Romney Does It Again!

Unless I am missing something really important in this political calculus, Mitt Romney just handed over the presidential election to the incumbent, one Barack H. Obama this morning at 9 AM EDT when he officially announced the choice of Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin to be his running mate. The announcement itself, made in front of an outdated and decommissioned WWII battleship was nothing less than prophetic.

Is there a rule which says that Republican presidential candidates must play Russian Roulette with the vice-presidency? First, we have George W. Bush appointing Dick “Boom-Boom” Cheney and getting, in the bargain, a finger-waving Svengali who took the country into two $2 billion-a-week, unwinnable wars and, on the eve of the worst economic meltdown in 4 generations, told the country that “deficits don't matter.” By the end of the Bush II presidency, the country was so fed up with those two, I swear the people would have elected my Uncle Charlie if he was on the ballot. (Unfortunately, Uncle Charlie died 30 years ago.)

As if to underscore lousy choices in running mates, in 2008 John “Maverick” McCain anointed a total idiot in the person of “Sister” Sarah Palin to be his running mate, hoping that a combination of a cute derriere and down home “you betchas” and "hockey moms" would transfigure McCain's image from “old man” to  “youthful hipster.” He got far less than he bargained for in Sister Sarah and got hammered.

And now [drum roll] the Mittster gives us Paul Ryan! I mean, if ever there was someone would would alienate about a third of likely GOP voters, it is Paul Ryan. This is a guy who would take down every federal social program in existence and more importantly, leave the most likely voters of them all - seniors – hanging from a Republican gibbet. And while Ryan has yet to spell out how he would wring $5.8 trillion from federal spending, he's made it plain that social programs will take the first major hit, while he calls for more massive tax cuts for the already rich and tax increases for the already poor.  In choosing Ryan , Romney has placed every GOP voting bloc at risk, including the 6-10% of the electorate who call themselves independents. The GOP base is simply not large enough to elect him. 

Moreover, Ryan (unlike the Mittster, who has evidently had an epiphany on his position since being governor) has been uniformly against abortion rights for women and even more strangely, has elevated even birth control, an issue settled decades ago, to the level of a campaign issue. In short, for “R^{2” (}Romney and Ryan) woman don't get to control their wombs. That should help with the women's vote enormously. For Democrats, that is. R2 = D2: Romney and Ryan will each be defeated is now a fairly good bet. 

At this juncture, it's hard to conceive that this 2012 Republican offering in the way of executive leadership can actually get elected. We will likely be hearing from that retired lady who was on Social Security and admonished McCain, “Don't cut my Medicare!” 

The truth is that Americans have always been pretty much centrists. And that's the way it will be in November. The GOP has left the Democrats much ground to stake out as their own, and they will take full advantage. 

In choosing Ryan, Romney has once again stepped on his shoestrings. So much for intelligent picks.

###

The Unspoken Victim in Colorado: The Truth

  It just seems like the same old tape gets replayed every year or two. We are given some horrible event involving a firearm and a lunatic and which winds up with innocents forfeiting their lives for the “price of freedom” to buy, own and use virtually any kind of gun one chooses to possess.

I have been reading the articles: all the comments of “multi-round drum magazines” which the shooter in Colorado could have had; his use of bulletproof clothing; how much worse it could have been; how he purchased several guns in a short period of time and hundreds of rounds of ammunition over the internet - all entirely legally. It's getting so that these events are occurring so frequently I can tick them off on my fingers, they are still so fresh in my memory: Thurston High School, Columbine High School, Gabby Giffords, Reagan, the Kennedys, James Brady, John Lennon, Dr George Tiller...on and on and on. 

