Pat Oliphant/Universal Press SyndicateFriday, November 12, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Sneak Preview: 'Brothers At Arms'
My next book is titled Brothers At Arms: The True Story of Twin Brothers In War & Peace. This oral history traces the lives of Jack and Bill Davies, eightysomething Marine Corps veterans of the Korean War. Their sacrifices and heroism in that forgotten war should be remembered on this Veterans Day -- and every day, for that matter.An excerpt:
BILL DAVIES: We were at [Camp] Pendleton [in California] and this officer said that we had our six months in and could go home. I said, "Wait a minute, we want to go overseas."The officer said, "You guys are a--holes."
They needed tankers so bad that they flew us over. We landed in Japan. The early part of December [1951]. Sasebo Naval Air Station [in southern Japan]. It was the middle of the night and they were bringing in guys right off the trenches.
One guy said to us, "Man, I’m so glad to get the hell out of there. I don’t envy you guys going up there."
JACK DAVIES: I said, "What the freak?"
BD: So they flew us to Korea and take us up to the front. They called it the MLR -- Main Line of Resistance.
A lot of the convoys had been ambushed, but we made it there. There were two tents, one for chow and one for ammo. The first thing we heard was that Fox Company had gotten overrun. It was snowing hard . . .
JD: There was a freaking blizzard.
BD: A captain comes down the road in a jeep. "You got two Davies there?" And off we went. . . .
JD: I remember that we were on the line. We relieved an Army unit, the 24th Infantry. I’ll never forget them. They had wolfhounds on their tanks. We pulled in there and they were playing volleyball.
BD: The captain says. "Here’s our line. If you have to retreat . . . I say, "We don’t retreat." . . .
JD: Then our unit gets hit and the captain says, "We're separating you guys."
I tell him "you can’t separate us."BD: The captain says "If you don’t want to be separated, write a letter to the commandant [of the Marine Corps] asking that you not be separated." We did.
JD: So we're in Korea six months and they pull the six-month thing again. The captain says, "Get your gear, you Davies, you're going home."I asked how long the regular Marine Corps tour was.
"Thirteen months."
"I want to stay."
"You want to do what?"
"I want to stay."
We went back to the tent and the guy says, "Don’t tell me, you volunteered."
BD: When my brother got hit they told him he could get out. Our father had just died. Our mother said no; if they both can't get out then they're not getting out.
SHAUN MULLEN: When did you get hit?
JD: In April, uh . . .
BD: April of '52.
SM: What happened?
JD: They overran us. There were four tanks and my tank took a round. It took off one whole side and the back of the tank. A Corps photographer showed later up to take pictures. He said nothing like that had ever happened before.
Me and the gunner jumped out. I got burned and I had shrapnel in both legs and my back, but the loader was in there screaming. The tank was on fire by that time. I'll never forget it. He was a beet farmer from Idaho. I said, "We have to go back and get him," so we rushed back.
BD: I was providing supporting fire. I knew that he was hit before he got hit.
JD: I radioed Bill and told him that I couldn’t get the tank started. He says "You’d better get the freaking tank started!"
You didn’t lose a tank over there and Chesty Puller [Lieutenant General Chester Puller] said "get that freaking tank out." He said "I have five Navy Crosses and you’re going to get me a sixth."
Brothers At Arms will be published in early 2010.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
It's A World Gone Crazier . . .
. . . Or maybe just voters are.
In the week since the mid-term election, President Obama's approval ratings have gone up despite what is widely viewed as a stinging rebuke to his party and agenda.
There are several possible explanations for the four-point bump in the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll that do not take into account hard drugs and non-medicinal alcohol:
* The president struck a mostly conciliatory tone in a post-election address.
* The stock market rallied to the highest levels since two months before the 2008 election.
* A better-than-expected post-election jobs report possibly heralding the end of the Bush Recession and beginning of the Boehner Recovery.
* Touchy feely-ness over the president's $200 million a day diplomatic tour of Asia.
* Americans' memories are even shorter than supposed.
The uptick, while not ginormous in absolute terms, also runs against the grain. The approval ratings of former Presidents Bush and Clinton decline after their parties' midterm election losses in 2006 and 1994, respectively.Cartoon by Michael Ramirez/Investors Business Daily
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Republicans To Main Street: Drop Dead
If timing is everything, then the re-emergence of the Republican Party as a congressional power is likely to bring further gloom to Main Street and a new round of high-fiving on Wall Street.
