A Most Sublime Presidency: What If Amy Klobuchar Should Win?

I’ll start this off by saying though I’m leaning toward someone who isn’t Amy Klobuchar, I’m not endorsing anyone for the 2020 presidential election yet. It’s way too early for me. But I’ve been watching Sen. Klobuchar and what I’m seeing is a compassionate, pragmatic Midwesterner wearing her decency on her sleeve. 

She’s quiet-spoken and without guile. She’s uncomfortable bragging about her own accomplishments but doesn’t hesitate to share her resumé when it’s necessary to remind people of her bona fides. She lurks and waits and then pounces with surprisingly tough precision whenever she sees an opening. She’s a force. Not a tornado, but a steady wind driving us toward safety.

I like her. I really, really like her. I like many of the other candidates, too, but Klobuchar eases my heart. I relax when she speaks. I calm down. I hear what she’s saying and I can picture her in the Oval Office, sitting at the Resolute desk, speaking the plain truth with ease and clarity.

She’s funny the way Barack Obama is funny. Her sense of humor doesn’t lean toward snark. If she uses it to skewer she wraps it in velvet first. I could be comfortable with Amy in the White House, and right now comfort is not a word that readily comes up in politics.

I know, even as I write this, that there will be pushback to what I’m saying here. Someone will dig up a quote or an action that will attempt to prove me wrong. So here — I’ll save them the trouble on this one point: I didn’t like what she did to Al Franken. He was her Senate colleague in Minnesota and she knew him as well as anybody, but, when the time came, she joined the others and urged him to “do the right thing” and resign.

Her rush to tell him to resign was infuriating, considering they were supposed friends, and considering his entire female staff came to his defense. I didn’t think I would ever forgive her for that. But I have. She made me forgive her. She has that ability.

So, yes, I could see Amy Klobuchar as the antidote to Donald Trump. She is everything he is not. But how would she be with foreign policy? With the Republicans who won’t be happy when Donald loses? With the aggrieved Trumpsters who will see her as a weak woman they can easily topple? With the fake churchies who thought they were on their way to a theocracy, if not the rapture?

She’d be just fine. She would surround herself with experts and with people who care about this country’s mental and physical health as much as we all do. She would recruit the best of the best and she would listen. She wouldn’t embarrass us in her trips abroad and she would NEVER shove another world leader out of the way in order to get up front. (Not that any of the others would, either. They wouldn’t.)

But don’t let her Minnesota Nice fool you. She was a prosecutor once. She grew up blue collar tough.Her staff says she can be fearsome. She’s been known to make some of them cry. (Okay, I’m not okay with that. Just so you know.) But there’s something about her that says, “Don’t worry. I’ve got this. We’re going to be okay.”

Look, I’m tired. We’re all tired. And this is just thinking out loud — maybe this is what we’re going to need after the madness. But who knows? By the time you read this she may have already dropped out. She’s not all that high on the Popular list. Here’s all I’m saying: With Klobuchar there would be no unnecessary drama. It wouldn’t get personal. Chaos would give in to calm. She’s steady. As a rock. She’s forthright. She would hold us together. When this Trump thing is finally over she would work at healing us. I might even sleep the whole night through. That would be nice.

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(Cross-posted at Medium/Indelible Ink.)

The Nothingness of Donald Trump

This will be short.  My eyes, dammit, are still bothering me, but not nearly as much as Donald Trump bothers me.  I HATE writing about Donald Trump, adding to the list of people who make him deliriously happy whenever we mention his name, but he hit a new low the other day, even for him, when he went after Hillary Clinton's aide, Huma Abedin, and then went after Hillary's aide's husband.

Abedin (Or "Ooma" as Donald calls her), as everybody knows, is the wife of former congressman Anthony Weiner. ("Did you know that?" Trump shouted to his audience, "Did you know that?")  So after insulting both Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin with unsubstantiated claims of underhanded collusion to hide some emails produced on an in-home server, he decided it would be a real crowd-pleaser to go after "Ooma's" husband, too.

Well, yes.  It was.  The crowd went wild!  During that speech and over the next couple of days he accused Abedin of giving national secrets to her husband, who, according to Trump, is a "perv", "psychologically disturbed" and "one of the great sleazebags of our time."  (Weiner's "crime", I don't have to tell you, was to tweet a couple of lewd pictures to women who weren't his wife.  Naughty, naughty, to be sure, but a perv?)

