon, he was the toast of the mad-right think-tanks, crowing on Fox and various wingnut websites about having brought ACORN to its knees by posing as a pimp and seeking the organization’s advice about setting up a house of ill-repute on the government’s dime. For this, and despite plain evidence that his stunt used selectively edited footage and audio, O’Keefe was hailed as a hero in the dimmer, danker precincts of the fever-swamp far-right. The Washington Times – predictably as insane as ever – dubbed O’Keefe “a role model and a true American patriot,” and don’t expect them to back away from that overheated assessment any time soon. The politicians who hailed him for his “diligent investigative journalism” – let’s see how long it takes Pete Olson (R-TX) to disavow that idiotic accolade, from a congressional resolution authored by him and signed by several dozen of his mouth-breathing peers – must now square their erstwhile image of O’Keefe as the Right’s own one-man Woodward & Bernstein with the new picture that’s now emerging after he and his pals apparently attempted to bug the offices of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. Not as neo-WoodStein, but as leader of a far-right, Hardy Boys version of Nixon’s Plumbers. Not a Junior G-Man, but a Junior G. Gordon Liddy-man.

O’Keefe is anything but the “investigative journalist” he claims to be: he’s an infantile black-propaganda warrior for the Status Quo Ante. His motto (which could be the logo-cum-modus operandi for the entire right-wing project of the last three decades) is, as O’Keefe expressed it on Andrew Breitbart’s brain-dead, truth-averse right-wing news-toilet BigGovernment.com “It is time for conservative activists to create chaos for glory.” I think a few bleak nights in the penitentiary will soon acquaint O’Keefe more intimately with chaos (likely in the form of severe rectal fissures) than they will with glory of any kind.

The echoes of the Watergate break-in are irresistible (though probably far-fetched; Nixon’s Plumbers were incompetent, but they were still pro’s): four 24-year-olds on some kind of Glenn Beck-inspired dorm-room sugar-rush attempt to bring down a wobbly Democratic Senator, apparently feeling ironclad and untouchable after the “success” of their ACORN prank. Certainly there are some weird touches to this story, including the fact that one of O’Keefe’s coconspirators is the son of the Acting US Attorney for Louisiana, whetting one’s appetite for further damning links to more mainstream, less guerilla-style arms of the GOP. And as with everything sleazy and untoward that goes down in Louisiana politics, unapologetic hooker-loving human garbage-pail Senator David Vitter also has a cameo role. Add to all that the presence of listening devices, disguises, misrepresentation, the surreptitious filming of the incident by O’Keefe, and the presence outside of another dimwit manning a “getaway car”, and you have quite the bill of particulars with which the Federal Prosecutor can lard up the indictment. I bet the pleading-up sessions going on right now are a real sweat-lodge for these morons. There may well be a US Attorney in the mix, but these brats are so far out of their depth they can no longer see land. It would be nice to see the Feds throw the book at O’Keefe because that boy, much like Gordon Liddy in his gung-ho, “I’ll kill or die for Nixon” days is OFF THE RESERVATION.

The old question arises again: Are they stupid? Are they evil? Or are they both? I’ll opt for answer no. 3, with the MITIGATING FACTOR that there may well be an 18-and-a-half minute gap somewhere in O’Keefe’s synaptically-short circuited brain.

How does the human mind arrive at this place? Is this, as Hunter Thompson used to say of Nixon, “the triumph of the twisted gene and the broken chromosome”? Or is it nurture, not nature? You have to wonder what kind of values were decanted from O’Keefe Sr’s mind into the son’s over the course of O’Keefe’s childhood. Did Pops read Liddy’s toxic, unrepentantly fascistic autobiography Will to him as he drifted off to sleep? Was there a photo of John Dean slotted behind the mesh of the family dartboard? Was he breast-fed on heroic tales of Donald Segretti and the USC “rat-fucking” mafia that caused so much mischief in the 1972 Presidential Election? Did he root for Nixon, Haldeman, Erlichman and Mitchell while watching All The President’s Men? Were Lee Atwater and Karl Rove the presiding spirits guiding that household?

I’d guess that these children (they sure ACT like children) have been raised in the new disinfotainment dispensation in which one can grow to manhood without ever consulting any source of news besides prejudice-confirming propaganda outlets like The American Standard, Michelle Malkin, WorldNetDaily and Fox News. And if you take your history lessons from ill-informed showboaters and attention-seekers like Glenn Beck, then it’s probably also likely that you have only the dimmest understanding of how the law works, or of how the legislative apparatus will kick your skinny post-pubescent ass down a mile-long flight of stairs if you behave as if it doesn’t apply to you. Believe all you want to the delusions and lies you pick up from the right-wing noise machine, but someday reality will come back and mug you – for real.

Let’s hope this puts these obnoxious neo-McCarthyite thugs out of the picture for ever. And if the people who formerly depicted O’Keefe as the risen spirit of Tom Paine and Paul Revere don’t retract their accolades right away, we’ll know just how worthless they are as truth-tellers and journalists. They’re just as guilty as he is.

Link To: Junior G-Man

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JIM BUNNING: TOO MEAN AND WEIRD FOR THE GOP.

Jim Bunning managed to do the nation one service: he proved beyond a doubt that some Senators have severed any connections they might ever have had with the rest of America, with verifiable reality itself, with ordinary human decency, or with the concept of shame. If a single image crystallized this feeling for me, it was the sight of Bunning exercising his Senatorial privilege in the most numbingly pedantic and lordly manner: “Excuse Me! This is a Senators only elevator! Excuse me!” he cried as he shooed away an ABC news producer intent on asking Bunning to explain his hold-cum-filibuster on a jobless benefits bill. Well, excuse US, Marie Antoinette! Shall we also avoid direct eye-contact with your majesty, or shall we just prostrate ourselves in the mud as you’re borne past us in your sedan-chair?