 

In America, reason in these matters is invariably trumped by demagoguery, the blurring of issues, the outright lies which, repeated over and over again, become as truth to millions of my countrymen. It is the same with universal healthcare; with global climate change; with bankers who gamble with their depositors' savings; with poisoned tap water which catches fire from gas seeping up from hydro-fracked wells. The truth or falsity of virtually every important issue we face in 21^st century America is impossibly deadlocked by those most vested in the business of it; by who wins and who loses in the great game of America: money. When you have money, you have power in this country. And when you have power you can determine political outcomes. 

And so we can reliably presume that in the board rooms and marketing departments of companies like Colt Industries, Sturm-Ruger, Glock, Winchester Repeating Arms, and Remington Arms they are working overtime to once more bring to the public the entirely specious argument that people kill people. Not their guns. Not their ammunition. Mr. LaPierre and his like can be reliably depended upon to produce some statement absolving guns from being in any way whatsoever a cause of these and other killings. And they will be featured on cable channels and broadcast media everywhere. 

And we can also presume that senators and congressmen are deftly fashioning public statements deploring violence on one hand, and on the other  steering clear of the obvious for fear of upsetting their constituents who have been bamboozled in the last 20 years from being a clear minority to a majority who think stricter controls on firearms are uncalled for, thanks to relentless advertising by organizations like the National Rifle Association and their corporate benefactors. 

Indeed, the two men running for the presidency have been deafeningly silent on this whole issue, even in the face of this most recent tragedy in Colorado. It is the same phenomenon as the argument over whether or not humanity is fouling its own nest. Once, a majority of us signed on to the pronouncements of the scientific community that global warming is at least partially caused by human activity. Thanks to the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, Shell, the coal industry and their like, that majority has evaporated. 

The fact of it all is that our leaders have become the lead. What we have is 535 members of Congress with their wetted fingers in the air, testing whether what position on an issue will gain or lose them votes. No one in Washington DC is willing to say the right thing if it involves jeopardizing their job. In politics, as in war, truth is the first victim and retention of power is the first goal. In Washington there are no more Profiles in Courage. The concept of the citizen-politician is as outmoded as  rotary dial telephones. Once you are elected to an office in Washington, you stay in Washington. And, generally, you get quite rich.  

So here we are, once more, mourning the loss of 12 young citizens who did absolutely nothing to cause the loss of their chance at life. The candles will be lit, the columns of pundits and photos of grieving mothers published, public officials will display their sadness and outrage, and a few people will march for a few days demanding something be done. But it will be for naught. Like the tides, emotions will ebb and we will return to trying to just survive. America seems, to this writer, to be unable or unwilling to face the unvarnished truth – on the issue of gun control or anything else. 

 

We will continue sacrificing our children, our leaders, our wives and husbands, even the guy who runs the night shift at the local 7-11, for the “freedom to keep and bear arms.” Maybe some future generation of Americans will get it right but right now, truthfully, I despair.

###

Remembering Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

I sat and stared at the screen, somewhat stunned to read that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the legendary German lyric baritone, passed away a few days ago, at the age of 86. The first thought was, Oh no! He was such an artist! Then the second thought was a self-reminder that all the heroes of my young years are falling by the wayside and that I'm probably not that far away from tripping into eternity myself. It's just the way things go, Fly.
 

If you aren't into classical music, you probably don't know who this man was; but I can say that in some big or small way, he probably affected your life. You may never have had the sublime pleasure of hearing the greatest baritone of a generation sing, but you can bet that he influenced some singer you particularly like, for he was the singer's singer.

In my first year of college as a music student in 1962, a buddy who happened to be a baritone introduced me to Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin cycle of art songs and asked if I would accompany him. I didn't even know what an “art song” was but I was up for the challenge of being an accompanist for a singer. As I began to study them, my friend gave me an LP of Fischer-Dieskau and his accompanist, Gerald Moore, singing that work, to give me an idea of tempi and interpretation. To hear the two of them was, for me, a near-spiritual experience. From that time on, I began my own collection of recordings by Fischer-Dieskau, which I treasure and still listen to very often, 50 years later. 

