[Peace-discuss] Too good to miss

[Rohn Koester]

	> 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 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.
> Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2010 11:17:46 -0500
> From: galliher at illinois.edu
> To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Too good to miss
> 
>   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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