Columnist.
Anyone old enough to remember Viet Nam can remember how the country felt toward the man and women who were sent to Southeast Asia to prosecute that war. They were treated like [as this is a family column] garbage. We have discussed before how, in the National Guard during those days, it was suggested that we wear civilian clothes to and from drills.
I’ve been doing a lot of TV since the shut down began. Specifically I’ve been doing one or both of Anderson Cooper’s programs at 8 PM Eastern and/or 10 PM Eastern. In almost every one of those programs whoever is to my Left says that President Obama has been elected twice on the program of ObamaCare and, as ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, Republicans should back off, roll over, and accept their fate as having lost the Presidency in 2008 and 2012.
Hey, here’s a scoop! I was wrong about when the shutdown would end. I thought it would be last Thursday. My new prediction is: Never. As I think I’ve made pretty clear in MULLINGS and on TV, I thought -- and still think -- that tying the shutdown to repealing or delaying ObamaCare was a bad idea.
The hoo hah over ObamaCare may actually have some basis in fact. It is going to cost more than anyone can today conceive. I am on Medicare. I don’t (and you won’t) have any choice. When you reach a certain age you have to join Medicare or you can’t get any other insurance. Trust me. This is true.
There a many, many calendars to mark the passage of time. There are, according to Wikipedia, 48 current calendars and 22 obsolete calendars ranging from the well-known Aztec Calendar to the more obscure Xhosa calendar (unique to certain areas of Nigeria). These 70 calendars do not include the Star Date Calendar, utilized by the United Federation of Planets; nor the U.S. Fiscal Year Calendar, utilized by a total of 536 people: The voting members of the U.S. House and Senate and the President of the United States.
Here in Our Nation’s Capital it is difficult to catch your breath as the days tick by toward September 30 -- the end of the 2013 Fiscal Year. On the Senate floor yesterday, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz (who is opposed to ObamaCare) filibustered a bill that had not been brought to the floor. As I type this at 10:10 PM Eastern time, Cruz had been speaking since shortly after 2:40 yesterday afternoon.
Here we go again. Like the Voice o’ Doom during the trailer for an upcoming horror movie we are being told again and again that we are facing the end of the political, fiscal, and monetary world if we get into a government shutdown situation next week. I am not in favor of shutting down the government. I am not in favor of the government exceeding the debt limit. I am not in favor of defunding Obamacare without a fully developed replacement in the same bill.
President Barack Obama, fresh from having his lunch money taken from him by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, is flailing about trying to find someone he can shift the public’s attention to. He has chosen House Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh) as the person and the upcoming end of the U.S. government’s fiscal year on September 30 as his verbal weapon. I think that is the wrong fight against the wrong guy.
We have spoken of this before: The veneer of civilization is very, very thin. Anyone. Anyone can cause unimaginable horror to happen by virtue of doing something that you or I would never think of. Such an event happened earlier this week at the Washington Navy Yard when a mentally disturbed contractor shot and killed 12 civilians who had gone to work that morning expecting that it would be just another day at the office.
Larry Summers will not be the 15th Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Because you have a rich and full life without keeping track of who’s in and who’s out in Washington, DC, you might not have known that Larry Summers was being considered for the post of Fed Chairman, but he was. How do I know that he will not be Chairman of the Fed? Because he has withdrawn his name from consideration.
President Barack Obama is back on his heels and that is a dangerous place to be. The more foreign leaders he met with, the more made it clear they were not going to be helpful in Syria. The more White House staff he sent to the Hill, the fewer Members and Senators were convinced. The more everyone talked about going to war in Syria -- no matter how small that war -- the lower the support among regular Americans.
The White House chief of staff during the reign of President Richard Nixon was a guy named H.R. Haldeman who was not known for being a terribly patient man. The story goes that he would put the letters “TL2” atop memo that he thought were weak. TL2 stood for “Too little, too late.” That pretty much sums up the Administration’s frenzied attempt to gain support for an attack on Syria.
Now, the Congressional nose-counting begins: Who’s for the resolution to attack Syria, who’s against, who’s undecided, and who is calling their chief of staff asking, “Why’s all this about Syria? Where the hell *is* Syria? Those are mostly U.S. Senators. Problem is, there is no resolution to be for or against.
I decided to run the annual Back to School issue on Friday because I thought events surrounding Syria were moving too quickly. For the first time in over 15 years, I was correct.
This column, first written, in 2000, has held up through the years. This year, I got all the way to the second bullet before I got teary. Enjoy. * * * The children of America have gone back to school. And, in nearly every household, there is at least one person who is standing over the kitchen sink in tears, wondering where the years have gone.
I am writing this at shortly after 8 PM on Monday. By the time you read this, we might have dropped a hell fire missile on Bashir al-Assad’s head. Not really, but there are some interesting ironies about the Syrian situation. Secretary of State John Kerry famously -- or infamously -- pretended to throw his Vietnam-era medals over the White House fence in 1971.
August. The silly season. When events that would never even be covered during the other 11 months of the year (the other 3 months if you’re counting by Congressional work days) get a spinning police light on Drudge, are featured on Google News, and trend on Twitter. Here are a couple. Sen. Ted Cruz (Tea Party-Tx) apparently holds dual citizenship -- U.S. and Canadian.
President Barack Obama has cancelled joint military exercises with Egypt in the wake of a government crackdown on demonstrators demanding the return of deposed president Mohammad Morsi. That crackdown (through yesterday afternoon) had led to the deaths of 525 people and the injury to more than 3,700 others. Friday in the Muslim world is the equivalent of Sunday in the West (or Saturday in Israel) and it is likely those numbers will rise dramatically.
A hundred years ago, when I was the news director at WMOA Radio, 1490 on your AM dial in Marietta, Ohio 45750; I read that there was an editor -- probably in New York -- who would mark up copy with the letters M.E.G.O. The acronym meant: My Eyes Glaze Over -- the piece was so boring as to make him enter alpha wave mode such as I go into when I’m behind a high school class trying to get through the TSA security area. Living in Our Nation’s Capital we have many opportunities to be bored by long explanations by powerful people telling us why something can’t get done -- that it’s too complicated for mere mortals such as myself to understand.
