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June 20, 2009
A Threat We Can't Ignore
By BOB HERBERT (NY Times)
Even with the murders that have already occurred, Americans are not paying
enough attention to the frightening connection between the right-wing
hate-mongers who continue to slither among us and the gun crazies who
believe a well-aimed bullet is the ticket to all their dreams.
I hope I'm wrong, but I can't help feeling as if the murder at the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the assassination of the
abortion doctor in Wichita, Kan., and the slaying of three police officers
in Pittsburgh - all of them right-wing, hate-driven attacks - were just the
beginning and that worse is to come.
As if the wackos weren't dangerous enough to begin with, the fuel to further
inflame them is available in the over-the-top rhetoric of the National Rifle
Association, which has relentlessly pounded the bogus theme that Barack
Obama is planning to take away people's guns. The group's anti-Obama Web
site is called gunbanobama.com.
While the N.R.A. is not advocating violence, it shouldn't take more than a
glance at the newspapers to understand why this is a message that the
country could do without. James von Brunn, the man accused of using a rifle
to shoot a guard to death at the Holocaust museum last week, was described
by relatives, associates and the police as a virulent racist and
anti-Semite.
Investigators said they found a note that had been signed by von Brunn in
the car that he double-parked outside the museum. The note said, "You
want
my weapons - this is how you'll get them."
Richard Poplawski, who, according to authorities, used a high-powered rifle
to kill three Pittsburgh police
officers in April, reportedly believed that
Zionists were running the world and that, yes, Obama was planning to crack
down on gun ownership. A friend said of Poplawski, he "feared the Obama
gun
ban that's on the way."
There is no Obama gun ban on the way. Gun control advocates are, frankly,
disappointed in the president's unwillingness to move ahead on even the
mildest of gun control measures.
What's important to grasp here is that this madness has nothing to do with
hunting, which the politicians always claim to be defending, and everything
to do with the use of firearms to resist policies and lawful government
actions that some gun owners don't like.
In a speech in February to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the
executive vice president of the N.R.A., Wayne LaPierre, said: "Our
founding
fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules."
A new book by Dennis Henigan, a vice president at the Brady
Center to
Prevent Gun Violence, goes into detail on this point. In "Lethal Logic:
Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy," Mr. Henigan
refers
to a Harvard Law Journal article written by an N.R.A. lawyer titled,
"The
Second Amendment Ain't About Hunting." In the article, the lawyer makes
it
clear that for the N.R.A., the right to bear arms is "directed at
maintaining an armed citizenry. ... to protect
against the tyranny of our
own government."
There was a wave of right-wing craziness along those lines during the
Clinton administration. Four
federal agents were killed and 16 others
wounded in 1993 during an attempt to serve a search warrant at the Branch
Davidian compound near Waco, Tex.,
where a stockpile of illegal machine guns
had been amassed. The subsequent siege ended disastrously with a raging fire
in which scores of people were killed.
In the aftermath of Waco, the N.R.A.
did its typically hysterical,
fear-mongering thing. In a fund-raising letter in the spring of 1995,
LaPierre wrote: "Jack-booted government thugs [have] more power to take
away
our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our
property, and even injure or kill us. ..."
Whatever the N.R.A. may intend by its rhetoric, there is always the danger
that those inclined toward violence will incorporate it into their twisted
worldview, and will find in the rhetoric a justification for murder. On the
second anniversary of the Branch Davidian fire, less than a week after
LaPierre's inflammatory fund-raising letter went out, Timothy McVeigh blew
up the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal
Building in Oklahoma
City.
You cannot blame the N.R.A. for McVeigh's actions. But you can sure blame it
for ignoring the tragic lessons of history and continuing to spray gasoline
into an environment that we have seen explode time and again.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported a resurgence of right-wing hate
groups in the U.S.
since Mr. Obama was elected president. Gun craziness of
all kinds, including the passage of local laws making it easier to own and
conceal weapons, is on the rise. Hate-filled Web sites are calling attention
to the fact that the U.S.
has a black president and that his chief of staff
is Jewish.
It might be wise to pay closer attention than we've been paying. The first
step should be to bring additional gun control back into the policy mix.
California: A Dream Decimated
By Harold Meyerson (Washington Post)
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
In Sacramento, they can hear the chimes at midnight. State legislators and
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have been told by State Controller John Chiang
that he will be compelled to pay the state's bills with IOUs starting
tomorrow unless they come up with a way to close California's
mammoth $24
billion deficit.
