OK, so Tom Daschle's bowed out of contention for Secretary of Health, Safety and Education, effectively the President's czar in charge of putting together a viable universal health plan for all US citizens - introducing us to the joys of socialised medicine. Concurrent with this responsibility would have also been responsibility for kick-starting a stagnant education system left to rot by the fundamentalist Republicans, who abandoned science to Creationism and the state school system to chartered schools. No child left behind. Yeah, sure.
So Daschle is no more, and various and sundry names are now being bandied about. Caroline Kennedy has been mentioned, no doubt as a sop for the cack-handed attempt on her part and fostered by her family to ensconce her firmly in the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton for the State Department. That's not to say that Ms Kennedy-Schlossberg wouldn't be a good choice. At least, she's had experience lobbying for the needs of the New York City public school system, even if her children received the best private education money could buy.
But there's one name which has been left out of consideration altogether ... John Edwards. Edwards had an absolutely cracking plan for universal health care, viable portions of which were adroitly adopted by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton when Edwards dropped out of contention for POTUS. He has experience as a legislator and advocate for people regarding safety conditions at work and his children attended local public schools. He's sincere and he was, more than most, an honest politician.
All of the above would be excellent criteria by which he should be judged in being appointed Secretary of DHSE.
But he won't be.
Because of the scandal of the affair from last year. I've lived in Europe for more than 20 years, and lived in Britain at that - probably the most puritanical and repressed of the Western European countries. After all, it was Britain who spewed the puritans amongst us - something from which we're still recovering, albeit slowly. Yet, politicians here, have affairs and are discovered all the time. The French Foreign Minister, over the Christmas holiday, gave birth to a child and still hasn't disclosed the name of the father. (Rumour has it, that the dad is the ex-Socialist Prime Minsiter of Spain). Italian President Berlusconi (a crook if there ever was one) is an avid womaniser, and even managed to become engaged to one woman whilst married to another. The Italians cordially hate him, but because he whiffs of Mafiosi and not because of his social morals. French President Sarkosy is on his third marriage. The current Mme Sarkosy once romped the beds with Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton (but not at once). Can you imagine any of that being tolerated with an American politician?
No. I thought not.
This is why I was so surprised and heartened when the pithy attempt to impeach Bill Clinton was overturned, and Clinton's popularity soared. I thought at last the American people were growing up.
In point of fact, even before I decamped to a Brit husband, I really couldn't have cared less who a President/Senator/Congressman/et al slept with (bar an underage child or an animal), as long as he/she governed her territory well, didn't break the law and listened to and catered for the needs of the people who elected him/her.
It's what's done here. And this is supposed to be 'Old' Europe as opposed to the 'New' World.
John Edwards had one affair in a marriage that's lasted and is still lasting 30+ years. He got caught. His wife forgave him. They've moved on. Together. If his missus can give him the nod, shouldn't the party he's supported and served most of his adult life welcome him back and move on?
I can't think of a better, more able and sincere candidate for Secretary of Health, Safety and Education than John Edwards.
Speaking Truth to the Power of the Lying Liars of the US Media, Right AND Left.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Wanted: US President: Train on the Job
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Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Prize Package or Trojan Horse?
Well, it passed the Senate, and of course, it's not to everyone's liking. My faux Conservative friend from Virginia e-mailed me today whingeing about the fact that his son and all his as yet unborn grandchildren were going to be the inheritors of a 'massive debt' due t0 our rapid descent into socialism. My heart bleeds for him ... not. I've lived under semi-socialism and it's not that bad. Honestly.
From what I can glean from the bill the Senate cut, pared and finally passed is that they're proposing a system by which the government 'buys' all the bad banks and sort of cleans them up and re-positions them. This is similar to what was done not too long ago in Norway; only there the bigger banks absorbed a lot of the smaller, less solvent ones under the bigger banks' aegis. I suppose our plan is semi-socialistic. I don't know. I can't pretend to understand economy as I've never been quite the one for maths, science and the lot, especially maths.
I know the Republicans are moaning about there not being enough tax cuts, but I can't see what that would accomplish. In an economically hard time, if you hand people more money in the form of tax cuts, middle- and working-class people are going to put this money aside in savings. Hand a tax cut to a wealthy person or a wealthy business establishment and they might spend; but we all know that trickle down simply didn't ... er, trickle down. The Republicans' behaviour has simply astounded me during the past week or so, especially in the Senate.
Talk about sour grapes. They're dangerously echoing the stated sentiment of their real leader, Rush Limbaugh, in wanting, willing Obama to fail. And I must admit, I've been more than a bit perplexed and critical of Obama in the past seven days, for his repeated attempt at 'peace, love and understanding' the Republican party in the name of bi-partisanship.
Mr President, these are not nice people. You've made your point. You've tried. They just aren't that into you as a President. They're bitter, twisted, angry, jealous, old and white. They tried. They failed. They're not going to get over it, so you and the Democratic party better develop some backbone and fast. Charlie Crist might be an exception; but Charlie Crist isn't sitting in Congress or the Senate with that disapproving old maiden-faced Mitch McConnell breathing down his neck or Lindsey Graham throwing hissy fits.
Mr President, kick ASS. Start by respectfully retiring that Mormon gentleman, Harry Reid. (A Mormon and a Democrat? That's an oxymoron, if ever there was one - or should I say oxyMormon?) I suggest making Jim Webb Senate majority leader. He's a man who takes no quarter and doesn't suffer fools gladly. (The fact that he's also a Virginian and from my native state, is an added bonus).
