One Last Papal Duty....

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The scene: A tiny, cramped office in the Human Resources Department at Vatican City.
The time: Last week.

HR GUY: Come in, come in, take a seat. I promise this won't take long, sir.

SOON TO BE EX-POPE BENEDICT: I don't know why I have to do this. I didn't even know the Vatican HAD an HR department. And it's "Your Holiness," not sir.

HR GUY: Oh, right, right. Sorry, Your Holiness. It's been 600 years since a pope has left the position while still alive. We're kind of feeling our way here. "Former Holiness" just doesn't work. 'Holiness Emeritus" just sounds weird.

BENEDICT: (Frostily) I agree.

HR GUY: Oh, dear, I feel like we've gotten off on the wrong foot here. Look, Your Holiness, I know this is awkward, and I'll try to make it quick. But, you know, rules are rules. And the rules say, everyone leaving employment has to do an exit interview.

BENEDICT: A what?

HR GUY: Just a few questions to help improve our workplace environment.

BENEDICT: Our workplace environment? This is the priesthood, young man! It's a life of service, sacrifice, suffering and devotion!

HR GUY: Well ... we're trying to sort of soft-pedal that part, if you don't mind. It's really murder on the employee retention rates.

BENEDICT: Oh, for the love of...
 
HR GUY: What was that, Your Holiness?

BENEDICT: Never mind. Ask your questions, and let's get this over with.

HR GUY: OK, great. So why would you say you're leaving your job?

BENEDICT: I think I've made it pretty clear. I'm old. I'm not feeling well. And there are all sorts of challenges facing the Church right now. The fuss over the cover-up of sex abuse by priests, the whole Vatican Bank money-laundering thing, the giant death asteroid, the new book coming out by that Dan Brown guy ...

HR GUY: Wait, back up. Did you say something about a giant death asteroid?

BENEDICT: Did I? Dang. This is why I need to quit. I keep blurting stuff out.

HR GUY: No, really. What about the giant death asteroid?

BENEDICT: Calm down, my child. It's nothing. I totally did not have a vision in which God told me that a giant asteroid was going to wipe out 75 percent of all life on Earth at 9:17 p.m. on New Year's Eve this year and bring about a new Dark Age.

HR GUY: Oh. Whew. That's a relief.

BENEDICT: You're not very bright, are you?

HR GUY: What?

BENEDICT: Nothing. Next question.

HR GUY: What would you say was your favorite part of being pope?

BENEDICT: I'd have to say the hat. I think I really look great in hats. And the shoes, of course.

HR GUY: Oh. Yeah. About the shoes. We're going to need those back.

BENEDICT: What? Not my red shoes!

HR GUY: I'm afraid so, Your Holiness. Only the pope himself can wear the red slippers
.
BENEDICT: But these are my favorite shoes ever! They're the only ones I have that don't hurt my corns! Look! Look at these feet!

HR GUY: Ahhhh! Gross!

BENEDICT: What?

HR GUY: Horrible old-man feet! Please, Your Holiness! I beg you! Put the shoes back on!

BENEDICT: So I can keep them?

HR GUY: We'll make new ones. Just ... wear the shoes around the house, OK? It'll be our little secret. But please, put them back on.

BENEDICT: OK, good.

HR GUY (shuddering): So, moving on. What was your least favorite part of the job?

BENEDICT: Hmmm. I'd say having to work on Christmas.

HR GUY: Really? You had a problem with that?

BENEDICT: Not a problem, exactly. I mean, celebrating the Midnight Mass and doing the homily for all those people is nice, but I'm looking forward to kicking back and spending a nice quiet Christmas Eve with a cup of eggnog and the "Charlie Brown Christmas" DVD.

HR GUY: Oh, that is a good one.

BENEDICT: And afterward, maybe "Die Hard."

HR GUY: I love that movie!

BENEDICT: Well, come on over to the residence this December. I'm only moving around the block a ways. We'll open a bottle of wine, watch some good TV.

HR GUY: Me, Your Holiness? I'd be so honored.

BENEDICT: Might as well. It's the last one any of us will have for a long while.