California has company in this
eleventh-hour agony. Indiana, Arizona,
Mississippi and Pennsylvania
also went into the final day of the fiscal year
facing the prospect of shutdowns of public agencies or paying bills through
IOUs unless they devised ways to close the yawning gap between their
obligations and their recession-savaged revenue.
The list of states -- Democratic and Republican, old economy and new -- is
sufficiently diverse to dispel any notion that the fiscal crisis of the
states is disproportionately the problem of one party or one region. It is,
rather, hard-wired into the American system of governance, wherein virtually
all the states have required themselves to produce balanced budgets even
during depressions -- which means they must slash
services and lay off
workers even though such actions actually deepen the downturn.
But California is a special
case simply because it's so big. Closing
California's budget gap entirely
through cutbacks in programs, as
Schwarzenegger and the Republicans in the legislature propose, will deepen
not only the state's recession but also the nation's.
Fully 1 in 4 of the
nation's underwater mortgages, for instance, are on California
homes, and
the effects of the governor's proposed cuts -- which UCLA's Anderson School
of Business estimates will cause 60,000 state employees to lose their
jobs -- will be to create a new wave of foreclosures and toxic assets on the
banks' books. California
accounts for 12 percent of the nation's gross
domestic product and a disproportionate share of the federal government's
revenues (and for every dollar that Californians pay to the feds, they get
just 80 cents back in services).
Right-wing ideologues see the crisis as an opportunity to shrink government
regardless of the consequences. Schwarzenegger is proposing to end welfare,
not just as we know it but altogether, and to throw 1 million children off
the rolls of the state's healthy families program. But the consequences of
closing the deficit simply through cutbacks will be felt by more than the
poor. Already reeling from $15 billion in cutbacks that the state put
through in February, many school districts, including that of Los
Angeles,
have canceled summer school this year. Scholarships that enable students of
modest means to attend California's
fabled university system have been
slashed. Most of the state's parks may have to be closed as well.
The terrible irony in decimating the public sector to save the state is that
the California that was the
epicenter of the postwar American dream was
fundamentally a creation of government. Fighting a Pacific war during World
War II compelled the federal government to spend billions on California
industry and infrastructure, and the state was the leading beneficiary of
Pentagon dollars during the Cold War. As Kevin Starr, California's leading
historian, points out in "Golden Dreams," his brilliant new history
of the
state in the 1950s and early '60s, fully 40 percent of all defense dollars
for manufacturing and research in 1959 went to California, anchoring the
state's booming economy in a well-paid workforce that was either unionized
or professionalized, and seeding an electronics and high-tech sector that
was to blossom in the following decades. Building on that prosperity to
create more prosperity, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown -- two
Republicans, one Democrat -- invested state dollars in schools,
universities, freeways and aqueducts that were the best in the world. The
Golden State
was never more golden.
Today, its governor seems determined to turn that gold to dross. On Monday,
the Democrats in the legislature passed a budget that included cuts of $11
billion, levied a tax on oil companies and tobacco, and raised auto
registration fees by $15 per car to keep the state parks from closing.
Schwarzenegger reiterated his refusal to raise any taxes or fees and said he
would veto the budget.
From a model for far-sighted investments in the future, California
has
become a state that uninvests in the present and has no vision at all for
the future. Proposition 13, enacted by state voters in 1978, effectively
blocked its cities and counties from funding their own endeavors, and the
Republican minority in the legislature, abetted by Schwarzenegger, has made
it all but impossible to invest in the kind of projects that Warren, Knight
and Brown undertook. Today's California
visionaries are calling for a
constitutional convention to rewrite the plainly dysfunctional rules by
which the state governs itself. It is not only Californians but also America
that has a stake in their success. A California
that decimates itself during
recessions drags the rest of the nation down with it.
Time for Iron Man
By E.J. Dionne Jr. (Washington
Post)
Monday, June 29, 2009
Every general studies the mistakes of the last war, and President Obama's
style has been much influenced by the difficulties of Bill Clinton's
presidency.
In particular, Obama has shied away from handing Congress his own plans on
"stone tablets," a phrase much loved by senior adviser David
Axelrod, and
instead allowed it room to legislate.
The president has won a lot, including a decent stimulus bill and laws on
children's health coverage, tobacco regulation and employment discrimination
that, in less exciting times, would have been seen as landmarks. But the
stimulus bill was neither as good nor as large as it might have been, and
Obama is still dealing with the problems created by the legislative train
wreck over his Guantanamo
policies.
And then there's his centerpiece campaign to reform the health-care system.