And listening to Tim Geithner's explanation of the bailout package .... well, hmmmmmmmmm, is all I can say. Part of it sounds suspiciously like stuff Bush propounded: like not holding the banks who got themselves up shit creek responsible for the dodgy mortgages and cruddy loans made to people who, unfortunately, didn't have repayment means.
Finally, I'm amused and dismayed and more than a bit peeved at the reaction of Mike Huckabee to the Stimulus Package. Governor Huckabee is one of the more likeable Republicans. He seems a nice man, in a Christian sort of way - and there's the rub. The very aspect that makes him likeable, also makes him 'unlikeable' as well. He reared the ugly head of Christianity when he slammed the fact that the Stimulus Package prohibited higher education funds from being allotted to Schools of Divinity. Quite bloody right. Someone's FINALLY thinking along Constitutional lines now in the Senate, especially after Obama's less-than-subtle wink in the direction of those people in the US who define themselves as secular. Federal money shouldn't be given to divinity schools. We have no established church nor do we have an established religion, and in no way should the government fund the education of clergymen or men of faith. It's a private matter. I see also, he went on to slam some of the agencies to which federal money had been allotted - like those evil women socialists who front Emily's List.
You know, they say the Republicans won the first round of the PR war last week with all their posturing and pirouetting about how bad the proposed Stimulus Package was; they did this with their usual 'fear tactics', with smear and appealing to the base, yet again. I was worried that some people, people who would normally have endorsed a Republican candidate, might have reverted to type in this first crisis of the new Administration. Therefore, I was glad the President moved swiftly, both in his Press Conference and in his visits to communities in Indiana and Florida. Obama is a great communicator. You have only to listen to him speak and then listen to some jumbled garbage propagated by Bush to understand the difference. The former speaks the people in the audience. He speaks directly to them. Take 49 people out of an audience of 50 and Obama would still sound the same way, as if he's speaking directly to the people. And he is. Maybe I'm naive, maybe I've been out of the country too long, maybe I'm just stupid and starstruck that after 8 years we have a President who can string a subject and a predicate together and come up with a coherent thought; but I trust Obama. I trust him in a way I've never really trusted any government leader in my voting lifetime. He seems sincere. I believe he's sincere, although I might be wrong. Listening to his predecessor was a painful exercise in anger management. I cannot believe the stupidity levels of American voters to have elected a cretin like George Bush, and to give him a second term and free reign to rape and pillage the Constitution. That single act by the American people gave credence to the addage that people get the government they deserve.
Well, we finally got one right, it seems - at least for the moment. I think Obama did the right thing in making those two trips and playing them out before the public. I hope he does more of that. Why? Because it will galvinise the people to contact their representatives and hold their feet to the fire in supporting a President who wants to work for his people - and not just the people who elected him, but those who didn't either. Maybe I'm wrong about Obama, but I hope not. A week after the Inauguration, I was speaking with one of my aunts in Virginia. She'll turn 80 this year. I asked how she liked the new President.
'Just fine,' she said. 'I've lived long enough to see a People's President.'
I have as well.
From what I can glean from the bill the Senate cut, pared and finally passed is that they're proposing a system by which the government 'buys' all the bad banks and sort of cleans them up and re-positions them. This is similar to what was done not too long ago in Norway; only there the bigger banks absorbed a lot of the smaller, less solvent ones under the bigger banks' aegis. I suppose our plan is semi-socialistic. I don't know. I can't pretend to understand economy as I've never been quite the one for maths, science and the lot, especially maths.
I know the Republicans are moaning about there not being enough tax cuts, but I can't see what that would accomplish. In an economically hard time, if you hand people more money in the form of tax cuts, middle- and working-class people are going to put this money aside in savings. Hand a tax cut to a wealthy person or a wealthy business establishment and they might spend; but we all know that trickle down simply didn't ... er, trickle down. The Republicans' behaviour has simply astounded me during the past week or so, especially in the Senate.
Talk about sour grapes. They're dangerously echoing the stated sentiment of their real leader, Rush Limbaugh, in wanting, willing Obama to fail. And I must admit, I've been more than a bit perplexed and critical of Obama in the past seven days, for his repeated attempt at 'peace, love and understanding' the Republican party in the name of bi-partisanship.
Mr President, these are not nice people. You've made your point. You've tried. They just aren't that into you as a President. They're bitter, twisted, angry, jealous, old and white. They tried. They failed. They're not going to get over it, so you and the Democratic party better develop some backbone and fast. Charlie Crist might be an exception; but Charlie Crist isn't sitting in Congress or the Senate with that disapproving old maiden-faced Mitch McConnell breathing down his neck or Lindsey Graham throwing hissy fits.
Mr President, kick ASS. Start by respectfully retiring that Mormon gentleman, Harry Reid. (A Mormon and a Democrat? That's an oxymoron, if ever there was one - or should I say oxyMormon?) I suggest making Jim Webb Senate majority leader. He's a man who takes no quarter and doesn't suffer fools gladly. (The fact that he's also a Virginian and from my native state, is an added bonus).
And listening to Tim Geithner's explanation of the bailout package .... well, hmmmmmmmmm, is all I can say. Part of it sounds suspiciously like stuff Bush propounded: like not holding the banks who got themselves up shit creek responsible for the dodgy mortgages and cruddy loans made to people who, unfortunately, didn't have repayment means.
