Archive for August, 2007

This evening I read All Politics is Local by former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. It is a breeze of a read, and I’d recommend it to those in the agora who are future public servants or just political junkies. It is a collection of short stories to illustrate what O’Neill calls the “rules of the game.”

I wanted to one of his lessons with the agora:

“One day Jim Curley heard me make a speech and told me I was lousy. He invited me to go around to his home. ‘I’m going to give you ten poems and essays to memorize,’ he said. ‘Never again will you be in the position you were in the other night, because you can always recite one of these to fit the moment. Believe me, people love it when you give them a quote, especially when you do it off the top of your head. They might not remember anything else from your speech, but they’ll remember that.’”

Below is the list:

1. Polonius’ speech to his son Laertes from Hamlet
2. “The Deserted Village” by Oliver Goldsmith
3. “It Can Be Done” by Edgar Guest
4. “Abou Ben Adhem” by Leigh Hunt
5. “Around the Corner” by Charles Hanson Towne
6. “If” by Rudyard Kipling
7. “Friendship” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
8. “Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
9. “The Man in the Glass” author unknown
10. “Rules of the Road” by John Boyle O’Reilly

I am not familiar with several of these, and sadly, I have only committed one to memory, but I’m going to read through these later this week. This post reminded me of the value of having a little bit of canned material, and inspired me to share a hidden treasure I recently discovered on the website of the University of Illinois College of Law.

One of the most revered legends of the University of Illinois is former Chancellor and Dean John Cribbet. Dean Cribbet was known for being able to seize any crowd with only a handful of different stories, which he could adapt to illustrate virtually any principle. The law school recently created this tribute to Dean Cribbet that tells some of his stories for a whole new generation of students. The most widely known, is Dean Cribbet’s “big picture” story from his days serving as senior aide-decamp to Lieutenant General Troy Middleton, who served under General Patton. Please take a look.

A dear friend and mentor of mine worked with Cribbet for years and he told me that Cribbet liked to joke about how he only had 4 or 5 stories in his repertoire. Cribbet gave each of them a number, and when he returned from an event he’d say, “I told them number 1, 2 and 4.” This joke picked up enough momentum that Cribbet could just say “number 3″ and his staff would get a laugh, until one day when he said “number 3″ and no one laughed. When Cribbet asked why no one laughed, someone quipped, “you just didn’t tell it right that time.”

Every time I think the Republican party is a serious outfit with some smart people I stumble upon news like this. Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of lewd conduct for apparently attempting to solicit sex with a plainclothes officer at an airport stall. In isolation this wouldn’t really be anything other than a hypocrite with some repressed sexuality issues. In a larger context, however, it shows a fundamental problem with the modern conservative movement in America which has found its home in the Republican party.

This restroom incident occurred pretty close on the heels of another infamous restroom incident involving a Republican Representative from Florida, Bob Allen. That incident itself followed on the heels of the infamous Mark Foley scandal involving Representative Foley exchanging lewd instant messages with a 17 year old page (yes I realize it wasn’t technically pedophelia since the age of consent is 16 in the district). Around this same time we had one of the Right’s poster boy’s Ted Haggard come out and beg forgiveness of his wife for sleeping with a male prostitute and soliciting illegal drugs while decrying gay marriage.

I really wish I were cherry picking, but these are just the headline scandals of the past year. I’m sure I’m missing dozens of smaller ones. The point I’m making here is that there is something fundamentally wrong with a group of people who decry the moral decay of our society brought about by sexual deviance, decadence, drugs, and homosexuality when those dirty two-faced bastards are doing it themselves. I don’t care who they solicit for sex. In fact, I think prostitution should be legal – why lie to ourselves? We should at least regulate it and make sure it’s safe and hey, Uncle Sam can get his cut too.

My point is a little deeper than whether Republican politicians have sex with men. I couldn’t care less frankly. What rankles me is that they sit on their high horses and decry immorality to get votes and hoodwink religious conservatives into voting for them so that they can sell those same conservatives down the river by cutting taxes for the wealthy and promoting legislation that is at odds with the economic interest of their base constituency.

Look at the exit polls from 2004 and you’ll see something funny. Look at the income section and the Republicans have managed to capture the middle class. Now I realize that this doesn’t have crosstabs (crosstabs allow you to look up how say someone who goes to church every week and makes $30,000 a year voted) but having seen the detailed crosstabs on the ‘00, ‘04, and ‘06 elections (the ‘02 exit polling was fundamentally flawed and no one uses it) it appears that a good chunk of the Republican vote comes from people of relatively modest means (lower middle to middle income) who attend church to use a bad pun, well, religiously. These people are economically screwing themselves to protest what they see as the elite establishment making fun of them and constantly denigrating them and their way of life. They vote for firebrand conservatives who are really much more interested in cutting taxes and protecting corporate interests than in helping them out.

