The Inquiring Manatee

Welcome to Weimar

    The atmosphere in this country is beginning to smack of the Weimar Republic between 1919 and Adolf Hitler's accession to power in 1933.

    In that era of turmoil, German defeat, crippling inflation and worldwide depression, the struggling German democratic government based in Weimar was faced with repeated challenges from both left and right -- in the end, most strongly from extreme nationalists whose message of blame, scapegoating and hate appealed to lower-middle-class masses who felt threatened by change and by economic loss.
    In the United States at that time, and even more so through the Franklin D. Roosevelt years of the 1930s, democracy was under attack from the same populist Know-Nothing elements that have arisen in every national economic crisis dating back to the Whiskey Rebellion. Demagogues ranging from Huey Long and Father Coughlin to Fritz Kuhn of the German-American Bund kept the pot of civic discourse boiling with hatred.
    Nowadays, just as Nazis and their growing bands of sympathizers could not accept German defeat in World War I and the costs imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, suddenly booming extremist groups do not accept the legitimacy of the 2008 election, President Obama or any policy proposal of the Democrats. In short, having lost in 2008, they trumpet their loyalty to democracy but refuse to let the winners govern. We are witnessing the temper tantrums of ignorant, noisy, easily led children.
    Have you had enough of the wildly anti-government "tea party" types and "Christian warrior" militias like the vicious, deluded Hutaree? I have. It's time to call these intolerant, screaming mobs what they are. If they are not fascists, they are fodder for fascists. Spittle, insults and bricks flying, they are out of control -- and getting excessive media attention that attracts even more of the mentally unstable to their ranks.
    The stench of fascism is in the air. These people want to destroy the elected American government as the Nazis wanted to destroy the Weimar Republic.

    To which I say: Never again.

Capturing Taliban Leaders: Stuff it, Cheney

    It's sad to think that I spent the weeks from Labor Day to Election Day in 2000 aboard the Boeing 727 campaign plane of Dick Cheney, traveling America and watching him deliver speech after speech to an adoring Republican base.

    Cheney generally kept his distance from his small accompanying press corps -- I was assigned to his campaign by my employer, USA TODAY -- but was accommodating enough on the couple of occasions when I needed and was granted one-on-one interviews with him, including on the eve of his successful televised debate with Democratic nominee Joe Lieberman. I had no reason to dislike Cheney. (And I had fun rebutting his frequent comments that Al Gore and Lieberman had "never met a payroll." I reminded Cheney at a rare news conference in Pennsylvania that Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln never met a payroll, either.)

    Cheney had an awfully nice family, especially his charming 4-year-old granddaughter, Kate, on whom he and his wife Lynne doted. I was expecting nothing but positive contributions from him if the Republican ticket were elected.

    Cheney's performance as vice president, once the Supreme Court awarded the election to the Bush-Cheney ticket, requires no further comment here. That is a matter of the past, although his power, policies and actions retain a resonance today. It is his performance since leaving office that disappoints me now. 

   Cheney has become a parody of the bitter, blindly partisan ex-officeholder. He takes sniper shots at the Obama administration at every opportunity (and at no opportunity), trumpeting the glories of waterboarding and Guantanamo Bay and playing a time-worn Republican card by portraying the Democrats as weak on terrorism, "pretending that we are not at war." This at a time when Obama, as Vice President Joe Biden pointed out last weekend on two TV talk shows, is continuing many Bush administration policies.

    As others have pointed out, it's almost as if Cheney were praying for a massive terror attack on the United States, if only to discredit Obama -- and perhaps even to cause Americans to forget that 9/11 happened on the Bush-Cheney watch, after serious warnings of al-Qaeda intentions to mount airborne terror against the U.S.

    If Biden's many accurate citations of Obama administration successes against terrorists -- stepping up use of drones and killing 12 of 20 al-Qaeda leaders, for one example -- were not enough to reveal Cheney's views for the balderdash they are, the news that the CIA and the Pakistanis have joined to capture at least two leading Afghan Taliban figures in the past week may finally keep Cheney silent for a while. 

    Whether or not we get any more valuable information out of the captured Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar or the Kunduz province "shadow governor" Mullah Abdul Salam, their removal from the battlefield is a major coup for antiterrorism efforts -- and, yes, for the Obama administration. It shows that American intelligence and diplomacy are very much on the job, keeping the pressure on -- just as Cheney patriotically should wish.

    So let's cool it with the unconstructive criticism, Dick. But please say hello to Kate for me.