HR GUY: What?

BENEDICT: Nothing, my child. Nothing.

The "You Worship Obama" Meme Explained

Recently, one of the more persistently idiotic right wing commenters on the Pilot Website exploded with one of those angry, bitter diatribes that exemplifies one of the more baffling cliches from the land of Wingnuttia:

There is nothing [Obama]  could do that would have them to speak ill of him. They would sooner have their tongues cut out. Liberalism is their religion and Obama is their deity.

This "leftists worship Obama  and never, ever criticize him" bullshit comes from people who have clearly never met any actual leftists. Read Glenn Greenwald, Firedoglake, a goodly portion of the posts on DailyKos, Americablog...there's been plenty of criticism of Barack Obama for not being liberal enough, not pushing for a public option in the health care law, for not being tough enough on bankers and Wall Street, for drone strikes and kill lists, etc. etc.

 But it's an article of faith on the right that Obama never gets any flak from the left, and by "article of faith" I mean "something that they believe despite a complete lack of real world evidence."

I never have been able to figure out why they cling to this particular lie so bitterly. After all, you'd think they'd be searching for liberals angry with Obama. I remember there used to be a right wing meme called "even the liberal," as in "even the liberal New York Times thinks Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction." But now that a center oh-so-slightly left President is in the White House, they blithely ignore all the criticism he gets from disappointed actual  leftists in favor of this fantasy that "all you liberals blindly worship him."

I think I've finally figured it out. As far back as the 2012 primaries, the far right backed one kindred spirit after another: Cain, Bachmann, Santorum, et. al. and they all imploded.

Finally, they got Mitt Romney. No one really liked the guy, on the left or the right. But for some reason, they thought he was "electable", and that's all that mattered. To them, anyone would be better than the Muslim Marxist Kenyan Usurper.

And that's why they get so furious at the idea that anyone actually likes Barack Obama. They're bitter and jealous that some of us got to vote for a candidate we actually like.

Wingnuts Punk'd Again

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You know, I've never really been a huge fan of former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel. I don't dislike him, mind you; he's just never been someone who excited me all that much.

He does get a lot of respect from me for being one of the first Republicans to buck his party and point out that George Dubbya's Wacky Iraqi Adventure was turning into another Vietnam. But when I found out that President Obama was nominating him for defense secretary, my reaction was, and I quote: "Meh."

What I saw of his confirmation hearings didn't stir up any more excitement. But, as so often happens with politicians in the Washington monkey house, I find myself rising to defend him, not because of his own merits, but because of the people attacking him and, more importantly, the way they go about it.

First, the Israel Lobby tried to paint Hagel as anti-Semitic for pointing out that there actually is such a thing as an Israel Lobby. Then Lindsey Graham announced that he intended to filibuster Mr. Hagel's nomination - the first time this had ever been done to a secretary of defense nominee - in a snit over the fact that, after hours upon hours of hearings, the only result of Republican attempts to create a "Benghazi-Gate" scandal has been to make former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the most popular politician in the country, according to the Quinnipiac University Poll taken afterward.

Of course, Hagel had nothing to do with the Benghazi killings or the State Department, but let's not let that get in the way if Lindsay Graham's got some tantrumin' to do!

But for true crack-brained right-wing attacks, you've got to go to the Internet loony bin known as Breitbart.com.

After the death at an early age of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, some wondered if the muckrakers at Breitbart.com (who became famous for shamelessly doctored and deceptively edited "expose" videos of ACORN and Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod), would fade away. Sadly, it seems that the perpetually apoplectic Mr. Breitbart may have actually been a moderating influence, which should give you an idea of the level of crazy we're dealing with here.

On Feb. 7, a headline at Breitbart.com blared, "SECRET HAGEL DONOR?" The story, written by "editor at large" Ben Shapiro, claimed that the administration was refusing to turn over documents about possible foreign sources of funding for Hagel because one of those was a group called "Friends of Hamas."