 

Fischer-Dieskau seemed to have had it all. He had the pipe, the incredible good looks, and especially a dedication to his art which made him world famous and attracted legions of followers. His precision and technique were unequaled. Although he sang opera from time to time – even Wagner, which requires heroic qualities of a voice - he made his everlasting mark as a singer of German art songs. His voice had qualities to it which, if you listened to him, expressed an incredibly personal and quickly identifiable bel canto sound in its richness. My all-time favorite recording of him is of Gustav Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn (here with Brigitte Fassbaender), which he recorded with Elizabeth Schwartzkopf, the peerless German soprano. 

 

Fischer-Dieskau was born in 1925, was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943 and sent to the Russian front. In 1945 he was captured in Italy and spent two years as a POW in the United States. In 1947 he returned to Germany and began a singing career which lasted nearly fifty years. Although he retired in 1992, he continued in music, conducting master classes in voice all over the world, teaching and inspiring young singers everywhere. 

I was never fortunate enough to see Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau live but he will always be a major influence on my music education and someone who has given me hours and hours of pure enjoyment. 

In a world in which much sometimes seems to be ugly, DFD - and his fellow artists - remind us that beauty is never far from us and is always ours for the taking.

Ruhe in Frieden, mein Freund. Rest in peace, my friend.

###

Seriously, Is Mitt Really Qualified?

I suspect that, for a lot of Americans, watching Mitt Romney as he has campaigned himself into the Republican nomination for the presidency, it's been bemusing to study this man's seemingly endless number of gaffes - not to mention his high degree of truth telling problems - in his public utterances. I found myself wincing as I watched Mr. Romney laughingly explain away his teenage pranks,  saying he could not remember committing assault and battery on a fellow student at the Cranbrook Schools, while others involved in the thing remembered it as though it occurred yesterday. On the event itself I would have given Romney a pass, but the explanation and the manner in which it was given defy reason.

If anything at all, Mitt Romney was the recipient of the best of what America has to offer in the way of upbringing, in education, in family circumstances, and in carving out a career from the benefits of them. Here is a man who never suffered for anything in life as the son of a self-made father who once aspired to the Presidency himself. Mitt Romney is a man who, despite the potential pitfall of becoming someone could have been on cruise control for virtually his entire life, nevertheless excelled at one of the nation's finest schools of higher learning after having been sequestered in an exclusive Michigan prep school, where the turmoil of the 1960's simply could not have meant much more than some hazy talk of war and social revolution which were raging outside the Cranbrook gates. 

Romney took his undergraduate degree in English from Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, which is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – the Mormons. Then, following that accomplishment up, he completed a double post-grad degree in Law and Business from Harvard, where he must have excelled at multi-tasking between Torts and Regression Analysis classes.  From there he made his own mark in the world of business (jump started with a little help from his friends) with Boston's Bain Management, and later became a founder of Bain Capital, where he made millions buying and selling distressed businesses. His life, for someone beginning to familiarize himself with the candidate, seems to be forty years of “the right stuff” in preparation for a stint in the White House: the right family, the right schools, the right curriculum vitae.
 

Non-stop misfires on the stump

Yet, Romney has displayed over and over again, a tremendous inability to communicate with ordinary Americans, to connect with them in his speeches, and most markedly in his off the cuff remarks to reporters covering his campaign. He has made some incredibly dumb mistakes along the way: mistakes which call into serious question his ability to think clearly before opening his mouth. It is not the smartest thing to say publicly that “I like to fire people” in a time when hundreds of thousands of perfectly good people have been let go of their jobs. Not is it smart to say, “I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there....” when you are looking for the votes of the poor. When asked how closely he followed NASCAR, while campaigning in Ohio, he now famously remarked, "Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners." 