    

Paranoia and Loathing in Las Vegas

      Johnny Lee Wicks, 66, was an extremely screwed-up African-American retiree. Whether before or after he suffered a stroke, moved from California to lower-cost Nevada and had his monthly Social Security benefits reduced by $317 a month under the law, he blamed all his troubles on racism -- as hotheaded Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. did when a police officer had the nerve to investigate a report of a break-in at his house.

    Wicks would have been just another harmless paranoiac without his gloriously all-American access to a shotgun. Exercising his Second Amendment "rights," Wicks shot up the Las Vegas federal courthouse where his ridiculous, illiterate complaint alleging that Social Security had acted solely because he was black had been tossed out by judges. He killed a security guard and wounded another guard. Other guards chased Wicks across the street and killed him. He died in the bushes of an old school building.
   Violent events like this happen almost daily in gun-loving America. What drew my attention to this one was its setting. Years ago I had some sordid personal dealings with a federal official who probably works now in that downtown courthouse. When I read first reports of the gunfire I wondered whether that official had been hurt -- not that I would have wanted it, despite the unpleasantness of our old relationship (the unprincipled guy wrecked my first marriage). Luckily for this official, the brave guards protected his unworthy butt. He and all of us owe the guards our thanks for their courage in potentially facing inglourious basterds like Wicks every day.
    My only caveat here is that the slain guard was 72 and perhaps couldn't react quickly enough with his handgun to the sight of Wicks opening an overcoat and displaying the shotgun; maybe there should be a cutoff age for guards, or tests of Wild West gun-toting agility.
    What are the other lessons? Too many guns out there, too readily available to the crazily violent. Too much insanity among people who blame racism for their problems, when most of their problems probably were caused by failing to study in school. 

    Another great start to 2010.

Settling the Great Question of When Human Life Begins

      

Those American Taliban religious far-righters may be chortling about their wins on banning same-sex marriage Tuesday in California, Florida and a third state, but they suffered defeats on their other obsession, abortion, in Colorado, South Dakota and California.
   The Colorado proposition, which lost 73%-27%, was particularly intriguing. It would have amended the state's constitution to give fertilized eggs, before implantation in the womb, the same legal rights and protections that apply to people once they are born. It would have been a constitutional precedent saying that life begins at conception, and therefore a slam-dunk for right-wing lawyers arguing from it in court challenges to contraception, medical research involving embryos and the very concept of fertility clinics.
   But the folks that H. L. Mencken used to call the "Christers" never give up. Just as sure as they came back in South Dakota with a sweeping challenge to Roe v. Wade after losing previously, and just as sure as they came back in California with yet another parental-notification initiative after losing three times earlier, the Intolerant Right is sure to be back in Colorado and other states.
   I hear that what they're planning next is an initiative saying life begins at the moment a guy propositions a woman. (They'll call it Proposition Proposition.) If that loses, the next initiative will move life's beginning to when a man unzips his fly. If that doesn't pass, they'll rewrite it to make it the moment a woman receives a text message asking for a date. If that fails, they'll successfully get thousands of signatures on a petition for a vote to establish that life begins when a man's eyes meet the eyes of a woman.  
    I'm telling you, these people never take no for an answer.
    Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., still has the best one-liner on this subject. He said: "A conservative is one who believes that life begins at conception -- and ends at birth." (Frank added: "We Jews believe that the fetus is not viable until it has graduated from medical school.")
   Oh, the right-wingers care about you desperately when you're a sperm, an egg, an embryo or a fetus. But once you're born, forget it. You're on your own. Theirs would be a Darwinian philosophy -- if they believed in Darwin. When will they stop pestering the rest of us and just leave us alone?

Probable Election Score for Harvard Law School: 1 Win, 2 Losses

  

I have something in common with three United States senators on the ballot Tuesday: Barack Obama, Elizabeth Dole, Ted Stevens and I all went to Harvard Law School. I used to pass Liddy Dole in the hallways, but she was two years ahead of me at the three-year school and I never formally met her. Obama was at the law school years after I attended, Stevens years earlier. (Stevens and I share an undergraduate alma mater, UCLA.)
   If I had to bet today, I'd say that one of these senators -- Obama -- will have a happy Election Day. Dole, in North Carolina, and Stevens, in Alaska, are scrambling desperately to save their seats. Dole, at least, is not convicted of felony corruption charges. Stevens is laboring under that handicap.
   Both Dole and Stevens could win, but I'm flipping a coin and saying they won't.
   In any case, I'm proud that Obama is a Harvard Law graduate -- and was president of the law review, no less. I have to look this up, but it's possible that if elected he'd be the first president from Harvard Law School since Benjamin Harrison (1889-93).