Given the mainstream media's penchant for taking any unsourced and sketchy Breitbart.com story and running with it without bothering to check it out (See "Sherrod, Shirley," above), it's probably a miracle that this didn't blow up into another one of those scandals where the accusations turned out to be hollow, but not before they nearly destroyed people's lives and careers.

In fact, reporters began asking people like Mike Huckabee what they thought about the story, while never actually bothering to ask whether the story they were asking for comment on was true. But what does that matter? Friends of Hamas "has a ring to it," in the words of Lou Dobbs.

Well, the name may have a ring to it, but once again, there's no bell. No one - not the State Department, not the Treasury Department, not any reporter who stirred himself or herself long enough to do a simple Google or Lexis search - could find any record of any such group ever existing.

There's a reason for that: It was a joke.

On Feb. 19, New York Daily News reporter Dan Friedman wrote in an op-ed that the "Friends of Hamas" reference came from a mildly sarcastic hypothetical question he'd asked an anonymous Republican staffer on Capitol Hill.

"I asked my source," Friedman wrote, "had Hagel given a speech to, say, the 'Junior League of Hezbollah, in France'? What about 'Friends of Hamas'?"

He had no idea that anyone would take the names seriously. They were "so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear he was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed."

No one, that is, except a pack of right-wing pseudo-journalists with axes to grind and not enough journalistic ethics to even pretend to try to find corroboration, so long as the story has a "ring" to it.

Worse, they don't have the sense to recognize sarcasm when they hear it. That's why the right, once again, has egg on its face.

It's been said (either by Joseph Conrad or Doctor Who) that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies. Given the sorry state of Mr. Hagel's enemies, I hope he does get confirmed.

Rubio: The New Nixon?

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In late 20th century and early 21st century politics, what the public perceives visually - the "optics," in modern campaign-speak - is often as important, if not more important, as the actual words used.

It's said, for example, that people who heard the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates on radio were convinced that Nixon had won, whereas the people who saw them on TV saw a pale, sweaty, nervous-looking Nixon losing badly to the cool, urbane Kennedy.

I thought of that event while watching the president's State of the Union address and the GOP response this past Tuesday. Thousands of words have already been written about the content of both speeches, but it's clear that it was President Obama who won the battle of the optics.

A lot of the president's message was positive: Six million new jobs. The auto industry in the best shape it's been in in years. Less foreign oil imports than in the last 20 years. Rebounding housing and stock markets. Manufacturers bringing jobs back to America from Japan, Mexico and China. Both parties working together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion.

The president looked forward to and expressed hope for bipartisanship on things like immigration, joint business/government partnerships for research and development, and education. He looked as he usually does: calm, upbeat and confident, while Vice President Joe Biden beamed genially from behind him.

Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner sulked in his chair, looking like a man undergoing a painful and invasive medical procedure. He refused to join in standing ovations for veterans, school shooting victims, or even the 102-year-old woman who'd stood in line for seven hours to vote in Florida.

He looked less like a guy you'd want to have a beer with than the angry, bitter old man at the end of the bar who you'd want to stay away from unless you wanted to hear an hour of Scotch-fueled ranting about how terrible everything is, especially those damned kids.

Then came the GOP response, delivered by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Now, Rubio seems like a likable enough young man, but his speech was a visual disaster.

From the lighting that looked like something on public-access cable, to the sweat beading on Rubio's upper lip, to the terrible dry mouth from which he seemed to be suffering, the whole production was cringe-worthy. I used to work in a TV studio, and the whole mess made me wonder if the producer was an agent of the DNC.

Then came The Drink: the moment when Rubio looked around desperately for his water bottle, then ducked down nearly off screen to get it before gulping it loudly like a man who'd just staggered out of the desert.

And a joke was born. Within an hour, "Rubioing" - taking pictures of oneself drinking water or other liquids and posting them online - had become an instant fad. "Rubio's Water Bottle" suddenly had no fewer than 15 parody accounts on Twitter. Pictures proliferated of Rubio as The Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis commercials saying some variation on "Stay Thirsty, My Friends."

The message might have been able to overcome the visuals, had the response itself not been so pedestrian. It was standard Republican boilerplate, less a response to the actual State of the Union than a recitation of the familiar catch phrases and talking points that did so poorly in the last presidential election.

