Category American Values

And now for some truth about today’s GOP, we go to Bob in the Heights

Pat Ryan 5 Comments

My friend Bob Eddy has something to say today about the current race for president of these United States, about which you may have heard a thing or two in the past year or so. He has an endorsement, and a prediction, and a link to a great story in Rolling Stone (that I’m still working on) with background on the evolution of the Republican Party over the last two generations into the enclave of selfish anti-tax extremists you see before you today. Bob…

Against my better judgment—I guess more than anything because I have a lot of reading time these days—I have been keeping up for some time now with the often humorous and desperate “Anyone but the Mormon!” reality show currently masquerading as the Republican primaries. I mean, who can resist? What a pack of fucking coconuts, every one of them. Excluding Ron Paul, who’s basically a nut with a couple of good ideas, and Huntsman, who is waaay too centrist for this rabid crowd, they’re a bunch of pathetic pledge-signing panderers beholden to the Tea Baggers and Christian right; scumbags who made their millions peddling their influence trying to portray themselves as “outsiders” and reformers—I’d have better luck trying to dress up and look like Kim Kardashian. I liked Bill Maher’s “New Rules for the New Year” featured in the [New York] Times last week – among my favorites: 

If you were a Republican in 2011, and you liked Donald Trump, and then you liked Michele Bachmann, and then you liked Rick Perry, and then you liked Herman Cain, and then you liked Newt Gingrich…you can still hate Mitt Romney, but you can’t say it’s because he’s always changing his mind.

And now you can add Rick Santorum to that list. Concerning Rick Perry:

The press must stop saying that each debate is “make or break” for Rick Perry and call them what they really are: “break.”

Even crusty curmudgeon Krauthammer at the [Washington] Post calls this one “a weak Republican field with two significantly flawed front-runners contesting an immensely important election.” Of course that was a couple of weeks ago, when everyone assumed it would be Romney vs. Newt: Yes Charlie, who will save America from that cloaked and quasi-American and his plan to turn this great nation into a socialistic Hieronymus Bosch painting, the commie love child of France and Cuba?!  In the same editorial he wraps it up with “If Obama wins, he will take the country to a place from which it will not be able to return (which is precisely his own objective for a second term).”

Wow!  Gives me shivers…

Bye-bye, Michele, you were my favorite! Sorry God’s mysterious plan for America doesn’t include you after all! And who can forget “I’m not going away!” Herman Cain…are you fucking kidding me? Oh yes you are, Herman, your little five minutes on stage are mercifully over. Poor Herman, the misunderstood Jimmy Stewart of the pizza business. Yes, after shuffle dancing around the harassment accusations, he then had to admit to a 13-year relationship with an Atlanta businesswoman that included him giving her monthly cash installments—but all in benevolent innocence of course, strictly friends. A friend his wife knew nothing about. You know, like George [Bailey], when he gives the town floozy some cash to go start a new life outside of Bedford Falls in “It’s a Wonderful Life!”

So anyways, with the remaining bag of nuts now taking off the gloves and heading to New Hampshire for another family cage match, the media has been dogging my phone for weeks asking if I’m ready to go on record endorsing a candidate! And my Tweeter is down!! So I’ve chosen tonight to officially give my full support to the incumbent, President O. To quote Thomas Friedman in a recent editorial, “I still don’t want my money back.” Not only that, my money says he will soundly beat any one of these weak challengers. Sorry, they just didn’t/couldn’t come up with a serious contender. Poor Mitt—will he once again face the shame and embarrassment of his party’s rejection? I see grandpa McCain has thrown him a bone of support, as if anyone gives a dry fart what he thinks—the man who gave us Sarah Palin. Dan Quayle is also for Mitt—take that Newt, IN YOUR FACE!

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation’s balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that’s crazy.”

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. “Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver,” he demands, “or less?”

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: “MORE!”

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

That’s the opening from an excellent and fascinating piece in a recent Rolling Stone (by Tim Dickinson), entitled “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich.” I mean no offense to those who vote and stand for the Grand Old Party, but sometimes I wonder if a lot of them really know what they’re voting for these days. It’s quite an extensive and in-depth look at the party today, and its evolution over the last 25 years. What’s most surprising is it’s filled with quotes from top level economic movers, shakers, and advisors of past Republican administrations that, frankly, barely recognize what their party has become. Reagan budget director David Stockman goes on record saying “The party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility. They’re on an anti-tax jihad—one that benefits the prosperous.” Bruce Bartlett, an architect of the 1981 Reagan tax cuts says “Taxes are ridiculously low! And yet the mantra of the Republican party is tax cuts raise growth…so where’s the fucking growth?”

George Voinovich, former GOP senator from Ohio, when discussing the debt ceiling standoff of last year, likened his party’s new guard to arsonists whose attitude is “We’re going to get what we want or the country can go to hell.” Even economist Glenn Hubbard, designer of the Bush tax cuts, tells Rolling Stone there should have been a revenue contribution to the debt ceiling deal, “structured to fall mainly on the well-to-do.”