Sarah Palin, Expense Account Fudger?

  Now all of us, liberals, moderates and conservatives alike, can honestly say that Sarah Palin is "just like us." She fudges on her expense account.
   Charging personal expenses to one's employer is an American tradition. Palin carries on this custom  in her own Palinesque way -- putting her children's travel on the taxpayers' backs so she can "have it all," holding public office while not shorting her kids on quality time with Mom. Women who admiringly ask, "How does she do it?" have the answer now.
  The AP breaks an investigative piece today on how the governor charged the state of Alaska more than $21,000 for commercial flights and hotel rooms for her three daughters -- Bristol, 17; Willow, 14, and Piper, 7 -- since she took office in October 2006. She took them to some events to which they had not been invited.
   In October 2007, Palin brought Bristol (now known as the pregnant one) with her to New York for a Newsweek conference on women and leadership. Air fare from Anchorage to LaGuardia Airport for $1,385.11 and a room for four nights at the $707-a-night Essex House on Central Park South were billed to the state. The conference lasted just a few hours, but also on the trip Palin also met Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs officials and visited the New York Stock Exchange.
   It's a fine, family-values idea for the kids to watch Dad start a snowmobile race. But it cost Alaska more than $1,500 to fly the three girls from Juneau to Anchorage so they could watch their father start his engine and roar off in the Iron Dog race, which he won.
   Three months ago, Palin charged Alaska $2,741 to take Bristol and Piper to the National Governors Association meeting in Philadelphia. The girls had their own room for five nights at the Ritz-Carlton for $215 a night.
   State law allows reimbursement for anyone traveling on official business for Alaska. After John McCain chose Palin as his GOP running mate and reporters started asking to see her travel records, she amended her expense forms to say that the girls were on official business -- serving such roles as accompanying her to "open the start of the Iron Dog race," or "to draw two separate raffle tickets" at the Alaska Symphony of Seafood Buffet in Anchorage, or to take part in "NGA Governor's Youth Programs and family activities" -- which in fact were merely ways to keep children busy, an NGA spokeswoman told the AP.
    Former Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat and the most recent other governor who had school-age children at the time, told the AP he paid his kids' expenses himself whenever they traveled with him.
    Alaska already is reviewing nearly $17,000 in per diem payments Palin asked for and received for more than 300 nights she slept at her own home in Wasilla, 40 miles from her satellite office in Anchorage. It remains to be seen whether state officials will be asking questions about the propriety of charging the taxpayers for Palin family togetherness across thousands of miles of glamorous, costly travel. And it remains to be seen what impact this latest unflattering revelation will have on the campaign.   
    The portrait of Palin emerging from all this is not an appealing one. In my opinion, she appears to be short on self-sacrificing idealism and long on an eye for her family's financial bottom line. Further, she sets an unfortunate example for other women in high office -- one that could cause voters to shy away from female candidates with young children on grounds that if elected these candidates might fog the distinctions between personal and public obligations.
    For now, everyone who pays federal income taxes faces the possibility that if the McCain-Palin ticket wins, the Palin children will be educationally seeing the world as "official" helpers as Mom jets off aboard Air Force Two to state funerals from Ecuador to Uzbekistan.

Obama's Amazing Field Operation

  

I find it hard to believe that John McCain and the Republicans can be doing anything that would match the unprecedented scope, organization and dedication of the Obama campaign's effort to register voters (without the help of ACORN), identify likely supporters, persuade them to vote and protect them from disenfranchisement by Republicans crying "voter fraud."
   On the liberal West Side of Los Angeles, where I live, I am observing the Obama field operation close-up. Until a couple of weeks ago, phone-banking in the Democrat's behalf was being organized more by MoveOn.org than by Obama's campaign. Now, a volunteer-minded Democrat on almost any day or night has the choice of going to Obama's Southern California headquarters; a satellite Obama office; an Obama phone-banking "party," or a MoveOn phone operation.
    The e-mails come in regularly, with information on how and where to volunteer, together with a sign-up link that yields a quick confirming e-mail.
    With California in the bag for Obama as a blue state, the populous Golden State is being used as a vast reservoir of volunteers for swing-state Nevada (which, when you call in there, should be pronounced "Nevadda." Remember, it's "Nevadda" and "Coloraddo," not "Ne-VAH-da" or "Colo-RAH-do.")
     Uncounted Southern Californians are giving up weekends to drive to Las Vegas and ring doorbells. Others take their cellphones and chargers to Obama or MoveOn phone-banking parties, usually in volunteers' spic-and-span houses, where plenty of coffee and snacks are available and the family cat is available for petting.
     The current emphasis in calling Nevada is to persuade people to vote early, in the 13-day period between Oct. 19 and Oct. 31, at any of 88 special precincts set up around the state, 10 of them in populous Clark County. An early vote gives Obama security that a mind won't be changed, and for the voter it avoids the Election Day lines at polling places.
     At Obama's Southern California HQ, volunteers have been calling long lists of University of Nevada-Las Vegas students, urging them to register at a booth or a free rock concert on campus.
     On the next two Wednesday nights, James Beach and Danny's Deli, two hip eating places in the Venice Beach area, are hosting three-hour call-in parties -- bring your own cellphone. At James Beach, there will be half-price margaritas and free gourmet snacks.
     It's grassroots politics. It's social. And the food is good. Who wouldn't want to take part? 