Trump has a masterful way of suggesting something bad is going on without having to prove it.  When he talked about the Mexicans coming over the border who were rapists and murderers, he added, "And some of them are good people, I'm sure."  As if, in the middle of his sentence, his brain finally engaged and balked a little, giving him the means to soften what he just said without having to take any of it back.

When he said McCain was only a war hero because he was captured and he, Trump, didn't like people who were captured, his brain must have been asleep at the time, forcing him, as often happens, to go it alone.  Later, when he knew he had to backtrack, he said, lamely, "I'm sure McCain is a hero."  There.  All done.

So when he took to talking about Hillary's emails, and Huma Abedine's role in what's turning out to be another Clinton non-scandal, it was, again, a masterful demonstration of speechifying without really saying anything:

"So how can she be married to this guy who's got these major problems? She's getting her most important information, it could be, in the world. Who knows what he's going to do with it? Forget about her. What she did is a very dangerous thing for this country, and probably it's a criminal act."

 Well, of course, the press went nuts, as it usually does whenever they latch onto non-stories as juicy as this one.  They went after Trump, practically begging him to keep it up:

Washington (CNN) Donald Trump on Saturday stood by his charge that disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner is a "perv," adding that he "obviously is psychologically disturbed" and alleging that his wife, Huma Abedin, a top adviser to Hillary Clinton, is passing sensitive information to him."I think it's a very fair statement that I made and a lot of people have congratulated me," Trump said after an event in Nashville, Tennessee. "(Abedin) is receiving this very, very important information and giving it to Hillary. Well, who else is she giving it to? Her husband has serious problems, and on top of that, he now works for a public relations firm. So how can she be married to this guy who's got these major problems?"

You know what's sleazy?  A man like Donald Trump having so little respect for our American system of government that he would use his guise as candidate for the presidency to spread his laughable malarkey, to push his one agenda, his own self-aggrandizement; to mock and insult anybody who isn't fawning over him and who dares to get in his way as he moves toward what he wants when he wants it.

You know what's perverted?  The notion that a man like Donald Trump could be considered for the job of President of the United States.  Right now, as I write this, he polls at the top of the Republican contenders.  He's a panderer who hasn't given an honest thought to the needs of the citizens of this country EVER.  He's a man who admits he'll do anything to get a deal.  He's a ruthless businessman who prides himself on not knowing anything about politics or foreign policy and sees that as a plus for his side.

He's a flim-flam man and proud of it.  A flim-flam man whose only cause is to keep his popularity going.  He's running for president of the United States and at least some of our citizens are hoping they'll get the chance to vote for him.  If you ask them why, they'll repeat the phrase embroidered on Trump's trademarked baseball cap:  To Make America Great Again.

Such is the state of our nation.

My head hurts.


(For the record, I have written about Anthony Weiner here and here, and about Huma Abedin here.)


Addendum:  Kevin Drum shares another example of the artistry of the Trump word salad.  Nothing leads to nothing leads to nothing. . .  And seeing is believing.  (H/T to my friend Linda Tilsen for finding and sharing.)

Sarah Palin: Out. Carly Fiorina: In

In 2007, the story goes, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and a few GOP movers and shakers went on a cruise to Alaska  and met a certain Sarah Palin, then-governor of that great state.  It's safe to say she knocked Kristol's socks off (and his head cockeyed, though he didn't know it at the time).

The word is that Kristol fell head over heels--as much as a Republican operative can--for the sassy, smart-assy former cheerleader and did a little cheer-leading of his own.  This woman, he told anyone who would listen, will be the next Vice President of the United States!  It seemed a simple matter (maybe not to you and me. . .) and somehow they convinced John McCain, the then-presidential candidate, that if a woman would be a good choice, this woman would be spectacular!

And so it went.  McCain didn't become president and Palin didn't become vice-president, but that didn't mean Sarah Palin would just fade away.  No, indeedy.  She's still around, still giving rah-rah speeches, still going for the anti-liberal, anti-Obama laughs.  But nobody is looking to her to be the first female to sit behind the Oval Office desk.  Not anymore.  She has a semi-permanent role as the gal who dishes the diss and keeps 'em rolling in the aisles.  She never wanted to be a politician anyway.  No big bucks in it and besides that, it's work!  (For further discussion, see Game Change.)