Alan Simpson, former senator and personal friend of the Gipper, says Reagan recognized raising taxes as a necessary and effective tool to bring down unwieldy deficits and wasn’t afraid to do so—he “raised taxes eleven times in eight years!” Yes, the Moses of the Republican party, the man who’s name and image is a virtual icon, only hearkened to with reverence and adulation.

Republicans have responded to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by slashing inheritance taxes, extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and endorsing a tax amnesty for big corporations that have hidden billions in profits in offshore tax havens. They also wrecked the nation’s credit rating by rejecting a debt-ceiling deal that would have slashed future deficits by $4 trillion – simply because one-quarter of the money would have come from closing tax loopholes on the rich.

How did this all start? With a smarmy little Harvard-educated Chamber of Commerce staffer and sphincter-licker named Grover Norquist, who began the hijacking of the Republican Party back in 1985 when Reagan made him point man for a pressure group called Americans for Tax Reform.

But it’s a long story, I’ve said my piece. I’ll close with something from one of the lucky few presidents who got to actually preside over a government that ran in the black—and get a hummer in the Oval Office from a hot young intern. The article mentions that a decade ago [Bill] Clinton warned the Republican tax cuts would return America to a period of “deficit upon deficit” that culminated in “the worst recession since the Great Depression.”

Obama is going to win because he will successfully make the case that his opponent’s party stands for obstructionism and the demise of the middle class. And it won’t be that hard.

Go Texans!

Star Wars analogies, girls in bikinis, and the spirit of journalism

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

I’m not the most cynical person around when it comes to the practice of journalism today…really, I’m not. If I was completely cynical about what passes for a lot of the journalism being published these days—if I believed it was a lost cause, a total sellout to the evil forces of what David Shaw called “the four horsemen of the journalistic apocalypse: superficiality, sensationalism, preoccupation with celebrity, and obsession with the bottom line”—then I wouldn’t bother talking about it at all; there’d be no point. I feel there’s still some good in there, or can be, perhaps in the way that Luke Skywalker could feel the Anakin Skywalker that still remained within Darth Vader. I must still try to turn it back to the good side of the Force.

Many of my contemporaries in the post-Watergate generation went into journalism with an idealized and inflated vision of what journalists could do, and we really did (and do) believe in the vital importance of the role of journalism as a watchdog over government power, a role that was understood and respected by the Founding Fathers to a far greater extent than it is by today’s civic and government leaders and a growing percentage of the general public. But without doubt, the excitement of being a reporter was part of the attraction, too.

Jim Romenesko linked to a recent Brain Pickings post highlighting a 1940 Encyclopedia Britannica film from the Your Life Work series, which called the film an “idealistic manifesto for the deeper ethos of journalism as a calling.” Yea…and it’s funny to see how they were selling it to the pre-World War II student body; enjoy…

While you’re at it, take a look at this video that fights against itself trying to disprove the idea that a pretty girl in a bikini is not necessarily a distraction to effective instruction.

And when you’re done, nose around Brain Pickings…some interesting stuff there on the notion of creativity.

You wouldn’t mind if we just arrested you a little bit, would you, since you look like you might hate America?

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Did you ever run across something that’s so bizarre, so out there, so freakin’ weird, that you think you must have heard it or read it wrong?  I did recently, when I read the story that the Congress of These United States was ready to pass a law making it perfectly legal for the government to use the Army to arrest American citizens here in America and hold them in custody, indefinitely, without charges or trial, if in the government’s wisdom that person was a terrorist threat.

Wait, what?

Yes.  Apparently still shivering with fear over the possibility of another September 11-type attack, Congress was ready to pass an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would authorize the use of the military as a domestic police force and give clearance to arrest and detain citizens on the mere suspicion of terrorist complicity; there would be no messy and time-consuming need for formal charges to be filed, or for due process or habeas corpus to be respected.  Congress seemed confident that the American sheeple either wouldn’t notice or were so scared of terrorists that they would happily line up to trade in some of their Constitutionally-protected liberties for an unkeepable promise of safety in the future and the warm confidence that comes from thoughtlessly submitting to government authority over their lives.

(When, please, are we going to stop being scared of terrorists?  I’m not saying we should ignore threats, or even that we should demand to keep our shoes on at the airport, but living our lives in quaking fear of possible terrorism isn’t much different from looking over your shoulder all day every day just in case there’s a tornado following you.)

But Congress didn’t pass that law, because enough people saw what was coming and made enough noise to shame the members into backing off.  They approved an additional amendment that specifically disallows the arresting-American-citizens-here-in-America-without-charges part.

What in the wide, wide world of sports were they thinking?  Seriously: what drives the thought process of supposedly mature and rational adults to think it’d be OK to do this, even though the Constitution expressly forbids using the military as a domestic police force and forbids indefinite detention without charges?

One of the richly ironic results of this misadventure is that it caused political enemies and philosophical opposites to unite: the “Say what?” reaction came from liberals and conservatives and moderates, who all recognized a ham-handed attempt to take a big bite out of the personal liberties that America promises to all of its citizens.  And they rose together—as Americans—to emulate Buckley and yell “Stop!”.

The lesson?  Keep your eyes and your ears open, because someone will try something like this again; they always do.  It’s up to us—all of us—to see that they don’t get away with it.