     Meanwhile, battalions of volunteer lawyers are being organized to parachute into Nevada, New Mexico and other swing states to guard the polls against Republican efforts to screw minority voters.
     If Obama wins on Nov. 4, it will be because this impressive display of organizing moxie turned young people's search for meaning and the economic miseries of Americans of every age into real results at the polls.

     This operation is costing a lot of money. The fact that Obama has the money for it is testimony that he has struck a chord with donors with fat wallets or thin ones.

Todd Palin Puts Spotlight on Role of "First Gentleman"

   According to the Alaska Legislative Council's Troopergate report, Todd Palin finds nothing better to do with his time than to sprawl at a conference table all day in the office of the governor, his wife. He has a phone, he's copied on important e-mails dealing with state business and he regularly meddles in personnel and policy decisions.
   This is a guy who's supposed to be a commercial fisherman, a North Slope oil worker and a snowmobile racer. Is he gainfully employed, or not? If he is, why is he spending more than 50% of his time making Sarah Palin look like a helpless little woman who can't make a decision without a hubby's guidance?
   Palin's role as "First Gentleman," as he's called in the state of AK, raises again a question that was asked about Bill Clinton during Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's run for the Democratic nomination in the primaries this year: What is the proper role of a husband when traditions are reversed and the wife is the high officeholder?
    Not a few voters and pundits feared that Bill would become an obnoxious pest if Hillary returned the couple to the White House. Unable to accept not being president himself, the feeling went, he'd try to have a say in everything, confusing staffers and jumbling lines of command. What self-respecting Democrat would have wanted to be Hillary's vice-presidential running mate if she'd been nominated, knowing that he or she would be eclipsed by the hyperactive Bill? Barack Obama was repeatedly advised not to accept the No. 2 spot on the ticket for that very reason. If you thought Lyndon Johnson was emasculated in the Kennedy administration, that was nothing compared to how Obama would have fared.
    The same questions would greet Todd Palin in the not-unlikely eventuality that the 72-year-old cancer survivor John McCain, if he were to win in November, would pull a William Henry Harrison. (Come to think of it, the initials "WH," for White House, also represent William Harrison and Warren Harding. What would kabbalists make of this?)
    The example Todd Palin is setting in Juneau and Anchorage is discouraging. If his conduct were carried into the White House, Todd would be an eminence grise, shadowy and unaccountable. If any guy in that position chose to peddle his influence, he could do a lot of damage as a secret lobbyist.
     It's true that at least until she fumbled the White House's health care initiative in 1993 and 1994, Hillary Clinton was the most active, policy-oriented First Lady in memory. She had an office in the West Wing. Staffers feared crossing her. By many accounts, she played a key role in firing the heads of the White House Travel Office (a couple of really nice, hard-working guys, by the way) and trying to turn that office into a patronage fiefdom for the benefit of a Clinton cousin and other family insiders.
    So isn't it sexism, one might ask, to deny a male First Spouse the same sort of influence?
    In my opinion, it isn't. A man should, in perception and practice, concede total independence to a wife accomplished enough to have become president -- as Dennis Thatcher did when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of Britain for 11 years. How will women ever become truly equal in officeholding potential if they cannot be judged on their own merits, and if they appear so insecure that they must lean on a male? A couple must be secure enough to leave the woman alone in her high office.
   Further, men are expected in Western society to have their own work, their own full-time sphere of action. There's something unmanly, therefore, about Todd Palin hanging out as an appendage at his wife's conference table. There is a temptation to tell him, "Get a life," or, more specifically, "Get a full-time job."

   

Save the Moose and Caribou!

