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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>> Reid is a career politician, veteran of the stump speech, the extempore oration, <br style="text-indent: 0px !important; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>> not to mention the formal rhetoric of a seasoned Solon. So how come he can <br style="text-indent: 0px !important; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>> barely frame a sentence, or convey a simple thought?<br style="text-indent: 0px !important; "><br><div>In March, a couple of days after Reid announced his intention to run for a fifth term, his wife and daughter were almost killed when a semi-truck plowed into their car.</div><div><br>> Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2010 11:17:46 -0500<br>> From: galliher@illinois.edu<br>> To: peace-discuss@anti-war.net<br>> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Too good to miss<br>> <br>> October 15 - 17, 2010<br>> Daughters of the Gipper<br>> By ALEXANDER COCKBURN<br>> <br>> Plump as a boudoir cushion, her dimpled countenance as rosy and excited as those <br>> of Watteau’s most gamesome courtesans, Christine O’Donnell established in her <br>> debate at the University of Delaware, that she is most certainly qualified to <br>> take a seat in the U.S. senate. I reached this conclusion after the Harry Reid / <br>> Sharron Angle debate in Las Vegas, where the two are neck and neck in the final <br>> run down to November 2. By the measure of the performance of the US Senate <br>> Majority leader, O’Donnell would shine in the Upper Chamber like Demosthenes. <br>> And next to Tea Partier Sharron Angle, a former state legislator, O’Donnell <br>> sounded like Aristotle.<br>> <br>> Reid is a career politician, veteran of the stump speech, the extempore oration, <br>> not to mention the formal rhetoric of a seasoned Solon. So how come he can <br>> barely frame a sentence, or convey a simple thought? In his two-minute opener he <br>> evoked his childhood in Searchlight, his mom taking in the washing from the <br>> brothels. Checking his notes and speaking in the halting tones of one unfamiliar <br>> with the English language, he limped through his core credo: "I believe my No. 1 <br>> job is to create jobs as United States senator."<br>> <br>> Both Reid and Angle speak as though rejects from the Disney animation shop. <br>> “Stiff” is too limber an epithet to toss at them. The brightest bulb on the <br>> platform in Vegas PBS was Mitch Fox, host of Nevada Week in Review. Citing <br>> Angle’s notorious remark Fox asks, "Do you believe getting jobs is not your job?"<br>> <br>> Angle: "My job is to create the policies to encourage the private sector to do <br>> what they do best, and that is creating jobs."<br>> <br>> Fox: "So that means 'no'?"<br>> <br>> Angle nods in agreement.<br>> <br>> Reid responds. He boasts of ways he's helped bring jobs to Nevada through tax <br>> policy -- at McCarran Airport, at Harrah's, where, he said, "We saved 31,000 <br>> jobs alone. My opponent is against those. My job is to create jobs. ... My <br>> opponent is extreme."<br>> <br>> Angle responds: "Harry Reid, it's not your job to create jobs. It's your job to <br>> create confidence to get the private sector to create jobs."<br>> <br>> This is insanity. We are in Nevada, as dependent on federal dollars as Limbaugh <br>> was once on Oxycontin. Nevada, home of the Hoover dam, of the nuclear test <br>> sites, of… of…. Vegas is filled with laid-off construction workers utterly <br>> dependent on a government check. And Harry can’t muster the strength to ridicule <br>> the utter absurdity of Angle denouncing the role of government. Already the <br>> audience is groaning and beginning to shuffle out.<br>> <br>> Mitch Fox again. He quizzes Angle on the fact that before the Republican primary <br>> she had referred to the need to "privatize" Social Security. Now she uses the <br>> term "personalize," as though the nature of one’s pension is a matter of <br>> aesthetic discrimination, like chosing an underarm spray.<br>> <br>> "Why did you change your position on Social Security?" Fox asked.<br>> <br>> She said she used the word "personalize" because it described a type of personal <br>> retirement account that lawmakers, such as Harry Reid, have.<br>> <br>> Reid says other nations have tried personalizing retirement accounts with <br>> disastrous results. He doesn’t say simply that if the Social Security accounts <br>> had been handed to Wall Street, as George Bush had attempted to do back in 2004, <br>> anyone opting to withdraw their retirement money from Social Security would by <br>> now have starved to death.<br>> <br>> It’s time for the closing statements. Harry fumbles for his notes. "I am a <br>> fighter. I will continue to fight for what I believe is best for the American <br>> people."<br>> <br>> Angle: "People ask me why I smile so much," she says. "I am an optimist. Like <br>> Ronald Reagan, I believe in American exceptionalism."<br>> <br>> Let’s hear it for the Gipper! It was Reagan who brought total insanity into <br>> political life and installed it as a permanent prop.