For several years post-Palin, there were no other GOP women who showed even the slightest interest in running the country. Then along comes Carly Fiorina, with no political experience save for a couple of CPAC appearances, and it's look out, Hillary!

Carly's best CPAC line about the former U.S Secretary of State:

"Like Hillary Clinton, I too have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe, but unlike her, I have actually accomplished something. Mrs. Clinton, flying is not an accomplishment, it’s an activity. I have met Vladimir Putin and know that it will take more to halt his ambitions than a gimmicky red ‘Reset’ button."

I love watching Carly Fiorina put on her haughty face, purse her lemony lips and smile her regal smile.  I love the "air quotes" thing.  I love it when she uses her I-mean-business voice to tell us why she would make the best president of the United States of Corporate America.

 Carly has given a lot of thought to what works best when a woman goes after the highest job in the land.  First of all, forget she's a woman.  Well, not totally.  It would be cool to be the first woman president!  If you must, think tough hard-knocks broad who can slam-bang with the best of them.Take no prisoners!  Get it done!  Enough with those liberals!  They'll be the ruination of us all! (Carly to her cohorts:  Honestly, don't they want us to own this country?)

Consider her thoughts on the California drought crisis:

Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett Packard CEO, failed 2010 GOP nominee for U.S. Senate, and friend of the fossil fuel industry. . .who is considering a presidential bid, told Glenn Beck that the California drought is a “man-made disaster.” And by man-made she means it has been caused by “liberal environmentalists” who have prevented the state from building the appropriate reservoirs and other water infrastructure.

“In California, fish and frogs and flies are really important,” she said. ” … California is a classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology.”

Says the same presidential candidate who called off-shoring "right-shoring"; the same candidate who bragged about moving parts of Hewlett-Packard out of the country in order to avoid having to pay high taxes here; the same candidate who micromanaged the lay-offs of some 30,000 workers, sending most of their jobs overseas, labeling the move "streamlining".  The same candidate who was fired from said job for questionable practices and for losing the company, and thus the stockholders, tons of money.  ("Not so," says Carly.  But who you gonna trust?)

Carly is all business.  She sees that as a good thing.  Our political system is too full of politicians, she says.  What we need is a female president who understands management, who understands technology.  Carly says she does. (She's against net neutrality--something 80% of Americans are for.) What we need, she says, is a female president who isn't Hillary Clinton.  Don't get Carly wrong; Hillary has given her life to her work. She's just. . .

Ready?

  "Hillary Clinton must not be president of the United States, but not because she's a woman. Hillary Clinton must not be president of the United States because she is not trustworthy."

Benghazi!

Oh.

But, aside from building businesses by quashing government interference, what does Carly have in mind for her presidency, should she, um, win?  I think she's probably pretty smart.  (That's a plus when you want to be president, but it's not a qualification written in stone.) I'm pretty sure she knows she won't just be the CEO of a company, she'll be the CEO of the whole damn United States.  Of America.  That's--count 'em--50 states.  Big ones.  Lots of people. 

She must have thought beyond just being the anti-Hillary, as she's depicted (and as she no doubt relishes), but has she thought beyond being the CEO? There is a whole contingency (almost everybody) who think Carly made a lousy CEO while at HP, but Carly isn't one of them.

In her announcement video, she makes no mention of her qualifications (showing she has a sweet side), and to her credit she left out the Demon Sheep. (She lost to California Senator Barbara Boxer in 2010--by 10 points--thereby giving rise to the notion that it might take more than a phony red-eyed sheep to pull the wool over some peoples' eyes.)  But Carly thought the sheep ad was a good one.  "Some people thought it was funny," she said.

Well,  yeah, we all thought it was funny.  But was it wise?

But never mind. Carly says it might have looked like she lost big time but, in fact, she only slightly lost because in the primaries she outshone every other GOP hopeful.  She won the primary.  She WON.  The primary.)

Despite the high marks she gives herself, Carly Fiorina will not be the next president of the United States.  Carly knows that as well as I do, but what I'm seeing from Carly is a much bigger ambition:  She really, truly wants to knock that ditzy Sarah Palin off her high horse, climb onto that bejeweled saddle, and be The Witty Smart Spokeswoman for The New GOP.