There are much more detailed examinations of this issue like What’s the Matter With Kansas and dozens of others, but none of them quite hit on the hypocrisy of the politics. They whine that conservatives vote against their own economic best interest, I agree, great. Few of them talk about the hypocrisy that seems to rot at the very core of the conservative movement. I’m really just picking on sexual misconduct because it’s easy, but the list goes on from Pat Robertson’s diamond links that he hides as humanitarian assistance to impoverished Africans to his shady for-profit charitable organizations that have made him a multi-millionaire. Jimmy Swaggart’s rendesvous with Prostitutes. Then of course there’s the standard financial stuff like the Jack Abramoff one.

Anyway, yes I had a point. See if a Democrat gets caught with a prostitute he’s like “and…?” at least we’re honest about our issues.

While checking in at my favorite legal blog, Above the Law, I saw breaking news that a divided Seventh Circuit panel affirmed the conviction of Former Governor George Ryan. For more on this story, check the AtL thread here. Also, the Sun Times put together an archive of stories Gov. Ryan’s trial here.

Governor Ryan looks like hell.

Interestingly, former Governor Jim Thompson was one of Governor Ryan’s laywers in this case, and Thompson’s firm Winston and Strawn represented Governor Ryan free of charge. This might cause some debate in the legal world of whether or not Winston should be able to claim this work was “pro bono.”

Forget everything else, the Democratic contenders are going to hit Iraq long and hard during the upcoming elections. Built on their mandate (which was hardly a mandate when you consider they have a one seat majority in the Senate after two incredibly tight races where the Democrats squeaked out a victory), the Democrats believe that Iraq will lead the way. We are in a war that cannot be won and are driving away our allies.

But, consider the inconsiderable: what happens if Iraq turns around?

Say what you will on the surge. No, literally, say what you will say. I cannot honestly assess how well the surge is working as I am (a) not on the ground and (b) depending on the news source, it is either going unimaginably well or absolutely horrible. But it has to be doing at least all right, because in the past week, leading Democrats (Reid, Clinton, etc.) started hedging their statements with the equivalent of “the surge is producing measurable results, but too late.” That sounds to me like the surge is doing more than being just another drop in the bucket, if Democrats have to admit improvement.

What about driving away our allies? Tony Blair and the Spanish executive were given the boot, probably in major part because of their alliance with the U.S. But Blair was hardly replaced with an American hater in Brown, who is not likely to slacken his “war” as on the day of his inauguration, his homeland of Scotland was bombed.

Also consider that the two loudest opponents to Bush, Schroeder of Germany and Chirac of France, were also shown the door and were replaced with individuals that are more cordial to American interests in Merkel and Sarkozy.

It was Sarkozy’s recent actions that prompted me to write this blog. Sarkozy, who called Chirac’s prior past policy on the US-Iraq as “arrogant,” sent his foreign minister, a life long socialist and most popular person in the French left, to Iraq. This could signal a significant change in French policy, which would be detrimental to the Democrats Iraq Policy.

So this is a whole lot of conjecture. People will insist that any military gains are “bandaids,” even though trained military personnel who have been doing this for over a quarter of a century and have better data insist otherwise. (See Petraeus and Gen. James Conway). Others will insist that the return of traditional allies into the fold mean nothing. But if this all comes to fruition, which is by no means certain but seems more likely now than it did six months ago, what do the Democrats do? A stable economy, an Iraq working toward Jordanian-like democracy (which most will accept because the vast majority of people don’t know what that means) and our traditional allies back in the fold. President’s numbers go up, I would imagine. Meanwhile the Democrats have a well-documented history of going against the President’s policies, which seemed a good idea both at the time and now, and a platform predicated on the failure of Iraq.

What happens then?

So I logged onto my google homepage today and was greeted with this story in my Top News Stories section. It’s a good article about how the average incomes for Americans have still not recovered to the highs 0f 2001. Particularly interesting was this passage:

“Total income listed on tax returns grew every year after World War II, with a single one-year exception, until 2001, making the five-year period of lower average incomes and four years of lower total incomes a new experience for the majority of Americans born since 1945.”

So, anyone still wonder why people are pessimistic about the economy when for the first time in most working people’s lifetimes incomes have failed to rise?