Obama's initial approach of laying out principles and giving Congress
latitude was the right response to Clinton's
mistake of offering a detailed
proposal, only to see it mocked and rejected. Yet two big problems confront
health-care reform that only Obama's intervention can solve.
The first is the absence of substantial Republican support for comprehensive
change. Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee,
has done everything short of making ethanol a reimbursable prescription drug
to win the heart of his good Republican friend from Iowa,
Chuck Grassley.
I'm told that Grassley, under immense pressure from Republican colleagues
not to deal at all, has informed Baucus that he cannot sign on to a bill if
it is supported by only one other Republican, the sensible Olympia Snowe of
Maine. Grassley needs more cover from more conservative colleagues.
This creates a terrible dynamic in which Baucus is pushed toward one
concession after another. It's a setup for a sellout. And the compromise
Baucus is likely to produce cannot be the final word.
Meanwhile, Democrats are divided among themselves on two central issues. The
first is over how to pay for expanded coverage. During the presidential
campaign, Obama stoutly opposed paying for new health-care proposals by
taxing existing health-care benefits. The Democrats' allies in the unions
are prepared to go to war if Obama backs off this pledge.
The unions argue plausibly that their members gave up wages in exchange for
high-end health plans and that reform should not leave financially pressed
middle class workers worse off.
But other liberals see taxing especially generous health care packages as a
way of having the better-off assist the less privileged. Grassley, who
endorsed this idea yesterday on ABC News's "This Week," is among
conservatives who support this view. In addition, some liberals fear that if
health care reform is paid for by more general tax increases, those levies
will be unavailable later to control the deficit without slashing programs.
Then there is the issue of offering a government-run health plan as one
alternative in a reformed insurance market.
Obama was right to offer a sturdy defense of the public plan last week.
"If
private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best-quality health
care," he said, "why is it that the government -- which they say
can't run
anything -- suddenly is going to drive them out of business?"
And those who call themselves fiscal conservatives should be the public
option's strongest supporters, since it provides the best hope of holding
down the costs of universal coverage.
There are progressives (probably including Obama) who would trade the public
plan for a strong universal-coverage bill if it included genuinely tough
rules on the insurance companies. What should be avoided above all is a fake
public plan hemmed in by so many restrictions that it would be doomed to
failure.
My own preference is for a bill with a strong public plan financed by
broader tax increases on the best-off Americans. Still, there are many
routes to universal coverage -- the recent proposal by former Senate leaders
Tom Daschle, Bob Dole and Howard Baker deserves more attention than it has
received -- and some compromises will be necessary.
The key is that no compromise should be allowed to undermine the long-term
goals of covering everybody and containing costs. Concessions made for
purely political reasons could produce an unworkable monstrosity of a bill.
Obama's lobbying helped to save climate change legislation, and he now needs
to weigh in more forcefully on health care. He should toughen Baucus's
negotiating strategy, and he'll have to mediate among liberals. He doesn't
need stone tablets, just an iron will.
Obama’s Stonewall
Richard Kim (The
Nation)
In 1996, when Barack Obama was running for the Illinois
Senate, he was asked in a
survey by Outlines, a gay community newspaper in Chicago,
if he supported
same-sex marriage. Unlike most candidates, who merely indicated yes or no,
Obama took the unusual step of typing in his response, to which he affixed
his signature. Back then not a single state permitted same-sex marriage, and
sodomy was a crime. Nonetheless, Obama took a position on the progressive
edge of the Democratic Party, and he did so with unmistakable clarity:
"I
favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit
such marriages."
Since then, as Obama traced his dazzling arc to the presidency, his
stance on gay rights has become murkier, wordier, less courageous, more
Clintonian. During his 2004 US Senate bid, he stated that he supports
domestic partnerships and civil unions instead of same-sex marriage. When
speaking to gay audiences, he explained his new position as "primarily
just...a strategic issue." But on bigger stages he cited his Christian
faith
as grounds for his belief that marriage is between a man and a woman, a view
he reiterated during the 2008 presidential election even while he also
asserted, inconsistently, that religion should not dictate a state's
approach to gay rights.
As president, Obama has made similar equivocations on gay
rights. As a
senator and as a candidate, he won the vocal support of the vast majority of
gays and lesbians by calling for the repeal of both the Defense of Marriage
Act (DOMA) and the miserable failure that is "don't ask, don't
tell," and by
supporting full federal partnership rights (but not same-sex marriage) and
the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would make it illegal to
fire someone because of his or her sexual orientation. But he has so far
spent no political capital to turn these promises into reality. Quite to the
contrary, Obama's slide hit what one hopes will be a nadir on June 12 when
his administration filed a brief defending the legality of DOMA by comparing
same-sex marriage to incest and pedophilia.