Finally, I'm amused and dismayed and more than a bit peeved at the reaction of Mike Huckabee to the Stimulus Package. Governor Huckabee is one of the more likeable Republicans. He seems a nice man, in a Christian sort of way - and there's the rub. The very aspect that makes him likeable, also makes him 'unlikeable' as well. He reared the ugly head of Christianity when he slammed the fact that the Stimulus Package prohibited higher education funds from being allotted to Schools of Divinity. Quite bloody right. Someone's FINALLY thinking along Constitutional lines now in the Senate, especially after Obama's less-than-subtle wink in the direction of those people in the US who define themselves as secular. Federal money shouldn't be given to divinity schools. We have no established church nor do we have an established religion, and in no way should the government fund the education of clergymen or men of faith. It's a private matter. I see also, he went on to slam some of the agencies to which federal money had been allotted - like those evil women socialists who front Emily's List.
You know, they say the Republicans won the first round of the PR war last week with all their posturing and pirouetting about how bad the proposed Stimulus Package was; they did this with their usual 'fear tactics', with smear and appealing to the base, yet again. I was worried that some people, people who would normally have endorsed a Republican candidate, might have reverted to type in this first crisis of the new Administration. Therefore, I was glad the President moved swiftly, both in his Press Conference and in his visits to communities in Indiana and Florida. Obama is a great communicator. You have only to listen to him speak and then listen to some jumbled garbage propagated by Bush to understand the difference. The former speaks the people in the audience. He speaks directly to them. Take 49 people out of an audience of 50 and Obama would still sound the same way, as if he's speaking directly to the people. And he is. Maybe I'm naive, maybe I've been out of the country too long, maybe I'm just stupid and starstruck that after 8 years we have a President who can string a subject and a predicate together and come up with a coherent thought; but I trust Obama. I trust him in a way I've never really trusted any government leader in my voting lifetime. He seems sincere. I believe he's sincere, although I might be wrong. Listening to his predecessor was a painful exercise in anger management. I cannot believe the stupidity levels of American voters to have elected a cretin like George Bush, and to give him a second term and free reign to rape and pillage the Constitution. That single act by the American people gave credence to the addage that people get the government they deserve.
Well, we finally got one right, it seems - at least for the moment. I think Obama did the right thing in making those two trips and playing them out before the public. I hope he does more of that. Why? Because it will galvinise the people to contact their representatives and hold their feet to the fire in supporting a President who wants to work for his people - and not just the people who elected him, but those who didn't either. Maybe I'm wrong about Obama, but I hope not. A week after the Inauguration, I was speaking with one of my aunts in Virginia. She'll turn 80 this year. I asked how she liked the new President.
'Just fine,' she said. 'I've lived long enough to see a People's President.'
I have as well.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Economic Stimulust for Power
It's been a pretty depressing weekend, one way or another. I've been following the brouhaha on Capitol Hill with the Senate working overtime (that's an anomaly, surely) to try and iron out the kinks they don't like in the President's new Economic Stimulus plan. Living outside of the US, I often feel - even with the internet - that I'm living inside of some sort of time-warp bubble, where I'm allowed to see a bit of what's going on and understand even less. Well, that's the way it seems if the only news from the US is coming at you 24/7 courtesy of the good old BBC.
I first heard that the US was careening down the road to economic ruin sometime in the late autumn of 2007, the beginning of the Primary season, when I began to watch NBC Evening News on the internet. I heard about gas prices creeping up towards $4.00 a gallon (but that didn't phase me, because in Britain, they were and still are near as dammit 8 bucks a gallon, with most of the money paid going on a fuel tax.) It got worse, so much worse that when I came home last year in March, I did my bit to help the economy by going on a massive shopping spree. Much good that did.
As things have seemed to go into freefall, and as Obama, whom I supported from Day One, seemed to really inspire hope, I listened to his proposals to turn the US economy around, not pretending to understand the intricacies of the situation, less how the US had arrived at that point anyhow. All this talk of foreclosure and 'first-time buyers' were terms that I'd heard before - but here, in Britain, in the waning days of Thatcherism, when the Keynsian approach to economy was failing and failing badly. If this problem in the States started with housing, it's news to me and surprising. When I left the US, more people, so it seemed rented houses instead of buying; and when you bought, you bought for life and you left in a box. In the UK, however, when I first arrived, the people were heady with the extra money Thatcherism had put in their pockets and bought and sold houses as we would buy and sell cars. Between 1981 and 1987, my husband and I had managed to rent one house for two years and buy and sell 3 in the course of 4 years. After 1987, the economy tanked, interest rates rose and - presto! - instant recession.
As I'm a person not known for the best of timing, 2009 was the year my husband and I had targetted for returning to the States, but listening to the dire news of 600,000 jobs being lost in the US in January 2009, I'm beginning to bite my fingernails again. As much as I don't like living in the UK, as homesick as I am, I do still have a job. So do I adopt a typically British attitude of sangfroid and muddle through or do I come home and take a risk? The Britishness that's wrapped itself around me relentlessly opts for the former, which means I'll spend the rest of my active days here, stifling back tears until nighttime and waking up with neuralgia from having slept on a sodden pillow all night. The Yank in me sticks up the psychological middle finger and dives into coming home with a greater vengeance. After all, the government is hiring, even though Michael Steele says a government job is just work and not a job at all.
But what disturbed me the most, listening to the wrangling going on on the Hill, was exactly what, in the end, the suits up there eventually agreed to drop as part of the package. Only items to do with education, health care and science!!!!!!!!!!! And what, specifically, did our new President talk about in his Inaugural address? Specifically?