He even (quite unconsciously) threw his wife under the bus when he mentioned her donation to Planned Parenthood 18 years ago in one instance, and in another noted her stable of Cadillacs. Noting his $375,000 “insignificant” income from speaker's fees last January, the country seemed to do a double take on this assertion that he worries about pink slips, too. Finally, there is that famous “Corporations are people, too, my friend!” comment to a (presumablky out of work)  heckler in Iowa.

But is he qualified?

Over and over again, this candidate has come across as a totally clueless rich boy, fully isolated from the pain, the anguish, the sheer fright of being an American worker in the midst of the worst economic slump in 80 years. At a time when great numbers of voters are unsure about their future, Mitt Romney reminds them, almost daily, that he is not of them; that he is of a different caste, disconnected from the people whose votes he will need in November.

The greatest power of the American presidency is the power to communicate. When a president cannot be persuasive of both his constituency and the other two branches of government, he is simply ineffective. The electoral success of two polar opposites in the modern presidency – Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover – hinged largely on their ability to communicate effectively, even though Hoover had a mile-long résumé of accomplishments prior to his election in 1928 and was the incumbent in 1932, running against FDR.

It may be, however, that Romney is different than his words. It may be he's a considerably more complex person than he has demonstrated to date. Be that as it may, Romney has demonstrated something far more important, which is an inability to think on his feet. He is a salesman telling 300 million people what he thinks they want to hear and in doing so exposes his lack of real conviction by consistently conflicting one remark with another. He can tick off the features without knowing “what's inside the can,” but the voters Romney most needs know when someone is insincere.  Even in a pair of jeans he looks ill at ease. His body language signals that he'd be happy to be anywhere but where he is. 

In the end, he has not thought about his campaign in that grand way it takes to develop a raison de courir, a reason to run. It may be that his impetus stems from some more personal reason: that of achieving what his father could not. Certainly, the notion of noblesse oblige is missing from Mitt Romney's behavior toward the less fortunate of America. For all his education, for all his accomplishments, he has shown he is an adept player at the most thoroughly American game of all: the achievement of great wealth, but miserable at authenticity. 

Good thinking requires something more than the ability to multi-task between two different ivy league college majors. It requires the ability to sit quietly, in solitude, and think about oneself and one's real mission in aspiring to greatness. Mitt Romney does not appear to have done that exercise. He has not figured out whether in his life there is, indeed, any “there” there.

Will Romney be elected?

I do not think Mitt Romney will make it all the way to the oval office. His flaws are numerous and too telling. He appears to be, at the end of the day, too unprincipled and too willing to approach his campaign as a business problem rather than offering a unifying vision for the country to voters. Regardless, Romney will get his share of votes simply because there is a distinct anti-Obama bias among socially conservative voters, particularly in the South and much of the Midwest and because there is so much corporate money lined up against him. Where normally a conservative voter would stay away from the voting booth when their candidate rings inauthentic, they are now willing to vote not so much for Romney as against Obama. But I do not believe it will be enough. 

 

What's really fascinating about this election, as in the last, is that the candidates are two men whose lives could not be more different in terms of the paths they walked to distinction, and the fact that for the first time in our history, the cost of electing a President will approach, and perhaps exceed, 2 billion dollars.

For that kind of money, a President should be able to at least appear to have his mouth and his brain synchronized. For a job which requires above all an ability to speak with clarity and credulity, Mr. Romney is abysmally underqualified. 

###

Dissembling Myth For Reality: a GOP Specialty

It is as American as the 7^th inning stretch; as much a part of our self-portrait as Washington Crossing the Delaware, or Rosie the Riveter and G.I. Joe.  Somewhere around half of us see ourselves as self-made or self-becoming and that, if only we work hard, educate ourselves, play fair, and even perhaps trust in The Lord, all not only can be, but will be, well. 

This is the myth: as old as our hills and so easy to understand and believe, being peddled by the GOP this election season. And from this myth stems the notion that those who are wealthy^* and (by all the Madison Avenue measures) considered to be successful, get to where they are by dint of hard work. After all, how many people does Google employ? Or Apple? Or perhaps Microsoft or even, say, News Corporation? Each of these companies,  (even like Ford, Chevron or General Electric in a prior age) started as the brainstorm on one or two  individuals and, taken together, employ in the hundreds of thousands of workers. 

