Darrell's Dashed Dream

Calhoun's Cannons for Aug 1, 2014 

Darrell ( I'm Ready For My Close Up, Mr. DeMille) Issa is dreaming.  That sweet, sweet dream.  He's the cynosure of all eyes, the subject of all headlines, his camera-ready teeth gleaming in the lights as he heads for the reporters and the microphones waiting just for him. And they'll be waiting for him day after day after day for months.  Every headline will be about the Select Committee he's heading.  He'll be the biggest thing since Monica Lewinsky! 24/7 Issa! Issa! Issa!

Suddenly, his eyes flutter and beads of sweat pop out on his forehead. " UhnnnNooooo," he moans. The nightmare has returned.  That awful, awful nightmare.  In it, the lights suddenly fade, the cameras disappear, reporters are nowhere in sight, and those who remain keep asking, "What did you say your name was?"  Then the halls are empty and he's alone in the dark. 

With a shriek, he sits bolt upright in his bed and realizes in horror that it wasn't just a bad dream.  That damned Boehner and his fellow Republicans -- those FOOLS! -- had blown it! And Darrell starts to blubber, Boo-hoo-hoo. 

Indeed, they did.  No longer content with spending years systematically poisoning Barak Obama and all his works, drop by drop, until the public's eyes glazed over and they gave Congress the lowest ratings in history, they sensed that even their base was growing weary waiting for the Prez to keel over, something he stubbornly refused to do, so they started teasingly floating the "I" word about the TwitterVerse.

Impeachment!  Ah, that magic word, glittering in all its power, promising a fabulous opportunity for Lies to get twice around the world before Truth could even put on it's shoes.  The perfect excuse for a Do Nothing Congress to continue doing nothing while self-righteously posturing in the public eye 24/7.  A glorious  piece of Theatre for feeding the Republican base with huge hunks of red meat.  Constant headlines, media punditry on steroids, this would be BIG.  Waaaaay bigger than Benghazi!  Bigger than ObamaCare!  Bigger than Birth Certificates!  BIG!

And what did the cowardly Republican Congressmen do?  Instead of a go-for-broke  Grand Spectacle, they file some sort of crummy lawsuit.   A lawsuit, for God's sake!!   No lights.  No cameras.  No grandstanding. After a flurry, no headlines.  Just dishwater-dull, mumbling lawyers -- LAWYERS! -- with their clause A's and sub-paragraph B's, endlessly  gathering in quiet courtrooms to argue and object over incomprehensible minutia until everybody's heads explode and they change the channel.

"Fools!" Issa mutters, peering glumly into his morning coffee.  "Not only are the Republicans in Congress unwilling to govern, they're now unfit to govern!  Can't even get an article of  Impeachment right.  Instead, a pissant lawsuit?  And now everyone is laughing at us.  Bwa-Hahahahah. Weenies!  Girly Men! Bring it on! HaHaHaHa!"

Meanwhile, both parties hit the airwaves. Eeek! Impeachment! Send us money, they cried.  No, send us the money!

Which absolutely blows Darrell (I'm Ready For My Close Up, Mr. DeMille) Issa's sweet, sweet dream of heading up the Select Committee running the impeachment proceedings. Poor Darrell. Camera-ready teeth and no cameras.

And poor America.  Two more years of wasting time while the world burns.  And now, no bread or circuses for the mob. Just a coterie of plodding . . . lawyers.

Bummer.

Calling Captain Phillips

Calhoun's Cannons for Oct 2  2013

Well, the terrorists finally won.  Oh, not the wild-eyed Muslim jihadists.  Those guys just managed to scare Americans so silly that they promptly shot themselves in both feet, and bankrupted the country in a paroxysm of wars, and Constitution-busting eavesdropping.    

Nope, wasn't the jihadists.  This time, Washington was hijacked by a cohort of wild-eyed government-hating, Christian, jihadist Neo-Confederates who do not like green eggs and ham.

Actually, it's Obama they don't like.  Neither does the mainstream Republican Party, the old guard that the Neo-Confederates have now managed to take over.  From day one they all vowed to resurrect the tactic of Southern Resistance and stand with the ghost of Governor Wallace in the schoolhouse door  -- segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever! -- with rhetoric filled with  Southern grievance, dog-whistle music and sick fears of ol' Nat Turner.

And for the past 5 years, while the country foundered, desperate for help from Washington, in Congress it was all one long ridiculous Wallace-ite blockade: Not today, not tomorrow, not ever!  Even legislation crafted by Republicans themselves was suddenly dumped when it appeared the President might possibly support it too.  Cooties! Cooties! No! No! Never!

Instead of governing, these fools wasted time repeatedly voting to defund, defeat, deny Obamacare to millions of uninsured Americans.  It was their ultimate Green Eggs and Hamish bet noir. And like cocaine addicted lab mice, they kept futilely hitting the anti-Obamacare bar again and again, hoping against hope that this time --- pleeze, pleeeze, puh-leeeze -- they would be rewarded by one teensie bit of cheese for their micey little handsies so they could claim they "won" a fight noted only for its monumental stupidity and utter futility. Forty-three times, forty-four?  I've lost count.

Finally, they shut the place down.  That'll show 'em! So what was the despised, hideous, awful "government" they shut down? Well, for example, it was a VA employee helping an Iraq vet get benefits, including treatment for ongoing PTSD.  Yes, the same bunch who couldn't wait to send that vet to war in the first place,  were now more than willing to toss him under the bus for reasons of obsessive ideological purity and conservative resentment. 