Education, health care and science. The importance thereof to our economy bettering itself.
Of course, these cuts were made in order to get our friends of the conservative persuasion on board. And it sucked. It sucked that the Democrats, the majority party, in a strong position, rolled over and played dead as a dodo for these evil-featured clowns. I was raised a Democrat from the cradle, so I can be forgiven for thinking, when a child, that these people were sour-faced old trouts who shouted at children for stepping on their lawns, but - Jesus, Mary and Joseph - I'm of the same generation as some of these people and they still look like sour-faced old trouts. Old. White, miserable and old. Like the British.
As an ex-teacher, cutting $18,000,000 from improving school and university curricula and renewal programs chills me to the bone. I know that in any budget-cutting exercise, education is always the first to suffer. It's as though people pulling the purse strings think that it's fair to pare away at schools and univerisities because they cater mostly to kids or people eithe too young or too busy having a good time to vote anyway. Besides, if the populace is basically ignorant and uneducated, they're more apt to believe the shit dished to them by a political party, and more apt to stay at the base of that movement full stop.
The health care issue, to use a bad pun, sticks in the craw too. For fuck's sake, we are still seen to be the leader in the Western world, yet we're the only Western country without a viable universal health care program for our citizens. The British model (not one to be copied) isn't perfect, by a long shot, but I still don't get an exorbitant hospital bill if I'm willing to suffer a waiting list for treatment. And I'll never pay more than about $20.00 for a prescription to be filled (not that I'm the biggest proponent of prescription drugs, I might add). And so they cut that part of the stimulus package as well ... including the part about contraceptives, to 'stimulate' the Republicans into crossing the aisle, or jumping the broomstick. Contraceptives go, because the Republicans just can't risk birth control. Every unwanted unplanned little Southern bubba born to a 15 year-old illiterate Mylie clone is a potential GOPer for the future, maybe even a Senator at that. The mind boggles mightily.
And as for science, well, BushCo and the faith-based initiative pushed for Creationism and some schools obliged. Science was denigrated and we're paying the price now. It's the Twentyfirst Century! We have to go forward.
The more I thought about this, the more I got depressed. And the more depressed I got, I was convinced that this is all a contrived plot on the part of the Republican Party, and that they're taking their clues from Rush Limbaugh and his audacious remark in public that he hoped Obama would fail. This is really what these people, these sad, bigoted, ignorant, miserable and twisted old white hypocritical people want. They want this good man, this man who cares about his country, to fail.
This, this is 'Country First'. Because if Country First had won, the stimulus would have consisted of huge tax cuts to those people who don't need them and the government doing little else. It would be Trickle-Down Redux, instead of Trickle-Down Deluxe. And, really, that's what they're aiming for now.
We simply have to get a grip. Get a grip and get behind the President. It's not going to be easy, but he's pushing for us. And he was honest enough to tell us that it wasn't going to be fixed in weeks, or months, but years - maybe longer than the two terms allotted him.
I'm behind him. Until he does something so incredibly stupid, I have to take him to task at the voting booth. I may kick myself for it and get kicked by the husband in the process, but I'm coming home. Recession or no recession, the US is still a better place to be inside of than away from. I think I may be in danger of becoming a patriot.
I first heard that the US was careening down the road to economic ruin sometime in the late autumn of 2007, the beginning of the Primary season, when I began to watch NBC Evening News on the internet. I heard about gas prices creeping up towards $4.00 a gallon (but that didn't phase me, because in Britain, they were and still are near as dammit 8 bucks a gallon, with most of the money paid going on a fuel tax.) It got worse, so much worse that when I came home last year in March, I did my bit to help the economy by going on a massive shopping spree. Much good that did.
As things have seemed to go into freefall, and as Obama, whom I supported from Day One, seemed to really inspire hope, I listened to his proposals to turn the US economy around, not pretending to understand the intricacies of the situation, less how the US had arrived at that point anyhow. All this talk of foreclosure and 'first-time buyers' were terms that I'd heard before - but here, in Britain, in the waning days of Thatcherism, when the Keynsian approach to economy was failing and failing badly. If this problem in the States started with housing, it's news to me and surprising. When I left the US, more people, so it seemed rented houses instead of buying; and when you bought, you bought for life and you left in a box. In the UK, however, when I first arrived, the people were heady with the extra money Thatcherism had put in their pockets and bought and sold houses as we would buy and sell cars. Between 1981 and 1987, my husband and I had managed to rent one house for two years and buy and sell 3 in the course of 4 years. After 1987, the economy tanked, interest rates rose and - presto! - instant recession.
As I'm a person not known for the best of timing, 2009 was the year my husband and I had targetted for returning to the States, but listening to the dire news of 600,000 jobs being lost in the US in January 2009, I'm beginning to bite my fingernails again. As much as I don't like living in the UK, as homesick as I am, I do still have a job. So do I adopt a typically British attitude of sangfroid and muddle through or do I come home and take a risk? The Britishness that's wrapped itself around me relentlessly opts for the former, which means I'll spend the rest of my active days here, stifling back tears until nighttime and waking up with neuralgia from having slept on a sodden pillow all night. The Yank in me sticks up the psychological middle finger and dives into coming home with a greater vengeance. After all, the government is hiring, even though Michael Steele says a government job is just work and not a job at all.
But what disturbed me the most, listening to the wrangling going on on the Hill, was exactly what, in the end, the suits up there eventually agreed to drop as part of the package. Only items to do with education, health care and science!!!!!!!!!!! And what, specifically, did our new President talk about in his Inaugural address? Specifically?