It is impossible to accept that a president
who owes so much to
movements for civil rights and social justice, never mind the Obama of
1996,
believes in such right-wing bigotry; the only plausible explanation can be
one of political calculation. The memory of Bill Clinton's early failure to
integrate the military, as well as the aftermath of the 2004 election, when
same-sex marriage was blamed for John Kerry's loss, looms large in the minds
of top Democratic strategists. Guided by veterans of the Clinton-era culture
wars like chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the prevailing wisdom in the White
House seems to be that a forward push on gay rights can only endanger what
the Democratic Party hopes will be a lasting majority and would squander
precious political capital better used on issues like healthcare and
economic reform.
Such logic, however, is quickly becoming obsolete. Six
states have
legalized gay marriage. Democrats like Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd
and New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine have renounced support for civil unions
and embraced same-sex marriage, with Corzine having done so as a centerpiece
of his re-election bid. Gen. John Shalikashvili, Clinton's
chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a cadre of military leaders have publicly called
for an end to "don't ask, don't tell." Huge majorities of
Americans, 89
percent in a 2008 Gallup poll,
support workplace rights for gays and
lesbians. Steve Schmidt, John McCain's campaign manager, and former Vice
President Cheney have announced their support for same-sex marriage; and
Utah's Republican governor, Jon Huntsman, came out in favor of civil unions,
a switch that has not eroded his popularity in Mormon country one bit. At
this rate, Obama is in danger of being outpaced on gay rights not just by
the American people but by the nonsuicidal wing of the Republican Party.
There is still time for a course correction. In the wake
of an uproar
from gay activists and progressives, Obama signed a memo extending limited
benefits to partners of gay federal employees (but not healthcare or
inheritance rights); reiterated his intent to repeal DOMA; and voiced
support for legislation that would, in the interim, give healthcare to
same-sex partners of federal workers. But words are no longer enough. Now is
the time for Obama to act with the full authority of his office and his
character to pass a gay rights agenda that, in the end, will be seen as
neither particularly radical nor particularly partisan but as a simple
matter of fairness under the law.
A promising first step would be to fast-track passage of
ENDA. A
previous version passed the House by a vote of 235 to 184 in 2007, with
thirty-five Republicans in favor, before dying under the threat of a Bush
veto. Congressman Barney Frank introduced a stronger version that includes
protections for transgender people on June 24, just before the fortieth
anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City,
which ignited the
modern gay rights movement.
In those forty years, and especially in the past decade,
the arc of the
moral universe, as Obama is fond of saying on other matters, has bent toward
justice. So much so that the question is no longer, Can the Obama
administration afford to support gay rights with full-throated passion - but
rather, Can it afford not to?
June 28, 2009
40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans
By FRANK RICH (NY Times)
LIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the
1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and
protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago,
1968. But I never heard about the
several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village
after the police raided
a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 - 40
years ago today.
Then again, I didn't know a single person, student or teacher, male or
female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay.
And though my friends and I were obsessed with every
iteration of the era's
political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do,
really. The Times - which would not even permit the use of the word gay
until 1987 - covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them
but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.
But if we had read them, would we have cared? It was typical of my
generation, like others before and after, that the issue of
gay civil rights
wasn't on our radar screen. Not least because gay people, fearful of
harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows. As
David Carter writes in his book "Stonewall," at the end of the 1960s
homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois.
It was a crime
punishable by castration in seven states. No laws - federal, state or
local - protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a
homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder
or suicide.
The younger gay men - and scattered women - who acted up at the Stonewall on
those early summer nights in 1969 had little in common with their
contemporaries in the front-page political movements of the time. They often
lived on the streets, having been thrown out of their blue-collar homes by
their families before they finished high school. They migrated to the
Village because they'd heard it was one American neighborhood where it was
safe to be who they were.
Stonewall "wasn't a 1960s student riot," wrote one of them, Thomas
Lanigan-Schmidt, in a poignant handwritten flier on display at the New York
Public Library in the exhibition "1969: The Year of Gay
Liberation." They
had "no nice dorms for sleeping," "no school cafeteria for
certain food" and
"no affluent parents" to send checks. They had no powerful allies
of any
kind, no rights, no future. But they were brave.