Republicans have never been friends of Joe and Jane Six Pack, and nowhere in the post-election gloating of party leaders was there the slightest indication of a course correction on that. In fact, while unemployment continues to hover near the 10 percent mark and the foreclosure epidemic continues unabated, Republicans are talking not of programs that might ease the pain but of slashing programs that arguably have kept the pain from being even worse.
Nowhere is the Republican's overarching cynicism and deep disconnect with the reality of many ordinary Americans more evident than its quest to extend the Bush era tax cuts for the most affluent two percent of the population.
As things now stand, these "have mores," as Barack Obama's predecessor calls them in his new autobio, would be gifted a $61,000 tax cut. The GOP is calling for a $370,000 cut while at the same time balking at any effort to expands jobs programs.
Republicans argue that a hefty tax cut for the rich is a jobs program in and of itself because it would stimulate the economy, but this canard is debunked by study after study that show the rich have been banking and not spending their tax-cut money. That is not going to suddenly change.
David Stockman, budget director for that tax-cutting Reagan administration, opposes extending tax cuts for the rich -- and anyone else, for that matter -- because he believes that doing so would essentially bankrupt the country.
"You have to pay your bills; you can't keep borrowing from the rest of the world at that magnitude, year after year after year," Stockman told National Public Radio. "So in light of all of those facts, I say we can't afford the Bush tax cuts."
As it is, Republican leaders appear to be coalescing around a more direct way to bankrupt the country: A government shutdown.Photograph by C. MacCubbin
Monday, November 08, 2010
Why The GOP's Year Of The Woman Strategy Was A Self-Inflicted Disaster
AYOTTE, FIORINA & ANGLEIn many ways, the 2010 mid-term elections were about women.
There were a record number of woman Republican candidates running for the U.S. Senate and statehouses. There were a record number of high profile Republican woman candidates, including Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Linda McMahon. Sarah Palin pitched her brand of "conservative feminism" to the Tea Party faithful, and woman voters once again outnumbered men, as they have since 1980.
Yes, if Republican leaders were to be believed, the mid-terms were shaping up to be a watershed election for women.
Women are, after all, the most vital demographic because, as was the case with the Obama-McCain showdown in 2008, they determine the outcome of elections. But that reality had become a problem for the Republican Party because generally speaking women lean left and prefer policy over politics, while the GOP has leaned increasingly to the right and has been pretty much bereft of policies in its thirst for playing politics and anti-Obama obstructionism.
That was all going to be so much history after mid-term ballots were counted. But was it? How did Republican woman candidates actually do?
The short answer is poorly overall, and that becomes even more true when you factor in the fact that woman candidates -- let alone woman voters -- are as different as . . . uh, male candidates and male voters.
Indeed, Whitman, who got her clock cleaned in California, and Nikki Haley, who in South Carolina was one of the relatively few Republican woman success stories, could not be more different policy-wise. Same for Fiorina in California and Angle in Nevada. (The other Republican success stories of note were Susana Martinez, who beat a Democratic woman to become the first Latina governor in U.S. history, and Senate candidate Kelly Ayotte, who won by a landslide in New Hampshire.)
In retrospect, the record number of GOP candidates for high-profile offices and in high-profile races was identity politics at its most blatant. The Republicans are masters of the lowest common denominator, and this simply was a bald-faced effort to out Democrat the Democrats gender-wise.
That effort failed not because the Democratic candidates were more formidable. Indeed, Harry Reid in Nevada, Chris Combs in Delaware, Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer in California, as well as Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut were, to varying degrees, vulnerable because some were much disliked incumbents in a year when the anti-incumbent tide supposedly was at flood stage.
That effort also failed despite the fact that the women who gave Obama his landslide -- single mothers and women of color -- stayed away from the mid-terms in droves while the women who voted for McCain -- older and married with children -- showed up in droves.
In the end, women split their votes 48-49 for Democrats and Republicans, and there actually was a net loss in the total number of women in political office for the first time in 30 years.
No, the Republican effort failed because of the underlying folly of a strategy that depended on candidates who happened to be women, not quality woman candidates. In fact, an election heralded as a watershed year for woman Republican candidates turned out to be a self-inflicted disaster.
Sarah Palin's Kiss Of Life -- And Death
Sarah Palin annointed some 51 candidates with her coveted endorsement in the mid-term elections and those candidates did well overall except, ironically, in most of the highest of high-profile races.
In baseball parlance, the former half-term Republican governor of Alaska had a blistering .586 batting average, endorsing the winners in 29 of 46 races. (Results have not been finalized in five others, including the Alaska senate and Minnesota governor's races.)