Education, health care and science. The importance thereof to our economy bettering itself.
Of course, these cuts were made in order to get our friends of the conservative persuasion on board. And it sucked. It sucked that the Democrats, the majority party, in a strong position, rolled over and played dead as a dodo for these evil-featured clowns. I was raised a Democrat from the cradle, so I can be forgiven for thinking, when a child, that these people were sour-faced old trouts who shouted at children for stepping on their lawns, but - Jesus, Mary and Joseph - I'm of the same generation as some of these people and they still look like sour-faced old trouts. Old. White, miserable and old. Like the British.
As an ex-teacher, cutting $18,000,000 from improving school and university curricula and renewal programs chills me to the bone. I know that in any budget-cutting exercise, education is always the first to suffer. It's as though people pulling the purse strings think that it's fair to pare away at schools and univerisities because they cater mostly to kids or people eithe too young or too busy having a good time to vote anyway. Besides, if the populace is basically ignorant and uneducated, they're more apt to believe the shit dished to them by a political party, and more apt to stay at the base of that movement full stop.
The health care issue, to use a bad pun, sticks in the craw too. For fuck's sake, we are still seen to be the leader in the Western world, yet we're the only Western country without a viable universal health care program for our citizens. The British model (not one to be copied) isn't perfect, by a long shot, but I still don't get an exorbitant hospital bill if I'm willing to suffer a waiting list for treatment. And I'll never pay more than about $20.00 for a prescription to be filled (not that I'm the biggest proponent of prescription drugs, I might add). And so they cut that part of the stimulus package as well ... including the part about contraceptives, to 'stimulate' the Republicans into crossing the aisle, or jumping the broomstick. Contraceptives go, because the Republicans just can't risk birth control. Every unwanted unplanned little Southern bubba born to a 15 year-old illiterate Mylie clone is a potential GOPer for the future, maybe even a Senator at that. The mind boggles mightily.
And as for science, well, BushCo and the faith-based initiative pushed for Creationism and some schools obliged. Science was denigrated and we're paying the price now. It's the Twentyfirst Century! We have to go forward.
The more I thought about this, the more I got depressed. And the more depressed I got, I was convinced that this is all a contrived plot on the part of the Republican Party, and that they're taking their clues from Rush Limbaugh and his audacious remark in public that he hoped Obama would fail. This is really what these people, these sad, bigoted, ignorant, miserable and twisted old white hypocritical people want. They want this good man, this man who cares about his country, to fail.
This, this is 'Country First'. Because if Country First had won, the stimulus would have consisted of huge tax cuts to those people who don't need them and the government doing little else. It would be Trickle-Down Redux, instead of Trickle-Down Deluxe. And, really, that's what they're aiming for now.
We simply have to get a grip. Get a grip and get behind the President. It's not going to be easy, but he's pushing for us. And he was honest enough to tell us that it wasn't going to be fixed in weeks, or months, but years - maybe longer than the two terms allotted him.
I'm behind him. Until he does something so incredibly stupid, I have to take him to task at the voting booth. I may kick myself for it and get kicked by the husband in the process, but I'm coming home. Recession or no recession, the US is still a better place to be inside of than away from. I think I may be in danger of becoming a patriot.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Lindsey Graham: GOP Drama Queen
I wasn't going to post any blog today, but I caught sight of the Senate debate on the Stimulus Package and I just had to vent my spleen.
Lindsey Graham, mouthpiece of McCain chicanery, was blowing hot air in a desperate and, at times, condescending attempt at filibuster in order to scupper the President's economic recovery plan. The minute I clued into this, reminded me of why I turned my back on Southern manhood collectively and sought refuge in the arms of the British. As in any chemical reaction, opposites attract, and when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish and often found myself, at university, in two rather serious relationships with Southern boys of the Republican persuasion. They had the charm, they had the manners, they talked the talk and - on occasion -they walked the walk too. But they had an ugly side to them and it reared its ugly head again today in Lindsey's petulant performance on the floor of the Senate. I spewed my gin and tonic when he actually used incorrect grammar ('ain't')! It wasn't even deliberately rhetorical, I actually think it was a genuine rube slip-up. It showed his crackerness; it was embarrassing.
He acted like a spoiled bubba who didn't get his just desserts. He was patronising to the President as a man and he dissed Barbara Boxer, who was classy enough to school him on his inadequate performance. Post-feminist that I am, I don't practice gender politics; but Graham didn't even have the grace to respect Senator Boxer as a person, much less a woman.
Watch this spectacle. I don't know if I feel sorrier for Southern boys from Deliveranceland being raised to aspire to this sort of adulthood, or those poor dumbass Southern belles who bag a beast like this and think they've got something. All I know is, men like Lindsey Graham make Brits look bloody good; and the thought that this Neanderthal is an elected representative in the United States, scares the living bejaysus out of me.
Lindsey, sorry ... I'm just not that into you. I may have tipped you the wink in the Seventies from my elitist Virginia perch, but even I wasn't that desperate then. The election was over in November. You lost. Have a mint julep and get over it.
http://http://www.c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-R-15146
Lindsey Graham, mouthpiece of McCain chicanery, was blowing hot air in a desperate and, at times, condescending attempt at filibuster in order to scupper the President's economic recovery plan. The minute I clued into this, reminded me of why I turned my back on Southern manhood collectively and sought refuge in the arms of the British. As in any chemical reaction, opposites attract, and when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish and often found myself, at university, in two rather serious relationships with Southern boys of the Republican persuasion. They had the charm, they had the manners, they talked the talk and - on occasion -they walked the walk too. But they had an ugly side to them and it reared its ugly head again today in Lindsey's petulant performance on the floor of the Senate. I spewed my gin and tonic when he actually used incorrect grammar ('ain't')! It wasn't even deliberately rhetorical, I actually think it was a genuine rube slip-up. It showed his crackerness; it was embarrassing.