They risked their necks to
prove, as Lanigan-Schmidt put it, that "the mystery of history"
could happen
"in the least likely of places."
After the gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of
history advanced haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of
gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay
people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national
awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made them
even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague.
On Monday, President Obama will commemorate Stonewall with an East Room
reception for gay leaders. Some of the invitees have been fiercely critical
of what they see as his failure, thus far, to redeem his promise to be a
"fierce advocate" for their still unfulfilled cause. The rancor
increased
this month, after the Department of Justice filed a brief defending the
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the most ignominious civil rights betrayal
under the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
The Obama White House has said that the Justice Department action was merely
a bureaucratic speed bump on the way to repealing DOMA - which hardly
mitigates the brief's denigration of same-sex marriage, now legal in six
states after many hard-fought battles. The White House has also asserted
that its Stonewall ceremony was "long planned" - even though it
sure looks
like damage control. News of the event trickled out publicly only last
Monday, after dozens of aggrieved, heavy-hitting gay donors dropped out of a
Democratic National Committee fund-raiser with a top ticket of $30,400.
In conversations with gay activists on both coasts last week, I heard
several theories as to why Obama has seemed alternately clumsy and
foot-dragging in honoring his campaign commitments to dismantle DOMA and
Don't
Ask Don't Tell. The most charitable take had it that he was following a
deliberate strategy, given his habit of pursuing his goals through long-term
game plans. After all, he's only five months into his term and must first
juggle two wars, the cratered economy, health care and Iran. Some speculated
that the president is fearful of crossing preachers, especially black
preachers, who are adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. Still others said
that the president was tone-deaf on the issue because his inner White House
circle lacks any known gay people.
But the most prevalent theory is that Obama, surrounded by Clinton White
House alumni with painful memories, doesn't want to risk gay issues upending
his presidency, as they did his predecessor's in 1993. After having promised
to lift the ban on gays in the military, Clinton
beat a hasty retreat into
Don't Ask once Congress and the Pentagon rebelled. This early pratfall
became a lasting symbol of his chaotic management style - and a precursor to
another fiasco, Hillarycare, that Obama is also working hard not to emulate.
But 2009 is not then, and if the current administration really is worried
that it could repeat Clinton's
history on Don't Ask, that's ludicrous.
Clinton failed less because of the
policy's substance than his fumbling of
the politics. Even in 1992 a majority of the country (57 percent) supported
an end to the military ban on gays. But Clinton
blundered into the issue
with no strategy at all and little or no advance consultation with the Joint
Chiefs and Congress. That's never been Obama's way.
The cultural climate is far different today, besides. Now, roughly 75
percent of Americans support an end to Don't Ask, and gay issues are no
longer a third rail in American politics. Gay civil rights history is moving
faster in the country, including on the once-theoretical front of same-sex
marriage, than it is in Washington.
If the country needs any Defense of
Marriage Act at this point, it would be to defend heterosexual marriage from
the right-wing "family values" trinity of Sanford, Ensign and
Vitter.
But full gay citizenship is far from complete. "There's a perception in
Washington that you can throw
little bits of partial equality to gay people
and that gay people will be satisfied with that," said Dustin Lance
Black,
the screenwriter who won an Oscar for "Milk," last year's movie
about Harvey
Milk, the pioneering gay civil rights politician of the 1970s. Such
"crumbs," Black added, cannot substitute for "full and
equal rights in all
matters of civil law in all 50 states."
As anger at White House missteps boiled over this month, the president
abruptly staged a ceremony to offer some crumbs. The pretext was the signing
of an executive memorandum bestowing benefits to the domestic partners of
federal employees. But some of those benefits were already in force, and the
most important of them all, health care, was not included because it is
forbidden by DOMA.
One gay leader invited to the Oval Office that day was Jennifer Chrisler of
the Family Equality Council, an advocacy organization for gay families based
in Massachusetts. She showed a
photo of her 7-year-old twin sons, Tom and
Tim, to Obama. The president cooed. "I told him they're following in
Sasha's
footsteps, entering the second grade," she recounted to me last week.
"It
was a very human exchange between two parents."
Chrisler seized the moment to appeal to the president on behalf of her boys.
"The worst thing you can experience as parents is to feel your children
are
discriminated against," she told him. "Imagine if you have to
explain every
day who your parents are and that they're as real as
every family is."
Chrisler said that she and her children "want a president who will make
that
go away," adding, "I believe in his heart he wants that to happen,
his
political mistakes notwithstanding."
