Letter to My Congressman

Mr. Rothman, I note with great disdain your vote in favor of the latest Tea Party extortion that will no doubt destroy the economy even further and destroy America. The debt ceiling has nothing to do with the deficit. The president has the 14th amendment; he had an option of proposing a clean bill. So what if they start impeachment proceedings! Who cares?

You can't lead through fear. Boehner is afraid of Cantor; the Republican Caucus is afraid of primary challenges from the Tea Party, Obama is afraid someone won't like him. Fear is what brought our country to its knees.

They impeached Bill Clinton and I believe most of America would have given him a third time easily if the Constitution allowed it. The Tea Party has no respect for the values that made this country great.

I am disgusted with Congress along with the majority of Americans.

Scary Days Ahead

Term limits were built into Congress by the founding fathers.  They're called "elections."  The entire House of Representatives stands for election every two years.  One third of the Senate is up every two years.  The problem is that people don't vote in either primaries or in non-presidential elections.  The Tea Party got elected because they voted in local primaries two years ago.  In a lot of places they ran unopposed.  This is the result.

Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Texas, Tennesee, Wisconsin, North Carolina have all passed laws requiring voters to have specific (difficult to obtain) identification cards in order to vote.  Why?  Because they want to stop people from voting.  Making voting even more difficulty means they get to sway elections.  No wonder these states are the breeding grounds of the Tea Party.  

What we should propose is a constitutional amendment that makes voting in all elections (primaries, et. al) a citizen's duty in the same way serving on a jury is a duty.  There's a reason these assholes in states like Arizona and are proposing all kinds of  certifications to be permitted to vote; they want fewer people voting.

I am astounded by the basic ignorance of these people who feel the rest of us don't matter.   I fear for all of us.  I love my country and I'm beside myself that these morons have hijacked our government and have so little respect for the rest of us. Worse, most of them don't have a clue what they're doing and can't be bothered to learn what is actually in the Constitution.  They just spout nonsense that they think is in the Constitution.

It doesn't help that our president, who I and every member of my family voted for, has no balls.  He could've invoked the 14th amendment and let the courts work it out years later, except the shmucks in the House threatened to impeach him if he did.  Hell, Clinton was impeached.  He seems to be doing okay.  

What we need to do is vote in primaries to make sure that like-minded people get on the ballot.  

In Wisconsin right now, they put up "fake" Democrats in primaries, hoping to avoid their recall.  Thankfully, the people of Wisconsin were so mad, they actually showed up for the primaries and defeated those candidates.

Sarah Palin Is More than She Appears

 Conventional wisdom regarding Sarah Palin among the liberal cognoscenti is that she's a dope,  but I think there's a definite method to it all.

    Granted, ever since Sen. John McCain plucked her from Alaskan obscurity to be his running mate in the 2008 election, she's been the national poster child for a carnival of blunders, missteps, misinformation, and downright ignorance.  However, if Andy Kaufman were alive today, and there're those who are convinced he is, he'd be in awe of Sarah Palin. This woman is a conceptual artist par excellence.  

     She seems not to have a clue about what's actually in the U.S. Constitution, or what Paul Revere's role in the Revolutionary War were, or able to finish out her term as governor or to see Russia from her house, but all the while disdaining the mainstream media that dutifully reports all this ad infinitim, she has become a worldwide celebrity. Indeed, much of the western world has come to know Sarah Palin as the embodiment of all that is wrong with America; no mean feat for someone who was virtually unknown except in Alaska three short years ago.  

     And in doing so, she has ama$$ed quite a tidy fortune.

      She's might be everybody's fool now, but to paraphrase Liberace, she's being victimized by the "lamestream media" all the way to the bank.

        By all accounts, except maybe for using her public office to settle a family score, she was quite an effective mayor and governor. She made the oil companies pay their fair share and she cleaned up corruption. When she was mayor of Wasilla and Alaska's governor, she was anything but a fool, but she was also poor.    

     Now she's everybody's fool, becoming more unpopular each day, but she's rich as Croeses.

     You do the math.

      I think she's pretty damn clever.

What I Really Think of Anthony Weiner's Hubris

There was no Twitter, or Facebook, or Internet when I worked on the Hill circa 1968, but there were plenty of assholes who thought they were just as entitled as Cong. Weiner obviously thinks he is.
     I was 22 when I was propositioned by an aged South Carolina Congressman, Mendel Rivers, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.  He was one powerful man as we were in the thick of the Vietnam War.
     This old man cornered me on the "subway" between the Longworth Building and the Capitol.  There was no one else around, save the guy who was operating the train, and he wouldn't dare interfere for fear of losing this very cushy patronage job.  I was terrified, but thankfully the old man took no for no and my virtue remained intact.
     Oh there were plenty of girls who would have jumped at the chance I turned down; and everyone who worked on the Hill in those days knew exactly who those girls were and to whom they were attached.  But this was also before the women's movement took hold and girls who fooled around with married congressmen and senators (they were always married and all but two were men) were considered, excuse my language -- tramps.
     And there were the closeted gay congressmen and senators, well known among Hill staffers, who dabbled with pages and a willing coterie of legislative assistants too.
     Everyone knew what was going on but there were rules of unwritten decorum in effect that kept these dalliances hidden from view.  There was the senator from New Jersey who installed his girlfriend in a tiny windowless office in the sub-basement; and the congressman from Pennsylvania who kept one blonde and one brunette on staff for his pleasure.  We dubbed them "chocolate and vanilla."  And there was the gay congressman who married some unsuspecting staffer but fooled around plenty.  Everyone knew he was gay but his wife.
      We who worked on the Hill knew all this, but unless someone did something outrageous like Wilbur Mills and his drunken debacle with Fanne Foxe at the Tidal Basin, the public retained faith that its government was doing the business it was elected to do. Boys will be boys, after all.
     Fade out, fade in Bill Clinton's presidency in the Internet era, and the circus that the Ken Starr investigation of a blow-job in the oval office became.   That was the turning point.  Nothing was or could be hidden ever again.
     So why on earth did Anthony Weiner, one of my former congressional heros, next to Alan Grayson, the one-term Florida congressman, think he could get away with such abysmal behavior?
     Any credibility that we liberals have in this current do-nothing; destroy America Congress, is gone.
     What do I think of Anthony Weiner's hubris?  I hate the man's guts and hope his wife ditches him and that he's not re-elected and he shuts his mouth forever.!