He acted like a spoiled bubba who didn't get his just desserts. He was patronising to the President as a man and he dissed Barbara Boxer, who was classy enough to school him on his inadequate performance. Post-feminist that I am, I don't practice gender politics; but Graham didn't even have the grace to respect Senator Boxer as a person, much less a woman.
Watch this spectacle. I don't know if I feel sorrier for Southern boys from Deliveranceland being raised to aspire to this sort of adulthood, or those poor dumbass Southern belles who bag a beast like this and think they've got something. All I know is, men like Lindsey Graham make Brits look bloody good; and the thought that this Neanderthal is an elected representative in the United States, scares the living bejaysus out of me.
Lindsey, sorry ... I'm just not that into you. I may have tipped you the wink in the Seventies from my elitist Virginia perch, but even I wasn't that desperate then. The election was over in November. You lost. Have a mint julep and get over it.
http://http://www.c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-R-15146
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Coming to America ... Again.
I booked my flights today. I'm going home at the beginning of March for two weeks. That's my lot. Leaving the UK for a two-week fest of washing the crust of Britishness off my skin, of ridding my mind forever of having to adjust one minute to the mindset of an obdurate Italian in Rome and the next to the haggle of a merchant in Madrid trying to make an extra buck out of a sheister deal, or having to explain to my anti-French management why the French are revolting on this particular day over that particular matter. In fact, the closest thing to a 'furrner' I'll see in the US will probably be a Mexican.
I come from a rural community in what Joe McCain described as socialist, communist Northern Virginia. Therefore, according to one McCain surrogate during the recent campaign, I am not a 'real Virginian', even though my mother's family came over to the colony in the mid-Seventeenth Century because the founding father of my tribe reckoned he valued his head on his shoulders more than he valued giving it up for his King. So the King lost his head, whilst my ancestor kept his - and successive generations of his descendants have been losing theirs over some sort of fiasco ever since.
We were the sole Catholic family in a rural community of Protestants, who varied in number from moderate Methodists to raving Holy Rollers, the likes of which would make Sarah Palin look liberal. We stood out like sore thumbs. Our parents were products of the Great Depression, who came of age under Roosevelt, just in time to go into the Second World War, having sacrificed education in order to contribute to the family coffers. In those days, if you were old enough to stand up and string a sentence together, you were old enough to earn your keep. All that, instilled in them a desire for their children to better themselves, and so we were raised with the aim of attending and finishing university.
I can't remember a time when I didn't like to read. In fact, I can't remember a time when I couldn't read. I certainly knew how when I started first grade at the local Catholic school, so I assume that, in her spare time, my mother must have taught me. I certainly didn't learn it from Miss Connie on Romper Room. I do know that the earstwhile novice nun who had charge of the entry class at St John's wrung her hands endlessly over the fact that I could read and had learned to do so in a manner which was 'all wrong'. That was the first of many disagreements I was to have with the Catholic Church in my life.
The thing about reading was that it taught me that there was a world outside the confines of a farming community. It taught me about life in the past in varied and foreign parts of the world, and it carried on teaching me about current life in those parts. By the time I'd reached high school, I'd also developed a penchant for foreign languages. But I didn't learn Spanish and French only to conjugate verbs. Somehow, I was able to use those verbs, those nouns and the adjectives describing them according to gender, to make sentences and communicate. In short, I could speak other languages.
By the time I left for university, I was aching to spread my wings outside my home community. A year abroad convinced me that I could never settle in the US, could never live with Americans. I felt more at home in Mediterranean Europe, I felt I'd been born in the wrong country at the wrong time. After teaching for four years, I met and married a Brit and settled in the southeast of England -close enough to the Med to make annual excursions, NOT of the package tour variety, a duty. I lived here happily enough, I worked with languages and kept abreast of politics on both sides of the Pond. Living here, I learned that, at least on the Continent, it never mattered what an elected Head of State got up to behind closed doors and with whom, as long as the electorate perceived that he ran the country well. I learned also that, for the most part, people in Europe were world-weary and cynical regarding their own politicians, electing someone because he or she was better than the next person, but - at the end of the day- only out for himself or herself.
All this time, I despaired of Americans, especially during the Nineties when I saw the resurgence of the Republican Party under the aegis of Newt Gingrich, a snarling, ugly, aggressive bunch of rednecks, preaching the doctrine of the right thinly disguised by the 'praise-the-Lord-and-pass-the-ammunition' brand of fervently born-again Christians from the backwoods and foothills of the Deep South. Something was familiar about this type, and then I remembered. These were the nasty little boys who spat through the gates of the Catholic school at the uniformed 'snappers' (so-called because we ate only fish on Fridays) as they passed by on the way to the bus stop, and then five years later steamed up the windows of their rattletraps on a Friday night while they tried to convince you to let them venture a finger or something else inside your Catholic panties before puking on your shoes. These were the homecoming queens who'd graduated with a degree in soccer mommery and tutted their tongues in hypocritical pity at any of their gender who dared to differ in anyway from their preconceived attitudes.
I hated them.