No president possesses that magic wand, but Obama's inaction on gay civil
rights is striking. So is his utterly uncharacteristic inarticulateness. The
Justice Department brief defending DOMA has spoken louder for this president
than any of his own words on the subject. Chrisler noted that he has given
major speeches on race, on abortion and to the Muslim world. "People are
waiting for that passionate speech from him on equal rights," she said,
"and
the time is now."
Action would be even better. It's a press cliché that "gay
supporters" are
disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren't just
another political special interest group. They are Americans who are
actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to
properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what
happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even
a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen
in the least likely of places.
June 27, 2009
The S.C. Firecracker
By GAIL COLLINS (NY Times)
The only good news this week for Gov. Mark ("I love your tan
lines") Sanford
is that all those celebrity deaths have knocked him off the top of the news
cycle.
For the rest of us, the whole
vanishing-governor-sneaks-off-to-visit-Argentine-squeeze has had a number of
side benefits. The Appalachian Trail has certainly
gotten a well-deserved
shot of publicity. And I have to believe that business is booming for
call-forwarding services.
Another big plus is that Governor Sanford has provided us with a chance to
revisit little-remembered historical precedents for scandals involving
American politicians and Argentine women.
O.K., I can only think of one. It was, of course, the evening in 1974 when
Fanne Foxe, "The Argentine Firecracker," took a hysterical leap
into the
Tidal Basin
after a fight with her inebriated escort, the House Ways and
Means Chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas.
Foxe was a stripper at the Silver Slipper nightclub in Washington,
and the
married Mills began escorting her around during a period of major-league
alcoholism. They were speeding past the Jefferson Memorial when they were
stopped by police. Foxe jumped out, took a dive into the Tidal
Basin, and
pretty soon Mills was in the headlines and in disgrace.
Years later, after he had retired, dried out and returned to Washington as a
tax lawyer, Mills told a Times reporter that during his Firecracker days, he
was drinking a half-gallon of vodka a night and had hallucinations that
buzzards were chasing him. As a result, he said, he lost control of his
committee and failed to report out a bill in which he had a great interest.
"I had President Ford convinced on national health," Mills said.
"I could
have passed it on the floor. But hell, I couldn't get the damned committee
to go with me. They had never failed to do that before, and I know now it
was because of my drinking that they didn't."
Whether or not Mills was overestimating his pre-buzzard ability to move
legislation, this story brings up two important points, only one of which is
that we were already failing to pass national health care in 1974.
The other is that sex was the least of his problems.
The public will almost always look past a politician's plain-vanilla affair.
The problem comes when he piles on icing and sprinkles and coconut and then
kumquats and zucchini and sardines until what started out as a little treat
begins to look really unnerving.
New Jersey would have been ready
to accept the news that its married
governor, James McGreevey, was in love with a male Israeli poet. But not a
male Israeli poet whom he had convinced to hang around with a job as head of
state homeland security. New York
could definitely have handled the fact
that Gov. Eliot Spitzer cheated on his wife if it had not been for all that
detail about Client 9 at Emperor's Club V.I.P. escort service. And even
Mills's fellow House members, many of whom were undoubtedly sexual sinners
themselves, decided it was probably not a good idea to have the nation's tax
policy being written by a guy who thinks there's a buzzard on his desk.
Now South Carolinians will have to decide if they want
their state run by a
man who can't remember to leave a forwarding number when he scampers off to
make whoopee in a different hemisphere.
While most people in the state seem to feel as if it would be swell if
Sanford just resigned, the governor
isn't showing any signs that he intends
to quit. It isn't entirely clear why he wants to hang on. He's term limited.
And whatever presidential ambitions he harbored were pretty much quashed
when he vanished and aides started explaining that he took a hike (well, not
really) because he was emotionally exhausted from his fight over the state
budget. You had to ask what he'd have to do to get over North
Korea.
So far, it appears that Sanford
is going to devote his career to
apologizing. On Wednesday, he held a press conference and apologized to
everyone from his father-in-law to American Christianity. On Thursday, he
was closeted with his wife, which undoubtedly involved heavy-duty apology
time. Friday, he called his staff together for more apologies, including one
to the leader of the Commerce Department, to whom the governor conveyed his
regrets for having undermined the dignity of a state trade mission by having
sex on the Buenos Aires stop.
It was right about then that Sanford
compared himself to King David, who
"fell mightily, he fell in very significant ways, but was able to pick
up
the pieces." I will end here so we can all ask ourselves whether the
entire
course of the Old Testament would have been different if David and Bathsheba
had had access to e-mail.
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