 

“Mything” an entire election

From that iconic America has emerged, in this election season, the concept of the “job creator,” a person generally understood to mean someone who (a) is wealthy and/or (b) runs a business, or invests in one – or perhaps several of them - which can hire people who need work. This is one of the two bleatings of the monied and the conservatice political  class who have enjoyed three decades of highly favorable tax treatment, and who, through the political process, have pretty much taken down the last vestiges of FDR's New Deal for the American worker. 

The other myth-turned-law of nature among the conservative class, is that “the market,” that incredibly mechanical and linear wonder of wonders which, left to its own devices, will provide for all if and only if it is left alone to do its magic. In the 19^th century it was termed laissez faire - French for “allow to act” - with as little governmental interference as possible. In other words, leave the “job creators” alone to work their magic. 

 

Millions of not-yet-arrived folks believe these myths as if they were sacred truths. The synthesis, the dialectic, if you will, is that to disturb the “job creators” in any way is to upset capitalism, the Deus ex machina of conservative economics.

...And then came the reality

We've seen it all before. Our grandfathers and great grandfathers, and their fathers before them, saw what happened when these economic bubbles burst. They've been through the bank panics of the 1870's and 1890's, and the 1900's, the Great Depression of 1929 – all a result of the concentration of economic power and financial finagling by, yes, the monied class and shady politicians sucking their share of lucre from their benefactors' teats. And when the bust was all over, we returned to the same behavior, over and over again.The myth of the rugged, Randian individual: every man a John Galt, just refuses to die.

In the latest iteration, beginning with gentle, kindly, and enormously naïve Ronald Reagan, and ending with one of the shallowest presidents in American history, George W. Bush, we expected that "they" - this time - knew better: through Savings and Loan crises; through dot-com busts, and finally through the collapse of the real estate market, the entire American economy was manipulated into a near total implosion. Where were the “job creators?” My guess is that they were stashing money any place but here. (Checked the price of gold lately?) 

 

And now the truth...

If you believe this country runs on consumerism, which by the way it does – that when someone buys something, it generates an order for someone else to make that thing (or provide a service) to replace it, then the whole “job creator” idea is stood on its head. The truth of the matter is that nothing happens until someone buys something. And that someone is not the “job creator.” It is the little guy who buys a new Chevy, or a bag of groceries. The guy who moves paper in an office, or goes out and sells another guy on buying a Chevy. It is the woman who works in the department store, or keeps a set of books, or, by God, the Mexican illegal who mows your lawn or cleans your house and goes out and buys a television set with the earnings from the sweat of his brow. And perhaps even, he someday opens a little taco stand, then another and another. (I've seen that happen a half dozen times in my own life) 

 

The point is that what will mend this economy is not only re-creating tax progressivity, as Adam Smith and the writers of the 16^th Amendment envisioned it to be, which will help the inflow/outflow equation. The quickest way out of this mess is to get money into the hands of people who will spend it: the workers and the out-of-workers. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, when the chips were down, were too feint-hearted to do the deed of injecting enough money into the hands of people to jump start the consumption process. A little, certainly, but not nearly enough. 

 

For all the carping the GOP does about the fed helping the down and outers, the old and infirm – the ones who took the fall for the Bernie Madoffs, the Jeffrey Skillings and Ken Lays; the Lehman Brothers; the Goldman Sachs and Bank of Americas - and lost everything, the fed should have done what Paul Krugman so valiantly fought for, which was a massive transfer of money to the real job creators, the people who consume what people like Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates, and even the Koch Brothers have to sell. I've never met a businessman who hired people without a solid expectation of an increase in business. There aren't enough wealthy folks to sustain a 13 trillion dollar economy, let alone bring it back to life.