This was the party who pointed fingers at Bill Clinton and tried to impeach him; the Brits laughed at all this and predicted a successful impeachment. I was glad when Clinton succeeded in defying them, even gladder when his popularity soared in the aftermath. This was the party who produced Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and who foisted George W Bush on an unsuspecting nation. I had him pegged from the start. Watching the first inklings of the 2000 campaign, I was reminded of a cocky rich fraternity boy who mistook cruelty as wit, the product of a legacied father at an Ivy League university.
I hated him, and I resented the fact that, because Europeans tend to judge Americans by the leaders they choose, I was lumped into a misshapen gaggle of Americans described only by their European counterparts as 'stupid.' This happened more and more as Bush stumbled toward Iraq, to the point that most American ex-pats here started referring to themselves as 'Canadians'.
And then, something happened to me.
Still hating Bush and still deploring his invasion of Iraq (and I feel justified in the reason behind this illegal war being exposed as a lie), it proved to me to be a moment of singular epiphany. Coming home in 2003 for a visit (I was there for the infamous 'Mission Accomplished' moment), I had been in e-mail contact with a person I'd known since high school, a boy who was a close friend and fellow liberal debating partner. He and I met for a long boozy lunch and cocktails session at an old inn in Little Washington, Virginia, the same place which had hosted the wedding nuptials of Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspan. His politics had reverted to the right; in fact, I almost gagged a maggot when he told me that his wife wanted to have Donald Rumsfeld's babies, if she hadn't already suffered menopause (thank goodness for small mercies!). As the minutes passed and the booze flowed, John's tongue loosened. He admitted -nay confessed - liberal sympathies and tendancies. He questioned the validity of the war, he admitted to hating Bush and deploring the Patriot Act. He was angered by the curtailing of civil liberties and the disparagement of the Constitution - the contents of which had been lovingly taught to us as students by an elderly retired colonel who looked like Colonel Sanders of KFC fame.
'I've got a confession to make,' he finally said. 'I'm a liberal at heart. And I'm so glad you haven't changed at all. You know,' he continued, 'I really wanted to go out with you in high school, but I always felt you were too clever to like me like that.'
'Well,' I replied, 'I always thought you were too pretty to like me like that. But you should have asked, anyway. I may have said yes. But then, had I done so, we wouldn't be sitting here, talking this honestly to one another.'
And that was probably true. We've seen each other on every visit since. The last time I saw him, last March, he was driving around with an Obama sticker on his car. But at the end of the day, he voted for McCain. Out of fear. Out of fear that Obama would 'spread the wealth'. He suffered a 'Joe the Plumber' moment of ignorance.
But, you know, I still love John; and I'll see him next month and catch up on the gossip. I love him as much as I love my brainwashed right wingnut cousin who says that because I'm to the left I have no morals, or the other cousin who was like a brother to me, but who hasn't answered an e-mail or a phone call since the election because he, a 'born-again' Christian, supported the 'right' candidate and I didn't. I love him as much as I love my best and oldest friend Robin, who's gay and hoping someday to marry her partner so I can be matron of honour, something I'll do with enormous pride, as much as I love Ross, who fires me up with indignation at Israel's plight in the world, or Wenonah, with whom I can sit around a kitchen table and bitch about the bitchy girls we hated in high school who've since enjoyed deliciously terrible moments of bad karma.
And since the election, I can love my country again ... for the moment; because we seem to have done something right for the right reason. And if our new President can weather the storm and calm everyone down and actually achieve half of what he aims to achieve, I can love the government too - and then I will have achieved a Mark Twain moment, loving my country all of the time, and my government when it deserves it. I'm not used to this love of government. I'd forgotten how it's done, so here I go again on a learning curve. Fingers crossed.
I come from a rural community in what Joe McCain described as socialist, communist Northern Virginia. Therefore, according to one McCain surrogate during the recent campaign, I am not a 'real Virginian', even though my mother's family came over to the colony in the mid-Seventeenth Century because the founding father of my tribe reckoned he valued his head on his shoulders more than he valued giving it up for his King. So the King lost his head, whilst my ancestor kept his - and successive generations of his descendants have been losing theirs over some sort of fiasco ever since.
We were the sole Catholic family in a rural community of Protestants, who varied in number from moderate Methodists to raving Holy Rollers, the likes of which would make Sarah Palin look liberal. We stood out like sore thumbs. Our parents were products of the Great Depression, who came of age under Roosevelt, just in time to go into the Second World War, having sacrificed education in order to contribute to the family coffers. In those days, if you were old enough to stand up and string a sentence together, you were old enough to earn your keep. All that, instilled in them a desire for their children to better themselves, and so we were raised with the aim of attending and finishing university.
I can't remember a time when I didn't like to read. In fact, I can't remember a time when I couldn't read. I certainly knew how when I started first grade at the local Catholic school, so I assume that, in her spare time, my mother must have taught me. I certainly didn't learn it from Miss Connie on Romper Room. I do know that the earstwhile novice nun who had charge of the entry class at St John's wrung her hands endlessly over the fact that I could read and had learned to do so in a manner which was 'all wrong'. That was the first of many disagreements I was to have with the Catholic Church in my life.
The thing about reading was that it taught me that there was a world outside the confines of a farming community. It taught me about life in the past in varied and foreign parts of the world, and it carried on teaching me about current life in those parts. By the time I'd reached high school, I'd also developed a penchant for foreign languages. But I didn't learn Spanish and French only to conjugate verbs. Somehow, I was able to use those verbs, those nouns and the adjectives describing them according to gender, to make sentences and communicate. In short, I could speak other languages.