What a tragic fall, from Cooperstown worthy pitcher to an angry old man now apparently at large in some parallel Versailles of his own devising. From the king of the pitcher’s mound to just another embittered old crank on the Capitol dunghill.

Like a lot of splenetic old right-wingers, Bunning has a well-nursed sense of personal grievance. He may have tried to throw hundreds of thousands of people off the unemployment rolls for the sake of some bullshit abstract principle he — and almost no one else — believed in, but Senator Jim Bunning only appears to be concerned about the personal pain felt by Senator Jim Bunning himself.

The Capitol Police, he moaned, were “doing a lousy job” protecting him from reporters like the one he shooed out of the elevator. This is pretty true to form for Jim, who is accompanied on visits back home by a phalanx of bodyguards (“there may be strangers among us…” he intoned darkly, in the true paranoid style). This is in spite of — or, come to think of it, perhaps directly because of — his repeated votes against raising funding for Kentucky law enforcement. Bunning reached some new climacteric of pathetic whining when he bewailed, on the Senate floor, the fact that his own filibuster had caused him to miss a big baseball game on TV.

Old, mean and right-wing: he’s the oldest Republican Senator and, according to the National Journal, has the second most conservative record in the Senate, after the dreaded enthusiast and off-the-charts rightie Rick Santorum before Pennsylvania’s voters wised up and threw that fool out. Talking to historian Taylor Branch not long after Bunning was elected to the Senate in 1998, President Clinton shared his own experiences with the ex-pitcher. Branch later wrote: “[Clinton] said Bunning, a former baseball player, was so mean-spirited that he repulsed even his fellow know-nothings. ‘I tried to work with him a couple times,’ said Clinton, ‘and he just sent shivers up my spine….I know you’re a baseball fan and everything, and you don’t like to hear it, but this guy is beyond the pale.'” More tellingly, Gene Mauch — Bunning’s manager during his tenure with the Philadelphia Phillies — seemed to think he was an ass, too.

It’s the “mean” part, not the old or the right-wing aspects, that most annoys people about Bunning. Do his grandchildren flee from him in terror and in tears? How often do his relatives have to bite their tongues at Thanksgiving Dinner? No one familiar with his atrocious record can be in the least surprised that Bunning was content to be the public face of a political move that not only cannot succeed in the long run, and which intentionally immiserates and impoverishes people — but which finally costs the government and the states MORE money.

Scary looking even as a Phillie.

Why would he care? It seems that so many already hate Jim Bunning, including even his ever more exasperated, equally right-wing and perceivably soulless peers on the GOP. Mam’selle Mitch McConnell, his fellow Kentucky Senator, put his own reputation on the line in backing Bunning in his 2004 reelection bid — and this at a time when there was open speculation, based on Bunning’s increasing eccentricity and obvious mental rigidity, that he might actually be suffering from senile dementia.

In case you’ve forgotten the evidence for that startling diagnosis, Bunning himself said that his Democratic challenger Daniel Mongiardo looked “like one of Saddam Hussein’s sons,” and refused to debate him face-to-face. (What? He couldn’t beat Uday or Qusay in a fair fight? Gene Mauch wouldn’t have stood for that kind of pussyfooting). When a debate finally took place, Bunning refused to leave Washington, claiming he was preoccupied with Senate votes despite there being no votes scheduled. He appeared instead by satellite-feed, and refused to admit electoral commissioners to determine if he was being fed his answers from behind the camera. In spite of all this anarchy and tragicomic idiocy, Kentucky voters put him right back in office, so my sympathy for them is currently in very short supply. If this is the man they want to represent them in the Senate, then I just can’t wait for Kentucky to secede from the Union already. The racehorses stay on our side, thank you very much.

In April, 2006, Time magazine confirmed what the political cognoscenti already believed by nominating Bunning as one of America’s Five Worst Senators, dubbing him “The Underperformer” for his dismal, lazy, splenetic and misanthropic performance in elected office, and noting his utter disinterest in topics unrelated to baseball or immigration. This lack of enthusiasm for public office manifested itself most bizarrely in his adamant refusal to attend the first week of the 2009 Congress, airily claiming he had inviolable plans with his family that week. Anybody hoping that said family might be staging a hostile intervention on behalf of their apparently brain-fried relative was swiftly disappointed. Students of Senatorial Idiocy 101 soon had their favorite test-subject back before them for continued examination — unchanged, unapologetic and still just as mean as a snake. Only a month later he was telling constituents back home that cancer-stricken Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be dead within nine months. In his inevitable apology letter, Bunning contrived to misspell Ginsburg’s name. Twice.

This time around, McConnell has withheld his endorsement entirely, urged Bunning to drop out, and meanwhile scorched the Kentucky political landscape to deny funds to the barmy old pitcher. A pox on both their houses, I say — my enemy’s enemy, etc. Bunning, despite whining unconscionably about his treatment, seems to have gotten the message. Before his disgraceful performance last week, he had already opted, in the face of near-universal hostility in his own party and his home state, to retire after the 2010 elections.

After that date, we won’t have Jim Bunning to kick around any more, so I plan on doing a lot of kicking while I still have the chance.

THE 41 PERCENT MAJORITY

Published at The Huffington Post January 24th, 2010

Published at The Huffington Post,  February 23, 2010

Link: The CPAC RODEO ROUNDUP