As an early AM riser, I have
watched Joe Scarborough’s Morning Joe show
on MSNBC for years. I even watch "Way
Too Early with Willie Geist," aired at 5:30am ET, which goes
on before Morning Joe, at a truly ungodly early hour when only my dog and I
have ventured out of our bedroom in search of coffee (me, anyway; the dog likes
peanut butter crammed into one of her hollow bones, but that’s another story.)
Joe has officially launched what he
and, his co-host, Mika (who often acts in the annoying role of cranky
Schoolmarm to Joe and his guests’ often funny locker room banter) are calling,
what Howard Fineman terms a Centrist
Civility Group. To say that Joe is
not thrilled with Sarah Palin’s Facebook postings and speeches of late would be
an understatement.
Joe is part of a growing cadre of
Republicans who are beginning to come out and openly question whether running
Palin in 2012, against Obama (or Hillary??) would be an act of utter political
suicide for the GOP, which Democrats would welcome with glee.
Reality shows and TV Dance
Contests, and holding up Palin’s daughter, a well-publicized teen-aged unwed
mother (complete with nutty ex-Husband for Palin to feud with) as the new
national symbol for chastity till marriage, show an increasingly disturbing
trend for the ex-Half-Governor of
Alaska. Palin recently professed on her
reality show that she doesn’t want to be cooped up in an office (before a huge
bear rose up behind her and her husband, while boating on some Kodiak river).
She has begun consolidating her
power base and to focus her highly touted gun sights on earning mega-Millions
and becoming the new Oprah of the Right, while issuing teasing pronouncements
of the ‘will she, or won’t she’ variety.
Becoming the Darling of TV, and the wealth beyond avarice that will
engender, may be the most effective antidote for the idea still in the minds of
some (despite Palin’s recent 52% polled ‘negatives’) that somebody with her
lack of qualifications could actually become some kind of Citizen-President for
troubled 21st Century America and the economically depressed and
highly dangerous world in which we now live.
Drinking the Kool-Aid is not just reserved for those who tragically died
in Jim Jones’ S. American communal nuthouse or for Democrats now increasingly
disenchanted with President Obama.
Joes’ Civilty Campaign calls for a
restoration of respect, dignity and treating each other in Washington in a
diplomatic fashion, to stop the currently unsettling slide of American Politics
into something between a Bar-Room Brawl and a hot day on the set of the Jerry
Springer Show. I could not agree
more. It is one thing for the new
Republican House Majority, buoyed by the Mid-Term Elections which many simply
ignored taking the trouble to vote in, to flex it’s muscles and meet with Pres.
Obama to profess that they will take a look at developing some Bi-Partisan
ideas together. But, it is quite
another, and one poorly thought-out strategy (which will backfire on the GOP, I predict), to send a letter the very
next day, signed by all Senate Republicans, threatening to filibuster
everything and anything until they get their own agenda attended to first. It is quite disrespectful – a concept we
should all get back in touch with once again before it’s too late. And it’s also just plain stupid.
We face huge problems in this
country as I have written about many times here and other places since that
fateful Sept. 2008. Our infrastructure
is crumbling, the huge gap between rich and poor hasn’t been seen since the
days of the old Russian Czars and Marie Antoinette herself, and droves of
people remain unemployed and even more are underemployed – the prospects of a
50 year old man with a family to support who has been laid off from a major
position getting another job of the same quality are about the same as my
ability to get up and fly when I’m done writing this.
We spend literally trillions on two
long wars and the upkeep of military bases all over the world which we built to
fight a Cold War that we won nearly 20 years ago (Hello!). The bulge of Baby Boomers, many friends,
family and me among them, will stretch and distort our economy even further, as
we all travel through much longer lives aided by all kinds of new and, of
course, costly medical miracles, like the pig bulging it’s way through the
length of the giant snake who just swallowed it.
Security and terrorism issues have
reached a fever pitch as we wonder where all those lost USSR nukes went and how
long Pakistan can keep it’s act together and protect it’s nukes, along with
enormous amounts of enriched uranium, from escaping, guarded by some 120,000
individual Pakistanis (per WikiLeaks), who cannot possibly have been vetted
thoroughly enough to weed out all the religious zealot nutcases.
You can decry climate change all
you want, and it seems the be the current GOP mantra to do so lately, but the
Arctic and Antarctica, as well as Siberia where the tundra is melting fast, are
living proof that something is going
on and we had better take it seriously, regardless of which science you like to
believe or what caused this rapid change.
Rejection of science is another big distracting force too – all that
really does is let China, Russia, India, S. Korea, and all of Europe leave us
in the dust, as they did when we shot down building the giant particle
accelerator here, but instead, the Giant Hadron Collider in Europe will now
assure that US dominance in particle physics is not what it once was. And, this is a tiny catalog of things that
must be addressed by both this Lame Duck Congress and the next one.
I’m sorry; just saying ‘No’ to
everything a Democrat utters does not constitute a national policy agenda, and
it is even worse for our foreign relations policies. Joe has the right idea – turn down the flames;
remember that good old fashioned diplomacy is the only way that our legislative
bodies can function – we must all demand civility on the national level so that
we can deal effectively with our real and massive problems. There is more to our future than getting a
zippy sound mnbite on the 6 PM National News.