When spending happens, business hires. In the end, it is a healthy, diverse, and growing middle class which will create the prosperity that the plutocrats and their political hirelings claim as being of their own making; and rather than cuff the “illegals” and send them back to Mexico we should be celebrating our own diversity, something no other nation on Earth has, and remember that people like Oprah and Lee Iacocca, or the guy with the taco stand or the Chinese restaurant are the secret weapons of this nation. It's one which will never be copied anywhere.

The further point, which is so self-evident that it's a wonder the monied class and the GOP can foist it on their less well off friends and get away with it, is that unregulated capitalism of the kind we've seen since 1980 (and read about in countless history books) is poison to both the well being of the citizenry and the health of the economic engine itself. And I'm not talking about the number of handicapped parking spaces required to be in front of an office building.

So, I tip my hat to the real job creators, the ordinary joes like you and I, who work all our lives, save a little, spend a lot, and try to get our kids ready for their own journey in life. When this is all over, everyone should agree that it's Everyman who is the real job creator. 

Either the voters will reject GOP campaign rhetoric or, in accepting it, will pretty much continue killing off the middle class by death from a thousand cuts. The GOP - and we, too - will soon get our lesson in reality. One way or another.

^{* "Wealthy" is a relative word, of course. Use your own definition.}

Graphic from the Hartford Courant

###

Günter Grass: Thinking About Israel

Günter Grass, the 1999 Nobel Prize winning German writer, sculptor, playwright and illustrator has now been officially made an official persona non grata in Israel. He is not welcome to visit. In fact, he has been banned from entering the country at all by Israel's ultra-orthodox Interior Minister Eli Yishai. Why? 
 

In a recently published poem, entitled “What Must Be Said,” Grass takes the West – especially Germany - to task for the hypocrisy of its unquestioned willingness to accept the fact of Israeli nuclear capability while at the same time pronouncing Iran a rogue state possibly seeking its own nuclear weapon. The more important point he makes in this (not very well made) poem is the West's – specifically Germany's – not-so-tacit support for Israel's policies toward its neighbors. He claims Germany's stigma from World War II has rendered the country incapable of being truthful to the reality that Israel, as much as anyone in the region, is as destabilizing to a just peace as Iran is currently being accused of being by the West.

It is important to remember that Günter Grass was conscripted into the Waffen SS near the end of the war, as a 17-year old, something he kept hidden for 60 years, until 2006. This fact was not overlooked by the Israeli government in their banning of him from Israel. Yishai remarked: "Grass' [sic] poems are an attempt to guide the fire of hate toward the State of Israel and the Israeli people, and to advance the ideas of which he was a public partner in the past, when he wore the uniform of the SS." 

 

Yishai's comment, certainly made with the acquiescence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was to this writer a pretty crude appeal to the man rather than to the argument Grass tries to make in his poem. Yishai offered a classic argumentum ad hominen attempt to divert attention from one issue to another. Yet Grass's poem calls, once again, the entire Middle East quagmire into consideration. 

 

What they say and what they do

In its declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel, the founders proclaimed, “THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” 

 

It doesn't take much to understand that the Israel of today, let alone the modern Israel, since its very birth, is hardly the state which was envisioned by the post-war Zionists who brought Israel into being. Or is it? In fact, there is a strong argument that even the notion of a “Jewish state,” the whole raison d'etre of Zionism, is incompatible with democracy. (Can you imagine the founders of the United States including the idea of their new nation being a “Christian state” in 1789?)

Yet, the well-deserved sympathy and guilt that the West, including the United States, felt toward what was left of European Jewry after the carnage of the war has been used as diplomatic tool by Israel for 70 years. Hence Yishai's comment about why he's keeping Günter Grass out of Israel. No seditious speech, even if worthy of consideration, is allowed. So much for freedom and adherence to the UN charter, so eloquently stated above. 

