Monthly Archives: March 2008

ego, power, entitlement, and politics

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By now, everyone knows about Spitzer’s fall from grace.
I have found it very interesting that his government colleagues of both parties have not said anything about the the morality of the actions that precipitated his downfall. Instead, the all simply express their concern for Sptizer and his family.
Why are they being so “compassionate” you might wonder.
Duh. It’s because most of them have active extra-marital lives themselves. I found that out decades ago when I worked at my state’s legislature. Hell, everyone there knew what Nelson Rockefeller was involved in long before he died so memorably..
To be a politician, you have to have a strong ego. If you are a successful politician, you will have amassed considerable power that will bolster your ego even further. Ego combined with power generates a sense of entitlement to dispensation from the obligations of ordinary people. Throw in a good dose of testosterone, and, well, just check this out.
In my 30s and pretty enough, I wasn’t working at the legislature more than two months when one legislator, who chatted with me as we waited for an elevator, asked if I would like to accompany him to the Bahamas. Maybe he was kidding; maybe not. (No, I didn’t take him up on it.)
After a while, I became friends with a female on the staff of a still-prominent legislator, who, I found out, had kept a mistress for as long as he’d been there. Having worked for him for many years, she knew all the dirt about him and many other legislators as well. And there was a lot of it. And everyone seemed to obey an unwritten rule to keep it all secret.
And that’s what so puzzling about Spitzer’s actions.
On my way out to my birthday visit with my daughter and family, I was listening to WAMC, where well-known local defense attorney Terry Kindlon began a list of all the things Spitzer did that would guarantee that he would be caught. It’s as though he wanted to be caught.
One radio station listener called in to comment that perhaps Spitzer was going through a mid-life crisis. Whatever it was/is, it sure is a crisis. For such a smart man, he he made really dumb decisions.
Ego, power, entitlement, and politics can be the perfect recipe for hubris (iin it’s modern definition.)
I wonder if all of those other politicians who have their mistresses stashed away in nearby condos are feeling just a little more vulnerable. Yeah. Right.
Ego, power, entitlement, and politics — can’t beat ’em, until they beat you.

this for you

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This is for you, my offspring, both of whom have the gift of insightful sight.

Snapshot
Charles Tomlinson
for Yoshikazu Uehata
Your camera
has caught it all, the lit
angle where ceiling and wall
create their corner, the flame
in the grate, the light
down the window frame
and along the hair
of the girl seated there, her face
not quite in focus —that
is as it should be too,
for, once seen, Eden
is in flight from you, and yet
you have it down complete
with the asymmetries
of journal, cushion, cup
all we might have missed
in the gone moment when
we were living it.

Thanks to Jim Culleny‘s daily poetry emails for the above poem.
I wrote a poem long ago about a photograph. And I posted it, along with the image.
And because of that post, I’ve been translated into Chinese by Yan, who left a comment to let me know.
I just love the Web.

is Obama Rove’s Frankenstein?

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It’s a long article, but you really need to go here and read it. Excerpts follow:
Evidence of a covert campaign to undermine the presidential primaries is rife, so it’s curious that the Democractic Party and even some within the G.O.P. have ignored the actual elephant in the room this year. That would be Karl Rove. Long accused of rigging the two previous presidential elections, this master of deceit would have us believe that he’s gone off to sit in a corner and write op-eds.
Not so. According to an article in Time magazine published last November, Republicans have been organized in several states to throw their weight behind Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic rival of Hillary Clinton. At least three former fundraisers for President Bush flushed his coffers with cash early on in the race, something the deep pockets haven’t done for any candidate in their own party. With receipts topping $100 million in 2007, the first-term Illinois senator broke the record for contributions. It was a remarkable feat, considering that most Americans had not even heard of him before 2005.
The Time article went on to explain that rank and file Republicans were switching parties this spring to vote for Obama in the Democratic primaries. Though not mentioned in the piece, a group called Republicans for Obama formed in 2006 to expedite the strategy. Many states have open primaries, allowing citizens to vote for any candidate, regardless of their party affiliation. In Nebraska, the Democratic mayor of Omaha publicly rallied Republicans to caucus for Obama on February 9th, according to Fox News Channel. Called crossover voting, the tactic is playing a crucial role in what appears to be a Rove-coordinated effort to deprive Clinton of the nomination. Even with his more well-known dirty tricks arsenal – phone bank sabotage, fake polling data, swiftboating, waitlisting, electronic voting equipment, Norman Hsu, etc. – Rove would be hard pressed to defeat Clinton in November, since she’s generally popular nationwide and has promised an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq. If the contest isn’t close, the vote-rigging won’t matter. (Several influential Republicans admit as much in a February 11th story for Politico.)
If, on the other hand, Obama wins the nomination (or even the VP spot), Rove’s prospects brighten considerably.
AND
Last year, at the same time she commanded a huge lead in the national polls, political analysts and professional strategists retained by CNN and other broadcast networks began hammering across the notion that “the voters don’t like her”. The adjectives “unlikable”, “divisive” and “polarizing” used to characterize Clinton have been repeated over and over in the same manner that “biological warfare” and “weapons of mass destruction” were employed during the lead-up to the Iraq War. In both cases, the terminology traces back to a cadre of right-wing, neocon ideologues who keep the studio seats warm at Fox News. “There is no candidate on record, a front-runner for a party’s nomination, who has entered the primary season with negatives as high as she has,” Rove told Reuters last August. Earlier this month, Bush’s former senior political advisor joined Fox as a part-time election analyst.
Obama himself recites Rove’s “high negatives” comment in press interviews whenever discussing Clinton. His often bitter criticism of the former First Lady and other “Washington insiders”, who he says want to “boil and stew all the hope out of him”, represents a staple of his core political message. His campaign slogan to the effect of “I’m a uniter, not a divider” is also reminiscent of the Bush 2000 campaign, which Rove managed. Perhaps that’s not suprising when you discover that one of Obama’s speechwriters is Ben Rhodes, the brother of Fox News VP David Rhodes. (Marisa Guthrie, of BC Beat, reported this connection recently.) The latter Rhodes has been with the network since its inception in 1996. You may recall that on election night in November 2000, it was Fox that called Florida for Bush, even though the other networks declared Gore the winner, citing the exit polls. How Fox knew the polls were wrong in advance of the vote tabulation has never been explained.
I, who have not necessarily been a supporter of Hillary Clinton, am changing my mind.