Good luck with that, Carly.  But hang around for awhile, won't you, honey?  Strictly for laughs, of course.  You make it hard for us to take you seriously.


(Cross-posted at Dagblog, Liberaland, and FreakOutNation. Featured at Crooks and Liars MBRU)

Newt to 'Really Poor Children': Buy Your Own Damn Ice Cream

Newt Gingrich is obsessed with the plight of poor kids these days. He's been all over the place talking about them, and I have to confess, the jollier he gets about his remedies for their plight, the more nervous I become.  It's an odd turn of events and one rife with suspicion.  It's Newt we're talking about.  Newt, who eats mean for breakfast and swallows the seeds.

Newt, who put a contract out on an entire nation, namely ours, and is still fretting over the insistent existence of a labor movement that was scheduled to die circa Reagan.  (He's got another, bigger contract ready to roll on Day One.  Fair warning.)

Newt, who sings "Only I can make this world seem right. Only I can make the darkness bright.  Only I and I alone can thrill me like I do and fill my heart with love for only me."

And encores with the stirring, "For what is a man, what has he got?  If not himself, then he has naught. To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels.  The record shows I took the blows and did it my way!"

That Newt.

(Let the record show Newt has so far ignored the first lines of the above tune.  The part where it says, "And now the end is near and so I face the final curtain...".  Yesterday, in fact, Newt told ABC's Jake Tapper he WILL BE THE NOMINEE.  I guess that means all debates are off now?) 

Ordinarily I wouldn't care about Newt's $60,000 per speech blabbings about stupid child labor laws and how really poor kids from really shiftless families will resort to stealing unless he steps in and puts them to work, but after some lengthy and intense investigation, I find I have barely an ounce of faith in this current century's sanity.  That dimpled nasty man could very well be running things come January, 2013.

 
 There are some who defend him by reminding us that there's nothing wrong with kids doing a little work. The kids feel good about themselves and the upside is that, as Newt says, they can buy their own ice cream someday.  Nice, really, that.  In a sane world we might actually picture our sweet darlings helping out and getting paid a tiny reward, leaving everybody happy, happy, happy.

But that's not what Newt means and that's not how he put it.  This is how he put it:

“Start with the following two facts. Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.

I come around to this question. You have a very poor neighborhood. You have kids who are required under law to go to school. They have no money. They have no habit of work. What if you paid them part-time in the afternoon to sit at the clerical office and greet people when they come in? What if you paid them to work as the assistant librarian?  What if they became assistant janitors and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?”

That's not helpful, that's hateful.  And full of hidden meaning.  What does it mean when Newt says, "You have kids who are required under law to go to school"?  Will there be an addendum to Newt's 2ist Century Contract on America abolishing school attendance for "really poor kids" so they'll have more time to do all that rewarding work?

When the kids take over as assistant clerks and assistant librarians and assistant janitors, what does that do to the work hours of the real clerks, librarians and janitors?  I'm reading between the lines and seeing part time jobs with no bennies for everyone as part of Newt's grand plan.  He's Newt, after all, clearly not Mr. Empathy.  If you've followed Newt at all you know how strongly opposed he is to equality of the masses -- the kind of thing any signs of empathetic weakness might very well lead to.

Lots of kids work after school and weekends now, even amongst the "really poor".  It's what kids do when they get old enough.  They baby-sit, they do paper routes, they cut lawns, they wash cars, they run errands.  What they don't do any longer is work in sweatshops under conditions that could maim or kill or rot the spirit.

From Utata Tribal Photography:  Lewis Hines, photographer, 1906  "Hines kept detailed notes on the children he photographed, including comments they made as he interviewed them. The twelve year old boy in the [above] photograph was unable to read or write. He'd been employed by a textile mill in Columbia, South Carolina for four years, since the age of eight. He told Hines, 'Yes, I want to learn, but can't when I work all the time'."

 Any student of history will tell you the reason we aren't allowed to work kids like that any more is because the laboring masses organized and put a stop to the exploitation of children by the privileged few.  Newt the Historian seems to have forgotten that.