 

Democracy and the Jewish state

Had Israel lived up to its own declaration, it would not be a Jewish state today. If Israel is to be a Jewish state, admitting the Arabs to full rights as citizens, particularly Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza, which make up about 52% of the biblical Israel, Israel would cease to exist as Israel, most likely as a result of demographics alone. If, by some magical change of heart, Israel decided to transform itself into a pluralistic, fully open, fully egalitarian, fully democratic entity, it would soon lose its identity as a state founded in 1948 for the purpose of restoring Jews to their own nation - a nation which the Romans literally erased from history in 135AD when they renamed the country Syria Palestina and scattered the inhabitants throughout the empire. The name Palestine, for that region, lived on in successive conquests by the Arabs, then the Ottomans, and finally the British. 

 

All the above said, Israel certainly has a right to exist. But as what? Certainly, a new Arab majority would likely even take back the name Palestine, should it decide to do so.

Israel: the new South Africa?

As it presently is, Israel is not much different than South Africa during Apartheid. There are two distinct groups of inhabitants of Israel: the powerful minority of Jewish Israelis, and a downtrodden Arab majority (who call themselves Palestinians), living both inside the 1948 Israel, as well as the West Bank and Gaza, which were taken from them in 1967. One group lives in relative freedom and controls the wealth, as well as the government; and the other is relegated to 2^nd class status, without a vote, without political or economic power. It is a tribal war but the camps are divided by religion and not ethnicity or race, as it was in South Africa. And just as in that case, both sides claim victimization to world opinion: that they are the aggrieved party.

The political power in Israel has moved far to the right of the founders of the country. Orthodox settlers in the West Bank would be happy to exterminate or force the remaining Arabs out of Eretz Israel; appropriating the remainder of the occupied land to themselves. As in the case of South Africa, this is not going to happen. And just as surely, this whole stalemate must resolve itself, one way or another. Which, of course, was Grass's point. 

 

In the meantime, Israel continues to use the Holocaust as the card most likely to be played when someone – anyone – calls it to task. If you happen to be a German, or worse, and old German who happened to to be a 17-year old soldier in World War II, you have no right to speak out against Israeli behavior. 

 

Is Israeli victimhood wearing thin?

Understanding that American support for Israel has been pretty much without anything resembling limits (Except for when Jimmy Carter speaks out), it's fair to ask whether this will always be the case. What will be the American position if Israel mounts a strike on Iran's atomic works? What will the admission of massive Israeli infiltration of the American defense and political establishment have on both Jewish and non-Jewish voters who are now two generations removed from the horror of World War II and what happened to Jews in Europe? Will Israel ever be held to behave more like a mature member of the community of nations, or simply excused as doing what it sees itself as having to do to survive, its neighbors being an existential threat?

The two options

Grass's point is that it's time to talk turkey about the Middle East. If we continue the present status, there is only one possible outcome: another holocaust in that region and possibly beyond it, with both Jews in Israel and Muslims throughout the Middle East employing nuclear weapons against each other.

The only workable solution is that the world – and Israel – must come to terms with the idea of a free and independent Arab Palestine, in which the security of both is guaranteed by the rest of the world. Reparations to displaced Palestinians and their descendents will need to be paid. It is the only way Israel can be a democracy primarily made up of Jews. 

 

As it presently is, the government of Israel has no intention of backing away from colonizing the West bank and, eventually, Gaza. Israel is currently run by a coalition a religious yahoos who simply see themselves as restoring what existed 2,000 years ago. (There isn't a dime's worth of difference between the man who assassinated Yitshak Rabin in 1995 and the man shot Dr. George Tiller to death. In both cases the act was initiated by religious fanaticism.) And they are certainy aided by the religious fanatacism of the evanglical Christian members of the American Congress. 

It is time for Israel and her  guarantors, most of all her strongest ally, the United States,  to speak the truth, just as Günter Grass said.  It is what also must be said. 