OK, now that you’ve eaten all your vegetables, here’s dessert:

3338df600dac012f2fc600163e41dd5b Thanks to Tom the Dancing Bug and his friend Ruben Bolling.

New information on the Penn State mess may exonerate the graduate assistant of cowardice (unless he’s lying)

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Take a minute to check out The Morning Call, the Allentown, PA newspaper that’s been breaking news on the Penn State scandal. This morning it reports that the graduate assistant in the Penn State football program who’s taken a ton of flak from a lot of people (including me) for not doing anything to stop the rape of a child he says he witnessed in the locker room shower may actually have done exactly what he should have done.  The paper has seen an e-mail that Mike McQueary sent to a friend of his a week ago in which he says he did stop the assault he claims he witnessed, and he did report it to police.  The grand jury report, the basis for all public information on the case up to now, doesn’t indicate that McQueary took any action against accused child rapist Jerry Sandusky when he caught him in the shower with a 10 year old, and says McQueary only talked to his own father and then to football coach Joe Paterno about what he’d seen.

If true: good for you, McQueary, and apologies for the unwarranted criticism.

OR NOT:

Now all the polices say, uh, nope, we got no record that McQueary reported the crime to us…so sorry.

Ball back in your court, McQueary…

Joe didn’t do anything wrong? Oh yeah, he did

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The fact that he is who he is, and that he did what he did, makes it even worse than it already is.

For most of us who are not in western Pennsylvania, this came out of the blue last week: a grand jury indicted a former Penn State University football coach on accusations he sexually assaulted young boys.  When I first saw the story in the paper last weekend, and read that head coach Joe Paterno had been told by an eyewitness that Jerry Sandusky assaulted a young boy in the shower and Paterno had relayed the information to his immediate superior but done nothing else about it, I felt like he should have done more.  But then I turned the page, because I don’t care about college football or Penn State, and because I didn’t want to really think about what was actually going on here.  Shame on me.

By Wednesday, the winningest coach in major college football history had been fired by his university, but he was not the only person in Happy Valley shamed by the incident.  Far from it.  More’s the pity.

Sandusky, the long-time Penn State assistant coach who gets a lot of the credit for the team’s history of turning out great defensive players—especially linebackers—stands accused of being a serial pedophile, of sexually assaulting at least eight boys over a 15 year period.  He also founded a charitable organization called The Second Mile in 1997, which provided services to children in need.

One of the saddest ironies of the sexual abuse charges against Sandusky that stunned and sickened the nation last weekend is that if the allegations that he assaulted eight boys over a 15-year period are true, he may have been allowed to prey on those children in large part because no one at Penn State would go that second mile for his victims.

Sports Illustrated’s Phil Taylor is one of many who’ve made the point: where the hell were all the adults at Penn State who should have done something about this?  I’ll tell you where—they were all busy protecting a wealthy university and its vaunted football program and its reputation, for surely those things were more important than the lives, and the futures, of pre-teenaged children whose parents had turned to Penn State for help.  What is Sandusky accused of doing?  McClatchy summarizes the timeline here, and it shows just how many people at Penn State didn’t stand up for these kids.

Sandusky was cashed out as the team’s defensive coordinator after admitting to having showered with a 10 year old boy, but the school and the coach only took his job away—Sandusky was allowed to keep using university facilities for his charity’s activities.

In 2000 a janitor saw Sandusky having sex with a young boy in a campus football building and told his supervisor, but neither of them called the police.

In 2002 a graduate assistant (a former player; a grown man) saw Sandusky having sex with a young boy and did not do anything to stop the assault that was going on right in front of his eyes; he did not call the police, not even the university police; he went home and called his own father and asked what he should do; and it wasn’t until the next day that he told Paterno what he’d seen.  Paterno told the athletic director, and left it at that.  About this time, school officials told Sandusky not to bring children to the campus any more, although he himself still used the facilities.

Paterno made a lot of his reputation for insisting that Penn State was different from other big college football programs, that Penn State did things the right way—it followed the rules, it graduated its student athletes, and it was successful on the field.  Bull.  Despite the high graduation rate and the championships and the bowl games, we now know that Penn State was just as sleazy as any other program.  Maybe more so.  Ohio State’s in trouble for its players selling equipment to get discounts on their tattoos; Miami is in trouble (again) over impermissible benefits given to players by a booster.  But no one else is in the news for making the conscious decision to protect their own ass by turning a blind eye to the alleged child rapist in their midst.  For years.

Where was the “Hey, you can’t do that” reaction the first time someone saw this man naked with a child?  Where was the unconscious and visceral “stop that” response?  Where was the call to the cops?  Where is the humanity?

Yesterday, Penn State played its first football game in the post-Paterno era.  It lost the game.  But the university community may have taken the first baby steps to recognizing what’s important in life, certainly more important than a university’s bruised ego or loss of financial support.

"It felt like we all banded together. And it wasn’t just about football," said Melissa Basinger, a 2005 Penn State grad who made the trip from Charlotte, N.C. "It was about coming together as a school, and showing the country, world or whatever that this does not define who we are."

We’ll see.