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