The "idea that our problems were caused by a government that was too small - it's just not true," Rubio intoned. It's also not what the president said. But then, Republicans are always more comfortable trying to refute points that were never made.

Really, though, why should something like The Drink get so much attention? The guy just wanted some water, right?

In a sane world, I'd agree. But we do not live in a sane world. We live in the age of the viral video and the Internet meme, an "optics"-driven environment where a politician who, like Rubio, is being touted as a potential presidential contender can't afford to look as awkward and amateurish as he did Tuesday night.

Can Rubio come back from it? Well, maybe. He did one very smart thing: join in the joke by posting his own water-bottle pictures on Twitter. And of course, Nixon won the presidency years later. But the difference is that Nixon's brand of paranoid conservatism had not yet come into its own in 1960, and wouldn't until after the upheavals of the '60s.

Nixon, sad to say, was ahead of his unhappy time. The demographics of a changing electorate have put Rubio and Boehner behind theirs. The best optics in the world can't change that.

The Wannabe Wolverines

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One of my favorite movies in the so-bad-it's-awesome genre is director John Milius' 1984 right-wing paranoid fever dream "Red Dawn."

This American cinematic masterpiece tells the story of a group of teenagers who take to the hills and engage in an insurgency against an invading Soviet/Cuban force that, for some reason, begins the conquest of the United States by attacking a high school in the hinterlands of Colorado.

Naming themselves the "Wolverines" after their local sports mascot, the plucky teens (played by, among others, Patrick Swayze and a pre-insanity Charlie Sheen) disrupt and sabotage the occupation, all while maintaining their perfect '80s hair.

 It was a fun movie, largely because it was so completely absurd, sort of like Milius' other '80s masterpiece, "Conan the Barbarian."

Sadly, however, a lot of America's current gun debate seems to be driven by people who think this movie is some sort of manual for political action. We need to have high-powered military-style weapons, they assert, in case we have to take to the hills and go full Wolverine, this time against our own government.

Their poster child is James Yeager, the fellow from Tennessee who declared on YouTube that he was going to get his gun, fill his backpack with food, and "start killing people" over executive orders that no one had even read yet.

You know, I remember when even mildly criticizing the President Who Must Not Be Named in a newspaper column was enough to draw angry letters and emails accusing me of treason. It was, after all, a time of war. Now, a few years later, we're still supposed to be at war, but these Wannabe Wolverines talk openly about needing assault weapons and lots o' bullets to commit actual treason because they're mad at Barack Obama for - well, they're just mad at Barack Obama.

As we've seen from the example of Mr. Yeager above, the president doesn't really have to have done anything to excite their rage. I'm not sure what the Wannabe Wolverines think they're going to do, even with the most tricked-out AR-15, against an Army that can field attack helicopters, artillery, bombers, drones, tanks, etc.

If you really follow their "logic," then the right to bear arms would also include the right to anti-tank weapons, land mines, shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, etc. But, you know, that would be crazy.

So let's leave aside teenage-movie fantasies about taking on The Man with the AR-15 in your gun safe. Let's recall Justice Scalia's statement in the landmark D.C. v. Heller case that "the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose" and approving of the "historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons." So why not a blanket ban on assault weapons?

Well, the last time we tried to do that, it didn't work too well, largely because they tried to define "assault weapon" using the same criteria the medieval peasants in the movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" used to ID a witch: "It looks like one!"

Many of the characteristics that defined a banned weapon were cosmetic: folding stocks, pistol grips, barrel shrouds and the like. Manufacturers found it childishly easy to circumvent the law by making minor changes and giving the banned weapon a new model number. They didn't address the core characteristic that made people want to ban assault weapons, then and now: the ability to mow down lots of people, very fast, without reloading.

I've said before that the problem of gun violence in this country can be summed up as "too many guns in the hands of too many crazy people." Upon reflection, I'd amend that to "too many guns able to throw too many bullets in the hands of too many crazy people."