 

###

It appears the Republican Party is making an all out, full frontal assault on women as we get into high gear this election season. The bullet points below were cut and pasted from various places around the net.

• The Susan B. Komen Foundation decides to stop contribution to Planned Parenthood, then backs away and fires its vice-president, a former GOP candidate for Maryland governor running on an anti-Planned Parenthood platform.
• Republican Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will convene a hearing (Thursday, 2/16), "Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?" The lead witness is the Most Rev. William E. Lori, Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., and chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty. Judging from Lori and the rest of the witness list, it's obvious that Issa has posed what he considers to be a rhetorical question and lined up nine like-minded rhetoricians to answer it anyway.

How many of the witnesses will offer testimony in support of the administration's position? According to Democrats, zero. How many can speak to issues regarding contraception and/or preventive health care? Again, zero. Issa invited nine people to testify, and each of them will tell Issa exactly what he wants to hear. Democrats were initially offered a chance to have one   witness testify, but when they selected a female law student at Georgetown, Republican committee staffers rejected the choice, arguing that she would only be able to speak to issues regarding contraception access -- and this was a hearing about religious liberty.

• Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum declares birth control is “harmful to women.”Every day three women in America are killed by their husbands or boyfriends. Yet, the Republican Party is opposing the extension of the Violence Against Women Act because it helps too many women. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is leading the charge against reauthorization over provisions that offer protections to domestic abuse victims that happen to be LGBT or undocumented immigrants. (In other words, straight white women only, please.)
  
• Sen. Roy Blunt, (R-MO), has vowed to push for a vote on his legislation to overturn the new birth control requirement, possibly this week, despite Obama’s efforts to quiet the controversy on Friday by tweaking the rule. Blunt’s move, in turn, has sparked a fierce lobbying campaign by women’s health advocates, who say his legislation is a “radical” effort to block a gamut of women’s health services, not just contraception.
• The GOP state legislative supermajority state in Virginia passed a law in which women are forced to be vaginally penetrated with an ultrasound probe to determine the age of the fetus before allowing a woman to terminate her pregnancy. The bill passed over bitter yet futile objections from Democrats. And one GOP delegate caused the House to ripple when he said most abortions come as "matters of lifestyle convenience."

And these are just for openers! It's as if conservative leaders have taken leave of their frikkin' humanity.

“Chicks Up Front”

In the 1960's, when the San Francisco Bay Area was a giant, nine county fermentation tank of political and social change, there seemed to be a “protest du jour” going on all the time. There were huge rallies at San Francisco State, Berkeley, San Jose State, even snooty old Stanford, down in Palo Alto. The Yippies were at their height of fame (or infamy, perhaps, if you were an indignant working adult). At times it got out of hand, and the cops usually could be stoked up enough to react unpleasantly in order to break us up. They routinely banged kids over the head with batons and hauled them off for a few hours. 

In 1969, then-Governor Ronald Reagan even sent in the National Guard when, in Berkeley, kids were protesting against the university taking over a local vacant lot called Peoples Park, near the UC campus, which served as a camp ground for street people. It got ugly as hell. One kid, sitting on a rooftop watching all the goings-on, was even shotgunned to death by the Berkeley cops.

That was when organizers created a tactic which they thought would keep the blue meanies from beating us all up by putting girls at the head of the demonstration to face off with the cops. “Chicks up front!” became almost a battle cry. (Along with “Don't trust anyone over 30!”) It was the women who were obviously the willing sacrificial lambs. 

It's time to get the “chicks up front” once again. This time to the polls. 

And filing for elective office, too. In the House there are 74 female Representatives (23%). The Senate has 16 females (16%). These are the highest numbers of women members in the history of the Congress! Of the 16 female Senators, 11 are Democrats and 5 are Republicans. Of the 74 female Representatives, 53 are Democrats and 21 are Republicans.

###