Big wins included Senate candidates Marco Rubio in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania. Big loses included Senate candidates Carly Fiorina in California, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada, as well as gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman in California.
It is tempting to suggest that the Palin endorsement hurt the candidates who lost, but that's too simple. It certainly did not hurt loser Angle in conservative Nevada nor winner Toomey in center-leaning Pennsylvania, while it probably did not help either Fiorina or Whitman in liberal California, and it should noted that she did not endorse Tea Partiers in several primary races.
The Palin endorsements, of course, come with a big string attached: Support for her presumed 2012 run for the Republican presidential nomination.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Puffing On The GOP Mandate Crack Pipe
When it comes to Republican leaders, mandates are in the eyes of the beholder.
That's why they could claim in the wake of the 2000 presidential election that the party had a mandate although Al Gore got 540,000 more votes than George Bush.
And that's why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell could claim with a straight face this week that he has a mandate although the Democrats have a 53 to 47 seat majority (two caucus members are independents) and Democrats have now secured a Senate majority for three consecutive cycles, the first time that has happened since 1992.
But it may be John Boehner lap dog Eric Cantor who has taken the biggest hit on the mandate crack pipe in claiming that the party will introduce a health-care reform repeal bill early in the 112th Congress because "that's what the American people want."
While repeal certainly is what some of the American people want, there has been no broad-based groundswell of support for repealing legislation and many of the harshest Republican critics of HCR following its passage have been conspicuous in their silence.
This may have something to do with the fact that the legislation, while expensive, can be literally life saving for some of their constituents, removes the pre-existing condition bugaboo and is a big help for families with unemployed young adults.
Friday, November 05, 2010
GOP Voters Send In The Clowns. Again.
I want to revisit a "dynamic" that I've addressed several times in the run-up to the mid-term elections and again in this post yesterday: For all of the fulminating and chest pounding about change, Republican voters have re-elected the very leadership that helped George Bush drive the economy into a ditch and subsequently was responsible for losing the White House and both seats of Congress.
This is a leadership absolutely bereft of ideas, whether it is now to reduce the deficit or create jobs. This is a leadership that already is promising to continue the kind of obstructionist politics that frequently paralyzed the 111th Congress while scratching Wall Street's tummy during a time when Main Street was crying out for relief.
As I noted yesterday, people didn't vote for or against a broken system on Tuesday, but rather for or against candidates, most of whom depend on that system's perpetuation for their own survival.
Is there an explanation for this bewildering state of affairs?
Please don't hand me any crap about these clowns being sent back to Washington with a big pat on the back because they're not Democrats. Because if that is your argument voters have not only gotten the leaders they deserve, but they are as willfully stupid as those leaders.
Have at it, but please be nice.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Mama Grizzly Palin & The Four F's
As the dust from the mid-term elections begins to settle, it is obvious that the men who represent what passes for the Republican establishment have yet again successfully employed the Four F's, a crude sexual expression popular back in my high school days. That is, "Find Them, Feel Them, F--- Them and Forget Them."
The first instance that I can recall of what some pundits more politely call the "fake right" strategy was during the Reagan Era. The Gipper and his legislative gurus raised taxes, expanded the size of government and pretty much ignored the religious right's legislative priorities, all the while talking a far different game to placate the conservative base.
That is pretty much what today's party establishment -- represented by McConnell, Boehner and Rove -- did with the Family Values crowd during the Bush Era: Paid lip service to their extreme positions, took their money and occasionally campaigned for them, but once the establishment's goals were achieved, pretty much abandoned them.
And so it is with the Tea Partiers.
The GOP establishment has achieved the first of its two major goals -- recapturing the House (making Barack Obama a one-term president is the second) -- but before the ink on the last exit poll was dry it had begun a concerted effort to make sure that Sarah Palin, the movement's Mama Grizzly standard bearer and, regardless of one's politics, the impetus for a lot of Republican mid-term fund raising and enthusiasm, is not the party's 2012 presidential nominee.
In other words, to assure that the corporate takeover of the Washington country club continues apace by stopping trailer trash Tea Partiers like Palin in their tracks.
One irony of this latest successful employment of the Four F's is that the Republican electoral gains were largely undeserved, and the very establishment Republicans who enabled George Bush's failed agenda and were accomplices in running the economy into a ditch will still be running the country club membership committee.
There is nothing unethical, let alone illegal, about this crass manipulation. In fact, you can make the case that Barack Obama wooed the hard left and then pretty much abandoned it after being elected.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)