signs

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When she flutters her hands in front of her nose, I know that she needs a Kleenex (well, we use Puffs because they’re softer on her nose). When she taps her teeth, I know that she wants her flosser. When she reaches out with her right hand and opens and closes her fist, I know that she wants her cane.
She doesn’t always use her self-devised sign language, but she’s tending to do it more often — especially when she’s tired. And she seems to be tired more and more. The signs are often there. The words are often not.
On a sunny day last week, when I got into my car to go to the drug store, I flipped down the visor mirror to check for any stray chin hairs that my Tweeze might have missed. No chin hair — but what’s that??? Long white hairs in my eyebrows??? Now there’s a sign. Definitely a sign.
I’m not sleeping well, my reflux is acting up, and that contact dermatitis I get on my elbow every once in a while is itching like crazy. I can’t ignore the signs.
Signs that I need a break. I need a couple of days away from here. And so I’m going to my daughter’s from Sunday to Tuesday. It’s my birthday present to myself.
In two years I’ll be 70. It just doesn’t seem real to me.
Maybe it will seem real when my natural hair color finally grows in. Then I will see the most obvious of all signs — the gray signs of being where I am in life.
Each year, on my birthday, I take a photo of myself. Each year, the signs are more obvious — the drooping jaw, the sagging chin. There won’t be much of the gray hair visible when I take this year’s photo. But next year, there will be no denying that sign of this life fading to pale.
If I were able to live my life at the age I am today in the way I would prefer, I wouldn’t be obsessing so much on my age and what I am losing with each day that passes.
But here I am, watching for signs and missing those times when the only sign I looked for was the one that said “dancing until 2 a.m.”

walking widdershins

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Sometimes, if my mother naps in the afternoon, I try to get outside a walk a bit. Only I can’t go out of earshot, because if she wakes up and can’t find me, she’ll spiral down into one of her dementia episodes.
So, like a prisoner let out into the prison yard, I walk in circles around the open area outside the front of the house. I go out in between snowstorms, when most of the snow has melted. I leave my footprints in the mud of now, rather than in the sands of time.
walkcircles.jpg
I find that I prefer to walk “widdershins,” which is, in the rituals of myth and magic, counter clockwise. And which, if done while chanting an incantation, is supposed to generate productive energy.
What should I chant, I think, as I pace around my imprisoned yard. “Freedom!” If only.
Meanwhile, it’s March and there’s still a good deal of snow on the ground. Inside, the seeds I planted have already sprouted. I thought it would take a month. Now I have to transplant them all into pots and figure out where to put them. The windowsill is not an option. The cold radiating in would wipe out the whole crop. Sometimes my timing really sucks.

1) ??? 2) ???

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(Monday is myrln’s day to blog here at Kalilily Time.)
1) ??? 2) ???
There are two items that could use some attention since both involve our tax dollars and in some ways, they point out just how ignorant we may be about the use of OUR money by the feds.
First off, for the past how long, we’ve been endlessly bombarded about the primary contests being waged to help find our candidates for the next president. We can’t escape the news about them — which in truth is good. It reminds us that our government is our choice and ultimately our responsibility. So far, what we’ve been seeing is a number of senators and congressmen mostly out campaigning, trying to whip up votes. Day after day they’re out “on the stump,” working hard to make their points to the potential voters.
Only, when you look a little harder or just sit and think about it, you come to realize something they don’t mention very much. Consider: for months they’re out there somewhere in the country and moving from one locale to another, days on end. What they are not doing during this time and in those activities is their job. Remember, they were elected to go to Washington as representatives of their state or district. Yet here they are anywhere but D.C. — while still getting paid, still getting health care (the best in the nation), and still piling up credits toward their pensions. All of it paid for with OUR tax dollars.
Doesn’t bother you? No big deal? It’s the process? Oh yeah? Try getting the same deal from your boss.
***
Item 2 is different. It’s this: why do we have an FDA, a Food and Drug Administration? At least as far as concerns new drugs coming into the marketplace? Without FDA’s approval, no new drug makes it out for sale here. Good idea, a watchdog for our protection against the release of dangerous substances. Oh yeah? Then why in this flood of TV commercials for new and existing drugs does every one of them finish off with someone sounding like a shady used-car dealer talking a mile-a-minute and warning us, almost unintelligibly he’s talking so fast, about all the potential dangers of the product?
If it’s so dangerous, why was it approved by the FDA for sale in the first place? Hm-m. Good question. Our tax dollars going to approve drugs that in normal use could harm us, even kill us.
A great service, huh?