By the time I left for university, I was aching to spread my wings outside my home community. A year abroad convinced me that I could never settle in the US, could never live with Americans. I felt more at home in Mediterranean Europe, I felt I'd been born in the wrong country at the wrong time. After teaching for four years, I met and married a Brit and settled in the southeast of England -close enough to the Med to make annual excursions, NOT of the package tour variety, a duty. I lived here happily enough, I worked with languages and kept abreast of politics on both sides of the Pond. Living here, I learned that, at least on the Continent, it never mattered what an elected Head of State got up to behind closed doors and with whom, as long as the electorate perceived that he ran the country well. I learned also that, for the most part, people in Europe were world-weary and cynical regarding their own politicians, electing someone because he or she was better than the next person, but - at the end of the day- only out for himself or herself.
All this time, I despaired of Americans, especially during the Nineties when I saw the resurgence of the Republican Party under the aegis of Newt Gingrich, a snarling, ugly, aggressive bunch of rednecks, preaching the doctrine of the right thinly disguised by the 'praise-the-Lord-and-pass-the-ammunition' brand of fervently born-again Christians from the backwoods and foothills of the Deep South. Something was familiar about this type, and then I remembered. These were the nasty little boys who spat through the gates of the Catholic school at the uniformed 'snappers' (so-called because we ate only fish on Fridays) as they passed by on the way to the bus stop, and then five years later steamed up the windows of their rattletraps on a Friday night while they tried to convince you to let them venture a finger or something else inside your Catholic panties before puking on your shoes. These were the homecoming queens who'd graduated with a degree in soccer mommery and tutted their tongues in hypocritical pity at any of their gender who dared to differ in anyway from their preconceived attitudes.
I hated them.
This was the party who pointed fingers at Bill Clinton and tried to impeach him; the Brits laughed at all this and predicted a successful impeachment. I was glad when Clinton succeeded in defying them, even gladder when his popularity soared in the aftermath. This was the party who produced Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and who foisted George W Bush on an unsuspecting nation. I had him pegged from the start. Watching the first inklings of the 2000 campaign, I was reminded of a cocky rich fraternity boy who mistook cruelty as wit, the product of a legacied father at an Ivy League university.
I hated him, and I resented the fact that, because Europeans tend to judge Americans by the leaders they choose, I was lumped into a misshapen gaggle of Americans described only by their European counterparts as 'stupid.' This happened more and more as Bush stumbled toward Iraq, to the point that most American ex-pats here started referring to themselves as 'Canadians'.
And then, something happened to me.
Still hating Bush and still deploring his invasion of Iraq (and I feel justified in the reason behind this illegal war being exposed as a lie), it proved to me to be a moment of singular epiphany. Coming home in 2003 for a visit (I was there for the infamous 'Mission Accomplished' moment), I had been in e-mail contact with a person I'd known since high school, a boy who was a close friend and fellow liberal debating partner. He and I met for a long boozy lunch and cocktails session at an old inn in Little Washington, Virginia, the same place which had hosted the wedding nuptials of Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspan. His politics had reverted to the right; in fact, I almost gagged a maggot when he told me that his wife wanted to have Donald Rumsfeld's babies, if she hadn't already suffered menopause (thank goodness for small mercies!). As the minutes passed and the booze flowed, John's tongue loosened. He admitted -nay confessed - liberal sympathies and tendancies. He questioned the validity of the war, he admitted to hating Bush and deploring the Patriot Act. He was angered by the curtailing of civil liberties and the disparagement of the Constitution - the contents of which had been lovingly taught to us as students by an elderly retired colonel who looked like Colonel Sanders of KFC fame.
'I've got a confession to make,' he finally said. 'I'm a liberal at heart. And I'm so glad you haven't changed at all. You know,' he continued, 'I really wanted to go out with you in high school, but I always felt you were too clever to like me like that.'
'Well,' I replied, 'I always thought you were too pretty to like me like that. But you should have asked, anyway. I may have said yes. But then, had I done so, we wouldn't be sitting here, talking this honestly to one another.'
And that was probably true. We've seen each other on every visit since. The last time I saw him, last March, he was driving around with an Obama sticker on his car. But at the end of the day, he voted for McCain. Out of fear. Out of fear that Obama would 'spread the wealth'. He suffered a 'Joe the Plumber' moment of ignorance.
But, you know, I still love John; and I'll see him next month and catch up on the gossip. I love him as much as I love my brainwashed right wingnut cousin who says that because I'm to the left I have no morals, or the other cousin who was like a brother to me, but who hasn't answered an e-mail or a phone call since the election because he, a 'born-again' Christian, supported the 'right' candidate and I didn't. I love him as much as I love my best and oldest friend Robin, who's gay and hoping someday to marry her partner so I can be matron of honour, something I'll do with enormous pride, as much as I love Ross, who fires me up with indignation at Israel's plight in the world, or Wenonah, with whom I can sit around a kitchen table and bitch about the bitchy girls we hated in high school who've since enjoyed deliciously terrible moments of bad karma.
And since the election, I can love my country again ... for the moment; because we seem to have done something right for the right reason. And if our new President can weather the storm and calm everyone down and actually achieve half of what he aims to achieve, I can love the government too - and then I will have achieved a Mark Twain moment, loving my country all of the time, and my government when it deserves it. I'm not used to this love of government. I'd forgotten how it's done, so here I go again on a learning curve. Fingers crossed.
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