To solve this problem, we need a solution that addresses all of those. That means better mental health services, better background checks, and - yes - some limitation on the availability of high-power, high-capacity weapons.

While polls show that a simple "assault weapons" ban sounds good to a majority of Americans, to just slap on a ban and walk away thinking the problem's solved would be as simple-minded as the fantasies of the Wannabe Wolverines. In the words of another great film, it's not our job to be as confused as they are.

All kidding and all film references aside, life is not like the movies. Complicated problems require multifaceted solutions, and we need to start considering all our options and not let the entire conversation being about one kind of weapon.

Culture War Over, Republicans Defeated

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The Culture War is over. The Republicans lost. Hey, don't take my word for it. I found out when I read about an interview given last week by one Dave Kochel, a former adviser to the campaign of a guy named Mitt Romney. (Remember Mitt Romney? I hear he ran for President once.)

Kochel gave an interview on a TV station in his home state of Iowa, in which he mentioned, as many others have, the "demographic shift" in the country and how younger voters want to move away from "the arguments we've been having" on the culture wars, which "the Republicans largely lost."

He described a growing number of Republicans, including former RNC Chairman and George W. Bush adviser Ken Mehlman, who are openly advocating marriage equality for gays and lesbians. Kochel also mentioned that for his children's generation, issues such as abortion and birth control are "largely settled," and not in a way that would make Rick Santorum happy.

He wound up by observing that he hears "a lot of conversation off the record, people talking about how they'd like to move on past some of these old fights we've been having, and can't talk about it."

It should be remembered that Kochel, according to his company's website, is the guy who advised Lord Mitt, the Earl of Romney, in "Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and nationally" - all arenas in which His Lordship lost.

But don't take just his word for it either. The Boy Scouts of America abruptly announced that they're reconsidering their ban on gay members and leaders; the Defense Department finally lifted the ban on women in combat; and right wing poster girl and Culture Warrior Queen Sarah Palin got ignominiously dropped by Faux News.

Oh, and Jim Nabors, Mayberry's very own Gomer Pyle, married his male partner after 38 years.

On other fronts as well, the storm troops of the far right have begun to abandon the redoubts they once vowed to defend.

Republican and Democratic leaders got together on an immigration reform proposal that included a "path to citizenship" for the undocumented, something that was once as unthinkable to a right wing Culture Warrior as surrender would have been to a World War II-era Japanese soldier.

The House, as noted last week, passed a bill raising the debt ceiling without the spending cuts the Teahadists once claimed were the hill they'd chosen to die on (and take the U.S. economy with them) rather than surrender. Across this great land of ours, there are signs that we may be seeing The Twilight of the Wingnuts.

Now, I don't expect the most fanatical Culture Warriors to throw down their arms and greet the victors with flowers. It would take a complete chump to believe a war would end like that. I expect that there'll be some diehards and dead-enders who'll take to the hills in a sort of insurgency.

They'll probably engage in a few acts of political hostage-taking and terrorism by threatening to blow things up if they don't get their way. Metaphorically speaking, of course. At least I hope so.

And I know that for the next few years, we'll be finding islands with holdouts who refuse to admit that the war is over. In fact, I suspect we may be living on one such island right now here in North Carolina.

But demographics are inexorable. In 1992, Pat Buchanan rose from the ashes of his own defeated presidential campaign and declared the Culture War - in a speech, it should be noted, that helped move me from a moderate seriously considering voting for Bush the Elder into a confirmed Clinton liberal. But Buchanan is 74 now and finding it harder to find a network who'll let him on.

His sister Bay, also once an ubiquitous right wing pundit, has reportedly given up the fight and gotten her real estate license.

Most of the formerly reliable foot soldiers of the Culture War are getting pretty long in the tooth. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who's only crazy about 85 percent of the time, called it while in a lucid interval: "We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business over the long term."

So the signs give me hope that the Teahadists of the Rabid Right will continue their long decline, their Wingnutdammerung, if you will, and the Republican Party can free itself from their tyranny. Then maybe we can start having some rational debates over issues in this country.

There won't be as much material for mockery, but it's a small price to pay.