<br>> <br>> Back to Delaware. O’Donnell is wallowing in the polls, as many as 19 points <br>> behind Coons in many polls taken in the past few days. Battered by comedians for <br>> her strictures on masturbation, and for her imperishable campaign ad proclaiming <br>> “I am not a witch”, O’Donnell held her own against Coons and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, <br>> who asked three times with increasing asperity whether she believes in evolution <br>> – a theory of biological development refuted on an hourly basis by CSPAN’s <br>> coverage of the deliberations of the US Congress.<br>> <br>> Turning aside Blitzer’s challenge, O’Donnell deprecated her personal beliefs as <br>> “irrelevant” , when set against her commitment to the U.S. Constitution – a clue <br>> that actually this Tea Party favorite is somewhat pragmatic in her <br>> politico-religious doctrines. A religious fundamentalist would have insisted <br>> that embedded in the U.S. Constitution is the divine law, with each article <br>> inscribed by the divine finger.<br>> <br>> O’Donnell offered another clue to her pragmatism, when invited to sketch out her <br>> program for the U. S. Department of Education. A conservative Republican would <br>> answer promptly, “Burn it to the ground.” O’Donnell said she did not see the <br>> need for so drastic a step. She’s also on record opposing the cutting of Social <br>> Security benefits and isn’t sold on the idea of private accounts – two <br>> prescriptions held by almost all Republicans and many Democrats.<br>> <br>> Then she dimpled up again and declared, gazing at the somewhat nerdy looking and <br>> balding Coons that he was a Marxist. Coons plaintively tried to explain that his <br>> self description as a “bearded Marxist”, made many years ago in a student paper <br>> had been a joke, allowing the national audience to reflect that maybe <br>> O’Donnell’s high school cavortings as a witch should be forgiven as somewhat of <br>> a joke too.<br>> <br>> O’Donnell offered some definitions of Marxism worthy of Reagan:<br>> <br>> "My opponent has recently said that it was studying under a Marxist professor <br>> that made him become a Democrat. So when you look at his position on things like <br>> raising taxes, which is one of the tenets of Marxism; not supporting eliminating <br>> death tax, which is a tenet of Marxism - I would argue that there are more <br>> people who support my Catholic faith than his Marxist beliefs"<br>> <br>> Coons tried to come back with the declaration that he's never been anything but <br>> a "clean-shaven capitalist" but O’Donnell took the round. The Forbes website, <br>> reporting this exchange, added helpfully, “In its simplest terms, Marxism <br>> philosophy is based on the idea that class struggle drives history and that <br>> capitalism will be replaced by socialism and eventually a classless society that <br>> governs itself.”<br>> <br>> There’s no point in trying to evoke substance in the O’Donnell-Coons debate. <br>> Almost everything said was a rich mulch of distortion or absurdity, but it was <br>> clear that O’Donnell is actually smarter and quicker on her feet than the patron <br>> saint of the Tea Partiers, and booster of O’Donnell, Sarah Palin. (Again, a low <br>> bar.) She’s shown Republicans in Delaware that they can vote for her without <br>> undue embarrassment, which is maybe why Pat Buchanan, assessing the debate, <br>> wagged his head dolefully and said Christine had been hobbled by milquetoast <br>> Republican advisors, like Randy Scheunemann.<br>> <br>> Alas for Christine, even as she was trying to winch herself off the shoals of <br>> national ridicule, the University of Indiana released some of the results of a <br>> huge new survey of America’s sex habits. O’Donnell’s strictures on masturbation <br>> as wrong (because it’s an expression of lust largely conducted outside the <br>> passionate physical conjunction of married partners of differing gender) are, as <br>> amusingly discussed by JoAnn Wypijewski in a recent Nation piece, out of step <br>> with national preferences.<br>> <br>> Culled from detailed responses from 5,865 Americans between the ages of 14 and <br>> 94 the university surveyors disclose in the October issue of the The Journal of <br>> Sexual Medicine that among people 70 or older 80 percent of men and 58 percent <br>> of women have masturbated solo over a lifetime. Among people aged 25 to 29, <br>> rates peak at 94 percent among men and 84 percent among women. Worse news yet <br>> for Christine: Masturbating with a partner is becoming increasingly popular.<br>> <br>> So the question is not whether the American people deserve Christine; it’s <br>> whether Christine, deserves this nation of wankers.<br>> <br>> http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10152010.html<br>> _______________________________________________<br>> Peace-discuss mailing list<br>> Peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net<br>> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss<br></div> </body>
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