  Oooh, what intrepid hunters Sarah and Todd Palin are, shooting all those moose and caribou.
  Got news for you, guys: Moose and caribou are bovines. They are CATTLE. They eat grass. They threaten nobody, unless your car runs into one on a dark highway. They are not very bright. They can't get out of their own way. As targets, they are nearly as unmissable as elephants. Where's the challenge?
   Right-wingers are making a heroine out of Governor Palin for hunting moose and eating those greasy mooseburgers, but how sportsmanlike is it to shoot them? If you're a starving Native Alaskan or a trapper in the 50-below dead of winter in the wilderness, there's an argument that it's morally permissible to shoot anything with meat on it, with the possible exception of your mother-in-law. But what need is there for any Alaska city-dweller to shoot some poor cow?
   You can put antlers -- or lipstick -- on it, but it's still a cow.
   If you have any guts, leave the inoffensive moose and caribou alone and go after game that has some natural means of fighting back: wolves and grizzly bears, for instance. If you use firearms, don't do it in the most cowardly and sadistic way possible -- from aircraft. That's not hunting, it's magnified fly-swatting. You're making a mockery of the Second Amendment.
   On second thought, Governor Palin, you'd do American politics a bigger favor by relocating to a wildlife preserve to live in peace with the grizzlies and protect the little dears -- as Timothy Treadwell did.

  

Use Your Real #$@&* Names on the Net, Morons

   Think that's a rude headline up there? It's merely a reflection of the disgracefully ill-mannered tone of the "dialogue" in viewers' comments appended to blogs and news stories on the Internet. It's time to clean up the World Wide Web by forcing commenters to use their own names on their postings, just as newspaper readers are properly required to do when sending letters to the editor. Say what you will about the MSM, published letters are generally civilized and read as if written by literates. That's because the writers are forced to take responsibility for their opinions.
   I'm very familiar with the appalling tone of the Web vox populi because I've been volunteering as a moderator of comments on the popular Huffington Post website. For 3 hours a week on Wednesday afternoons, I wade through hundreds of comments posted by readers. Comments posted in response to HuffPost blogs are moderated -- OK, censored -- in advance. Moderators go to the queue of pending comments and either "publish" or delete them. There's less worry about comments defaming the public figures in news stories that draw reader responses (as opposed to defaming the poor, unpaid HuffPost bloggers), so every comment is allowed to pass through to the website but may be deleted later, especially when readers "flag" obnoxious remarks for the moderators.
     On political websites, commenters almost always use fake IDs. Some are cute ("technokitty"). Many are creative. What you don't see are real names. Freed from identifying themselves and risking reproach or retribution, those who post remarks are often unbridled in their vitriol. It's fine to see passion in politics, but deeply held opinions too frequently are expressed with demeaning put-downs and name-calling that can be obscene.
    Even that would be OK if the thinking were original. But it's not. Everybody picks up the same few, weary tropes. Hillary people dismiss Obama people as "Obamabots." The Obama people have their own annoying names for the Clintonistas. Republicans are "Repugs." McCain is "McSame" or "McCane" or "McBush." Every 4-letter epithet in the slang book is used, the more polite commenters inserting asterisks as they call the blogger or the previous commenter a f*cking a**hole. Those who disagree with them are fools, morons, "bots."    And I'm not even talking about the kindergarten-level spelling, or the English-as-a-Fourth-Language grammar used by all too many Americans. To see writ so large the failure of the American school system is to wince in pain.
   It's an abysmally infantile level of discourse, unworthy of a democracy. And the only way to raise it is to end the ability to wear a mask.
    It is true that pseudonyms have a worthy history going back to Colonial times. But these days, how many disguised Web users are following the high-minded example (though controversial even then) of 18th Century pamphleteers like Ben Franklin or James Madison, who wrote under pseudonyms like "Silence Dogood" or "Publius"? Read their works. These patriots could jab royalists or Federalists, but they wrote literately and in the public spirit. They wrote to persuade, not merely to calumniate or to sniff at opponents in dubious superiority. All too many comment-writers grow giddy in their anonymity -- carried away to unpunished excess like Ku Kluxers in their white cone hats with those little eye slits.
    First Amendment considerations? They don't apply here. The First Amendment relates only to government actions. A private website is perfectly free to set its own standards for attributing comments.
    Starting today, we need independent decisions by leading websites to end the cowardly masquerading and restore a measure of civility to an American political process that is being steadily debased day by day -- a global warming by the hot air of bitter, inarticulate and insecure haters.
    Message to this sort of Web user: Grow up or shut up.
    And, whatever you do, go to school.