They were also willing to toss their own staffers under the bus, offering at one point in their desperation, to force all Congressional staff members be required to "buy their health insurance on the new exchanges [but] without any government subsidies."  So while they made sure they'd keep their own Cadillac plans (paid for by the taxpayers) they were happy to toss their staff -- the little people -- to the wolves.  Portrait of self-serving politicians who don't want to govern but want only to rule -- the perfect Marie Antoinette moment.

And so came Oct 1, and two very important things happened: 1) The Government was shut down by a handful of radical, crazy-eyed Neo-Confederates in order to "save" the American public from the sheer horrors of Obamacare. 2) The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) started signing up people on the exchanges and the system kept crashing because so many people were trying to access it in order to sign up for the horrible, terrible, dangerous, freedom-destroying, awful, no-good, Obamacare.

Is it possible that Americans are finally figuring out that they are not helpless passengers on this ship of state, but crew?  And being crew, it's up to them to keep the ship in working order, keep it off the rocks, keep it steady.  And if the captain and ship has been hijacked by wild-eyed pirates and is being held hostage, it's up to the crew to take the ship back and set things right.

Now, where's  Seal Team 6?  

  

  

Smackdown Reboot

Calhoun’s Cannons for Oct 17, 2012

Well, that old saying is true:  When you want something done right, send in a woman. In this case, two of ‘em.  Unlike Jim Lehrer, Martha Raddatz and Candy Crowley managed to do the impossible: Keep two circling sleek, well-dressed, surface-polite Dobermans from peeing on each others shoes.

As theatre of the absurd, you can’t beat our Presidential Debates, Town Hall Version.  The beautiful stage, the hand-picked, rehearsed and vetted audience, the whole thing scripted like a piece of Kabuki Theatre.  But, c’mon, America, we gotta up our game.  Here was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for Mr. John Q. Citizen to ask a serious question of both a candidate and a President, and we get some doofus whining about how the Secretary of Energy told him that it wasn’t this administration’s responsibility to do anything about gas prices and could this possibly be true, O woe?  

People, people.  Really? Gas prices?  Secretary of Energy?  This is gas-guzzler America, home of ruthless, winner-take-all capitalism, where Free Market Rules rule, where we love our price-gougers and rip-off commodity speculators, and now we have this guy on national TV whining about gas prices?  Like he thinks the President is some kind of dreary Soviet five-year planner who should take over Exxon Mobil and show up at this guy’s local Gas ‘N Go with a screw driver to reset pump prices? Oh, Plueeze.

But that’s how much of the evening went, hand-picked questions that allowed the candidates to conveniently hang themselves in velvet ropes of clichés while the real 600 pound gorillas sat quietly off stage, untouched.

Like a Republican Congress of NO with only one stated goal: Defeat Obama by any means necessary.  Pretty hard to do much of anything to help a foundering country with that millstone around your neck.  Or income disparities that are a worsening drain on the economy and a real threat to America’s unique promise: upward mobility.  Or global warming, the mother of all gorillas coming down on us fast, a gorilla that will make jobs and gas prices – and everything else – moot. Or a realistic, grown-up discussion about our gazillion-dollar debt that wasn’t full of fairy stories about how we can all make it disappear while still getting lots of tax breaks and free pudding. You know, grown-up topics that needed grown-up answers.  Instead we get whines about gas prices.

And theatre, which did have its moments. Candidate Mitt was back doing his anxious little boy routine from the first debate, fairly hopping up and down promising the moon, a long litany of,  I can do it, I can create jobs, I know how, I do, I do, I do, I know how, the middle class is crushed, I can get all the oil we need, I can do it, crushed middle class, I know how, crushed, I’ll lower the rates, crushed, millions of jobs, lower taxes, more crushed, jobs, I can, I can, plueeze, plueeze, until Crowley had to tell him to hush up and go take his seat, which he finally did.

Amusingly, Candidate Mitt’s crowded litany of his own glorious campaign promises was often juxtaposed with his long j’accuse litany of candidate Obama’s unfulfilled glorious

campaign promises of four years ago, but at no time did I ever get a sense that Mitt understood the delicious irony of those juxtapositions: The huge difference between campaign promises (past and present) and real world governance.

Not so amusing was Mitt having to be fact-checked on air by Moderator Crowley.  If there’s one thing vital in a Commander in Chief, it’s the ability to make sure he’s got the facts straight before speaking or acting.  Mitt had already gotten smacked for rushing into the initial muddle of the Libyan terrorist attack even before he knew what the facts were and here he was again, weeks later, still unclear of the events. Not good, even for an Etch-A-Sketch candidate.  Hourly changeable campaign promises are one thing; Wrong facts about terror attacks are quite another.

But Democrats were happy.  The President was awake this time and ready for a smackdown and now the media, which never met a sports metaphor it didn’t love, will be filled with zinging sound bites and fact-checking wonkery, all of which will be endlessly repeated in order to gin up ratings for the last big showdown before the Big Race. 

Which likely will be a squeaker, given how divided this country is.  But until the voters understand that if they want those 600 pound gorillas dealt with, they’ve got to vote into office a better grade of Congressmen.  If they don’t, those gorillas will still be there, growing bigger and more dangerous every year. And in a few years, when some guy stands up again to whine about gas prices, their response won’t be pretty.