But on to other things Newt, because, again, there's a mighty strangeness afoot:  The Great One told Sean Hannity over at Fox, apropos of nothing, that, "I helped lead the effort to defeat communism in the Congress.”

And, okay, I have to ask:  How many communists were there in congress?  Were they as hard on us as the teabaggers in congress today?  Can you give us a few tips on how to get rid of subversives?

FRIDAY FOLLIES: Huntsman's Debut Dud, New Bank Heist Health Care Plan, Pop-up Pianos, and Barbie killed Bratz

Rachel Maddow, dear-heart, I'm begging you--never, ever do beat poetry at the bongo drum AGAIN!  Gawd!  That was painful! I'm telling you, it was excruciating!  I love you truly but that was just gawdawful.  Really.

So if you were watching Rachel and you managed to get past the dimmed lights and the bongo and the terrible, horrible attempt at...whatever the hell that was, you might have seen what it was leading up to, which was a hilarious account of the disastrous roll-out day for newly announced GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman.  Oy, they shoulda stood in bed.  The lot of 'em.  Video here, but Rachel recaps it nicely like this:

“Getting the name of your candidate wrong, getting the state wrong where you launched your campaign in getting your address wrong, getting your phone number wrong, not getting the cameras pointed at the Statue of Liberty, and then the generator dies 12 minutes before the announcement, and then as soon as the whole thing is over and it time for whatever this guy’s name is to go to his next campaign event in New Hampshire, when it comes time to get all the press, all those dozens of press get them on board the plane to go with whatever his name is to go to New Hampshire for his first big campaign event. What happens? They try to accidentally board the press corps on to a plane that is not going to New Hampshire, but is instead going to Saudi Arabia.”

Okay, a lot of it wasn't Huntsman's fault (though that bizarre motorcycle ad might have been) and a lot of it was kind of nitpicky, but I laughed my head off as it went on and on...and on (the video is almost 19 minutes long!), and it's Friday, so there it is.

The first Barbie commercial.  Found this, the very first Barbie commercial at Paddy and Laffy's "The Political Carnival" and it took me back--not to my day but to my daughters'.  Oh, yes.  Fun but fraught with dangerous girl-to-woman signals, those Mad Men babes.  But Barbies were like peaches and cream compared to Bratz, the black-booted hussy dolls my granddaughter went nuts over.  (Their first commercial is here.) Interesting to note that Mattel won the battle over competition and forced Bratz out in order to keep Barbie strong.  I thought competition was a good thing for capitalists.  But then there is that whole values thing going on...

 This next story is funny and sad and poignant and ripe for movie-making if only George Carlin were still alive (or if Woody Allen hadn't done something similar in "Take the Money and Run").

 James Verone, age 59, robbed a Gastonia, NC bank using a demand note requesting only a dollar, apparently the lowest amount needed in order to get free housing and medical care in the local hoosegow.  Verone said he is hoping for a three-year sentence so he can ride it out until Social Security kicks in and he can go live at the beach.  He said he's never done a dishonest thing in his life before this. 

I could launch into a screed on the need for universal health care in this country and what the lack of same drives even the most honest men to do, but I'm picturing James Verone sitting on the floor of the bank holding a stolen dollar bill in his hand waiting for the police to arrive and take him away to safety.  A man at the end of his rope. With a plan. An absurd, ridiculous plan  And then I'm picturing millions of people at the end of their ropes, each demanding one dollar from banks all across the country and waiting for the police to come and take them away.  And from there I'm remembering honest black citizens breaking the law by sitting at all-white lunch counters or refusing to get to the back of the bus and I have to marvel at the purity of James Verone's plan.  He might well be this century's Rosa Parks.


A Moment Sublime:  Pop-up pianos in New York City (video).  Sing for Hope, a non-profit arts project, has set up 88 artist-decorated pianos in public places all over NYC and made them available to anyone who feels the need to tickle the ivories.  Artists include Izaac Mizrahi, Diane Von Furstenburg, Kate Spade, B.D. Wong, and others whose names New Yorkers will surely know.  They're asking people who have visited to come back to the website and tell their stories.  What a great project.  Wish I could be there to see some of them. (It runs through July 2.  Hope it doesn't rain...)

From newyorkology.com

Cartoon of the Week:

R.J Matson - St. Louis Post Dispatch

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